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Features
Broadcast on June 16 & 17 on CBC Radio One
 Listen to Episode 1
(.ram file runs: 54:00)
Listen to Episode 2
(.ram file runs: 54:00)
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In the winter of 1838, an astonishing sight could be seen in the eastern United States. On rough earthen roads and through mountains and valleys, a great stream of Cherokee, 15,000 of them, slowly made their way west. Wagons with women and children, men walking, herds of cattle and horses, there were thirteen of these caravans. It must have been a terrifying sight too, for the white settlers along the route; who were these Indians, what might they want? Better to move them along.
This was the Trail of Tears, the great Cherokee removal, a move on the political chessboard of the young United States that was to have long repercussions. The Cherokee were an independent nation, but in the great game of the building of America, they were disposable. Cheated out of their lands in the east, the Cherokee were forced to relocate a thousand miles to the west, in Indian territory, beyond the Mississippi. The long march of the Cherokee, through the bitter winter of 1838, had a dreadful toll: maybe as many as 4,000 dead - of exposure, disease, sickness, the whole episode a great human tragedy, a betrayal of ideals, both American and Cherokee, that ripples down to our own time.
Documentary maker Philip Coulter travelled along the Trail of Tears, asking questions about how such a thing could happen, how the past shapes the present, what the legacy is today.
Map of The Trail of Tears
Trail of Tears National Historic Trail Map, National Park Service.
Some of the Cherokee went south, through Memphis and Little Rock. Others went by water, along the Tennessee, Mississippi and Arkansas Rivers, and the great majority took the northern route, up through Tennessee and Kentucky, across the bottom of Illinois and through Missouri before dipping down through Arkansas into what is now Oklahoma.
Photographs by Philip Coulter.
RESOURCES
Books
Trail of Tears by John Ehle, published by Anchor Books, 1988.
The Path to Snowbird Mountain: Cherokee Legends by Traveller Bird, published by Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 1972.
Living Stories of the Cherokee by Barbara Duncan, published by University of North Carolina Press, 1998.
The Cherokee Nation: A Troubled History by Duane King, published by Tennessee Press, 1979.
The Cherokees by Theda Perdue, published by Chelsea House, 1989.
The Cherokee Trail of Tears by Duane King, published by Graphic Arts Books, 2007.
Cherokee Removal, The Journal of Rev. Daniel S. Butrick, published by Trail of Tears Association. Oklahoma Chapter, 1998.
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