Debunking “Trail of Tears” Indian Genocide Mythology
William R. Higginbotham
Originally published February 28, 1988
The problem with some of our accounts of history is that they have been manipulated to fit conclusions not borne out by facts. Nothing could be more intellectually dishonest. This is about a vivid case in point.
Congress recently passed a bill, later approved by President Reagan, to memorialize as a National Historic Trail what both professional and amateur historians call the Cherokee Indian Trail of Tears. The trail is the route by which the Cherokees moved west from their Georgia-Tennessee-Carolinas homeland into what is now Oklahoma.
The act caused a spate of articles about how the Cherokees lost 4,000 or more dead on a terrible trek, described as a “forced” march, presumably indicating they were prodded by bullet and bayonet as they moved during the hard winter of 1837-38.
The oddities are: 1) Voluminous records, including those of the Cherokee nation itself, show no loss approaching 4,000 (an actual figure of about 840 deaths was bad enough); 2) The word “forced” insults the Cherokees because they conducted their own march, paid for by Washington; 3) The phrase “Trail of Tears” was never used by a Cherokee in the 1830s, but came into existence under other circumstances some 70 years later.
How could such distortions have become embedded in accounts of a publicly debated episode with loud political overtones? Approaching that question requires some background.
Cherokee removal was part of the enforcement of U.S. law and policy.
Years before, President Thomas Jefferson had advocated removing Indians out of reach of rapidly oncoming white settlement. In 1802, the United States had guaranteed Georgia it would wipe out Indian title to lands in that state.
Congress finally enacted, effective in 1830, a law decreeing the transfer of all eastern Indians to open lands west of the Mississippi River. Some Indians had already gone there.
Those in favor of the policy, led by Presidents Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren, held that this was the only way to prevent white settlers from exterminating the Indians. Those against, mainly Whig Party opponents of Jacksonian democracy and eastern Protestant religionists, said it was simply a case of land-hungry whites stealing Indian lands.
With much political help but no success, the Cherokees, one of the major Indian tribes, delayed their own removal until the United States sent the military to round up their members from their hill-country homes in preparation to going west.
The Cherokees were a mixed lot. Their chief, John Ross, was only one-eighth Indian. A 1835 census showed 23 percent of the tribe had white blood. The Cherokee elite kept black slaves, as did leaders of other advanced southern Indian tribes. The Cherokees had adopted their own constitution, a move their opponents said violated the U.S. Constitution.
Ross gave up the fight after some 5,000 Cherokees had gone ahead, many at their own request, some with military escort, and made a deal with Gen. Winfield Scott. Under the agreement, the remaining Cherokees would move themselves, under their own leadership, hiring their own help, using money advanced by the United States.
The Cherokees employed doctors for each group. One was Elizur Butler, a resident medical missionary who worked for the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), a Harvard-based Protestant group.
Back from his own effort, and before the last parties had even reached western Indian territory, Butler reported to the ABCFM the 4,000 deaths figure, which he said was “not extravagant.” His letter is on file at Harvard.
An ABCFM history published in 1840 picked up Butler’s figure, which Butler himself stated was based on hearsay and guesswork. From there the figure started on its way to historic gospel.
Cherokee removal was investigated by Congress to an extent that can be believed only by reading the Congressional Record. Some reports run to hundreds of pages. The written military record exists in detail in U.S. archives. Nothing like an extravagant death toll among the Cherokees exists. Butler is the sole source for such a conclusion. No historian mentions that.
In the Cherokee nation’s own files, now on deposit in the Gilcrease Institute in Tulsa, the number of Indians departing the East in 13 main parties is recorded at 12,623, the arrivals West at 12,783. Some stragglers joined on the way. American military counts are almost the same. The Cherokees were being paid per Indian moved.
T. Hartley Crawford, head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, reported on Aug. 6, 1840, in a private communication to the secretary of war that the death toll among the 13 groups was 447. He also said that Lewis Ross, John Ross’ brother, who was supplier to the movement, made a large profit. Historians have never used the Crawford document or, for that matter, the Cherokee documents.
Other deaths, raising the total to more than 800, took place in parties outside the main groups and were carefully reported to the U.S. government. John Ross never made unusual claims for deaths, although he returned to Washington repeatedly after 1838 seeking more money.
The phrase “Trail of Tears” entered the story much later. In 1958, Gaston Litton, former archivist at the University of Oklahoma, attributed it to a remark by a Choctaw Indian to a Baptist preacher about an Indian Territory road. It reached print for the first time in 1908, 70 years after the exodus, when all the participants were dead.
From then on it spread like an advertising slogan, as if it came from the mouths of the 1830-40 Cherokee Indians who had never heard or used it.
