When Lucian Truscott tries to explain how he's related to Thomas Jefferson, he says, OK, he's 73. He used to visit a great grandmother who used to visit her great grandfather, Thomas Jefferson's grandson.

So there is only when I was growing up, when I visited my great grandmother, there was only one dead person between me and Jefferson when Lucian was a boy in the early 1950s, just six or seven years old.

When we visit family in Charlottesville, sometimes they would drop him off with his brother at Monticello, Jefferson's home, which is, as it was before the place had been remade for tourists like it is today, basically visitors who pay maybe a dollar and walk through the house.

You know, my great aunts, they treated the place like like it was still the family home. And we had the run of the place. We used to fill our pockets full of pebbles from the walkways up there and go up on the second floor and third floor of the place and crawl out windows onto those parapets that are up around the top of Monticello and drop pebbles on the shore.

So we're walking around the house and very asocial behavior.

Yeah, and and you're talking to one of the probably the only person you'll ever talk to in your life that's actually jumped on Thomas Jefferson's bed. I mean, we we would play on the bed. We'd go through that little doorway and up the stairs into the closet, which is above the bed there, and sit up there in the closet. When tourists came through the room, we'd stick our faces out of the window up there, say boo, and scare them and we'd hide out there.

And, you know, no adult supervision at all.

No, no adult supervision at all.

We went through all the bedrooms and stuff up there, and then, of course, we'd play down in the in the basement rooms and then, of course, what they call the dependencies, which were the slave rooms that run under the two wings that run out from Monaco itself. It would be decades before the slave quarters are part of the Monticello. Torossian says these are just empty rooms under the house, no furniture or anything else in them. He and his brother would explore and run around and play hide and seek or whatever little boys did.

It's amazing to me the degree to which it felt like a family home. Did it feel that way to you as a kid? You know, I have to tell you that all of this stuff in my family was just taken for granted these days, of course, nothing about the legacies of the founding fathers has taken for granted.

Just this week, a special committee appointed by the mayor of Washington, D.C., called for removing, relocating or contextualizing a bunch of monuments to slave owning founding fathers, including the Jefferson Memorial and the Washington Monument, which, by the way, the mayor doesn't actually have jurisdiction over. Meanwhile, the president, of course, has put his arms around this issue right after he began his reelection campaign and gave a speech at Mount Rushmore to make clear that he does not want to remove any monuments or rename any buildings or military bases.

But this great, great, great whatever it is, a direct descendant of Thomas Jefferson, Lucian Truscott, he's got a special perspective on this. He led the charge to convince all the other white descendants of Thomas Jefferson to allow the black descendants of Thomas Jefferson into their official family association. The black family members, of course, traced back to Jefferson and Sally Hemings, one of the people he enslaved. Luzhin thinks that everybody needs to get real about the slave owning past of some of the founding fathers, like how do you feel about people taking down monuments of Thomas Jefferson?

I think they ought to be taken now. I think that the great monument to Thomas Jefferson is Monticello. And I think it's an appropriate monument because it actually puts Jefferson's life in context. It puts his slave owning as part of his life. And in context, if you visit Monticello today, you get to see where the slaves lived. You'll be shown where Sally Hemings, his brother John, did would work in Jefferson's bedroom and study and so forth.

Slaves built that place. I never heard slaves built that place when I was growing up. But it's talked about today. The history of Monticello at this point is about half Jefferson history, half slave history. I think that's appropriate as a memorial. It it tells the story of the whole man, not just the the sort of God like Thomas Jefferson we've all been raised to venerate.

What are we supposed to do with the shameful parts of America's past, this being talked about so much today and back in the early days of our radio show in the late 90s, one of our contributors, Siravo, did a story that took that on in this very vivid and complicated way. She said out on the road with her sister Amy, to visit the site of a historic tragedy, one that involved part of their own family 160 years before that.

And we want to replay it this holiday weekend because the questions that it addresses, things that it is obsessed with, are all so much more talked about today than 22 years ago when she did that story from Chicago. It's This American Life. I'm IRA Glass. We take a road trip into history today. Stay with us. So Servalan, her sister, Amy, was born in eastern Oklahoma, what was called Indian territory before statehood.

That's where story ends and that's where it begins. Enrolled citizens of the Cherokee Nation, like the parents, which, as you hear, is important to this story. Here's the opening.

Anusara story from 1998 being at least a little Cherokee in northeastern Oklahoma is about as rare and remarkable as being a Michael Jordan fan in Chicago. I mean, who is it?

I'm guessing I don't need to explain that antique 1998 sports reference to many of you. But I do have one note before we play the rest of the story. And it's about the word InGen. Sarah asked me to point out to anyone hearing this today that her grandfather was born in Indian territory before statehood and he used the word Indian as a term of affection. It was never derogatory.

