Stuff You Should Know - History of the Trail of Tears, Part II

Episode Date: March 9, 2017

In the second of two parts, what was once a voluntary resettlement program becomes a violent, forced relocation under the leadership of President Andrew Jackson. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry's over there and this is part two of Trail of Tears which we already did part one. If you haven't heard that I would strongly recommend you go listen to that one first. Yes and just a 15 second recap of part one. We are in 1830 roughly and America is getting along great with Native Americans and they say why don't we all just live together and we can all just share wealth. The end. Oh wait, that's not what was

happening at all. No, Americans wanted more land. The Indians had land. Americans felt that the Indians weren't putting it to good enough use and used that to morally justify forcing them to leave their land. That's right in the form officially of the 1830 removal act and that's where we pick up in the the government said you know what let's start off with a future podcaster Chuck Bryant's tribe the Choctaw. Are you Choctaw? I have very

negligible amount of Choctaw. As long as it's not negligent. No, in fact I'm not exactly sure how much but I know my but I think my dad did my family tree at one point and I got some Choctaw on me. I love Choctaw. Yeah, it's great. So they picked the Choctaw because they said well they're pretty friendly and we think this can be a good I mean was it sort of a proof of concept? That's what I am. How this could work? Yeah, they said how about you guys go first? Right and the Choctaw said okay

fine we'll sign this. We'll sign this treaty where we're going to seed all of our land east of the Mississippi to the federal government and in exchange we're going to get a sizable amount of land in this new air Indian territory what you guys will later call Oklahoma. Right and the the Choctaw again they they went largely willingly. Yeah, even though they were split internally like all the tribes were to some degree. Right but the there were and there were three divisions in the eastern division which was

led by Chief Muschela Tubi. He basically said you know what we're not going to win this war let's just we'll design this treaty. Right. So he negotiated the treaty and the Choctaw moved and as they were moving they they the whole thing was carried out the whole Indian removal process was carried out by the war department which in and of itself says something. Yeah. The fact that it's being carried out by federal soldiers with guns and bayonets rather than say some other civilian department that in and of itself says a

lot right. Yeah. That's going to form a certain type of tension to the whole thing. Yeah, it reminds me of the great movie Dr. Strangelove. There's no fighting in the war room. It's one of the best lines from that movie. So the Choctaw are going some of them said no I'm not going and they were shackled and bound and were forced to undertake this journey. I think if you if you look at the the trail that the Cherokees took I think it was like 1200 miles for them. They were coming from the Carolinas and Georgia by way of

middle Tennessee I think but the Choctaw were coming from Mississippi and Alabama. It may have been a little shorter but regardless the the Choctaw were forced to march with very little supplies with very little care taken to prevent them from dying. Yeah. For several hundred if not a thousand miles out of their homelands to this new Indian territory and a lot of them did die on the way. Yeah and I get the feeling that the you know the ones dying were like the attitude was well that's just fewer

people we have to worry about on this journey. That was that is very astute I think that is that is kind of the impression that it was kind of like you're you're lucky we're letting any of you move anyway and not just exterminating all of you. Right and again like I pointed out in the last episode there was I think in this other attitude that like well I mean you're American Indians you can just it doesn't matter where you're from you can get along out there like it doesn't matter that you're coming from the lush green

southeastern what would become United States and moving out to the great plains which you know nothing about you don't know how to succeed their farm there necessarily they probably could have figured it out because they had done so all across North America for you know eons but it was they weren't set up for success in any way being relocated right so 2,500 Choctaw died along the way out of 20,000 died in three waves of migration and the first group to arrive in Oklahoma found some reporters waiting there and there were white people there too

already yeah there are settlers and when the I'm sure when the eastern tribes got there they were like white people no you promised um but when the when the first group the first of the three Choctaw waves and from what I understand they were the first ones to move under the Indian Removal Act but when they got there there were some reporters there that said you know how how was it basically one scale of one to ten and one of the Choctaw chiefs who it was exactly was lost to history was either

