The Cherokee Nation once spread across Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Alabama and was home to thousands of men, women, and children. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 required the Cherokee to surrender their land and move west, and although many actively opposed the act and refused to move, in the spring of 1838 soldiers established forts and camps across the Cherokee homeland and swiftly rounded up every Cherokee they could find. Knowing this was coming, many Cherokee had chosen to resist removal by waiting in their homes to be forcefully evicted by militias. In the camps, they suffered from exposure, disease epidemics, inadequate sanitation, and heartbreak, remaining prisoners until their final deportation to the West. Oo-loo-cha, widow of Sweet Water, recalled in 1842 that soldiers surrounded her house, took the mare while the family worked in the fields, drove them out without allowing them to take anything, not even a second change of clothes, marched them on foot to Ross' Landing, including little children, and sent them away. Federal Indian removal policy aroused fierce and bitter debate: supporters claimed it would save tribes east of the Mississippi River from being overwhelmed by an expanding American population, while opponents decried its inhumanity and tragic consequences for Indian peoples. Removal also freed millions of acres of Indian land for white settlers. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 resulted in the removal of thousands of American Indians from their ancestral lands to new homes in Indian Territory, present-day Oklahoma, by existing roads and rivers. Many groups left in the fall to avoid the disease and heat of summer travel and instead faced treacherous winter weather, and many died during the ordeal of the Trail of Tears. In the 1830s, the federal government forcibly removed approximately 16,000 Cherokee, 21,000 Muscogee (Creek), 9,000 Choctaw, 6,000 Chickasaw, and 4,000 Seminole from their ancestral homes in the southeastern United States. Despite the hardships of the journey, members of the five removed tribes established new lives in the West as successful sovereign nations preserving cultural traditions while adapting to the challenges of the 21st century. Cherokee who survived the Trail of Tears created a new sovereign nation in present-day Oklahoma, while some Cherokee remained in North Carolina and, due to a special exemption, formed the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.