director, for hillary clinton jennifer shares her thoughts on how future women lead reverse success in dear mad m president. the world of war craft chronicle volume three next, followed by strength finder 2.0 but tomoand wrapping up our look at some of the books from the wall street journal best seller list is the story of jesus by jane wariner some of these authors have appeared on booktv you can watch them on our website, booktv.org. >> please be sure to turn off all of your noise-making items on you as we have c-span here

tonight and we don't want to be rude coast to coast. this author has made presentations made possible by the foundation and trustees are here tonight. we want to thank them for bringing authors. tonight mr. cedric will discuss book. mr. sedgwick's story is ethic and so it is. john is a novelist, biographer, best-selling author of 13 books. hamilton and burr. two novelties and written publications like newsweek, vanity fair, atlantic. please join me in welcoming john

sedgwick. >> how about that, i haven't been to georgia since i was researching my book? now i come back and i feel like the whole mission is complete. nice to see you out there and quite overjoyed for seeing the reception of the atlanta georgia constitution to my book. i don't know how many people saw that. i hope everyone did. quite a nice review. yeah, it's a thrill to be here. you know, such an interesting thing when you're a writer, i live in brooklyn, hold up in my house for like years it seems like going through documents all by myself and then suddenly the book is out and i have to talk to people and get out into the

world and make reasonable presentation with myself and i feel sort of like a hermit who has emerged to find that everybody is ready to party and -- [laughter] >> and anyway, i will do whatever i can to live up to this. i have to say also that i'm extremely grateful to all of you for having me down here after what i wrote about georgia. i don't know. [laughter] >> how many of you have seen this and how many would be willing to see this after what i say. but georgia, i have to warn you, does not come across all that well in my story and i think i hope you brace this. for this fact, we can blame one individual and one individual only, a man with unusual man of

uncle bennie hart. i don't think that means anything to any of you. uncle bennie was the first man in georgia to discussion cover gold in 1829 and scratching tat soil. saw something that sparkled yellow, got very excited and decided that he was going to lease that property and mine the gold. of course, he didn't own it. he had to lease it to baptist minister who by the name of reverend robert obar. thought when uncle bennie wanted to mine this land to look for gold that that was the silliest thing he had ever heard and he would be delighted to lease the property because he was convinced there was no gold there. well, he starts mining and sure enough there is gold and the reverend robert obarr is very upset that he has leaked

extremely valuable property to uncle bennie for a song and he tries to get the lease back and they start scrap lg, the two of them and obarr's mother get into the act and starts pounding him with rocks. before you know it, you have a major skirmish on your hand. the lease held and uncle bennie was able to come away with a small fortune, in the process revealed something about the georgian spirit that i suspect is not combined to georgians which is that people go crazy for gold and people do that anywhere and they did it in georgia and what happened in georgia was that once they learned that the gold was there, they discovered the second thing that was important about this which was the gold was there on cherokee land.

at the time georgia and its property overlapped with what was the cherokee nation and the georgians was so keen to get the gold that they ignored the fact that the georgians -- that cherokee nation was by common understanding a sovereign nation independent of georgia law. well, the governor of georgia didn't see it this way and he set forth a bunch of 550 surveyors to divide up the portion of the cherokee nation that fell on georgia soil into sections and those sections were divided into divisions and those divisions were divided into 160-acre lots, they took chips that represented each of those lots and put them in a big barrel on one side and had all of the georgians who we wanted to claim those lots, put their names in another barrel and these two bens rolled and this was the georgia land lottery of

