The Long, Bitter Trail

June 28, 1993
Wallace, who won a Bancroft Prize in 1978 for Rockdale: The Growth of an American Village , turns to Native American history in this retelling of the story of the Trail of Tears. This refers to the forced removal in the 1830s of thousands of Indians, particularly the Cherokee and the Choctaw, from the American east to west of the Mississippi River. The author expands his focus to examine the relocation of numerous Indian groups. Central to the story is Andrew Jackson, who assumed the presidency confronted with a government divided over the question of Indian removal and who soon became one of its major proponents. Responses of the Natives ranged from legal action and ultimate resignation on the part of some to warfare on the part of the Seminole. In a concluding chapter, Wallace shows how the effects of removal continue to the present day. All of this is told in a straightforward manner. Although he points to certain well-known white historians who give short shrift to this history, he overstates the uniqueness of his study. While it is a good introduction to the topic, this volume is far from the only modern historical treatment. Two documentary appendixes will be helpful to readers new to the subject.

December 1, 1993
YA-The Indian Removal Act of 1830 summarily dismissed the rights of Native Americans to their homelands east of the Mississippi and mandated their relocation to the wilds of the Oklahoma plains. The infamous Trail of Tears is indeed a riveting tale of political expediency, greed, and sorrow. In this book, Wallace recounts in a balanced and clear manner the influences that gave rise to a governmental policy that regulated the disenfranchisement of Native peoples within American boundaries. The author carefully traces the movement and activities of the Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles through the Trail of Tears to their eventual destinations and fortunes. While almost scholarly in tone, the calm and precise narrative remains arresting because of the strength of its subject matter.-Carol Beall, Immanuel Christian School, Springfield, VA

July 1, 1993
The Indians, not Jackson, are the chief focus of this excellent account of the five "civilized tribes" being forced west with the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Wallace succinctly traces the evolution of the government's Indian policies from colonial days to this removal. It was Jackson's actions--or lack of them--that forced the westward migration. Wallace paints an uncomplimentary picture of a man driven by politics, land hunger, and profit who justified his ambitions as a desire to save the Indians from extinction. Wallace's work compares favorably with Ronald N. Satz's critical study, American Indian Policy in the Jacksonian Era (1975), and contrasts sharply with Francis Paul Prucha's favorable treatment in The Great Father: The United States and the American Indian (Univ. of Nebraska Pr ., 1984. 2 vols). This sobering study is essential for people wanting a terse description of the Indians' trek over the "Long, Bitter Trail."-- Richard Hedlund, Ashland Community Coll., Ky.

Copyright 1993 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 1993
%% This is a multi-book review: SEE also the title "Prisoners without Trial." %% Short, pithy studies inaugurate a new series vetted by Eric Foner, the historian of the Reconstruction era.What mitigations can be advanced for the dispossession of the Five Civilized Tribes of Georgia and Alabama, or for the expropriation and incarceration of Japanese Americans a century later? Practically none, but perspectives on the origins of these shameful chapters in American history can at least admonish the future. Each event united strands of prejudice, panic in times of war, and outright avarice--and the victims received but slivers of compensation for their losses. The Japanese immigrants had been on the receiving end of the Hearst yellow press or of discriminatory laws for years before FDR caved in to army demands, based on the phantoms of sabotage, to uproot about 120,000 people as potential fifth columnists and park them in concentration camps. As noted by Daniels, author of several full-length studies of the affair, mid-level zealots, in the name of "military necessity," pushed a vacillating general (DeWitt) into making the decision. Restitution came only in 1988, and though it's hard to believe it could happen again, Daniels remains wary.The Indian removals of the 1830s, on the other hand, were so complete that they can't possibly happen again. A modus vivendi seemed to have settled in: Cherokee John Ross, for example, could barely be differentiated from the surrounding society. He owned slaves and ran a plantation--no saint by modern lights--but as Wallace aptly concludes, "it was not the savagery' of the Indians that whites dreaded; it was their civilization.'" Weaving ethnographic issues into his story, especially as perceived and written about by the not widely known Lewis Cass, the craggy-faced founder of Michigan and war secretary who carried out the removals, the author succinctly records the pressures that built up to the U.S. government's steps, some of pure chicanery, to have done with the southern Indians once and for all, some of whom (the Seminoles) were implacably hostile.Knowledgeable and well-written surveys both, these books of Daniels and Wallace presage good omens for this series, not every title of which will be an account of tragedy and injustice ((Reviewed July 1993))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1993, American Library Association.)