The North Little Rock Site on the Trail of Tears National Historic Trail:
Historical Contexts Report

If there is a metaphor that captures the Trail of Tears in the collective history of the Choctaws, Muscogees, Florida Indians, Chickasaws, and Cherokees, it is the metaphor of burden.         It suggests not only the literal burdens that the Indians carried on the trail but also the spiritual burden of psychological trauma that resulted from their loss of the landscapes that held everything familiar, dear, and sacred to them, and also the terrible burden of history that the dark days of enforced removal represent to the tribes today.  What is elusive, hard to document, is the personal anguish that the Indians felt at the thought of removal, the experience of it, and its aftermath.  Though it is elusive, our insights into that anguish become fuller and the lines more clearly focused as we look beyond the public record, listen to the words of the people whenever possible, and search out clues to cultural survival, despite the cultural discontinuity that resulted from removal.  Perhaps those insights will suggest what the tribal people might well have thought and felt regarding the past and future as they passed through the North Little Rock site.

            The Choctaws were the first of the tribes to experience the trauma of enforced removal under the Indian Removal Act of 1830.  Unlike the Cherokees, who waged a legal battle against removal, the Choctaws based their resistance in moral arguments derived from their ancient cosmology.  Statements in resistance to the treaty process are characterized by references to the Choctaws’ obligations to the bones and spirits of their relatives.

            According to the Choctaw migration story, the people carried the bones of their dead and, at the end of their journey, deposited them at Nanih Waiya.  Failure to care for the bones would offend the spirits and inspire vengeance upon the people.  In Choctaw society at the time of the removal, the sense of responsibility to the dead was still a powerful force.  Fulfilling their duty by honoring the dead ensured the Choctaws that the ancestral spirits watched over and guided them.  The bones represented both a physical and spiritual attachment to the landscape. In Choctaw beliefs, every person had two souls.  Upon death, one departed to the Land of Death, and the other remained nearby to watch over the remains and to monitor how well the living fulfilled their duties to the dead.  To Choctaws, removal meant abandoning the spirits of their relatives.  Travel to the west also presented a fearsome prospect.  The Land of the Dead was in the west, the direction from which their ancestors had traveled to Nanih Waiya.  Choctaw scholar Donna Akers argues that these cultural beliefs informed the adamant refusal of so many Choctaws to remove.¹

When the removal treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek was announced, the Choctaws lapsed into despair.  They stopped planting and harvesting, and hunger ensued.  One missionary described them as a nation in mourning, who had simply given up in “a kind of sullen despair.” ²  James Culberson, a Choctaw who recorded his father’s experiences on the Trail of Tears, described the people’s reactions to the treaty like this:  “In some countries subject to earthquakes the native people have been known to return and build over anew the fatherland after it had been destroyed by some natural catastrophe, and apparently forgot the destruction and death that had wrought such havoc to friend and neighbor, but the earthquake produced in the hearts and minds of the native-born Choctaw Indians when the knowledge that the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek had been agreed upon and approved by some of their head chiefs was greater than any that has ever occurred in the natural world.”  The people, Culberson said, “staggered and almost fell from the shock to their consciousness, but recovered and gathered their last personal relic in a bundle and turned their faces westward to face unknown perils by land and in the forest, and make themselves new homes rather than violate the pledged word of their Chiefs.” ³

It is easy to understand, then, why those who remained expressed their sorrow in song.  As they watched their tribes’ people depart from their homes on their way to the Mississippi, those who remained sang the following song, “Hinaushi pisali, Bok Chito onali, yayali (I saw a trail to the big river, and then I cried.)”  Choctaw historian Muriel Wright reported in the early twentieth century that this song was still in the repertory of the Mississippi Choctaws.⁴ And it might well be a part of it today.