chief Nidekechi or chief John Harkins and one one described it as a trail of tears and death yeah and that's where the trail of tears ultimately got its its name from was a an unknown Choctaw chief who were the was among the first to arrive in Oklahoma yeah and you'll hear a lot of names in this part two like chief John Harkins you're like wait a minute that doesn't sound like a very American Indian name right and these are just great examples of how enculturated some of these factions of tribes had become right like they

were speaking English they were had English names and um still being removed yeah and again traded extensively white people a lot of them were Christian um some of them fought alongside the federal government and yes they were still being removed all right so the trail of tears was uh kind of coined there although it wouldn't like you said earlier in the first episode that the the the Cherokee trail of tears is sort of what most people think about as the official trail of tears right

but regardless the reporter got this uh blasted it out and the whole world sort of is now privy to these stories of this atrocity going on so you might think well they probably just tried this once then and got so much blowback that they said yeah this is does not look good for us right um so we should kind of stop it yeah that's not how it went no not how went at all no the the whole process ground on i think there was kind of a probably a sense among the pro removal factions in washington saying like

just 2,500 died out of 20,000 well it's way less than we thought it was going to be you know an acceptable amount of casualties right so um and with with uh the white americans as well the idea was ultimately indians are going to be free from encroachment by whites out there in indian territory the war department is tasked with making sure that happens the war department did not do that yeah and in fact when they got out west they found the same type of harassment and encroachment that that they

experienced east of the mississippi as well well maybe worse too because not only were white settlers west of the mississippi encroaching they like we talked about in episode one they were already planes indians they were like whoa whoa whoa who are these people you know i know they look like us but we're we're different you know right and the white settlers like what are you talking about like we're encroaching on your land too so it was it was not friendly in anyway yeah you know this arrival plus also after the war of 1812 and um the

seminal wars the us didn't have any european powers on the continent any longer yeah which meant two things one the indians weren't a useful buffer between the us and say the british yeah they didn't need they weren't needed in that respect any longer which put them in a very um shaky position and then secondly there was no european power that the indians could ally themselves with right check american aggression against they had done with book britain and spain so after that and during this

indian removal process part of the reason why it was so rough and brutal was because there was no reason aside outside of anything moral to check american aggression in this process yeah so things got worse a bad situation got worse right here in georgia again uh with the Cherokee nation they held these lotteries uh between 1805 and 1832 they had seven lotteries basically where you could uh a white male could if you're over 18 years old could buy a lottery ticket

for four bucks about a hundred dollars today and that would give you a chance if you were picked to buy 160 acre tract of land that was not theirs right which that kind of says it all yeah and those those a lot of those parcels still exist you can trace the the um land parcels back to the original lottery today we call them subdivisions yeah you know yeah you said about three quarters of these parcels in georgia uh you can still trace back right that's amazing so the chickasaws were up next chuck they

were sick of being harassed and um by white settlers and said we're out of here we'll we'll take the government up on its offer here are all of our lands east of the mississippi we'll take some land west of the mississippi and the government said great here's a treaty let's sign it uh slap each other on the back maybe have a cigar and that's that yeah and the chock tall got or the chickasaw got out to indian territory and found they didn't have any land out there yeah they had to negotiate with the chock

tall who'd gotten out there a year or two earlier to buy some of their land yeah about a raw deal well it is a raw deal and it's interesting that some of the um i mean i don't think word was getting back but you could see a little bit of the wisdom of well hey the writing's on the wall so at least we can get out there early and claim some land of our own right and that's what happened you know the chock tall had claimed this land and then the chickasaw had to come out there and deal with them well i think

i think no i think they they had been given actual territory by the federal government right but they they it didn't pan out they hadn't actually gotten that land right i mean it wasn't like you said the war department just sort of wash their hands of it all right so then you also have the seminal as well right the seminal took a different tack they they were definitely the ones that were the biggest thorn in the side of the indian removal process yeah for sure so you remember back in i think 1817 and

