TELLING TALES: FORMER TAIL OF TEARS HISTORIAN PUTS VISITORS' STORIES INTO BOOK

When Brother Mark Elder, a painter at DePaul University in Chicago, wondered how local residents reacted when the Cherokee on the Trail of Tears crossed the Mississippi River here, he asked Marie W. Exler.

Exler told him about Henry Windeknecht, who found a Cherokee boy and girl hiding in the bushes, scared and hungry. He and his wife raised them. The Cherokee girl's granddaughter, Norma Humes Stone, told Exler this story, one of several passed on to her when she was the historian at Trail of Tears State Park.

Elder's painting, "Charity Along the Trail of Tears," illustrates the cover of Exler's new collection of stories titled "Tears of the Trail." Mr. and Mrs. Windeknecht and the Cherokee children are in the painting's right foreground.

The Center for Regional History at Southeast Missouri State University published the book, which is currently available only at the University Bookstore. Exler will sign copies of the book at a reception in her honor from 2-4 p.m. on Feb. 23 at the Johnson Faculty Centre.

Considering that Exler worked at the park as historian for seven years, the stories told to her aren't that numerous. The Cherokee looked upon the experience as a disgrace, she said. "Families didn't want to talk about it."

One Exler story concerns Priscilla and her hollyhocks. Priscilla was a slave who carried hollyhock seeds with her from her home in North Carolina. While encamped between Jonesboro and Ware, she was purchased by a man named Basil Silkwood and became one of the 16 orphans he raised. Since then, the strain of hollyhocks known as Priscilla hollyhocks has flourished throughout the region.

The book makes the point that these stories are not factually substantiated, but "they give a human voice to the Trails of Tears experience."

National disgrace

Kindnesses occurred along the trail, but the treatment of the Cherokee and the other tribes removed from their lands in the mid-19th century was a national disgrace. In the book, Southeast anthropologist Dr. Carol Morrow points out that President Andrew Jackson defied a U.S. Supreme Court ruling by refusing to recognize the legal rights of the Cherokee to remain on their land.

When hired by the park in 1988 at age 74, Exler became the oldest employee in the Missouri park system. But she began collecting information about the region's Native American history much earlier. She has done research at Cherokee, N.C., at Tahlequah, Okla., both Cherokee capitals. Her involvement with the Otahki Girl Scout Council led to research about Otahki.

Nine groups of Cherokee were loaded onto Green's Ferry at Willard's Landing on the east side of the Mississippi River and landed at Moccasin Springs, the area now occupied by the park. Now surrounded by a pagoda, Otahki's is the only marked grave of the many who must have died here during the severe winter of 1838.

Her husband, Lewis Hilderbrand, and Jesse Bushyhead, the Baptist minister who was either her father or her brother, put a wooden marker on her grave. Farmers tended the grave ever after, erecting a mound of rocks and an iron cross after the wooden marker was destroyed by fire. "They had enough of a story, which was such a tragic story, that they wanted to do something for the people," Exler suggests.

Exler says Elder hopes someday to paint a mural of "Charity Along the Trail of Tears." One version of the painting is on permanent display inside the park's visitors center.

Exler retired from the park at age 80. Now 86, she lives at the Lutheran Home in Cape Girardeau but still volunteers at the park when called on to make a presentation about the Trail of Tears.