OK, so picking up Sara's part Cherokee, it goes without saying that my twin sister, Amy, is to accept that I have dark eyes and dark hair and she's a blue eyed blonde. And so our grandfather nicknamed me InGen and her Swede. Here's Amy's take on all this. I must point out that while my sister and I don't really look alike, we sound almost exactly alike and hint for listening to this story. I'm usually the grouchy one. Here's Amy.

I mean, those roles were assigned to us, you know, Indian and Swede, because of the way we looked. But it was also more like the things we were told about ourselves. And, you know, she was the one who was given the Cherokee language book. And I was the one who was always told how much alike I was to our Swedish grandmother. And I think I was probably, you know, six or seven or something before I realized that I was Cherokee to.

We're a little French and Scottish and English and Seminole, too, typical American mutt, but the Cherokee and Swedish sides of the family were the only genealogies anyone knew anything about. Here's what we knew about ourselves. Ellis Island, A Trail of Tears. And I think to a kid, Trail of Tears. The Cherokee forced march from the east to Oklahoma where we were born, seemed enormously more interesting. Just as a name. Even the smallest children know what tears mean.

And I think in my earliest understanding of where I came from, I pictured myself descended from a long line of weepers with bloodshot eyes, the trail of tears between 18, 38 and 39. The U.S. Army wrenched 16000 people from their homes, rounded them up in stockades and marched them across the country. 4000 died. Every summer when we were children, our parents would drive us to a place about half an hour from where we lived called geology, which is the Cherokee word for Cherokee geology is the tribe's cultural center.

There's a recreated village, a museum, and this was our favorite part, an amphitheater which staged a dramatic recreation of the Trail of Tears.

Every summer we watched Chief John Ross try like mad to save the Cherokee land back east. We saw his hotheaded rival, stand wady, rage off to the Civil War. We especially loved the death of the Phoenix, a noisy, magenta lit interpretive dance in which the mythic bird would die only to rise again. We would get these programs or brochures, and Sarah was kind of in charge of them. And sometimes she'd let me look at them. She had a whole little file and, you know, we would look through them.

And it was I mean, I did take it to heart. It was a story that was really tragic. I have a sort of reverent feeling towards it. And I think it's because of this play, because this play was so serious and untold, such a detailed story, that it kind of took this place of significance, like it was really important and it really mattered. Here's the measure of how important the ampitheater show was to Amy and me.

Our father and our grandfather used to show us photographs of Cherokee leaders in books. But even now, when I imagine stand waitI, I picture the actor geology. So all my life I knew I wouldn't exist.

But for The Trail of Tears and it struck me as a little silly that most of the things I knew about it were based on an ampitheater drama I haven't seen for nearly 20 years. At first I thought I'd read some books about it, which I did, but then I wanted to see it, feel it, know how long a trek it was. I wanted it to be real. I enlisted Amy, perhaps she'd like to do all the driving, a historical tragedy in five, 14 hour days behind the wheel, who could pass that up?

And so I fly from Chicago, she from Montana. In one spring morning, we find ourselves in a rental car on our way to northwestern Georgia, the homeland of the Cherokee, before they were shoved out to Oklahoma, the place the Trail of Tears begins. The Cherokee territory once encompassed most of Present-day, Tennessee and Kentucky, as well as parts of Alabama, Georgia, Virginia and the Carolinas, even before contact with the Europeans in 15 40, there were a Proteau Democratic Society.

They built these enormous council houses big enough to fit the entire tribe inside so everyone could participate in tribal decisions were barely on the road an hour when we spot them Injuns ceramic ones three feet tall at a shack on the side of the road, Amy drives past them. We do a double take and we don't even discuss whether or not to stop. She just backs up immediately and parks.

Are you of Native American descent? I'm a I'm a Mexican, I'm from Texas. From Texas. And what brought you to Calhoun, Georgia, the work, the eight little Indians he's selling her of the kitschy teepee toting Plains Indians variety, which are probably a lot easier to sell than the stereotypical image of a Cherokee, a tired old woman tromping through the trail of tears in rags. Who wants that as a lawn ornament? What hoodie? Who buys these statues, these Indian statues?

People here from Calhoun, Georgia. People here on Georgia love Indians.

Uh huh.

Well, after they got rid of them right through to their very.

The Cherokee, especially the mixed bloods, were always your nerdy overachiever, bookish sort of tribe, and in the early 19th century, they launched a series of initiatives directly imitating the New American Republic.

In one decade, they created a written language, started a free press, ratified a constitution and founded a capital city. New a chota was that capital. Now it stands in the middle of nowhere, a Georgia state park with a handful of buildings across from a golf course.

