Forrest Carter, from the age of four or five, was inseparable from his part-Cherokee grandfather, who owned a farm and ran a country store nearby. Granpa called him Little Sprout; when he grew taller, he became Little Tree. From Granpa he absorbed the Cherokee ethic; to give love without expecting gratitude, to take from the land only what you need. Little Tree watches a mountain storm when Nature is birthing Spring, learns bird signs and wind songs and which crops to plant by the dark of the moon. He hears the true story of the Cherokee Trail of Tears, and why it is not the Indian who wept, but the watching white man. From a Jewish peddler who came every season to Granpa’s store he learns a lesson in charity; from a sharecropper he learns to understand misplaced pride. He escapes death through Granpa’s courage and confronts, for the first time, the hypocrisy and brutality of white Americans.Much of the lore passed from generation to generation by word of mouth is found in these stories in “The Education of Little Tree,” autobiographical if not all factually accurate. For instance, Granma is based on family memories of Carter’s great-great-great grandmother (Granpa’s great-grandmother), who was a full Cherokee, combined with the author’s own mother, who read Shakespeare to him when he was a child. But Granpa is all and forever true in this storyteller’s memoir of a time that ended when Little Tree was ten and Granpa died.
Walk in My Soul
Tiana was a Cherokee woman. She grew up learning the magic, spells, and nature religion of her people. Before Sam Houston became the father of Texas, he was a young man who had run away from his home in Tennessee to live among the Cherokee. He came to love Tiana. As the Cherokee would say, she walked in his soul. But Sam was a white man, and Tiana, a Cherokee. And the dreams each had for their land and their people were far apart….
Journal of Jesse Smoke : A Cherokee Boy, Trail of Tears, 1838 (My Name Is America)
Cherokee Tragedy: The Ridge Family and the Decimation of a People
Beginning with the birth of the Cherokee patriarch Major Ridge in the 1770’s, Thurman Wilkins tells the events that led to the Trail of Tears, through the eyes of the illustrious Ridge family. Major Ridge and his Connecticut-educated son John were willing to abandon the rich tribal homelands in North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia and emigrate west to the Indian Territory to escape the white invaders.
During the decades of fruitless negotiations that culminated in the infamous Treaty of New Echota, Georgia, in 1835, the Ridges and their relatives Elias Boudinot and Stand Watie became persuaded that further protests by the Cherokees would lead only to their annihilation at the hands of the whites. The pro-treaty Ridge faction was opposed by fiery John Ross, the leader of the majority National Party, who wanted to stay and fight in the Southeast against all odds.
In this revised edition of his great work, Thurman Wilkins addresses the new scholarship of the past fifteen years and reconsiders the important questions raised by Cherokee history aficionados: Were Major Ridge and John Ridge paid off by the United States for their support of removal? If not, how did these Cherokee patriots come to change their minds about emigrating west? Was Chief John Ross a hero or a villain?
Since Cherokee Tragedy was first published in 1970, it has been valued as a penetrating social and political history of neither the whole Cherokee Nation-nor just the Ridge family- from the last quarter of the eighteenth century to the 1838 Trail of Tears and the subsequent “execution” of the Ridges in Indian Territory.
Soft Rain: A Story of the Cherokee Trail of Tears
In Soft Rain, a 9-year-old Cherokee girl finds herself in the same situation as Sweet Leaf as soldiers arrive one day to take her and her mother to walk the Trail of Tears, leaving the rest of her family behind. It all begins when Soft Rain’s teacher reads a letter stating that as of May 23, 1838, all Cherokee people are to leave their land and move to what many Cherokees called “the land of darkness”. . .the west. Soft Rain is confident that her family will not have to move, because they have just planted corn for the next harvest. Because Soft Rain knows some of the white man’s language, she soon learns that they must travel across rivers, valleys, and mountains. On the journey, she is forced to eat the white man’s food and sees many of her people die. Her courage and hope are restored when she is reunited with her father, a leader on the Trail, chosen to bring her people safely to their new land.
Over the Misty Mountains (Spirit of Appalachia #1)
Swamp Fox, Francis Marion
This book gives a good description of Marion’s involvement in the French & Indian War, where he played an instrumental role in defeating a large Cherokee war party near Charleston. The French & Indian War set the stage for the American Revolution because this is where Marion meets some of the other leading South Carolina militia commanders during the revolution: William Moultrie, Thomas Sumter & Andrew Pickens. Leading political figures like John Rutledge and Christopher Gadsen are also prominent.
This is all based on research but some details have been created when accurate information was missing. The book also traces Marion’s romance with Esther Videau, dating back to his late teens/early twenties in Georgetown, South Carolina. She was the only woman Marion ever loved but they didn’t marry until after the Revolution.