up in apartheid era south africa and followed by clinical psychologist, 12 rules of life. and wrapping up or look at some of the books from "the los angeles times" nonfiction bestseller list is i'll be gone in the dark, the life true crime journalist's first hand account of her search for the golden state killer. some of these authors have appeared on book tv. you can watch them on then web site, booktv.org. good evening. i'm the president and ceo of the atlanta history center and welcome to tonight's lecture feet fuehring john sedgwick. please be sure to turn awe all the noise-making items as we have c-span here and don't want

to be rude coast to coast. this author is made presentations -- presentation made possible by the livingston foundation and the trustees are here today. tonight mr. sedgwick kill discuss tis book "blood moon." in his review new "wall street journal," it would describe as rifting. engrossing and adding that mr. sedgwick's subtitle calls the cherokee story an american epic. john sedgwick if a journalist, novelist, memoryist and biographer. he has 13 books, including his account of a duel between hamilton and burr. and in addition to his books we has wherein for publications like "news week," "vanity fair"

and "atlantic." downme in welcoming john sedgwick. maas applause. >> how about that. nice to see you all. i haven't been to georgia since i was here researching my book, and now i've come back and have book in hand and i feel leak the whole mission is complete. it's nice to see you out there. i was also quite overjoyed to see the reception of the atlanta journal constitution in my book. don't know how many people saw that but i hope everyone did, who is quite a nice review. it's a thrill to be here. it's such an interesting thing. when you're a writer, i live in brooklyn, i'm holed 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 a reasonable

presentation of myself, and i feel sort of like a hermit who has emerged to find that everybody is ready to party, and anyway, i'll do what 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 how many of how have seen this and how many people will now be willing to see this after what i say. but georgia, does not come across all that well in my story, and i think i -- i hope you'll be braced for this. for this fact, we can blame one individual and one individual only. a man with an unusual name of uncle benny parks.

i don't income that means anything to any of you. uncle benny parks was the first man in georgia to discover gold. in 1829. and he was scratching at the soil, saw something that sparkled yellow, got very excited, and decided he was going to lease that property and mine the gold. well, of course, he didn't own it. had to lease it from a baptist minister who by the name of reverend robert o'barr. he thought when uncle benny parks wanted toman the land for gold, that was the silliest thing he he heard and would be delighted to lease him the property but a he was convinces there was no gold there. he starts mining and sure enough there is gold there and the rev rep "barr is very upset he has leased this extremely valuable

property to uncle benny for a song, and he is trying to get the lease back. and they start scrappling, the two of them and then o'barr's mother gets into the act and starts pelting him with rocks and you have a major skirmish on your hands, but as it turned out, of course, the lease held and uncle benny was able to come away with a small fortune, but in the process, revealed something about the georgian spirit that it suspect does not confined to georgia, which is that people go crazy for gold, and people do that anywhere, and they did it in georgia. what happened in georgia was that once they learned that the gold was there, they discovered the second thing that was important but this, which was that the gold was there on cherokee land. at the time georgia and its

property overlapped with what was the cherokee nation, and the georgians were so keen to get the gold they ignored the fact that the cherokee nation was, by common understanding, a sovereign nation, independent of georgia laws. well, the governor of georgia didn't see it this way and he sent forth a bunch of 550 surveyors to divide up the portion eye the cherokee nation that fell on georgia soil into a section and then the section were divided into divisions and in this divisions were divided into 160-acre lots. they took chits that represented e represented each lot and put them in a big barrel on one side and had all the georgia yapans who wanted to claim the lots put their names in another barrel and these two bins 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, property would come there, and these 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 created a -- that one portion of the terrible tension and the bind that the cherokee nation got in because the georgians are 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, this was -- were the cherokee allowed to withstand the georgians, the georgians win to the extreme step of actually depriving them

