Toward The Setting Sun: John Ross, The Cherokees, and the Trail of Tears by Brian Hicks

Toward The Setting Sun chronicles one of the most significant but least explored periods in American history, recounting the unknown story of the first white man to champion the Native American cause. Though the son of a Scottish trader and a quarter-Cherokee woman, John Ross thought of himself as Cherokee. Chief for forty years, he defended the tribe against the white encroachment and Andrew Jackson. Clashes between the two men raged over decades. from battlefields and meeting houses to the White House and the Supreme Court. Jackson felt no shame in ignoring decades of U.S.-Indian treaties as more and more whites settled illegally on the Cherokee Nation's native land. Only when a group of renegade Cherokees betrayed their chief did Ross recapitulate, forced to suddenly begin his journey west and relocate beyond the Mississippi. In one of America's great tragedies, thousands of Cherokees died during the tribe's migration on the Trail of Tears.

Soft cover only.

About the author: Brian Hicks is a senior writer for The Post and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina, an historian, and the author of five books. He lives in Charleston.