The Trail of Tears Started Here

We Live on the Trail of Tears

For thousands of Cherokee people, the Trail of Tears started here.

The last Cherokee capital in the East sat at Red Clay, on the south edge of what is now Bradley County.^[1] In the summer of 1838, the U.S. Army held thousands of Cherokee prisoners in camps strung along the valley between Charleston and Cleveland.^[1] Hundreds died in those camps before the march west ever began. Our city was chartered that same year, on land the Cherokee had just been forced off.

Most of us drive past these places every week. Some of us grew up with a flattened, school-trip version of this story. We think our neighbors deserve the whole truth to be told. So this is a long read. It covers how the removal was planned, how it was carried out, what it cost, and who survived. Then we ask the harder question: what does a town built on this history owe, and how do we pay it with honesty and respect?

A note on sources. We leaned on Cherokee Nation's own removal history, the National Park Service, state archives and historians. Everything is linked at the bottom so you can check our work.

Before: a nation with a capital, a constitution and a newspaper

The Cherokee were a nation with a government, written laws and a press.

Around 1821, a Cherokee man named Sequoyah finished a writing system for the Cherokee language, known as the Cherokee syllabary.^[2] His daughter Ayoka was the first to learn it.^[3] Within a few years, thousands of Cherokee people could read and write in their own language.^[2]

In 1825 the Nation built a new capital at New Echota, in what is now Gordon County, Georgia.^[4] In 1827 it adopted a written constitution with a principal chief and a two-house council. That constitution laid out the Nation's borders.^[5]

In February 1828 the Nation started printing the Cherokee Phoenix at New Echota. It was the first Native American newspaper in the country, printed in both English and Cherokee.^[2] Its first three issues printed the Cherokee constitution.^[6] The press itself weighed about 1,000 pounds and came 200 miles by wagon over mountain trails from Augusta.^[6]

We should be honest about one more thing. Some wealthy Cherokee families, including leaders, held Black people in slavery.^[7] That fact comes back later in this story, because enslaved people were also forced down the trail.

None of this protected the Cherokee. The more the Nation looked like a modern state, the harder Georgia worked to erase it.

The machine: gold, lotteries and a court ruling nobody enforced

Gold changed everything. In 1829, prospectors found gold in the North Georgia mountains on Cherokee land, near present-day Dahlonega.^[8] The name comes from a Cherokee word for gold.^[9] At the peak, as many as 15,000 miners poured into the area.

Georgia moved fast. The state passed laws declaring that after June 1, 1830, Cherokee laws and customs were void inside Georgia's claimed borders.^[7] Cherokee people were barred from digging for gold on their own land.^[7] The Nation was banned from holding council meetings in Georgia except to sign away land.^[10]

In May 1830, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, pushed by President Andrew Jackson. The law gave the president power to trade land in the West for Native land in the East.^[11]

Then Georgia surveyed Cherokee land and gave it away. In 1832 the state ran a Land Lottery and a Gold Lottery. White Georgians drew tickets for 160-acre farm lots and 40-acre gold lots. Cherokee people could not enter.^[12] Families were evicted from homes their parents had built.

The Cherokee went to court. In 1831, in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, the Supreme Court declined to hear the case.^[13] In 1832, in Worcester v. Georgia, Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that Georgia's laws had no force on Cherokee land. Only the federal government could deal with tribal nations.^[10]

The ruling changed nothing on the ground. Samuel Worcester was a missionary jailed for refusing to swear loyalty to Georgia, and Georgia kept him in prison into 1833.^[14] Jackson did not enforce the decision. The famous line "John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it" is probably not something Jackson said.^[14] But it describes what he did.

The treaty most Cherokee never agreed to

The legal basis for the Trail of Tears is the Treaty of New Echota. Most Cherokee people rejected it. It passed anyway.