Indian outrage at removal is understandable. So, too, is opposition to the policy on moral or political grounds or out of sympathy for the Indians. The Cherokees were well-paid. Actual removal costs ran $2.9 million and by 1849 had gone up another $3 million. In today’s money that would be billions.
The Cherokee removal episode seems to need some historic revision.
I, who have spent more than 20 years researching it, doubt anyone will bother. It is too good a story as it stands and too well-fixed to disturb. That makes it all the more dishonest.
Original article:
“The Oklahoman”
https://oklahoman.com/article/2217279/trail-of-tears-death-toll-myths-dispelled
https://archive.fo/3O52d
The Marxist Myth of the “Trail of Tears”
An excerpt from “Andrew the Great”
By Mike King
We’ve all heard that sad story about “The Trail of Tears” ™ – the one about how mean old “racist” ™ PresidentAndrew Jackson (terms: 1829-1837) rounded up the Indians of the Southeast (mainly Cherokees from Georgia-Tennessee-Carolinas) and force-marched them off to Oklahoma. The various treks, ranging between 700-1000 miles, are said to have caused the deaths of 4,000 Indians who were buried in unmarked graves along “The Trail Where They Cried.”
There is just one little problem with this unchallenged narrative — it is not totally false, but it has been grossly edited and wildly embellished, mainly for the purpose of besmirching the great name of the heroic American figure who paid off the National Debt down to zero and “killed the bank” (America’s Central Bank). Let us examine some of the problems with this attack against “the White Man” in general — and Jackson in particular — and set the record straight about “The Trail of Tears” once and for all.
1. Andrew Jackson slays the multi-headed monster of the 2nd Bank of the United States in 1833.
2.Jackson survives an assassination attempt. The Rothschild Globalists have always hated Jackson for paying off the National Debt and killing the Central Bank, which was finally reborn as the “The Federal Reserve” in 1913.
3. The false propaganda tale of “The Trail of Tears” is just another manifestation of that hatred towards Jackson.
10 PROBLEMS WITH THE OFFICIAL STORY
1. Judging historical figures out of the context of their times can be misleading.
We do not believe that right and wrong are “relative” concepts, of course. However, we should tread very carefully when pulling any historical personage out of the context of his day and condemning him according to some of the arguably more enlightened attitudes of contemporary times. After all, back in the day, many good and noble men saw nothing wrong with owning slaves, provided they were well-cared for. Does that mean that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson himself and even the estimated 3,700 Black slaveholders (here) were all “evil?” We don’t believe so.
Similarly, let’s not childishly tag all men from the past with the stupid term “racist” ™ so easily just because they foresaw potential problems arising from different races living within close proximity of each other — a sad historical reality of human existence which has afflicted mankind ever since the Cro Magnons knocked off the Neanderthals. It was simply the way of the world back then.
2. Not all Indians were exactly angels.
What modern day libtards refer to as “toxic masculinity” ™ is not unique to White males. Many innocent White people as well as some of the more docile Indian tribes were persecuted and slaughtered by some of the more violent Indian elements. So let’s dispense with all this “evil White Man” talk. Over the course of the centuries of interaction in the Americas, atrocities were committed by both sides. Notwithstanding the many cases of Indians and Whites getting along nicely, the proximity to each other was often problematic in some areas, for both races.
3. The Indian Removal Act was approved by Congress and the Senate.
Jackson was not a dictator issuing Executive Orders to relocate the Indians. In 1830, the US Senate passed the Indian Removal Act by a vote of 28 to 19; and the House of Representatives passed it by a vote of 101 to 97. The Act granted the president authority to negotiate treaties that swapped Indian lands east of the Mississippi River for reservations in the West, and said nothing about removal by force.
This policy of using money and land instead of force was later continued by President Martin Van Buren, after Jackson left office in 1837.
1. Black slaveowner Nicolas Augustin Metoyer of Louisiana and his other family members owned 200 slaves. Was he “evil” too?
2. Not all Indians were peaceful. There were many cases of White women and children being slaughtered.
3. Senate and House majorities also supported Indian relocation in exchange for western reservations.
4. Jackson was more of a realist than a “racist.” ™
Many northerners opposed the plan. Jackson regarded these northern critics as hypocrites because Indian tribes had become nearly extinct / assimilated in the North — where Indian hunting grounds gave way to family farms as state law replaced tribal law. If the Indians of the south and their culture were to survive, it could only be done in separation, not integration. The wise words of America’s greatest President made perfect sense for that time:
“Humanity has often wept over the fate of the aborigines of this country and philanthropy has long been busily employed in devising means to avert it, but its progress has never for a moment been arrested, and one by one have many powerful tribes disappeared from the earth.