And we follow, OK, New Chota was founded in 1825, to call it the Cherokee version of Washington, D.C., is entirely applicable given the form of government the tribe established there. They ratified a constitution based on that of the United States dividing into legislative, judicial and executive branches. Its preamble begins. We, the representatives of the people of the Cherokee Nation in convention assembled in order to establish justice, ensure tranquility, promote our common welfare and secure to ourselves and our posterity the blessings of liberty.

Unlike Washington knew a child, it is cool and quiet and green.

Site manager David Gomez showed us around the grounds and Amy and I were unprepared for the loveliness of the place for its calm lushness, its fragrance everywhere. Honeysuckle was in bloom.

I like it here. It's nice, it's peaceful and it's right for the for the you know, the atmosphere is right for what is going on in the story that we tell here. You know, it's a story that's sad and a lot of ways.

But there was a lot of great things happening with the Cherokee Nation, the Cherokee, along with the other Southeastern tribes who suffered removal to Oklahoma, the Chickasaw, the Creek, the Choctaw, the Seminole are one of the so-called five civilized tribes. It was in eighteen twenty two that the Cherokee hero Sequoia developed an alphabet, inventing the sole written language of any North American tribe. Only six years later, Cherokee editor Elias Boudinot founded the Cherokee Phoenix, a bilingual English Cherokee newspaper published it knew a Chota.

Many Cherokee, especially the mixed bloods, practiced Christianity. And because many of these lived as civilized Southern gentleman of the early 19th century, they owned prospering plantations, which meant they owned black slaves more than any other Native American tribe. The Cherokees adopted the religious, cultural and political ideals of the United States, partly as a means to self preservation. By becoming more like the Americans, they hoped to coexist with this new nation that was growing up around them.

They weren't allowed to.

Georgia settlers wanted their land and their gold, which was discovered near New Chota in 1829. They were really progressing so fast at this time period.

The printing operation was going with their newspaper here.

Things things were moving so fast for for a short while here, it looked very promising. But because of the old and the big demand for the land, the fate has already been really sealed for them in earlier years.

The tribe allowed Christian missionaries to live and work among them and to teach their children English, the most beloved of these was the Presbyterian Samuel Worcester, who built a two story house at Newark, Choteau, which functioned as a post office, school and rooming house. It's still there.

And David Gomez walks us through, I guess, safe stance here.

You know, down the state of Georgia, which of all the southern states treated the Cherokee with the most hostility, passed a number of alarming laws in the eighteen 20s and 30s, undermining the sovereignty of the nation. One of these laws required white settlers within the boundaries of the nation to obtain a permit from the state of Georgia. Samuel Wooster refused to apply for such a permit, arguing that he had the permission of the Cherokee to live on their lands.

And that should suffice. Georgia arrested Worster and imprisoned him for four years. Worster appealed to the Supreme Court in the case. Worcester vs. Georgia became a great victory for the tribe. The court, under Chief Justice John Marshall, ruled that the Cherokee Nation was just that a sovereign nation within the borders of the U.S. and therefore beholding only to the federal government, i.e. not under the jurisdiction of Georgia state laws.

And a Cherokee Nation was a lady. You know, they thought. All right. The highest court in the land of the United States. You know, this government that we're trying to copy, you know, they ruled in our favor. This is this is going to be good. And, of course, Andrew Jackson, who was pro removal from the early years he had campaigned on that issue, decided he wasn't going to back the Supreme Court ruling.

Think about that. What that means. Jackson is violating his own oath of office to uphold the Constitution.

Anyway, the state of Georgia was thrilled when Jackson thumbed his nose at the court and immediately dispatched teams to survey the Cherokee lands for a land lottery. Soon, white settlers arrived here.

They show up two years later in 1830 for the land lottery deed. And with Georgia soldiers saying, you know, I've got this land from the lottery, get off of it.

One small constitutional violation that was part of the land grab, Georgia seized the Cherokee printing press so they couldn't publicize their cause and win political support in states up north. The tribe was divided about what to do, stay and fight or demand cash for the land and head west. No one exploited this split more than Andrew Jackson. And no one annoyed Jackson like Principal Chief John Ross, Ross was a Jeffersonian figure in almost every sense, a founding father of the Cherokee Nation in its modern legal form.

He preached liberty while owning slaves. An educated gentleman planter, he was there cheap from 1827 to 1866. In his later years, he corresponded with Abraham Lincoln. In his early years, he was such a believer in the inherent justice of the American system that he lobbied relentlessly in Washington, DC, believing that once the Congress and the president understood that the Cherokee were a virtuous sibling republic, that they treat the tribe fairly as equals.

Once the state of Georgia began evicting the Cherokee and John Ross among them, Ross wrote, Treated like dogs, we find ourselves fugitives, vagrants and strangers in our own country. The vast majority of the tribe wanted to stay put and supported Ross, but around 100 men, including Phoenix editor Elias Boudinot and his brother Stan Wady, one hundred in a tribe of 16000 men at Boudinot House in New Chota and signed a treaty with the U.S. government. They had no authority to do this, called the Treaty of New Icona.

