Grant Foreman - Böcker

This pioneering work is about the traders, trappers, and explorers in the vast area that would become Oklahoma, Texas, Missouri, Arkansas, New Mexico, Kansas, and Colorado. Foreman describes the early explorations of the French and Spanish in the Louisiana Territory and often focuses on the junction of the Verdigris, Grand, and Arkansas rivers, known as the Three Forks, a trading and military center from which the conquest of a large part of the American Southwest was achieved. Viewed in historical perspective are the business enterprises of A. P. Chouteau and others; treaties with the Indians and warfare between the Cherokees and Osage; massacres and disease epidemics; garrison life at Fort Gibson and the visits of writer Washington Irving and painter George Catlin; expeditions into the Southwest led by Colonel Henry Dodge, Captain Benjamin de Bonneville, and others; Sam Houston's sojourn in Indian country; and warfare on the Texas border.

Sequoyah is widely celebrated as an unlettered Cherokee Indian who, entirely from the resources of his own brilliant mind, endowed his whole tribe with learning-the only man in history to conceive and perfect in its entirety an alphabet or syllabary. Soon after 1800, Sequoyah began to realize the magic of writing. He and other Indians of the time, who occasionally saw samples of writing, called these mysterious pages the white man's ""talking leaf."" He experimented aimlessly at first, but gradually his conception took practical shape. It was slow and laborious work for an untutored Cherokee. Finally, after twelve years of labor and discouragement, he completed his syllabary, composed of eighty-five symbols, each representing a sound in the Cherokee language. The simplicity of the syllabary and its easy adaptability to the speech and thought of his people enabled them to master it in a few days. The Cherokee nation was made practically literate within a few months.

It is unlikely that any single book or document will ever earn a more firmly-fixed position of respect and authority than this distinguished volume by Grant Foreman. Originally published in 1932, on the date of the hundredth anniversary of the arrival in Oklahoma of the first Indians as a result of the United States government's relocation of the Five Civilized Tribes, Indian Removal remains today the definitive book in its field.The forcible uprooting and expulsion of the 60,000 Indians comprising the Five Civilized Tribes, including the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, Cherokee, and Seminole, unfolded a story without parallel in the history of the United States. For more than a decade thousands of tragedies and experiences of absorbing interest marked the removal over the ""Trail of Tears,"" but there were no chroniclers at hand to record them. Only occasionally did the tragedy and pathos of some phase of this history-making undertaking beguile a sympathetic officer to turn from routine and write a line or a paragraph of comment.From fragments in thousands of manuscripts and in official and unofficial reports Grant Foreman gleaned the materials for this book to provide readers with an unbiased day-by-day recital of events.

In 1841 U.S. government authorities sent Major Ethan Allen Hitchcock to Indian Territory to investigate numerous charges of fraud and profiteering by various contractors dealing with the Cherokee, Creek, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw Indians, who had been removed from the South during the last decade. Hitchcock's report, filed after four months of travel, exposed such a high level of graft and corruption that his investigation was suppressed and never brought to the attention of Congress.Hitchcock kept nine personal diaries of his travels and observations, however, and they reveal much historic and ethnographic information on Indian life in Indian Territory. He observes how the Indians were adjusting alter removal and includes many details on their customs, beliefs, culture, religion, ceremonies, amusements, industry, tribal councils, and government. To aid the modern reader, editor Grant Foreman provides an introduction and annotations, and Michael D. Green, in his foreword, explains the politics behind Hitchcock's mission to Indian Territory and his accomplishments in advancing ethnographic knowledge.

In Indian Justice, Grant Foreman presents John Howard Payne's first-hand account of the trial of Archilla Smith, a Cherokee charged with the murder of John MacIntosh in the fall of 1839. The Cherokee Supreme Court at Tahlequah (in present-day Oklahoma) found Smith guilty and sentenced him to die.Occurring immediately after the Cherokee Removal to lands west of the Mississippi River, the trial involved people on both sides of the bitter factional controversies then raging in the Cherokee Nation. Payne's account of this important Indian case first appeared in two installments in the New York Journal of Commerce in 1841.In his foreword to this new edition, Rennard Strickland places the case in historical and contemporary context, exploring the evolution of tribal court systems and Indian justice over the past century and a half.