They called it the Trail of Tears because of the losses suffered by the exiles whose weary feet created it.

Then it, too, was lost.

"If you know what you're looking for, you can see it--it's just so obvious--but unfortunately, most people don't know what it is," says John Burde, an SIUC forestry professor.

Burde and graduate students Karen Frailey and Kevin Schraer have spent the last few months tracking down the Illinois leg of the trail at the behest of the National Park Service, which is working to preserve and develop the paths that 19th-century soldiers once used to drive Cherokee Indians off their land.

The Trail of Tears--actually three overland routes and a waterway--begins near Chattanooga, Tenn., and ends in Oklahoma. Rounded up like cattle and stripped of their property under the federal Indian Removal Act of 1830, thousands of Native Americans were forced to march west on the trail through winter storms. Many died. Congress made the trail a national historic area in 1987 to honor them.

Only a small piece of the trail's northern route runs through Illinois, from Golconda to a point just north of Cape Girardeau.

"Unfortunately, a lot of it is right under the existing highway--those parts are gone," Burde says, referring to Illinois Highway 146. "A lot of it has been plowed under for agriculture, too.

"But there are numerous places not far from 146 where the original road is quite obvious. We've pretty much identified the trail except for a piece west of Jonesboro."

After reviewing aerial photographs in fall 2003 to identify segments of the trail, Burde and Schraer began mapping it on foot, using hand-held global positioning system (GPS) equipment that takes measurements every five seconds. The equipment translates radio signals from satellites into geographic information. The mapping had to be done in the winter because thick foliage can interfere with the signals.

Fellow faculty member Andrew Carver and his students in the Forestry Department's Geographic Information System laboratory will use the data to create detailed maps showing trail segments, topographic information, land use patterns, and political boundaries.

Burde's team also is digging through archives and libraries, hoping to root out old maps, newspaper articles, letters, diary references, and other materials about the trail in southern Illinois. Whatever they find will go into an annotated bibliography, something that could be used not just by researchers but by regular folks who want to learn more about the trail.

"There's a lot of interest down here, a lot of community lore, and a lot of people claim kinship to the Cherokees because they stayed some time in certain areas--they didn't just pass through," Burde says.

"We've already found some articles from the '20s and '30s. For someone interested in looking deeper, this would be a good point to start."

The research also could help regional tourism development efforts. For example, the Park Service could use the material as the foundation to build what Burde calls a tourist "interpretive route"--a means for following the trail and understanding what happened there.

As part of their report to the Park Service, the team will identify potential interpretive/educational sites, recreational opportunities along the trail, and ways to preserve and develop existing segments in partnership with landowners. (For her master's thesis research, Frailey will identify and interview landowners to see who might be willing to allow hikers or interpretive signs on the portions of the trail that cross their land.)

"We're behind other states in this, probably because we have the shortest number of miles--of all the states that the trail goes through, Illinois is the only one without a museum or a cooperating visitors' center where people could go to find out about it," Burde says. "There's no place to even put out brochures.

"But that doesn't make Illinois less important. Serious winter events occurred here. When the Cherokee got over toward the river--in November or December--the Mississippi was iced over and they couldn't get across, so they had to set up camps. A lot of people died.

"There's a fairly large church cemetery east of Anna that has no headstones. The common lore is that those are Cherokee graves, but nobody knows.

"Even with history, some things get lost. That's why the Park Service has started this project."

--by K. C. Jaehnig, Media & Communication Resources

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