On this day in 1830, Andrew Jackson singed the Indian Removal Act, which forced 46,000 Native Americans from their ancestral land, pushing them into concentration camps & forcing them to undertake a 1000 mile death march or “trail of tears”, which killed over 4,000 ppl. 
Whites coveted valuable Native lands in the South for use as slave plantations. As a result, the US gov forced Native tribes off their land & marched them to an “Indian colonization zone” in Oklahoma, those who refused faced terror, theft, & murder by white settlers.
In 1831, under threat of invasion by the US Army, the Choctaw were the 1st nation expelled. They were marched “bound in chains & double file”, without any food, supplies or other help from the gov. Thousands died along the way; many are buried in unmarked graves along the trail.
In 1838, the US sent 7,000 soldiers to force the Cherokee from their land. The army forced them into stockades while whites looted their homes. Then, they marched the Indians more than 1,200 miles as they suffered from Whooping cough, typhus, dysentery, cholera & starvation.
This US government effort of ethnic cleansing the American South opened up 25 million acres of fertile, valuable farmland to white settlement in Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas.
The US government promised that "Indian Territory" would remain theirs forever, but as white settlement pushed west, their territory diminished greatly in size . In 1907, Oklahoma became a state and Indian territory was gone forever.
