Blood Moon: An American Epic of War and Splendor in the Cherokee Nation by John Sedgwick

For generations, Americans have been amazed and impressed with how quickly and thoroughly many Cherokee people assimilated into the American mainstream. That John Ridge, of the Wild Potato Clan in North Georgia, for example, not only graduated at the top of his class at the Foreign Mission School in Cornwall, Connecticut, in 1824, but married the headmaster’s daughter, is emblematic. The outrage of the locals, over what they viewed as miscegenation, resulted in the closing of the school. Recent non-fiction and fiction books by Dr. Tiya Miles of Harvard have brought renewed attention to the Cherokee plantations that bought and worked African-American slaves. Cherokee scholars and readers have been fascinated by the rivalry between the two most powerful Cherokee leaders during the period leading up to the Trail of Tears which President Andrew Jackson implemented in 1938 despite the U.S. Supreme Court prohibiting it. The Ridge family largely cooperated with the move to Oklahoma while John