In October 1835, federal agent Reverend John Schermerhorn brought a removal treaty to the council at Red Clay. The council turned it down almost unanimously.^[1]

So the government went around the council. In December 1835, while Principal Chief John Ross was away, a few hundred Cherokee met U.S. officials at New Echota.^[15] A small minority faction called the Treaty Party signed. Its leaders included Major Ridge, his son John Ridge, and Elias Boudinot, the former editor of the Cherokee Phoenix.^[7] They believed removal was coming no matter what and that a deal was better than nothing. They had no authority to speak for the Nation.

The deal: all Cherokee land east of the Mississippi for $5 million and land in Indian Territory, now Oklahoma. The Cherokee would have two years to leave.^[16]

The Cherokee answered loudly. In February 1836, the National Council voted to reject the treaty.^[17] Ross carried petitions to Washington. The largest is reported to carry more than 15,000 names, nearly the entire Nation. A separate petition, signed by 3,352 Cherokee and kept today in the National Archives, called the treaty repugnant to reason and justice.^[18]

Congress set the petitions aside. In May 1836, the Senate ratified the treaty with one vote more than the two-thirds it needed.^[19] Jackson signed it. The deadline to leave was set for May 1838.^[16]

As a Cherokee Nation chief later put it, his people lost their homelands by a single vote in Congress.

Red Clay: the capital in exile, in our county

When Georgia outlawed Cherokee government, the Nation moved its capital just over the state line. That place is Red Clay, in southern Bradley County.

From 1832 to 1838, Red Clay was the capital of the Cherokee Nation in the East.^[20] The council met beside a deep spring the Cherokee used for water, now called the Blue Hole.^[21] Eleven general councils were held there.^[22] They were huge gatherings. Thousands of people camped for days or weeks. By 1836 there were 91 log buildings on the grounds.^[17]

Red Clay is where the Nation fought removal with every legal and political tool it had. It is where the council rejected Schermerhorn's treaty in 1835 and rejected the New Echota treaty again in February 1836.

It is also where the Army started to close in. In mid-1836, Brigadier General John Wool posted about 300 soldiers near the council grounds.^[17] His troops camped at a large spring a quarter mile east and watched the meetings. More than 3,000 Cherokee attended a council in September 1836 under that watch.^[1] That fall Wool issued an order condemning the Red Clay council and refusing to recognize its delegates.^[23]

The last council at Red Clay met in August 1837.^[17] It was the Nation's final failed effort to keep its homeland. A regular council was scheduled for 1838. It never happened. By then the people were in camps.

In March 1838, a young Cherokee woman named Jane Bushyhead wrote a letter to a friend from "Red Clay, Cherokee Nation."^[24] She wrote that she feared her people were about to be driven west by the cruel hand of oppression.

The roundup: May and June 1838

Most Cherokee families did not leave by the deadline. Many were planting their fields that spring like always. They still believed the fight in Washington could be won.

President Martin Van Buren sent General Winfield Scott to do it by force.^[7] Scott set up command at the Cherokee Agency in Charleston, in Bradley County.^[25] On May 17, 1838, he issued Orders No. 25 from there. He had about 7,000 soldiers, federal troops plus state militia and volunteers.^[1]

To hold the prisoners, the Army and militias built 31 forts and stockades across the Cherokee Nation. Thirteen were in Georgia, eight in Tennessee, five in North Carolina and five in Alabama. They sat near Cherokee towns. Georgia's militia built 14 roundup forts of its own. The troops already knew where each family lived and how many people were in each house.

The roundup began on May 26, 1838.^[25] Missionary Daniel Butrick kept a journal. He wrote that people were taken from their homes as they were found, with no chance to gather friends or belongings. On the first day, Georgia citizens near New Echota drove 16 Cherokee to a fort and asked Scott for permission to take them out and whip them.

People were marched to the stockades at a fast pace, some more than 100 miles. Most could carry only what fit in a basket on their back. Behind them, neighbors moved in. Houses, livestock, tools and crops were taken.

Scott's own order told soldiers to treat the Cherokee kindly.^[7] The record shows that did not hold. A missionary at one camp described children blue and trembling from cold, and said the missionaries wept and prayed for children they expected to die soon.

