Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"On December 29, 1835, a party led by John Ridge and Elias Boudinot (publisher of the Cherokee Phoenix) signed the Treaty of New Echota, consenting to trade the tribe's ancestral homeland in return for $5 million and land in Oklahoma. . . . Starting in May 1838, the majority of the tribe were rounded up by the U.S. Army and sent to detention camps to await Removal; others fled to neighboring states. . . . Conditions in the unsanitary detention camps and the harsh weather along the notorious 'Trail of Tears' westward in the fall and winter of 1838-39 led to a tragically high death rate; the usual estimate is that four thousand people died out of the twelve thousand participants in the forced migration. . . . Even after tribes had relocated to the west of the Mississippi River, their ability to remain on their new domain was no more secure than it had been on their old." [Howe: What Hath God Wrought, p. 415-22]