It relinquished all Cherokee lands east of the Mississippi in exchange for land in the West. They figured Georgia was already seizing Cherokee land. This might be the only way the Cherokee could get something for it. John Ross, whom the Georgia militia arrested so that he could not protest, was stunned. He accused the treaty party of treason. The rest of the sixteen thousand Cherokees signed a petition calling the treaty invalid and illegal. Congress ratified the treaty by only one vote, despite impassioned pleas on behalf of the Cherokee by Senators Henry Clay and Davy Crockett.

The tribe was given three years to remove themselves to the west.

Now we're standing at the side of Elias Boudinot house, where the infamous new Chota Treaty was signed last spring of thirty eight rolled around about right right now.

Nobody was going anywhere. Georgia and federal government thought they were going to have some problems. And you had about 7000 troops come in to forcibly remove the Cherokees from their farm, from their houses, and initially rounded up in what were known as forts or stockades, and then moved up into eastern Tennessee and northeastern Alabama to three immigration depots where they were then transferred and then moved out on the Trail of Tears, as everybody knows. So technically, this is the starting point for the Trail of Tears, for the individual trit Cherokee.

It really started at their front door where they were rounded up from them.

Amy and I want to step on this patch of grass where the treaty was signed, but we hesitate. It's not a grave, Gomez tells us, but that's what it feels like. We tiptoe on to it this profane ground. And then we tiptoe away. Perhaps we should be embarrassed by certain discrepancies between our Trail of Tears and Thayer's, where weak or decadent we are Americans, which means road trip history buffs one minute amnesiacs the next we want to remember, except when we want to forget.

Pardon me, but is that the Chattanooga Joujou? Yes, but why did we register at the Chattanooga Choo Choo?

The Chattanooga Choo Choo?

It's a hotel now, a gloriously hokey, beautifully restored Holiday Inn in which the lobby is the ornate dome of the old train station. And the rooms are turn of the century rail cars parked out on the tracks. We're in giggles the entire night for the simple reason that the phrase choo choo is completely addictive. We try to work it into every sentence. What should we do for dinner? Stay here at the choo choo. We end up going out for barbeque saying This is good, but I can't wait to get back to the choo choo.

We watched the X Files in our train car commenting. Is it just me or is this Joe even better in the choo choo? I sent email from my laptop just so that I can write greetings from the Chattanooga choo choo exclamation point number of times I just said choo choo seven. No choose fourteen Chattanooga.

Day two, sadly, we check out of the choo choo and drive across town to Ross's landing. It used to be where John Ross is. Ferry service carried people across the Tennessee River. But in 1838, it was one of the starting points for the water route of the Trail of Tears. I stand on the sand and read a weathered historical marker established about 1816 by John Ross, some three hundred seventy yards east of this point. It consisted of a ferry warehouse and landing Cherokee parties left from the landing for the West in 1838.

The same year the growing community took the name Chattanooga, and I'm sure there's no connection at all between those two points, that sounds so nice left for the West. But by the way, I haven't mentioned that Ross Islanding also functions as Chattanooga's tourist center. Up the hill from the river is the gigantic Tennessee Aquarium and an IMAX theater.

The place is crawling with tourists, a crowd so generic and indistinguishable from one another, they swirled around us as a single t shirt 160 years ago.

Thousands of Cherokees came through this site. In the summer, they were forced onto boats and faced heat exhaustion and a drought that stranded them without water to drink. In the fall, they headed west by foot, eventually trudging barefoot through blizzards. Either way, they died of starvation, dysentery, diarrhea and fatigue. A quarter of the tribe was gone. And here, in the shadow of the aquarium, the Trail of Tears is remembered by a series of quotations from disgruntled Native Americans carved into a concrete plaza.

One of the citations from a Cherokee named Dragging Canoe is from 1776. The white men have almost surrounded us, leaving us only a little spot of ground to stand upon. And it seems to be their intention to destroy us as a nation. Good call on. We're moving diagonally across the sidewalk and Andrew Jackson in 1820. It is high time to do away with the farce of treating with Indian tribes as separate nations will step on that one. Cracks in the sidewalks, they are symbolic of broken promises, you're making that up?

No, it says right here are some of the papers are cracked to symbolize the broken promises made to the Indians. Hmm. Most Americans have had this experience. Most of us can name things our country has done that we find shameful from the travesties everybody agrees were wrong. The Japanese internment camps or the late date of slavery's abolition to murkier partisan arguments about legalized abortion or the Enola Gay. World history has been a bloody business from the get go. But the nausea we're suffering standing on the broken promises at Ross's landing is peculiar to a democracy because in a democracy we're all responsible for everything our government does.

