A few months back Ben and I were told that our home sits pretty much a stone's throw from the old road bed that was the Trail of Tears. This has caused us to do a bit of research into the history of the Cherokee people in our area, and more specifically, into the portion of their history that ended in their removal at bayonet-point from our area.
The short version of the story is that from 1833-1836 (after an embarrassing series of failings in our system of checks and balances), 18,000 Cherokee were forcibly removed from their homes in Northern Georgia, parts of Tennessee and North Carolina to a reservation in Oklahoma. During this thousand-mile trip on foot, 4,000 Cherokee died of starvation, exhaustion and disease. It is a pointed example of the injustices in the United States' relations to the Native American Nations during the early part of our country's history.
You can read the long version of the story (please do, it really is interesting!) at:
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