Slow reading • Quiet analysis • Evidence-based thinking
The Cherokees are nearly all prisoners. They have been dragged from their homes and camped at the forts.... The most unfeeling and insulting treatment has been experienced by them.... Multitudes were not allowed to take anything with them but the clothes they had on. Well furnished houses were left a prey to plunderers.... It is a painful sight ... the soldiers standing with guns and bayonets...
— Evan Jones, June 16, 1838
Cherokees! The President of the United States has sent me, with a powerful army, to cause you, in obedience to the Treaty of 1835, to join that part of your people who are already established in prosperity, on the other side of the Mississippi. . . . Every Cherokee man, woman and child . . . must be in motion to join their brethren in the far West.
— Gen. Winfield Scott, May 24, 1838
The people suffer extremely in the stockades. Many are sick, and some die daily.
— Daniel Butrick, June 1838
A nation of people, peaceful and unoffending, is to be driven from their homes and country.
— Cherokee Phoenix, March 1838
I was sent as interpreter into the Smoky Mountain Country in May, 1838, and witnessed the execution of the most brutal order in the History of American Warfare. I saw the helpless Cherokees arrested and dragged from their homes, and driven at the bayonet point into the stockades. And in the chill of a drizzling rain on an October morning I saw them loaded like cattle or sheep into six hundred and forty-five wagons and started toward the west.
— John G. Burnett, 1890
The Cherokee Nation hereby cede to the United States all the land… east of the Mississippi River.
— Treaty of New Echota, 1835
Which voice stayed with you — and why?