My good friend Scott shares my love of history and road trips. A couple of years ago he generally followed Lewis and Clark’s route between Louisville and Astoria, Oregon. To Scott, the Lewis and Clark expedition is one of the “greatest American stories.”
Then, earlier this year, Scott suggested that the two of us take a road trip roughly following the infamous Trail of Tears. After a few lame attempts at humor observing that all my road trips could be described as a trail of tears, I accepted the suggestion and we set late summer as our target date.
I then went about the task of making preparations, the first of which was to figure out what, exactly, is the Trail of Tears? I was vaguely aware that it involved a forced march of thousands of Cherokees in the early nineteenth century, but that was about all I knew. So to ameliorate my ignorance on the topic I spent a month working through a small pile of history books from the local library. Gradually I came to better understand the iniquity of the US government’s Indian removal policy that, in 1838, forced about 16,000 Cherokees from their ancestral homes in Georgia and drove them across inhospitable terrain to what was then called “Indian Territory” (but which you and I would call “Oklahoma”). About 4000 Cherokees died along the way. It is hardly one of the “greatest American stories,” but it is an important one.
Our other main preparatory task was deciding which route we should take. The Cherokees left in various groups throughout the year, following a half-dozen different routes. Scott and I decided to generally follow the northern route, because (A) it was the most popular (if I can use that word) route and (B) it accommodates a side trip through Kentucky’s bourbon country. (More on that later.)
So it was that this morning before the sun came up, my wife (who generally appears as an unseen Mrs. Columbo in these stories) deposited me at Sacramento Intergalactic Airport. And in a trice (or perhaps a few trices) I was in Atlanta, meeting up with Scott, who’d traveled from LAX.
We got our rental car and headed over to the Fox Bros. Bar-B-Q. (You just know it’s authentic when they spell the word with two hyphens.) After a satisfying (albeit artery-clogging) meal of jalapeno-cheddar sausage, beef brisket, and Frito pie, we had a nightcap at the Pour Taproom. It’s the Automat of beer bars, where you serve yourself from among dozens of automatic taps, paying by the ounce. I sampled a half-dozen beers, but they didn’t have the imperial stout I was pining for.
Tomorrow morning we’ll set out for New Echota, GA, which is considered the official starting point of the Trail of Tears tragedy. Until then.
sdb
Chasing Phantoms 