Trail of Tears Commemorative Park, Hopkinsville: The Winter Camp and Mourning Exhibits

The setting

At the Trail of Tears Commemorative Park in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, a pair of interpretive panels stands in the grass beside a parking lot, and each has an audio description. This page gives both in words.

Facing the panels, a small log building with restrooms and a water fountain stands to the right, and beyond it a larger log building that serves as a museum. Two walkways cross behind the panels; the farther one runs up a slight rise along a wooden rail fence, set every few yards with brick columns bearing brass historic markers. At its left end, a black metal fence encloses two life-size statues, two raised gravesites and two more graves marked with brass plaques.

"A Winter Camp"

The right-hand panel shows a wide path leading away through bare woods half-hidden by fog, the ground covered in brown leaves. Beside it is a report from the New York Observer of January 26, 1839:

"We found them in the forest camped for the night by the road side under a severe fall of rain accompanied by heavy wind. With their canvas for a shield from the inclemency of the weather, and the cold wet ground for a resting place, after the fatigue of the day, they spent the night. We met several detachments in the southern part of Kentucky . . . two thousand Indians with horses and mules in proportion. The forward part of the train we found just pitching their tents for the night, and notwithstanding some thirty or forty wagons were already stationed, we found the road literally filled with the procession for about three miles in length."

The panel continues:

• 1830s Indian removal policy: for Cherokees, homelands are places of origin, with deep spiritual and cultural value in the land and waterways. Federal removal policy became a divisive tool that forced tribes west of the Mississippi River; some of its supporters believed tribes could not coexist within states. In the end, Jacksonian-era policies removed tribes to open a path to rapid growth, wealth and power for white settlers in the East.
• A map of the Southeast, from Florida to Texas and north to Illinois, shows wide arrows running west to Indian Territory, in Oklahoma, from the homelands of the Cherokee (the western Carolinas), the Creek (Georgia), the Seminole (Florida), the Choctaw (southern Alabama and Mississippi) and the Chickasaw (northern Mississippi and western Tennessee and Kentucky). The United States forcibly removed more than 15,000 Cherokee, 21,000 Muscogee (Creek), 9,000 Choctaw, 6,000 Chickasaw and 4,000 Seminole.
• Today: members of the five removed tribes suffered starvation, exposure and disease during removal. Survivors built new lives in Indian Territory, and the tribes continue as sovereign nations, keeping their cultures and traditions for generations to come. Cherokee survivors of the Trail of Tears joined those who had moved earlier, reuniting as the Cherokee Nation in what is now the Cherokee Nation reservation. Some Cherokee stayed in North Carolina and formed the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.
• A second map, from the western Carolinas to eastern Oklahoma, traces the routes of the Trail of Tears National Historic Trail, where the Park Service and its partners tell the story of the forced removal of the Cherokee and other Native American tribes.

"Mourning at Camp"

The left-hand panel shows a painted line of Cherokee men, women and children walking through snow, wrapped in colorful blankets, heads bowed, with a great horned owl in flight above them. Its text is in both Cherokee and English.

• Chief White Path was a leader of his people. He led them in battle alongside United States forces at Horseshoe Bend, served on the Cherokee Council, and in 1830 traveled to Washington to petition Congress to overturn the Indian Removal Act. For the next eight years he was one of the leaders fighting removal. When the forced removal began, he led his people once more — this time toward an unknown land. He and the respected elder Fly Smith became gravely ill on the trail and both died soon after arriving here. Wooden monuments and white flags marked their graves with honor, and White Path's people carried on the fight for Cherokee rights and sovereignty.
• Rare markers: at least 4,000 Cherokee people died during the forced removal, but few marked graves exist. The graves of Chief White Path and Fly Smith stand as solemn reminders of the suffering and loss. Beside this text, two Cherokee men stand, one looking up with his palms raised, the other holding a rifle in front of him, head bowed.

More

The panels are the work of the Trail of Tears Association, the City of Hopkinsville and the National Park Service; "Mourning at Camp" also carries the logo of the Cherokee Nation. Explore the Trail of Tears National Historic Trail, places to visit along it, and the Park Service's national trails.

Sources

Based on "Trail of Tears Commemorative Park Exhibits Audio Description," National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The panels themselves are not reproduced: one is built around a stock photograph and the other around a credited painting.