Trail of Tears Episode 3: Damn Mudbloods

What happens when the courts say you have the right to your land, but the government decides it doesn’t matter?

In the final episode of our three part journey through the Trail of Tears, Kevin Young and Dan Hourigan follow the Cherokee, Seminole, Creek, and Chickasaw as the fight over Native sovereignty reaches its breaking point.

We’ll look at the Supreme Court battles that put the Cherokee Nation directly against Georgia, the rise of Osceola and the bloody beginning of the Second Seminole War, the forced removal of the Creek and Chickasaw, and the growing divisions within the Cherokee Nation itself.

Then comes the Cherokee removal. Thousands are rounded up, imprisoned in stockades, and forced west along routes that would become known as the Trail of Tears. We’ll follow the journey, the disease, starvation, exposure, death, and the families left behind, before looking at what happened when the survivors finally reached their new homes.

But the story doesn’t end there. Political divisions lead to assassinations, civil war tears through the relocated nations, and the United States later finds new ways to take even more Native land.

And yet, despite everything, these nations survive. The Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muscogee, and Seminole rebuild their governments, communities, and cultures, continuing the story that began long before the Trail of Tears.

Kevin and Dan bring their usual irreverent humor to the final chapter of one of the darkest stories in American history.

If you’re interested in the Trail of Tears, Cherokee history, the Second Seminole War, Andrew Jackson, Indian Removal, Native American history, the Cherokee Nation, Osceola, John Ross, Major Ridge, and the long history of Indigenous resistance and survival, this is the conclusion to a story that never really ended.

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