The State Historical Society of Missouri will examine the southern Missouri Route along the Trail of Tears on Tuesday, April 8, noon-1 p.m. The event is free and open to the public at the State Historical Society of Missouri Center for Missouri Studies, 605 Elm St., Columbia. Historical archaeologist Erin Whitson will speak on the topic as part of the History on Elm noon series, sponsored by SHSMO.
The passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830 forced 60,000 or more Native Americans in today’s southeastern United States to leave their ancestral lands and relocate to Indian Territory (in present-day Oklahoma). Thousands of people in various Indian tribes died on the Trail of Tears, including members of the Cherokee Tribe, who were forced to walk through difficult Missouri terrain and Winter weather to get to their new home.
Whitson will discuss how archeological approaches may provide ways to better see aspects of Removal that have been overlooked and how collaborative approaches offer descendants space to explore the histories in the places where their ancestors lived and died. One of the darkest times in U.S. history, Wahnenauhi (Lucy Keys), a survivor of the infamous “Trail of Tears”, wrote that “despair in its thickest blackness” settled down on the Chiefs of the Cherokee as they prepared their people to relocate from their traditional homelands to “Indian Territory.”
Whitson, a native of Steelville, Mo., has been uncovering ties between her hometown and the Trail of Tears. Whitson works as an archeologist for the Missouri Department of Transportation. She is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Binghamton University in New York. Her current doctoral work is focused on research at two Cherokee Removal (Trail of Tears) campsites in southcentral Missouri that date from 1837 to 1839. Partners for the project include Cherokee Nation, United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee, Mark Twain National Forest, Saint Louis University’s Remote Sensing Laboratory, Binghamton University’s Anthropology Department and Geophysics and Remote Sensing Laboratory, and private landowners.
The State Historical Society of Missouri hosts History on Elm on the 2nd Tuesday of the month, at noon. No registration is required.