Trail of Tears Term Paper by Top Papers

The paper relates that in the summer of 1999, Washington Post reporter Gary Lee set out to drive the 1,800 miles from Montgomery, Alabama to Oklahoma. The paper explains that he was retracing the trip that his great-great-great-grandfather had been compelled to make in the winter of 1837-38. The paper describes how forcibly removed by the government of Georgia with the complicity of the federal government, the Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw, Catawba, and Choctaw were required to walk from their traditional homeland in northern Georgia to a new Indian Territory in Oklahoma. The paper relates that the trek was made in the winter, amidst severe hardship and cost approximately one-quarter of the refugees their lives, and for this reason they came to call their exodus the "Trail of Tears," the subject of this paper.