She heard me preach. She attended the church one night of the meeting when I preached in Waco, Texas. She was staying at the Holiday Inn with her family. At breakfast, she saw me and said, “You are the preacher I heard last night.” She was sitting at the next table in the dining room. We engaged in conversation and she told me her story. Her name was Roberta Cobb, a Native American Indian–a descendant of the Indians who marched on the “Trail of Tears” in the 1830’s. It is ironic that she met me from Tennessee in Texas. Had it not been for the hideous “ethnic cleansing” of President Andrew Jackson and General Winfield Scott, that meeting might have occurred between us in Chattanooga all those generations later.
It was her great grandfather, Edmund Pickens, that had made the unspeakable journey. Roberta was three generations removed from the tragedy but her voice and her expression told the story.
“My great grandfather was given an allotment of land. He died in 1868 but his courage and determination lived on in his descendants. Those descendants became teachers and professionals.” Her great grandfather, Edmund Pickens, was born in 1789 and died in 1868. Roberta continued, “I taught school for 36 years. I grew up poor. I worked hard but I made it.”
I was in awe to be speaking to Roberta. The “Trail of Tears” had always captivated me, but it had until this moment always been an event of the past–a piece of history. Now sitting before Roberta, it became personal and close. Roberta told her story with such a vivid description that one would have thought that she must have made the journey herself…and so she had. Around the Indian firesides in Oklahoma, the story had been told and retold. From her great grandfather Edmund Pickens, the details, the sorrow, the sadness and the betrayal had been embedded in the hearts of every succeeding generation until it reached Roberta. The tears of the journey had never dried.
The journey, one of the saddest stories of American history, was the scene of a group of depressed souls making their way over unfamiliar and foreboding terrain. Each painful step was taking them away from the only life they had ever known and from the only place they had ever called home. As they journeyed into the setting western sun, they were leaving behind the graves of fathers and mothers and ancestors. Each turn of the wagon wheels seemed to tell them that they were making a journey into the unknown–to a destination strange and to a life of dreary days without any prospect of hope. To all that ever seemed precious, it was goodbye forever.
Moreover, when future children would ask about Tennessee, they would try to describe the greenery, the mountains and the magnificent eternal river. Their voices would quiver and their eyes would mist with tears.
The Cherokees were not primitive savages. They had adapted to the way of life of the white settlers. Many of the Cherokees had intermarried with the whites and they had developed a system of government that paralleled any legal system in existence. They also had adopted the Christian faith as their own. They had translated the Bible into the Cherokee language. Their progress, however, did not save them. The white settlers’ greed for their land intensified.
In 1830, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act. During these events, a leader emerged whose name in history should have paralleled that of George Washington, Cromwell or Martin Luther. That leader was a mixed–blood of Scottish and Cherokee descent, who had been the leading spokesman and chief in 1828 for his people. John Ross was brilliant. He spoke English and knew the laws of the day. He made many trips to Washington, defending the Cherokees’ title to their homeland. This “Indian Removal Law” was contested by Chief John Ross and missionary Samuel Worcester. John Ross took the challenge all the way to the Supreme Court and the court ruled in favor of the Cherokees.
The Cherokees had won. They had successfully taken the question to the Supreme Court twice, again proving that they were solid and intelligent human beings. President Andrew Jackson ignored the United States Supreme Court’s decisions and proceeded to pursue his policy of ridding the land of the Cherokees and other tribes. That action labeled him as one of the worst violators of human rights among US presidents and slapped the American system of justice in the face. Andrew Jackson’s fame as a national military hero is tarnished historically by his treatment of Native Americans.
President Jackson justified the removal based on a rigged treaty that his government agents signed with a handful of disgruntled Cherokees. The treaty, signed by the “renegade 100,” a group of Cherokees who called themselves the “Treaty Party,” relinquished all lands east of the Mississippi River in exchange for land in Indian Territory and the promise of money, livestock and various provisions and tools.
Chief John Ross opposed the infamous 100 who had signed the treaty, giving everything to the U.S. Government. He sought to prove that the 100 had no right to speak for the 17,000 members of the Cherokee Nation. He again traveled to Washington with a petition signed by 16,000 Cherokees, protesting the bogus treaty. He was ignored.
Other great men also opposed the treaty. Henry Clay, Daniel Webster and Congressman David Crockett sided with the American Indians. Henry Clay called Jackson’s Native American policy a stain on the nation’s honor. Daniel Webster (1782–1852) was one of the most influential men in history and yet his voice fell on insensitive ears. David Crockett left Congress and headed for the West. Disgusted with the government’s hypocrisy, he said, “I would rather be politically dead than hypocritically immortalized.”
Missionaries were drawn into the conflict. Government pressure persuaded most of the mission groups to advocate removal. Methodist, Moravian, and Presbyterian missionaries caved in to government agents. Political correctness demanded compromise. There were exceptions in these groups–but only exceptions. Only the Baptists held firm and resolved to stand with the Cherokees in their crisis.
Unlike the other denominations, no Baptist converts signed the fraudulent treaty. The Cherokees deeply resented these missionaries who they felt had betrayed them. Generally, Indian membership plummeted among these groups. William McLoughlin, a historian, states:
“While the Methodist denomination lost over half of its members between 1830 and 1838, and while the American Board and Moravians barely held their own, the Baptist denomination increased by over 500 percent.”
Reverend Evan Jones, a fervent Baptist missionary, stood with the Cherokees and with their Chief, John Ross. McLoughlin comments:
“But undoubtedly the most significant fact in the Baptist growth was the dynamic personality of the Reverend Evan Jones and the work of his dedicated native preachers.”
The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture provides background on this faithful missionary.
