(I wrote this article 22 years ago and it was published in issue #38 of OLD TUSCALOOSA MAGAZINE. I finally got it online today. To read the rest of the article click on the following link)

Tuscaloosa: Stopover On The Trail Of Tears

by Robert Register 

Every act of Indian removal in Alabama
occurred while Tuscaloosa was
State Capital. 

" We pledge never to give... Alabama an opportunity to excuse herself to the world, by any concession on their part, to the schemes she has adopted to expel us from our lands. Her grasping rapacity and tyranny must stand, as a monument to future generations, of wanton violation of laws respected by civil and barbarous nations! " 

Memorial of a Deputation from
the Creek Nation of Indians,
February 3, 1830-
Senate Document 53, 21st Congress.
Washington, DC 

It is said that the Southern Indians called their forced migration to Oklahoma the Trail of Tears. On at least two occasions- once in December, 1834, and again in September, 1836, Tuscaloosa was a stopover for large groups of Creek Indians destined for "the Terminal on the Trail of Tears," Fort Gibson. Fort Gibson was an army post located twelve-hundred miles away on the Grand River in eastern Oklahoma.

It is entirely appropriate that Tuscaloosa would be forever touched by the sorrow of Indian removal. Tuscaloosa was Alabama's capital and the home of the governors and lawmakers who enacted the laws that stripped Native Americans of all their human rights and enacted the laws that protected the white men who profited from the Indian's misfortunes. https://robertoreg.blogspot.com/