Creek Mary's Blood Author:Dee Brown Dee Brown's first novel in more than ten years is a powerful, beautifully wrought and ultimately tragic saga about four generations of American Indian life. Against a background of the Revolutionary War period in Georgia and the Carolinas, the forced "removal" west of the Mississippi in the 1830s and life on the Great Plains during the second h... more »alf of the 19th century, Brown traces the life of one family, which over the stormy decades and through intermarriage forged roots in the Creek, Cherokee, and Sioux nations.
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 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 Georgia from General Oglethorpe to the white trader she married. As the colonists usurped the Creek hunting grounds, she fled the isolated village of Okelogee and married again, the Cherokee Long Warrior. From these 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 Georgia homeland; and her full-blood son, Talasi, whose progeny roamed the West as far as Santa 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.
The characters and events of Dee Brown's unforgettable novel are part of our own vilent past: Tecumseh, Andrew Jackson, Teddy Roosevelt, the great chiefs Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, the broken treaties and endless lies of rapacious settlers and politicians. But it is Brown's inspired storytelling and fictional characters -- Creek Mary and her "blood," especially old Dane who, in 1905, tells a newspaperman the story of his indomitable grandmother and her far-flung family -- that elevate "Creek Mary's Blood" to the level of an American epic.« 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.