1818 andrew jackson fought the first seminal war he did not win the first seminal war the seminals were still there and although he did get a lot of land from the spanish in florida the seminals ultimately came out on top the second seminal war took place when the um when the seminals a very small faction that were prepared to leave went against the wishes of the tribe in general and negotiated secretly with the federal government to cede the land yeah and the seminal the rest of the seminal

tried said no they didn't represent us we're not leaving and the federal government said oh yeah well we're gonna come down and invade and the second seminal war went from 1835 to 1842 yeah man seven years that's tough yeah thousands and thousands of people died it was a war straight up war between the seminals and the federal government and again the seminals won yeah you said to hear that the um in today's dollars the the government spent about two billion dollars fighting that war about a billion oh billion dollars okay yeah

sorry about that um so that's number two the third seminal war uh was from 1855 to 1858 and that was the last attempt of the us to say please get out of here well not please but get the heck out of here and that failed and so eventually the seminal got paid pretty good money the holdouts uh there for their land yeah so you know i mean if there's a success story in all of this it really hard though the seminals but yeah it it also resulted in the deaths of a lot of people

yeah uh so this next part is sort of sets up to play out over kind of the remaining years of the trail of tears and there's important names in here that um you should take note of so get out your pad and your pen exactly don't literally take a note especially if you're driving um that's a good point so the Cherokee they they sort of did a similar thing that the seminals did uh when a small group of people make this treaty that the rest of the tribe doesn't necessarily uh agree with right and this time it was called the

treaty of new ecotoa i thought it was ecotoa at first too but then i stopped and realized i i think it's ecotoa ecotoa i think so all right we'll go with ecotoa i like that better anyway uh so there were about 20 Cherokee leaders that um and the names they were headed at this point at chief john ridge uh his brother major ridge uh stand how do you pronounce that last name i think wadi w atie and alias budino nice um and again a lot of these names are very anglo because they

had assimilated at this point anglo or french well yeah some of them were budino is i think definitely french um sherry so there were about 20 of them in all though and those were the most notable and they became known as the treaty party they were the ones that met with federal agents negotiated this treaty where they would give up this land in exchange for you know kind of the same old story right the cycle that happens again and again and again so imagine if you were a Cherokee and you were like we're not leaving we're staying we're gonna fight this in the courts we're

gonna you know take our guns to them if we have to we're not leaving our land and you find out that 20 20 Cherokee leaders went secretly behind the back of the rest of the Cherokee nation the other 18 000 members of the divi the eastern tribe yeah and secretly negotiated away that land that you had just vowed to protect and never leave there's a lot of anger yes rightfully so so the the ones that decided that they were going to stay were led by chief john ross

he was a very powerful chief um in the east yeah for decades he had been negotiating to that point fairly successfully with the federal government saying okay if you're going to if you're gonna take this land we're gonna sell it to you and you're gonna pay through the nose for it even though they still gave him a pretty fair price like four dollars in something per acre yeah when the going rate was about 15 but this was this was much more money 20 million dollars i think in in 18 30s dollars yeah then um then the government

was prepared to spend which was zero yeah it was no you give us the land and you you can move out west right instead so they were negotiating a treaty or john uh john ross was with the blessing of the Cherokee council and the Cherokee people as a whole and one of the other parts of that that uh negotiation was that anyone any Cherokee would be recognized as a full u.s citizen yeah it sounds like you had like a couple of different versions of the offer one is you can have all this land for 20 million bucks

or you can have some of it for four million bucks let us keep some and whoever wants to stay can become full citizens with all the rights afforded to a full citizen right so he was actually in the middle of making what was you know not a bad deal for his people known again and he had the full the blessing of the Cherokee council to do this yeah and did he not know at all that the treaty party was doing this from what i understand no it was a secret secret negotiation and they were having happening concurrently

right man so the the uh john ross faction was negotiating for about four bucks an acre the the treaty party negotiated for about a dollar five in our acre or about five percent of the value of the land yeah and they the government said oh we'll go with you guys right they signed the treaty uh the Cherokee when they found out about it um basically signed a petition saying that's an illegal treaty we don't we don't condone that they got something like 17 000 signatures there are only 18 000 Cherokees

