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72 / Chapter 3 course of removal, two thousand to twenty-five hundred died in the camps, one thousand to fifteen hundred died on the trip, and a thousand died within a year after their arrival.53 The oral histories of the Trail of Tears are filled with images of the trauma of being rounded up, the terrible conditions in the camps before departure, the bad food on the trip, and the deaths of parents, grandparents, and children. Lillian Lee Anderson's grandfather, Washington, was separated from his father, mother, and sister during the journey. He did not know whether they had died. She described the trip as told by her grandfather: The Cherokees had to walk; all the old people who were too weak to walk could ride in the Government wagons that hauled the food and blankets that they were allowed to have. The food was most always cornbread or roasted green corn.... The food on the Trail of Tears was very bad and very scarce and the Indians would go for two or three days without water, which they would get just when they came to a creek or river as there were no wells to get water from. There were no roads to travel over as the country was just a wilderness. The men and women would go ahead of the wagons and cut the timber out of the way with axes.54 Anderson's grandmother's sister, Chin Deenawash, survived the trip. Her husband died shortly after they got out of Georgia, leaving her to battle her way through the rest of the journey with three small children, one who could not walk. Anderson recalled: ''Aunt Chin tied the little one on her back with an old shawl, took one child in her arms and led the other one by the hand; the two larger children died before they had gone very far and the little one died and Aunt Chin took a broken case knife and dug a grave and buried the little body by the side of the Trail of Tears. The Indians did not have food of the right kind to eat and Aunt Chin came on alone and lived for years after this:'55 Bettie (Perdue) Woodall's mother walked every step of the way to Indian Territory on the Trail of Tears. Her mother told her that not a single woman rode in the wagon unless she was sick and not able to walk. She told her daughter of an incident in which a baby was murdered on the trip by a soldier: "On one occasion she told of an officer in charge of one of the wagons, who killed a little baby because it cried all the time. It was only four days old and the mother was forced to walk and carry it, and because it cried all of the time and the young mother could not quiet it, the officer took it away from her and dashed its little head against a tree and killed it. Mother got transferred after this to another wagon; she feared the officer might kill her to keep her from The Trail of Tears / 73 Fig. 13. "Trail of Tears" by Robert Lindneux. (Courtesy Woolaroc Museum, Bartlesville, Oklahoma) telling on him:'56 Even when children died, the parents were not given ample time to bury their dead. Comingdeer told his son Nick the story of his journey on the Trail of Tears. He described how he had seen many old Cherokees carrying their dead children all day until the detachment stopped for the night. Then the fathers of the dead children, with the help of other Cherokees in the group, would dig a shallow grave and bury them.57 Children sometimes got lost from their parents on the trip. Jennie McCoy Chambers recalled that her mother and her grandfather, Elijah Hicks, picked up two children along the trail who were lost.58 Rachel Dodge's grandmother, Aggie Silk, told her of the many hardships of the trip to Indian Territory. She said that many people suffered from chills and fever because of their exposure and because they often went hungry. She recalled , "When they got too sick to walk or ride, they were put in the wagons, and taken along until they died. The Indian Doctors couldn't find the herbs they were used to and didn't know the ones they did find, so they couldn't doctor them as they would...

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