Then when I was four years old, I with my parents and other kin, came west to join my grandparents. My mother and father remained in Georgia about six years after Mother’s folk’s came on the “Trail of Tears” and Mother worried continually about her parents. It was in 1838 when my grandparents came and I heard them say it was in the winter time and all suffered with cold and hunger.
Some Cherokees were already in the country around Evansville, Arkansas, before my grandparents came. The Cherokees came through Tennessee, Kentucky, part of Missouri and then down to Indian Territory on the “Trail of Tears”. I have heard my grandparents say that after they got out of the camp, and even before they left Georgia, many Cherokees were taken sick and later died. Dysentery broke out in their camp by the river and many died, and many died on the journey but my grandparents got through all right.
Old men and women, sick men and women would ride but most of them walked and the men in charge drove them like cattle and many died enroute and many other Cherokees died in Tennessee waiting to cross the Mississippi River. They brought only a few things with them traveling by wagon train. The Cherokees came a group at a time until all got to the Territory. Finally the Cherokees knew that they had to go some place because the white men would kill their cattle and hogs and would even burn their houses in Georgia. The Cherokees had protested to the bitter end. I have heard them say that the United States Government drove them out of Georgia. My parents did not come to the Territory on the “Trail of Tears” but my grandparents on my mother’s side did. I never attended school and my education is practical except what I was taught by my husband. My mother and father died when I was but seven years old and I was raised by an aunt, my mother’s sister. I was only four years old when my parents came to the Indian Territory and I am now ninety-three years old. My mother was a Cherokee woman and my father was a white man. My name was Mary Cobb and I was married to Walter S. 917 North M Street Muskogee, Oklahoma (photo)
0 kommentar(er)
