Blood Moon: An American Epic Of War And Splendor In The Cherokee Nation, by John Sedgwick

This book is a bit disappointing, it must be admitted. While the subtitle of the book promises a tale of war and splendor, we get precious little of either here, far less than we would want to see. As is the case with most books about the Cherokee, there is a huge amount of focus on the Trail of Tears, and on the struggle between the Treaty Party led by Major Ridge and his family and those who were in thrall to John Ross, whom the author comments is a slippery and deceitful and corrupt and untrustworthy sort of person who nonetheless made the Cherokee Nation his own domain for decades before bequeathing a corrupt system to others to rule more or less corruptly after him. We only get a brief bit of information about the American Civil War, though, where the Cherokee were divided, and while I have read elsewhere about the suffering faced by Ross’ group as they trudged into Kansas, the book portrays him as spending a great deal of the war in Washington DC trying to appease the federal establishment into preserving his gravy train of subsidies and payments to himself and his cronies.

This book is a bit over 400 pages in length, and is divided into 4 parts and roughly 35 or so chapters. After a list of maps and an introduction, the first part of the book details the fateful encounter of the Cherokee with American settlers who were moving into the backcountry of Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, and Kentucky for settlement, and discusses the family background of Major Ridge and John Ross, those fateful antagonists for control of the Cherokee, as well as the blood law of revenge that kept the Cherokee in a state of internal turmoil during times when their hold over vast hunting grounds was coming under serious difficulty. The second part of the book explores the efforts of the Cherokee to obtain literacy in their language and to develop into what their white neighbors would recognize as civilization even as the greed of Georgians and others led to desperate efforts to maintain their land via favorable Supreme Court decisions as well as abandonment of Ridge’s party to the inevitable in the Treaty of New Echota, after which came the suffering of the Trail of Tears. The third part of the book looks at the vengeance and destruction that took place in and around the Indian territory after removal as three different groups–the Treaty Party led by the Ridges and their relatives and supporters, those who supported John Ross, and the early settlers who moved to the area before removal was forced–for leadership of the Cherokee people. Included in this section is also a chapter that shows Ross as a nearly sixty year old man courting a teenage Quaker young woman he found himself attracted to and who he married when she turned eighteen. The fourth and final part of the book discusses the further division and suffering of the Cherokee Nation during the Civil War and the economic disaster that followed, as well as the efforts of a lone ethnographer to capture what remained of Cherokee traditions, while the epilogue shows the continued turmoil and corruption within the politics of the Cherokee Nation. The end of the book follows with acknowledgements, notes, a selected bibliography, credits, and an index.

Although the Cherokee deserve a great deal of praise for their ability to come up with a syllabary for their own language and to preserve their culture in the face of disastrous changes, the author has a great deal to criticize them for as a result of their seeming lack of attention to their history and their comfort in myths and legends and self-deception about the ways of this world. It is indeed true that given the limited numbers of Cherokee that there was no way that the nation was going to be able to withstand the difficulties of American settlement onto their lands, and this fundamental demographic reality should have led the Cherokee to make the best deals possible, but they moved between cessions which were often obtained under coercive conditions with large amounts of bribery and a steadfast and unsuccessful attempt to use American courts as a way of preserving their status as an independent nation, which was never something that was going to be allowed. This book has a tragic sense that makes no one look good, which is perhaps as true to life as one might expect with these sorts of histories. The sordid tale of tribal politics, of people seeking to use power corruptly, and to seek to benefit themselves in whatever they do, is the tale of a great deal of human efforts and endeavors, and it is little surprise to see such tendencies in full display even among the refugees of the catastrophe of the Trail of Tears.