1832 and what happened was that, of course, they matched them up and the people who -- a name would come here, a property would come there and the so-called lucky drawers would then allow to go into the cherokee nation and chuck out whatever cherokee were on the property and take it over. well, this didn't sit so well with the cherokee as you can imagine and this created the impetus from the south that it created a -- that one portion of the terrible tension and the bind that the cherokee nation got in because the georgians were encroaching from the south and then the federal government with the president andrew jackson who was pushing for indian removal from washington. well, the question was, were the cherokee allowed to withstand

the georgians? the georgians went to the extreme step of depriving of them any rights of court trial or testify in case that is involved their own property, so was that going to stand? jackson had the terrible choice to make. supreme court ruled that the cherokee nation was, indeed, a sovereign independent nation within the larger country of the united states. a very awkward arrangement as you can imagine, it's like having france in the middle of new england and vice versa. the question is whose rules prevailed? the supreme court ruled that it was a sovereign nation and the georgians should get out of there and that the american who is were encroaching on every side should back off as well but jackson was in a pickle because this was the time where slavery was becoming an issue that the

north and the south were in this precarious balance between who was -- who was -- whether slavery was going to rule in the nation or whether the nation was to become abolitionist and that jackson was in no mood to have the -- to counter the georgians and force them out, annoy them, have them rise up with the confederacy and have a civil war which even in 1830's he feared with good reason as it turned out in 1860's. but that was -- that was the beginning of it. and what it's set up in this case that the tension of the outside and the inside between the federal government and the -- and the georgia from the south were catching the cherokee nation in this ferocious bind and the question the people had

to face as nation and government should they respond, should they allow the jackson had been pushing for this indian removal, should they exceed to jackson and remove from the lands to east and i should remind you that cherokee nation was primarily at this point was in tennessee and georgia, originally it had 125,000 square miles of southern united states. it was a land that stretched from the top of kentucky to the bottom of georgia and went across to both carolinas and then out to the west to alabama. a large acreage as you can imagine for really small group of people, they're only at the time we are speaking of, there were about 20,000 cherokee on very large parcel of land that the whites were eager to. what are they going to do,

respond to this in where my story kicks in that within the tribe there were two extraordinary men and they each had a separate position on the subject and one of them everybody in the room aspires to, the ridge, he who walks on mountain tops, if you would like to call me the rich, i would accept that as accolade, but the ridge was born in 1771. he was a traditional cherokee warrior, 7-foot 2, powerful, great booming voice and to give you an indication of what it means to be a traditional cherokee warrior was that when he at 12 or 13 hit puberty and was to become a man, he endured what i would consider one of the

most horrendous rituals that any young man could face which was the scratching ceremony. the scratching ceremony was hardly that although it was described that way to bureaucrat many years ago, a young boy, the ridge, standing up on the rock in front of assembled townsmen where he grew up, a river that loops through eastern tennessee and then dumps into the larger tennessee river and he was on this rock and an old cherokee warrior came with fox bone and those tips were then inserted onto just inside his wrist, they cut in about a quarter of an inch and they were raked all the way up his arm across his chest, down the other arm and then up

his backside and then down his front until he was almost literally a river of blood and this was his introduction to adulthood, to what it meant to be a cherokee warrior. as i write in the book, introducing him to a world of pain and it made life a matter of endurance of hardship rather than anything more liberating that we would think of in our civilized way of life. this was his transformation into adulthood meanwhile john ross grew up 20 years later in an entirely different fashion. john ross grew up on the kusa river in a town called turkey town. the rich was a traditional settlement where it would have been the same, maybe a thousand

years before. john ross grew up along the kusa where there was really a trading village and that he spoke, his parents spoke english, grandparents spoke english, grandson of scottish traders and looked very much like a scottish trader and as a kid normally the cherokee indians are allowed to run naked and play ball games and he was always outfitted in a suit, yellow suit on the kusa and he grew up speak nothing cherokee. the ridge grew up speaking no english and the two of them rose together to become the great leaders of the nation and they met in the course of war of 1812. they both served under andrew jackson battling the creeks, the red state creeks which were renegades which opposed the

american government and went from there and became the founders of the cherokee government. it's little known, cherokee were considered the most advanced of the cherokee tribes for this reason that they actually aspired to kind of -- to pass as whites and to do so they created a government that was modeled after the american one that had -- that you can seeits of it still in north of here. it actually had a supreme court, a legislature and it had a chief executive called the principal chief and the john ross cobbled this together with the ridge and he became the -- ross became the principal chief and elected democratically followed the constitution that they had created and the rich was his first, his chief counselor. then along -- this was 1826 and then along comes the georgian threat from below. the jackson threat from the east

