The trail of tears!

The following is a story told by my great-great maternal Grandfather, Private John Burnett, to my Grandfather Fred Burkett and others on Dec. 11, 1890.

Although he talks of the Cherokee Nation, we must remember that other nations such as the Chocktaw and Chickasaw of our area in Alabama and Mississippi were also involved.

Following is the birthday story of Private John G. Burnett, Captain Abraham McClellan's Company, 2nd Regiment, 2nd Brigade, Mounted Infantry, Cherokee Indian Removal, 1838-39.

This is my birthday, December the 11th, 1890. I am eighty years-old today. I was born at Kings Iron Works in Sullivan County, Tennessee, December the 11th, 1810.

I grew into manhood fishing in Beaver Creek and roaming through the forest hunting the deer the wild boar and the timber wolf. Often I spent weeks at a time in the solitary wilderness with no companions but my rifle, hunting knife, and a small hatchet that I carried in my belt in all of my wilderness wanderings.

On these long hunting trips, I met and become acquainted with many of the Cherokee Indians, hunting with them by day and sleeping around their campfires by night. I learned to speak their language, and they taught me the acts of trailing and building traps and snares. On one of my long hunts, in the fall of 1829, I found a young Cherokee who had been shot by a roving band of hunters, and who had eluded his pursuers and concealed himself under a shelving rock.

Weak from loss of blood, the poor creature was unable to walk and almost famished from lack of water. I carried him to a spring, bathed and bandaged the bullet wound, built a shelter out of bark peeled from a dead chestnut tree, nursed and protected him, feeding him on chestnuts and roasted deer meat. When he was able to travel, I accompanied him to the home of his people and remained so long that I was given up for lost. By this time I had become an expert rifleman, a fairly good archer, and a good trapper, and spent most of my time in the forest in quest of game.

The removal of the Cherokee Indians from their life-long homes in the year of 1818 found me a young man in the prime of life, and a Private soldier in the American Army. Being acquainted with many of the Indians and able to fluently speak their language, I was sent as interpreter into the Smoky Mountain Country in May, 1838, and witnessed the execution of the most brutal order in the history of American warfare. I saw the helpless Cherokees arrested and dragged from their homes, and driven at the bayonet point into the stockades. And in the chill of a drizzling rain on an October morning, I saw them loaded like cattle or sheep into six hundred and forty-five wagons and started toward the west.

One can never forget the sadness and solemnity of that morning. Chief John Ross led in prayer, and when the bugle sounded and the wagons started rolling, many of the children rose to their feet and waved their little hands good-bye to their mountain homes, knowing they were leaving them forever. Many of these helpless people did not have blankets, and many of them had been driven from home barefooted.

On the morning of November the 17th we encountered a terrific sleet and snow storm with freezing temperatures, and from that day until we reached the end of the fateful journey on March the 26th, 1839, the sufferings of the Cherokees were awful. The trail of the exiles was a trail of death. They had to sleep in the wagons and on the ground without fire. And I have known as many as twenty-two of them to die in one night of pneumonia due to ill treatment, cold, and exposure.

Among this number was the beautiful Christian wife of Chief John Ross. This noble-hearted woman died a martyr to childhood, giving her only blanket for the protection of a sick child. She rode thinly clad through a blinding sleet and snowstorm, developed pneumonia and died in the still hours of a bleak winter night, with her head resting on Lieutenant Gregg's saddle blanket.

I made the long journey to the west with the Cherokees, and did all that a Private soldier could do to alleviate their sufferings. When on guard-duty at night, I have many times walked my beat in my blouse in order that some sick child might have the warmth of my overcoat.

I was on guard-duty the night Mrs. Ross died. When relieved at midnight I did not retire, but remained around the wagon out of sympathy for Chief Ross, and at daylight was detailed by Captain McClellan to assist in the burial like the other unfortunates who died on the way. Her uncoffined body was buried in a shallow grave by the roadside far from her native mountain home in Tennessee, and the sorrowing cavalcade moved on.

Being a young man, I mingled freely with the young women and girls. I have spent many pleasant hours with them when I was supposed to be under my blanket, and they have many times sung their mountain songs for me, this being all that they could do to repay my kindness. And with all my association with Indian girls from October 1829 to March 26th, 1839, I did not meet one who was a moral prostitute. They are kind and tender-hearted and many of them are very beautiful.

The only trouble that I had with anybody on the entire journey to the west was a brutal teamster by the name of Ben McDonal, who was using his whip on an old feeble Cherokee to hasten him into the wagon. The sight of that old and nearly blind creature quivering under the lashes of a bull whip was too much for me. I attempted to stop McDonal, and it ended in a personal encounter. He lashed me across the face, the wire tip on his whip cutting a bad gash in my cheek. The little hatchet that I had carried in my hunting days was in my belt, and McDonal was carried unconscious from the scene.

