Creek Mary's Blood Author:Dee Brown The proud and beautiful Creek Mary, daughter of a Muskogee chief, was the matriarch of a family of warriors, hunters, traders, and even some Christian converts. Staunch husbands and courageous wives, they fought in the American Revolution, the War of 1812, on both sides of the Civil War, and against the hated Bluecoats - the army that inexorably... more » decimated their numbers and stole their land, ostensibly in the name of progress and civilization, but in reality at the bidding of inexhaustible greed and avarice of the white invaders. Creek Mary charmed all the male colonists of GA from Gen. Oglethorpe to the white trader she married. As the colonists usurped the Creek hunting grounds, she fled to the isolated village of Okelogee and married again. From those two marriages, emerged the twin branches of her family: the half-blood son, Opothle, and his children, who were content to live in the territory of the Cherokee Nation after being evicted from their GA home-
land; and her full-blood son, Talasi, whose progeny roamed the West as far as Sante Fe, married into the wild Cheyenne, fought the white man on the Great Plains at the Little Big Horn, fled to Canada, and finally, except for a few survivors, were massacred at a creek called Wounded Knee.« less
I thought this book was a little slow moving when I started it. It reads like a history book sometimes. However, I stuck with it and was absolutely astounded. I thought I knew the history of the Trail of Tears, but this book went into the details of what the Cherokee people had done to "settle" their land and create their own government before Andrew Jackson signed their removal orders. I've since seen a documentary of the same. This should be mandatory reading for high school English or history classes. Americans should be required to know what the Native peoples in this continent went through in the name of western expansion. I could not put the book down and I recommend this to anyone who wants to learn the realities the Native American faced when this country was established.