in the east and the senate still ratified it yeah they said that's just very see all those names it's very impressive um let me rip that into two pieces and we're gonna ratify this uh and it becomes a federal statute and um this kind of is what really set everything in motion for the final removal of the Cherokee yeah you Cherokee now have three years to vacate your land and uh if you don't well let's just say you should vacate your land within three years is what the federal government said but they still for the

most part didn't leave and uh we'll take a break here and we'll we'll talk about that process after this hey friends when you're staying at an airbnb you might be like me wondering could my place be an airbnb and if it could what could it earn so i was pretty surprised to hear about lisa in manitoba who got the idea to air bnb the backyard guest house over childhood home now the extra income helps pay her mortgage so yeah you might not realize it but you might have an air bnb too find out what your place could be earning

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apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts all right so we're back um the treaty had been signed in 1835 against the will of the Cherokee people yeah they had three years to get i was gonna say get out of dodge but man what are you saying that get out of Cherokee and then i was about to say they had three years to play ball but they'd be like what does play ball mean well that hadn't been invented either no that's true get by the chuck three years later only 2000 of the 18 000 had migrated

west and so president martin van buren who's as we saw earlier kind of just continue to carry out jackson's policies yeah jackson was a two-term president and the van buren presidency just made it 12 basically yeah 12 years yeah uh he said all right well here's what we're gonna do because jackson is telling me i have to do this we're gonna send in federal troops and you holdouts in georgia in the carolinas um we have a general named winfield scott he's gonna bring about 7 000 men in there and he's going to ask you nicely to

leave and that he doesn't want bloodshed all while tapping on his side arm on his hip exactly which is basically what happened yeah he had a he had a quote here you want to read that he read a statement he said the blood of the white man or the blood of the red man may be spilt and if spilt however accidentally it may be impossible for the discreet and humane among you or among us to prevent a general war and carnage think of this my Cherokee brethren i'm an old warrior and have been president many a scene of slaughter but spare me

i beseech you the horror of witnessing the destruction of the Cherokees in other words don't make me kill all of you and let's think about because we will right we have 7 000 men behind me yeah and think about where this came from like this was we want your land you have to leave that's that yeah and now it's gotten to the point where we're going to kill you if you don't leave yes and when they came and forced them to leave finally uh and 1838 at gunpoint they said you have to leave now

and and it was not gather your stuff and leave it was stop what you're doing and leave yeah most of the people um were not able to get their supplies together some were able to grab blankets a lot of them were barefoot um and they were herded out of their houses yeah you said there was one case where there were these uh there was a small child who had died uh at the night that they were preparing for burial and they turned guns on them and said no no no you can't even do that get out and they had to leave this

body of a child behind yeah by itself plus they also had to suffer the um indignity of watching white settlers loot their houses as they were being marched away oh yeah the people that have been encroaching all these years had free reign at this point open season so the the federal government had built 31 posts around the carolinas in georgia which were basically like temporary holding stations before the forced migration began yeah and like a third of the people who died during this um removal process

among the Cherokee died in these posts yeah they died of exposure they died of hunger there's like disease ripping through these things it was just a terrible situation even just a start yeah and you know as far as what's going on today regardless of how you feel about deportation just look into deportation facilities in 2017 are they pretty bad I mean it wasn't you know people aren't dying aren't dying of cholera but uh just go look it up make your own judgment I'll say that

okay don't want to get too political here um all right so there were a couple of routes here that the Cherokee took to get to Oklahoma basically you could go on a boat or you can walk right maybe if you're old in frail you might be in a wagon but basically you're gonna walk yeah the draft animals were for carrying supplies the wagons were just for the elderly and maybe like little little little kids yeah um but yeah you're gonna have to walk in again

