Episode 39: Trail of Tears: The Legacy of a Faithful People

Jacob Paul: Welcome to the truth and love podcast with your hosts Kimberly Faith and John Mack. The truth and love podcast seeks to present God’s timeless truth through the lens of his remarkable love.

Kimberly Faith: Well, dad, welcome back to the Truth and Love podcast. It’s been a few weeks since we’ve gotten to get together and, talk, I’m just beyond excited about the topic today and you’re going to be the star of the show.

John McLarty: Well, it’s great to be here. I don’t know about the star, but I have some information about the Yeah.

Kimberly Faith: And you really have, been studied and been engaged with the Trail of Tears. I don’t know if you would call it it’s not a project, but the history, studying the history and been involved with the Cherokee nation. Is that right?

John McLarty: I have for over twenty years.

Kimberly Faith: So tell us about that. Tell us about your involvement and how we got here today to talk about this amazing story, untold stories of the Trail of Tears.

John McLarty: Untold Yeah. Well, I give PowerPoints and one of the titles to my One of my PowerPoints is From Lines on a Map to Stories that Must Be Told. So it goes back to the origins of how I got involved in this is we were developing a bike and pedestrian trail system for Northwest Arkansas. And we came up with the idea of using historic routes to be the main corridor for the trail system. And one of them was the Butterfield Stagecoach and another was the Trail Of Tears and then civil war troop movements.

So we studied all those lines on a map and they developed into a trail system for the two counties of Northwest Arkansas, Benton

Kimberly Faith: Which are lovely, wonderful trails.

John McLarty: Benton and Washington County. And we formed a group called the Heritage Trail Partners. And as we explored those different routes, I began to we we first focused on Butterfield, but I began to read journals about just where the lines on the map were that were revealing that the Trail of Tears used the same road. Actually, they were there some of the original users in a tragic way of the road that became the Butterfield.

Kimberly Faith: Interesting.

John McLarty: And it’s because it was the main road from St. Louis to Springfield, Missouri to Fort Smith. And the military created that road. Actually, I I would say they improved the road because it turns out it was probably an ancient Indian path from you know, there’s mounds in Saint Louis and then the mounds down around Fort Smith, the Oklahoma, the Spiral Mounds. Interesting.

So it was probably a trade route. And if you look at the geography of it, it is the only way through the two counties where you don’t cross our major river systems, the Illinois or the Dwight. So after a flood event, it’d be the only way through. And then the topography, the up and down movement is almost the flattest way through the two counties.

Kimberly Faith: Interesting.

John McLarty: So probably the military didn’t just, you know, cut a new road through the forest. They used an existing path. But so, anyway, so that road was the state road or the military road, and some old maps is called the Springfield to Fayetteville Road. So as we discovered we’re looking for the Butterfield route, I came across references in old journals to it being the Trail Of Tears. So I got more interested in the Trail Of Tears aspect of the story, and then some colleagues of mine got more interested in the civil war routes and that story and the Butterfield routes and that story.

So that’s kinda how it got started was these discovering these lines on a map.

Kimberly Faith: Now for people who don’t know what the Trail Of Tears is, just because there’s there may be some people listening who don’t even know what that means.

John McLarty: And that was me twenty years ago. Yeah. I had just heard of the Trail of Tears, and it was, you know, that the the Cherokee and some other tribes were forcefully removed. I had no idea when it happened, how many people were involved. I just heard of the Trail of Tears.

So it was just amazing to me as I delved into it. So I started going to conferences and meeting Cherokee friends.

Kimberly Faith: So Trail of Tears Conference.

John McLarty: Trail of Tears Conference held by the Trail of Tears Association, meeting Cherokee friends who are very interested in telling the story. And I’ll just put a little subtitle. The Cherokee really are impressive in that they want to tell this story of tragedy, which we’ll go through here. Mhmm. But one of their messages is overcoming adversity, not being perpetual victims.

Kimberly Faith: Interesting.

John McLarty: But they survived it. They persevered, and they’re actually now a thriving nation over in Eastern Oklahoma. And according to them and according to the truth, doing quite well, thank you, for the most part.

Kimberly Faith: So what what role do you play in the Cherokee Nation or the Trail of Tears currently?

John McLarty: I just started attending these conferences and then became a member of the state chapter, the Arkansas chapter Trail of Tears. It’s just it sound like you show up for for a meeting and you’re on the board.

Kimberly Faith: Right.

John McLarty: And then the next thing you know, you’re the vice president because someone left and then became the president, but I was really enjoying it. Mhmm. So learning more and more about it. So I started putting together PowerPoints and teaching here locally at museums and schools and Butterfield Village, you know, any place that wanted to have a PowerPoint. So one of the revealing things was well, I’ll start with this.

One of my kind of moments was I was at Pea Ridge, Pea Ridge National Military Park, and there’s a portion of the trail over there just north of Elkhorn Tavern leading up to Missouri up to where up to actually to Waynesville where you live.

Kimberly Faith: Right. Where we have a Trail Of Tears site as well.

John McLarty: So it’s this formal ceremony dedicating a panel there, and the Cherokee Nation shows up with the chief of the Cherokee Nation and their this amazing the Cherokee Youth Choir. Oh. And they’re all dressed in Cherokee garb, and it’s, you know, young young men and and ladies, you know, high school age, early college. And so they take over the ceremony so that, know, it’s the park superintendent. Mhmm.

And, know, and, of course, you’ve got all this kind of separation of church and state. How how often do you go to a state or a national park and hear a prayer

Kimberly Faith: Right.

John McLarty: To open any kind of event?

Kimberly Faith: Can’t remember anything like that.

John McLarty: This over to the Cherokee Nation, and the first thing they do is the the master of ceremonies. I don’t know if it’s the chief or the assistant chief or maybe they had a chaplain. They go up and they started they said, we’re gonna start with prayer. So I’m like going like, this is really going to be interesting.

Kimberly Faith: Now who are they praying to?

John McLarty: Well, that’s why why I was like my ears perked up. Like, who You know, they’re praying and who are they who are they praying to? And it was a very Christian prayer. And then they finished with, in the name of Jesus. Amen.

Kimberly Faith: Wow. I bet you didn’t expect to

John McLarty: I did not expect that.

Kimberly Faith: Because, yeah, we always hear that that that native Americans have they’re tribal gods. And you know?

John McLarty: Then they come then they come in with their the flag, the honor guard, and they’re carrying the chair the American flag and the Cherokee flag. And they they have this presentation regarding their military service, And they they make it very clear. They do not see themselves as perpetual victims.

Kimberly Faith: Interesting.

