Review by Booklist Review
Among the many tales of history and the white man's encounters with the American Indian, none is as bitter or shameful as the removal of more than 18,000 Cherokee from their eastern homelands. In this well-documented work, Ehle discusses the history of the Cherokee nation, and he presents a sympathetic and emotional account of the development of the Cherokee political, social, and religious structure. The various factors, political and social, leading up to the 1838 migration and the ensuing murder of some 4,000 Cherokee tribesmen are also described. Newspaper stories, personal recollections, and diary entries are used to help recount pertinent facts and events. Highly recommended for public library ethnographic collections. Notes, bibliography; to be indexed. JMM.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
One of the many ironies of U.S. government policy toward Indians in the early 1800s is that it persisted in removing to the West those who had most successfully adapted to European values. As whites encroached on Cherokee land, many Native leaders responded by educating their children, learning English, and developing plantations. Such a leader was Ridge, who had fought with Andrew Jackson against the British. As he and other Cherokee leaders grappled with the issue of moving, the land-hungry Georgia legislatiors, with the aid of Jackson, succeeded in ousting the Cherokee from their land, forcing them to make the arduous journey West on the infamous ``Trail of Tears.'' Popular history for public libraries. Mary B. Davis, Museum of American Indian Lib., New York (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A meticulously researched but not wholly satisfactory history of the Cherokees from 1770 to 1838, when 12,000 Indians were forced to move to Oklahoma in a march known as The Trail of Tears. Novelist Ehle (The Winter People, 1982; Last One Home, 1984; etc.) grew up in North Carolina on what was once Cherokee land, and the bond he feels with the area's past informs his work with passion--if not seamless coherence. That passion drove Ehle to amass an astounding amount of primary material--letters, documents, folklore, etc.--and to wield it with sociological assessments and odd bits of fictionalization into this account. Nonetheless, there's an unfinished feel here: most striking is Ehle's failure to provide an overview of the Cherokee nation before the whites' arrival--the first significant character introduced is Ridge, a Cherokee with Scottish blood. Moreover, further characters and incidents are often mentioned with no explanation, a problem sometimes remedied in later pages and sometimes not. Even so, though, the gallery of little-known, historical figures--mixed bloods who tried to improve the Cherokee fate: the noble Major Ridge, the brilliant Elias Boudinet, the hardheaded John Ross; Sequoyah, the first to create a written Indian language--glows, and some rarities (e.g., the letters of a young US soldier assigned to the removal of the Indians) impart a poignant intimacy. Although Ehle never quite weaves a tight tapestry from his multithreaded skein of raw information, his is certainly the most thorough Cherokee history to date--and it makes up in emotional impact what it lacks in narrative rigor. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