of any rights to a court trial or even to testify in cases that involved their own property, and was this going to stand? well, jackson had this terrible choice to make. the supreme court actually ruled that the sovereign -- 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. like having france in the middle of new england or vice versa, and so the question was, whose rules prevail? well, the supreme court ruled that it was a sovereign nation but georgians should get out of there and that the americans, who were encroaching of every side, should back off as well. but jackson was in a pickle because this was at a time where slavery was becoming an issue. the north and the south were in this precarious balance between

who was -- whether slavery was going to rule in the nation or whether in the nation was to become abolitionists, 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 he even in the 1830s, he feared. with good reason as it turned out in the 1860s. but that was the beginning of it. what it set up in this case, the tension of the outside and the inside, between the federal government and the georgia from the south, were catching the cherokee nation in this ferocious bind that -- and the question that the nation had to face, as a people, as a government, was how to respond.

should they allow the jackson had been pushing for this indian removal. should they accede to jackson and remove from their lanes in the east and i should remind you that the cherokee nation is -- was primarily at this opinion in tennessee and georgia, originally it had 125,000 square miles of southeastern united states. it was a lan that stretched from the top of kentucky to the bottom of georgia and went across to both carolinas and out to the west to alabama. a large ache ranch for a relative -- acreage. there were only 20,000 cherokee of a very large parcel of land that the whites were very eager for. the question was, then what are they going to do? how are they going to respond? that's where my story kicks in.

within the tribe there were two extraordinary men and they each had a separation position on this -- a separate position on this subject. one of them had the name that everybody in this room aspires to, i'm sure. the ridge. he who walks on mountaintops. if you would like to call me the ridge, i would accept that as an accolade. but the ridge was born in 1771. he was a traditional cherokee warrior. he was 6'2", copper skinned, powerful, great booming voice, and that just to give you an indication of the -- 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 most horrendous rituals

any young man could face which is the scratching ceremony. the scratching ceremony was hardly that but was describe that way to a bureaucrat many years later. actually a matter of a young boy, in this case the ridge, standing up on a rock in front of all of the assembled townsmen along the hiwassee, a river that loops through eastern tennessee and then dumps interest the larger tennessee river. and he was on this rock and an old cherokee warrior came with a fox bone that had been whittled to have four points tips, and those tips were then inserted on to just inside his wrist, they cut in about a quarter inch, and then they were raked all the way up his arm, across his chest, down the other arm, and then up his back side and then down his

front until he was almost literally a river of blood. this was his introduction to adulthood, to what it meant to be a cherokee warrior. as i write in the book, it was introducing him to a world of pain and it made life a matter of endurans, 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, drew up 20 years later in an entirely different fashion. john ross grew up on the river in a town called turkey town. hiwassee of the ridge was a traditional settlement that would have been the same, maybe a thousand years before. john ross grew up along the

river where the -- that was really a trading village, and that he spoke -- his parent spoke english, the son and grandson of scottish traders and he looked very much like a scottyear trader and as a kid normally the cherokee indians are allowed to run around naked and play ball games and was always outfitted in a yellow suit, like little ford fauntleroy and grew up speaking no cherokee, the ridge, of course, grew up speaking no english and yet the two of them rows together to become the great leaders of the nation, and they met in the course of the war of 1812. they both surfed under andrew yackson, battling the creeks, the red stick creeks creeks whoe renegades who opposed the american government, and that then went from there to become the founders of the cherokee

government. it's little known that the cherokee were considered the most advanced of the cherokee tribes for this reason, that they actually aspired to a kind of -- to pass as whites, and to do so they created a government that was modeled after the american one, that had -- you can see bits of it still in nr -- it had a supreme court and legislature and had an executive, 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, elected democratly, following the constitution they crated and the rim was his first -- his chief councilor. this was in 1826 and then along comes the georgian threat from below, the jackson threat from