John McLarty: But that, in fact, the Cherokee Nation at the time and probably still does, per capita has the greatest number of military members in the in The US armed services of any other Indian nation.

Kimberly Faith: You know, that’s interesting.

John McLarty: And they were proud of that.

Kimberly Faith: That’s And

John McLarty: I thought that is these are some people that were treated terribly

Kimberly Faith: Right.

John McLarty: By our nation. Right. But they they they serve with pride. And other tribes do too. The Navajo code talkers and wonder what percentage of their tribe

Kimberly Faith: has served in the military.

John McLarty: Yeah. That’s but it’s it’s the highest per capita of any other Indian nation.

Kimberly Faith: Because, you know, less than 1% of our entire nation serves in the military.

John McLarty: Right.

Kimberly Faith: And so I just would be curious to

John McLarty: know that. Well, that’s that’s Then the Cherokee youth choir starts singing. I’m going, oh, this is going to be interesting. And they’re singing in Cherokee, but it’s hymns. The whole program was hymns.

Wow. Like amazing grace or when the role is called up yonder, I’ll be there. Just kinda like hymns we would sing in our country churches

Kimberly Faith: Mhmm.

John McLarty: You know, all over, you know, the the bible belt.

Kimberly Faith: Right.

John McLarty: And then one of their primary messages was like, we don’t wanna be considered victims. We’re here to kind of honor this ground and dedicate this site, but we we do not wanna be we’re overcomers.

Kimberly Faith: We’ve heard

John McLarty: this weird.

Kimberly Faith: A site of one of the where the trail of tears went through.

John McLarty: Went through, and there was a camp a campground there. So that just really drew me into the Cherokee Nation. They just they they just got my admiration and respect. So I became friends with I went up and met people and met the executive director of the Trail of Tears Association and just became good friends with that whole group. And then you go to these conferences, and you start hearing more and more of the story.

Kimberly Faith: So

John McLarty: one of the most revealing things was to go over to a conference in Cherokee, North Carolina because that’s where their tribal origins are. North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee.

Kimberly Faith: Are those the states the four states they were removed from? The in the Trail of Tears, was that the

John McLarty: That that that was their home country. It. Tennessee, North Carolina, Alabama, and Georgia.

Kimberly Faith: So when they’re when they’re that those were the four states that they were that that they were removed from and relocated to out west. We’ll talk about that later, but those are the four states.

John McLarty: Yeah. So, basically, we’ll we can just kinda jump into the story. So what what is that story? It’s so the Trail of Tears, and I always thought it was just a singular event.

Kimberly Faith: Mhmm.

John McLarty: It was actually over several several months. And instead of one detachment, one big mass movement, it was 17 different groups.

Kimberly Faith: Okay.

John McLarty: There’s about 16,000 Cherokee at the time, and they they broke up into 17 detachments of about a thousand each, 800 to 900.

Kimberly Faith: How did it all start?

John McLarty: So the forced removal of the Cherokee, the timeline is is that happened 1837 to 1839. But what’s fascinating is this whole story is is such an American story and so much a part of the greater picture of of American history. So I kinda have this PowerPoint. It all started with Andrew Jackson was elected president in 1828, and he campaigned on Indian removal platform.

Kimberly Faith: Mhmm.

John McLarty: And that’s what he was he was voted in on. So it goes back a little bit before that, of course, because the the Cherokee, this was their homeland, so they’ve been there forever.

Kimberly Faith: Mhmm.

John McLarty: And then it is kind of interesting. You think of, you know, we have the date Plymouth Colony was 1620. There was even the you know, Jamestown was a little earlier, but we think of 1620. So this is the 1820s. So the Europeans and the Cherokee had already been interacting for two hundred years.

Kimberly Faith: Oh, wow. I hadn’t thought

John McLarty: about just think about that.

Kimberly Faith: Yeah. Yeah.

John McLarty: So they had talk They’ve been getting along. And and, actually, the Cherokee and the Indians are, you know, just resourceful Mhmm. Intelligent people. So they see things like iron pots and rifles and spinning looms, and they’re like all about this.

Kimberly Faith: Mhmm.

John McLarty: So the kind of the story is the Cherokee were assimilating. They had actually formed their own government. This was just astonishing to me. We went to in in the Georgia, there’s Neuachita, Georgia State Park now, but it’s one of their ancient capitals. They had the build they had recreated the buildings.

They had the legislative building. There’s an executive branch.

Kimberly Faith: Wow.

John McLarty: They had judicial. Judicial. They had a constitution. They had government. They had, you know, Sequoia.

They had a written language. Mhmm. They were publishing a newspaper. Wow. That was actually being sent to England. So this is ’18 the early eighteen hundreds.

Kimberly Faith: Wow. So before the civil war.

John McLarty: Before the civil war.

Kimberly Faith: But but far after state we became a nation and after the initial settlement. That’s pretty

John McLarty: true. Were missionaries down there and a lot of a lot of the Cherokee that’s part of this untold story. A lot of the Cherokee were Christians. And there is kind of this there’s I’m just gonna call it a myth that the only reason that the Cherokee were coming around the mission stations was just to get education Mhmm. To get the the learning.

But there’s strong evidence, and one of them is that they were actually Christians, born again, saved Christians. Mhmm. One of

Kimberly Faith: the They had an independent passion to serve Christ.

John McLarty: Yeah. One and and one of the I used this in an opening PowerPoint slide is a picture of the reverend Jesse Bushyhead was an ordained Baptist preacher Wow. In the eighteen twenties, ’18 thirties, and then was removed with he was a detachment leader. But he was an ordained Baptist preacher. He ended up serving in the when he got here to the Indian nation in what’s now Oklahoma, he was a supreme court justice.

Wow. And he would go the the Cherokee were making the claim that we don’t need to be removed. We have assimilated. A lot of us are Christians.

Kimberly Faith: Mhmm.

John McLarty: We’re into higher education. We’re into farming. The typical Cherokee homestead was about 13 to 15 acres with hogs and a log cabin. And, you know, you couldn’t tell the difference if you go out to, like, you know, one of our state parks, Prairie Grove, and look at the log cabins and the interior.

Kimberly Faith: Mhmm.

John McLarty: That’s what the Cherokee cabin looked like.

Kimberly Faith: Interesting.

John McLarty: So they were Not to say that they weren’t keeping their culture. Right. Most of them would’ve kept their We’re still practicing their traditional religions in the 1830s.

Kimberly Faith: And that’s not uncommon all across the world. You have people in Africa who worship God. They worship Jesus Christ of the Bible, but they have different traditions.

