If American settlers wanted to build their houses on land where Native American tribes lived, they were supposed to ask for the land and sign a treaty explaining that the Native Americans had agreed to give it.

Often, the Native Americans weren’t given much choice. And they were hardly ever paid enough money for their land.

_______________ bought entire forests and farms with handfuls of cheap jewelry and a few pounds of tobacco. But at least the settler who handed over the jewelry had to admit that the ___________ had “owned” the land first!

By ______, more and more Americans wanted to “buy” land from the Native Americans who lived in the Ohio Valley and in the southeast states.

Settlers coming from Europe, called ______________,

didn’t want to go all the way out to the empty western lands of the Louisiana Purchase, where there were no roads or stores or doctors. They wanted to settle near cities and rivers.

Native American tribes who lived on the valuable land in the Southeast and Midwest were too slow to hand those lands over. Many tribes refused to sell any of their land at all!

The President of the United States, _________, signed a law called the Indian Removal Act.

The Indian Removal Act said that the President could not take Native American land without asking for it or paying for it, as long as he gave the Native Americans who lived there an equal amount of land in the unsettled prairies of the west.

The Indian Removal Act seemed like a good idea to Congress and President _______________.

For over a __________years, whites and Native Americans had quarreled, fought, and killed each other.

To the Native American tribes, the Indian Removal Act meant that they would lose their homes—without any way of getting them back. Many _____________ had begun to follow _____________customs.

Many Native Americans had begun to follow white customs. For years, they had lived in log houses, growing fruit trees and planting gardens. Their children went to schools run by white __________.

In the Southeast, five Indian tribes___________________had been nicknamed the “Five Civilized Tribes,” because so many of them lived just like white settlers.

Cherokee chiefs had adopted English names, like John Ross and David Vann. Some Cherokee even owned plantations and kept African slaves to work the land.

Some of the Five Civilized Tribes decided that they could not fight the United States government. The ______loaded wagons, preparing to leave.

The __________Indians began their journey west in the middle of the winter, the year after the Act was passed. The government had promised to give them money to buy food and clothes during the journey, but the money never arrived. The ____________ran out of blankets and coats. Many trudged toward their new homes barefoot, in the snow.

The ____Indians refused to go. So United States soldiers came to their homes, chained them together, and marched them toward the west. Hungry, cold, and loaded down with chains, thirty-five hundred ____Indians died before reaching the new Indian territory.

The _____and the _______ tribes fought the hardest to keep their homes.

Down in Florida, the _____picked up weapons and went to war. It took the United States seven years to defeat the _____and drive them out of Florida. The seven-year fight is now known as the Second _____War.

The _____Indians tried fighting in a different way. They went to court to keep their homes. Judges heard them argue that they deserved to live on their own farms. The court hearings dragged on for almost eight years. But

the governor of Georgia, where many _____lived, didn’t bother to wait for the judges’ decisions. He divided up the _____land and started to give

it out to settlers who had won a lottery.

In June of 1838, the _____were marched toward the new Indian Territory in Oklahoma, eight hundred miles away. On this long, wretched journey, they marched through drought, dying of thirst. Measles and other diseases began to spread along the long line.

It took the _____nation a year to walk to Oklahoma. One out of every four _____died on the journey. The ____called their journey nunna-da-ul-tsun-yi, or “The road where we cried.” Today, this journey is called the Trail of Tears.