Quotes from Robert M. Utley

The Cherokees had 1,200 miles to go before they reached eastern Oklahoma, the end of the trek they would forever be remembered as the Trail of Tears. As their homeland disappeared behind them, the cold autumn rains continued to fall, bringing disease and death. Four thousand shallow graves marked the trail. Marauding parties of white men appeared, seized Cherokee horses in payment for imaginary debts, and rode off. The Indians pressed on, the sullen troopers riding beside them. They

The tactics used by the English in their warfare with the Indians crossed the foggy dividing line between strategic deception and outright immorality.

As the struggle continued, Mason abandoned his plan to seize the camp intact for its booty, grabbed a firebrand, and set it aflame. As the eighty closely packed huts, which housed 800 Indians, went up in smoke, the Pequots poured out of the stockade to meet death from English and Narraganset swords and muskets. Others - hundreds of them - remained huddled inside the huts and were burned, women and children, old and young, "in promiscuous ruin." The