Ross's Landing and the Trail of Tears

In eighteen sixteen, a twenty-five-year-old Cherokee leader named John Ross built a warehouse and ferry landing on the south bank of the Tennessee River. He was the son of a Scottish trader and a part-Cherokee mother, bilingual, formally educated, and already emerging as one of the nation's most capable diplomats. The landing he built would eventually give Chattanooga its first name, Ross's Landing. The city incorporated on that site in eighteen thirty-nine.

Ross would become Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation in eighteen twenty-eight, a position he held for nearly forty years. He fought the Indian Removal Act through every legal and political channel available, petitioning Congress, arguing before courts, writing to presidents. The majority of his people stood with him. A minority, convinced that resistance was futile, signed the Treaty of New Echota in eighteen thirty-five without Ross's authorization. The United States used that unauthorized treaty to justify what followed.

In the summer of eighteen thirty-eight, the U.S. Army established three major concentration camps for Cherokee families awaiting removal to Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma. Ross's Landing was one of them. Thousands of Cherokee men, women, and children were held in stockades along the riverbank here before being loaded onto boats. The conditions in the camps were severe. Disease spread before the journey even began.

What followed became known as the Trail of Tears. Thousands died on the journey west, from disease, exposure, and the physical toll of forced displacement across hundreds of miles. The full death toll is not precisely known. Estimates range from four thousand to more than eight thousand people. John Ross himself made the journey, losing his wife Quatie to illness along the way.

Ross's Landing Riverfront Park stands here now. The site is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The river is still beautiful. What happened here is not a footnote.