The New Echota Treaty of 1835 relinquished Cherokee Indian claims to lands east of the Mississippi River, but most Cherokee people considered the treaty fraudulent and refused to leave their homelands in Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina, and Tennessee. Seven thousand Federal and State troops were ordered into the Cherokee Nation to forcibly evict them, and on May 26, 1838, the roundup began. Over fifteen thousand Cherokees were forced from their homes at gunpoint and imprisoned in stockades until removal to the west could take place. Two thousand seven hundred left by boat in June 1838, but because of many deaths and sickness, removal was suspended until cooler weather. Most of the remaining thirteen thousand Cherokees left by wagon, horseback, or on foot during October and November 1838 along an eight hundred mile route through Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois, Missouri, and Arkansas, arriving in what is now eastern Oklahoma during January, February, and March 1839. Disease, exposure, and starvation may have claimed as many as four thousand Cherokee lives during capture, imprisonment, and removal in the ordeal known as the Trail of Tears.