Jim Ogden is a ranger and historian with the Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military ParkWhen Pamela Dorsett began researching newspaper accounts of what happened to the Cherokee people in the years following the Trail of Tears, she got more than she bargained for.
“What I found was not what I expected to find,” Dorsett told a roomful of journalism experts and professors Saturday at UTC’s Symposium on 19th Century Press, the Civil War and Free Expression.
News coverage of the Cherokees from 1839 through 1846 centered on death, the brutality and the “savagery” Cherokees perpetrated on themselves, she said.
“There were assassinations that occurred within weeks of their arrival [in what is now Oklahoma], and [reprisals] continued for years” because of the political factions among the Cherokees.
The divisions all centered around the removal, brought about by the signing of the Treaty of New Echota, which sold native land in the Southeast.