the east and the question is that would do about to the cherokee nation. is this to be preserved or acceded to these powers that were 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 a surprising way. you think that john ross, being essentially white and a statesman who had great affinie for the whites that might have acceded to the white wishes and gone west. he did. no he categorically refused to to go and his constituent kizzy was the full blood -- the cherokee responded to capitalism in a way that most society does which is by creating class striations that were never the cherokee way. they had all business a society where nobody was better, nobody

was worse, all in it together. well, when capital jims, people are better or worse and the full bloods, the people who had -- were john ross' primary backers were the ones who were committed to their traditional way, and wanted to stay in where they were, and had no real concept of the larger threat because they were not ones to either leave the nation or learn to much but the outside. they weren't educated. the whites and the mixed bloods that the ridge appealed to were much more savvy and much -- they were wealthy, they had money that they could take with them out to oklahoma and get started again there. so, that was the divide. the upper class mixed bloods said, yeah, we can get out of up to and be fine. set out in oklahoma and start over.

the ross on the other hand said adamantly, no, we shall never good we'll fight the last man. we'll die here, by the bens of our ancestors. of course, what the ridge knew was the truth of it, which was that the powers that were massed outside of the borders of the cherokee nation were far greater than anything that they cherokee were capable of facing. that has a fledgling economy, no army to speak of, just 3,000 aging warriors. they had no natural allies among more powerful groups like a european nation that would come to their rescue. a hopeless situation. and yet the ross -- john ross was committed to this because he had the backing of the full bloods and that he was kind of locked into their position in their own ignorance of the situation, that he had to stick with them. and so that when the trail of

tears became inevitable. i it was too late for the cherokee respond. they were caught out. the never believed for a second that these federal troops, 7,000 of them, were ever going to come for them, and roust them out of their houses, put them on to these keel boats or force them out along -- on these paths west. 800 miles. they never thought this would happen and they were many of them interrupted literally in the middle of dinner, with the bayonet point, these federal soldiers banging on the door, rousting them out, sending them to these boats or on to the trails are holding them in what amounted to kind of internment camps until more boats could come. it was one of the great tragedies of american history, absolutely devastating for the cherokee, but it is my position that it didn't have to -- it was going to be bad but 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 once they arrived in oklahoma from the disease and from famine as well. so it was -- that was -- it is one of the great calamity and it's horrible to thing it didn't have to be so. but it was indeed -- that is the way the story went. then once they arrived in the west, the two men who had turned against each other, they had been together but they on this disagreement, fed a blood feud when them. at first it was personal, and

then it became more than personal. they each had their factions the factions were opposed and that opposite they get to oklahoma, that the fury that had build up among the cherokee people for having been abused in this way, they wanted to blame one side or the other. i will not tell you what happened exactly but i'll say that one side set on the other with the most bitter bloodshed that you could imagine. it was a slaughter of one family from the other. that then created a convulsion within the cherokee nation that lasted intensely for five or six years, hundreds of cherokee were sloggerred on the highway and then there were reprisal and took until 1846 for the near the be resolved by peace between the two families, engineered by president polk, but 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 die this? for the simple factionalism that had governed their behavior for the previous decade and ended up fighting against each other under the national of the confederacy or the union but really it was the factional strife. well, why get into this? long time ago, nobody remembers, a piece of hidden history you might think should just stay hidden. really raises the question of what history is for anyway. why do we care? what difference does it make

this happened? well, i have to say that i stumbled on the story accidentally myself. i was looking into a question about the civil war, and learned that the battle of fredericksburg, there were some indians who fought, and in fact they fought and then they died at indians, they once -- they were actually fighting for the union. that once they were out of billets, locked into their positions, it was hopeness. the confederates were descending on them and they covered over their heads with their blouses and sang, war songs until the end came for them. i found that so moving, this extraordinary combination of cultures that is a clash of cultures and i thought how fascinating that and is learn what i just said think cherokee ways the only tribe to come in on opposite sizes and this stem from a more than a

