Cadron Settlement on the Trail of Tears Water Route

Cadron Settlement Park lies on the Arkansas River, 154 miles upstream from where the Arkansas meets the Mississippi. Two Trail of Tears National Historic Trail exhibits there, a joint project of the National Park Service and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, tell what happened to the people forced west along this river. The Park Service publishes audio descriptions of both; this page retells what they say.

They passed this way

Under the Indian Removal Act of 1830, Cherokee men, women and children were forced from their homes in the southeastern United States toward Indian Territory, now Oklahoma, and thousands of them passed this spot on the water route. Travel by river was faster than by land, but it had its own dangers: sickness spread quickly on board, disease lurked in the river lowlands, steamboats caught fire, the weather was unpredictable, and changing water levels made the river hard to navigate.

The Cherokee were not alone. Muscogee (Creek), Choctaw, Chickasaw and Seminole people also passed along the Arkansas River during their removal. The United States government forcibly removed more than 15,000 Cherokee, 21,000 Muscogee (Creek), 9,000 Choctaw, 6,000 Chickasaw and 4,000 Seminole.

In the 1830s the Arkansas was not the broad, smooth river seen today. It was treacherous, and its delays deepened people's misery, so thousands of Indian people went overland instead, on the Military Road of 1828; remains of that abandoned road survive northeast of the park. On August 1, 1838, the Arkansas Gazette reported:

Between 700 and 800 Cherokee arrived here...the river being too low to proceed farther by water...they are resuming their journey by land. The summer (or bowel) complaint... is prevailing among them...particularly among the children, and a good many deaths have occurred.

The tragedy of early removal

Some Cherokee went west before the Trail of Tears of 1838–1839. In 1834 more than 700 were stranded here by low water while a cholera epidemic killed dozens of them, many of them children. Their detachment leader, Lieutenant Joseph Harris, wrote in his journal:

Notes of lamentation & woe arose upon the morning air, and the shrieks of the dying. . . . There were three cases of death before breakfast and eleven in all before the sun went down. . . . All are panic struck; and are scatter through the woods building their campfires as remote from each other as their several fears direct them.

The Cherokee camped at Cadron for 16 days, trying to decide what to do. With Harris himself sick with cholera, they buried their dead and went on by land. Harris reported that 81 people died on the journey, and that half of those who arrived died within the following year from the strain of the trip and disease. Harris died in 1837 from the lingering effects of his own cholera.

In 1991 the Faulkner County Historical Society identified 44 American Indian graves at the site, and found 36 more that could not be identified as Indian. More unmarked graves almost certainly exist.

NPS Exhibit.

Along the river

The exhibits also list other places along the Arkansas River where the Trail of Tears can be explored, measured in river miles from the Mississippi: Arkansas Post National Memorial (14), Pendleton Bend Park (16), Rising Star Park (48), Tar Camp Park (84), Willow Beach Park (102), North Shore Riverwalk Park (112), Toad Suck Ferry Park (152), Cadron Settlement Park (154) and Lake Dardanelle State Park (204), with the Oklahoma border at mile 303. More is on the Trail of Tears National Historic Trail site.

Sources

• National Park Service, Trail of Tears National Historic Trail: "Cadron Settlement Park Exhibits Audio Description" (2023), describing the exhibits "They Passed This Way" and "Tragedy of Early Removal." The 1838 newspaper passage and Lieutenant Harris's journal are quoted as printed. The exhibit photographs, which reproduce a painting and an illustration, are not included. Pictures an earlier version of this page left out were restored on 2026-09-26.