About this ebook
By 1100 A.D., Cahokia held more residents than Paris, its central plaza ringed by earthen pyramids taller than a ten story building. Nine hundred miles west, in a desert canyon in New Mexico, another nation built stone complexes so precisely aligned with the sun that modern engineers still travel there to study the method. These were not scattered camps waiting for history to notice them. These were nations, with law, diplomacy, trade routes stretching a thousand miles, and monuments built to outlast empires.
Then came 1539, and Hernando de Soto's expedition through the Southeast. Then 1830, and the Indian Removal Act signed by Andrew Jackson. Then December 29, 1890, and the frozen ground at Wounded Knee. Chapter by chapter, this book tracks exactly how a continent of cities, confederacies, and civilizations was pushed toward the edge of the record itself, using court documents, treaty text, tree ring data, and firsthand nineteenth and twentieth century accounts rather than guesswork or myth.
But this is not only a story of loss. It follows John Ross fighting the Cherokee case to the Supreme Court in 1832. It follows Red Cloud forcing the United States Army to abandon an entire fort in 1868. It follows the seventy one day standoff at Wounded Knee in 1973, and the Supreme Court ruling in 2020 that handed nearly half of eastern Oklahoma back to Muscogee jurisdiction. Nations written off as finished keep appearing again in the record, on their own terms, refusing the ending written for them.
Told in the tradition of narrative American history at its finest, precise on dates, grounded in primary sources, and paced like a story you cannot set down, this account follows the full arc from the mound builders of the Mississippi to the tribal governments negotiating water rights in federal court this year.
Readers of sweeping, charac Scroll up and click Buy Now to begin where the true history of this land actually starts.