A note on one famous source. For decades, a letter credited to a Tennessee soldier named Private John G. Burnett has been quoted as an eyewitness account of bayonets and stockades. Recent research says the letter is likely a fake, written decades later. Burnett's company was disbanded in 1837, before the roundup. We are leaving it out. The real record is bad enough.

The camps between Charleston and Cleveland

This is the part of the story that happened on our ground. The largest set of removal camps in the whole operation sat in the 12-mile valley between Charleston and present-day Cleveland.^[1]

Fort Cass was the hub. Before removal, the Cherokee Agency at Charleston worked like an embassy between the Cherokee Nation south of the Hiwassee River and the United States to the north. In 1838 it became the command center for arrests and deportation. About 10,000 Cherokee were sent here.

The plan was to ship people west by flatboat within weeks. Then the rivers dropped. 1838 brought a brutal drought.^[11] It barely rained all summer, and temperatures sat in the 90s from mid-June into September. Cherokee leaders also feared summer travel. A group that went west by water in 1834 had died in large numbers from cholera in Arkansas.^[26]

So thousands of prisoners waited in the heat. The Army had planned for none of it. Scott considered sending people home, but Georgia announced it would shoot or hang any Cherokee found back inside its borders.

An Army report from July 1838 counted more than 4,800 Cherokee in seven camps around Charleston alone^[7]: 700 at the Agency post, 600 at Rattlesnake Springs, 870 at the first Mouse Creek camp, 1,600 at another, and more along Chatata Creek, Chestuee Creek and Bedwell Springs. By mid-July, 13,870 people were held in camps across the region. As springs dried up, camps moved to bigger springs that still ran.

What it was like. Whooping cough was already spreading when people arrived. Measles broke out. Dysentery was everywhere. Army doctors filed monthly reports. On Mouse Creek in July, 60 people died out of 1,600. Many of the dead were children. Archaeologist Brett Riggs of Western Carolina University, who studied the camps, believes the doctors underreported deaths. He called it a place of death. Missionary Daniel Butrick estimated 750 to 1,500 people died in these camps before the march even started. Other estimates for camp deaths across the whole roundup run as high as 2,000 to 2,500.

Women in the camps also had to protect themselves from soldiers. One account records 23 volunteer soldiers committing an indecent outrage against a Cherokee woman.

Who made money. Cherokee families were being paid cash for property claims. Traders noticed. A map from July 1838 shows 17 temporary stores near the Agency, set up to capture that cash. Riggs's team dug up cheap embroidery scissors at two camps. They broke after a couple of snips, and people threw them away.

Rattlesnake Springs. About five miles northeast of Cleveland, in the Dry Valley, more than 200 people reportedly died from unsanitary conditions. Soldiers guarded the area from two military camps, Camp Foster and Camp Worth.^[1] The last council of the Nation in the East met in these camps. On August 1, 1838, at Aquohee Camp, the council resolved that Cherokee sovereignty, its constitution and its laws would continue forever.^[27] They carried their government west with them.

Rattlesnake Springs is now a private dairy farm. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975.^[28] A historical marker once stood near it. Nothing remains of Fort Cass or the camps above ground. The 1849 Henegar House stands on part of the fort site.^[29]

The march west

The first boats did leave in June. On June 6, 1838, more than 1,500 Cherokee were put on steamboats and barges at Ross's Landing, the riverfront that became Chattanooga. The Army ran three water detachments that summer.^[30] They were a disaster. Of the four Army-run groups, made up of more than 2,000 people, 437 never arrived. They died or escaped along the way.

