The eliminations, led under Presidents Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren, shadowed the Indian Removal Act of 1830. The Trail of Tears was a sequence of involuntary eliminations of Native American nations from their ancestral native land in the Southeastern United States to a zone west of the Mississippi River that had been selected as Indian Territory. The forced rearrangements were conceded out by numerous government authorities following the way of the Indian Removal Act in 1830.