I was placed under guard, but Ensign Henry Bullock and Private Elkanah Millard had both witnessed the encounter. They gave Captain McClellan the facts and I was never brought to trial. Years later I met 2nd Lieutenant Riley and Ensign Bullock at Bristol, Tennessee, at John Roberson's show, and Bullock jokingly reminded me that there was a case still pending against me before a court marital and wanted to know how much longer I was going to have the trial put off. McDonal finally recovered, and in the year 1851 was running on a boat out of Memphis, Tennessee.

The long, painful journey to the west ended March 26, 1839, with four thousand silent graves reaching from the foothills of the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee to what is known as Indian territory in the west. And covetousness on the part of the white race was the cause of all that the Cherokees had to suffer. Ever since Ferdinand DeSoto, made his journey through the Indian country in the year of 1540, there had been a tradition of a rich gold mine somewhere in the Smoky Mountain Country, and I think the tradition was true. At a festival at Echata on Christmas night 1829, I danced and played with Indian girls who were wearing ornaments around their necks that looked Gold.

In the year of 1828, a little Indian boy living on Ward Creek (Tennessee) had sold a gold nugget to a white trader, and that nugget sealed the doom of the Cherokees. In a short time, the country was over run with armed brigands claming to be Government Agents, who paid no attention to the rights of the Indians who were the legal possessors of the country. Crimes were committed that were a disgrace to civilization (of the White Race). Men were shot in cold blood, lands were confiscated. Homes were burned and the inhabitants driven out by these gold-hungry brigands.

Chief Junaluska was personally acquainted with President Andrew Jackson. Junaluska had taken five hundred of the flower of his Cherokee scouts and helped Jackson to win the battle of the Horse Shoe, leaving thirty-three of them dead on the field. And in that battle Junaluska had drove his tomahawk through the skull of a Creek warrior, when the Creek had Jackson a mercy.

Chief John Ross sent Junaluska as an envoy to plead with President Jackson for protection for his people, but Jackson's manner was very cold and indifferent toward the rugged son of the forest who had saved his life. (Maybe it would have been a very good service to all mankind if Junaluska had let the Creek drive his ax through Jackson's head.) He met Junaluska, heard his plea, but curtly said, "Sir your audience is ended, there is nothing I can do for you." (How a President of the United States, a considered friend of the Cherokee Indians, who owed his very life to the Cherokee could do such a thing is beyond any idea I can conceive.)

The doom of the Cherokee was sealed. Washington, D.C. had decreed that they must be driven West (so the white man could have their gold). Their lands were given to the white man, and in May 1838 an Army of four thousand regulars, and three thousand volunteer soldiers under command of General Winfield Scott, marched into the Indian country and wrote the blackest chapter on the pages of American History.
Men working in the fields were arrested and driven to stockades. Women were dragged from their homes by soldiers whose language they could not understand. Children were often separated from their parents and driven into the stockades with the sky for a blanket and the earth for a pillow. And often the old and infirm were prodded with bayonets to hasten them to the stockades.

In one home death had come during the night. A little sad-faced child had died and was lying on a bear-skin couch, and some women were preparing the little body for burial. All were arrested and driven out, leaving the child in the cabin. I don't know who buried the body.

In another home was a frail mother, apparently a widow, and three small children, one just a baby. When told that she must go, the mother gathered the children at her feet, prayed a humble prayer in her native tongue, patted the old family dog on the head, told the faithful creatures good-bye, and with a child on each hand started on her exile. But the task was too great for that frail mother. A stroke of heart failure relieved her sufferings. She sunk and died with her baby on her back, and her other two children clinging to her hands.

Chief Junaluska, who had saved President Jackson's life at the battle of Horse Shoe, witnessed this scene, the tears gushing down his cheeks. And lifting his cap, he turned his face toward the Heavens and said, "Oh my God if I had known at the battle of the Horse Shoe what I know now, American history would have been differently written."

At this time, 1890, we are too near the removal of the Cherokees for our young people to fully understand the enormity of the crime that was committed against a helpless race; truth is, the facts are being concealed from the young people of today. School children of today do not know that we are living on lands that were taken from a helpless race at the bayonet point to satisfy the white man's greed for gold.
Future generations will read and condemn the act, and I do hope posterity will remember the private soldiers like myself. And like the four Cherokees who were forced by General Scott to shoot an Indian Chief and his children, we had to execute the orders of our superiors. We had no choice in the mater.