and the question is what to do about the cherokee nation, how is this to be, is this to be preserved or or is this to be competed to pers greater than their own and should they go west out to oklahoma as jackson wanted or should they hunker down and resist to the last man. well, it broke in surprising way. you would think that john ross being essentially white and statesman who had great affinity for the whites that might have exceeded the white wishes and gone west on that basis, he did not, he absolutely categorically refused to go and -- another curiosity is he constituency proved to be the full bloods of the cherokee that the cherokee had respond today capitalism in a way that most societies do by creating class that were never the cherokee way. the cherokee had always been society where no one was really

materially different from anybody else. nobody was better, nobody was worse, they were all in it together. when capitalism comes in, people are better, people are worse and the full bloods, the people who were john ross' backers, the ones who were committed to traditional ways and wanted to stay where they were and had no real concept of the larger threats because they were not ones to either leave the nation or to learn too much about what was going on outside. they were not particularly educated whereas the whites and the mixed bloods that the ridge appealed to were much more savvy, they were wealthy, money that they could take with them out to oklahoma and get started again there. so that was the divide that the upper class mix bloods said, yeah, we can get out of town and we set out in oklahoma and

started over. ross on the other hand said adamantly, no, we should never go we will die here if necessary, by the bones of ancestors. well, of course, what the ridge knew was the truth of it was that the powers that were masked outside of borders of cherokee nation were far greater than the cherokee were capable of facing. they had an economy, they had no army to speak of, just 3,000 aging warriors, they had no natural allies among more powerful groups, it was hopeless situation and yet the ross was -- john ross was committed to this because he had the backing to have full bloods and that he was kind of locked into their position in their own situation that they had to stick with them and so when the trail of tears

became ine -- inevitable they were surprised and caught out and they never believed that the federal troops 7,000 of them were ever going to come to them and put them in boats, force them out along these paths, 800 miles. they never thought this was going to happen and they were many of them interrupted literally in the course -- in the middle of dinner with federal soldiers banging on the door, rousting them out, sending them to these boats or onto trails or holding them in what amounted to kind of camps until more boats could come. it was one of the great tragedies of american history. it was absolutely devastating for the cherokee but it's my position that it didn't -- it

was going to be bad but it didn't have to be that bad. the other tribes were able to remove in a more orderly fashion, the cherokee were caught by surprise and out they went on the trail of tears and thousands died on route and thousands more died when they arrived in oklahoma from the disease, from famine as well. so it was -- that was -- it's one of the great colamities, it's horrible to think that it didn't have to be so but that it was, indeed, that that is the way the story went and then once they arrived in the west, the two men who had turned against each other, they had been together, a blood feud between

the two of them. at first personal and then it became more than personal, each had factions, factions were opposed and once they got to oklahoma that the furry that had built up among the cherokee people from having been abused from this way, they wanted to blame one side or the other. i will not tell you what happened exactly but i will say that one side sat on the other with the most bitter bloodshed that you can imagine. it was a slaughter of one family from the other that then created a convulsion within the cherokee nation that lasted intensely for 5 or 6 years, hundreds of cherokee were slaughtered on the highways and it took until 1846 for that matter to be resolved by a peace by the two families and engineered by president polk

and then the dispute continued to simmer and then flowered again at the time of the civil war. so that the cherokee uniquely among all the tribes, there were many indians that fought in the civil war but the cherokee were the only tribe that came in on both sides and why did they do this? they did this for the same factionalism that had governed their behavior for the decades and they ended up fighting against each other under the name of the confederacy or the union that really was the factional strife. well, why get into this? long time ago, nobody remembers, a piece of hidden history that you might think could stay hidden and really it raised the question of what history is for anyway, why do we care?

