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watering hole
This is a representation of what the Great Comet of 1811 must have looked like. It was the largest and brightest comet in recorded history, and remained so until the Hale-Bopp Comet in 1997.
Tecumseh, the Shawnee prophet who convinced the Creek and their Seminole allies to resist the U.S. government.
persuaded them to sign the Treaty of New Echota, giving the president and the state of Georgia everything they wanted. The Cherokee tribes collected a list of 13,000 signatures of tribal members opposed to this unauthorized treaty and presented it to Congress. In spite of the protests, the treaty was ratified in the U.S. Senate by a single vote and signed into law by President Andrew Jackson. Removal took place in three stages: Voluntary Removal—Members of the tribe who were in favor of the treaty were assisted by the government. Forced Removal—Members of the tribe opposed to the treaty were placed in internment camps during the hottest part of the summer of 1838. Reluctant Removal—After being held in the internment camps, the reluctant Cherokee were forced to travel across country to their new home in Indian Territory. Two thousand Cherokee died in the internment camps and another two thousand perished on the forced march across the country.
opposition to slavery and refusal to obey the laws of the white government. Along with a breakaway faction of the Creek, the Seminole took the side of the British in the war of 1812, primarily because Britain had no plans to bring them under her control. The United States spent an estimated $20,000,000 to defeat the Seminole in the second Seminole War, more than the removal costs of all the other tribes combined. Although the U.S. did sign the Treaty of Payne’s Landing with the Seminole, the tribe never went peacefully to their assigned lands in Indian Territory. They were captured in small numbers beginning in 1832 and continuing through the 1840s and transported in shackles along with runaway slaves (Black Seminoles) who had joined the tribe.
The Seminole The Seminole didn’t start out as a tribe. They were a mix of breakaway Muskogee, and runaway African slaves who took refuge in the swampy lands of southern Georgia and central Florida in territory claimed by the Spanish, the English, and the Americans, but actually wanted by no one. Their name might be a corruption of cimarron, the Spanish word for wild, or it might be derived from the Muskogee term yat’siminoli, which means free people. The United States probably wouldn’t have gone to so much trouble to remove them if they hadn’t been so zealous in their
The Chickasaw With all the bad press the United States had received in removing the Choctaw, Creek, Cherokee, and Seminole, the Chickasaw were in an excellent position to negotiate. Rather than trade their homeland in what is now Mississippi, Alabama, Kentucky, and Tennessee for assigned land in Indian Territory, the Chickasaw sold their land to the U.S. for $3,000,000 and purchased territory from the Choctaw Nation for $530,000. They were a relatively small tribe—roughly 5,000 including approximately 1,200 black slaves. They traveled along the same general route as the Choctaw from 1837 through 1847. About eight hundred Chickasaw died during the removal. —John T. Biggs is a critically-acclaimed writer with four novels and over sixty published short stories to his credit. When not travelling the globe with his wife, he makes his home in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.