The Trail of Tears

In 1830 the United States Congress passed a bill turning into law what had been until then unofficial policy: the forcible removal of those Indian tribes living east of the Mississippi and their resettlement in the West. The Removals were to prove merely the first step in the deliberate destruction of an entire people.

Originally published in 1976, and making use of hitherto unpublished Indian sources, Gloria Jahoda’s book relates the history of Indian courage in the face of implacable white expansionism during the first half of the nineteenth century and shows how this expansionism led inexorably to the final massacre at Wounded Knee. The historical indictment is all the more telling and moving for the author’s scrupulous research and scholarship and her eloquent writing.