The Trail of Tears' Oklahoma End

Fort Washita was built in eighteen forty-two to govern a problem the United States government had created for itself. A decade earlier, Congress had passed the Indian Removal Act, and between eighteen thirty and eighteen fifty, five nations, the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole, had been forcibly marched from their southeastern homelands to what the federal government called Indian Territory, the land that is now Oklahoma.

Between thirteen thousand and seventeen thousand people died on the various removal routes, from disease, exposure, and violence. Most Americans know the march. What is less taught is what happened after the march ended.

The five nations arrived in Indian Territory with nothing. They had been allowed to bring only what they could carry. They had to rebuild their governments, their courts, their newspapers, their schools from raw land they had not chosen, under treaties that the United States would spend the next sixty years renegotiating away from them. They did it anyway.

The Cherokee Nation re-established its public school system in Indian Territory in eighteen forty-one. Kansas would not establish public schools until eighteen sixty-one. The Cherokee re-founded the Cherokee Phoenix newspaper, which had originally been published in Georgia before the removal. They built the Cherokee Female Seminary, one of the first institutions of higher education for women west of the Mississippi River.

This was accomplished by a people who had buried between a quarter and a third of their number in transit, who were operating on land they had not chosen, under treaty guarantees that were already being revised. Fort Washita, whose ruins you can visit near Durant, was built the year after the Cherokee schools opened. Its stated purpose was to protect the removed tribes from hostile Plains nations. It also functioned as an instrument of the federal oversight that constrained the nations it claimed to protect.