This is the letter from Ralph Waldo Emerson to President Martin Van Buren. In eighteen thirty eight, a crime is projected that confounds our understandings by its magnitude, a crime that really deprives us as well as the Cherokee of a country for how could we call the conspiracy that should crush these poor Indians, our government, or the land that was coerced by their parting and dying imprecations, our country any more? You, sir, will bring down the renowned chair in which you set into infamy.

If your seal is set to this instrument of perfidy and the name of this nation. Hitherto the sweet omen of religion and liberty will stink to the world and the path and. With a quotation from an unknown survivor of the Trail of Tears who said, Long time we travel one way to new land. People feel bad when they leave old nation womens cry and make sad wails. Children and many men and all look sad, like when friends die, but they say nothing and just put heads down and keep on go towards west.

Many days pass and people die very much. We bury close by trail. That last passage, especially the part about when friends die, bring us to tears and we just stand there looking towards the Tennessee brokenhearted. Meanwhile, there are little kids literally walking over these words, playing on them, making noise, having fun. We sort of hate them for a second. We ask a teacher who's with a group of fourth graders why she isn't talking to them about Cherokee history.

And she says normally she would. But it's the end of the school year and this trip is their reward for being good. Sounds reasonable. I ask Amy if she thinks these kids should share our sadness. Well, I think it's a sad story. It's like. I mean, it's sort of like the Holocaust, just you don't have to be Jewish to think that that's a definitely a sad part of history. And I think the Trail of Tears is, you know, America's version of genocide.

And I mean, it really started right over there. You look like you're about to hit something. Still, I can't take my eyes off those children. I envy them. I want to join them. I'm an IMAX person. I had been to an IMAX theater just weeks before. I wanted to come on this trip to get a feel for this trail that made us. But standing here at Ross's landing, it hits me how crazy that is.

Suddenly, the only thing I get out of it is rage. Why should we keep going? No, I don't know why I don't know why we're here. I seriously don't like I know it's an interesting story. And yes, we are always interested in our past, but I don't know, sometimes I wonder what good comes in that I don't I don't think it makes me like more content in person at all. In fact, I think I feel really haunted by all of this.

And I feel very kind of weighed down by the pain. And part of me thinks this whole thing is a mistake. And and maybe I feel more knowing about it. But I I mean, it's not like this is a story where the more you know, the better your feet you'll feel. It's just the opposite. The more I learn, the worse I feel and the more hatred I feel towards this country that I still love and therefore the more conflicted and like just the most like I just feel like all this anger at everything in there standing next to this like stupid aquarium building and like talking to Coast Guard guys and they're like ducks around.

And now there's a calliope. And I mean, I don't know. Now I just feel like no. I feel worse, I feel worse. There are only so many hours a human being can stomach unfocussed dread, I was tired and confused and depressed and I needed the kind of respite that can only come from focused resentment in the Trail of Tears saga. If there's one person you're allowed to hate, it's Andrew Jackson, the architect of the Indian removal policy.

And since the Trail of Tears passed through Nashville, anyway, we stop at his plantation, the Hermitage. Sarah Palin, her sister, entered the enemy's bedroom. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

It's this American Life, I'm IRA Glass. Today, a program about the past and what to make of the past, we continue with the story of Siravo and her sister, Amy, who are retracing the path of the Trail of Tears. They have just arrived. If you remember before the break at the home of the president responsible for the trail, somebody they hate and intend to keep hating, Andrew Jackson, who, incidentally, is one of President Trump's favorite presidents.

President Trump praised Jackson's portrait in the Oval Office. He spoke at Jackson's home to commemorate the 200 fiftieth anniversary of Jackson's birth. In that speech, he called out, Jackson is a people's president like himself out for the common man, somebody who defied the political class of his day.

It was during the revolution that Jackson first confronted and defied an arrogant elite. Does that sound familiar to you? I wonder why they keep talking about Trump and Jackson, Jackson and Trump. I know the feeling, Andrew, so I pointed out earlier that today's program was first broadcast in 1998, in the years since our enemy visited Jackson's home.

They've updated the exhibit at the museum. There includes exhibits on slaves and on Native American removals that Jackson enacted. There's an audio toward the focus is entirely on the enslaved people who have their. Again, from our original story here, Servoz, the house and museum are closed to the public when we arrive because of astonishing tornado damage. Part of me wanted to destroy Andrew Jackson and everything he represented. Seeing all those hacked up trees made me feel like someone had beaten me to the punch.

God, look at it. The trees are down in. The wrath of God inside, there's no display mentioning Indian removal because remarkably there is no display about Jackson's presidency. Carolyn Brackett showed us around the house, a columned antebellum mansion that looks like a cross between Graceland and Terra. Unfortunately for my spites, Bree, I liked Carolyn Brackett. I felt bad for her, like she would point into the library and say Jackson subscribed to a lot of newspapers before his death and I'd say was one of them, the Cherokee Phoenix.

