The People Who Profited Off the Trail of Tears

They held back tears as they left, touching the autumn leaves one last time. The Choctaw had fought alongside Andrew Jackson in the War of 1812, and a U.S. official had ensured their territory in perpetuity. Now they were being forced west anyway, the first indigenous nation to be expelled from its ancestral homelands under President Jackson’s 1830 Indian Removal Act. Abandoning the schools, spinning wheels, and carpentry shops they had built throughout what is now Mississippi, the Choctaw embarked on an arduous journey to Oklahoma, their eviction “an experiment on human life,” as an outraged Massachusetts congressman warned. Survivors called their new home “the Land of Death.”

Expulsion was a windfall for the white Mississippians who raced into Choctaw houses, harvesting the crops and supping on the spoils. Over the next decade, the United States repeated the pattern from Ohio to Alabama, banishing some 80,000 women, men, and children beyond the Mississippi River, to the western fringe of an unabashed American empire. “They are on an outside of us,” a Senate committee exulted, “and in a place which will ever remain an outside.” More than 25,000 Native people died.

In , , a historian at the University of Georgia, offers a damning