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How to Walk on the Trail of Tears
There is a place in Prairie Grove, Arkansas, at the quiet corner of Black Nursery Road and East Heritage Parkway, where the ground remembers. Stand there long enough and you begin to feel the weight of it — not the weight of a battlefield monument or a presidential memorial, but something older and more enduring. This was a road where thousands of people were forced to walk because the United States government, under President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1830, had decided their homelands belonged to someone else.
The Trail of Tears National Historic Trail spans more than 5,000 miles across nine states, but you cannot walk it end to end. Much of the route passes through private land, along modern roads, or across waterways, leaving only scattered segments accessible to visitors on foot. What remains open, though, rewards the effort — and northwest Arkansas has some of the most evocative stretches anywhere along the trail.
It’s worth knowing what you’re standing on here. Prairie Grove sits on the Cherokee Benge Route, one of several overland paths traveled by the tribe in the brutal winter of 1838–1839. But Arkansas was not only Cherokee territory during the removal years. All five of the forcibly displaced nations,the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole, traveled through this state on their way to Indian Territory. The routes overlapped, diverged, and converged again across the Arkansas landscape. When you stand at any point along this trail, you are standing on ground that absorbed the suffering of all of them.
The Benge Route passed through Fayetteville and Washington counties before traversing Prairie Grove on its way toward Evansville and the Oklahoma border. Thirteen Cherokee detachments passed through this region. Some arrived near Prairie Grove on Christmas Day, 1838, with snow on the ground. The trail entrance you can walk today follows the same corridor.
The history you know (and some you don’t)
The story most Americans learn goes something like this: five sovereign nations were forcibly expelled from their ancestral homelands in the American Southeast and marched westward to Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma. Thousands died from exposure, disease, and starvation along the way. In the Cherokee language, the journey is called Nunna daul Tsuny, “the trail where they cried.”
What the standard telling leaves out is equally important, and considerably harder to sit with.
The more prosperous members of all five nations had, in the decades before removal, adopted many of the economic practices of the white planter class surrounding them, including the enslavement of Black people. When the forced marches began, those enslaved people were marched west too, not as survivors of a tragedy, but as property dragged along by it. Thousands of enslaved Black people, owned by members of all five tribes, were forced to make the journey. They cooked, nursed the sick, and labored throughout. They had no say in any of it.
The story resists easy moral framing. Leaders across the five nations fought their removal with extraordinary legal and political skill, and many of those same leaders enslaved people. This chapter of American history sits at the painful intersection of two of the nation’s deepest injustices, entangled and unresolved. The tears on this trail were not shed by one people. They belonged to everyone forced to walk it.
How you can walk it
The Prairie Grove entrance off Black Nursery and East Heritage Parkway offers a quiet, accessible entry point into this history, one that most visitors to northwest Arkansas never find. The surrounding landscape looks deceptively ordinary: Ozark woods, a gravel path, the sounds of a region that has moved on. But the Heritage Trail Partners of Northwest Arkansas have done careful work marking and interpreting these routes, and informational signage helps orient visitors to what they’re standing on. Markers call out the path the Cherokee took through these dense woods, the same section passed by the groups that stayed in Cane Hill and those traveling north from Dardanelle. From Prairie Grove, you can follow the Benge Route west toward Evansville and the Oklahoma state line.
Other access points worth seeking out across the trail’s nine-state span include Mantle Rock in Kentucky, a sandstone shelter bluff where Cherokee were forced to wait, sometimes for days in brutal cold, before being allowed to cross the Ohio River. The hike there is short and level, about 0.4 miles from the parking area, with signage explaining the site’s role in the removal. Fort Smith National Historic Site in western Arkansas marks the point where the Arkansas and Poteau rivers converge, the final crossing into Indian Territory.
Where to learn more
The Museum of the Cherokee Indian in Cherokee, North Carolina tells this story from the perspective of those who survived and those who hid in the Smoky Mountains to avoid removal. It is essential.
The Cherokee Heritage Center in Park Hill, Oklahoma sits near Tahlequah, the endpoint of the trail and the current capital of the Cherokee Nation. It holds archives, oral histories, and a reconstructed 17th-century village that puts the removal into the longer sweep of Cherokee civilization.
The National Park Service maintains the trail’s official site at nps.gov/trte, with maps, driving routes, and accessible segment information.
The Arkansas Heritage Trails system at arkansasheritagetrails.com offers a detailed guide to the state’s routes specifically.
For those who want to explore northwest Arkansas’s stretch of the trail in depth, heritagetrailpartners.com is the local resource, maintained by the organization that has done the most to interpret and preserve this corridor.