Twenty-five years after the removal, it was my privilege to meet a large company of the Cherokees in uniform of the Confederate Army under command of Colonel Thomas, they were encamped at Zollicoffer. I went to see them. Most of them were just boys at the time of the removal, but they instantly recognized me as "the soldier that was good to us." Being able to talk to them in their native language, I had an enjoyable day with them. From them I learned that Chief John Ross was still ruler of the nation in 1863. And I wonder if he is still living?

He was a noble-hearted fellow, suffered a lot for his race. At one time he was arrested and thrown into a dirty jail in an effort to break his spirit, but he remained true to his people and led them in prayer when they started on their exile. And his Christian wife sacrificed her life for a little girl who had pneumonia. The Anglo-Saxon race should build a towering monument to perpetuate her noble act in giving her only blanket for comfort of a sick child. Incidentally the child recovered, but Mrs. Ross is sleeping in an unmarked grave far from her native Smoky Mountain home.

When Scott invaded the Indian country, some of the Cherokees fled to caves and dens in the mountains and were never captured, and they are there today. I have long intended going there and trying to find them, but I have put off going from year to year, and now I am too feeble to ride that far. The fleeting years have come and gone, and old age has overtaken me. But I can truthfully say that neither my rifle nor my knife are stained with Cherokee blood.

I can truthfully say that I did my best for them when they certainly did need a friend. Twenty-five years after the removal, I still live in their memory as "the soldier who was good to us."

However, murder is murder, whether committed by the villain skulking in the dark or by uniformed men stepping to the strains of martial music.

Murder is murder, and somebody must answer; somebody must explain the streams of blood that flowed in the Indian country in the summer of 1838. Somebody must explain the four thousand silent graves that mark the trail of the Cherokees to their exile. I wish I could forget it all, but the picture of six hundred and forty-five wagons lumbering over the frozen ground with their cargo of suffering humanity still lingers in my memory. (And should today in memory of every white person of the United States. How? How? How could a thing like this happen? And what is so bad is that it was done with the blessing of many of the so-called men of cloth, and they were proud of it. Is this the kind of thing that men of God would do?)

Let the historian of a future day tell the sad story with its sighs, its tears, and dying groans. Let the great Judge of all the earth weigh our actions and reward us according to our work.

Children -- Thus ends my promised birthday story. This December the 11th, 1890. The remarks within the are my own, and not part of the original writing.

(If you would like more information, call or write: Cherokee Publications, P.O. Box 430, Cherokee, NC 38719; phone 714-488-8856.)

The Trail of Tears is a perfect example which may substantiate the arguments that when two distinctly different cultures collide, the most powerful of the two will prevail and that history written by the conqueror can and often does either overshadow or attempt to hide the truth.

The US Government of that era perpetrated a heinous crime against the Native Americans and not only hid it from the general populace but justified the acts of greed and barbarism by using false comparisons, illogical conclusions, and overwhelming military superiority.

Our government, supposedly founded on the principal of equality, and that all men are endowed with certain inalienable rights, obviously decided early on that the government itself should retain the right to determine just who was eligible for those rights. It is also obvious that the Native Americans, occupying prime land coveted by greedy gold seekers and land-hungry colonist, did not fit into the government's eligibility category.

The most significant and obvious difference between the Native Americans and the US government is that Native Americans were willing to live and let live, that co-existence was based on their own concept of civilized behavior, and they obviously assumed that a great power such as the United States should be civilized enough to recognize that fact and deal with them on equal, just and amiable terms.

They were wrong to believe this and their primal innocence cost them their civilization. The US Government decidedly believed that progress and civilization as the white man conceived thereof, should not be hampered by savages with rude institutions. Therefore, the end justified whatever means it took to eliminate the Native American problem.

The Trail of Tears poignantly displays both the horror and beauty of humanity, facts that have not changed since the dawn of recorded time. My ancestor's story of the rape of a proud culture, of the death and deprivation and suffering they endured, and the elegant beauty of bitter-sweet sacrifices made so that others may live, is a sad testament to the white man's greed and the red man's struggle.

My great great Grandpa Burnett was justifiably concerned and saddened that children of the 1890's were taught nothing about the Trail of Tears and that they did not know they were living on land taken by force from the original Native American owners. He was obviously afraid and ashamed that we Americans would forget the horrors he had witnessed and the guilt of the American government would forever go unheralded.

However, with the advent of modern education, and the eagerness of present day scholars to unravel that part of our history which has been cloaked in darkness, the collective conscious of we Americans has been awakened, awakened not only to the blatant greed of our government, but to the imperfections of our society as a whole.

No longer can we hide behind the mantle of ignorance and the cloak of indifference. If American culture is to progress and fulfill its true 'manifest destiny' these concerns and others must be fully addressed and judiciously rectified.