By Tabitha Evans Moore
EDITOR & PUBLISHER

It’s a crisp fall day. Birds chirp. The sun beams through the changing fall leaves, and a stillness washes over the rural stretch of road. There are pockets of development but much of Bean’s Creek Road just west of Salem remains forest or farmland. I roll down my car windows and listen.

On or about October 28, 1838, roughly 700 Cherokee men, women and children came down this same road and forded nearby creeks, headed west under military escort toward Memphis and, eventually, Indian Territory in Oklahoma. They had left their homes in southeast Tennessee 17 days earlier. They would not stop walking until January.

That stretch of creek sits about 15 miles south of the Lynchburg square as the crow flies. Moore County didn’t exist yet — it was carved out of its neighbors in 1871 — so in 1838 the land the Cherokee crossed belonged to Franklin and Lincoln counties. But it is our backyard, and most of us have driven over the Trail of Tears without knowing it.

This week, 188 years later, I drove it looking for signs of what it all meant.

JUST FIVE VOTES CHANGED EVERYTHING

It is easy to think of the Trail of Tears as something that simply happened — a tragedy, like a flood. It wasn’t. It was debated policy — argued over, voted on, challenged in court, and signed into law. At almost every step, it could have gone the other way.

Those people were on that road outside Salem because of decisions made in Washington, in Milledgeville, Georgia, and in Nashville.

By the 1820s, the Cherokee Nation had already given up most of its land through decades of treaties. What remained was a block of southeast Tennessee, north Georgia, northeast Alabama and western North Carolina. The Cherokee had a written constitution, a newspaper, and a capital. Their communities, in many respects, looked a lot like their white neighbors’.

Then, in 1829, gold was found in north Georgia. Georgia then passed laws stripping the Cherokee of legal protections — they could not testify against a white man or dig for gold on their own land — and began raffling their land off to white settlers by lottery.

That same year, President Andrew Jackson, a Tennessean, asked Congress to move all eastern tribes west of the Mississippi. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 passed the House by just five votes.

Not every Tennessean went along. Davy Crockett — who owned a homestead in what is now Moore County — cast the Tennessee delegation’s lone “no” vote against Andrew Jackson and the act. Some say he lost his seat in the next election because of that vote. Crockett lived near the head of Mulberry Creek, in what is now Moore County, around 1811 to 1813, before moving to Franklin County.

His homeplace, Kentuck, is marked by a well on US 64 west of Belvidere. The state study’s oral tradition says the Bell detachment camped at Rattlesnake Springs near Salem. If those are the same spring, the Cherokee camped near the old homestead of the one Tennessean who voted against their removal.

Parts of Highway 64 now sit renamed as the David Crockett Highway and the near entirety of the road that runs from Fayetteville to Winchester sits on the map of the Trail of Tears National Historic Trail.

WHEN THE COURTS FAILED

The Cherokee tried to defend themselves in court. In 1832, in Worcester v. Georgia, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Georgia had no authority over Cherokee land, but Jackson’s administration declined to enforce the ruling. Georgia eventually carried on — putting a chink in the checks and balances the framers established in the U.S. Constitution. Jackson famously said, “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it” — but some say that’s just legend.

The Removal Act still required a treaty. Principal Chief John Ross, backed by the overwhelming majority of Cherokee, refused to sign one.

So federal officials found people who would. A small faction — Major Ridge, his son John Ridge, newspaper editor Elias Boudinot and others, who had come to believe removal was inevitable — became known as the Treaty Party. In December 1835, the Georgia Guard crossed into Tennessee and arrested Ross, holding him for nearly two weeks while treaty supporters were gathered. The Treaty Party signed the Treaty of New Echota on Dec. 29

More than 15,000 Cherokee signed petitions against it. The U.S. Senate ratified it anyway, by a single vote the two-thirds it needed, and Jackson signed it on May 23, 1836. It set a two-year deadline.

When the deadline came, Jackson was out of office. His successor, Martin Van Buren, a New Yorker, enforced the treaty anyway.

Some of the officers sent to do it objected. Gen. John Wool, sent to disarm the Cherokee, reported in 1837 that almost all of them opposed the treaty, and he resigned, disgusted with the job. Brig. Gen. R. Dunlap, commanding Tennessee volunteers, threatened to resign, saying the roundup dishonored Tennessee’s arms.

In May 1838, Gen. Winfield Scott’s troops began driving Cherokee families from their homes at gunpoint and into stockades. Their houses were looted behind them. They spent a summer of drought in crowded camps in southeast Tennessee, where missionaries recorded several deaths a day. An estimated 4,000 Cherokee died in the roundup, the camps and on the road west.

Most Cherokee traveled in detachments organized by John Ross and took a northern route through McMinnville and Nashville. The 700 who came through Winchester, Salem and Fayetteville were different: they were the Treaty Party’s people, led by John Bell. Because the split between the two factions had grown so bitter, they traveled separately, on a southern route along what is now Highway 64, with a military escort.

That complicates the story in a way. These were, in a sense, the people who said yes. But they said yes to a choice made under enormous pressure — under state laws written to drive them out, a federal law built to remove them, and a president who ignored the Supreme Court. Consent given under those conditions is not much of a choice.

And the decisions followed them west. From his home at the Hermitage outside Nashville, Jackson continued to encourage John Bell and Stand Watie against Ross. In June 1839, Major Ridge, John Ridge and Elias Boudinot were killed by Cherokee who held them responsible for the removal.

REMINDERS THROUGHOUT SOUTHERN MIDDLE TENNESSEE

The Bell detachment wasn’t walking through empty country. The Cherokee gave up a large tract of land here in 1806, under a treaty signed in Washington, and Franklin County was created the following year. Many of the white families who watched the detachment pass in 1838 were living on land that had been Cherokee within living memory.

The people who were here before are still in the names on our maps and the places we take our kids on a Saturday. Wartrace, over in Bedford County, takes its name from a Cherokee war path that ran through it. At Savage Gulf, tradition holds that Native people used the Stone Door, the great crack in the cliff above Beersheba Springs, as a passage up and down the plateau. Old Stone Fort in Manchester is older still: a walled ceremonial enclosure built roughly 2,000 years ago, during what archaeologists call the Middle Woodland period, by people who lived here centuries before the Cherokee and Chickasaw towns Europeans would later meet. Even the name of our state comes from Tanasi, a Cherokee town. And across these counties, plows and bulldozers still turn up points, pottery and graves. Those burial grounds belong to someone’s ancestors, and state law protects them.

None of us were there. But all of it was decided by people elected, appointed and sworn in to make decisions for this country — and some of them were Tennesseans, and some of them were from just up the road. The people who paid for those decisions walked past Salem on their way out.

Driving in Franklin County on Saturday reminded me that history isn’t just something that gets written in books. It’s real, and there are often winners and losers.

To learn more, you don’t have to go far. The Bell Route marker stands on the Highway 64 bypass in Fayetteville. In Sewanee, a stretch of the Mountain Goat Trail follows the route the detachment walked. In Pulaski, the Giles County Trail of Tears Interpretive Center, open Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., tells the story of the two removal routes that crossed there.

For a deeper dive, Sewanee’s online Bell Route archive and the Tennessee Division of Archaeology’s free 2001 study, “The Trail of Tears in Tennessee,” trace the road county by county. The Tennessee Chapter of the Trail of Tears Association keeps the work going, and it’s always looking for people who know the old roads and the stories handed down along them. If your family passed down oral history, they’d love to hear it. •

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