Scholars tracing 'Trail of Tears' across S. Illinois

Chicago Tribune

Originally published April 11, 2004

DIXON SPRINGS, Ill. - Sometimes in plain sight, sometimes in wilderness, scholars armed with settlers' writings and aerial photographs are tracking down where the Cherokee Indians' "Trail of Tears" in the late 1830s snaked across the southern end of Illinois.

It weaves on and off Illinois Highway 146 and is buried under cracked blacktop near Campground Church. In the Shawnee National Forest, it follows a rutted hilltop trail. It is carpeted in purple flowers beside the weathered Mount Pleasant cemetery.

While celebrated in other states, the Trail of Tears has been virtually ignored in Illinois, only to be rediscovered after 165 years by researchers and enthusiasts mixing traditional sleuth work at historical societies and small-town libraries with modern maps and hand-held Global Positioning System receivers.

They have found the trail was more forgotten than lost.

For the first time since thousands of Cherokees walked the old military roads to the West in the winter of 1838-1839, scholars in southern Illinois are finding the old trail on paper, then walking remnants of it to be sure of where it actually passed.

As they do, they have amassed a more complete account than ever before of the Cherokees' passage through Illinois. Though just 60 miles of the thousand-mile forced march from Tennessee to Oklahoma cross the southern part of the state, new attention is being given to the infamous Trail of Tears here, among the harshest passages in the Indian nation's relocation to the West.

Illinois has been the only state along the Cherokees' relocation route without an information and education center known as an interpretive site. The only marker of the ordeal is a plaque in a park in Vienna, Ill.

Southern Illinois University professor John Burde and a graduate student have traced the trail through forests, library archives and local folklore.

"The whole idea is to let the public know what happened here and what's still here to look at because, right now, even the local folks don't have a clue," said Burde.

The amount of neglected historical information they found has been staggering, he said, as was the discovery of long stretches of the old road, thought to have been paved over or weathered away.

Instead, long, rutted miles still cross Illinois' wilderness.

The discoveries coincide with efforts to expand and promote the Trail of Tears National Historic Trail, where signs currently point the way along roads from Charleston, Tenn., to Tahlequah, Okla. National Park Service maps show the alternative route from Chattanooga to Oklahoma by river. There were at least four land routes, and the Illinois route from Golconda to the Mississippi was the northernmost and the one most used.

The National Park Service, which manages the trail, has efforts under way to create an online interactive map of the entire forced removal. The park service's driving map of the trail parallels Illinois 146, crossing the Mississippi at Cape Girardeau, Mo., rather than farther north, where the Cherokees crossed.

Besides the SIU effort, an Illinois chapter of the private Trail of Tears Association opened last summer, and trail supporters said there has been a steady demand for more information.

The goal is to mark the trail and develop an interpretive center somewhere along its length, said Rowena McClinton, who heads the Illinois chapter of the Trail of Tears Association and teaches Native American studies at SIU-Edwardsville.

Until now, no centralized effort has been made to collect all the available information. It is hoped the current SIU project will weave together family accounts before they are forgotten.

"It's extremely important. We don't know exactly in a lot of cases where this historic movement occurred. We have some general ideas," said Andrew West, of the Illinois chapter of the Trail of Tears Association. "There are people coming out of the woodwork down here that are interested in the trail."

The Trail of Tears joined the National Park Service's national historic trail system in 1987, though it was unfunded until 1996, when it was given an annual budget of $40,000. The annual appropriation increased to $300,000 last year, yet the Trail of Tears remains one of the least researched trails in the nation.

Much is known about the Cherokees, however, and their forced relocation was the capstone of the Indian removal policies established in the Andrew Jackson administration.

Wars and treaties led to the removal of even more - principally the Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Seminole - opening 25 million acres to white settlement. The Cherokee left without widespread violence, but not without controversy.

Though a small faction without tribal authority signed a treaty agreeing to move, more than 15,000 Cherokees later signed a petition in protest.

The U.S. Senate ratified the removal treaty in 1836, nonetheless, and the Cherokee were ordered to migrate within two years.

By 1837, Jackson had removed more than 40,000 natives from lands east of the Mississippi.

Though 2,000 left on their own, many more were herded into stockades and relocation camps by federal troops.

Between 11,000 and 13,000 Cherokees in 13 groups went west overland between August and December 1838, the last of them arriving in Oklahoma on March 24, 1839, after a cold winter in southern Illinois.

Blocked by ice floes on the Mississippi that prevented ferry traffic, thousands of Cherokees camped in canvas tents erected on muddy ground within miles of one another.

Depending on who did the count, between 400 and 4,000 Cherokees died en route overland, many of them in Illinois.

"It was some of the hardest part of their trip," said Karen Frailey, an SIU graduate student researching the trek. "They were camped all across southern Illinois in a very cold, wet, miserable environment."

From settlers' accounts drawn from SIU's special collections, nearby libraries and local historical societies, Frailey and Burde have pieced together stories about the trail between Golconda and the Mississippi, as it became part drawn-out campground, part graveyard.

Bits of the Cherokees' passage can still be found there, Frailey said, including the old road behind the Mount Pleasant cemetery.

She and Burde had been able to track the old trail for miles under gravel roads and through forests and farm fields.

It seemingly vanished altogether until they found it again at the cemetery's edge, covered in day lilies and grape ferns, and invasive purple flowers that were planted on settlers' graves and spread to the Cherokees' path.

As spring peeper frogs chirped in the background, she and Burde stepped carefully over barbed wire and followed an old roadbed for a quarter-mile before it dead-ended in a new home's back yard.

"I've always heard of the Trail of Tears, but it's different to learn the history about it and to actually be on some of those spots," Frailey said in a voice still hushed from the graveyard.

She said she walked the trail in winter, mapping a section in the Shawnee National Forest that has been gnarled and chewed by all-terrain vehicles.

In the quiet and cold, it was just as it was when the Cherokees waited for ice to clear on the Mississippi, she said.

Nearby, a pair of canted limestone headstones peek from between oak trunks. When she found the old path a few yards away, it made the hair stand up on the back of her neck.

"I know that was the trail they walked on," she said.

"It's a feeling many have when they're told they're standing on the actual trail," said Trail of Tears Association President Jack Baker, "many of whose ancestors made the trek."

"It's very powerful," he said. "You think of the people who came along there, what they felt and what they did."

The Chicago Tribune is a Tribune Publishing newspaper.

Source: baltimoresun.com  online newspaper

Back to Native Americans Today

Home