She wasn't sure she wanted to show off the mansions, painstaking restoration.

All of the the rooms that have original wallpaper, all of the paper was conserved and had to be cleaned with a eraser the size of a pencil eraser.

So it was quite an undertaking. The portrait of Jackson was finished nine days before his death. I think he shows the wear and tear of his life in that portrait. The one over the he looks like he's sticking his hand at a car.

I guess he wasn't worrying about his hair much better.

Carolyn guides his past the flower garden planted by Jackson's wife, Rachel, and into the family graveyard. There are a few piddly headstones and one Greco Roman monstrosity with an obelisk rising from the center.

Let me guess which one of these graces Jackson here. He actually had this design for Rachel and left him for himself. And these are other family members. I pull a book out of my backpack, a book with the subtitle Andrew Jackson in the Subjugation of the American Indian. Carol and Amy Exchange a worried look.

Well, so I'm standing. I'm standing here and I'm standing here on Andrew Jackson's grave. And there is part of me as a person of partly Cherokee descent that wouldn't mind dancing on it. You know, like there's a letter that Jackson Jackson wrote in about the the removal of the Southeastern tribes. And this is his opinion on the on the southeastern tribes leaving their land. Doubtless it will be painful to leave the graves of their fathers, but what do they more than our ancestors did, more than our children are doing to better their condition in an unknown land?

Our forefathers left all that was dear in earthly objects. Our children by thousands yearly leave the land of their birth to seek new homes in distant regions. And then it ends. Can it be cruel in the government when by events which it cannot control, the Indian is made discontent in his ancient home to purchase his land, give him a new and extensive territory to pay the expense of his removal and support him a year in his new abode? How many thousands of our own people would gladly embrace the opportunity of removing to the West on such conditions?

I mean, there's something like or something sort of nutty about Old Hickory in this passage, you know, just the fact that that that he just thinks, well, oh, well, to compare the removal of Indians from their land with the opportunity of his generation, you know, to just go out west, do you think I mean, what do you make of that?

Can you help me understand that mindset? Probably not. I mean, the interesting thing about that era was that that they really felt that they were preserving this is how they justify it in their own minds, was that they were actually helping preserve it, that this was inevitable. It was sort of the early thought of Manifest Destiny, that it was inevitable that this would happen at the interestingly to me, as they never seem to think that we were going to settle the country all the way to the west, all the way to California.

So if they just kept moving everybody further away, they would suddenly get to a point where there wasn't going to be any settlement, which, of course, didn't happen. We drive on into Kentucky, towards Hopkinsville, when the Trail of Tears passed through southern Kentucky in December of 1838, a traveler from Maine happened upon a group of Cherokees, he wrote. We found them in the forest by a roadside camped for the night under a severe fall of rain, accompanied by a heavy wind canvas for a shield against the clemency of the weather and the cold, wet ground for a resting place after the fatigue of the day, they spent the night.

Several were then quite ill, and an aging man, we were then informed, was in the last struggles of death. Even aged females, apparently ready to drop into the grave, were traveling with heavy burdens attached to the back on the sometimes frozen ground in the sometimes muddy streets, with no covering for the feet except for what nature had given them. We learned from the inhabitants on the road where the Indians passed that they buried 14 or 15 at every stopping place.

John Ross's wife died in a place like this in winter of pneumonia. She had one blanket to protect herself from the weather and she gave it to a sick child during a sleet storm.

There's more. It gets worse. I always knew the Cherokee owned slaves, that they owned them in the east and that they owned them in the West. Only in the course of this road trip did it occur to me that the slaves got to Indian territory in the same manner as their masters on the Trail of Tears. Can you imagine as if being a slave wasn't bad enough to be a slave to a tortured Indian made to walk halfway across the continent?

Day three Hopkinsville. We stopped here because it was on the map. But pulling into town, we saw signs for a Trail of Tears Memorial Park we didn't know about. It seemed like a good idea to go there. You work here. I never bother you a second. Uh, can you tell me about what the origin of this place is and why why there's a park here and how it came about?

Hopkinsville was a recent stop along the way on the Trail of Tears, the Cherokee. Camped here. They were here for a week or so while they were here, two of their chiefs died and they're buried up on the hillside. If you start here and walk up to the grave area, there are three bronze plaques on each one of the posts.

The last one, just before you got to the grave area, tells you about the two chiefs white path and flashed me the plaque nearest the graves says that White Path was one of the Cherokee who fought under Andrew Jackson in 1814 at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. Jackson even gave White Path a watch for his bravery in that battle. A Cherokee saved Jackson's life, which hints at the level of Jackson's betrayal of the tribe. Had a Cherokee not saved his life, then white path and fly.