After that, the Cherokee National Council voted that the Nation would run its own removal. In July, Scott agreed. Principal Chief John Ross and his brother Lewis organized the rest, in detachments of about 1,000 people each, each led by a Cherokee conductor.^[30] Between late August and early December 1838, the detachments pulled out of the camps around Fort Cass and other depots. The last group left Fort Cass on December 5, 1838.^[1]

There were several routes, more than 5,000 miles of them in all:^[31]

• The Northern Route. Most people went this way. Nine detachments, more than 9,000 people, crossed the Tennessee River at Blythe Ferry, about 15 miles from Cleveland in what is now Meigs County. From there they climbed the Cumberland Plateau, averaging 10 to 12 miles a day, then crossed Tennessee, Kentucky, southern Illinois and Missouri. The first group, led by Hair Conrad, left in late August and reached Indian Territory on January 17, 1839.^[1]
• The Bell Route. On October 11, 1838, John Bell of the Treaty Party led 660 people west from Fort Cass through southern Tennessee and Arkansas.^[1]
• The Benge Route. On September 28, 1838, John Benge led 1,079 people from Fort Payne, Alabama, across southeast Missouri and northern Arkansas.^[32]
• The water route. The Hiwassee, Tennessee, Ohio, Mississippi and Arkansas rivers.

Most people walked. Wagons were for the sick, the old, small children and nursing mothers. Many had no shoes or blankets.

Then winter came early and hard. The summer that had been one of the hottest turned into one of the coldest winters on record. In December, 11 detachments, more than 10,000 people, were stuck in Kentucky near a rock arch now called Mantle Rock. They waited for the frozen Ohio River to clear. When they crossed at Golconda, Illinois, a ferry owner named John Berry charged them $1 a head. That was many times his normal rate. His ferry reportedly made more than $10,000 that winter.

In southern Illinois, ice floes blocked the Mississippi River crossing for days at a time. Thousands camped in the woods in what is now Trail of Tears State Forest. Many died there. In Arkansas, an observer watched the Benge group wade across the icy White River rather than stop.^[32]

The last detachments reached Indian Territory on March 24, 1839.^[7] Some had left their homes the previous September.

The dead

Nobody kept a full count. The number most often cited is 4,000 dead, out of about 16,000 people forced west.^[33] That is roughly one in four or one in five.

The figure comes from Elizur Butler, a missionary doctor who traveled with the Cherokee.^[15] He admitted it was an estimate. It includes people who died in the camps, on the road, and in the first months in Indian Territory. Official numbers from the Ross detachments alone counted more than 1,600 deaths on the journey.^[34] Hundreds more died soon after arriving. Some scholars put the total as high as 8,000 once the aftermath is counted.^[30]

The Cherokee name for it is often given as Nunna daul Tsuny, the trail where they cried.

Quatie Ross. John Ross's wife, Elizabeth "Quatie" Ross, traveled with the last water group on the steamboat Victoria. She died of pneumonia aboard the boat near Little Rock on February 1, 1839. She was one of nine who died in that group of about 200. A popular story says she gave her blanket to a sick child. Historians say there is little evidence for that part. She is buried at Mount Holly Cemetery in Little Rock.^[35]

Enslaved people. The Cherokee were not the only people driven west. Black people enslaved by Cherokee owners were forced down the trail too. Scott's own order told soldiers to treat slaves the same as the Indians.^[36] Their names and deaths are even less recorded.

The Creek. A number of Creek people who had taken refuge in Cherokee country were swept into the removal as well.^[37]

Who got paid. Contractors were hired to feed the detachments. Ross and other Cherokee leaders complained about corruption among them. Store owners at the Agency, ferry operators and land speculators all made money. Georgia lottery winners got farms. Gold miners got gold. The Cherokee got graves.

Those who stayed, and those who rebuilt

Some Cherokee people escaped removal, and their descendants are still in the mountains of western North Carolina.

One group, the Oconaluftee Cherokee led by Yonaguska, lived on land outside the Cherokee Nation's borders under an earlier 1819 treaty.^[38] They argued the New Echota treaty did not apply to them. A white merchant named William Holland Thomas, whom Yonaguska had raised like a son, worked as their agent and lawyer.^[39] Hundreds of other Cherokee hid in the mountains to avoid capture.