what difference does it make that this happened? well, i have to say that i stumbled on to the story accidentally myself. i was looking into a question about the civil war and learned that the battle of fredericksburg there were indians who fought and died as indians. once they were actually fighting for the union that once they were out of bullets, they were locked into their position, it was hopeless, the confederates were descending on them and they covered over their heads with blouses and saying war songs until the end came for them and i found that so moving, this extraordinary combination of cultures that's a clash of cultures and i found out how fascinating that the cherokee was the only tribe to come in on the opposite sides and stems

from a feud that had governed the nation decades before that. something would hold the nation in its grip for 40 or 50 years and flower at intervals and lead to this explosion so much later. but there is always with these stories this question that historians struggled so much, the matter of relevance. who cares, what difference does it make? i will say it just a few things and i would love to hear from you as to what your response is to this, what this might mean to you. three things that come to my mind when i think of this. one is that the cherokee people had an extraordinary cosmology,

world view that we all aspire and find it unattainable. the cherokee believe that the world was fundamentally in order. that there was a balance of opposites, that spring was balanced against fall, that just as summer was against winter and north against south and moon was against the sun and that peace was against war and men were against women, that the opposites were not antagonistic and that there was sense of order and permanence that i think we all long for today and that for the cherokee as for us, that when that balance was disturbed, when there was a lunar eclipse, for example, and the moon suddenly disappeared from the night sky there was

pandemonian, report of irish trader who said he had never seen a howling terror among the cherokee as they were at the moment. some of them would plunge into the water to save themselves, well, what is this except -- who cannot identify with this today? who among us does not feel that our world for whatever reason, from whatever perspective you look at it is not out of order in the same way and who does not feel a sense of confusion, fear, of uncertainty. that's what the cherokee had. another part was with john ross and the ridge. what was -- they were -- they had terrible disagreements as i said, proremoval, antiremoval. why couldn't they work this out? well, some of it, of course, was this capitalist divide that they were upper class and lower class

but another part of it was even more important which was that literally they did not spe each other's language, that they once spoke cherokee, the other spoke english, they literally d not converse, the two great statesmen of the nation could not talk and what does not think that that might be present today as well. [laughter] >> and then finally, i -- there's a part of this that frankly blew me away and that is that once the story was done and i thought this was a story about the cherokee, distant people unrelated to me, i discovered that an ancestor of mine had written novel of a cherokee marriage or about a native american marriage, it didn't specify what tribe and i was -- i happened to be reading, a book called hopelessly and it

mentioned that the marriage in question was -- that was being referred to was the marriage of the ridge's nephew, elias, to a woman in connecticut, cornwall connecticut, named harriet, amazing moment for the cherokee because this -- this man was there in cornwell because that was the equivalent of the only college that the native americans could go to, it was like yale for the cherokee and he had fallen in love with one of the leading family's daughter in the town harriet gold. she was -- her grandmother was the sister of the man who

sedgwick's think as found over clan. their descendants and there were many, were also sedgwick's. i found the story for new york times, when history touches genealogy, different approaches to history, genologists have personal interest. they are fascinating by ancestor who did this or that and historians, of course, don't care about the individual people unless they are i lustrous. i had a gene -- i suddenly felt this clash in myself and wrote about it and, of course, in the

-- i don't know if you ever see these things, when you write something in "the new york times" you get commentary at the bottom, trolls we call it. [laughter] and the genologists were up in arms because i was coming from a historian perspective. historians was pissed because i was given too much credit, you can't get this right, but -- but what it meant to me was that even this story for me as a sedgwick of new england. i grew up in boston. my family has been in new england for generations, as far as cherokee that i could have imagined that even the sedgwick's had married and the cherokee had married out and to me -- it reminded me of something incredibly important about our country which is so easy to forget which is we are all family here, everybody is

related. you wouldn't imagine it but it's true and that i have my connection to the cherokee not just of the east but also of the west. i will leave aside allusions to elizabeth warren and just let that sit right there. i don't want to -- [laughter] >> i don't want to get any angry tweets from the president but i just want to -- i just want to sound that note because i think that it's an important thing about this story that i'm telling and it's important thing about the country in which it resides. now, let me take my questions from you if you have them. if not, i will just keep up here. >> because c-span is recording, we need you guys to get microphone. two fining -- microphones. >> yes.

