Indian Removal Act

Today I had a very bad day. When I was coming out of my home I found these men dressed strangely trying to force us to leave. I thought that the man they called Andrew Jackson said that they would not treat us badly at all. I joined up with the forces of the Cherokee Indians. The government did not allow us to go to trial, so we got a man by the name of Samuel Austin Worcester to go in our defense. Supreme Court Justice John Marshall ruled in our favor, but Andrew Jackson said that he would like to see him enforce that law. When there was a group of guys in our tribe thinking that we should just relocate some federal agents decided to make a minority have the say so in our majority. The traitors signed a treaty giving us $5 million and land to the west of the Mississippi River. However, by 1838, I did not move along with about 20,000 other Cherokee. When President Martin van Buren heard of this he decided to send in troops to get us out of here. Thus began are cruel and unusual punishment. He broke us into groups of about 1,000 and told us to start walking. We did not know how far we had to walk; all we knew was that we were going to walk or we were going to get shot. It turns out that we walked for over 800 miles on very little food because the stingy Americans took our portions and our clothing and shoes.



The nation was being hindered from growth because of the way that they treated the Native Americans. If we had treated the Indians fairly and how we said we would; we would have made great allies. They could have helped us find a way to plant large crops and methods of harvesting them without the need of many slaves. Instead we either had a very hard struggle against them in miniature battles or we had to forcibly remove them from the land that we were about to go settle in. This caused them to become angry at us and vice versa.