Smith might not be buried here beneath our feet.

The graves are up on a little hill. You can hear the highway down below, but still it's serene. Up until this moment, all the graves along the trail had been metaphorical. All through Tennessee. Amy and I kept saying, we're driving over graves, we're driving over graves. But even then, we just imagined them there under the blacktop, off in the woods. But here, the skeleton suddenly had faces, specific stories. The graves were real.

It took the Cherokee about six months to walk to Oklahoma. We're doing it in five days. Every 10 minutes we cover the same amount of ground they covered in a day. We drive with the sun in our eyes on back roads through Kentucky, we duck into a remote section of downstate Illinois. Chicagoans fear to tread. A plaque marks the spot where thousands of Cherokee camped, unable to cross the Mississippi because of floating ice. We cross it in under a minute.

I know we're going fast, but it doesn't feel fast. We plod through most of Missouri stopping at yet another Trail of Tears State Park. There's actually a name for what we're doing. It's called Heritage Tourism, which sounds so grand like it's going to be one freakin epiphany after another. But after a while, we just read the signs without even getting out of the car. At the end of every day, we fall into our motel beds ripped.

Day four in the morning, we plow through Arkansas, we get to Fayetteville in the afternoon, we have lunch with two old roommates of mine, Brad Lelani, who take us to a little Trail of Tears marker next to a high school parking lot that looks like, huh?

On this site in the summer of eighteen thirty nine there camped one thousand Cherokee's men, women and children and route to their signs facing a semicircular arrangement of boulders, anyone who's ever been to high school would recognize it immediately as the place students go to sneak cigarettes or get stoned. And once again, it's striking how the two American tendencies exist side by side to remember our past and to completely ignore it and have fun like it. How we treat all our national holidays.

Don't we mourn the dead on Memorial Day with volleyball and sunscreen, don't we? The people commemorate the Fourth of July by setting meat and bottle rockets on fire, which makes a lot of sense when you remember that a phrase as weird and whimsical as the pursuit of happiness sits right there in the second sentence of the founding document of the country.

Get the most happiness I find on the trip is when we're in the car and I can blare the Chuck Berry tape I brought, we drive the trail where thousands died and I listen to the music and think, what are we supposed to do with the grisly past? I feel a righteous anger and bitterness about every historical fact of what the American nation did to the Cherokee. But at the same time, I'm an entirely American creature. I'm in love with this song in the country that gave birth to it.

New York, Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago. Let alone just to be at my home back and old lady. Listening to back in the USA while driving the Trail of Tears, I turn it over and over in my head, it's a good country. It's a bad country, good country, bad country.

And of course, it's both anything you want. He got it right here in the U.S.. Welcome to Oklahoma, Native America. I don't remember the scientist say that you. I think they used to say Oklahoma, OK, well. It's about right to. Across the state line, we're in the western Cherokee Nation and the maddening thing, the heartbreaking, cruel, sad, cold fact is that northeastern Oklahoma looks exactly like northwestern Georgia. Same old trees, same old grassy farmland.

The Cherokee walked all this way, crossed rivers, suffered blizzards, buried their dead. And all for what? The same old land they left. We breezed through Tahlequah, the Cherokee capital, even though the Trail of Tears officially stopped there. Our trail won't be over until we get to our hometown. Braggs It's about 20 minutes away and we plan on spending the evening with our aunts and uncles there.

I mean, this is the way I am.

I wanted to talk to my Uncle Johnny, my mother's brother, at 74. He's my oldest living relative. I asked him about his great grandfather, Peter Parson, who came to Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears, was 12 years old.

And he was he grew up here from 12 years old and he was a stonemason. And some of his work is still around, Tawakol, you're going up to the to the village tomorrow, you will see two two big columns and he bit him.

He built those. He he helped build those two columns. They built that right after they came up here.

I didn't know that the columns he's talking about and there are actually three instead of two are the great symbols of the Cherokee Nation in the West. For years, I've had an old photograph of them stuck on my refrigerator door. They're all that's left of the remains of the Cherokee Female Seminary, the very first public school for girls west of the Mississippi, which my great grandmother attended. Everything about the journey until now has been a little world historical. Hearing that our ancestor helped build the columns is the first time I felt an actual familial connection to the story.

I asked Johnny about our family and the Cherokee presence in Oklahoma. I ask him a lot of off topic questions about his service in World War Two, mainly because I was dying to. I was never allowed to ask him about it when I was a kid. And then I asked him a mundane reporter's question about whether he thinks the state of Oklahoma has done a good job educating its students about American Indian history. He says yes, then jumps into a non sequitur about his own education.

Then I haven't been able to stop thinking about since.