s. >> excellent presentation. i think i can understand how unsophisticated to not have section of how powerful the world was but i don't quite understand how john ross could have failed to see that so could you expand a little bit? >> i have to say i'm down on john ross. you know, you shouldn't play favorites in this game but i will cop to this. i think he was being a politician and playing to his base as we would say. in ignorance of the facts that he plainly knew. one of the reasons that i say that is he converted to the removal side towards the end and he did so for one reason only and that was he was offered a lot of money to do it, that he

was given the exclusive franchise, in effect, for the removal of the cherokee from the east to the west charging them -- charging the federal government somewhere in excess of $100 a head for a journey that cost him on the order of $20 a head and that he as his brother were the ones who got this money and it riled the nation once it was discovered but again that too fell along political lines that his backers refused to accept that he might have been on the take and his opponents that seized on this as proof that this was a bad man and so i think that -- i think frankly that ross did know, i don't know how he could not have known, but i think he also wanted to -- he wanted to hang

onto power. i think it's as simple as that. also, for a politician, if you make a strong stance on a particular position and it's controversial and that you double down on it when it becomes more controversial, it's very hard to move away from it when it becomes abundantly clear that you're in the wrong and i think that's what happened with ross. yes. >> after that comment, i loved your presentation, authenticity and personal journey through the story is inspiring and i just love it. i listen to a lot of crap and you're not anything near that so thank you. >> well, let's just stop right there. [laughter] >> i don't want to hear your question. please, go ahead. i read a lot about andrew jackson and i see note that andrew jackson feared civil war and i want you to expand and i

want to add my other question because the next one is more important. >> i will try and remember, yeah. >> i'm right here if you forget. [laughter] >> major ridge was a traditional cherokee that somehow had the vision or the ability to break out of traditional mold and see what was impending -- >> yes. >> what did he have to enable him to see that and how can we do something similar so that we don't find ourselves in the wrong shoes in our lives because it seems extraordinary. >> well, it is and i appreciate you saying that. on his behalf because i have to say i'm a ridge partisan. not a perfect man by any means. i would say that unusually for human being generally and for a cherokee in particular he was remarkably open-minded. this was a man who saw life as it was and wanted to see life as it was rather than as he wished it to be. and that in his case, i will give you an example of this, the

missionaries, you know, came into the cherokee nation with great determination obviously to convert as well as to educate and that in -- and that the ridge -- the cherokee were in a bind because their traditional view of the world was not a winning proposition, they were on the losing side of history or so they thought because their gods -- for instance, they were in a terrible situation when small pox came into the country and wiped half of the population, their medicine men were unable to -- to keep this at bay, so the question was, are there medicine -- is their medicine any good and probably wasn't, the white guys that they lived through this, this must be better. they thought about this down the line, they had more guns and more numbers. probably their way of life must be better, must be a winning proposition and then on top of

that, their christian god must be more powerful than ours and that was the most challenging question of all and that they, you know, they worshiped the great spirit and the great spirits seem not to have anything on this christian god. well, so the ridge struggled with this and he was particularly troubled by the notion of sin which is central to the christian perspective and it meant nothing to the cherokee, the cherokee had no notion of sin, they did stuff, stuff happened and that was it. [laughter] >> maybe you're like this. [laughter] >> but so he -- he himself had gone through this extraordinary experience of he had been essentially enlisted to fight off diabolical chief with

wonderful and unforgettable name of double head. double head was a small man but extremely powerful and utterly vicious and that he was stealing a lot of the land in the cherokee nation, the cherokee i should say that land could be owned. they didn't think that it was like owning sunlight or something, that you just couldn't do this. double head thought differently, he was going to take the land and sell it to government on its own and take the spoils, the ridge said, no, you're not. he killed him in a vicious battle that i described in wonderful detail in my book. [laughter] >> and anyways, he was very troubled by this. you know, this notion of sin and should he have killed double head, was he in a position to do this, who was he to decide whether somebody should live or die and that god might not like

