The Trail of Tears | The Frontier
episodePreviously titled “The Trail of Tears” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 3, 2026
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. In 1831, the French political thinker and writer Alexis de Tocqueville visited Memphis, Tennessee. As he stood on the banks of the Mississippi River, he caught sight of a horrendous scene. Mass removals of native Choctaw people from their ancestral homelands. In his book, Democracy in America, he described what he saw that day.
In the whole scene, there was an air of ruin and destruction, something which betrayed a final and irrevocable adieu one couldn't watch without feeling one's heart wrung. He asked one man why they were leaving. The answer came back simply, to be free. What Tocqueville witnessed that day would come to be remembered as one of the darkest chapters of American history, the beginning of what is now commonly referred to as the Trail of Tears.
American History Hit The idea of the frontier, to which we've dedicated so much time lately in this series, lives on in our collective American imagination, still charges the spirit of this country. But the idea of white settlers of the colonial period into the American Republic is, of course, in direct opposition to those already living upon that land. As settlers pushed westward, Native nations were pushed aside, pressured, killed. This painful legacy in mind, in this, our fifth and final episode of our Frontier miniseries, we turn to one of the darkest chapters of this checkered past. The Trail of Tears is a story of forced removal and migration, but it is also one of endurance, identity, and survival.
And today, we explore it all in its particulars, when, why, and how it all happened, and of course, what it meant and still means to the Native nations who were driven from their homelands. To lead in this telling, I'm joined by Ryan Spring, Cultural Research Associate in the Historic Preservation Department of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, himself a member of the Choctaw Nation. Hello, Ryan. Thank you so much for being with us. Thank you, Don. It's a pleasure to be here. Before we discuss the Trail of Tears itself, I want to mention that the Trail of Tears is not one thing, but several. There were different forced march migrations for different nations, and we'll discuss all this later. The Choctaw were the first, and so it's helpful especially to understand their experience.
But as I say, it's the first of several that happened over a kind of 20-year period, roughly 1830 to 1850. Regarding the Choctaw, who were they and where were their native homelands geographically?
So our stories place the Choctaw people in the southeastern part of the United States since time immemorial.
What is the Trail of Tears and its significance in American history?
And so we are a Western Muskogean speaking people. That's our language group. And so we speak the Choctaw language, which is in common with some of our related tribes that are still here with us today.
Yeah.
So we're talking about Mississippi, Louisiana, what is today those areas. How large a population are we talking about as far as the Choctaw are concerned?
Yeah. So in the 1831 Armstrong rule that the U.S. government took of Choctaw people, they estimated Choctaw was around 20,000. But we know that our people... were much larger than that. So while our homelands are in Mississippi and Alabama, we had several Choctaw people that were living in Louisiana and Arkansas. And so a lot of those people had left the tribe and they had made new homes to the West. How was this society organized? So our society on a large scale level was made up of three districts, which we call Ulfti. These districts each had a district chief. And Each district chief represented all of the individual village chiefs that were under him.
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