Ho
I have read that a group of Cherokee dismantled a church, then carried each piece on their backs, and then rebuilt the church once they arrived at the end of Trail of Tears. Have you or AuntB ever heard this?
No..I haven’t heard that...I would not be surprised though...I will look for that...Thank you very much....
“Ho
I have read that a group of Cherokee dismantled a church, then carried each piece on their backs, and then rebuilt the church once they arrived at the end of Trail of Tears. Have you or AuntB ever heard this?”
Similar.
Two years before the ‘Trail of Tears’, John Ridge & others set up a community in the new Indian Territory for the arrival of the removed Cherokee. They traveled by steam boat. It’s doubtful that they ‘carried’ anything on their backs on the Trail of tears because they were rounded up by the army and put in livestock stockades, not allowed to take anything by the time they were forcefully removed. Here are some excerpts from Chapter 4 - Retribution
Blood Vendetta - The Cherokee Civil War
“Hoping to avoid bloodshed and to prepare for moving thirteen thousand Cherokee refugees west in the coming months, The Ridge Family moved themselves to Indian Territory in 1837 by steamboat, which took about four weeks. Along with them were the Boudinots and Stand Watie, with John Adair Bell returning several times to Georgia as a guide and transporting supplies and finally leading his own wagon train of Ridge Party Cherokees to Indian Territory West, when they were finally able to safely leave. Through his many scouting and commerce missions Bell gained the respect and cooperation of the United States Army to use military roads instead of the standard longer routes.
Upon their arrival in Indian Territory near the Arkansas line two years earlier, Major Ridge and the others began investing their money. They purchased land on Honey Creek, built two homes and set up a trading store.
Honey Creek flows across the Oklahoma line near Southwest City, Missouri, continues west to the Grand River near Grove, Oklahoma. The location planned as a junction of trade did just that, but proved also to be a place of bloodshed and death for the following two decades.
With nearly seventeen thousand dollars, John Ridge traveled to New Orleans and New York to purchase merchandise for the store and supplies for a printing press and missionary site at Park Hill operated by Reverend S. A. Worcester.”
An interesting note is that the Cherokee, being mostly Christian, sang Christian hymms as they walked the ice cover trails.
This is covered in the surprisingly well done documentry, We Shall Remain, Episode 3 Trail of Tears.