But true philanthropy reconciles the mind to these vicissitudes as it does to the extinction of one generation to make room for another.… Philanthropy could not wish to see this continent restored to the condition in which it was found by our forefathers. What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms, embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute, occupied by more than 12,000,000 happy people, and filled with all the blessings of liberty, civilization, and religion?”
5. Jackson (and later Van Buren) had the best interests of the Indians at heart.
According to historian H. W. Brands, Jackson sincerely believed that his population transfer was a “wise and humane policy” that would save the Indians from “utter annihilation.” Brands writes that, given the “racist realities of the time, Jackson was almost certainly correct in contending that for the Cherokees to remain in Georgia risked their extinction.” Jackson believed that his paternalism and federal support were generous acts of mercy.
In his autobiography, Van Buren praised Jackson’s vision of Indian removal and thus, preservation.
“No man ever entered upon the execution of an official duty with purer motives, firmer purpose or better qualifications for its performance. We were perhaps in the beginning unjustifiable aggressors (toward the Indians) but we have become the guardians and, as we hope, the benefactors.”
1. Jackson (Image 1)
2. Van Buren’s (Image 2) attitudes towards the Indians were paternalistic and benevolent, not cruel or tyrannical.
3. Cherokee leader John Ross (half White) — negotiated the transfer deal with the US Federal government, and profited from it. He never spoke nor wrote about any mass deaths.
6. The Indians were well-paid to relocate and received lots of new land.
Unlike, say, the dispossessed and terrorized Palestinians of 1948 and beyond, the Cherokees of the 1830’s actually negotiated the terms of their relocation with Washington DC. The Cherokees, though under pressure, were actually well-paid with removal costs running at about $3 million and another $3 million by 1849. In today’s money, $3 million would represent as much as $90-100 million. In essence, the Indian relocation was an eminent domain deal, not unlike the transactions which clear out the residents of city blocks in order to make way for bridges, tunnels, skyscrapers etc.
Jackson outlined his policy in his Second Annual Message to Congress, in which he said nothing about the use of force. Rather, his comments on Indian removal began with the words:
“It gives me pleasure to announce to Congress that the benevolent policy of the Government, steadily pursued for nearly thirty years, in relation to the removal of the Indians beyond the white settlements is approaching to a happy consummation. Two important tribes have accepted the provision made for their removal at the last session of Congress, and it is believed that their example will induce the remaining tribes also to seek the same obvious advantages.”
Further contradicting the misconception of a mass forced roundup at bayonett point is the historical fact that some Cherokees insisted on staying in North Carolina and had a Federal reservation set aside for them there in later years (here).
THIS IS WHAT A REAL “TRAIL OF TEARS” LOOKS LIKE!
1. 1948: 700,000 uncompensated Palestinians flee their homes and farms in terror as Jewish gangs commit massacres.
2. 1967: 300,000 more uncompensated Palestinians are forced out of their lands by the Israeli military.
3. Jewish-run PBS is big on pushing the lie of the Cherokee “Trail of Tears” — but totally silent when it comes to exposing the real, more recent and still ongoing Palestinian Trail of Tears.
7. Only 12,783 Indians were relocated.
Most products of the American “education” system remain under the mistaken impression that mass numbers of Indians from the Southeast United States was herded out to Oklahoma. Texas historian / writer William R. Higginbotham claimed to have spent 20 years researching original archival data from that era. In a 1988 essay published in The Oklahoman newspaper, he informs us:
“In the Cherokee nation’s own files, now on deposit in the Gilcrease Institute in Tulsa, the number of Indians departing the East in 13 main parties is recorded at 12,623, the arrivals West at 12,783. Some stragglers joined on the way. American military counts are almost the same. The Cherokees were being paid per Indian moved.”
Even establishment historians do not dispute the relatively low number of the relocated, though their “official” number is 16,000. (here)
8. The sovereign Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma still exists and is thriving.
From PowWows.com — sourced from Cherokee.org:
“Citizens of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma reside within 14 counties in Northeastern Oklahoma, the tribe composes of descendants of those that were forced removed from lands in Southeastern United States during 1838-1839 time period. In addition to those descendants the tribe also comprises of descendants of ‘Old Settlers’ which were those that had moved from lands in the east prior to 1833 and are subject to the 1828 and 1833 treaties. Over 70,000 Cherokee reside within a 7,000 square mile geographical area, which was never a reservation but rather a federally-recognized, truly sovereign nation covering most of northeast Oklahoma.
Today its jurisdictional service area encompasses eight entire counties along with portions of six others. As one of only three such federally-recognized Cherokee tribes, the Cherokee Nation has both the sovereign right and the responsibility to exercise control and development over tribal assets, including more than 66,000 acres of land and 96 miles of the Arkansas Riverbed. Tribal citizenship is granted if a lineal descendant from the Final Roll of the Dawes Commission 1907 of the applicant can be proven through birth and death records.” (here)
Andrew Jackson: the benefactor of Cherokee culture? Believe it! Whereas northern tribes have long since gone extinct / blended out (as Jackson had said), the racial Cherokees of Oklahoma still exist as a sovereign nation in an area almost as large as the stolen nation of Israel — with a population many times greater than in 1830!