For all of the tribal people, the Mississippi seemed to represent the point of no return. At Natchez, aboard the steamboat Huron on his way west in early 1832, the young Choctaw George W. Harkins drafted a letter to the American people.  It reflected the resignation that inevitably set in among most of the people, who would pick up their burdens and take up the trail into the unknown.   Harkins describes removal as the lesser of two evils, preferable to submitting to control by the legislators of Mississippi.  He described the Choctaws’ situation thus:  “We found ourselves like a benighted stranger, following false guides, until he was surrounded on every side, with fire and water.  The fire was certain destruction, and a feeble hope was left him of escaping the water.  A distant view of the opposite shore encourages the hope; to remain would be inevitable annihilation.”⁵ The temper of the times said that the progress of American civilization was inevitable, and in the face of it the Indians must somehow “catch up” to it or die.  They argued that if they were allowed to remain where they were, they could do so.  If removed, they would be destroyed, for they could not think of themselves separately from their traditional lands.  Choctaw Israel Folsom and Cherokee DeWitt Clinton Duncan, both of whom made the trek, later gave expression to these ideas in their poetry.⁶  

Following their removal treaty in 1832, many Muscogees were at first defiant concerning removal beyond the Weogufky, the muddy water, their word for the Mississippi.  And they had made this song:  “You say you are going to drive me across the Weogufky, but I will not go.”  As time wore on and removal was delayed, the whites preyed on Muscogee property, plied the Muscogees with whiskey, the Muscogees became demoralized, and the whites pointed to their debauchery as a further justification for removal. In their despair, the Muscogees revised their song:  “Whiskey I drink.  I am drunk now.  Now I am drunk.  My nephew told me to drink.  I drank.   I am drunk.  And I am singing the song that you say you are going to drive me across the Weogufky, but I will not go.” ⁷

Others lapsed into the same kind of despair that beset the Choctaws.  One woman in the early twentieth century related how, according to her family’s stories, the Muscogees found it difficult to comprehend what was happening as her tribal town was taken to the mustering camp in preparation for removal.  “We were taken to a crudely built stockade and joined others of our tribe.  Even here, there was the awful silence that showed the heartaches and sorrow at being taken from the homes and even separation from loved ones.”⁸ 

Other Muscogees faced removal with resignation. Opothleyohola, the famed leader, had early on opposed removal, but announced in the winter of 1835 that the Tuckabatchees and related tribal towns of Kialigees, Thlopthloccos, Thlewarles, Autaugas, and Artussees were preparing to remove at an appointed time.  He said, “We shall at that time take our last black drink in this nation, rub up our tradition plates, and commence our march.”  He would prepare his traveling medicine and his traveling clothes, and he would “put out his old fire and never make or kindle it again,” until he reached the West and “then never to quench it again.” ⁹

To him, then, removal was an interlude, a hiatus in the ceremonial life of the nation.  In the winter of 1836, he and his people passed through central Arkansas.  It was they who carried the dead ashes of their town fires, the sacred copper ceremonial plates, and the sticks that contained the exact measurement of the Tuckabatchee chacofa, or town house, which they would replicate to scale a few miles southwest of present-day Eufaula, Oklahoma.¹⁰

Siah Hicks, looking back at removal, reflected on the resignation with which his people faced removal:  “When their removal to a country to the West was just beginning, it was the older Indians that remarked and talked about themselves by saying, ‘Now, the Indian is now on the road to disappearance.’  They had reference to their leaving of their ways, their familiar surroundings where their customs were performed, their medicine, their hunting grounds and their friends.” ¹¹

For some Muscogees, the realities of removal did not sink in until the middle passage from New Orleans to Fort Gibson.  The Muscogees tell, for example of Sin-e-cha, who as a young girl survived the sinking of the Monmouth.  One remembered Sin-e-cha, this way: “When the events, with never no more to live in the east, had taken place, she, too, remembered that she had left her home and with shattered happiness she carried a small bundle of her few belongings and reopening and retying her pitiful bundle she began a sad song which was later taken up by the others on board the ship at the time of the wreck and the words of her song was:  ‘I have no more land.  I am driven away from home, driven up the red waters, let us all go, let us all die together and somewhere upon the banks we will be there.’¹²

Sin-e-cha’s “pitiful bundle” became the psychological scars or spiritual burden that those who had removed bore for the remainder of their lives. Siah Hicks, in remembering his elders, said:  “When they had reached their new homes…they said, ‘We…are facing the evening of our existence and are nearly at the end of the trail that we trod when we were forced to leave our homes in Alabama and Georgia.  In time, perhaps, our own language will not be used but that will be after our days.’ . . . When those old men met, they would talk about their old days with tears in their eyes and cry for the children that were to come, with the belief that they would be treated just as they had been treated.”¹³

There was the nagging belief that the time would come when they would be forced to remove again, farther west.  The Muscogees revived their old song of defiance about removal west of the Mississippi.  In the place of weogufky or muddy water, their word for the Mississippi, they substituted wechadi or wechadi thlocco, their words for the Arkansas and Red rivers.  And now they sang,  “You say you are going to drive me across the wechadi, but I will not go,” and “You say you are going to drive me across the wechadi thlocco, but I will not go.” ¹⁴

