Native American Trail of Tears Routes Studied

The National Wildlife Refuge System has begun a study of federally designated Trail of Tears routes through the Tennessee National Wildlife Refuge, Wheeler National Wildlife Refuge in Alabama and White River National Wildlife Refuge in Arkansas. The project, expected to take some two years, will include field work and studying archival records to determine if visible evidence of the trail, boat landings or camp sites still remain at those three refuges.

The Trail of Tears commemorates the 1838 forced removal of some 16,000 Cherokees from their ancestral homelands in the mountainous southeastern woodlands of Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia and Alabama. An estimated quarter of the Cherokee died on the trail to the Indian Territory, in what is now Oklahoma.

Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks and Seminoles, among many other tribes, were similarly uprooted and displaced.

Currently, 2,200 miles of land and river “Trail of Tears” routes through nine states are maintained by the federal government as a national historic trail. Those routes pass through eight national wildlife refuges in Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas, Illinois and Oklahoma: Chickasaw, Lower Hatchie and Tennessee Refuges in Tennessee; Wheeler Refuge in Alabama; Holla Bend and White River Refuges in Arkansas; Cypress Creek Refuge in Illinois; and Sequoyah Refuge in Oklahoma.

In July, the House of Representatives passed legislation requiring a six-month study by the Department of the Interior on the proposal to expand the trail by some 1,400 miles. The proposed expansion would include two other routes by which Cherokees were herded through Arkansas and Tennessee into Oklahoma. The Senate has yet to act on the measure.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Archaeologist Richard Kanaski says new interest in the Trail of Tears could provide an avenue for educating the American public more broadly about all those first residents of the “new” world.