Cherokees of the Smoky Mountains

A Little Band that Has Stood Against the White Tide for Three Hundred Years

De: Horace Kephart

Narrado por: Janice Kephart

The text relates the powerful and dramatic history of the Smoky Mountain Cherokees, who for 40,000 years thrived in the difficult terrain of the Great Smoky Mountains and its surrounding regions areas of what is now Kentucky, Ohio, West Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama. With a constitution, organized government, written language, and no economic debt, the Cherokees sought to live in relative peace. However, President Jackson and the state of Georgia thought differently, forcing the Cherokees and their devoted Chief John Ross to leave their homeland and be removed to Oklahoma in the Trail of Tears of 1837.

Much political tension was exacerbated by the fact that a key Supreme Court ruling by Chief Justice John Marshall made clear that Georgian land grabbing of Cherokee lands was illegal. This story, and how one Cherokee Chief was sacrificed to retain a small piece of Cherokee land in the southwest corner of North Carolina, known today as Qualla Boundary, is told with passion, empathy, and historical accuracy.

Horace Kephart is also the author of Our Southern Highlanders, Camping and Woodcraft, and Smoky Mountain Magic, and the creator of the Kephart knife. Mount Kephart, a 6,217 foot peak just northwest of Qualla Boundary, was chosen by Kephart and designated in his lifetime. He was instrumental in the founding of the Great Smoky National Park. This version of Cherokees of the Smoky Mountains was revised by Kephart's great granddaughter, Janice Kephart, a spoken word artist and subject matter expert who served as a 9/11 Commission counsel. Janice added context for some commentary within the text, but left the writing mostly as is. Janice also added historical photographs from the Hunter Library Horace Kephart Archive at Western Carolina University and other libraries, as well as a new foreword and introduction.

©1936 Laura Mack Kephart (P)2023 Janice Kephart

This scope is narrow

This scope of this book is very narrow. It does not really cover the daily life of the Cherokee in an engaging or thorough way and mostly focuses on land conflicts and extirpation. While that is interesting, it wasn’t the hoped for content. It is an emotional and tragic dislocation, but you don’t get to know the Cherokee so it isn’t gripping as it should be. Narrator is a granddaughter of author which is very cool, but narration was not as strong as it could have been. Overall, flat story read in a way that doesn’t make it more compelling.