In the 1830s, the Cherokee, or Tsalagi as they called themselves, were a farming people who lived in what is now northern Georgia, western Tennessee, eastern North Carolina, and eastern Virginia, where they had lived since at least 1540. They had been greatly influenced by the customs of European immigrants and had adopted many of their ways. Many had attended college. Most had adopted Christianity. Their homes were generally built in the same manner as those in neighboring white communities. Their clothing was of woven cotton or wool. An 1825 census of the Cherokee Nation authorized by the Council of the Cherokee listed 10 sawmills, 61 blacksmith shops, 18 ferry boats, 31 gristmills, 2,493 plows, 8 cotton machines, 2,488 spinning wheels, and 762 looms. The United States government had signed a treaty in 1785 recognizing the Cherokee's right to perpetual occupancy of their lands. During the War of 1812, Chief Junaluska volunteered over 600 Cherokee scouts to aid the United States army in fighting the Creek Indians at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. During this battle Chief Junaluska personally saved the life of Andrew Jackson. By 1821 the Cherokee Sequoia had developed a system for writing the language of his people, and within 10 years the literacy rate was greater among Cherokees than among U.S. citizens. In 1832 the Cherokee began printing their own newspaper in both Cherokee and English.

In 1828 a Cherokee boy at Ward Creek, Georgia, sold a gold nugget to a white trader, an act that one observer of its results said sealed the doom of the Cherokees. Cherokees began to be driven off their land by gold seekers. In 1830 the state of Georgia passed a law annexing a large portion of the Cherokee lands and declaring Cherokee laws and government null and void within Georgia. Cherokees were forbidden to mine gold within this area, a law enforced by the Georgia Guard. The Cherokees sought redress through the federal courts and sued the state to keep their lands. The case reached the United States Supreme Court, which was presided over by Chief Justice John Marshall. In 1832 the court ruled in favor of the Cherokees. However, President Andrew Jackson would not honor the Supreme Court's decision; he remarked that "John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it." Jackson became involved in the removal of the Cherokees from their lands. Chief John Ross sent Chief Junaluska as an envoy to plead with President Jackson for protection for his people, but Jackson rejected the pleas of the man who had saved his life. In 1835 the Treaty of New Echota, Georgia, made the evacuation of the Cherokees from all of their lands mandatory. Chief John Ross requested a two-year period for his people to prepare to leave for land in what is now Oklahoma and Kansas.

The Cherokees continued to negotiate their right to remain. But, in 1838 while Chief John Ross was in Washington, D.C., attempting to work out an alternative to the removal of his people, 7,000 soldiers under the command of General Winfield Scott began immediate arrests of Cherokees wherever they were found. Men working in their fields were beaten and driven at gunpoint into stockades. Women were driven from their homes, and children were separated from their families. No time was allowed to take clothing, blankets, or food. Eighteen thousand Cherokees were housed in rat-infested stockades without sanitary facilities. From May until November of 1838, people with as much as one thirty-second Cherokee ancestry were arrested. One of those evicted was John Ross, nephew of Chief John Ross, who was preparing to leave for Princeton. He was taken from his Georgia home, a two-story brick mansion, with his mother, a full-blooded Scottish woman, after his father was shot in an upstairs room. The mansion was burned as they left. During the fall and winter of 1838, the Cherokees were loaded into 645 wagons, and the 900-mile trek began. Four thousand died in the stockades or on the journey to Oklahoma Indian Territory.

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