Rating: 
Summary: Ehle sheds light on an important part of American history.
Review: "Trail of Tears," by John Ehle, is a beautifully written bookwhich educates and entertains, uplifts and depresses, frustrates and astonishes. The reader becomes painfully aware that the history we were taught in school virtually ignored an important part of the American story. The true nature of the Cherokee is exposed and examined through Ehle's obviously dedicated research, while throughout the book, the tone is less that of a documentary, and more that of a story being told, gripping the listener with each new development. Heroes are exposed as miscreants, and statesmen as traitors to principles we all hold dear. The reader comes to realize just how close the Cherokee came to having an entirely different destiny than the one to which they finally succumbed, and becomes intimately acquainted with the characters and causes involved therein. The book is a fast read, an eye-opener, and contains a story that all people, and especially all Americans, should know and pass on for generations to come.
Rating:
Summary: A Terrible Journey
Review: After reading this book for a college class, my heart just broke for the Native American Indians and how they were treated, assulted, and driven off their land. They walked that long winding trail and died by the thousands. Families were separated, divided, and death took a lot of the natives. This book is very informative containing the facts and details of the early history and leading up to to the removal of the Indians. the book grabs you and it seems to put you right there as it unfolds.
Rating: 
Summary: One of several works to balance the whole story
Review: As much as we'd like to pat ourselves on the back these days by saying we are the nation that is holding up the true ideals of civilization, we should always be aware that this wasn't always the case. While I believe we are the best nation on earth, we had our growing pains as much as any other group of people. Slavery is a permanent black eye. And while we condemn Sadaam Hussein for killing his own people, our country has to remember that at one time doing everything we could to eliminate the people who were here before the Caucasians was virtually government policy. "The Trail of Tears" is only one of these incidents. History is loaded with them, including the government policy to almost make the American bison extinct, for the sole purpose of removing the food source of native Americans. "The Trail of Tears" deals with the "relocation" of the Cherokee people. No, it is not the definitive story. However, it is well researched, and presents one point of view. It is recommended that this work be read, but others also, to get a well-rounded view of a piece of history that more Americans should be aware of.
Rating:
Summary: Death of a Nation
Review: Ehle's has a unique, fast paced, style of laying out the facts. This is an intense, no holds barred look at the end of the Cherokee Nation, most of which existed in present-day Northwest Georgia. I do not recommend this work as an introduction to the Trail of Tears. You should have a good grasp of the people and events leading to North Georgia's Trail of Tears before attempting to read the book since Ehle frequently does not introduce minor characters, and does not spend much time introducing the major characters and events. The book is well researched but controversial, since there are essentially two sides to the story, that of Major Ridge and that of John Ross. This gives a balanced presentation of both sides, although I suspect that fans of Major Ridge may disagree.
Rating:
Summary: Historical story of the Ridge Family
Review: I found this book more of the history of the Ridge family. It wasn't as good as I had hope,but it did tell the story of what lead to the 'Trail of Tears'. I wish it also had more on Ross effort in the process. It is a good companion book for "The Cherokee" by Grace Steele Woodward. With both books you can get a greater feeling for what happen. I'm now looking for one about John Ross side of it. I have to give it a 4 star rating.
Rating: 
Summary: Insightful
Review: I liked the book - even though it did become slow-paced at times.
The historical content was insightful and really applied to many other races apart from the Native Americans.
Many people would today want to revert to the way it was, but society has certainly prevented us from doing that - but what can we learn, or keep, that existed in those days?
Rating:
Summary: The most accessible book on the subject
Review: I've read every book on the Trail of Tears, and this one is the absolute best introduction and overview. Most books on the subject romanticize the travails of the Cherokee (thus perpetrating the "noble savage" iconography of the 19th century), or gloss over the non PC parts (such as Cherokee slaveholding) but Ehle is not afraid to offer an insightful and comphrehensive overview of the early 19th century Cherokee Nation.
This book is written in an extremely accessible style: more like a novel than an academic history, and thus can be enjoyed by just about anyone. It offers valuable information about the political turmoil, in the US and in the Cherokee Nation, that surrounded removal.
Rating:
Summary: Historically Relevant, Dry Reading
Review: John Ehle's Trail of Tears is definitely historically relevant, but I found it to be very dry reading. The book is filled with an abundance of facts, dates, and sources and will be a wonderful selection if you enjoyed your college history textbook. This is a book to learn facts from, not to enjoy an emotionally jarring narrative. If you are looking for a truely enjoyable narrative of Native American life that is historically accurate yet fills in the unknown blanks with reputable intuitiveness, I suggest James Alexander Thom's Panther in the Sky. Trail of Tears would make an excellent source for research.
Rating: 
Summary: Uneven at best...
