John G. Burnett was a U.S. Army private during the winter of 1838-39.  In 1890, nearly 50 years after the Cherokee's removal, Burnett recorded his account of the Trail of Tears.

The removal of the Cherokee Indians from their life long homes in the year of 1838 found me a young man in the prime of life as a private . . . in the American Army.  Being acquainted with many of the Indians and able to speak their language fluently, I was chosen as interpreter into the Smokey Mountain Country [here I] witnessed the execution of the most brutal order in the history of American warfare.  I saw helpless Cherokees arrested and dragged from their homes, and driven at the bayonet point into stockades.  And in the chill of a drizzling rain on an October morning I Saw them loaded like cattle or sheep into six hundred and forty -five wagons and headed for the West.

The trail of the exiles was a trail of death.  They had to sleep in wagons and on the ground without fire.  I have known as many as 22 of them to die in one night of pneumonia due to ill treatment, cold and exposure.  Among this number was the beautiful Christian wife of Chief John Ross.  The noble hearted woman died a martyr to childhood, giving her only blankets for the protection of a sick child.  She rode thinly clad through a blinding sleet and snow storm, developed pneumonia and died in the still hours of a bleak winter night . .

The long painful journey to the west ended March 26, 1839, with four thousand silent graves reaching from the foothills of the Smokey Mountains to what is known as the Indian Territory in the west.  And the covetousness on the part of the white race was the cause of all that the Cherokees had to suffer.

In the summer of 1838, federal troops entered the Cherokee nation and began rounding up the Cherokees and imprisoning them in stockades.  They looked back only to see the soldiers burning their cabins and crops.  This was to discourage them from escaping and returning home.  As the soldiers went through the Indian villages, parents and children became separated.

After being put into stockades, the Cherokees did not have enough food or water.  The health conditions were terrible, many died in the stockades.  They were herded in like a bunch of cattle.  With hardly enough room to lay down on the cold and wet grounds to sleep.  One fourth to one half of them died before ever reaching the West. This forced migration came to be known as the Trail of Tears because of the Cherokees' suffering.