Choctaw Trail of Tears
The Choctaw Trail of Tears was the attempted ethnic cleansing and relocation by the United States government of the Choctaw Nation from their country, referred to now as the Deep South (Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana), to lands west of the Mississippi River in Indian Territory in the 1830s by the United States government.
[1] The Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek was ratified by the U.S. Senate on February 25, 1830, and the U.S. President Andrew Jackson was anxious to make the Choctaw project a model of removal.
Will you extend to us your sympathizing regards until all traces of disagreeable oppositions are obliterated, and we again shall have confidence in the professions of our white brethren.
The Choctaw believed that ceding over 2 million acres to the United States would be enough to satisfy the American need for land, but it was not.
[11] This became problematic because the people in Arkansas felt as though their government had abandoned them in order to remove the Indians from Mississippi, so they began launching an all-out effort to prevent the treaty from being ratified.
[12] Although the treaty was ratified, President Jackson appointed a surveyor to find another border line that would give the Choctaws the same amount of land without upsetting the status quo of the whites.
[16] Before the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek had been ratified, the government allowed LeFlore to send numerous unorganized and ill-provisioned tribe members to the west in the first wave of removal.
[17] Since then, other historians have suggested that some Choctaw favored removal because they pragmatically wanted to try to get the best deal from a US that seemed implacably intent on forcing them out.
They were treated better by white settlers and by the natives from Dimery Settlement who entered into Ft Adams after having served in the lands of the Southern Tuscarora.
[18] When the Choctaw signed the treaty of Fort St. Stephens, they believed they were at "a friendly banquet [rather than] a meeting of opposing forces".
[18] In exchange for the land, the Choctaw received a $6,000 annuity for the next 20 years, and goods such as guns, blankets, and tools for an additional value of $10,000.
The Choctaw remaining in Mississippi described their situation in 1849, "we have had our habitations torn down and burned, our fences destroyed, cattle turned into our fields and we ourselves have been scourged, manacled, fettered and otherwise personally abused, until by such treatment some of our best men have died.
Joseph B. Cobb, who moved to Mississippi from Georgia, described the Choctaw as having "no nobility or virtue at all, and in some respect he found blacks, especially native Africans, more interesting and admirable, he considered the red man inferior in every way.
