Trail of Tears

This is Saturday and the park is less than half full - where are all the vacationers?  I guess its still too early in the season.

Since rain is predicted mostly for the afternoon and we don’t have to check out of Village Creek until 3 pm, we decided to stay around until after lunch so that John could rent a boat with an electric motor and go fishing all morning.  I elected to go on a long hike.

From our campsite to the trailhead for the Trail of Tears Military Road it was 1.7 miles.  The Trail of Tears, as most of us remember, is when the US government moved thousands of Indians from the southeastern United States to Oklahoma Indian Territory so that settlers would have an easier time of taking over the land and claiming it for their own.  In 1824, the government decided to build a road from Memphis to Little Rock with the Indian removal in mind.  The road was completed in 1830 but was washed out by floods and storms several times, and repaired, in the years between 1831 and 1840 when the removal was completed.  Five Southeastern Tribes - Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, Cherokee, and Seminole, were gathered near Chattanooga, over 50,000 Indians. There were 3 majors routes across the south.  The northern route went through TN, KY and southern MO.  The central route went across TN, to KY and then across the central parts of Arkansas.  The southern route used the TN River, Mississippi River and the Arkansa River mostly but also used the land route to Little Rock.  Mostly women and children used the rivers.  They traveled in the winter to avoid diseases like yellow fever, cholera, etc. But the winters were very cruel too, as was the swamps and bogs they had to cross. Of the 21,000 Cherokee that were removed, 7000 died along the trail.  It was a very sad and bad time for the United States.

I walked only 2 miles of the trail and cannot even begin to imagine the trials these men, women and children had to endure.  By the time I got home, I had logged almost 7 miles on my Fitbit.  John came in from fishing having caught 3 nice bass which he tossed back.

Following lunch we packed up and drove the 50 miles to West Memphis where we spent the night in a park along the Muddy Mississippi. And it rained on us most of the drive!