In 1838, the United States government deported more than 16,000 Cherokee Indian people from their homeland in Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina, and Georgia to Indian Territory, now Oklahoma, and thousands perished during the forced relocation known as the Trail of Tears. This tragedy grew out of the 1832 Indian Removal Act, a federal policy to purge Native nations from the eastern United States. Nearby, the Valley Towns Baptist Mission operated from 1820 to 1836 as a boarding school, center of Cherokee scholarship and political activism, and the most popular and successful Protestant mission in the Cherokee Nation after its teachers adopted the Cherokee language for classroom use. With a model farm, gristmill, and blacksmith shop, it provided vocational and academic training, housed as many as 50 students at one time, and educated hundreds of Cherokee scholars, including future leaders such as Peter Oganaya, John Wickliff, and James Wafford, who later opposed the New Echota Treaty that led to removal. Evan B. Jones, the mission's teacher and pastor from 1821 to 1836, helped establish the Baptist church as the primary denomination among Christianized Cherokees with Cherokee preachers including Jesse Bushyhead, Peter Oganaya, and John Wickliff; in 1836 the U.S. Army expelled him for aiding Cherokee resistance to removal, and he later traveled the Trail of Tears as assistant conductor in Situwakee's detachment before helping rebuild Baptist churches in Oklahoma.