a lot of these people were removed from their homes with and not given even enough time to get their shoes so they were walking barefoot 1200 miles yeah and I think about 15,000 by foot and about 3,000 were fortunate enough I guess you could say to go by steamship yeah and we should say also that the experience of this is not it's not the same for everybody right there were plenty of very wealthy Cherokees yeah who who arranged for their own passage west including one guy rich joe van he was I don't know where he made his

money but he was a wealthy Cherokee who um traveled privately on his own steamship yeah I mean if he owned a steamship he's doing pretty well sure uh and again you point out in the article this is it's just another reminder of how encultured some of these Native Americans had become at this point and they were still like now man you're ostensibly living like a wealthy white person but you're still Indians to get out right the um again the overlooked group in this

too seems to be the African-American slaves yeah again some Cherokees own slaves and the slaves were made to to go on the trail of tears with them as well yeah or forced to um you know the ones who didn't have to go west were forced to relocate from all over the colonies largely down south right to support the cotton industry that was a big deal um so this land that opened up immediately became like cotton land yeah and it created the biggest agricultural economy in the

world the american south had the biggest largest most robust agricultural economy in the entire world during this period as a result of this land opening up but part of that required this slave labor and so um the slave trade increased dramatically during this period as well so the the forced removal of Native Americans led to a forced diaspora of African-Americans into that land that had just been vacated where they were forced to work yeah which is yeah it's an overlooked part of

history for sure i mean we all understand we know about slavery and we know that it happened and that was in the south or whatever but this this period is where it just steps up exponentially yeah as a direct result of the the forced removal yeah i mean like hundreds of thousands of acres of land all of a sudden that needed tending to um millions of acres millions and millions of acres yeah which is a lot of hundreds of thousands right it's true i'd be like dozens of acres

about 40 million dozen uh so back to the uh the westward trail of tears um this first migration was in the summer of 1838 and i don't know if anyone out there has ever walked from georgia to oklahoma at all i i wonder if that's like a thing if anyone ever does that hike the trail of tears yeah uh jeez i don't know i'll bet somebody does probably like in an awareness right campaign or something yeah i could see that um so that it was in the summer heat it's it's not

forgiving in any way um a lot of people died on that first wave and i don't think we mentioned that chief dron ross he was the last of the cherokee of his group to to leave to pick up and leave yeah the the the federal government was doing such a disastrously bad job of overseeing this migration yeah the john ross went to general scott and said please if we're going to migrate let me oversee the remaining migrations because you guys are botching this yeah and scott actually said okay fine you can oversee the the migrations

despite andrew jackson yeah angrily writing like no that's a terrible idea do not do that you can't let the indians oversee their own forced migration you dummy right scott still did it he stood up to the political pressure um and so the trail of tears uh historically what you think of the official trail of tears uh started at the rattlesnake uh in rattlesnake springs tennessee which is where you said is that middle tennessee i think it's middle like around memphis maybe isn't memphis in the center no no

memphis is west nashville then i think it's around nashville okay tennessee is uh you know my family's from tennessee from west tennessee and your chock tall well mississippi uh before tennessee but mainly from west tennessee okay which is got probably more in common with arkansas than like nashville sure you're like maybe you've heard of my cousin he was falsely accused of killing some boys back in the 80s oh the memphis three yeah no not a cousin but they were in

arkansas west memphis arkansas right yeah it's confusing um it's not that confusing well i mean west memphis arkansas right you hear memphis you generally think of tennessee that's east memphis we should do a show on elvis uh we well we did one on grace land yeah and i think that's when i pointed out to that god bless my dear departed grandmother but she was of that camp like oh elvis he's poor thing he just his doctor skilled him as a grandmother he was a big fat junkie died on the toilet made some great music though

okay um all right so elvis aside rattlesnake springs tennessee is where the trail of tears officially the route kind of began um and it went through and this is something that i never considered it went or you know let's take a break that's a good little teaser there okay and we'll talk about um the impact it had on these towns that it went through okay all right i teased that i had never realized this but um the old story you heard about white people lining up in their towns

