By the 1830s, the Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw nations had done exactly what the United States demanded of them: built large farms, written constitutions modeled on the U.S. government, and integrated deeply into the Southern economy. None of it protected them. Between 1830 and 1850, roughly 60,000 Native Americans and enslaved people were forcibly displaced from the Deep South, because they had mastered the rules of a game their opponent was willing to flip over.

This episode traces the mechanics of the Trail of Tears: how the cotton gin turned sovereign inland territory into prime real estate overnight, how the Georgia Gold Rush sent speculators swarming onto Cherokee land, and how a popular novel helped sanitize the theft before it happened. It follows the Cherokee legal fight to the Supreme Court, the famous Jack ...