Birthday Story of Private John G. Burnett, Captain Abraham McClellan's Company, 2nd Regiment, 2nd Brigade, Mounted Infantry, Cherokee Indian Removal, 1938-39.

Children: This is my birthday, December 11, 1890, I am eighty years old today. I was born at Kings Iron Works in Sullivan County, Tennessee, December the 11th, 1810. I grew into manhood fishing in Beaver Creek and roaming through the forest hunting the deer and the wild boar and the timber wolf. Often spending weeks at a time in the solitary wilderness with no companions but my rifle, hunting knife, and a small hatchet that I carried in my belt in all of my wilderness wonderings.

On these long hunting trips I met, and became acquainted with many of the Cherokee Indians, hunting with them by day, and sleeping around their campfires by night. I learned to speak their language, and they taught me the outs of trailing, and building traps and snares. On one of my long hunts in the fall of 1829, I found a young Cherokee who had been shot by a roving band of hunters, and who had eluded his pursuers and concealed himself under a shelving rock. Weak from loss of blood, the poor creature was unable to walk, and almost famished for water, I carried him to a spring, bathed and bandaged the bullet wound, and built a shelter out of bark peeled from a dead chestnut tree. I nursed and protected him feeding him on chestnuts and toasted deer meat. When he was able to travel I accompanied him to the home of his people, and remained so long that I was given up for lost. By this time I had become an expert refleman, and fairly good archer, and a good trapper; and spent most of my time in the forest in quest of game.

The removal of Cherokee Indians from their life long homes in the year of 1938 found me a young man in the prime of life, and a Private soldier in the American Army. Being acquainted with many of the Indians and able to fluently speak their language, I was sent as interpreter into the Smokey Mountain Country in May 1938, and witnessed the execution of the most brutal order in the history of Amarican Warfare. I saw the helpless Cherokees arrested and dragged from their homes, and driven at the bayonet point into the stockades. And in the chill of a drizzling rain on an October morning, I saw them loaded like cattle or sheep into six hundred and forty-five (645) wagons, and started toward the west.

One can never forget the sadness and solemnity of that morning. Chief John Ross, led in prayer, and when the bugle sounded and the wadons started rolling, many of the children rose to their feet and waved their little hands good-bye to their mountain homes, knowing they were leaving them forever. Many of these helpless people did not have blankets, and many of them had been driven from home barefooted.

On the morning of November the 17th, we encountered a terrific sleet and snow storm with freezing temperatures, and from that day until we reached the end of the fateful journey on March the 26th, 1939, the sufferings of the Cherokees were awful. The trail of the exiles was the trail of death. They had to sleep in the wagons, and on the ground without fire. And I have known as many as twenty-two (22) of them to die in one night of pneumonia, due to ill treatment, cold, and exposure. Among this number was the beautiful christian wife of Chief John Ross; this noble hearted woman died a martyr to childhood, giving her only blanket for the protection of a sick child. She rode thinly clad through a blinding sleet and snow storm, developed pneumonia and died in the still hours of a bleak winter night, with her head resting on Lieutenant Greggs saddle blanket.

I made the long journey to the west with the Cherokees, and did all that a private soldier could do to alleviate their sufferings. When on guard duty at night, I have many times walked my post in my blouse in order that some sick child might have the warmth of my overcoat. I was on guard duty the night Mrs. Ross died. When relieved at midnight I did not retire, but remained around the wagon out of sympathy for Chief Ross, and at daylight, was detailed by Captain McClellan to assist in the burial like the other unfortunates who had died on the way. Her unconfined body was buried in a shallow grave by the roadside far from her native home, and the surrowing Cavalcade moved on.

Being a young man, I mingled freely with the young women and girls. I have spent many pleasant hours with them when I was supposed to be under my blanket, and they have many times sung their mountain songs for me, this being all that they could do to repay my kindness. With all my association with indian girls from October 1829 to March 26th 1839, I did not meet one who was a moral prostitute. They were kind and tender hearted, and many of them were beautiful.

The only trouble that I had with anybody on the entire journey to the west was a brutal teamster, by the name of Ben McDonald, who was usingt his whip on an old feeble Cherokee, to hasten him into the wagon. The sight of that old and nearly blind creature quivering under the lashes of a bull whip was too much for me. I attempted to stop McDonald, and it ended in a personal encounter. He lashed me across the face, the wire tip on his whip cutting a bad gash in my cheek; the little hatchet that I carried in my hunting days was in my belt, and McDonald was carried unconscious from the scene.

I was placed under guard, but Ensign Henry Bullock, and Private Elkanah Millard had both witnessed the encounter; they gave Captain McClellan the facts, and I was never brought to trial. Years later I met 2nd Lieutenant Riley, and Ensign Bullock at Bristol; at John Roberson's show, and Bullock jokingly reminded me that there was a case still pending against me before a court martial, and wanted to know how much longer I was going to have the trial put off? McDonald finally recovered, and in the year 1851, was running a boat out of Memphis, Tennessee.

The long painful journey to the west ended March 26th, 1839, with four-thousand (4,000) silent graves, reaching from the foot-hills of the Smokey Mountains to what is known as Indian Territory in the west. And covetousness on the part of the white race was the cause of all that the Cherokees had to suffer. Ever since Ferdinana DeSoto, made his journey through the Indian Country in the year of 1540, there had been a tradition of a rich gold mine somewhere in the Smokey Mountain Country, and I think the tradition was true. At a festival at Echota on Christmas night 1829, I danced and played with indian girls, who were wearing ornaments around their neck that looked like gold.