The Trail of Tears: The Story of the Cherokee Removal

by Dan Elish, Milton Meltzer

Among the authors of this highly acclaimed series are Laura Ingalls Wilder Award winner Milton Meltzer, Coretta Scott King Award winner James Haskins and noted author Raymond Bial. The series itself focuses on major population shifts in America and the driving forces behind them. The authors' vivid accounts are given additional immediacy with the inclusion of excerpts from diaries, newspaper articles and letters.

Genres: History

112 pages, Library Binding

First published September 1, 2001

About the author

Dan Elish is the author of eleven novels, including the upcoming KING OF BROADWAY (Olympia Press, 2025). Dan's other books include THE WORLDWIDE DESSERT CONTEST (Orchard Books and Bantam), THE SCHOOL FOR THE INSANELY GIFTED (Harpers), NINE WIVES (for grown-up types/St. Martins), and BORN TOO SHORT (S&S) which won a 2004 International Reading Association Students’ Choice Award for young adult literature.

Dan also writes musicals - many for children (music and lyrics) - but also the script (with Robert Horn) to the musical 13 which played at the Mark Taper Forum and won the 2007 Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for best production; the show moved to Broadway in 2008 and is now a feature on Netflix, named one of the best ten films of 2022 by Variety. Dan is also the book writer and co-lyricist of THE EVOLUTION OF MANN which played at the Cell Theater in NYC in 2018.

Dan has also written scripts for TV (notably CYBERCHASE and THE WONDER PETS), and has won scholarships and fellowships to The Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences. He was a member of the BMI workshop and a current member of the Dramatists Guild.

Dan lives in New York City with his wife and two children.

Reviews

[Marilyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I learned more about the Cherokees than I knew before. I always imagine them with those loin cloths and handsome bodies. Did you know some Cherokees owned slaves? Did you know that many quickly took to white man ways? I respect them and wish our forefathers had been more fair and kind.

[Cheryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating and concise introduction to the topic for youth. I learned a lot, but clearly a lot was left out (for example mention of "Sooners" which is still a term of pride here in OK).

"'Let the Indians forget their own languages... and learn ours, which will at once open to them the whole field of every kind of useful knowledge....'" Jedidiah Morse, 1822.

"Other native tribes had already met a similar fate. The Choctaws and Chickasaws have been forced to move West, paving the way with their own suffering and deaths. Members of the Creek had resisted only to be defeated in battle. Other Creeks had been persuaded to help ferret out the Seminoles who still maintained a stronghold in Florida swamps. Less fortunate Seminoles were already being sent by boat to the Arkansas territory."

" Out of the 16,000 cherokees who left the east, at least 4,000 didn't live to see their new homeland. With all the undocumented deaths in the stockades, some scholars put the number closer to 8,000." Also, at least 1,00o were Black, apparently mostly slaves of the Cherokee.

"By all accounts blacks were generally treated more humanely within the Cherokee Nation than they were on farms and plantations elsewhere in the South.... In fact, by 1835 a strong movement was afoot to emancipate the slaves and make them Cherokee citizens."

Includes sources bibliography, 'for further reading,' and index. Insufficient illustration credit - by whom is the cover painting?