A group in Steelville wants to install an art memorial to acknowledge the small Missouri town’s location along the Trail of Tears.
The Trail of Tears Remembrance Committee is working with Native groups to honor people who passed through Steelville during their forced removal from their ancestral homes in the East by the U.S. government.
The memorial is meant to foster understanding and collective healing, said Madison Bouse, a committee member who is raising funds for the project.
“We also want it to be a celebration of resilience to remember that descendants of these people still live on today in really vibrant communities, and there they have a lot of stories to be told,” Bouse said.
Bouse grew up in Steelville, but she learned much later that Missouri had the most Cherokee Trail of Tears miles of any state and that her hometown in Crawford County was on its path.
“This history has been suppressed and kind of erased for a really long time,” Bouse said.
The art memorial will feature a 10-foot bronze statue created by visual artist Daniel HorseChief. The Cherokee and Pawnee artist said art is an important way to publicly acknowledge and teach people about the painful history of ethnic cleansing.
“Steelville is there waiting for a statement like this,” HorseChief said. “It needs to be acknowledged, and that has relevance to not just that small community, but to the state, to this nation, and then, in effect, the whole world.”
The Steelville monument will be a companion piece to another statue HorseChief is working on, which will be placed in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, the capital of the Cherokee Nation. The two statues will face one another like bookends, which he said is a symbol of the connection between the two communities and their shared history.
“We need to stand up again after we're knocked down, and perhaps become even stronger— that's what I want everybody, not just Native people or Cherokee people specifically, but anybody that sees this to, you know, take in,” HorseChief said.
The statue will be placed at a verified encampment site in Steelville City Park.
Along with the sculpture, the art memorial will feature a pathway imprinted with footprints and wagon tracks. Bouse said there will also be a native plant garden and interpretive panels that tell personal, humanizing stories of people forced on the trail.
For years, archeologist Erin Whitson has been researching the history of the Trail of Tears in Steelville, uncovering sites where Cherokees, enslaved people and missionaries camped along their long journey to Oklahoma.
Formally marking the campsites honors those who survived, Whitson told St. Louis on the Air in July.
“Lives were lost, families were broken, and those moments have long, profound effects that still haunt today,” Whitson said.
Limited historical records show the trail’s conditions were brutal for the nearly 10,000 Cherokee, Muscogee (Creek), enslaved and other individuals who journeyed along the trail's northern route that passes through Steelville. By the winter of 1837, people had been traveling mostly on foot for up to 15 miles per day for weeks before they arrived in Steelville, where several people died.
“To try to just imagine a sliver of a fraction of what that experience is like for an individual, kind of zooming in, instead of just looking at it as this textbook paragraph about this terrible thing that happened in history — I think art is the best way to accomplish that,” Bouse said.
The committee is hosting a Remember the Removal Walk, Ride, and Bike event along the trail this Saturday to raise funds for the memorial.
