NOVEMBER 22:

November 22, 1812:   Today, Potawatomi Chief Winamac will be killed in fighting with Captain Logan (Spemicalawba). One of two Potawatomi Chiefs with the same name, he was a principle leader in the attacks on Forts Dearborn and Wayne in 1812. The other Winamac was pro-American.

November 22, 1845:  Chahta leader Nitakechi was returned to Mississippi by Superintendent Armstrong, to tell the remaining Chahta of the good conditions in the Indian territory.  While in Mississippi, Nitakechi get pleurisy, and dies on this date.
 
 

BACKGROUND:

From http://www.skullyville.com/mosh2.html
 

... Through most of his life, he, like Nitaketchi, espoused the full-blood cause. His change became more marked when they spoke for the removal and cooperated with the white man, and his "friend" Andrew Jackson helped with the cause of the removal.

Nitaketchi joined forces with Moshulatubbee on more than one occasion, once against LeFlore and once against David Folsom. Oddly enough, at one time or another, all the chiefs favored removal, then stood against it. But, finally, Greenwood LeFlore, Moshulattubbee and Nitakechi signed the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek on September 27, 1830. LeFlore remained in Mississippi, but both Moshulatubbee and Nitakechi migrated west.
 

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>From http://www.choctawnation.com/history/trail_of_tears.htm
 

After the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, George S. Gaines was named by Secretary of the War Department Lewis Cass as General Supervisor for the removal of the Choctaw from Mississippi to what is now Oklahoma.

Gaines determined that the best method of handling the removal was to move about one third of the Choctaws per year, in each of the years 1831, 1832, and 1833. Gaines set the date for the removal of the first group of Choctaws to begin on November 1, 1831 ....

...  Thus during the final week of October, encampments of Choctaws began to spring up all around the outskirts of Memphis and Vicksburg, with the population of these encampments growing daily.

And, along with the Choctaws came something else ... RAIN! These heavy rains came and stayed, flooding the Mississippi, St. Francis, White, Arkansas, and Big Fork (Quacita) rivers, turning the river valleys into quagmires.

A quick conference between George S. Gaines and his principal removal agents revealed that the floods would make the roads impassable so that there was no way the Choctaws could be taken west from Mississippi by wagon as originally planned.

This left only one alternative, to make the removal by steam boat. With the government having already cancelled its order for such boats, the Choctaws had to wait in the rain and cold, without much shelter, until they could secure steam boats.

Finally Gaines and his crew were able to secure five steam boats, the Walter Scott, the Brandywine, the Reindeer, the Tama, and the Cleopatra, the latter three being smaller steam boats with smaller capacity.

And while the boats gathered, the Choctaws had to wait outside of Memphis and Vicksburg. They did not have any food rations.

Already uneasy with "all those injuns" camped outside of town, residents of Vicksburg and Memphis soon found themselves facing food shortages and battling profiteers for the available foodstuffs.To make matters worse, as the steamers began to gather, one of the two big boats caught fire (Brandywine) while moored at Memphis and was so badly damaged that it could not be used in the operation.

This left the Reindeer and the Walter Scott available at Memphis and the Talma and Cleopatra available at Vicksburg.

The 300 Choctaws who had "taken the bait" on the offer to walk were ferried across the Mississippi on the Reindeer, and then turned over to the guides who would lead them to the new land.

George Gaines and his agents determined that the Choctaws at Memphis would be taken by steam boat up the Mississippi River to the Arkansas River and to Little Rock and Fort Smith and from there by wagons to the wilderness. (This didn't happen.)

And, the Choctaws waiting at Vicksburg would be taken down the Mississippi to the Red River, up the Red to Big Fork (Quacita) and up that river to Ecore`a Fabri (which by this time was being know as John Camden's Post and would later become Camden, Arkansas) and hauled by wagon from there to Fort Towson. (This didn't happen either.)

There were thousands of Choctaws at Memphis. Sometime in mid-November they were crammed aboard the Walter Scott and the Reindeer and dispatched up the Arkansas River toward their new homeland.

But at Arkansas Post, which was only about 60 miles up the Arkansas River from the Mississippi River, the army halted the steam boats, said they needed them to transport a new detachment of soldiers to Fort Smith, and unloaded all of the Choctaws.

Following the floods, a blizzard was settling in, with strong, cold northerly winds, snow and sleet dancing across the landscape. Most of the Choctaws were scantily clad, some of the children were naked. The small detachment at Arkansas Post had not stocked supplies for this movement of Choctaws. They had no tents and were not prepared for the removal of the Choctaws.

By the time help arrived, both the Choctaws and the soldiers were rationed a handful of boiled or parched corn, one turnip and two cups of heated water a day.

To make matters worse, the temperature remained below the freezing mark for six day, and the Arkansas River became so clogged with ice that the Reindeer and Walter Scott were iced in at Fort Smith and could not get back down the Arkansas River to Arkansas Post. (Arkansas Post is about 70 miles down river from Little Rock.)

After eight days, forty government wagons were sent to Arkansas Post from Little Rock to begin relaying the soldiers on to Fort Smith, fortunately bringing food and blankets to the starving soldiers and Choctaws, many of whom had already frozen to death or died of pneumonia.

When the first wagons reached Little Rock, a famous term that would eventually burn itself into history was born. In an interview with an Arkansas Gazette reporter, one of the Choctaw Chiefs (thought to be either George Harkins or Nitakechi) was quoted as saying that the removal to that point had been a "Trail of Tears and Death".

The "Trail of Tears" quotation was picked up by the Eastern Press and widely quoted. It soon became a term analogous with the removal of any Indian tribe and was later burned into the American language by the brutal removal of the Cherokees in 1838.