John Rollin Ridge: His Life and Works

by James W. Parins

John Rollin Ridge is the first full-length biography of a Cherokee whose best revenge was in writing well. A cross between Lord Byron, the romantic poet who made things happen, and Joaquin Murieta, the legendary bandit he would immortalize, John Rollin Ridge was a controversial, celebrated, and self-cast exile. Ridge was born to a prominent Cherokee Indian family in 1827, a tumultuous and violent time when the state of Georgia was trying to impose its sovereignty on the Cherokee Nation and whites were pressing against its borders. James W. Parins places Ridge in the circle of his family and recreates the circumstances surrounding the assassination of his father (before his eyes) and his grandfather and uncle by rival Cherokees, led by John Ross. Eventful chapters portray the boy’s flight with his mother and her family to Arkansas, his classical education there, his killing of a Ross loyalist and subsequent exile in California during the gold rush, his talent as a romantic poet and author, and his career as a journalist. To the end of his life, Ridge advocated the Cherokees’ assimilation into white society.

262 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

Reviews

[Walter Knapp · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although a mixed-blood Cherokee born in Georgia prior to the removal, his life was one of a classically educated gentleman of the mid-nineteenth century with one exception. The black cloud of revenge tormented him since he was twelve years old after witnessing the murder of his father, John Ridge, a prominent leader of the Cherokee Nation.
Fearing for the family's safety, his mother moved from Indian Country (Oklahoma) to Arkansas where Rollin completed his education and married a white girl. They eventually moved back to their homestead and tried to make a life there, but a run-in with David Kell, a man he suspected was one of his father's murderers, he killed him. Believing he would not get a fair trial in the Nation, he struck out for California and the goldfields.
Failing as a miner, he took to writing and edited some of the local newspapers. Here, I believe, he shows some of his strongest beliefs and conflicts. He wrote about the need for Indian assimilation, yet he was a strong supporter of the idea of an all Indian state. He believed the Indians originally from east of the Mississippi were equal to whites, but that blacks and California Indians were inferior.

Rollin, a slaveholder, was a patriot, a supporter of Stephen Douglas and believed in the preservation of the Union, but was completely anti-Lincoln. Eventually turned to support the Confederacy and held to the notion that abolitionists were the cause of the Civil War. It was even likely he was a member of the secret society known as "The Knights of the Golden Circle."
His one last chance to become a leader of the Cherokee Nation came after the war when he leads the Southern delegation of Cherokees in Washington to draft a new treaty. Their position was that the tribe could no longer live as one group and needed to be separated. They thought they had won, but it was not to be. Ridge died a year later at age forty, a loss to the literary world.
James Parins does an excellent job describing the life and works of Rollin and compares his poetry favorably to that of the more famous poets of the time. Rollin's wife, Elizabeth, published a collection of his poems in 1868, but it was not a complete work, and those are all that remain. I highly recommend the book as well as the publication of his poems.