Trail of Tears Reading Center
Directions:
1. Pick one reading to read closely
2. Read the piece 2 times if time permits.
3. Ask yourself:
4, Respond in your notebook, answering one of the questions above.
2. Read the piece 2 times if time permits.
3. Ask yourself:
- What type of document is this (a journal entry? A song? A newspaper article?)
- Who wrote it? When?
- What does this piece teach us about the time period?
- Why was it written?
- How do you think the author feels about the time period/event in consideration?
- If there was a debate about this topic, what position might the author take?
4, Respond in your notebook, answering one of the questions above.
John G. Burnett's letter to his children in 1890John G. Burnett was a soldier and an interpreter for the U.S. Army who accompanied the Cherokee from Georgia to Arkansas and Oklahoma in 1838 and 1839. His gripping account of what he saw, heard, and felt was written as a letter to his children more than 50 years after the event.
Children: This is my birthday, December 11, 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 and the wild boar and the timber wolf. Often spending 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. . . . . . . The removal of Cherokee Indians from their lifelong homes in the year of 1838 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-by 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. . . . . . . The long painful journey to the west ended March 26th, 1839, with four-thousand silent graves reaching from the foothills of the Smoky Mountains to what is known as Indian territory in the West. . . . In the year 1828, a little Indian boy living on Ward creek 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 overrun with armed brigands claiming 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. Men were shot in cold blood, lands were confiscated. Homes were burned and the inhabitants driven out by the gold-hungry brigands. . . . . . . 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. Future generations will read and condemn the act, and I do hope posterity will remember that private soldiers like myself, and like the four Cherokees who were forced by General Scott to shoot an Indian Chief and his children, had to execute the orders of our superiors. We had no choice in the matter. . . . 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 lived in their memory as "the soldier that 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 4,000 silent graves that mark the trail of the Cherokees to their exile. I wish I could forget it all, but the picture of 645 wagons lumbering over the frozen ground with their cargo of suffering humanity still lingers in my memory. 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. www.cherokee.org., Cherokee Nation Home, the Official Site of the Cherokee Nation, Tahlequah, Okla. |
Song Lyrics: Cherokee Nation
Cherokee Nation Lyrics
written by Don Fardon
sung by Paul Revere & the Raiders
They took the whole Cherokee nation
Put us on this reservation
Took away our ways of life
The tomahawk and the bow and knife
Took away our native tongue
And taught their English to our young
And all the beads we made by hand
Are nowadays made in Japan
Cherokee people
Cherokee tribe
So proud to live
So proud to die
They took the whole Indian nation
Locked us on this reservation
And though I wear a shirt and tie
I'm still part Redman deep inside
Cherokee people
Cherokee tribe
So proud to live
So proud to die
And some day when they've learned
Cherokee Nation will return
Will return will return
Will return will return
written by Don Fardon
sung by Paul Revere & the Raiders
They took the whole Cherokee nation
Put us on this reservation
Took away our ways of life
The tomahawk and the bow and knife
Took away our native tongue
And taught their English to our young
And all the beads we made by hand
Are nowadays made in Japan
Cherokee people
Cherokee tribe
So proud to live
So proud to die
They took the whole Indian nation
Locked us on this reservation
And though I wear a shirt and tie
I'm still part Redman deep inside
Cherokee people
Cherokee tribe
So proud to live
So proud to die
And some day when they've learned
Cherokee Nation will return
Will return will return
Will return will return