American Literature Romanticism UHCL 2015 sample student research project

American Literature: Romanticism
research assignment
Student Research Submissions 2015
Research Post 1

Carol Fountain

The Plight of the Cherokee on the Trail of Tears

They took the whole Cherokee Nation

Put us on this reservation

Took away our ways of life

The tomahawk and the bow and knife

Songwriter Loudermilk, John

Published by Lyrics©Sony/ATV Music Publishing Company

I remember from my childhood singing songs like “Ten Little Indians,” watching Tonto and the Lone Ranger, watching Clint Eastwood in the spaghetti westerns of the time, playing cowboys and Indians with other neighborhood children, and making yearly visits to the Cherokee Indian Village in North Carolina, where we watched “Unto These Hills” and bought moccasins and other Cherokee Indian souvenirs on a yearly basis. I do not claim to have any Indian blood that I know of, but the subject and the plight of the Indians in early America have always fascinated and saddened me, especially the saga of the Trail of Tears.

The connection that I feel to their story stems not only from the commercial associations that I had with them at an early age, but also because they became such a huge part of my early life simply by association with the homeland of my parents and our frequent visits to the area. Imagine my pleasure last summer when we studied some of the Indian narratives in the American Immigrant Class. To realize their association with the American Romantic Period only heightens my interest and spurs me to research some of their literature and commentary on that literature. My question is, how did the plight of the Indians on the Trail of Tears become a part of the literature of the Romantic Era, and not just an historical account of the journey?

Much of the literature that covers the Trail of Tears concerns commentaries on personal accounts of the happenings before, during and after the Removal, mostly “first-person accounts of the Cherokees during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries” (Teuton) In some of the sources I detected a note of controversy over whether or not those sources were totally reliable, but further controversy extends from the question of who was to blame for the Removal. In Rozema’s introduction she notes that her collection contains eyewitness accounts from Cherokee leaders, missionaries, and friends of the Cherokee, and military representatives, but Andrew Jackson, one of the main proponents of the removal, is never mentioned. She is also criticized for her omission of thorough historical context in her work. Agnew uses a phrase for the matter of the Removal: that it is a “clash of cultures.” This is simply put and obvious, but I had never considered that definition for the Trail of Tears. Not only was there a clash between the five Indian Tribes that were a part of the Removal and the U.S. government, but there was also a clash between those tribes and the area to which they were moved, already occupied by the Osage Indians.

Diane Glancy wrote two novels about the Indians and the Trail of Tears entitled Pushing the Bear and Pushing the Bear: After the Trail of Tears. The first novel is about the Trail of Tears itself and the second novel relates events which happen during the following decade. The “bear” in these novels is the Removal, the pressure placed on those Indians involved in the Removal and its aftermath. She calls the victims “indigenous immigrants,” a tag that I thought was interesting not only from the “minority narrative” point of view but also for the explanation of how this can be considered part the Romantic Era. The tag, when studied more deeply, indicates someone who has lost their homeland through no wish of their own, an oxymoron which bears consideration.

The most interesting discovery that I made in this research project was a short story by Edgar Allan Poe in which he satirizes the white social reaction to the Removal. What led to this discovery was the work of Bettina Drew entitled “The Great Amnesia.” She writes about the convenience of denying the number of deaths on the Trail of Tears. In it she cites the short story, “The Man that Was Used Up,” in which Poe “took the national temperature…likely the most sustained and insightful commentary on white social reaction to Indian Removal.”

The literature surrounding the Trail of Tears is certainly of the American Romantic Period, and fits in with the concepts of separation, desire and loss, and nostalgia for the past. For these reasons, the literature of this time fits the Romantic period and joins The Last of the Mohicans and other minority narratives in providing students of literature with another view of Native Americans and their contributions to the era of Romanticism.

Works Cited and Consulted

Agnew, Brad. Fort Gibson: Terminal on the Trail of Tears. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980. Book.

Drew, Bettina. "The Great Amnesia." Southwest Review (2014): 556-569. Academic Search Complete.

Glancy, Diane. "Pushing the Bear: After the Trail of Tears." Literature Resource Center (2011): 197. Print.

Poe, Edgar Allan. "The Man That Was Used Up." n.d. Poem.

Rozema, Vicki. Voices from the Trail of Tears. Winston-Salem: John F. Blair, 2003. Print.

Teuton, Christopher B. "Cherokee Voices: Early Accounts of Cherokee Life in the East." Appalachian Journal 33.1 (2005): 116-117. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40934778. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/40934778>.