Beginning in 1831, the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee, and Seminole lived as autonomous nations in what would later be called the American Deep South, but pressure from white settlers, expanding U.S. territories and states, population growth, slavery, and cotton cultivation drove a federal policy of removal from the Southeast. Although many people strongly opposed it, including U.S. Congressman Davey Crockett of Tennessee, President Andrew Jackson secured passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, authorizing the government to extinguish Native American title to southeastern lands. The Choctaw were removed first in 1831, followed by many Seminoles in 1832 after two wars, the Creek in 1834, the Chickasaw in 1837, and the Cherokee in 1838. By 1837, 46,000 Native Americans from the southeastern states had been removed from their homelands, opening 25 million acres for predominantly white settlement, and over 100,000 Native Americans from the five tribes were forced to move. In 1838, more than 15,000 Cherokee were removed by the U.S. Army from parts of North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama to land set aside in what is now Oklahoma. They were held in concentration-like camps through the summer and then forced to travel more than 1,000 miles under very hard conditions to Indian Territory, where nearly 4,000 Cherokee died of starvation, exposure, or disease. The Cherokee called this forced move "Nunahi-Duna-Dlo-Hilu-I," or "Trail Where They Cried," and it became best known as the Trail of Tears. Many Native Americans nevertheless remained in their ancestral homelands, including Choctaw in Mississippi, Creek in Alabama and Florida, Cherokee in North Carolina, and Seminole in Florida, where a small group had moved to the Everglades and were never defeated by the U.S.
