Missouri bicentennial: Historian Nickell reflects on Trail of Tears

This is the third of a series of articles with Kellerman Foundation for Historic Preservation board chairman Frank Nickell, an emeritus faculty member of Southeast Missouri State University, commenting on Show Me State history on the 200th anniversary of Missouri being received as America’s 24th state in 1821.

Frank Nickell pulls no punches when it comes to U.S. President Andrew Jackson’s attitude toward Native Americans — a view brought into sharp relief by congressional legislation approved during his tenure and signed by America’s seventh president: the Indian Removal Act of 1830.

“(Jackson) had no respect for Native Americans. In fact, had contempt for them and believed the more killed the better,” Nickell said.

The infamous trail

Indigenous people who had once inhabited land in Missouri were forced to leave by the Act and resettle in Indian territory, what is now present-day Oklahoma, Nebraska and Kansas, in the forced evacuation known as the Trail of Tears.

“One of the routes traversed the southern part of Missouri, where many lives were lost crossing the Mississippi River in Cape Girardeau County during the harsh winters of 1838 and 1839 (with) an estimated 4,000 Cherokees perishing,” reported the State Historical Society of Missouri in its bicentennial timeline found at www.missouri2021.org.

“No (president) was more severe to Native Americans than Jackson,” said Nickell, agreeing with the society’s death toll data.

“One-fourth of 16,000 evacuated Cherokees died, many from dysentery,” added Nickell, who taught 43 years at Southeast and was the former director of the university’s Center for Regional History.

Longstanding discrimination

To be fair to the man known as “Old Hickory,” the sentiment to relocate Native Americans perhaps had its genesis three decades earlier thanks to Thomas Jefferson.

“Jefferson (America’s third president) had a sort of strange romantic ideal for Native Americans and he wanted them to assimilate and become farmers,” Nickell said.

“(Removal) was a policy introduced by Jefferson and was largely carried out by treaties in Missouri supervised (later) by William Clark as superintendent of Indian Affairs from 1822 to 1838,” according to www.missouri2021.org.

Clark’s central role in relocation of indigenous people covered four presidencies.

Originally appointed by President James Monroe to the post based in St. Louis, Clark, a former governor of the Missouri territory, also served as the government’s top point man on Indian matters under subsequent presidents John Quincy Adams, Jackson and Martin Van Buren during a long tenure in the job.

“The Trail of Tears experience is one of the great tragedies of Missouri and 19th century American history,” opined Nickell.

Long ignored

Nickell said he didn’t really know much about the Indian Removal Act and the Trail of Tears until the 1970s.

“I never learned what it really was until Watergate,” said Nickell, noting that just as Jackson defied the U.S. Supreme Court in 1832 in a case involving the Cherokee nation in Georgia, Richard Nixon temporarily defied federal courts in 1973 when ordered to turn over White House recordings of conversations having to do with the cover-up of Watergate crimes.

“As a historian, (Watergate) got my attention and all at once as a consequence, so many of us discovered what led to the Trail of Tears,” Nickell said.