Mantle Rock and the Trail of Tears: the Cherokee camped along the road, not under the arch

The National Park Service (NPS) says the Cherokee story at Mantle Rock is about the road beside the arch. The Nature Conservancy’s Mantle Rock Preserve in Livingston County, Kentucky, has a hiking trail along a piece of the Trail of Tears, with outdoor exhibits that guide visitors in retracing it.

A winter wait

During a harsh winter, 11 detachments of the Cherokee, more than 10,000 people, passed through the Mantle Rock area on the long journey to Indian Territory. They had left Tennessee in 1838, and illness, exhaustion and death left hundreds fewer by the time they reached Oklahoma. The Peter Hildebrand Detachment was forced to spend two bitterly cold weeks encamped for miles along the road. They were waiting for the frozen Ohio River to thaw enough for the ferry to carry people from Berry’s Ferry, Kentucky, to Golconda, Illinois. Once across, many were trapped again between the frozen Ohio and Mississippi rivers. People on the road wrote of deep frozen ground, bad roads, floating ice and the hardships ahead, and a 1839 newspaper account described a procession of two thousand people with horses and mules stretched about three miles along the road.

The road is now the hiking trail. More than 10,000 men, women and children traveled it in the winter of 1838-1839, NPS says, and visitors can walk it and think about what the Cherokee faced.

What is true about Mantle Rock

Mantle Rock is the largest freestanding arch east of the Mississippi River, 188 feet long and 30 feet high. A sandstone glade on top is one of the highest quality in Kentucky, and it has been estimated that less than one percent of such habitat remains. Some of the plants here are not known to grow anywhere else in the state. NPS corrects two stories:

• That the Cherokee camped under the arch. There were far too many, and historical accounts describe a long, linear camp along the road. It is unlikely that many people visited the rock itself, since they were exhausted and stayed near supplies and wagons on the road.
• That people were buried there. The Trail of Tears claimed many lives, but there is no evidence of burials at Mantle Rock.

The removal policy

In the 1830s the federal government forcibly removed approximately 16,000 Cherokee, 21,000 Muscogee (Creek), 9,000 Choctaw, 6,000 Chickasaw and 4,000 Seminole from their ancestral homes in the southeastern United States. The policy provoked fierce and bitter debate. Supporters said it was a benevolent way to save the tribes from being overwhelmed by an expanding American population. Opponents decried its inhumanity and its tragic consequences. One thing was certain: removal opened millions of acres for white settlers. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 sent thousands of American Indians to Indian Territory, in present-day Oklahoma, over existing roads and rivers. Many groups left in the fall to avoid summer disease and heat and met dangerous winter weather instead, and many died.

Today

The five removed tribes built new lives in the West and are successful sovereign nations preserving their cultures while adapting to the 21st century. The Cherokee who survived created a new sovereign nation in present-day Oklahoma, while some stayed in North Carolina and, through a special exemption, formed the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. NPS and its partners preserve historic sites and trail segments and develop them for public use, so that the story of removal is remembered.

Sources

• National Park Service, Mantle Rock Preserve and the Trail of Tears; rewritten in hubnx’s own words. The exhibit’s painting and illustration are left out. Period quotations are from the New York Observer, January 26, 1839, and a survivor’s recollection.