John McLarty: In fact, that’s really interesting because some of the foreign missionary boards that were sending money to the Cherokee missionaries begin to have this argument that, well, there’s as much there’s this as big a percentage of the Cherokee are now Christians as in the white population. So why are they why do they need missionary funds?

Kimberly Faith: Right.

John McLarty: They should be supporting themselves.

Kimberly Faith: Right.

John McLarty: Because, you know, maybe five or 10% of them are act you know, are active Christians going to church. Right. And so there was actually these letters.

Kimberly Faith: Interesting.

John McLarty: So the missionaries, one being Evan Jones, would say, no, we still, you know, they’re they’re, you know, just sustenance, you know, living, and we need funding. But so that argument was being made that so so many of them were, you know, Christians.

Kimberly Faith: So what was the what was the tip of the spear that started this whole process?

John McLarty: Great question. So, you know, Washington and Jefferson kinda had after you know, no. Just to be brutally honest, the the Northeast Indians, you know, and I don’t know much about them. Mhmm. But they had been kind of locked out

Kimberly Faith: Right.

John McLarty: In the you know, with the colonies and the Indian wars and all this stuff. Right. But these are the South the southeast Indians. So the Cherokee, the Chickasaw, the, you know, Seminole, they’ve been kind of more isolated from the Northeast. So they were they’ve been left alone more.

North the mountains of North Carolina.

Kimberly Faith: Right. And and and I I understand. To to be clear, this podcast is about the Trail of Tears, which is primarily about the Cherokee and some other contemporaneous tribes.

John McLarty: About- All the five civilized

Kimberly Faith: The Osage or any of the other tribes that there are different stories about.

John McLarty: Yeah. Yeah. So like up in the Northeast, you had, you know, the Mohawks and the

Kimberly Faith: Comanches and

John McLarty: Well, that was in the plains.

Kimberly Faith: In the plains? Okay. Yeah. Thanks for

John McLarty: But so the North the Northeastern thing. Right. You know? I don’t I don’t let’s see. It’s the last of the Mohicans.

Kimberly Faith: Right. Right.

John McLarty: You know, the up in Maine and you know? So there there were some of them left.

Kimberly Faith: Mhmm.

John McLarty: But down in North Carolina, there was, like, large numbers of Cherokee and Seminole. Mhmm. So this is yeah. The Trail of Tears is about those tribes. So they’ve been assimilating and trading with the whites.

So what was the tip of the spear? It was this election of Andrew Jackson, eighteen twenty eight. And in 1828, they discovered gold in Northern Georgia. Which is where the

Kimberly Faith: Cherokees lived?

John McLarty: That’s where they were. Northern Georgia, kind of Eastern North Carolina.

Kimberly Faith: Was this a small pocket of gold?

John McLarty: Actually, Western North Carolina, Eastern Tennessee. This was a gold rush. A lot of people don’t know that there was a lot of gold. It was the first gold rush. They actually had a mint in in a town in Georgia, a US mint.

There was so much gold. So yeah. So Western North Carolina, Eastern Tennessee, Northern Georgia, and then Northern Alabama is kind of their their homelands. So they discovered gold. And I really like to make this clear that the removal of these Indian tribes, it was not about it was not about extermination.

Mhmm. Because I you and I, we’ve been to holocaust museums.

Kimberly Faith: Right.

John McLarty: They were not lining them up and digging ditch trenches and just en masse executed. Yeah.

Kimberly Faith: Yeah.

John McLarty: They were but they did want them gone. They wanted the gold. They wanted the land. The land in Northern Georgia is prime plantation land. So the for the most part, the Europeans wanted them gone.

And I say for the most part, it was it wasn’t all all the whites. Mhmm. And as this as we flash forward a little bit, this this was very controversial to move the remove the Indians because a lot of whites were like well, one of the reasons is the the protests. And we’ll let’s just dig into that a little bit. Because then and so in 1828, the state of Georgia so the state of Georgia and we just we have to be blunt.

They they were the they were really some of the

Kimberly Faith: bad actors. Mhmm.

John McLarty: They they wanted the gold. They wanted the plantation land, and they started passing anti Indian acts. And one of them was you cannot you can’t process gold unless you’re white. Wow. You can’t have you can’t do commerce unless you have a white partner.

So you can’t be a witness in a trial unless you’re white. Man. So they’re just trying to make it Impossible. Impossible Right. For the Indians to live there.

They wanted them to kinda, quote, voluntarily remove. So then in 1830, May ’20 eighth of ’18 ’30, the federal government passed the federal Indian removal act. So this is kind of the tip of the spear.

Kimberly Faith: And how did did that pass unanimously, or how how how close of a vote was that?

John McLarty: I’m not sure that you know, Jackson campaigned on that. Uh-huh. What what kinda showed the pushback on that was when the treaty of Niuoshoda was was signed in 1835. Mhmm. And that was that was for removal.

That was specifically for, you know, forced removal. And that went that had to be ratified by the senate, and it was only ratified by one vote.

Kimberly Faith: The the president’s vote? Or the vice president’s vote?

John McLarty: That would it could have been the vice the vice president And

Kimberly Faith: and the the the treaty of neo neo no. Neoshoto.

John McLarty: Neoshoto.

Kimberly Faith: Was was not from what I understand from our earlier conversations before we started this podcast, it was not something that was ratified by the majority of the tribes. Is that right?

John McLarty: Yeah. So let’s just get our time framework back up. Let’s back up a little bit to 1832. So so because it all it fits in it it fits in. So the state of Georgia passed these anti Indian acts.

Mhmm. And then one of their requirements was you had to have a permit from the state of Georgia to do business.

Kimberly Faith: Any kind of business.

John McLarty: Any kind of business or commerce or activity. So there was a missionary there, Samuel Worcester, that had been invited by the Cherokee Nation and had the permission from the federal government. And he, know, bless his heart, he said, hey. I’m here, you know, kinda by the blessings of God

Kimberly Faith: Right.

John McLarty: And the blessings of the federal government and invitation of the Cherokee Nation. I don’t need permission from the state of Georgia, so I’m not gonna fill out your form. So do you know what the state of Georgia did?

Kimberly Faith: Sued him.

John McLarty: Threw him in jail. Oh. They threw him in jail and sentenced him to four years of hard labor.

Kimberly Faith: Oh my gosh.

John McLarty: So this became an international or national cause. Like, you know, the Northeast press and, you know, Ralph Waldo Emerson got involved. And, like, this was outrageous Wow. That the state of Georgia has imprisoned a missionary Right. That was among the Cherokee.

So this became like a cause, editorials and protests. And so they actually took this to the Supreme Court, Samuel Worcester versus the state of Georgia

Kimberly Faith: to let him The United States Supreme Court.

