In eighteen thirty-eight to eighteen thirty-nine, John Benge led a detachment of approximately eleven hundred Cherokee with sixty wagons and six hundred horses on a Trail of Tears route from Alabama through Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri, Arkansas, and into Oklahoma. Leaving a camp in Wills Valley about eight miles south of Fort Payne on about September twenty-eighth, eighteen thirty-eight, the group traveled through Huntsville and Gunter’s Landing in Alabama and Reynoldsburg on the Tennessee River in Tennessee, and evidence suggests they crossed the Mississippi River at Columbus, Kentucky. Although the exact route is not fully known, reports to John Ross and General Scott and the study of period maps indicate that the detachment crossed the Tennessee River at Gunter’s Landing, headed north to Huntsville, most likely entered Tennessee south of Ardmore in Giles County along the general route of present-day U.S. thirty-one, went north to Pulaski, crossed Richland Creek, proceeded northwest through Mount Pleasant, crossed the Natchez Trace, passed Centerville, crossed the Duck River by bridge or ferry, and was ferried across the Tennessee River at Reynoldsburg on November third. From there the detachment marched northwest to Charleston and then to Benton, south of Cape Girardeau, proceeded southwest to the Arkansas state line, and crossed the Current River at Indian Ford near Hicks Ferry on or about December seventh. In Arkansas, the detachment continued to Smithville; at least a portion traveled south to Batesville and likely rejoined the main body, which may have disbanded near the Woodhall Farm west of the Arkansas state line on January seventeenth, eighteen thirty-nine. In Giles County, the detachment most likely entered south of Ardmore, crossed the Elk River, passed through Elkton, and reached Pulaski either by a stage road running north from Elkton to Bunker Hill Road and then west and northwest, or by the Elkton-Pulaski Turnpike if it had been completed by October eighteen thirty-eight. The stage road alignment survives as an abandoned roadbed more than one and a half miles long, ten to twelve feet wide, with four- to five-foot embankments, and includes the remains of the Early Benson House, built about eighteen twenty and used as a stagecoach stop. Whichever route was used, the detachment passed through what is now Tarpley, continued north on the approximate path of U.S. thirty-one into Pulaski, most likely headed west across Richland Creek at what is now Mill Street, then followed west on Vales Mill Road, turned north at Mount Moriah Road, traveled along Dry Creek Road through Campbellsville, and went up the valley of Brownlow Creek to Elk Ridge, where it entered Maury County.