to watch the native americans pass through and shed a tear for them which is bunk right or maybe one person did probably yeah um but it had a big like you can't move 18 000 people and that was just the Cherokee right without um you know there's a big economic boon that can happen when you go through a town of that many with that many people right and they went through many many many towns the government spent two and a half two point one five billion dollars in 2015 money

um moving the Cherokee and all of that was for things like supplies and stuff like that and sure so the entire um i think arkansas i think it was arkansas their entire agricultural economy shifted from the cotton boom that was going on in the rest of the south yeah to growing corn strictly to supply the federal government for this migration yeah it the trail of tears itself had its own economy right its own moving uh portable economy yeah a lot of cottage industries grew up where um

you know people towns people would uh get into like porting and ferrying like helping carry supplies or moving people across bodies of water um some were exploitive sure not surprisingly like there were people who said well this is my land and i'm going to charge each of you a fee for crossing over it yeah and then an exit fee when you get to the other side kind of stuff you know yeah and some of the towns would i guess despite the fact that it would could have been a bit of a temporary economic boom refused to even let it happen

like you can't have passage through my town even though it's easier on you you got to go around this entire town yeah cape jero dough did that in missouri they said it's way easier to cross the mississippi through town but there's another crossing two miles up and it's treacherous but you got to take that one yeah so some of this was documented by um white soldiers who were overseeing i guess from the war department um should we read a couple of these accounts well yeah i think we should this

one in particular is from john g bernett who in 1890 as a he was an old man uh dying uh he was interviewed by a newspaper for his experiences because he'd been a soldier along the trail of tears with the Cherokee uh all right i'll read one of these um 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 the drizzling rain on an october morning i saw them loaded like cattle or sheep into 645 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 wagon started rolling many of the children rose to their feet and waved their little hands goodbye to their mountain homes knowing they were leaving them forever many of these helpless people did not have blankets and many of them have been driven from their home barefooted on the morning of uh november the 17th we've encountered a terrific sleet and snowstorm with freezing temperatures

and from that day until we reached the end of the fateful journey on march 26 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 22 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 snowstorm developed pneumonia and died in the still hours of a bleak winter night with her head resting on lieutenant greg's saddle blanket yeah so clearly some of the soldiers were kind of haunted sure with the task that they were uh given yeah because this guy john brunette was on the trail in 1838 this is 1890 he's still giving this impassioned like a count of it you know man um there was another witness who estimated that the uh Cherokee buried 14 or 15 of their people at every stopping

place and this was along this 1200 mile trail which they did about 10 miles a day by foot and as a result about 4 000 of the 7 000 17 000 Cherokee who uh moved during this migration died along the way yeah and again um just like the cycle all uh when they got there they were not met with open arms uh remember the old settlers that we talked about from the very beginning the very first ones to go out west uh they did not take kindly to their arrival no because remember they formed

basically a different tribe of Cherokee out there yeah like they were their own tribe yeah that you know said you know what all bets are off is our land so when they showed up the eastern Cherokees were like yeah but there's a lot more of us than there are of you guys so we're we're in charge now yeah and i think one of the more interesting things you know we mentioned when i said to take note uh with that new Echitoa treaty with those 20 um was it 20 or so 20 leaders leaders that that signed this treaty against the will of uh John Roth's

those i mean that stuff was like in stone now this faction that was created with that carried through for decades and decades right and and that same line carried over yeah out west as well right so allegiance is formed between the treaty party supporters and the john ross supporters and ultimately john ross was able to consolidate power out there and he became the the chief of all of the Cherokees now that they were all out west the come the combined tribe

yeah and once once he consolidated power he gave it a day or two and then he said okay it's time to have the treaty party members killed yeah he uh he had vengeance on his mind for sure uh so he dispatched uh in one night on june 22nd 1839 uh he dispatched some assassins um they went and found the principal signers we mentioned major ridge uh his brother john ridge and alias budino and they all died that night but uh stan watty interestingly escaped and i don't think we said you know we said it

