The Cherokees

In The Cherokees and Christianity, William G. McLoughlin examines how the process of religious acculturation worked within the Cherokee Nation during the nineteenth century. More concerned with Cherokee "Christianization" than Cherokee "civilization," these eleven essays cover the various stages of cultural confrontation with Christian imperialism. The first section of the book explores the reactions of the Cherokee to the inevitable clash between Christian missionaries and their own religious leaders, as well as their many and varied responses to slavery. In part two, McLoughlin explores the crucial problem of racism that divided the southern part of North America into red, white and black long before 1776 and considers the ways in which the Cherokees either adapted Christianity to their own needs or rejected it as inimical to their identity.

The Cherokees: A Population History is the first full-length demographic study of an American Indian group from the protohistorical period to the present. Thornton shows the effects of disease, warfare, genocide, miscegenation, removal and relocation, and destruction of traditional lifeways on the Cherokees. He discusses their mysterious origins, their first contact with Europeans (prob-ably in 1540), and their fluctuation in population during the eighteenth century, when the Old World brought them smallpox. The toll taken by massive relocations in the following century, most notably the removal of the Cherokees from the Southeast to In-dian Territory, and by warfare, predating the American Revolution and including the Civil War, also enters into Thornton's calculations. He goes on to measure the resurgence of the Cherokees in the twentieth century, focusing on such population centers as North Carolina, Oklahoma, and California.

Of the Five Civilized Tribes of Indians the Cherokees were early recognized as the greatest and the most civilized. Indeed, between 1540 and 1906 they reached a higher peak of civilization than any other North American Indian tribe. They invented a syllabary and developed an intricate government, including a system of courts of law. They published their own newspaper in both Cherokee and English and became noted as orators and statesmen. At the beginning the Cherokees’ conquest of civilization was agonizingly slow and uncertain. Warlords of the southern Appalachian Highlands, they were loath to expend their energies elsewhere. In the words of a British officer, "They are like the Devil’s pigg, they will neither lead nor drive." But, led or driven, the warlike and willful Cherokees, lingering in the Stone Age by choice at the turn of the eighteenth century, were forced by circumstances to transfer their concentration on war to problems posed by the white man. To cope with these unwelcome problems, they had to turn from the conquests of war to the conquest of civilization.

Discusses the history of the Cherokee Indians, including origins, contact with Europeans, and their struggle to survive into the twenty-first century.

A detailed and accurate recording of the development of the Brainerd Mission near Chattanooga.

This is a lively effort to pierce the thick fog of Falsehood, calumny, ignorance, and legend surrounding the four years Sam Houston spent among the Cherokees in what is now northeastern Oklahoma, the broken years in Tennessee, and his advent in Texas on the eve of the War for Independence.–Virginia Quarterly Review

In this newly researched and synthesized history of the Cherokees, Hoig traces the displacement of the tribe and the Trail of Tears, the great trauma of the Civil War, the destruction of tribal autonomy, and the Cherokee people's phoenix-like rise in political and social stature during the twentieth century.

In 1857 James Anderson Slover rode into Indian Territory as the first Southern Baptist missionary to the Cherokee Nation. As the Civil War began to divide the Cherokees along with the rest of the nation, Slover was caught up in one of the most intense dramas of his century. As a farmer, teacher, preacher and evangelist, observer of the Mexican War and the Civil War, contemporary commentator on slavery, and California pioneer, Slover played a small role in changing the face of the nation. It was in 1907, a year after he helped build shelters for people left homeless by the great San Francisco earthquake, that he began composing a record of his eventful life. The resulting book is a wonderful gift to any reader curious about the life and culture of nineteenth-century America. Slover tells of flatboating down rivers from Tennessee to Arkansas, "skedaddling" from the Union army in Indian Territory, and working his way up the West Coast to Oregon, preaching the gospel as he went and carving a new life for himself and his family time after time. His autobiography, encompassing eighty-three years of his life and spanning most of a century, gives us a vivid picture of a lost world and of how it was experienced by an ordinary man in extraordinary times.