disagreement -- a feud that governed the nation for decades before that. seem to me extraordinary that somebody would hold the nation in its grip for 40 '5years and then flower at intervals and then lead to this explosion so much later. but there is always with these stories this question that historians struggle with so much, which is this matter of relevance. who cares why. what difference does this make? and i'll say just a few things and then i'd love to hear from you what your response is to this, what you're thinking but. what this might mean to you. there are three things that come to my mind. one is that the cherokee people had an extraordinary cosmology, a world view that we can all aspire to although we frankly

find it unattainable and that is that the cherokee believed that the world fundamentally was in order there was a balance of opposites. that spring was balanced against fall. that just as summer was against winter, as north was against south, as moon was against the sun, and that peace was against war, and men were against women. that the opposites were not antagonistic. they were balancing. and that there was from this balance a sense of order and permanence that 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 night sky,

there pan -- pandemonium. an areich trader said he had never seen such a shrieking, howling terror, 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 bay and who does not feel a sense of confusion, bewilderment, fear, uncertainty. that's what the cherokee had. another part was that with john ross and the ridge, what was the -- they had terrible disagreements. pro removal, anti removal. why can't that it work this out? some of this was the capitalist divide, upper class and lower class. another part was even more

important that literally they did not speech each other's language. one spoke cherokee and the other spoke english and could not converse. the two great statesmen of the nation could not talk, and who does not think that might be present today as well. and then finally, there's a part of this that i 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, up related to me. i discovered that a -- an ancestor of mine had written a novel but a cherokee marriage -- native american marriage. didn't specify what tribe. a become called "hopelessly" and

i happened to be reading a scholarly account of this and it mentioned that the marriage in question was being referred to was the marriage of the ridges' nephew, a man named elyas to a woman in lynchfield -- in cornwall, connecticut, named harriet gold. an amazing moment for the cherokee because this man was there in cornwall because that was the equivalent of the only college that's native americans could good to. it was like yale for the cherokee, and it was in cornwall and that he had fallen in love with one of the leading families' daughters in the town, hair yet gold. harriet gold was a sedgwick. her grandmother what's sister of the man who -- the sedgwicks, my branch in the sedgwicks, thing

ofs the founder of our clan. so their descendens, many, the most illustrious was a man named elyas cornwall and i wrote a story about this for "the new york times" about the interesting way that when history touches against genealogy and there are different approaches to history, genealogists are fascinated by ancestors and historians don't care but the individual people necessarily. they're looking for the bigger picture and when i happened to combine these two qualities, that i had genealogical interest, i identified with harriet gold but as a historian i was looking at this from a larger and neutral point of view, that it suddenly felt this clash in myself and wrote about it, and of course, in the -- i don't know if you see these

things but you write something "the new york times" you get commentary the bottom of. trolls we call it. and the genealogists were up in arms because i would come at it from the hoity-toity historian perspective. the historians were pissed do because i was giving too much credit to jeanollist -- genealogists. >> what it meant for me -- my family has been in new england for generations. about as far from the cherokee is a could have imagined. that even the sedgwicks had married in and the cherokee in effect had married out. to me, and it reminded me of something incredibly important but our country, which is so easy no 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 of not just of the east but also of the west. i will leave aside allusions to elizabeth warren and let that sit right there. i don't want to -- i'll get any angry tweets from the president but i just want to sound that note because i think that it's an important thing about this story that i'm telling and important thing about the country in which it resides. now, let me take questions from you. if you have them. if not i'll just keep riffing up here. >> we have c-span recording and we need you to go to the microphone. thank you for the

presentation. i think i can understand how up sophies unsophisticate its changer keys cooperate have a perception -- i couldn't understand how john ross could fail so see that. could you respond on that. >> i have to say i'm down on john ross. you shouldn't play favorites in this game but i will cop to this. i think that he was duplicitous. i think that he was being a politician, playing to his base, as we would say, in ignorance of the facts which he plainly knew and one of the reasons that i say that is that 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 of -- 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 journaly that cost him some would say on the order of $20 a head and he and 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 seized on this that this was proof he was bad man. i think that i -- 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 on to power ump think it's as simple as

