After the United States government failed to reach an agreement with the duly authorized leaders of the Cherokee Nation, it signed a treaty on December 29, 1835, with a minority faction willing to cede the last remaining portion of the original Cherokee homeland. Although the overwhelming majority of Cherokee people protested, the fraudulent Treaty of New Echota was ratified by the U.S. Senate by a single vote on May 23, 1836, and the Cherokees were given two years to remove to Indian Territory. When that period ended, only 2,000 of the nearly 17,000 Cherokees in the east had left their ancestral homeland. In May 1838, General Winfield Scott and 7,000 federal and state troops entered the Cherokee Nation to enforce removal, forcing families from their homes into 31 stockades and open military stations across southeast Tennessee, western North Carolina, northwest Georgia, and northeast Alabama, and then sending them to emigrating depots near Ross's Landing at Chattanooga, Tennessee, Fort Cass near Calhoun, Tennessee, and a camp eight miles south of Fort Payne, Alabama. In June 1838, the first three detachments of Cherokee captured by the Georgia Guard were forced to leave Ross's Landing, Tennessee, but high casualties among these groups led to a delay until fall, when cooler weather was expected, and Cherokee leaders successfully petitioned General Scott to conduct the removal themselves. The remaining Cherokees began the journey west in the fall of 1838 in 13 detachments and, after an extremely severe winter, reached the West in the late winter and early spring of 1839. It is estimated that between 2,000 and 4,000 of the 16,000 Cherokees died as a direct result of the forced removal, yet the Cherokee people survived, adapted, and rebuilt their homes and government, and only 12 years after removal the Cherokee Female Seminary opened on these grounds as the first institution of higher learning for females west of the Mississippi River.