The story of Tsali shows how cruel the choices were. Tsali, also called Charley, was a farmer near the Nantahala River. In November 1838, soldiers captured his family's group.^[40] On the way to camp, some of the Cherokee attacked the soldiers and escaped, and soldiers died. The Army hunted them. Thomas and a Cherokee leader named Euchella helped track the group down, on the understanding that Euchella's people could then stay in North Carolina. Tsali was executed on November 25, 1838. The popular legend says he gave himself up to save the others. The military records tell a messier story. Either way, his people paid a price to stay.

After removal, Thomas bought land for the Cherokee in his own name, because Cherokee people were not allowed to own it in theirs. He eventually bought about 50,000 acres along the Oconaluftee River and Soco Creek.^[41] That land became the core of the Qualla Boundary. The people became the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, based today in Cherokee, North Carolina.

In the West, the survivors rebuilt their Nation. In 1839 the new arrivals and the Old Settlers, Cherokee who had moved west earlier, signed an Act of Union and wrote a new constitution. Their capital became Tahlequah, Oklahoma.^[42] Today there are three federally recognized Cherokee tribes:^[43]

• Cherokee Nation, based in Tahlequah, Oklahoma
• United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians, also based in Tahlequah
• Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, based in Cherokee, North Carolina

All three trace their story through this county.

After: blood in the West, land sales in Cleveland

The pain did not end at the Oklahoma line. In June 1839, Ross tried to reunite the new arrivals, the Old Settlers and the Treaty Party. The meeting broke up. On June 22, 1839, three groups of Cherokee men killed Major Ridge, John Ridge and Elias Boudinot on the same morning.^[44] They were acting under an old Cherokee law, written down in 1829, that made selling Nation land without consent punishable by death. Major Ridge had helped write it.^[45] Historians say Ross was not part of the plan. The killings split the Nation for years.

Back here, the paperwork moved fast. Bradley County was created on February 10, 1836, just weeks after the New Echota treaty was signed and months before the Senate ratified it.^[46] Cleveland was picked as the county seat on May 2, 1836. Another site a few miles east, owned by a wealthy Cherokee man named Deer-in-the-Water, had also been considered. On January 20, 1838, the legislature formally named Cleveland the county seat. It had about 400 people.^[47] That was four months before the roundup.

Tennessee called the newly taken land the Ocoee District. It covered everything south of the Hiwassee and Tennessee rivers to the Georgia line. Surveyors laid out the land in 1837. The survey's base line started at a limestone outcrop on the Hiwassee across from Charleston and ran south through Cleveland to the Georgia line.

In November 1838, a land office opened in Cleveland.^[48] While the last Cherokee detachments were still leaving the camps a few miles away, settlers were lining up in town to buy their land. Prices dropped the longer land went unsold. Some parcels later sold for as little as 50 cents an acre.

That land office sat in our town. Many of the property lines in this county trace back to it.

Cleveland today: what we remember, and what we skip

Some real work has been done here, much of it pushed by Cherokee people themselves.

• Red Clay State Historic Park. The 263-acre park preserves the council grounds and the Blue Hole spring, with a museum and replica council house.^[21] In April 1984, the Cherokee Nation and the Eastern Band held their first joint council in 146 years at Red Clay.^[49] Runners carried a torch on foot from Cherokee, North Carolina, about 130 miles. The two principal chiefs lit the Eternal Flame that still burns there. It went out in 2020 and was relit with a protected backup flame.
• Signs in Cherokee. The city put up entrance signs in English and Cherokee marking Red Clay as part of the Trail of Tears National Historic Trail.^[50] Before that, the park had never had signs showing the designation.
• Charleston. The Hiwassee River Heritage Center, opened in 2013, tells the story of the Agency and Fort Cass.^[51] A short interpretive trail there pairs quotes from Cherokee people with quotes from U.S. officials.
• Blythe Ferry. Cherokee Trail of Tears State Park in Meigs County lists 2,535 heads of household from the 1835 Cherokee census on a memorial wall.^[52]
• Remember the Removal. Each year, Cherokee Nation and Eastern Band cyclists ride the roughly 950-mile Northern Route.^[33] Red Clay is one of their first stops.

Here is what is missing.

