Removal and the Stories We Tell: Trail of Tears State Park, Cape Girardeau County, Missouri

Travel to Cape Girardeau County and Trail of Tears State Park, a site overlooking the Mississippi River that marks one of the most painful chapters in American history — the Trail of Tears, which saw some 60,000 Native Americans forced from their homelands in the Eastern United States and sent to lands promised to them in Oklahoma. This included some 13,000 members of the Cherokee Nation, who traveled the northern route of the Trail, traversing Missouri in the coldest of winter of 1838-1839.We talk to English Professor Chris Otto about the story of a woman whose death on the trail took on mythological proportions as she became known as “Princess Otahki,” and was venerated by the park and the neaby town of Cape Girardeau. And we speak with Will Chavez, of the Cherokee Nation and its annual “Remember the Removal Bike Ride,” to learn more about the trail, the story behind the Otahki myth, and how the Nation commemorates removal today.