John McLarty: The United States Supreme Court. And Jess Jesse Bushyhead went and presented, and friends of the court, the New England, you might say, intellectuals Mhmm. Know, were were were arguing against the state of Georgia. And the supreme court actually ruled in favor of Worcester and told the state of Georgia, you need to let him go. Federal law permits him to be there, and you don’t have the rights of the state to kick him out.

Kimberly Faith: And so what happened?

John McLarty: So it was a constitutional crisis. Yeah. So Andrew Jackson, remember, was president, and he had campaigned on the anti Indian, you know, the Indian removal Mhmm. So he refused to enforce the law. Oh, wow.

So the supreme court justice was George Marshall. And there’s this famous quote that Jackson said, Marshall made that ruling. Let Marshall go and force it.

Kimberly Faith: Oh my goodness.

John McLarty: So in other words, he says, I’m not sending federal troops down to tussle with the Georgia state militia Wow. And order them to let Samuel Worcester out.

Kimberly Faith: That is a constitutional crisis.

John McLarty: It is. Yeah. That’s crazy. Refused to obey this you know, follow the supreme court.

Kimberly Faith: So what happened?

John McLarty: So the state of Georgia wouldn’t let him out. So this was this was kinda led to the treaty of New Shota because the Cherokee were like, oh my goodness. We followed all the white man’s rules.

Kimberly Faith: We went

John McLarty: through the courts. We had friends of the court. We won. We won our our case.

Kimberly Faith: Mhmm.

John McLarty: And the state of Georgia is not cooperating, and Andrew Jackson won’t enforce the law. So it’s a big letdown, obviously. They’re like, what? Maybe we should. And that’s at that point, some of them just went ahead and voluntarily removed to the Indian territory.

They put a place. They had an offer that will give you kind of an acre of land in Indian territory if you’ll move for an acre of land in your home country.

Kimberly Faith: So it wasn’t it wasn’t like they were they they had a a trade straight across. It that include the personal property as well?

John McLarty: Well, that’s really interesting because there there was this semblance of kind of, you know, The US was like, we’re gonna be fair about this. So, yeah, they did this valuation of, you know, how much property did you have? Did you have improvements? And the reason we know a lot about this is because they wrote all this down, kinda like a census.

Kimberly Faith: The federal government did.

John McLarty: Yes. And what they owned is the valuations. And then so, of course, there was corruption and the bureaucracy. So there was lawsuits. Once the Cherokee were all removed, there was lawsuits for decades that, hey.

You never paid us for our iron pot. And I had this, this, and the other. We know a lot about that.

Kimberly Faith: Where were these records found?

John McLarty: They were found in the different states, like the courthouses. Interesting. Oklahoma courthouses and Tennessee courthouses and just wherever the lawsuits were filed. Interesting. This information is still being discovered.

So so after versus Georgia so what did Worcester do? He he recanted. He said, you know what? I’m and he had a wife and kids.

Kimberly Faith: Oh my.

John McLarty: He was like, I’m not I don’t wanna spend four years in the Georgia prison camp.

Kimberly Faith: Right.

John McLarty: Because, you know, if you can imagine the conditions were awful. So he said, okay. I’ll and he’s a hero. Because he could have gone back to, you know, Philadelphia or Boston or whatever. He moved to the Indian territory with some Cherokee and started his mission station in Oklahoma.

Kimberly Faith: So he didn’t give

John McLarty: up. He didn’t give up.

Kimberly Faith: He just got out of Georgia.

John McLarty: He just he got out of Georgia. He, in a sense, saw the writing on the wall. Right. He said, they’re they’re going to remove us. Yeah.

We might as well just go on and get get our lands, our crops in, and our churches started. Mhmm. So he he left, and then but most of the nation didn’t. They stayed there, and they kept arguing. They helped actually that when Jackson left, that they would outwait Jackson.

Then the next was president was Van Buren.

Kimberly Faith: Mhmm. You

John McLarty: know, maybe Van Buren will have a change of heart. Well, Van Buren didn’t. He says, nope. We still have to go. So they sent some delegates down to the the US government sent some delegates down to the Cherokee and found a minority of some some leaders of the Cherokee nation, but not the chiefs, not the principal chief.

And they got a group of I don’t know. Was three main men, but I don’t know. May you know, a few hundred Cherokee agreed to this treaty of Neoshoada, and it was assigned 12/29/1835, signed by a minority. And then that’s the treaty that had to go to the Senate, and it was just ratified by one vote.

Kimberly Faith: So the chiefs of the tribes weren’t even involved in the In

John McLarty: fact, the petition was submitted while this was ratification was going on, the debate.

Kimberly Faith: Mhmm.

John McLarty: Actually, there’s a number here. 15656 Cherokee signed a a petition denouncing this treaty

Kimberly Faith: Interesting.

John McLarty: And had it delivered to congress. And they said, this is not the reflection of our people. We did not agree to this treaty. This was these few.

Kimberly Faith: And this was a treaty that provided had a timeframe to leave. They would get this one for one trade with land.

John McLarty: And they had two years to voluntarily remove. So that was in May twenty third of eighteen thirty six. So after two years, only 2,000 had removed voluntarily. Wow. And so by the spring of eighteen thirty eight, general Winfield Scott was ordered to forcefully remove the Cherokee people.

So that’s when you have the actual roundup, the Trail Of Tears. And, you know, some it’s correctly said that where did the Trail Of Tears start? It started on the the front porch of every Cherokee homestead. Oh, yeah. That’s interesting.

Came to just round them up. Wow. They said, you know, you get gather your belongings, and they took them to these camps, these internment camps Mhmm. And started the process of removal. Wow.

So on 05/24/1838, Winfield Scott ordered the federal troops, and this is a key point, the Georgia state militia to begin the roundup.

Kimberly Faith: So Jackson ordered the Georgia state militia to participate in this?

John McLarty: This would have been actually, so Jackson would have been out of office by now. So this would have been Martin Van Buren.

Kimberly Faith: Okay. Yeah. That’s so interesting that they got the Georgia State Militia involved when kind of there was that original hostility there.

John McLarty: Yeah. And that’s where I kind of add in, you know, what the untold stories. Mhmm. Because I think this is important. Number one of the untold stories is the level of Christianity in the Cherokee nation in the eighteen thirties was very significant.

Not the majority Mhmm. But very significant. And then these pictures of the Trail Of Tears, the Indians being herded along like cattle and bayonets, and that was there’s that’s true. But that was mainly the Georgia state militia.

Kimberly Faith: Interesting.

John McLarty: Because they were literally moving into those Cherokee homesteads. They wanted them out, and they were moving into the the properties.

