Cherokee Nation History

A woman ahead of her time, Mary Breydon knew how to get things done. Raised on a Virginia plantation, she learned how to care for livestock, respect her workers, and keep good books. But after her husband is killed, Mary must provide for her young daughter by running a stage coach station on the...

One of the darkest and cruelest chapters in the history of the United States occurred when the nation’s young government decided to remove the native peoples from their lands in the name of profit. Having helped settlers for hundreds of years, five Native American tribes found it increasingly more difficult to relate to, and trust, the country that had once acted as their allies. The native peoples had fought alongside the Americans to gain freedom from England, the nation that the colonists deemed oppressive and unfair.

In this new bundle audiobook from Captivating History, you will discover the shocking and controversial history of the Native Americans.

In December 1835, fewer than five hundred Cherokee signed the Treaty of New Echota—a document never ratified by the Cherokee National Council or the Cherokee people. Congress accepted it anyway, by a single vote. Three years later, sixteen thousand Cherokee were marched at bayonet point from Georgia to Oklahoma. Four thousand died in stockades, on frozen roads, and by the ice-choked Mississippi. The mortality rate rivaled the Bataan Death March. General Winfield Scott's orders called for "every possible kindness," yet one in four never arrived.

Most histories of the Cherokee nation focus on its encounters with Europeans, its conflicts with the U.S. government, and its expulsion from its lands during the Trail of Tears. This work, however, traces the origins of the Cherokee people to the third century B.C.E. and follows their migrations through the Americas to their homeland in the lower Appalachian Mountains.

An astonishing untold story from the nineteenth century—a “riveting…engrossing…‘American Epic’” (The Wall Street Journal) and necessary work of history that reads like Gone with the Wind for the Cherokee. “A vigorous, well-written book that distills a complex history to a clash...