cover image Wil Usdi: Thoughts from the Asylum

Wil Usdi: Thoughts from the Asylum

Robert J. Conley. Univ. of Oklahoma, $14.95 trade paper (160p) ISBN 978-0-8061-4659-1

This well-told, informative historical novel is from the late Cherokee writer Conley (Cherokee Thoughts: Honest and Uncensored), who died in February 2014. The narrative opens in 1890 with the octogenarian William Holland Thomas (1805–1893) imprisoned at a state mental hospital in Morganton, N.C., from where he recounts his eventful life story to the federal government ethnologist, James Mooney. At age 12, the fatherless and white Thomas was adopted by the renowned Cherokee chieftain Yonaguska (Drowning Bear) and entered the tribe as his son, Wil Usdi (Little Will). Through the years, Thomas runs a trading post where he assimilates into the Cherokee culture. He eventually studies law, becoming affluent, and is elected to the state Senate. He purchases vast tracts of land so the local Cherokees can continue living on their ancestral soil during the federal government’s forced resettlement of the out-of-state Cherokee tribes. A cousin of Jefferson Davis, Thomas recruits a Confederate unit of Cherokee soldiers at the outbreak of the Civil War; he is promoted to colonel and marries and raises a family. But the Confederate defeat marks the end of Thomas’s good fortune, and his behavior grows so violent and erratic that he is eventually committed. Thomas’s oral history sessions with Mooney result in a touching and fascinating fictionalized biography. (Feb.)