![]() ![]() The journey for these voluntary exiles was as short as 25 days, and deaths numbered less than two dozen.Ĭonditions proved far worse for the Cherokee evicted from their homes at gunpoint by 7,000 federal troops dispatched by President Martin Van Buren. They traveled westward by boat following the winding paths of the Tennessee, Ohio, Mississippi and Arkansas Rivers. The first Cherokees to relocate-approximately 2,000 men, women and children split into four groups-did so voluntarily in 1837 and early 1838. When white settlers encroached on Cherokee land to grow cotton and search for newly discovered gold, the United States ordered the Cherokee to join the Creek, Seminole, Choctaw and Chicksaw tribes in resettling to present-day Oklahoma. The Indian Removal Act signed by President Andrew Jackson in 1830 authorized the federal government to relocate tribes within state borders to unsettled land west of the Mississippi River. ![]()
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