him for this and he didn't know who the god was and as he thought about it it was absurd that anybody should worship a loser god who was like tortured on the cross and why? but he believed the missionaries, the for ver -- good and evil, he really thought about this and the same thing. he was one of the driving forces of creating the washington, d.c. that he had traveled several times to see and that he believed that there were better things, that he wanted to sort out what they were and so i think that there was just within him and it's just this marvelous thing that a lot of people have, not everyone called curiosity and it allowed him to be the prosperous figure that he was,

that he gave up the hunting ways of his the tradition he became an agriculturist and also he had basically a plantation, he was one of the richest men in the nation and he came by his wealth honestly, he wasn't doing a lot of the self-dealing that john ross was. anyway, that's the answer to that question and then the little question, smaller question which is, in fact, the larger question about how could andrew jackson have seen the civil war coming; is that right? well, part of it was that i think it was south carolina at the time was deciding that it had -- you know, the state's rights issue is persist to this day, it's one of those curiosities and difficulties frankly with the constitution that all rights that are not enumerated in the constitution revert to the states, right, and so the question is well, then whose right prevails, south carolina was waying, well, our

right prevailed and screw you federal government and, of course, within that was the right to hold slaves, who was going to be able to tell them from the outside not to conduct their lives the way they had done it and as they believed they should be allowed to do. if that was an issue, abolitionists who came flooding into the cherokee nation because to try and get the cherokee later onto stop having slaves and it was abolitionism became quite a force in the nation, it picked up from affiliation of natural feeling for native americans with extended to a feeling for african americans, the two of them had an interesting alliance and so when you're dealing with the they are key you're also in a certain way dealing with black slavery and jackson realized this was touchy and this could be explosive and

remember that the missouri compromise had set up this perfect division between north and south and that you didn't want to tip the balance one way or the other and the whole thing could fall apart and sure enough that what was happened, kansas was put in play as free state or as a slave state, he saw that coming and he was not wrong. he's often criticized for being, for insisting on ignoring john marshal's ruling in the supreme court, supreme court said this is a sovereign nation, that the federal government should come to the rescue of the cherokee, push back on these georgians and that the jackson said, you know, the famous line that he may or may not have said, that's john marshal's opinion let him enforce it. that's in direct violation of the constitution but he has his

reason which if he did enforce it the whole country could go up in flames and he was right, rly tohink this but it was definitely smoldering. next question, if any. i hope you still like me. [laughter] >> we are so nervous up here, historians. >> what in your research shows how ross rose up in the position and i ask because having read fictional books and i think in that doesn't he have that he was abandoned and adopt bid cherokee chief or something like that, is that at all part of the true story? >> that was true of sam houston. that wasn't john ross. john ross was certainly not adopted. he knew -- his parents were as far as i know genuine parents, they looked a lot alike.

he is so true to scottish and it's in his blood to be of tha way. >> i didn't ask it very well, if he didn't speak any cherokee aside from in the being able to communicate with the ridge, how did he get the support of other cherokees? >> that's an excellent question. the very fact that he couldn't speak cherokee worked peculiarly in his favor. i think that the cherokee viewed him as better than them and that they -- that only somebody who was of that stature who had kind of holiness was going to deal as an equal, command of the language that they didn't even know, that put him in a special category in their minds.

