Grant Foreman (1869–1953)

This elemental work, first published in 1932, had been for years the authoritative account of the Trail of Tears. But 1932 was a high-point of Progressivism in American history; right on the eve of the New Deal. From the days of Andrew Jackson, the Progressive movement in the United States, when accompanied by control of the White House and Congress by the Democratic Party, has tended to have ethnic cleansing components like the Trail of Tears, slavery, and Japanese internment.

In 1932, the country was not in the mood to look at the Trail of Tears with clear eyes focused on the hard and brutal realities of it. "Happy Days" were about to be here again, and so the textbook of the Trail of Tears could be factually correct, as this one is, yet lacking the passion and honesty of later works like "Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee" and Gloria Jahoda's superb "Trail of Tears".

The language of this work, too, is a little hard to follow from today's attention-deficit perspective. The footnotes are too long, and there are too many important but uninteresting details like numbers of people moved, quality and quanitities of supplies, etc. There are constant lists of such aspects of the story, repeated throughout the text.

I am a family genealogist searching for answers to the question: "Who is my great-great Grandmother Mattie Clemons?" Can she be found? Was she a Native American, as we have been told? Was she Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, or Creek? And so, for this purpose, I found the book illuminating. I may have made marginal gains in my search for my ancestor. But the few morsels that provided understanding of the Trail of Tears policy itself, made it valuable to me.

But, it was valuable only in the sense that Alex Haley had to sit through hours of story-telling, before finding Kunta Kinte. You have to have a purpose in reading this, and you have to know what you want out of it, before commencing.

Not a good casual read. But for people that hunger for more information on the Trail of Tears, I do recommend it.… (más)