The Trail of Tears Through the Arkansas Valley

In the autumn of eighteen thirty-eight, the Cherokee removal began in earnest. United States soldiers and state militia had spent the summer rounding up Cherokee families from their homes in Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Alabama, holding them in stockade camps through the worst months. When the marches finally started in October and November, the roads through what is now northwestern Arkansas and the river bottoms near Fort Smith became corridors of the dispossessed.

The Cherokee called the removal Nunna daul Tsuny, a phrase often translated as the trail where they cried. Historians estimate that somewhere between four thousand and eight thousand of the roughly sixteen thousand people removed died during the roundup, the stockade period, and the journey west. The range is wide because the record-keeping was inconsistent and because many deaths went unrecorded.

That uncertainty is itself part of the record. Columns of Cherokees passed through the Fort Smith vicinity following the Arkansas River valley westward into the Territory. Accounts from the period describe the procession: families on foot, elders in wagons when wagons were available, children in the cold, livestock dying along the route.

Some detachments crossed the Arkansas near Fort Smith; others used the Illinois Bayou crossing to the north. The routes west of Fort Smith became part of what is now designated the Trail of Tears National Historic Trail, which the National Park Service administers in coordination with the Cherokee Nation. Not every mile is marked.

Not every death site is known. What remains is the landscape itself: the river, the valley, the November cold that follows the same calendar it always has.