Trail of Tears: The Cherokee Winter Crossing of Arkansas

The winter of eighteen thirty-eight was one of the coldest in recent memory, and sixteen thousand Cherokee men, women, and children were walking through it under military escort. They had been removed from their homelands in Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Alabama by order of the federal government, following a treaty signed in eighteen thirty-five by a minority faction of the Cherokee Nation without the consent of its elected leadership. Chief John Ross had protested, organized, and lobbied Congress. None of it mattered. The Indian Removal Act was law, and Andrew Jackson had signed it in eighteen thirty.

The routes west ran through Arkansas. The Arkansas River valley corridor, which the road you are traveling follows today, was one of the principal paths. Fort Smith, at the Arkansas-Indian Territory border, served as a federal administrative center for the removal operations, a processing point on the way to lands in what is now Oklahoma that the Cherokee had never seen and that bore no resemblance to the southern Appalachian country their families had farmed for generations.

The Cherokee called the journey Nunna daul Tsuny, which translates roughly as the trail where they cried. Tribal records and subsequent historical work place the number of deaths during the crossing at somewhere between four thousand and eight thousand people, out of a removal population of roughly sixteen thousand. The deaths came from exposure, disease, exhaustion, and the simple fact that the Army moved people in winter without sufficient food or shelter.

The Cherokees were not the only nation on this road. The Quapaw had already been forced from Arkansas. The Caddo, the Chickasaw, and the Creek passed through on their own removal routes. The road through Arkansas was not a single tragedy; it was a corridor.

Fort Smith National Historic Site holds the federal administrative record of what passed through here.