that. for a politician, if you make a strong stand 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 you're in the wrong. and i think that's what happened with ross. >> i echo the comment, i loved this presentation. your authenticity and your personal journey how to the story is inspiring and we can feel it and i just love it. >> great. >> i listen to a lot of crap and you're not anywhere near that. >> let's just stop right there. i don't want to hear you question. >> one big question. >> go ahead. >> i read about andrew jackson and just noticed that little note that andrew jackson feared civil war as early as 1830 so maybe expound on that. i want to add my other question. the next is more important.

>> i'll try remember. >> i'm right here -- so major ridge clearly was kind of a traditional cherokee that somehow had the vision or the ability to break out of his traditional mold and see what was impending. what did he have that enabled him to see that and how can we maybe do something similar so we don't find ourselves, you know, in the wrong shoes in our lives. how can we emulate that. steams pretty extraordinary. >> it is and i appreciate your saying that. on his behalf because i have to say i'm a ridge partisan. not a person man by any means. i say unusually for a human being generally and for a cherokee in particular, he was remarkably open-minded. this was a man who saw life as it was, wanted to see life as it was, rather than as he wished it to be. and that in his case, -- i'll give you an example.

the missionaries came interest 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 they're traditional view of the world was not a winning proposition. they were on the losing side of history, or so they thought, because their god -- for instance, they were in a terrible situation when smallpox came into the country and wiped out half of the population. their medicine men were simply unable to keep thissed a bay so the question was, is their medicine any good and probably wasn't. these white guys, they lived through this and might be better. they thought but that it i. that had more guns and numbers and probably they're way of life must be better, winning proposition, and then 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 spirit seemed 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. that was it. maybe you're like this. so he himself had gone through this extraordinary experience of -- he had been essentially enlisted to fight off a rather diabolical chieftain with the wonderful and unforgettable name

of double head. a small man and extremely powerful and utterly vicious and he was stealing a lot of the land in the cherokee nation. the cherokee didn't believe land could be owned. i was like owning sunlight. the doublehead throughout davidly. he would take this land, sell it to the government on his spoken take the spoils. the ridge said no, you're not, and he killed him in a vicious battle that i described, in wonderful detail. [laughter] in my book. so, he was -- but he was very troubled by this. this notion of sin and should he have killed double-head. what he in a position to do this? who was to the 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 tortured on the cross and why? but he still believed the missionaries, the fervor of their belief, and he struggled with it. think that, good and evil, what disthis -- what did this mean, and he thought about this and was one of the driving fors behind creating a version of the washington, dc, which he had traveled to several times to see, and that he believed that there were better things but wanted to sort out what they were, and so i think that there was just within him -- it's just this marvelous thing that a lot of people have but not everybody, called cure -- curiousty. he was really interested, and it allowed him to be the prosperous figure he was, that he gave up the hunting ways of his -- of

the tradition. he became an agriculturalist and had a -- he came by his wealth honestly, not doing the self-dealing that john ross was. so that is the answer to that question. then the little question, the smaller question, which is a larger question, which is about how could andrew jackson have seen the civil war coming. is that right? well, part of it was that -- i think what was south carolina was deciding -- the states rights issue persists to this day. one of these curiosities and difficulties, frankly, with the constitution that all rights that are not enumerate inside the constitution revert to the states. and so the question is, then whose right prevails? and their south carolina would say, well, our right prevails and screw you, federal

government. and that of course within the was the right to hold slaves. who could tell tell from the out not to conduct their lies they way they had always done it and as they believed they should be allowed to do. well, the abolitionists came flooding into the cherokee nation because to try and get the cherokee later on to stop having slaves. abolitionism became quiet a force in the nation. picked up from an an affiliation natural feeling for native americans was stenned to a feeling for african-americans. the two of them had an interesting alliance and so that with -- when you're dealing with the cherokee, you're also dealing with black slavery and jackson realized this was touchy and could be explosive, and remember, the missouri

