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 capitol 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.

According to Thomas Maxwell, Sr., "Opothleyaholo while here never pretended to be satisfied with the removal of his people, but admitted he moved only because of imperative necessity. Before leaving Tuscaloosa he declared that he no longer felt that he was a chief and he tore off his wampum war belt, for which he had no further use." Two years later, in 1838, Maxwell purchased Opothleyaholo's wampum belt.

Virginia [Tunstall] Clay lived in Tuscaloosa during Opotheyaholo's visit and she described what she witnessed as a child in her book, A BELLE OF THE FIFTIES. Mrs. Clay encountered Opothleyaholo in the White House when the 80 year old chief visited President James Buchanan in 1855. Mrs. Clay wrote:

In the winter of 1834, more that 22,000 Indians were living on the Creek Indian reservation which covered 5,200,000 acres eat of Montgomery. Out of this large population, only 630 Creeks volunteered to travel to Oklahoma with John Page of the U.S. Army. These destitute people arrived in Tuscaloosa during December while the legislature was in session. The leader of this party of Creeks, Chief Eufaula [Chief Yoholo-Micco] requested to visit the capitol and address the Alabama legislature. His audience found the words deeply poignant.

“I come brothers to see the great house of Alabama, and the men that make the laws, and tell the in farewell in brotherly kindness before I go to the far west, where my people are now going. I did think at one time that the white man wanted to oppress my people and drive them from their homes by compelling them to obey the laws that they did not understand—but I have now become satisfied that they are not unfriendly towards us, but that they wish us well. In these lands of Alabama, which have been my forefather’s, where their bones lie buried, I see that the Indian ſires are going out—they must soon be extinguished. New fires are lighting in the west—and we will go there. I do now believe that our great father, the president, intends no harm to the red men—but wishes them well. He has promised us homes and hunting ground in the far west, where he tells us the red men shall be protected. We will go. We leave behind our good will to the people of Alabama, who build the great houses, and to the men who make the laws."


“This is all I have to say—l came to say farewell to the wise men who make the laws, and to wish them peace and happiness in the country which my forefathers owned and which I now leave to go to other homes in the west. I leave the graves of my fathers—but the Indian fires are going out—almost clean gone—and new fires are lighted there for us."

A few cold nights on the Columbus road west of Northport probably forced Chief Eufaula to reconsider his words about believing Alabamians wishing him well. Captain Page, the U.S. Army escort, soon learned why the Southern Indians, so noted for the silent dignity of their grief, would call their journey west, The Trail of Tears. He wrote from Columbus, Mississippi on January 6, 1835, that the cold weather was "so severe on the little children and old persons and some of them nearly naked that they would perish if they were not attended to. I have to stop the wagons to take the children out and warm them and put them back again six or seven times a day. I send ahead and have fires built for this purpose. I wrap them in tents and anything I can get hold of to keep them from freezing. Strict attention had to be paid to this or some must inevitably have perished. Five or six in each wagon constantly crying in consequence of suffering with cold. I am sometimes at a stand to know how to get along under existing circumstances. There was continued crying from morning to night with the children. I used to encourage them by saying that the weather would moderate in a few days, but it never happened during the whole trip."

Three months later, after miles of walking through severe snow storms, Chief Eufaula's group arrived at Ft. Gibson. Four hundred sixty-nine of the six hundred  in the original party survived this deplorably bad journey.

The next group of Creek Indians to use Tuscaloosa as a stopover on the trail to Ft. Gibson arrived in town on September 12, 1836. This group of 2,700 Indians under Chief Opothleyaholo had their march delayed by whites who filed suits against the chief and other Indians for fraudulent debts. By turning over their 1837 annual annuity of $31,900 to the whites and agreeing to "furnish from their tribe 600 to 1000 men for service against the Seminoles," Chief Opothaleyaholo paid his people's ransom and they were allowed to leave east Alabama.

The Sunday edition of the July 20, 1919 TUSCALOOSA NEWS contains an article by Thomas Clinton entitled, "Interesting Account of Emigration of the Creek Indians in 1836." This description of Chief Opothleyaholo's people's visit to Tuscaloosa was the first installment in a long series of articles by Clinton on Tuscaloosa's history (Clinton's son Matt continued this family tradition of historical articles in the NEWS through the 1970s). In his article Clinton includes Dr. Joshua Foster's version of the Indians' visit to Tuscaloosa:

"In their [the Creek Indians] emigration westward, some of them camped where the University observatory now stands...I had passed the grave of a chieftain's son in the northwest corner of the old Observatory field and seen its lonely sentinel, the pet dog of the little dead boy, as he kept his ceaseless vigil over the tomb of his master. My heart yearned in youthful sympathy for the young Indian.