Peter Pitchlynn, the Choctaw leader who passed through the North Little Rock site on several occasions during the removal period, did not believe that removal was the last assault on tribal existence.  In 1849, looking back at removal, he wrote, “For a mere pittance, we have yielded to you our country in Mississippi, the most beautiful and productive, rendered dear to us by the associations of our youth, the traditions of our people, the graves of our fathers.”   The American policy of civilizing the Indians, into which removal fit, might be “beautiful in theory,” he wrote, “but it is the beauty of the summer cloud that rises in the west, its borders trimmed with golden sunlight, and ascending in its majesty it towers to the zenith—filling the beholder with wonder and awe; but the forked lightning is in that cloud, and its bolts scatter death around; the wild hurricane is in its bosom, and it is let loose to scatter, to blast and to destroy.” ¹⁵

In the early 1880s, Cherokee DeWitt Clinton Duncan, a survivor of removal, wrote a narrative of the event, apparently based on his family’s experience.  He says, with sarcasm, about the day they left their home in the East:  “That very day he ‘hitched up,’ and putting his wife and little ones aboard he turned his face toward the Western wilderness, moved off, and surrendered his place to the service of that ‘glorious civilization before whose effulgence the American Indian, like an abnormal plant beneath the blaze of the meridian sun, naturally pines, withers and dies.’  On he went, crossed the great Father of Waters, cleared the borders of the wild Arkansas, and stayed not till he reached the Red Man’s asylum in the Indian Territory.”  But the asylum was under siege.  He concludes, “Years have since rolled away.  He and his heroic wife have long since found rest in death.  The children still live, and that malignant power, falsely called civilization, is to this day still at their heels demanding their room or their ruin.”  ¹⁶

Despite the losses and the psychological scars that resulted from removal, the tribes survived.  Evidence indicates that cultural survival resulted in part from conscious decisions by not only the tribes themselves but American officials as well during the removal process.  Opothleyohola’s view of removal as a hiatus in the ceremonial life of the Tuckabatchees and related tribes might have been more typical that it appears at first glance.  For example, Muscogees tell how Tuckabatchees especially appointed to the task walked in single file ahead of the party, carrying the sacred copper plates.   The Cowetas brought the ancient conch shells that they had traditionally used in their black drink ceremony.    Other stories tell how men appointed to the task carried live coals or dead ashes of their town fires to use in rekindling their fires in the West.¹⁷  Some of these relics without question passed through the North Little Rock site, unknown to the local population.  Neither did they likely note the men carrying reeds with eagle feathers and circling the marchers or their camps.  According to Mary Hill, a woman from Okfuskee town, “There were several men carrying reeds with eagle feathers attached to the end.  These men continually circled around the wagon trains or during the night around the camps.  These men said the reeds with feathers had been treated by the medicine men.  Their purpose was to encourage the Indians not to be heavy hearted nor to think of the homes that had been left.” ¹⁸

  Those who tell of transporting live coals claim that the coals were kept alive by being used to kindle their camp fires on the road.  According to Angie Debo, the men entrusted to this task “observed the strictest taboos regarding women, refusing even to drink out of a cup a woman had used; and they ate only White Food (humpeta hutke), hominy made from white corn with no seasoning or flavoring.  When the new site was selected, the whole town watched while the chief established the communal hearth.”  After Hotulke Emarthla, the leader of Okchiye Town, had rekindled the town fire, he said, “My town (tulwa) shall not go any further West, but this marks the end of our journey.”¹⁹

Removal officials helped to ensure tribal survival and a revival of societies and cultures through the organization of removal.  The Choctaws were removed in parties made up from the various districts of the old Choctaw Nation. District chiefs retained their authority throughout the removal process, and upon arrival in the West, the people of each district tended to settle together.  The Mingo of the Chickasaw Nation retained his authority through removal and into the post-removal Chickasaw society.  The Muscogees were moved primarily by towns, with their miccos in power throughout the removal process.  The Florida Indians were removed by bands, and removal resulted in nationhood in a sense that it had not existed for those people in Florida.  There, they were a loosely affiliated group of different tribes and remnants of peoples, including people of Spanish descent and of African descent.  In the West, they were united in a common cause:  refusal to submit to the authority of the Muscogees as had been called for by the Treaty of Payne’s Landing (1832) and the Treaty of Fort Gibson (1833).  They finally achieved separate nationhood as the Seminole Nation through an interim treaty in 1845 and finally in a treaty of 1856 under which the disparate bands merged into a single nation.

