What Are The “Trail Of Tears” And The “Long Walk”?

Faced with the embarrassing problem of displaced and recalcitrant Indian peoples, in 1830, Congress enacted the Treaty of New Echota, which included the Indian Removal Act. The forced relocations included the Trail of Tears and the Long Walk.
In 1834, 17,000 Cherokees were rounded up and placed in camps.
The Cherokee name for the incident is "Nunna daul lsunyi, or "The Trail Where We Cried." Eventually, the people who had not died from disease were forced marched across three states -- North Carolina to Oklahoma -- to a reservation. Four thousand died, mostly from disease.
The Trail of Tears also refers to the forced relocations to reservations of the "Five Civilized Tribes": the Creek, Choctaw, Seminole and Chickasaw people.
In 1864, Col. Kit Carson was ordered to round up the last holdouts of a Navajo uprising. He chased the families into Arizona's Canyon de Chelly (now a Navajo monument) and cut off their food supply by burning their agricultural resources and killing their livestock. Many Indians also died in the roundup.
Then began the "Long Walk" of 8,000-9,000 people for 300 miles in 20 days from Bosque Redondo to a reservation in southeastern New Mexico. Two hundred died of starvation and cold.
In 1865, the federal government admitted that the Navajo's new home was unsuitable for agriculture, and sent them back to their ancestral lands.

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