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In 1831, the French political thinker and writer Alexis de Tocco visited Memphis, Tennessee.

As he stood on the banks of the Mississippi River, he caught sight of a horrendous scene,

mass removals of native Choctaw people from their ancestral homelands.

In his book, Democracy in America, he described what he saw that day.

In the whole scene,

there was an air of ruin and destruction, something which betrayed a final and irrevocable adieu.

One couldn't watch without feeling one's heart rung. He asked one man why they were leaving.

The answer came back simply, to be free. What Tokville witnessed that day would come to be remembered as one of the darkest chapters of American history. The beginning

of what is now commonly referred to as the Trail of Tears.

Music Tears. Dear listeners, welcome again to American History Hit. I'm Don Wildman.

The idea of the frontier, to which we've dedicated so much

time lately in this series, lives on in our collective American imagination, still charges

the spirit of this country. But the idea of white settlers of the colonial period into the

American Republic is, of course, in direct opposition to those already living upon that land. As settlers pushed westward,

Native nations were pushed aside, pressured, killed. This painful legacy in mind,

in this our fifth and final episode of our frontier miniseries, we turn to one of the darkest

chapters of this checkered past. The Trail of Tears is a story

of forced removal and migration, but it is also one of endurance, identity, and survival. And today,

we explore it all in its particulars, when, why, and how it all happened, and of course,

...