1. The Trail of Tears

3. What is the Trail of Tears?
The Trail of Tears was a forced relocation of
Native Americans from their homelands to
Indian Territory.

4. The two main reasons that caused the
beginning of the Cherokee migration were:
Gold was discovered in Georgia and white
settlers wanted to get that gold and the thirst
for expansion. The Government, under
President Andrew Jackson, authorized the
Indian Removal Act of 1830. This act was to
force the Native Americans off of their
ancestral lands.

5. Ideas of the Indians Versus the Americans
Indians
-Land is not for sale, it is for everyone
-Live on the land they got from a higher
spirit
Americans
-Land is to buy and to own
-Buy land to find gold and other
resources

6. “Being Indian is an attitude, a state of
mind, a way of being in harmony with
all things and all beings. It is allowing
the heart to be the distributor of energy
on this planet; to allow feelings and
sensitivities to determine where energy
goes; bringing aliveness up from the
Earth and from the Sky, putting it in and
giving it out from the heart.”
-Brooke Medicine Eagle

7. “The Five Civilized Tribes”
-This was the name given by whites to the
Creek, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and
Seminole.
-They called them this because they gave up
many of their ways to live peacefully with the
whites.
-Most had given up hunting to become farmers.
-Many had learned to read and write: The
Cherokee had their own written language, a
newspaper, and a constitution modeled on the
U.S. Constitution.

9. Living Places of the Cherokee:
-Georgia
-North and South Carolina
-Kentucky
-Virginia
-Tennessee
All states were at or near the East-Coast.

10. The Cherokee lived peacefully side by side
with whites, but tensions between Georgia
and the Cherokee Nation were brought to a
crisis by the discovery of gold in Georgia in
1829, resulting in the Georgia Gold Rush,
the first gold rush in U.S. history. Hopeful
gold speculators began trespassing on
Cherokee lands.

11. Leaders of Both Parties
Cherokee Indians
Leader: Sequoyah
American Settlers
Leader: Andrew
Jackson

12. Removing the Indians from
their Lands...
-By the time Andrew Jackson became
president, only 125,000 Native Americans still
lived east of the Mississippi.
-Jackson believed that the Government should
be organized to benefit the great body of the
United States- the planter, the mechanic, and
the laborer.
-Andrew Jackson had a goal to remove the
remaining Indians to a new Indian Territory in
the West (present-day Oklahoma).
-The Indians called Andrew Jackson Sharp
Knife.

13. The Indian Removal Act
-The Indian Removal Act, part of a United
States government policy known as Indian
removal, was signed into law by President
Andrew Jackson on May 26, 1830.
-It allowed the president to make treaties in
which Native Americans in the East traded
their lands for new territory on the Great
Plains.

14. The Trail of Tears
-More than 17,000 Cherokee were dragged
from their homes in Georgia and herded west
by federal troops
-4,000 died during the walk to Indian Territory

15. The Trail of Tears
-Thousands of Creeks were also taken from
Alabama in handcuffs, and marched west.
-One soldier called it, “The cruelest work I
ever knew.”
-Many whites were ashamed and appalled
by the treatment of Indians and protested in
Washington D.C.