compromise had set up this perfect television between north and south and didn't want to tip the balance or it could fall apart expecter that's what happened. in the 50s they'd throw it out with the nebraska act, kansas is put in play as a free state or as a slave state. katy bar the door. he saw that coming and was not wrong. he is often criticized for being -- for insisting on ignoring john marshall's ruling in the supreme court. the supreme court said this is a sovereign nation and the federal government should come to the rescue of the cherokee, push back on these georgians -- sorry -- and that that jackson said, this famous line he may or may not have said, that's john marsal's opinion. let him enforcement it. that's in direct violation of the constitution, but he had his reason, which was if he did enforce it, the whole country

could good up in flames and he knew that, and he was right. he was early to think this but definitely smoldering. next question, if any. i i hope you still like me. we're so nervous up here, we historians. >> what in your research explains how john ross rose to this position and partially because of having read the fictional book, but i think somewhat based on this charles fraser, 13 million, and i think in that doesn't he have that he was abandoned and adopted by cherokee chief or something like that? is that at all part or the true story. >> true of sam houston. not john ross. john ross was not adopted. he was -- he knew his parents -- as far as i know his genuine parents -- they looked a lot alike and i'd never read that he was not, and he is so true to

that scottish ancestry you have to imagine there is would a blood loyalty in his blood to be of that way. >> if he didn't speak cherokee, aside from not being able to communicate with the ridge hour decide he get the support of the other cherokee. >> an excellent question and i think the very fact that he couldn't speak cherokee worked publicly and paradoxically in his favor. i think the cherokee viewed him as better than them. that they -- only somebody who was of that stature, who had a kind of holiness almost, was going to be able to deal with the federal government as an equal; that he had a command of this language that they didn't even know. that put him in a special category in their minds. otherwise it's impossible to explain.

countless stories of him coming back to the nation, heed be on his here -- he is 56 had, wears a stove pipe hat, leger shoes. would never have been in breeches and a loincloth. never killed anybody. like what kind of chief is this? and -- he comes back, and he is there, and the cherokee approach him like a god, totally hesitant, whispering, quiet, waiting for their moment, and then finally they're allowed to come up and touch his garment, and just his coat, and that was enough. that sent them, and it was so much like lawrence of arabia. i don't if you know the story but his would a white man who was an englishman who the arab thought was sensational. he had this quality and there's smug about not knowing that -- something about not knowing that create as certain mystery that can allow for a certain

exaltedness that another -- that the ridge for all of his talents and majesty-didn't have. they understood what the ridge was saying and oddly that counted against him. >> would you speak to the revolutionary war experience between england and the loyalists and the perception that the cherokees were on he british side and how that might have contributed to the adversarial relationship. >> absolutely. they -- that perception was accurate. they were on the english side, nothing get back at these white settlers and also is septembers -- stems from a visit that some cherokee chiefs paid to george 2en in in 1730.

a man who was known as the little carpenter to the english, went with a couple of fellow chiefs, one of -- at behest of english trader and in the national of the english king he wanted to create a new title and new position called the cherokee emperor. purely for -- to find someone to have a negotiation, trade negotiation with. they wanted to speak to just one guy, the top guy, the equivalent of the english king. it was so much easier for them. of course, the cherokee had no emporer and nod concept of trade negotiations. they certainly -- then when they were asked to go across the ocean to london, that blew their minds. they never seen the ocean. had no idea what a sailing ship