it's otherwise impossible to explain. there are countless stories of him coming back to the nation, he would be on his horse, this guy is 5'6, wears hat, leather shoes and never been in breaches, cloths, he never killed anybody. what kind of chief is this. so he comes back and he's there and the cherokee approached him like a god and totally hesitant, whispering, quiet, waiting for their moment and finally allowed to come up and touch his garment, the end of his coat and that was enough, that sent them and it was so much like -- i don't know if you know the story, he was a white man who was an englishman who arabs thought were sensational and he had quality. not knowing that creates the

certain mystery that can allow for certain that the ridge for all of his talents and majesty didn't have. they understood what the ridge was saying and oddly i think that counted against him. yeah. >> would you speak to the revolutionary war experience between england and the loyalists and the perception that the cherokees were on the british side and how that might have contributed to the adversary relationship? >> absolutely. they were -- that perception was accurate. they were on the english side, anything to get back at these white settlers and also it stems from a visit that some cherokee chiefs paid to georgia the

second in 1730, a man man, little carpenter to the english went with a couple of fellow chiefs, at the behest of an english trader and rather sharp and he in the name of the english king had wanted to create a new title, new position among the cherokee called the cherokee emperor, purely to find someone to have a negotiation, trade negotiation with, they wanted to speak to one guy, top guy, equivalent of the english king. it was so much easier for them. of course, the cherokee had no emperor and had no concept of trade negotiations, and when they were asked to go across the ocean to london, that blew their

minds. they had never seen the oceans. they had no idea what the sailing fish or imagine riding waves for weeks, months whatever it took to get over there and once they arrived and were in the company of the king that they didn't know like who was weirder, because you have the king, king georgia the second was there, you know, carrying the septemberor that was useless in battle but it was bejeweled and he couldn't move without delivery attendant reaching for fork, a useless human being and there he was stalled by everyone. they're at the park, the king, you know, had, of course, open air facility and that there were up on this balcony where they're having this glorious royal dinner and one of the chiefs spotted an elk loose down below and happened to have bow and

arrow with him and he was ready to shoot and the attendants, sacred elk, if there's an elk there, why wouldn't you eat it, it was his thinking. anyway, but at the end of that, that they made the royal tour of the various, the theaters, the cathedrals and so forth and they came away with the feeling that for whatever else the english had they were materially superior, that they had more stuff and there was more of them and that there was no way that they were ever going to beat the english, but that there was a way that they thought that the english might be able to help them and in the strength of that, 1730 meeting vowed that if there was ever a war that they would come in on the english side which they did and they did this as i say because they we wanted to get back at american

settlers and second that they figured that the english were going to be powerful and therefore be able to help them and it didn't work out well. they were on the wrong side of it every time. of course, the english -- lost to the americans as you may have heard in the revolution, and then the english lost again in the battle of 1812, that wasn't good. they actually turned to the spanish hoping that the spanish would beat allies, they were no better. so this was another aspect of their geopolitical limitations that they really couldn't see well enough what was coming and they ended up on the short side of it too many times. anything else? yeah. >> i look forward to buying the book. >> hey, you better. [laughter] >> would you take us before the gold rush and contextualize the

cherokees among other native american groups because they seem so different. >> i'm glad you say that, i like to throw this in. i didn't know exactly when and now is the time. i will confess something i shouldn't, i knew nothing about the cherokee, i'm sorry that's going out to the nation as my admission of ignorance but that's the fact. i was the product of a conventional schooling and conventional school you didn't hear the history of native americans and you certainly didn't hear about -- about them from the native americans, you got it from the english perspective and the american one later, but here is the thing about the native americans, that i didn't realize and tremendously clarifying if you don't realize this either, it's grossly oversimplifying but it is actually true that there are

two broad classes of native american in america broadly. you have to remember, the native americans came across from euro asia in 20,000bc roughly during ice age to my surprise, there was the land bridge, i never understood how a land bridge worked. you have this big ocean, it's like the parting of the read -- red sea. in the ice age, the ice is denser than water and cause it is water to part literally to part and create a land passage from one continent to the other and euro asia to walked across the open space and it's so hard to visualize, presumably glaciers on either side and filtered down across the united

