The Trail of Tears was a forced migration undertaken by the Cherokee Indians of the eastern United States in 1838-39. The Cherokee were tricked with an illegitimate treaty. In 1833, a small faction agreed to sign a removal agreement: the Treaty of New Echota. The leaders of this group were not the recognized leaders of the Cherokee nation, and over 15,000 Cherokees - led by Chief John Ross - signed a petition in protest. The Supreme Court ignored their demands and ratified the treaty in 1836. The Cherokee were given two years to migrate voluntarily, at the end of which time they would be forcibly removed. By 1838 only 2,000 had migrated; 16,000 remained on their land. The U.S. government sent in 7,000 troops, who forced the Cherokees into stockades at bayonet point. They were not allowed time to gather their belongings, and as they left, whites looted their homes. Then began the march known as the Trail of Tears, in which 4,000 Cherokee people died of cold, hunger, and disease on their way to the western lands. Archaeological and linguistic evidence indicates that the Cherokee migrated in prehistoric times from present-day Texas or northern Mexico to the Great Lakes area. Wars with the Iroquois tribes of the New York area and the Delaware tribes pushed them southeast to the Allegheny and Appalachian mountain regions in modern North and South Carolina, Tennessee, and northern Georgia and Alabama. There the Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto encountered them in 1540. In 1715 smallpox reduced their population to about 11,000. During the British and French struggle for control of colonial North America, the Cherokee generally sided with the British, and during the American Revolution the tribe aided Great Britain. In 1785 they negotiated a peace treaty with the United States, but Cherokee resistance continued for a decade thereafter. In 1791 a new treaty reconfirmed the earlier one; part of Cherokee territory was ceded to the United States, and the permanent rights of the tribe to the remaining territory were established. Between 1790 and 1819, several thousand of the tribe migrated west of the Mississippi, becoming known as the Western Band. In 1820 the tribe established a governmental system modeled on that of the United States, with an elected principal chief, a senate, and a house of representatives. Because of this system, the Cherokee were included as one of the so-called Five Civilized tribes. In 1827 they drafted a constitution and incorporated as the Cherokee Nation. Meanwhile, valuable gold deposits were discovered in tribal lands, which by previous cessions had been reduced to about 2,830,000 hectares (about 7 million acres) in northwest Georgia, eastern Tennessee, and southwest North Carolina. In 1819 Georgia appealed to the U.S. government to remove the Cherokee from Georgia lands. When the appeal failed, attempts were made to purchase the territory. In retaliation the Cherokee Nation enacted a law forbidding any such sale on punishment of death. In 1828 the Georgia legislature outlawed the Cherokee government and confiscated tribal lands. Cherokee appeals for federal protection were rejected by President Andrew Jackson. In 1832 the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the Georgia legislation was unconstitutional; federal authorities, following Jackson's policy of Native American removal, ignored the decision. About 500 leading Cherokee agreed in 1835 to cede the tribal territory in exchange for $5,700,000 and land in Indian Territory (now Oklahoma). Their action was repudiated by more than nine-tenths of the tribe, and several members of the group were later assassinated. In 1838 federal troops began forcibly evicting the Cherokee. Approximately one thousand escaped to the North Carolina mountains, purchased land, and incorporated in that state; they were the ancestors of the present-day Eastern Band. Meanwhile, most of the tribe, including the Western Band, were driven west about 1,285 km (about 800 mi) in a forced march, known as the Trail of Tears. About 4,000 perished through hunger, disease, and exposure while on the journey or in stockades awaiting removal. In Indian Territory the Cherokee reorganized their government under their chief, John Ross. During the American Civil War, after great internal conflict, the tribe sided with the Confederacy; a postwar treaty with the United States freed the black slaves of tribal members. Under the General Allotment Act of 1887 - uncompromisingly resisted by the Cherokee -plots of tribal land were forcibly allotted to individual members. The government of the Cherokee Nation was dissolved, and its people became U.S. citizens when Oklahoma achieved statehood in 1907. Surplus lands were parceled out by the federal government, and in 1891 the tribe's western land extension, the Cherokee Strip or Cherokee Outlet, was sold to the United States; in 1893 it was opened, mostly to white settlers, in a famous land run.