was. couldn't imagine riding these waves for weeks, months, whatever it took, to get therefor and then once they arrived and were in the company of the king, that they didn't know, like, who was weirder. you had this king, king george ii was there in ermin, carrying a scepter that was useless in battle. he was like a useless human being and he was extolled by everyone and they thought, what is with this? there's a park -- the king had of course -- it was an open air facility in effect, and that they were up on this balcony where they were having a glorious royal dinner and one of the chiefs spotted an elk and he hand to have his bow and arrow with him, and he was ready do shoot and then the attendant

said, no, it's like sacred elk. why -- if there's an elk there, why wouldn't you eat it? was his thinking. but at the end of that, they made the royal tour of the various -- the theaters, the cathedrals and soing for were gawked at by thousands. whatever else he english had, they were materially superior, they had more stuff and there was more of them and 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 that he vowed if there every war they would come in on the english side, which they did. they did this first because they want told get back at the 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. then once -- they were on the wrong side every time. of course the english beat the americans -- i mean lost to the americans, at you may have herd in the revolution, and that then the english lost again in the battle of 1812. that wasn't good good. anyone they turned to the spanish, hoping hoping the spanh would be good allies and they were no better. another aspect of their geopolitical limitations. they couldn't see well enough what was coming, and they ended up on the short side of it too many times. anything else? >> thank you very much and look forward to buying the book. >> you better. >> take us back to before the gold rush and contextualize the cherokees among other native

american groups. they seem to different. >> i'm glad you said. that lied to throw this in and i didn't know when but now is the time. i will confess something i shouldn't -- i knew nothing but the cherokee when started. i'm sorry this is 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 the native americans and didn't hear about the them from the native american perspective. i if you heard them it was the english perspective and then the american one. here's the thing about the native americans. i didn't realize and is tremendously clarifying if you don't realize this either. it's grossly oversimplifying but actually true that there are two broad classes of native american

in america and in the -- broadly. you have to remember the native americans came across from euro asia in 20,000bc roughly during an ice age when, again, to my surprise, there is this land bridge -- never understood huh a land bridge worked. this ocean and like the parting of the red sea, in an ice age, the ice is denser than the water it and actually causes the water to part, literally to part, and create a land passage from one continent to the other and that there were intrepid souls who walk across the open space and it's so hard to visualize, presumably there were gray series on either side. i don't know. but they came across and then filtered down across what became the united states, down to south america, the tip of peru, up

into canada, practically every square mile of the land mass of north america was accounted for by one tribe or another but they fill into two categories and still do of east and west, and the east -- let's start with the west. the west are the indians that most people know. the apatch key, the pawnee, the -- apatchee, the pawn. >> these are the plains indians, who are on horse back who have the feathers and nonadic and chasing the buffalo and resist the railroads. the one you think of. there's the classic warriors. the eastern indians are a totally different type. the woodland indians and they oddly parallel the colonialists in that they were town builders

they were stayed in residents permanently. they created social struck -- lasting social structures. they did not move around. they stayed put. they had to enforce their borders, one tribe against another, but for no. part, the ridge, living on the hiwassee, lived there as he had lived and his forebears lived for thousands of years. split off from the ear -- that this fundamental difference. these are social people, that they had -- they needed order because they believed in permeance because they were going to stay. the know -- nomadic drives had no territory. they went where the buffalo were. no stann the cherokee became farmed, they stayed put for that

reason. they hunted but they hand end in a fairly narrow area. the -- with these nomadic tribes they would all goh all over the western states and that was a totally different deal. does that answer your question? >> i can't find my question. there. >> there i was prattling on. >> let's limit immigrant to the eastern. the devils in the northeast was iroquois and new england and the early settlers and the experience down here was souterly different in the northeast, massachusetts flag has got it an indian and a set el are and the new york city -- but the experience down here was so different. this characids went to london in 1730 but nobody was taking their iroquois. between the northeast experience and the experience here was so