• Rattlesnake Springs is closed to the public. The site where the last council in the East met and hundreds died sits on a private farm. The marker that once stood near it is gone.
• The camps are unmarked. Mouse Creek, Chatata Creek, Chestuee Creek and Bedwell Springs held thousands of prisoners. Most people driving past them have no idea.
• Our own role is left out. The usual story is about Georgia and Andrew Jackson. It rarely says that the Army ran the whole removal from Charleston, or that Cleveland's land office sold Cherokee land while the camps still held people.
• No local apology. We could not find any record that the City of Cleveland or Bradley County has ever formally apologized to the Cherokee people. Chattanooga and Carter County have. If we missed one, we want to hear about it.

What repair could look like

We are a newspaper. What the Cherokee people are owed is for them to say. What we can do is lay out real options, most of them already working somewhere else, and push our local leaders to start the conversation.

Start by asking. Any serious effort begins with the three federally recognized Cherokee tribes: Cherokee Nation, the Eastern Band and the United Keetoowah Band. Each is a sovereign government. The city and county should request formal government-to-government meetings with all three and ask a simple question: what would you want from us? Then listen, and let them set the terms. Native neighbors from many nations live in Cleveland today, and they should have a seat too. One caution. The three Cherokee tribes have warned publicly about groups that claim Cherokee identity without their recognition. Repair has to reach the people it is meant for.

Give land back. Land is what was taken, and land is what many tribes ask for first. It is already happening near us.

• In February 2026, the town of Franklin, North Carolina signed over the deed to the Noquisiyi Mound to the Eastern Band.^[53] It took years of work through a shared nonprofit made up of the town, the county, a land trust and the tribe.
• Our own congressman, Chuck Fleischmann, has passed a bill through the House five times to return 76.1 acres of TVA land in Monroe County to the Eastern Band, including the Sequoyah Birthplace Museum and the Chota and Tanasi memorials.^[54] Every time, it has died in the Senate. The current version, H.R. 226, has sat in the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs since early 2025.^[54] Readers can call our two U.S. senators and ask them to move it.
• Locally, the obvious candidate is Rattlesnake Springs. If the landowners are ever willing to sell, a local land trust or the city could buy it and offer it to the tribes, on the tribes' terms. Unmarked camp sites on public land could be offered the same way.

Pay into it. In the Bay Area, non-Native residents pay a voluntary yearly Shuumi Land Tax to an Ohlone women-led land trust.^[55] Cleveland could build something like that with tribal input: a voluntary land fee that residents, churches and businesses pay to a fund the tribes control. The city could match it, or set aside a share of hotel and tourism tax. Visitors come here for Cherokee history. Some of that money should go to Cherokee people.

Fund the language. In 2019, all three Cherokee tribes declared a state of emergency for the Cherokee language.^[56] Fewer fluent speakers are left every year. Local money could go to tribal language programs. Cleveland could also add the Cherokee syllabary to public signs, parks and street markers, with tribal translators paid for the work.

Tell the truth in our schools. Bradley County and Cleveland City schools could work with the tribes to teach this history where it happened: the camps, the land office, the survivors. Students should know the Burnett letter is likely fake and learn from real sources. Field trips to Red Clay and Charleston should be standard.

Mark the ground. Put markers, written with the tribes, at the camp sites, the old Agency, and the place the land office stood. Restore a marker at Rattlesnake Springs.

Make room for ceremony. Guarantee Cherokee citizens free and private access to Red Clay for ceremony and council. Make sure any Cherokee remains or sacred items held by local museums, colleges or private collections go back to the tribes.

How to say sorry like we mean it

Apologies have been made before. Some of them show how not to do it.

In December 2009, President Obama signed an official U.S. apology to Native peoples. It was folded into a defense spending bill as a small section on page 45.^[57] There was no ceremony. No tribal leaders were invited. The White House put out no announcement. Most Americans still do not know it exists. A Navajo man named Mark Charles later stood outside the Capitol and publicly refused to accept it.^[58]

In 2019, all three Cherokee tribes passed a joint resolution asking the U.S. government for an apology for the harm done through colonization, removal and the Trail of Tears.^[56] They are still asking.