...With other boys I visited their camp and bought from them a few trinkets. We had gone again to visit another camp across the river where we saw some boys and girls- fifty or more between the ages of two and twenty years, not clad in modern bathing suits, but all in their birthday suits or in undress uniform, all paddling like ducks in the creek. I had seen Opothleyaholo and his lithe and graceful daughters and heard the great chief talk in eloquent pathos of their bitter grief on leaving their hunting grounds and the graves of their fathers."

According to Thomas Maxwell, Sr., "Opothleyaholo while here never pretended to be satisfied with the removal of his people, but admitted he moved only because of imperative necessity. Before leaving Tuscaloosa he declared that he no longer felt that he was a chief and he tore off his wampum war belt, for which he had no further use." Two years later, in1838, Maxwell purchased Opothleyaholo's wampum belt.

Virginia [Tunstall] Clay lived in Tuscaloosa during Opothleyaholo's visit and she described what she witnessed in her book, A BELLE OF THE FIFTIES. Mrs. Clay encountered Opothleyaholo in the White House when the 80-year-old chief visited President James Buchanan in 1855. Mrs. Clay wrote:

"While I was still a child I had seen  five thousand Cherokees and Choctaws [Creeks], passing west to their new reservations beyond the Mississippi, had rested in Tuscaloosa, where they camped for several weeks. The occasion was a notable one. All the city turned out to see the Indian youths dash through the streets on their ponies. They were superb horsemen and their animals were as remarkable. Many of the latter, for a consideration, were left in the hands of the emulous white youth of the town. Along the river banks, too, carriages stood, crowded with sightseers watching the squaws as they tossed their young children into the stream that they might learn to swim. Very picturesque were the roomy vehicles of that day as they grouped along the leafy shore of the Black Warrior, their capacity tested to the fullest by the belles of the little city, arrayed in dainty muslins, and bonneted in the sweet fashions of the day.

During the encampment a red man was set upon by some quarrelsome rowdies and in the altercation was killed. Fearing the vengeance of the allied tribes about them, the miscreants disemboweled their victim and, filling the cavity with rocks, sank the body in the river. The Indians, missing their companion, and suspecting some evil had befallen him, appealed to Governor C.C. Clay, who immediately uttered a proclamation for the recovery of the body. In a few days the crime and its perpetrators were discovered and justice was meted out to them..."

A Tuscaloosa correspondent writing in the October 11, 1836 edition of the ARKANSAS GAZETTE, described the sadness that the Creek Indians represented to Tuscaloosa's citizens. "They all presented a squalid, forlorn, and miserable condition and seemed to be under the influence of deep melancholy and deep dejections. They are said to have left their homes with great reluctance, but they are becoming more reconciled to their destiny. Their condition excited much sympathy and commiseration in the heart's our our [Tuscaloosa's] citizens, and many a heartfelt regret was uttered at the necessity which compelled us to remove them to the far West." Obviously Tuscaloosa's citizens were helpless to do anything to stop removal.

All of the detachments of Alabama Creeks converged on Memphis in November, and by December, more than ten thousand suffering Native Americans from Alabama arrived at Ft. Gibson. On December 21, 1836, Marine Lieutenant J.T. Sprague, who had just arrived at Ft. Gibson with almost two thousand Creeks from Tallassee, Alabama, received this letter from his Indians:

"You have been with us many moons...You have heard the cries of our women and children...Our road has been a long one, and on it we have laid the bones of our men, women and children. When we left our homes the great General Jesup to us that we could get to our country [Oklahoma] as we wanted to. We wanted to gather our crops, and wanted to go in peace and friendship, Did we? No! We were drove off like wolves...lost our crops...and our people's feet were bleeding with long marches. Tell General Jackson if the white man will let us we will live in peace and friendship..but tell him these agents [emigrating contractors] came not to treat us well, but make money and tell our people behind not to be drove off like dogs. We are men...we have women and children, and why should we come like wild horses?"

The fact that every act of Indian Removal occurred while Tuscaloosa was Alabama's capitol links this city to this cataclysm. Can we ever comprehend the suffering and grief that Alabama's Indians felt as they camped on the hilltop where the Old University Observatory now stands? Can we walk or drive by that place where Joshua Foster saw the young Indian?"

An enormous mass of unpublished documents contain details of the catastrophe that occurred within the Creek Nation in 1836. The records of fraudulent land deals and actions of the Alabama Emigrating Company expose a small cadre of entrepreneurs who profited from human suffering. The removal of the Indian became one of the most lucrative industries in Alabama during 1836. It is a blight on the early days of Alabama statehood- a sad story of exploitation, suffering and greed. I wonder if we've learned to behave any differently in the one hundred and fifty-plus years since.