Matt Walsh

If you grew up in the United States in the past 50 years, then you know about the Trail of Tears.

It's one of those stories that's beaten into our collective consciousness starting in grade school.

We're taught in no uncertain terms that Native Americans were forcibly removed from their ancestral lands by the US government between 1830 and 1850, and that thousands of natives died in the process.

The government did this so that white men could seize Indian land and the valuable resources that it sat on.

In case you missed that lesson in the classroom, you might have caught it in the 2006 documentary narrated by James Earl Jones, or the sprawling national park with signs that note that the Indians did not want to leave, or the endless amount of online propaganda about it.

Much of what they're saying is a myth.

As it turns out, none of the Cherokee Indians who traveled the Trail of Tears had ever heard of the Trail of Tears.

That's because from 1830 to 1850, almost no one used the phrase.

The term was popularized a full seven decades after the Cherokees moved to Oklahoma.

And even then, it wasn't truly a household name.

That didn't happen until the 1960s, more than a century after it took place.

But it isn't just the name that's at issue here.

It's the details that are so often omitted from the actual story.

The story begins in 1830 when President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act.

The law did not authorize the US government to forcibly remove Indians or march them westward against their will.

Instead, the law authorized the president to negotiate legally binding treaties

with the various tribes in which those tribes would be awarded compensation a new territory west of the mississippi in exchange for voluntarily vacating the territory that they currently lived on in accordance with that law many indian tribes agreed to terms to relocate the first major treaty was the treaty of new achota in 1835. in school this treaty is presented as a

fraudulent agreement in which a tiny number of Cherokees signed away all Cherokee lands in the Southeast, allowing the US government to obtain a pretext to forcibly remove the Cherokees to Oklahoma, resulting in the deaths of 4,000 Indians.

Well, every aspect of that narrative is false.

The first lie is that 4,000 Indians died.