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

first. in the northeast, the reason you have this tradition of thanksgiving at plymouth rock is that the settlers and the indians were right there together from the -- 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 the when the white settlers came, in they came in initially in ones and twos and didn't come by the boatload and came usually as traders first and would set up little trading network and then at was going well then bring their families and more families came and suddenly this integrity of the nation broached and a few more would come in but it wasn't -- it was because the northeast was thinly settled by

whites. that's the big difference. i'm just riffing here. don't know for sure. [inaudible question] >> i enjoyed that. how did the divisions you relate in this book play out in 2018 or has the hatchet been buried. >> the division necessary type or the divisions in our own society here? >> in the cherokee. >> well, it's interesting that -- as i note in my 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 have -- there was an issue two principal chiefs back there was an investigation that was going occur and that the supreme court was in support of the investigation, and the principal chief had the supreme court shut

down and the doors locked. this isn't -- hasn't been the way we do it on 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 knopp cherokee society or in american society. it also speaks to the fact that democracy is difficult. and that it requires a certain tradition. democracy didn't start in america. get to back greeks and europe. i wait as new thing. a startling new thing. it was -- the cherokee always operated by consensus. 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 a quaker meeting or a village in new england that would have a town meeting, and talk through some local question. that was the way the cherokee were and when a political divide rose up, they didn't have a tradition in some ways they still don't have a tradition by which compromise can be easily created. ... >> obviously, that slows things down but it also speaks to the kind of society that they were -- engaged in that there weren't that many big issues. you know, it wasn't like they're

putting in a new subway line or something. they -- everything was the the way that it had been and it was going to be the way it was. it was, there was a continuity there and it spoke to the perm assistance of the society that they treasure and could maintain because they were imbalance that they have natural reare sources they needed. they have not and didn't believe many more. they believed in enough, and enough is actually very sustaining. you can go on generation after generation if it's pretty much the same population, and pretty much the same needs of that population. but then, the capitalism comes in, and it is set into this larger context of a whole new approach to life, this -- democratic capitalism, and the cherokee remain thrown. >> final questions --

all right. i love this. this is very dramatic. [laughter] no drum roll? charismatic, scott at odds with the feds because he was one who was against removal. >> that's right so he and followers that fought for the confederacy. >> not really are it was the ridge who were the confederates and that great -- cherokee general and i love that i ams he was pathetic by comparison. for which i apologize. but the thing, yes, the cherokee i think naturally had for the confederacy for reason they aspire to plantation and held slaves they were literally in

the south and that -- that became, sided with with the union again, for political reason ares because it was the union that he figured that was going to be dispensing the federal money that they were going to be receiving for the, for the sale of their lands. the the money was channeled through the principle chief but it came from the federal government, the federal government was thing union. so he decided that at first, he didn't know who was going to win. and when it became a little clearer that -- the union was going to win and i might add that union put the arm on him because they actually came to him and -- arrested him. and he then said i don't know i've always been a union guy. you know, come have some tea and so that -- so he was able to walk that back. as we with say and -- so he was able. he sat with lincoln you know, he

spent he was a glorious war for him he spent many washington height society. he married a girl from delaware a quaker lady 17 year old when he met mary stapler gorgeous little thing, and they met when she was in boarding school. he tried to pose he was in his 50s he tried to pose as her uncle so they had have this until he was found out. but man, this guy who was a -- this fierce independent the, strong minded guy once he was -- had a 17-year-old in his eyesight he became this giving little 17-year-old himself. he couldn't wait to get a date with his honey so funny. how these people you know when a love comes on the scene. you have to love that. >> thanks. thanks for that book. >> thanks. [applause] hey, thanks a lot you're a great

crowd. i love georgia. [applause] >> so john will be in the atrium signing books -- 25% off mothers day, fathers day -- so many -- >> i have kids to put through college. [laughter] thank you for coming. you're watching booktv. television for serious readers. you can watch any program you see here online at the booktv.org. so jeanie what do you do for a living? >> a psych analyst that means people lie on the couch if i can get them to and i ask them to come more than once a week to really t