Ultimately, the story of removal is a story of survival, a fact that the tribes who endured it have been aware of through time.  In the early twentieth century, Amos Green, a Muscogee, distilled the burden of history—that sense of uncertainty—that removal created in his people in this statement:  “It didn’t seem possible that the Indians were forced to leave the homes that they loved for an unknown country, but when they had arrived in the Indian Territory, the leaders and some of the older prophets of those times talked of their heavy ‘sa-bo-gas’ saying that this would not be the last time they would have to take them up and carry them away.”  Green continued, “’Sa-bo-ga’ is a Creek. . . word meaning a bundle or a load of anything which is . . . carried.  The word used in this case would mean the hardships that the Indians had been through as they were being brought to the new country which was to be their home.  Many of those early day Indians had been through sickness, loss of all the few possessions they had and the starvations as well as the deaths that occurred without number.  When the first settlements were completed for the Indians, the weary Indians without knowing whether they would be permitted to stay always in the Indian Territory are said to have remarked, ‘We place our sa-bo-gas here for we will need to take them up again.’” Green concluded: “The Indians then began to make their homes and getting accustomed to their new country.  The older Indians did not forget their ‘Trail of Tears’ soon. . . .” ²⁰

Thus the burden of history passed from one generation to the next.  And it survives today in tribal memory.  But the burden does not belong to the tribes whose family stories keep it alive.  It is a burden that American society at large also must bear.  The Trail of Tears National Historic Trail project provides an opportunity not just to tell the story, and  tell it truthfully and accurately, but to interpret it as sensitively as possible.

Notes

1.    Donna L. Akers, “Removing the Heart of the Choctaw People:  Indian Removal from a Native Perspective,”  American Indian Culture and Research Journal 27:3 (1999), 68-70.  The foregoing extremely generalized summary of Choctaw cosmology is derived from Akers.  To do her work justice, one should consult her article.

2.  Ibid., 70

3.    James Culberson, “Choctaws Were Hastened in Starting ‘Trail of Tears,’” The American Indian 3 (October 1927), 11.

4.   See Muriel H. Wright, “A Chieftain’s ‘Farewell Letter’ to the American People,” The American Indian 1 (December 1926), 7.

5.   George W. Harkins, “To the American People,” Niles’ Register 41 (February 25, 1832), 480; reprinted from the Natchez.  The letter also appeared in the New-York Observer as did another letter from Harkins after he reached the West (March 3, 1832).

6.   See Israel Folsom, “The Indians’ Song,” Vindicator, May 1, 1875; Too-qua-stee [Duncan], “The Dead Nation,” Daily Chieftain, April 24, 1899.

7.   “Song Sung by the Creek Indians Just before the Emigration to the West,” Creek File 4200, Creek Notes, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution.

8.  Quoted from Angie Debo, The Road to Disappearance, 104.

9.  Quoted from Ibid., 100.

10.    Jackson Lewis, informant, “Creek Ethnologic and Vocabulary Notes, Oct. 1910,” Creek File 1806, and “Creek Notes,” Creek File 4200, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution.

11.   Interview with Siah Hicks, November 17, 1937, Indian-Pioneer History (Oklahoma Historical Society), 29: 80. 

12.   Interview with Elsie Edwards, September 17, 1937, Indian-Pioneer History (Oklahoma Historical Society), 23: 25.

13.   Quoted from Debo, The Road to Disappearance, 106

14.    “Song Sung by the Creek Indians Just before the Emigration to the West,” Creek File 4200.

15.    Peter Pitchlynn, Brief, 1849, cited from Orlando Swain, “A Tribute to Alex Posey,” Alexander L. Posey Papers, Gilcrease Museum of Western Art and History, Tulsa, Oklahoma.

16.   De Witt Clinton Duncan, Story of the Cherokees (No publisher, 1882?), 23-24  

17.  Debo, 106-107.

18.  Quoted from Debo, 105.

19.  Debo, The Road to Disappearance, 106-107.

20.    Amos Green, Interview, Indian-Pioneer Papers (Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma), 36: 8.