Kimberly Faith: And how do you know this?

John McLarty: A lot of the federal troops wrote diaries and letters about how awful this was. See, they were just and they’re on assignment

Kimberly Faith: Right.

John McLarty: In the the rough country of North Carolina.

Kimberly Faith: It wasn’t personal for them.

John McLarty: Yeah. They were just there, and some of them, we have these eyewitness accounts. And they said, this is one of the most awful things we’ve been asked to do, the federal troops. And we have George Winfield Scott. He ordered.

He said, this needs to be done in the most orderly kind of, you know- Kind. Kind way possible.

Kimberly Faith: Yeah.

John McLarty: You know, it’s kind of US military. They weren’t just hooping and hollering. Now there I’m sure there were some US army bad actors.

Kimberly Faith: Some outliers.

John McLarty: There’s always some outliers.

Kimberly Faith: Yeah. Yeah.

John McLarty: But it was for the federal troops because this professor did a whole study of a lot of reports of the US army. And then the eyewitness accounts were just saying the Georgia state militia were just they were coming in saying, you have an hour to get out of here. We’re rounding you up and were very vicious about it.

Kimberly Faith: And then they were just moving into the native Americans’ homes, the Cherokee’s homes and the the militia or the people they brought with them? Or

John McLarty: Sometimes well, the Georgia state militia were clearing the homes, and sometimes them personally or their friends were moving into those cabins.

Kimberly Faith: Wow.

John McLarty: Here’s an eyewitness account. This is from is from Evan Jones. So he was a Baptist missionary. He’s a colleague of Jesse Bushy Head. Mhmm.

So here’s just one of his quotes.

Kimberly Faith: Now was he wait. Was he was he involved or going along with them in this was he a leader?

John McLarty: Oh, this is so fascinating. So Evan Jones was a Welsh a a Baptist missionary, originated from Welsh, but he moved to Philadelphia. He’d been living among the Cherokee since like 1820s, maybe 1827.

Kimberly Faith: Oh, okay.

John McLarty: And he was

Kimberly Faith: In the East Coast, on the East

John McLarty: In North Carolina.

Kimberly Faith: In North Carolina.

John McLarty: Okay. Around Cherokee, North Carolina.

Kimberly Faith: All

John McLarty: right. So he was living among the Cherokee, and we’ll just have to get into this this whole, you know, bringing up Evan Jones. His operation was not to bring the Cherokee in and teach them English and just have them, you know, learn the gospel that way. He was he was the opposite of that. A lot of some of

Kimberly Faith: the What way?

John McLarty: Some of the missionary stations were like that. Uh-huh. But he was, we need to learn Cherokee. We need to put the Bible into Cherokee. We need to put songs, our hymns into Cherokee.

Kimberly Faith: The translation.

John McLarty: Yes. So he was like, and then get Cherokee Christians to go out among the Cherokee.

Kimberly Faith: It kinda reminds me of second Timothy two, where Paul says, and these things that you have heard from me among many witnesses, commit these to faithful men who will be able to teach them to others also.

John McLarty: Yes. Because Evan Jones, his congregation was mainly Cherokee.

Kimberly Faith: Interesting.

John McLarty: And then they would go out and reach other Cherokee.

Kimberly Faith: So he was disciplining?

John McLarty: Jesse Bushyhead was a ordained Baptist preacher.

Kimberly Faith: That’s so interesting.

John McLarty: And then other Cherokee were becoming saved, born again, and becoming preachers. And they had this neat title. I don’t see this in the Bible, but it was just this title they came up with. I don’t know if was just the Cherokee or just the Baptists at the time, but some of the young men would reach the status or the designation of being an exhorter.

Kimberly Faith: Interesting.

John McLarty: And that means that it was real serious to them and they wanted to go out to the mission stations because it was very rural. They were scattered all over the place. They weren’t just in a big city. And they would go out and teach and exhort and encourage their congregations.

Kimberly Faith: So it was their disciple. Their discipleship program was kind of geared around their culture and the way their culture was set up. And that was Evan Jones, his MO was His model. They go in and change them to be more European. He was like, okay, we’re gonna use your culture to reach your people.

John McLarty: Right, to reach your people with culture and your language and written material, the Bible in your language. So Evan Jones really, I mean, he loved the Cherokee people.

Kimberly Faith: So how did he get to be an observer of some of this removal process?

John McLarty: So he was there when the roundup happened. And in fact, those 14,000 some odd signatures, in one of the books about Evan Jones, he and Jesse Bushyhead and others, they gathered those signatures because they had their circuit riding routes of preaching stations. Jesse Bushy, Evan Jones team of Baptist Cherokee gathered a lot of those signatures.

Kimberly Faith: That’s so interesting.

John McLarty: Because they had the routes. Then Jesse Bushy had the skills to then take this and present it to Congress.

Kimberly Faith: Right. He was a lawyer.

John McLarty: He was a lawyer.

Kimberly Faith: Yeah. It’s so interesting that I love that you’re calling this the untold stories of the Trail Of Tears because I don’t think most people think about Native Americans two hundred years ago being educated, skilled, orators, publishers of newspapers. Right. My understanding is that when they moved to Oklahoma, one of the oldest publication in the state of Oklahoma was actually a Christian Baptist publication from the Cherokees.

John McLarty: Right.

Kimberly Faith: That’s amazing.

John McLarty: In fact, one of the oldest continuously operating church in Oklahoma was the church started after the Trail of Tears by Jesse Bushyhead and Evan Jones. It’s in Westville. It’s the Baptist mission.

Kimberly Faith: Wow.

John McLarty: It’s still there today. You can go to services in it. It was started

Kimberly Faith: We should go.

John McLarty: In 1838, ’18 ’30 ‘9, right after the we should. Yeah. After the chilling period.

Kimberly Faith: Not that far from Missouri and Arkansas.

John McLarty: So their love of education.

Kimberly Faith: It’s also interesting to me how that this missionary and this preacher, Jesse Bush, he had an Evan Jones, were because of their Christian principles, spearheaded an effort to bring justice and equity to the native Americans. And it was that culture that Jesus laid down of loving your neighbor as yourself. Evan Jones was from Wales. He didn’t have to be there fighting the Cherokees battle.

John McLarty: That’s so true.

Kimberly Faith: But he was there because he believed that the gospel was what was most important and he could glorify God through using his position as a white man to help people who really were kind of at the mercy of a very unjust, unconstitutional federal government and

John McLarty: state That’s so true. He really is an amazing man. He loved the Cherokee. And then something telling about Evan Jones, just like Samuel Worcester. But see, Samuel Worcester moved early, but Evan stayed.

