Places: Fort Mitchell, Russell County, Alabama

Five Southeastern Tribes experienced the deportation of the Trail of Tears during the period of Indian Removal during the 1830's.  Among them were the Muscogee/Creek, who had once held vast hunting ranges in Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi.  In 1836, faced with giving up their last portions of their ancient homelands many Creeks had enough and rose in revolt, echoing the Red Stick uprisings of the earlier Creek War in 1813-14.  Like that earlier conflict, this unrest was quickly put down and the government decided that the Creeks were moving to Oklahoma, like it or not.

As resistance by their distant cousins the Seminoles flared in Florida, the government instituted forcible removals of Creek families, going from home to home and ordering them out with whatever possessions they could snatch up at the last minute.  Where to put these people until they could begin the trek to Oklahoma?  Fort Mitchell in Russell County, Alabama had been built in 1813 as a response to the Creek War.  Beginning in 1817, the fort was also a trading post where the Creek could trade deer and other hides for supplies.  However, the fort soon became a haven for off-the-record smuggling and sales of black slaves.  Unscrupulous traders also sold whiskey to the soldiers and the Creek, though such was strictly forbidden to the latter.  The fort was a wooden palisade, with blockhouses on each corner and barracks, a hospital and storage rooms.

The palisade also made a convenient stockade into which hundreds of men, women and children were crowded to make camp as best they could until the trek to Indian Territory, now Oklahoma, could begin.  Overcrowding, exposure, poor sanitation and insufficient rations led to disease and eventually death.  The tears of bereaved and dispossessed people began at Fort Mitchell even before they started their journey west.  The original wooden fort has long since disappeared and been replaced with a reconstruction.  It's on the National Register of Historic Places and is a National Historic Landmark.  An informational plaque mentions the internment of the Creek here on their Trail of Tears.