I just wish that I could have maybe went to school a lot more. I got no education. And that was one of my big thoughts at but when I was growing up, it took everybody to make to make a living, so I had to work at home. He's got a master's degree in education. I got third grade. You know that. No third grade. I love that third grade dog is about third. Fourth grade. We didn't get no education.

So what you learn, you you can't afford to forget.

You know, on this trip, I've been so wrapped up in all the stories of all the deaths on the Trail of Tears, sitting there listening to my uncle ask, what if I realize that there are lots of ways that lives are pummeled by history? If the Trail of Tears is a glacier that inched its way west, my uncle is one of the boulders it deposited when it stopped. He had to work the farm and then came the Dust Bowl.

And then came the war. All these historical forces bore down on him, but he did not break compared to him compared to the people we descend from. I am free of history. I'm so free of history. I have to get in a car and drive seven states to find it.

It's good to to to to know, to know who are you from say to know or you or your beginning years, and it really probably don't amount all that much, only just to oneself, you know, has nothing to do with you getting out here, doing your what you're going to do tomorrow or a week or two from now.

But at least if you want to look back, you can look back maybe on this trip and say, well, I was down in the area there, you know, and for some of my ancestors originated from, you know.

Day five, geology here, this is what you remember this? Yeah, don't you? Yeah, I mean, we came here once a year. Those was colder, a lot slower than I remember it, I remember them just being these arrows into the sky and they can't be more than, what, 20 feet tall? Oh, I think they're taller than that. Look, now we're at this is the ampitheater entrance, huh?

Oh, here's where you get your program up here.

And here's the statue of Sequoia over there where the Phoenix would rise again. Over there, over there, isn't that down there on the right? That's where I'm standing, waiting with like he was always throwing a fit right there. Oh, really?

Unfortunately, due to loss of funding, the drama here at Geology won't be performed this summer. Amy and I sit in the chairs where we first learned about the Trail of Tears and talk about our trip. Our experiences were different. She minored in Native American studies in college. She not only owns a copy of Black Elk Speaks, she could quote from it. And for her, the trip was about empathy. You know, I've been like pretty close to tears sometimes just thinking about the pain or whatever, like what the kids must have been thinking.

Like when we were driving, I just kept imagining, like, you know, the kid saying, where are we going? Where are we going? You know, like what is happening? Um, I guess I've been sort of thinking about what it really must have been like. I've been thinking about those kids, too, but the person I identify with most in this history is John Ross, the principal chief during the Trail of Tears because he was caught between the two nations.

He believed in the possibilities of the American constitution enough to make sure the Cherokee had one, too. He believed in the liberties the Declaration of Independence promises and the civil rights the Constitution ensures. And when the U.S. betrayed not only the Cherokee but its own creed, I would guess that John Ross was not only angry, not only outraged, not only confused, I would guess that John Ross was a little broken hearted. Because that's how I feel, I've been experiencing the Trail of Tears not as a Cherokee, but as an American.

John Ridge, one of the signers of the Treaty of New Akeda, wants proper sized Cherokee blood, if not destroyed, will wind its courses in beings of fair complexions who worry that their ancestors became civilized under the frowns of misfortunes and the causes of their enemies. He was talking about people like my sister and me. The story of the Trail of Tears, like the story of America, is as complicated as our Cherokee, Swedish, Scottish, English, French, seminal Family Tree.

Just as our blood will never be pure, the trail of Tears will never make sense. Turbo charged version of this story about the Trail of Tears in her book Take the Canali Stories from the New World. But in the years since she told the story on the radio, she has written a number of surprisingly funny books, retelling some very grim American history, The Wordy Shipmates about the Puritans, a book on afeard and the book on Hawaii, one called Assassination Vacation.

Just Google.

And you'll see what I'm talking about. This program is produced by Julie Snyder and myself and Nancy Updike and Louise Spiegel, senior editor for the show, Paul Tough jimmying editors for today's show, Jacquette Maggie Rochlin.

And consider Servoz production up in Hanover doGet and Sylvia Wemyss. Additional help on this rerun by Emmanuel Buring or Gilday. Diane wounding Batstone Stone Nelson and Matt Tierney. Special thanks. Today to Ben Wyatt or Manny Schweitzer and Brad Summerhill, Pat and Jenny Powell and the series Sister Amy Lucian Truscott. The fourth we heard at the beginning of the show talking about Monticello is a columnist at Salon, wrote about monuments to Jefferson for The New York Times.

This American life is delivered to public radio stations by parks, the Public Radio Exchange, our website, This American Life. Doug, we can listen to any of our over 700 programs for absolutely free. Thanks, as always. Your program's cofounder, Mr Renate, who today is hearing our program from Chattanooga and asks, is it just me or is this Joe even better in the choo choo?

I'm IRA Glass, back next week with more stories of this American life.