Evan Jones stayed and fought the fight against removal.

Kimberly Faith: Right. And both were important.

John McLarty: Both were important, obviously. But he advocated for them to stay there. And then his wife died, children died. I mean, is North Carolina. This is the Smoky Mountains, the tough, rugged terrain.

Kimberly Faith: They died while they were there?

John McLarty: Yeah. Oh, At his mission station. And so when the Indians were finally removed, he could have gone back to Philadelphia. No, he traveled on the Trail Of Tears. Him and Jesse Bushyhead were detachment leaders.

Kimberly Faith: That’s why he’s got a

John McLarty: on the Trail Of Tears. Wow. And established and then he lived and died in Indian territory.

Kimberly Faith: Wow.

John McLarty: But back to this firsthand account, here’s Evan Jones when they were rounding up the Cherokee. He wrote to his mission board, The work of war in time of peace has commenced in the Georgia part of the Cherokee nation and was executed in an unfeeling and brutal manner. They were driven before the soldiers through mud and water with whooping and hollowing like droves of cattle. At Ross’s Landing, that’s Chattanooga, Tennessee, the place to which most of the Georgia Indians were brought, the scenes of distress defy all description. In many instances, they were dragged from their homes without chains of clothing and marched 120 or 30 miles to heat and dust and rain and mud, in many cases barefooted, lodged on the hard ground, destitute of shelter from dews and rains, they had of course become very dirty And on that account, they have been reproached as degraded wretches.

Kimberly Faith: Wow. That’s powerful.

John McLarty: So not only he’s describing what happened, but also he’s kind of defending them, saying that they’ve been regarded as degraded wretches because how they looked after this journey. But he’s saying

Kimberly Faith: It wasn’t their doing.

John McLarty: This is how they live. Yeah. Yeah. But this is how anybody would look after being dragged along for a hundred miles.

Kimberly Faith: It’s such a powerful reminder to me just to hear how the tip of the spear And again, every state, every nation’s got things that they’re ashamed of that their people before them have done. And you just think about the amount of greed and pride that it would take to treat another human that way. And of course, we know Jesus was treated that way.

John McLarty: Right.

Kimberly Faith: But it’s like, you get so darkened that you do the most inhumane things because you’ve been darkened by whatever, whatever work of the flesh, you know, or pride, greed, you know, just selfishness.

John McLarty: So that’s interesting because that’s an here’s the other side of that story. Here’s a federal here’s one of the federal troops, Lieutenant John Phelps. This is 06/22/1838 from Fort Butler, which is in North Carolina, but they’re on their way to Ross’s Landing Chattanooga. And he says, this is a report, upwards of a thousand Indians passed by today from Fort Hembury, Eighteen miles to the east, where they have been collected. Some had ponies, some had small quantities of luggage, but generally they were unencumbered, having left all behind.

When I saw them, men, women, and children moving along through the valley toward the West, I could not think but some fearful retribution would yet come upon us from this much impugned race. The scene seemed to me more like a distempered dream or something worthy of the dark ages.

Kimberly Faith: Wow.

John McLarty: So here’s this lieutenant, and he’s full of compassion. He’s like, this is awful how we’re treating these people. And there’s this story after story and recorded journal from the federal officers. They’re like, this is awful. This isn’t right.

Kimberly Faith: Well, something that I know you and I have had very just here and there conversations about, as you’ve learned about the Cherokee and the Trail Of Tears. And it seems like we were having a discussion about some one of these discussions we’ve had, and you said something about how these the Cherokee would have tent revivals along the way.

John McLarty: This is what amazed me. They would have actually, in one of the camps in North Carolina around, I think it’s Butler, North Carolina, they had it was kind of an early collection point before they’d been shipped onto Ross’s Landing. But they had revivals. They had camp meetings. They had baptisms.

Kimberly Faith: How do you know this?

John McLarty: And there’s these recordings from army officers that went down and observed, and they were like in shock. Like, the Cherokee are baptizing people down in the river. Wow. And they’re having tent revivals and singing. And some of these army officers are like, what are we doing?

Why are we removing these people? Here, they’re more Christian living out their faith than we are. They’re singing and rejoicing and having invitations down in the river being baptized. And here we are rounding them up, keeping them at gun

Kimberly Faith: I had never When you told me that, I was like, I have never heard these stories. And I was very curious. Of course, that’s one reason why I wanted to just podcast about where was this information coming from? And it turns out it’s very well documented. All of it’s very well And it’s not even in our history books.

Many of our history books don’t even have this in it.

John McLarty: So one of the detachments was led by Jesse Bushyhead, about 800.

Kimberly Faith: And again, to clarify, when you say detachments, you’re talking about groups

John McLarty: of Cherokees. Yeah. When they had had them in the camps and they broke them up, like we said earlier, into detachments around 800 to 900. Right. And they tried they weren’t all together.

They you know, they came about four or five different routes. Right. But we don’t have time to get into all that. That’s a whole another story. But it was different routes, different times.

Some came by river, some came over land. So Jesse Bushyhead was head of one detachment that came over land Illinois and Missouri, Waynesville. Jesse Bushyhead would have come right through Waynesville.

Kimberly Faith: Right by my office.

John McLarty: Down through Pea Ridge. But when they came through Nashville, his detachment were the Baptists. There were about five or 600 Baptists Wow. With Jesse Bushyhead. They were invited by the Nashville Baptists to come to a meeting.

Kimberly Faith: Really? Jesse

John McLarty: Bushyhead preached. So we have a report of this in the Nashville Baptist publication.

Kimberly Faith: Wow.

John McLarty: And they’re bragging on the Cherokee and how lovely they are and peaceful and sincere, and that Jesse Bushey had got up and preached a message about Jesus Christ and sat down in tears. Jesse Bushey had. Wow. So anybody says, no, they were just faking Christianity to get some education. Jesse Buschey had preached a message that brought him to tears and the Nashville Baptist to tears.

And they were like, these Cherokee are like our brethren. And this isn’t a publication of Nashville Baptist Herald or something like that. Wow. Nothing very documented.

Kimberly Faith: It’s something we can read today that was written back when it happened. Yeah. So what happened? What else? What are some of other untold stories?

Or what do you wanna tell us next? I should ask.

John McLarty: I think just kind of to sum up. So the idea of removal was to get them out of Ross’s Landing, which is Chattanooga, and all go by river. And so, again, it was it was terrible, but the idea was to get it done quickly.

Kimberly Faith: Mhmm.

John McLarty: And what happened is the Arkansas River was too dry that year, so they could only get to about Little Rock. And but it was horrible. I mean, there were steamboats, but the Cherokee were on flat barges being pulled by the steamboats. So, you know, it’s not

Kimberly Faith: a It like they were a luxury cabin.