um that faction and that divide between the nation uh was going on for decades it lasted into the civil war yeah and the new echitoa supporters supported the south yeah the others opposed to the north so the divide between the union and the confederacy also fell along that new echitoa treaty party and uh john ross supporters line still and they fought each other as confederate and union soldiers yeah out in Oklahoma and actually stan watty became a general in the confederacy yes he survived the assassination attempt

right uh he got out because he was warned by the reverend samuel uh were chester maybe where's just your share uh and he was i think we mentioned him earlier he was a missionary who originally filed that suit against george on behalf of the cherokee that went to the supreme court right and um he was he warned uh watty watty got out went on to fight in the civil war and he was the last general to surrender in the confederacy the last one yeah not the last cherokee general the last general of the confederacy did to

surrender yeah so he uh very interesting story there so overall chuck between 1830 and 1850 i said it was a decade earlier i think the 1830s were the worst of it yeah but between those those 20 years the u.s government moved more than 100 000 native americans east of the mississippi to the west of the mississippi and not just the five civilized tribes not just the southeastern or eastern tribes northern tribes like basically everyone who was living east of the mississippi between canada and the gulf of mexico

was pushed away across the mississippi and it was the first big massive movement of of native americans to what would be basically a sweeping motion by the by america by the federal government from one edge of the coast to the other trying to sweep the continent clean of native americans and at first it was here you go to this other area where native americans are and you can deal with it and then eventually they started running more out of land more and more and extermination became

more of a policy than than removal yeah because remember we had said that thomas jefferson said well the mississippi rivers clearly going to be our western border sure um they went on to later say remember when we said that we would kind of like all the land yeah and we're going to take it and in response finally it was 2009 i think before any official apology was proffered for um the uh trail of tears and it wasn't just the trail of tears it covered everything anything that had ever been done

to native americans by the federal government was summed up with an apology for quote the many instances of violence maltreatment and neglect inflicted on native peoples by citizens of the united states back to business yeah and uh that was drafted um a few years prior to that by kansas senator sam brownback and um signed into law by president barack obama right and then i guess another the closest thing to an apology that georgia ever gave was

back in 1916 georgia adopted the cherokee rose as the official state flower yeah and according to cherokee legend the flower grew from the tears of the mothers who cried for their children along the way and the flower still grows along that official trail of tears today all the way into eastern oklahoma yeah and that trail is protected um federally for now at least yeah so that's trailer tears man tough one tough two yes uh if you want to know more about the

trail of tears just type those words into your favorite search engine and start learning and since i said start learning it's time for listener mail uh this is a correction about the holy roman empire hey guys well i know you like to get things right uh even after the fact so i thought i'd help you out a bit uh listening to the death tax episode picked up on something you said in this and at least one of the recent episode when you mentioned the holy roman empire it's pretty clear you're referring to roam during the early part of the first millennium c e but it's actually an

incorrect moniker for that state uh the holy roman empire as it's referred to in history was a collection of central european traditionally germanic uh states uh though briefly some of italy early on under a loose rule by the holy roman emperor not the pope who was the ruling papal uh who was ruling the papal states when the holy roman empire was in its early existence origins of the holy roman empire began in the ninth ninth century followed by the division of charlemagne's frankish kingdom

into the three partitions given to each of his three sons the eastermost eventually becoming the holy roman empire uh duh without getting into too much specific history i'll tell you that it's roughly uh one thousand year run is filled with fascinating events and political structure unique in world history catholic reformation and the 30 years war impacted and influenced heavily the political structure of the holy roman empire and its member states for one and chris ortloff buddy you are a student of history

clearly yes very well done and thank you for that nice name dropping of charlemagne too chris uh if you want to school us like chris did we love that kind of thing especially if it's nice and pleasant uh you can tweet to us i'm at josh um clark and at sysk podcast chucks at charles w chuck bryant on facebook and it's stuff you should know on facebook right yes you can send us both an email the stuff podcast at howstuffworks.com and as always join us at our home on the web stuff you should know.com

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