This is a moving, excellent easy read (at only 64 pages) describing the Trail of Tears, the ethnic cleansing of the Cherokee from the South-eastern United States. The book starts with a short description of John Ross and his wife Quatie who headed the final group of refugees as they make their way to what is now Oklahoma. With her death en route the book switches to a brief history and description of the Cherokee, focusing on their relationship with Europeans. The book has a relatively narrow scope, following a few personalities in particular and centering on how Cherokee culture changed in response to interaction with American settlers, and is very well researched, with an extensive (for its size) bibliography and further reading.
The book is balanced and fair, describing a band of Cherokee who fought the Americans during the Revolutionary for example, and leaving it to the reader to percieve the horror of a forced migration where one in four (particularly the very young and very old) died on the way from eastern Tennessee and northern Georgia to Indian Territory (now Oklahoma). Furthermore, the book clearly presents the political and legal aspects of the relationship between the Cherokee, the states (particularly Georgia), and the federal government, as treaties are made and broken, again and again. In this the reader experiences the feeling of causing a car wreck stretched out over sixty pages.
This book contains interesting illustrations, though not many. I felt the book could use a more detailed map, though there is an interesting portrait of John Ross standing in front of a map, and the reader eventually does come across a map showing the route, though many of the places described in the narrative are not shown. I felt there could have been more information on Sequoyah and his syllabary, though there is a sidebar with some information on him. I was pleased the book contained a photograph of the Phoenix, an English-Cherokee newspaper, which gives some impression of the way the language looks, though I feel this picture could have been enlarged just a little to make the Cherokee a little more legible. The book does not mention much of what happens once the Cherokee reach Indian Territory, as the scope of this book is primarily to explain how the migration came about.
One serious problem I do have with the book concerns a man named Elias Boudinot, who was a president under the Articles of Confederation, founder of the American Bible Society, and noted missionary who campaigned for the rights of Blacks and Native Americans. I was interested when I read the he was the first editor of the Phoenix, and also played an important (and perhaps unpalatable) role in the build-up to the migration. I thought it strange his other accomplishments were not mentioned though, and discovered on Wikipedia that the Elias Boudinot of this book was in fact a Cherokee friend of the first Elias Boudinot who was so impressed with him that he took his name. This is a small piece of trivia, perhaps, but definitely one that could be confusing and certainly is not explained in this book.
I think that on the whole this is an excellent and moving account of an important incident in American history. I imagine many people today would not believe what happened was possible, as many people of the time did not. Namely, a Native American tribe that pursued peace, cooperation, and assimilation as earnestly as possible was still subject to massacre, eviction, and loss of civil rights. The book is not a very difficult read, and I can imagine an advanced middle schooler would have little difficulty reading it. Further, I imagine most high schoolers could, and this book could very easily fit into an American history classroom, and would be very interesting in a Civics class. ( )