One account of the Trail of Tears 

In 1838, my family was living near Murphy, North Carolina . Early one morning they heard a banging on the door. They looked and there was a whole group of soldiers standing in the yard. And they took them out of the cabin, burned the cabin to the ground, and took them to a place called Fort Butler.   

The soldiers put them in the stockade for six weeks and it was very bad conditions there. Early in one morning, when the ground was frozen, they took them over the mountains toward the Mississippi River.  

When they got to the Mississippi River , my grandfather was chosen to count the Cherokees as they crossed the river. He told his wife to hide with the baby and to not cross the river. 

After everyone had crossed the river and my grandfather had counted all the Cherokees, he went up and told the soldiers that they were all there. The soldiers told him to go back and check one more time. And when he did my grandfather jumped in the Mississippi River and hid. The soldiers shot in the water many times, but they thought he was dead because he didn’t surface. But they didn’t know that he was breathing through a hollow reed.   

After the soldiers went away he swam back across the Mississippi River and looked for his wife but she had heard the gunshots and started running back home with the baby in her arms. She would walk all night and rest during the day in the haystacks and briar patches.   

Six weeks later she made it back to the burned-out cabin site. For a whole year she waited for her husband and he didn’t come back. One morning, she looked up and there was a man coming and she ran and hid with the baby. But when he got closer she recognized him as being her husband. They moved to a place called Birdtown and that is where we live today.

-- An abridged version of a story from the video "Cherokee: The Principal People" (sold at the Museum of the Cherokee Indian in Cherokee, N.C.)