The Trail of Tears Through Fayetteville

In the winter of eighteen thirty-eight into eighteen thirty-nine, eleven of the thirteen land-route detachments of the Cherokee removal passed through northwest Arkansas on the State Road that ran from Springfield, Missouri south through Fayetteville toward Fort Smith. Congress had passed the Indian Removal Act in eighteen thirty, and the federal government had spent years forcing the Cherokee Nation off their ancestral land in the southeastern states. By the time the marches began in the cold months of late eighteen thirty-eight, thousands of Cherokee men, women, and children were moving west under military escort.

A journal kept by one of the detachments records Thursday, March twenty-first, eighteen thirty-nine: cloudy and cool, passed through Fayetteville, got a mean meal at the Brick Tavern. That is what Fayetteville looked like from the road, a frontier village that provided a bad meal to people who were cold and exhausted and had no choice but to keep moving. John Benge led one group of approximately eleven hundred Cherokee through Fayetteville on January thirteenth, eighteen thirty-nine.

The Richard Taylor detachment camped at what is now Pea Ridge National Military Park on March eighteenth, then pushed south through what is today Lowell and Springdale before reaching Fayetteville days later. The numbers who died along the various routes range in the thousands. Scholars and the Cherokee Nation place the death toll across the removal at roughly four thousand people, though some estimates run higher.

A park in Fayetteville today honors the passage of those who walked through. The road they traveled, portions of it still traceable, is part of the Trail of Tears National Historic Trail, congressionally recognized in nineteen eighty-seven.