Riding
To Remember
By
Bonita Wilborn
Riding to Remember, Trail of Tears Motorcycle Ride is held each year on the 3rd week in September. Jerry “Shadow Wolf” Davis, a man that is 18% Cherokee and a founder of the Trail of Tears Motorcycle Ride, has written and published a book covering many aspects of the events that led to the Trail of Tears. Jerry’s passion is keeping the memory of the horror that was executed against his ancestors alive and in the memory of every American so that hopefully it will never happen again.
According
to Davis, the Trail of Tears Motorcycle Ride, which saw its 27th
Anniversary in 2019, is more than just a motorcycle ride; it has raised more
than $400,000 in scholarship monies for American Indians. “It’s a ride for a cause,” Davis said. “I owe
a lot of gratitude to the motorcyclists.
Their culture has been very benevolent to our country. We have had as many as 175,000 in the
escorted parade, riding over 70 miles.”
Jerry
Davis will be holding a book signing at the Lena Cagle Public Library in
Bridgeport on December 1, 2019, at 2:00 PM.
Signed copies of Davis’ book are also available at the Mountain Valley
News Office in Rainsville as well as on Amazon and soon to be on Barns and
Noble. The cost of this historical book
is $28.
At the beginning of the
1830s, nearly 125,000 Native Americans lived on millions of acres of land in
Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina, and Florida. It was land that their ancestors had occupied
and cultivated for generations. Working on behalf of white settlers who wanted
to grow cotton on the Indians’ land, the federal government forced the Native
Americans to leave their homelands and walk thousands of miles to a specially
designated “Indian territory” across the Mississippi River. This difficult and
sometimes deadly journey is known as the Trail of Tears.
White Americans,
particularly those who lived on the western frontier, often feared and resented
the Native Americans they encountered. To them, American Indians seemed to be
unfamiliar, alien people who occupied land that white settlers wanted and believed
they deserved.
The Native Americans’ land was valuable, as gold had been
discovered in Georgia, and it grew to be more coveted as white settlers flooded
the region. Many of these whites yearned
to make their fortunes, and they did not care how “civilized” their native
neighbors were. They wanted that land,
and they would do almost anything to get it.
They stole livestock, burned and looted houses and towns, committed mass
murder, and squatted on land that did not belong to them.
State governments joined in this effort to
drive Native Americans out of the South. Andrew Jackson
had long been an advocate of what he called “Indian removal.” As an Army
general, he had spent years leading brutal campaigns against the Creeks in
Georgia and Alabama and the Seminoles in Florida, campaigns that resulted in
the transfer of hundreds of thousands of acres of land from Indian nations to
white farmers. As president, he continued this crusade. In 1830, he signed the
Indian Removal Act, which gave the federal government the power to exchange
Native-held land in the cotton kingdom east of the Mississippi for land
to the west, in the “Indian Colonization Zone,” present-day Oklahoma.
The law required the government to negotiate
removal treaties fairly, voluntarily and peacefully; it did not permit the
president or anyone else to coerce Native nations into giving up their land.
However, President Jackson and his government frequently ignored the letter of
the law and forced Native Americans to vacate lands they had lived on for
generations. In the winter of 1831, under threat of invasion by the U.S. Army,
the Choctaw became the first nation to be expelled from its land altogether.
They made the journey to Indian Territory on foot, some “bound in chains and
marched double file,” and without any food, supplies, or other help from the
government. Thousands of people died along the way. The Indian-removal process continued. In 1836, the federal government drove
the Creeks from their land; 3,500 of the 15,000 Creeks who set out for Oklahoma
did not survive the trip.
By 1838, only about 2,000
Cherokees had left their Georgia homeland for the Indian Territory. President
Martin Van Buren sent General Winfield Scott and 7,000 soldiers to
expedite the removal process. Scott and his troops forced the Cherokee into
stockades at bayonet point while whites looted their homes and belongings. Then, they marched the Indians more than 1,200
miles to the Indian Territory. Whooping cough, typhus, dysentery, cholera, and
starvation were epidemic along the way, and historians estimate that more than
5,000 Cherokee died as a result of the journey.
By 1840, tens of thousands
of Native Americans had been driven off of their land in the southeastern
states and forced to move across the Mississippi to Indian Territory. The
federal government promised that their new land would remain unmolested
forever, but as the line of white settlement pushed westward, “Indian Country”
shrank and shrank. In 1907, Oklahoma became a state, and the Indian Territory
was gone for good.
