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Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation by John Ehle

1989; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 24; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wal.1989.0025

1948-7142

Robert E. Morsberger,

Indigenous Studies and Ecology

Reviews 177 The personality that emerges isthe stuff of myth itself. As a youth Zerelda grew large-bodied, wild, and full of primitive appetites drawn directly from the frontier landscape. These physical characteristics were balanced, accord­ ing to Dodd, with a pagan “knowing” that was at once intuitive and realistic. In the novel, it isolates her from any institution, group, or savior (all for fools, says Zerelda). She survives the loss of children and husband, the encroach­ ments of mobs, and the relentless pressure of the law after her boys. Even the amputation of an arm, resulting from an attack by Pinkertons, does not bring her down. All through these struggles she communes with her sons, to whom she has passed on her “knowing” in pagan ritual. Thus, faithful to the face of Mamaw, Susan Dodd has imagined a force (prophetess and earthmother) out of the records of Missouri folklore and frontier history to justify the origins and legends of the James family. Mamaw is a convincing portrait finally because the narrative captures the simple crude­ ness of the people and times and does so with a voice that speaks in the vernacular of borderer culture. DAVID HECKER Olympic College Trail of Tears:The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation. ByJohn Ehle. (New York: Doubleday Anchor Press, 1988. 424 pages, $19.95.) The removal of the Cherokee Indians to Oklahoma on a death march called The Trail of Tears is one of the tragic injustices in American history. As many as four thousand Indians, perhaps a third of the Cherokee nation, died on the way in 1838 and 1839 for no crime except having land that the whites wanted. John Ehle, a novelist from the original Cherokee country, has written the most dramatic account yet of the Cherokee tragedy, bringing to bear his literary skills to recreate the Cherokee culture, its leading players, and the suffering on the way west. Ehle focuses his story on a leading Cherokee family, that of Major Ridge, his son John, and his nephew Elias Boudinot. He begins in the 1770s, when Ridge was a child. Refusing to sentimentalize the Cherokees, as some have done, Ehle shows the savagery of Indian warfare, the cruelty and pain of some of their games and ceremonies, and the fact that many of them owned slaves. In the early nineteenth century, the Cherokees made remarkable progress. Ridge, who had been a breech-clouted warrior in his youth, built an affluent plantation and became an orator and diplomat, conferring with Presidents. His son John and his nephew Elias Boudinot, converted to Christianity and educated in New England schools, became highly articulate spokesmen for their people, and Boudinot published a Cherokee newspaper. Visitors from New England found the Cherokee communities asprosperous as those at home. 178 Western American Literature But white land speculators considered the Cherokees an obstacle that must be removed. Ehle chronicles in painstaking detail the decades of attack and defense, the viciousness of politicians and land grabbers. He dramatizes the divisiveness that sprang up as the Ridge faction was finally persuaded that further resistance was hopeless and that it would be better to make a fresh start in the West, while the followers of principal chief John Ross refused to give way. Finally the Ridges and Boudinot were persuaded to sign the treaty ofNew Echota, selling the Cherokee lands and property for $5 million plus comparable acreage in Indian territory, though they considered that they might be signing their death warrant, since a Cherokee law proclaimed death for anyone who sold their land without the full consent of the nation. In 1838, an army was sent to collect the Cherokees and move them west. Ehle recreates the actual Trail of Tears with some of the dramatic impact of the migration to California in The Grapes of Wrath, even using some of Steinbeck’s effects—composite characters, anonymous scraps of dialogue by representative individuals or a chorus, quick vignettes along the route. After the removal, the prophetic deaths of the Ridges and Boudinot were fulfilled, as vigilantes of the Ross faction murdered them. Ehle chronicles this epic in rich detail, with copious quotations from the principal characters. Sometimes...