Kelly Sufrinko
Article Review 4
June 13, 2013 For this assignment I chose the article “Cherokee Population Losses during the Trail of Tears: A New Perspective and a New Estimate.” The article starts by saying that as many as 100,000 Native Americans were removed from their homelands to locations west of the Mississippi River during the first half of the nineteenth century. Most of the Indians were from the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole tribes. The relocations occurred after the United States Indian Removal Act of 1830. During the move, the Cherokees suffered from bad weather, mistreatment by the soldiers, hunger, disease, and the loss of their homes. The article then goes on to talk about where the Cherokees used to live and how far they stretched across America. They went from occupying areas from the Ohio River south to Atlanta, from Virginia across Tennessee and Kentucky, and Alabama to the Illinois River to only occupying where North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama meet. Men from Georgia would come to the homes of Indians and take their cattle, eject them from their houses, and assault any owners who put up resistance. With pressure from the state of Georgia and the U.S. Government, the Cherokees fought as hard as they could to resist being moved west of the Mississippi River. Eventually the Treaty of Echota was signed by some Cherokees that offered an exchange of eastern lands for lands west of the Mississippi River and the Cherokees would be paid $15,000,000. This would lead to the removal of all the remaining Cherokees. The article then explains thousands of Cherokees are said to have died during their journey on the Trail of Tears including the round-up of people, the transportation, the months they spent in blockades waiting to be transported, and the first year in the new Indian Territory. From accounts that were found by the Five Civilized Tribes, most Indians are thought to have reached the new land, but after arriving an epidemic of diseases wiped out a huge number of people. Today it is generally accepted that 16,000 Cherokees were removed from their lands and 4,000 of them died. The author then compares this to the number of deaths of the other tribes. For example, the Choctaws are said to have lost 6,000 out of 40,000, the Creeks and Seminoles suffered about a 50 percent loss of their people, and the Chickasaw people made out relatively well and didn’t lose a considerable amount of people. However, the author feels that the estimate of 4,000 lost Cherokees is off seeing as how it is only an estimate. He fills the rest of the article uses graphs and numerical data to show what the actual population and death count could be. I found this article to be very informative, especially on the last few pages with all of the graphs and numbers. However, I do find it a little contradictory that he mentioned in the article that the actual number of deaths is not, and will not ever be known because everything is an estimate. But then he presents all of this data and mathematical equations to argue the number of deaths. Nevertheless, there clearly was a large amount of research that was done in order for this article to be written and that does help to prove his point that the generally accepted deaths could be wrong. I also think that this article was the best written one that I have read so far. It actually had an abstract, which I haven’t come across yet in any of my other assignments. The author also had large quotations instead of just a sentence or two. In my opinion, this always adds something to a paper because we get the speakers full thoughts as opposed to one or two words pertaining to the subject at hand.