The Trail of Tears was the forced displacement and ethnic cleansing of about 60,000 Native Americans of the 'Five Civilized Tribes', including their black slaves, between 1830 and 1850 by the United States government. This removal followed the passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830 and was part of the broader Indian removal policy. The Cherokee removal in 1838 was the last forced removal east of the Mississippi and was precipitated by the discovery of gold near Dahlonega, Georgia, in 1828, which sparked the Georgia Gold Rush and intensified pressure to displace Native Americans from their ancestral homelands in the Southeastern United States.
Members of the Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw nations were forcibly removed from their ancestral homelands and relocated to newly designated Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River. The article does not provide specific details about commanders or key military moments during the removals themselves, focusing instead on the nature and scope of the forced displacement.
The relocated peoples suffered from exposure, disease, and starvation while en route to their newly designated Indian reserve. Thousands died from disease before reaching their destinations or shortly after relocation. A variety of scholars have classified the Trail of Tears as an example of the genocide of Native Americans, while others categorize it as ethnic cleansing, reflecting the devastating humanitarian consequences of this forced removal policy.
The Indian Wars encompass more than three centuries of armed conflict between the United States government, American settlers, and Indigenous nations — from the Powhatan Wars of the 1620s through the final Plains campaigns of the late 19th century. The eastern conflicts — King Philip's War (1675–1676), the Tuscarora War (1711–1715), and the Creek and Seminole Wars — largely ended organized Indigenous resistance east of the Mississippi by the 1840s. On the Great Plains, the Sioux Wars (1854–1890), Red River War (1874–1875), and Nez Perce War (1877) followed the displacement wrought by the transcontinental railroad and the near-extinction of the American bison — an estimated 30 to 60 million animals reduced to fewer than 1,000 by 1890. The Ghost Dance religious movement and the massacre at Wounded Knee (December 29, 1890), in which US cavalry killed approximately 250 Lakota men, women, and children, marked the effective end of armed resistance. The Dawes Act (1887) allotted reservation land to individual families, opening millions of acres to white settlement and reducing Indigenous landholdings by about two-thirds over the following decades.
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