Review: The book has a few strong points that make it worth reading: it introduces detailed information about the the Ross and Ridge families, and provides an excellent portrait of Andrew Jackson's unstinting animosity towards the Cherokees--with much background material about Georgia's unfailing commitment to rob the Indians and dispossess them of their lands. The book also does a good job of describing the different ways that the Cherokees had adopted elements of Anglo culture.
The book is broken down into phases:
First, it describes the nascent conflict between whites and Cherokees in the 1790's along with the ways that Cherokee culture had been impacted by Anglo culture. Second, it introduces the upbringing of the Ridges and Rosses, and how they led to the development of a Cherokee government and a Cherokee lobby in Washington. Third, it describes the legal maneuvering that led to the Treaty of New Echota, which forced the Cherokees to give up their ancestral lands for new territory in Eastern Oklahoma. Fourth, it briefly describes the Trail of Tears and the internecine war that occurred between pro-treaty and anti-treaty forces once the Cherokees reached Oklahoma.
The subtitle of the book is misleading and inaccurate in the extreme: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation leaves readers with the impression that after the Civil War everything just withered. Nothing could be further from the truth: check www.cherokee.org and see that the nation is vital, vibrant, dedicated to the preservation of Cherokee language and culture, and a powerful force for the continued welfare of Cherokees.
Ehle perpetrates the myth that after Indian tribes were dispossessed, they were ruined or otherwise destroyed, when in fact Indians throughout the Americas have in large part retained huge swaths of their cultural and political identity.
The book's most glaring flaw is its failure to confront the central issue of U.S. Indian policy, which was to take away their land and means of subsistence. Ehle couches the Cherokee problem as a conflict between Ridge and Ross, between pro-treaty and anti-treaty forces, when in fact it was a conflict between indigenous peoples and a powerful invader who robbed them of their land. Rather than focusing on the Anglo traditions and culture that brought and propagated slavery in the Americas, Ehle focuses on the "sin" of the Cherokees for themselves holding slaves. The division of Cherokees in the Civil War and the opposition of traditional Cherokees to slaveholding is either ignored or casually dealt with.
Other reviewers have commented on the difficulty of the book's writing style: lots of letters and documents that, however interesting, are neither interpreted nor fit into a particular scheme.
The book's other major failing is its strategy of taking the legal and political problems of the Cherokees and interpreting them as intertribal conflicts. It seems never to occur to Ehle that the Cherokees faced the same problems as every other Indian tribe, and that those problems were instigated by the designs of a hostile, powerful, and unscrupulous invader. This book will leave you thinking that the Cherokees were politically inept, internal squabblers, when in reality the U.S. government's policy of divide and conquer was used as effectively two hundred years ago as it is today.
In his haste to represent John Ross as the false prophet who led his people to ruin, Ehle makes no mention of the incredible successes Ross achieved in his legal maneuvering against the state of Georgia, or of his adroit lobbying in Washington. In the end Ross had no solution other than delay and maneuver, but he is perhaps the only example in early U.S. history of an Indian leader successfully fending off the government's incursions by words, lobbying, and lawsuits. To my mind this is worthy of great praise and recognition, though in the end it failed. Ehle seems incapable of praising anyone who fought to the bitter end against removal.
It is also incomprehensible that a history of the Cherokees would not mention Worcester v. Georgia, and give only cursory treatment of The Cherokee Nation v. the State of Georgia. Worcester was the decision that led Andrew Jackson to refuse to enforce the supreme law of the land. A discussion about Jackson's enmity towards the Cherokee, and an analysis of the actions of the real cretin on the block, the state of Georgia, would have given this book at least a tincture of balance and credibility.
Rating: 
Summary: Dissappointing, skewed, cumbersome reading
Review: The title "Trail of Tears" brings to mind a simple, dramatic outline. Cherokees adapt to the coming of white men by borrowing "civilized arts," but in the end are cruelly and uncivilly displaced from their homes to reservations in the West. This book does tell that trajedy. But Ehle gives more of a social and sometimes anthropological history, not a melodrama or sermon. He describes Cherokee customs, tells the story of two leading Cherokee families, and also offers a series of snapshots of contemporary American culture (or cultures): frontiermen and missionary, statesmen and black slave. Both Indians and whites come across as more complex and varied than any derivative of either the John Wayne or the Noble Savage stereotype: Ehle is a historian, not a historicist, and allows facts, events, and letters to speak for themselves without undue manipulation. The details he selects are usually interesting, and my net impression is of meeting real human beings. The contrast between missionaries and full-blooded Cherokees could easily descend to hagiography or satire, but Ehle manages instead to show something of the nobility, and the blindness, on both sides of that particular conflict. Georgia legislators and frontiersmen come across a bit more negatively, but appear to have no one to blame for that but themselves. Ehle does not press the point, but there is a lot of food for thought and fruitful national soul-searching here. author, Jesus and the Religions of Man
|