Others in Tennessee have gone further. In 2006, Chattanooga's mayor and council chairman delivered a Proclamation of Repentance to the Cherokee Nation's chief and council, and later to the Eastern Band. Carter County passed a resolution in 2010, and Cherokee Nation members accepted it days later. The Tennessee General Assembly passed a resolution, HJR 553, for the 175th anniversary of the removal, and gave copies to leaders of the federally recognized tribes.^[59]

Those are the models. Here is what we think a real apology from Cleveland and Bradley County would need:

1. Be specific. Name the wrongs plainly. The camps in our valley. The Army headquarters in Charleston. The county created before the treaty was even ratified. The land office in Cleveland selling Cherokee homes while families were still held nearby. 2. Deliver it in person. Bring it to each tribe's government, on their schedule and their ground, or at Red Clay if they choose. 3. Let them answer. The tribes may accept, decline or ask for changes. That is their right. 4. Pair it with action. Words alone repeat 2009. Attach real commitments, like land, a fund, markers and schools, with dates and dollars. 5. Keep showing up. Make it a standing relationship, with a yearly meeting and a public report on what was done.

We live, work and raise our kids on land that was taken by force from people who did not consent and did not stop resisting. Their descendants are alive. They still come back to Red Clay to meet in council and tend the fire. The least we can do is know the full story of this place, say it out loud, and ask them what comes next.

Sources

Cherokee sources

• Cherokee Nation: Fort Cass Cherokee Agency and Emigration Depot
• Cherokee Phoenix: Insight provided on Cherokee removal camps in Tennessee
• Cherokee Phoenix: May 26 anniversary of the roundup
• Cherokee Phoenix: June 22, 1839, a bloody day in Cherokee Nation
• Cherokee Phoenix: 25th anniversary of 1984 joint council
• Cherokee Phoenix: New sign unveiled at Red Clay
• Cherokee One Feather: Bill to place Tennessee lands into trust for EBCI passes House
• United Keetoowah Band: Two resolutions passed at Cherokee Tri-Council

Government and archives

• National Park Service: Cherokee Round Up
• National Park Service: Trail of Tears history and culture
• National Park Service: Tennessee Trail of Tears brochure
• National Park Service: Trail of Tears map
• National Park Service: Mantle Rock
• National Park Service: Ferries during the Cherokee removal
• National Register nomination: Rattlesnake Springs
• Tennessee Division of Archaeology: The Trail of Tears in Tennessee
• Tennessee HJR 553
• National Archives: Cherokee petition against the New Echota treaty
• Cherokee Removal Order No. 25 (1838)
• H.R. 226 bill text
• Rep. Fleischmann: H.R. 226 passes House
• Historical Marker Database: Blythe Ferry removal marker
• Illinois HJR 142 on Berry's Ferry

Encyclopedias and histories

• Tennessee Encyclopedia: Rattlesnake Springs
• Tennessee Encyclopedia: Red Clay State Historic Park
• Goodspeed's History of Bradley County (1887)
• NCpedia: Trail of Tears
• NCpedia: Tsali
• NCpedia: Qualla Boundary
• New Georgia Encyclopedia: Cherokee Phoenix
• Encyclopedia of Arkansas: Quatie Ross
• Smithsonian: Treaty of New Echota
• World History Encyclopedia: The Burnett letter as a hoax
• Wikipedia: Fort Cass
• Wikipedia: Red Clay State Historic Park
• Wikipedia: Bradley County, Tennessee

Land return and apology

• WUNC: Noquisiyi Mound returns to the Eastern Band
• Sogorea Te' Land Trust: Shuumi Land Tax
• Indian Law Resource Center: Obama signs apology, fails to draw attention to it
• Newspaper Rock: Mark Charles refuses the apology
• Blue Ridge Country: Red Clay and the 1984 reunion
• WDEF: Eternal Flame returns to Red Clay