In a small town in County Cork, Ireland, a monument stands in appreciation to the Choctaw Indian Tribe. Although impoverished, shortly after being forced to walk the Trail of Tears, the tribe gathered $170 to send to Ireland for famine relief in 1847.
On March 23, 1847, the Indians of the Choctaw nation took up a collection. Moved by news of starvation in Ireland, a group of Choctaws gathered in Scullyville, Okla., to raise a relief fund. Despite their meager resources, they collected $170 ($5,362.84 in todays money) and forwarded it to a famine relief organization. For context, in 1870 men in Ireland were making about $7 per week (women $40 per year)
The Choctaw Indians may have seen echoes of their own fate in that of the Irish. Just 16 years before, in 1831, the Choctaw Indians were forcibly removed from their ancestral lands in Mississippi to what is now known as Oklahoma on a forced march known as the Trail of Tears.
