Riding To Remember
By Bonita Wilborn
Riding to Remember, Trail of Tears Motorcycle Ride is held each year on the 3rd week in September. Jerry “Shadow Wolf” Davis, a man that is 18% Cherokee and a founder of the Trail of Tears Motorcycle Ride, has written and published a book covering many aspects of the events that led to the Trail of Tears. Jerry’s passion is keeping the memory of the horror that was executed against his ancestors alive and in the memory of every American so that hopefully it will never happen again.
According to Davis, the Trail of Tears Motorcycle Ride, which saw its 27th Anniversary in 2019, is more than just a motorcycle ride; it has raised more than $400,000 in scholarship monies for American Indians. “It’s a ride for a cause,” Davis said. “I owe a lot of gratitude to the motorcyclists. Their culture has been very benevolent to our country. We have had as many as 175,000 in the escorted parade, riding over 70 miles.”
Jerry Davis will be holding a book signing at the Lena Cagle Public Library in Bridgeport on December 1, 2019, at 2:00 PM. Signed copies of Davis’ book are also available at the Mountain Valley News Office in Rainsville as well as on Amazon and soon to be on Barns and Noble. The cost of this historical book is $28.
At the beginning of the 1830s, nearly 125,000 Native Americans lived on millions of acres of land in Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina, and Florida. It was land that their ancestors had occupied and cultivated for generations. Working on behalf of white settlers who wanted to grow cotton on the Indians’ land, the federal government forced the Native Americans to leave their homelands and walk thousands of miles to a specially designated “Indian territory” across the Mississippi River. This difficult and sometimes deadly journey is known as the Trail of Tears.
White Americans, particularly those who lived on the western frontier, often feared and resented the Native Americans they encountered. To them, American Indians seemed to be unfamiliar, alien people who occupied land that white settlers wanted and believed they deserved.
The Native Americans’ land was valuable, as gold had been discovered in Georgia, and it grew to be more coveted as white settlers flooded the region. Many of these whites yearned to make their fortunes, and they did not care how “civilized” their native neighbors were. They wanted that land, and they would do almost anything to get it. They stole livestock, burned and looted houses and towns, committed mass murder, and squatted on land that did not belong to them.
State governments joined in this effort to drive Native Americans out of the South. Andrew Jackson had long been an advocate of what he called “Indian removal.” As an Army general, he had spent years leading brutal campaigns against the Creeks in Georgia and Alabama and the Seminoles in Florida, campaigns that resulted in the transfer of hundreds of thousands of acres of land from Indian nations to white farmers. As president, he continued this crusade. In 1830, he signed the Indian Removal Act, which gave the federal government the power to exchange Native-held land in the cotton kingdom east of the Mississippi for land to the west, in the “Indian Colonization Zone,” present-day Oklahoma.
The law required the government to negotiate removal treaties fairly, voluntarily and peacefully; it did not permit the president or anyone else to coerce Native nations into giving up their land. However, President Jackson and his government frequently ignored the letter of the law and forced Native Americans to vacate lands they had lived on for generations. In the winter of 1831, under threat of invasion by the U.S. Army, the Choctaw became the first nation to be expelled from its land altogether. They made the journey to Indian Territory on foot, some “bound in chains and marched double file,” and without any food, supplies, or other help from the government. Thousands of people died along the way. The Indian-removal process continued. In 1836, the federal government drove the Creeks from their land; 3,500 of the 15,000 Creeks who set out for Oklahoma did not survive the trip.
By 1838, only about 2,000 Cherokees had left their Georgia homeland for the Indian Territory. President Martin Van Buren sent General Winfield Scott and 7,000 soldiers to expedite the removal process. Scott and his troops forced the Cherokee into stockades at bayonet point while whites looted their homes and belongings. Then, they marched the Indians more than 1,200 miles to the Indian Territory. Whooping cough, typhus, dysentery, cholera, and starvation were epidemic along the way, and historians estimate that more than 5,000 Cherokee died as a result of the journey.
By 1840, tens of thousands of Native Americans had been driven off of their land in the southeastern states and forced to move across the Mississippi to Indian Territory. The federal government promised that their new land would remain unmolested forever, but as the line of white settlement pushed westward, “Indian Country” shrank and shrank. In 1907, Oklahoma became a state, and the Indian Territory was gone for good.