Witnesses from the Past

Witnesses from the Past

In a quiet corner of Prairie Grove, Arkansas, at the intersection of Black Nursery Road and East Heritage Parkway, lies a place where the earth still remembers. Stand there for a moment, and you’ll feel a weight that isn’t from monuments or presidential statues, but from something much deeper and more enduring. This is the path that thousands were forced to walk when the U.S. government, under President Andrew Jackson, decided that their homeland belonged to someone else.

The Trail of Tears National Historic Trail stretches over 8,000 miles across nine states, but you can’t walk it from start to finish. Much of the route goes through private land, modern roads, or waterways, leaving only small accessible sections for visitors. However, what remains open is worth the effort — and the northwest region of Arkansas boasts some of the most poignant stretches along this trail.

Historical Footsteps

Prairie Grove lies along the Benge Route of the Cherokee, one of many overland paths the tribe traversed during the harsh winter of 1838–1839. However, Arkansas was not only the territory of the Cherokee during their years of removal. All five nations forced to relocate, including the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole, passed through this state on their way to Indian Territory.

The overlapping, diverging, and converging routes weave through the Arkansas landscape. Wherever you stand on this path, it holds meaning, as you are on land that has absorbed the pain of all those who walked here. The Benge Route travels through Fayetteville and Washington counties before continuing toward Prairie Grove, heading toward Evansville and the Oklahoma border. As many as thirteen groups of Cherokee crossed this area, with some arriving near Prairie Grove on Christmas Day in 1838, when snow still blanketed the ground.

Stories from the Past

The entrance to the trail that you can walk today follows the same corridor as before. The story most Americans know goes something like this: five sovereign nations were forced to leave their ancestral homelands in the Southeastern United States and move west to Indian Territory, what is now Oklahoma. Thousands died from the cold, disease, and starvation along the way. In Cherokee, this journey is called Nunna daul Tsuny, meaning “the trail where they cried.”

What this story doesn’t address is equally important and harder to accept. The more prosperous members of these five nations in the decades before removal had adopted many economic practices of the surrounding white landowners, including the enslavement of Black people. When the forced removals began, those enslaved individuals were also compelled to move west, not as survivors of a tragedy, but as property to be transported. Thousands of enslaved Black people, owned by members of all five tribes, made this journey, cooking, tending to the sick, and working along the way. They had no voice in any decisions.

A Unique Journey of Discovery

The leaders of the five nations fought against the removal with extraordinary legal and political talent, many of whom had also enslaved others. This chapter in American history sits at the painful intersection of two of the nation’s most profound injustices, tangled and unresolved. The tears on this path belong not to one person, but to all who were forced to traverse it.

The entrance in Prairie Grove at the intersection of Black Nursery and East Heritage Parkway opens a quiet and accessible gateway to this history, something that most visitors to northwest Arkansas never discover. The surrounding landscape appears quite ordinary: Ozark forests, a gravel road, and the sounds of a land that has endured its share of suffering. But the Heritage Trail Partners of Northwest Arkansas have carefully marked and interpreted these routes, with informational signs helping visitors understand what they are standing on.

Other Notable Destinations

Signage along the trail names the paths the Cherokee took through these dense forests, the same stretch that groups from Cane Hill and those moving from Dardanelle traversed. From Prairie Grove, you can follow the Benge Route west toward Evansville and the Oklahoma border. Other noteworthy access points along the entire route, which spans nine states, include Mantle Rock in Kentucky, a sandstone cliff where the Cherokee had to wait, sometimes in brutal cold, before being permitted to cross the Ohio River. The walk there is short and level, about 0.4 miles from the parking area, complete with explanatory signs about the site’s role in the removal process.

The Fort Smith National Historic Site in western Arkansas marks the point where the Arkansas and Poteau rivers converge, serving as the last crossing into Indian Territory.

Helpful Resources

The Cherokee Museum in Cherokee, North Carolina, recounts this story from the perspective of survivors and those who hid in the Smoky Mountains to avoid removal. It is a significant place. The Cherokee Heritage Center in Park Hill, Oklahoma, near Tahlequah, the endpoint of the trail and the current capital of the Cherokee Nation, houses archives, oral histories, and a reconstructed 17th-century village, helping to put the removal into the larger narrative of Cherokee civilization.

The National Park Service maintains the official website of the trail at nps.gov/trte, featuring maps, driving routes, and information on accessible segments. The Arkansas Heritage Trails system at arkansasheritagetrails.com offers detailed guides to the state’s routes. For those looking to delve deeper into the northwest Arkansas stretch, heritagetrailpartners.com is a local resource, provided by the organization that has done the most work to interpret and preserve this pathway.