states down to south america, tip of perú, up into canada, practically every square mile of that land mass of north america was accounted for by one tribe or another, they fell into two categories, america still falls into two categories of east and west and the east -- let's start with the west. the west are the indians that most people know, the apache, these are the plains indians, the ones who were on horseback, who have the feathers, who are chasing the buffalo and later they are resisting the railroads. they are the ones that ewe -- you think of. the classic warriors. the eastern indians are totally different type, these are the woodland indians and they oddly parallel the colonists and that they were town builders, they

were -- they stayed in residents permanently. they created social -- lasting social structures, they did not move around. they stayed put. they had to enforce their borders, one tribe against another, but for the most part, the ridge living, lived there as he had lived there literally for thousands of years. they had split off several thousand years before, but not many, but once they were there, they were there. that's the fundamental difference. these are social people, their clan affiliations were paramount with them, that they needed order because they believed in permanence, they were going to stay. they went where the buffalo were. in, effect, to the extent that the cherokee became farmers,

they were stayed put for that reason that was their land and they hunted but they hunted in fairly narrow area. with neumatic tribes, they would go to different states, it was a totally different deal. did that answer the question? there i was paddling on. >> let's limit it to the eastern. the difference with northeast, new england and early settlers there and the experience down here was so utterly different where up in the northeast, i mean, the massachusetts flag has got it, indian and settler and the new york city has peter and someone who hold land for 24 bucks, but the experience down here was so different, cherokees went to london in 1730 but nobody was taking -- >> yeah. >> that's what i meant really

between the northeast experience and the experience here was so different. >> you know, i will honest with you, i don't really know. that wasn't -- i'm not a student of native americans. i really only know this one tribe but i can guess that the land mass that we are talking about. there are two things that come to mind. one is the population centers in the 17th century were to the northeast. you know, new york, boston, philadelphia, were the major cities, there were no major cities south of philadelphia particularly, atlanta was much later to come, and if that -- therefore the mass -- the land was much larger and there were -- that they -- it was a different kind of struggle. there was the question of encroachment for the southern tribes, the so-called civilized

tribes because the land was open when -- at first. in the northeast, the reason you have this tradition of thanksgiving at rock that settlers and indians were together from that point. they were, in effect, living with each other, they weren't living with each other in the south. the cherokee had a separate ongoing kind of civilization of their own and that when the white settlers came in, they came in initially in ones and twos, they didn't come from the boat load and came in usually as traders, they would set up little trading networks and that was going well so they'd bring their families and then more families came and then suddenly the integrity of the nation was breached and a few more would come in but it wasn't -- it was because the southeast was thinly

settled by whites. i think that's the big difference here but, again, i'm just riffing here. ion't know for sure. yeah. great. >> a few more questions and then -- >> i enjoyed that. how did the divisions that you relate in this book play out in 2018 or has the hatchet been buried? >> the divisions in the tribe or in the division in our own society here? >> in the cherokee. >> it's interesting as i note in the book, the cherokee have had a kind of awkward relationship with democracy which is to say that there is factionalism still within the tribe and that there was an issue two principled chiefs back that there was an investigation that was going to occur and that the supreme court was in support of the

investigation and the principal chief had the doors locked down. this isn't the way we do it, the national american level but i think it speaks to the fact that there is a way still that the cherokee have not fully embraced the democracy that we aspire to ourselves in noncherokee society or at american society and it also speaks to the fact that democracy is difficult and that it requires a certain tradition, that, you know, that democracy didn't start in america, it starts -- goes back to greeks and that there was a bit of a tradition of it in europe. that was -- it was a new thing. it was startling new thing. again, the cherokee always operated by consensus. they didn't -- they didn't recognize that there might be

factions within a group because they always talked it out, the group was small enough that they could do that. it was like -- you know, a quaker meeting or a village in new england that would have a town meeting and talked through some local question. well, that was the way the cherokee were and when a political divide rose up, they didn't have a tradition and in some ways they still don't have a tradition by which compromise can be easily created, that they -- dispute could not be solved because it was not part of world view. when a dispute arose, they waited until it resolved itself and then they acted. they didn't act until everybody agreed on how to act. .. ..

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