Cherokee Stand Watie moved out west on “The Trail of Tears.” ™ Years later, he became the leader of the Cherokee Nation and attained a general’s rank in the Confederate Army during the U.S. Civil War (1861-1865). Watie commanded the Confederate Indian cavalry of the Army of the Trans-Mississippi — made up of Cherokee, Muskogee and Seminole. He was the last Confederate general in the field to cease fighting at the end of the war. — And oh, by the way, Waite owned at least 800 Black slaves. (here)
9. The “Trail of Tears” term was actually coined decades later.
Higginbotham:
“The phrase “Trail of Tears” entered the story much later. In 1958, Gaston Litton, former archivist at the University of Oklahoma, attributed it to a remark by a Choctaw Indian to a Baptist preacher about an Indian Territory road. It reached print for the first time in 1908, 70 years after the exodus, when all the participants were dead.
From then on it spread like an advertising slogan, as if it came from the mouths of the 1830-40 Cherokee Indians who had never heard or used it.”
Noted Oklahoma scholar Gaston Litton — author of “Cherokee Cavaliers” — traced the first use of the propaganda term “Trail of Tears” to 1908 — 70 years after the event!
10. The death toll is grossly exaggerated.
The commonly accepted and endlessly repeated figure of “4000 dead” represents a quintessential (a $10 word for ‘perfect example of) case of a hearsay bit of data embedding itself in the public mind to such a depth that none dare question it. (sort of the like the “6,000,000” dead Jews of Holohoax fame, or the phony “350,000” from the mythical “Rape of Nanking”). Such a death toll would mean that 33% of the trekkers died (Higginbotham’s numbers), or 25% (if you believe official numbers of 16,000 relocated). Either case is impossible! How could that many people have died on treks undertaken on established trails, in the generally warm / mild-weathered south, with horse-drawn wagons packed with provisions, on journeys that should have lasted only 2-3 months? Where are the “4,000” bodies? What documentation is there to support such a high death total?
Higginbotham:
“The act caused a spate of articles about how the Cherokees lost 4,000 or more dead on a terrible trek, described as a “forced” march, presumably indicating they were prodded by bullet and bayonet as they moved during the hard winter of 1837-38.
Voluminous records, including those of the Cherokee nation itself, show no loss approaching 4,000….
T. Hartley Crawford, head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, reported on Aug. 6, 1840, in a private communication to the secretary of war that the death toll among the 13 groups was 447
Other deaths, raising the total to more than 800, took place in parties outside the main groups and were carefully reported to the U.S. government.”
Cherokee removal was investigated by Congress to an extent that can be believed only by reading the Congressional Record. Some reports run to hundreds of pages. The written military record exists in detail in U.S. archives. Nothing like an extravagant death toll among the Cherokees exists. Butler’s (hearsay) is the sole source for such a conclusion. No historian mentions that.
(Cherokee leader) John Ross never made unusual claims for deaths, although he returned to Washington repeatedly after 1838 seeking more money.
The piece which William Higginbotham (no image available) wrote for the Oklahoman (here) sums up most of the scam, but fails to identify the main motive. He wrote: “It (The Trail of Tears) is too good a story as it stands and too well-fixed to disturb. That makes it all the more dishonest.”
Not only do the lower aforementioned death totals (447, or 800 if other groups and separate events are counted) seem much more realistic, but when you consider the fact that during those times, about 25 people out of 1,000 would die naturally each year anyway, (here) the “Trail of Tears” ™ doesn’t seem to have been so treacherous after all!
So you see, dear reader, this bullsh nonsense about “The Trail of Tears” ™ is nothing more than a romanticized lie, concocted by “the usual suspects” for the devious purpose of attacking the “evil” White Man and tearing down the reputation of Andrew the Great at the same time. For Jackson, like Hitler, shut down the operations of the International Jewish-Marxist banking Mafia which controls our money and our minds to this very day. That’s the truth, and no amount of Fake History can alter it.
Trail of Tears? Ha! Trail of Smears is more like it.
1. The “critically acclaimed” ™ Broadway Show “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson” was a historical musical that went out of its way to slander Andrew Jackson over the “Trail of Tears.” ™
2. In 2016, the Obongo administration decreed that Jackson would be removed from the $20 bill in the Year 2020, and replaced with an image of the negro Union spy Harriet Tubman. President Trump later rescinded that order. Jackson’s place is safe, for now.
