The Trail of Tears: The Forced Removal of the Cherokee Nation
By Margaret Ellsworth Calloway
Length5h 18m
About this audiobook
In the spring of 1829 a stranger crouched in a creek in the Georgia piedmont, sifting gravel through his fingers with a tin pan and a rifle beside him, and said quietly that there was color in this branch. By autumn thousands of miners had followed him onto Cherokee land. They dug shafts and sluices without asking anyone, cut timber, turned their hogs loose in Cherokee cornfields, and took it for granted that the land would soon change hands anyway.
What they walked past was a republic. From its capital at New Echota the Cherokee Nation governed itself under a written constitution of 1827, with a principal chief, a two-house National Council and courts in eight districts. It printed the Cherokee Phoenix in English and in Sequoyah's syllabary. Its people ran mills, ferries, orchards and schools, and some of its families held enslaved African Americans.
The book moves from the gold fields to the treaty signed at New Echota in 1835 by a faction with no authority to sign it, over the protests of Principal Chief John Ross; to the stockades of the summer of 1838; and to the long road west through the winter that followed, when thousands died. It stays with what the soldiers wrote home, the women who held families together, and the old feuds and new wars that followed the Cherokee into Indian Territory.
They had built exactly the kind of nation Washington claimed it wanted from them. In the end, the gold and the land counted for more.
Audiobook details
GenreHistory
Length5 hrs 18 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateSep 18, 2026
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Chapter 1: The Gold in the Long Grass
2Chapter 2: A Nation on Paper
3Chapter 3: The Treaty That Was Not a Treaty
4Chapter 4: Stockade Summer
5Chapter 5: The Long Road West
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6Chapter 6: What the Soldiers Wrote
7Chapter 7: The Women Who Held the Line
8Chapter 8: Indian Territory
9Chapter 9: Old Foes and New Wars
10Chapter 10: The Long Memory
11Chapter 11: What the Ledger Knew
12Chapter 12: The Land Remembers
13About the Author
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