“Born in Wales May 14, 1788, Evan Jones arrived in the United States in 1821 and spent fifty years as a Baptist missionary to the Cherokee. He lived among them, engaged in political activity on their behalf, and ministered to them through teaching, preaching, Bible translation, and newspaper publication.”
Evan Jones and other Baptist missionaries would not bow to government agents who wanted their assistance in removing the Cherokees. They refused to condone for any reason the gross violation of human rights by President Andrew Jackson.
When the forced exodus finally happened and the nation began its journey toward the West, there were hundreds of converted Indians who were Baptists among the travelers.
In an interview with Elizabeth Mulligan, published in the St. Louis Post–Dispatch, January 18, 1970, she wrote noting the Baptist influence along the trail:
“One detachment was led by the Rev. Jesse Bushyhead, a grandson of a Scot captain and his Cherokee wife. He was an ordained Baptist minister and served his own people as a missionary. He was also a gifted interpreter and became a leader among the Cherokees in their struggle against the white man’s intrusion.
“In late 1838, the Rev. Bushyhead gathered his family and followers together and started out ‘on the trail of tears.’ Although the six–month ordeal was extremely difficult, this group fared better than many others. The minister’s party of about 1,000 was strongly religious and maintained regular services throughout the long march.”
With his troops, General Winfield Scott descended on the land in the spring of 1838 to execute the illegal decree of the President. Although General Scott insisted on humane treatment toward the Indians, the undertaking was too vast to police.
John G Burnett, a soldier who participated in the Removal, wrote, “I saw the helpless Cherokees arrested and dragged from their homes, and driven at the bayonet point into the stockades.
“Men working in fields were arrested and driven into stockades. Women were dragged from their homes by soldiers whose language they did not understand.
“The long painful journey to the west ended March 26th, 1839, with four–thousand silent graves reaching from the foothills of the Smoky Mountains to what is known as Indian Territory in the West.”
When President Andrew Jackson gave his seventh annual message to Congress, he painted a magnificent word picture of how the government would care for the Indians–a picture of paradise–but the reality was not so. This “glorious land” was actually the dry, parched, barren land of the Oklahoma prairies. It was a place where most men would not want to live.
Chief John Ross, seeing the abuse and inhuman treatment of his people, petitioned General Winfield Scott to allow him to lead the expedition. His request was granted. Chief John Ross led in prayer, the bugle sounded and the sad procession of hundreds of wagons was set in motion toward the Western sky. Sad eyes glanced backward to a life left forever. John Ross could not save his people from their fate…but he could go with them, love them and lead them through the dark valley.
The journey was long. Men and women cried. It is reported that the men kept their heads down as they trudged along the trail, weeping tears that said they could do nothing. One report told the sad story of a father dying, then the mother and then five brothers–one each day until they were all gone.
Lucy Ames Butler, a Presbyterian missionary, in a letter penned on January 2, 1839, to a friend, described the Indians as having been “Swept into Eternity…by the white man.”
In August 1839, John Ross was elected Principal Chief of the reconstituted Cherokee Nation in Okalahoma. He again brilliantly put the nation back together. The people were organized with a constitution and elected legislature. School systems were set up and missionaries appeared in their midst again to serve them and teach them the Word of God.
Chief Ross died in Washington City (Washington D.C.) on August 1, 1866, just after finalizing another treaty with the federal government that preserved (for a time) the Cherokee government in the West.
In Rossville, Georgia, the old homestead of Chief John Ross remains. I walked through the old dwelling and visualized John Ross and his wife, Quatie, sitting by the fireplace and talking of the tragic events that were engulfing their people. John and Quatie were Christians. If walls could speak, I would have heard the echo of their prayers. Tears dropped on the wooden floor would have been long dried. Along the journey, Quatie Ross, suffering from a cold, gave her only blanket to a child. She died near Little Rock with pneumonia.
That day in Waco, Roberta related to me her family’s painful history. She, however, with the positive air of a professional showed no personal bitterness. She was a winner and then with a note of joy she said, “But there were mission stations along the way.” Others in those circumstances might have been bitter at God, but not Roberta. Her thought was that along the Trail of Tears, God had been there in those mission stations, reaching out His arms to the oppressed.
I thought of Samuel Worcester, the missionary to the Cherokees who pled their rights in court. I thought of David Brainerd’s love for the Indians. I thought of Evan Jones, the Baptist missionary from Wales, who lived among the Cherokee Indians and never caved in to the government’s scheme to deny them their homeland. I thought of the Brainerd Mission in Chattanooga, manned by those who dared to love and care for the oppressed. Their graves in the little cemetery at Eastgate testify. “But there were mission stations along the way”–mission stations manned by missionaries–lights beaming through the blackness. In a horror of darkness–“mission stations along the way.”
I left Roberta that day with feelings mixed with guilt and inspiration. She had come out of the shadows and had prevailed–a teacher for 36 years. She was a diamond out of the rough. She was a shining star that had shone in utter blackness. She had put together the pieces of those broken dreams of her Native American ancestors into a beautiful life. My European ancestors were the reason for those broken dreams.
I came away that day with lessons. Roberta Cobb had not only taught school for 36 years but she had found a new student…in me. From her life I was reminded that it is possible to excel…even out of despair. It is possible for a person to rise from the bottom level of humanity to achieve the impossible. I learned that when wrong prevails…right shines.
From the mission stations along the Trail of Tears, I am challenged to be a personal outpost of hope and light to those in my generation who are traveling down their personal… trail of tears.
Thank you…Roberta.
This issue of BIMI World is dedicated to a wonderful ministry that helps prepare workers for those “mission stations along the way.” Congratulations to CAMP BIMI for 15 years of helping people find where they fit in missions.
