Cherokee Trace
Longview, Gregg County, Texas
Marker Inscription
In 1821 near this site, Cherokee Indians blazed a trail from near Nacogdoches, Texas, to their home reservation at White River, Ark. They slashed trees, cleared path, planted "Cherokee" roses, and established camps at springs. Used by Sam Houston, friend of the Cherokees, on his move to Texas; by David Crockett, other soldiers of the Texas Revolution, and thousands of immigrants. After June 1839, when Texas settlers drove the Cherokees out of the state, the Indians departed over this trail; others traveled it for years thereafter.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
In 1821 Cherokee people blazed this trace from the Nacogdoches area to their reservation on Arkansas's White River, slashing trees, clearing a path, planting Cherokee roses, and marking springs as camps. The trail became a thoroughfare for Sam Houston, David Crockett, other soldiers of the Texas Revolution, and thousands of immigrants. After Texas forces drove the Cherokees from the state in 1839, the very people who made the road departed over it into exile.
Why it matters
The Cherokee Trace stands as both a monument to Native pathfinding and a stark reminder of Indian removal, the road a displaced nation built and was then forced to walk out of Texas upon.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In 1821, the year this trail was blazed, Texas was on the edge of huge change. Mexico won its independence from Spain that year, and East Texas was a thinly settled borderland centered on the old town of Nacogdoches. That same year, the first Anglo-American colonists began arriving under Mexican authority.
The Cherokees who came to Texas were part of a larger story of displacement. Pressure from American settlement had already pushed groups of Cherokees west from their homelands in the Southeast, some into Arkansas and some on into Texas. There they hoped to secure land of their own, first from the Mexican government and later from the Republic of Texas.
Those hopes did not survive the 1830s. After Texas won independence in 1836, the new republic was divided over how to treat the Native nations within its borders. Under President Mirabeau B. Lamar, the government turned to a policy of driving them out. In the summer of 1839, Texas forces expelled the Cherokees from the state.
People & events
The trail's first story belongs to the Cherokees who made it. Starting near Nacogdoches and heading north toward their reservation on Arkansas's White River, they blazed trees to mark the route, cleared the path, and set up camps at springs where travelers could find water. They also planted Cherokee roses along the way, so the road they made was both practical and marked with their presence.
Over time the trail drew many other travelers. Sam Houston, known as a friend of the Cherokees, used it when he moved to Texas. Houston had lived among the Cherokees as a young man and later as an adult, and he remained one of their most notable allies in Texas politics. David Crockett and other men who would fight in the Texas Revolution also came down this trace, as did thousands of ordinary immigrants looking for new lives in Texas.
Then the story turned bitter. In 1839, after Texas settlers and troops drove the Cherokees from the state, the Indians left over the same trail they had built. Others kept using it for years afterward, and for many of them it was simply a road. For the Cherokees, it led into exile.
Its place in the American story
The Cherokee Trace is a small but powerful example of a larger pattern in American history. Native peoples built many of the paths, trade routes and river crossings that later carried American settlement. Again and again, the roads that opened a region to newcomers were older Native routes.
It is also part of the long history of Indian removal. In the same years that the United States was forcing the Cherokee Nation out of the Southeast, the Cherokees who had moved to Texas were also driven out. Their 1839 expulsion shows that removal was not a single event or the work of a single government. It was repeated, by several governments, across the continent.
The trail also links the famous and the forgotten. Sam Houston and David Crockett are among the best-known names of the Texas Revolution, yet they traveled a road made by people whose own claim to Texas was taken from them. Remembering both sides of that story gives a fuller picture of how Texas came to be.
If you visit
This marker in Longview sits in the pine country of East Texas, a very different landscape from the open plains farther west. It's easy to picture a path cut through these woods, with blazed trees showing the way and springs serving as stopping places along the route.
As you stand here, think about the people who passed this spot heading in opposite directions and for very different reasons: immigrants moving south into Texas full of hope, and Cherokee families leaving under force. One road served both.
The Cherokee Trace fits well into an East Texas history trip that also takes in Nacogdoches, one of the oldest towns in the state and the trail's southern end. Several other markers in the region also follow the trace's general route, so you can trace it on a map as you drive.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Sam Houston
- · David Crockett
Related events
- · Cherokee expulsion from Texas (1839)
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Cherokee Trace
Gilmer, TX
Around 1821, Cherokee people living near Nacogdoches blazed a trail north toward their kin in Arkansas, guided by a scout who set his course by dragging buffalo skins behind his horse while others marked the trees and planted Cherokee roses still seen along the route. Sam Houston, David Crockett, and thousands of settlers followed this road into Texas. The Cherokee were expelled from Texas in 1839 after Houston left the presidency, their chief killed in a two-day battle on the Neches River.
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O. H. Methvin (1815–1882) came to Texas from Georgia around 1848 and bought some 1,200 acres of East Texas, including a cornfield on this site. In 1870 he deeded 100 acres to the Southern Pacific Railroad, and the town that grew along the line was named Longview for the sweeping view surveyors admired from nearby Rock Hill. When Gregg County formed in 1873, Longview became its county seat, a city born from one landowner's gift to the railroad.