John McLarty: Right. It wasn’t luxury. But the whole idea was to be quick and efficient. The Arkansas River had kind of dried up. They could not get to Oklahoma, to Fort Gibson, so they got stuck in those camps.

And the Cherokee chief, John Ross, petitioned Winfield Scott. He said, can we just remove ourselves?

Kimberly Faith: Mhmm.

John McLarty: He said, we don’t need an army escort. We we give up. We’re we know we’ve seen the writing on the wall. So they Winfield Scott ok’d that

Kimberly Faith: Mhmm.

John McLarty: And funded it, not enough, but funded it. So but they had to get wagons and supplies. And so they got stuck in those Georgia and Tennessee prison camps over the summer. Ugh. And it wasn’t my point is it wasn’t intentional

Kimberly Faith: Right.

John McLarty: To, like, round them up. In fact, there was arguments to let them go back home for the summer and then gather them back up in the fall. Mhmm. But that so that was ruled out. So but those that that some of the worst experiences were in those camps.

Think of if you’ve seen the Andersonville Mhmm. The civil war camps in Georgia. Mhmm. Just hot, dysentery, the water went bad.

Kimberly Faith: Right.

John McLarty: So that’s where a lot of the deaths were in those camps.

Kimberly Faith: I didn’t know that either. But that wasn’t necessarily It wasn’t planned. Anybody’s fault.

John McLarty: It was wasn’t planned. And then when they finally started, so in in late eighteen thirty eight in the fall, they got on the road, and they got hit by one of the worst winters ever.

Kimberly Faith: Wow.

John McLarty: It was so cold the Mississippi River froze up.

Kimberly Faith: Oh, I didn’t know that.

John McLarty: So some of the detachments got stuck on the East Side Of Mississippi River and had to wait for the ice blocks to melt. Mhmm. So it just became tragedy upon tragedy.

Kimberly Faith: Wow.

John McLarty: So the removal was terrible. But I guess one of the points is it wasn’t intended to be as terrible as it was by the Feds. It was a land grab. They wanted them gone. But it wasn’t like, let’s make this as miserable as possible. It turned out that way.

Kimberly Faith: Yeah. Mean, nobody nobody just to be clear, nobody is excusing what happened. It was wrong. It was just wrong on every level, but it I think if at least from my standpoint, the takeaway to this is the, you know, anytime we have affliction it is an opportunity to be greater than you would have been without And the Cherokee mantra that you’ve mentioned, we’re not victims.

John McLarty: Right. We’re survivors.

Kimberly Faith: We’re survivors.

John McLarty: We’re overcomers. Yeah. More than just survivors.

Kimberly Faith: Yeah. Even better is to me this story, like all of our stories that of whether it’s something bad somebody else has done to us or something stupid we’ve done for ourselves is an opportunity, which they are using and they have been using to write a greater story and all for God’s glory. And because think about I don’t know. I, the more I learn about people like Jesse Bush, he had, you know, how he was a lawyer, he was a preacher and he had such a short life, but he did so much, in that short life. And he is even being talked about two hundred years after his death. 

John McLarty: And then here’s a triumphant end as they came here and they reestablished their schools, reestablished their churches, reestablished their government. And their story is we want this terrible tragedy told, but they want it told honestly. They’re the ones that are uncovering that the federal troops weren’t as bad as the Georgia state militia, that it was not the intent to make it as miserable as possible. But there are like, there’s plenty of bad stories. Like there was funding, but the whites along the way would cheat the Cherokee.

Gauge them. They’d gouge them. They’d charge more for ferry crossings, jack up the price of food. So terrible treatment. But the Cherokee made it to Indian territory, reestablished their culture.

And I’ll just have Jesse Bushyhead died in 1844.

Kimberly Faith: Oh, he died young.

John McLarty: But his gravestones over in this mission church in Westville, Oklahoma. Here’s a picture of Hannah over there at the Baptist Mission in our little PowerPoint. But here’s from his gravestone. And we would all wish to have this said about us. So it says, sacred to the memory of the reverend Jesse Bushyhead, born in the old Cherokee nation in East Tennessee, September 18 0 4, died in the present Cherokee nation, 07/17/1844, and then this quote, well done, good and faithful servant.

Thou has been faithful over a few things. I will make thee ruler over many things. Matthew twenty five twenty three.

Kimberly Faith: That’s a great epithet.

John McLarty: So he was an honored man.

Kimberly Faith: Yeah. Yeah. That’s and, you know, I I love that. There’s so many things I love about this story, but just think about Evan Jones, born in Wales, right? He could have just lived on Wales his whole life, but the Lord called him to follow the great commission, to go into the uttermost parts of the earth preach the gospel and make disciples.

I mean, when Jesus talks about, Go ye therefore, the first thing he says is make disciples. Well, that’s to me that we’ve got, of course, Brother Robert Creech, who is a missionary, been a missionary down to Panama. He follows his model. You go into a country and you don’t put the white ways and the white men in charge, using that term loosely, but you train the people who were born there to become disciplers.

John McLarty: And that’s right. That’s the biblical method of discipleship and missions and churches. And that’s what Devin Jones was doing.

Kimberly Faith: And as a result, have in Oklahoma now, have isn’t that where the most settlement is or is it

John McLarty: They’re mostly in Oklahoma. Yeah. And I would venture to say, I’d like to study this, but I would venture to say that the largest denomination in Oklahoma would be Baptist.

Kimberly Faith: Of the Cherokee.

John McLarty: Of the Cherokee.

Kimberly Faith: Well, my point being that because the discipleship was done more from grassroots within the culture and teaching the teaching the people of the culture how to study the God’s word and carry out the gospel and carry out the great commission, then they were of course able to reach a much broader spectrum of people because they were in, you know, the people that they, their neighbors, their friends who knew that they respected the Cherokee culture would then be able to relate, which I think is what Jesus was trying to I mean, I think he’s trying to tell us that, that we need to, and I’m just speaking to culture, we need to be the kind of people who meet people where they are and teach them based on where they are and what they know or don’t know, and then train them to get their discipleship. I don’t use the word program, but to learn how to be disciplers based on where they are, not train them to be something else.

John McLarty: Yeah. And think of the Cherokee boldness. Go back to Pea Ridge National Military Park, where you had a federal park and you’ve been introduced by the superintendent. And then to start the whole ceremony with a Christian prayer.

Kimberly Faith: Right, that’s crazy.

John McLarty: I was just like, the superintendent couldn’t do that, but he couldn’t tell the Cherokee not to.

