Cherokee Tragedy: The Story of the Ridge Family and the Decimation of a People

Signed by candlelight in a crowded house in the old Cherokee capital, New Echota, Georgia, the Treaty of 1835 set in motion a mournful chain of events that was to force the Indians of the Cherokee Nation from their ancestral homelands in North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia into the Indian Territory beyond the Mississippi, that was to sweep them west over a route so marked with disease and death that it would ever afterward be know as the Trail of Tears.