After the Trail of Tears: The Cherokees' Struggle for Sovereignty, 1839-1880

Brown University historian McLoughlin (who died recently) brings an important but oft-neglected story before a wider audience in this follow-up to Cherokee Renascence, 1794-1833. He recounts the tragedy that continued to afflict the Cherokee Nation after their forced removal from their traditional home to Oklahoma during the 1820s and 1830s. In Oklahoma the Cherokee Nation set out to reconstruct their society, reestablishing their newspaper, which published in the Cherokee language, and governing themselves according to a constitution modeled on that of the United States. But a virtual civil war raged between those who had favored removal and those who had opposed it. During the American Civil War, Cherokee society again split, this time over the issue of slavery. In 1907, Oklahoma statehood ended Native territorial sovereignty. McLoughlin vividly depicts the conflicts between ``fullbloods,'' who sought to live by more traditional ways, and Cherokees of mixed ancestry who favored assimilation into the dominant culture. Towering above the entire story is John Ross, the principal chief of the Nation; as depicted by McLoughlin, Ross, only one-eighth Cherokee, was the only person who could unite both full- and mixed-blood factions. (Jan.)