John Burnett’s Story of the Trail of Tears

John Burnett’s Story of the Trail of Tears

Web Version: http://www.cherokee.org/Culture/HistoryPage.asp?=128

John Burnett, an interpreter in the U.S. Army, recounted the horror of the Trail of Tears from the

stockade experience to the end of the painful journey.

The removal of Cherokee Indians from their life long homes in the year of 1838 found me a

young man in the prime of life and a Private soldier in the American Army. Being acquainted

with many of the Indians and able to fluently speak their language, I was sent as interpreter into

the Smoky Mountain Country in May, 1838, and witnessed the execution of the most brutal

order in the History of American Warfare. I saw the helpless Cherokees arrested and dragged

from their homes, and driven at the bayonet point into the stockades. And in the chill of a

drizzling rain on an October morning I saw them loaded like cattle or sheep into six hundred and

forty-five wagons and started toward the west.

One can never forget the sadness and solemnity of that morning. Chief John Ross led in prayer

and when the bugle sounded and the wagons started rolling many of the children rose to their

feet and waved their little hands good-by to their mountain homes, knowing they were leaving

them forever. Many of these helpless people did not have blankets and many of them had been

driven from home barefooted.

On the morning of November the 17th we encountered a terrific sleet and snow storm with

freezing temperatures and from that day until we reached the end of the fateful journey on March

the 26th, 1839, the sufferings of the Cherokees were awful. The trail of the exiles was a trail of

death. They had to sleep in the wagons and on the ground without fire. And I have known as

many as twenty-two of them to die in one night of pneumonia due to ill treatment, cold, and

exposure. Among this number was the beautiful Christian wife of Chief John Ross. This noble

hearted woman died a martyr to childhood, giving her only blanket for the protection of a sick

child. She rode thinly clad through a blinding sleet and snow storm, developed pneumonia and

died in the still hours of a bleak winter night, with her head resting on Lieutenant Greggs saddle

blanket…

The long painful journey to the west ended March 26th, 1839, with four-thousand silent graves

reaching from the foothills of the Smoky Mountains to what is known as Indian territory in the

West. And covetousness on the part of the white race was the cause of all that the Cherokees had

to suffer…

Chief John Ross sent Junaluska as an envoy to plead with President Jackson for protection for his

people, but Jackson’s manner was cold and indifferent toward the rugged son of the forest who

had saved his life. He met Junaluska, heard his plea but curtly said, “Sir, your audience is ended.

There is nothing I can do for you.” The doom of the Cherokee was sealed. Washington, D.C.,

had decreed that they must be driven West and their lands given to the white man, and in May

1838, an army of 4000 regulars, and 3000 volunteer soldiers under command of General

Winfield Scott, marched into the Indian country and wrote the blackest chapter on the pages of

American history.

Men working in the fields were arrested and driven to the stockades. Women were dragged from

their homes by soldiers whose language they could not understand. Children were often

separated from their parents and driven into the stockades with the sky for a blanket and the earth

for a pillow. And often the old and infirm were prodded with bayonets to hasten them to the

stockades…

Murder is murder, and somebody must answer. Somebody must explain the streams of blood that

flowed in the Indian country in the summer of 1838. Somebody must explain the 4000 silent

graves that mark the trail of the Cherokees to their exile. I wish I could forget it all, but the

picture of 645 wagons lumbering over the frozen ground with their cargo of suffering humanity

still lingers in my memory.

Two Accounts of the “Trail of Tears”

Web Version: http://marchand.ucdavis.edu/lessons/HS/CherokeeHS.htm

The following two excerpts provide a window into a calamitous tragedy of the Trail of Tears.

Many Native Americans were driven from their homes, marched across the freezing terrain

without adequate clothing, given poor food provisions. As one might expect the death toll

mounted along the way, especially among the elderly and ill individuals.

DOCUMENT #17

Mooney, “Myths of the Cherokee”.

“Under Scott’s orders…[Cherokee] men were seized in their fields or along the road, women were

taken from their [spinning] wheels and children from their play. In many cases, on turning for

one last look as they crossed the ridge, they saw their homes in flames, fired by the lawless

rabble that followed on the heels of the soldiers to loot and pillage…

“…In Oct. 1838 the long procession of exiles was set in motion…the sick, the old people, and the

smaller children, with the blankets, cooking pots and other belongings in wagons, the rest on foot

or on horses. The number of wagons was 645.

“…In the middle of winter, with the [Mississippi] river running full of ice…several [groups] were

obliged to wait some time on the eastern bank…In talking with old men and women [60 years

later]…the author found that the lapse of over half a century had not sufficed to wipe out the

memory of the miseries of that halt beside the frozen river, with hundreds of sick and dying

penned up in wagons or stretched upon the ground…

At last their destination was reached…It was now March, 1839, the journey having occupied…six

months of the hardest part of the year.”

DOCUMENT #19

Account of a traveler who signed himself “A Native of Maine”, The New York Observer, Jan.

1839.

“…On Tuesday evening we fell in with a detachment of the poor Cherokee Indians…about eleven

hundred…We found them in the forest camped for the night…under a severe fall of rain…many of

the aged Indians were suffering extremely from the fatigue of the journey, and ill health…

“We found the road literally filled with the procession for about three miles in length. The sick

and feeble were carried in wagons…multitudes go on foot — even aged females, apparently

nearly ready to drop into the grave, were traveling with heavy burdens…on the sometimes frozen

ground…with no covering for the feet….They buried fourteen or fifteen at every stopping

place…Some carry a downcast dejected look…of despair; others a wild frantic appearance as if

about to…pounce like a tiger upon their enemies…

“When I read in the President’s Message that he was happy to inform the Senate that the

Cherokees were peaceably and without reluctance removed — and remember that it was on the

third day of December when not one of the detachments had reached their destinations…I wished

the President could have been there that very day…”