Kimberly Faith: Well, they’re sovereign nation, right?

John McLarty: Exactly. He’s not going to say, Wait, you can’t mention Jesus in a federal park. Think about- I thought, These people have it together.

Kimberly Faith: Well, and you think about how God used this terrible process to give them this sovereignty status, to have the ability to go in and basically unapologetically say, This is who we are and this is what we stand for and we’re going to do God’s way.

John McLarty: And I’ll say this, I go to conferences and some of them are in Tahlequah. I don’t think I’ve been to a conference or an event that’s hosted by the Cherokee and yet it’s a meal that they have a prayer

Kimberly Faith: begin Interesting. So the Christian culture, biblical culture has permeated their culture to the extent that it And it’s like we teach in the Bible concepts. We talk about where does your truth come from? Because ultimately the the source of truth is going to drive the cultural, norm, right? I mean, if the basic, if the Bible is the source of truth, if the golden rule is the source of truth, that the culture most relies upon, that’s what’s going to be reflected in government and and public meetings, in the public square, in the education system.

And the Cherokee, I mean, this because of this tragedy, because they were I’m I’m assuming their sovereignty was something that, and I don’t know. Maybe you can answer this. They be was it what what point did the US government recognize the Cherokee as being or other nations as being sovereign nations that would be not be able to be dictated by the states?

John McLarty: That is really fascinating because it’s still going on. But of all things, they were I mean, the terrible story goes on. They got here. They were establishing their nation. They had a large amount of sovereignty.

In fact, just one fight, I don’t know if this is true, but it’s been said that in the 1840s and 1850s, I guess up to the civil war, that there was more law and order in the Cherokee nation than in Western Arkansas. Because they had law and They brought their culture with them and we were just the wild West, shoot them up, Fort Smith, gunfights. So they established their culture. Then after the civil war, they really got a bad deal because an original faction of the Cherokee joined the Confederates, but then most of them switched joined the union.

Kimberly Faith: Why would they do that?

John McLarty: The Confederates Yeah. Joined the Confederates. Yeah. Some of the slave owner and it was the I’m gonna say the mixed bloods

Kimberly Faith: Mhmm.

John McLarty: Were slave owners and from Northern Georgia and they had slaves, so they were pro slavery. Wow. Wanted to and it’s really funny because these Baptists, Evan Jones, they had decreed in North Carolina that slavery was a

Kimberly Faith: sin. Interesting.

John McLarty: The Baptists. And when Evan Jones got over here, he was actually accused by the Fort Smith newspapers of being an abolitionist. Gosh. And he wasn’t. He was just like, they thought it was a They advocating freeing the slaves, but they thought it was a sin, the only slave is the Baptist.

And that’s before the civil war, that’s what created the Northern and the Southern Baptists. Anyway, after the civil war, the union, the feds took the position that the Cherokee had sided with the Confederates. So they got the full brunt force of reconstruction.

Kimberly Faith: Oh, wow.

John McLarty: We’re taking over everything, and you have no status whatsoever. So the tribes in general, then the Plains, the Indian wars, which were now if you talk about closer to genocide

Kimberly Faith: Right.

John McLarty: That was the plains wars after the civil war. Right. Eighteen seventies, ’18 eighties.

Kimberly Faith: I read about those.

John McLarty: Was it that was extermination. Yeah. Yeah. The intent of extermination, much more than the Cherokee and the Seminole. But it was surprisingly enough, the sovereignty question, it was president Nixon that passed some kind of order in the nineteen seventies that gave allowed the Indian nations to reestablish a form of government to have councils and a chief and some a greater degree of self autonomy.

And now if you’ve been following it, that’s growing.

Kimberly Faith: Yes. Yes. And interestingly enough,

John McLarty: all these where the Indians are taking claiming more sovereignty

Kimberly Faith: Mhmm.

John McLarty: Their cases go back to Worcester versus Georgia.

Kimberly Faith: Interesting.

John McLarty: Because they’re telling the states that we have federal treaties. Yeah. We have federal agreements and that those Trump overruled states laws. Yeah. I got Positions.

Kimberly Faith: I had a it’s fascinating.

John McLarty: It’s ongoing today.

Kimberly Faith: I had a case in the it was a person who was injured on a on a in a casino in Oklahoma, And, it’s controlled by the Kwapaw Nation. Yeah. And, so I had to become a member of the bar, the Kwapaw Bars. That’s fascinating. Get admitted to their bar in order to file my lawsuit. And, yeah, I just I thought it was great because And I didn’t know this history about, you know, about how back two hundred years before they’d had their own very organized government with kind of three branches of government, really.

John McLarty: Yeah. The Cherokee did.

Kimberly Faith: Sounds very interesting. But I don’t know if there’s anything else you wanna tell us about this, but the big takeaway I’m getting from this whole podcast, which thank you very much for sharing all your research and knowledge in this, is that the power of the gospel is, is really, permeated this culture and made their story. Their story is still alive today, even though it was a, it was a horrible thing what happened to them. But because of the, you know, that you have this whole side of, or whole facet of people like Evan Jones and Jesse Busyhead, who put their skills to work for the people in the context of the gospel really. Because if you read, you know, I mean, from what I’ve read about Jesse Bush, lived for Jesus.

John McLarty: Yeah. And the fruits of those laborers are still ongoing today,

Kimberly Faith: what they did

John McLarty: in the Cherokee nation.

Kimberly Faith: It’s almost like God gave them limitless ability to be remembered in eternity because they live with their primary purpose being to glorify God and to bring the gospel to a people. And instead of just fighting a war for a nation to survive, it was a deeper eternal purpose, which is really incredible.

John McLarty: Yeah. And you go back to on Jesse Bush, he had your gravestone. Well done, good and faithful servant. Thou has been faithful over a few things. I will make thee ruler over many things. And this was in 1844, and here we are in 2025 reading and studying and contemplating Jesse Bushyhead, he was a servant of Jesus Christ.

Kimberly Faith: Yeah. And he

John McLarty: And he discipled.

Kimberly Faith: And he inspired I mean, he’s inspiring me today in 2025. And I just So I appreciate you sharing these untold stories from the Trail of Tears. Love it. Thanks, dad.

John McLarty: You’re welcome. This has been great.

Kimberly Faith: Yeah. And you all listening, just have a great week. And it just makes us understand that even an ordinary person can live an extraordinary life when their life is lived for the glory of God. So glory be to God.

John McLarty: Right. Amen. 

Jacob Paul: You’ve been listening to the truth and love podcast with your hosts, Kimberly Faith and John Mack. To discover more answers to the big questions in life, visit us at GoFaithStrong.com. He rescued me.