Indian Removal: The Emigration of the Five Civilized Tribes of Indians (Civilization of the American Indian Series) [Paperback]

Grant Foreman (Author), Angie Debo (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 15, 1974 | Series: Civilization of the American Indian Series

It is unlikely that any single book or document will ever earn a more firmly-fixed position of respect and authority than this distinguished volume by Grant Foreman. Originally published in 1932, on the date of the hundredth anniversary of the arrival in Oklahoma of the first Indians as a result of the United States government’s relocation of the Five Civilized Tribes, Indian Removal remains today the definitive book in its field.

The forcible uprooting and expulsion of the 60,000 Indians comprising the Five Civilized Tribes, including the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, Cherokee, and Seminole, unfolded a story without parallel in the history of the United States. For more than a decade thousands of tragedies and experiences of absorbing interest marked the removal over the "Trail of Tears," but there were no chroniclers at hand to record them. Only occasionally did the tragedy and pathos of some phase of this history-making undertaking beguile a sympathetic officer to turn from routine and write a line or a paragraph of comment.

From fragments in thousands of manuscripts and in official and unofficial reports Grant Foreman gleaned the materials for this book to provide readers with an unbiased day-by-day recital of events.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Grant Foreman (1869-1953), known as the dean of American Indian historians, was the author of Indian Removal, The Five Civilized Tribes, and Sequoyah and editor of Ethan Allen Hitchcock?s Traveler in Indian Territory, all published by the University of Oklahoma Press.

Angie Debo was reared in a pioneer community, at Marshall, Oklahoma, where it has been her privilege to know from childhood the folkways of the Indians and the traditions of the western settlers. A member of her community high school's first graduating class, she later attended the University of Oklahoma, where she was a Phi Beta Kappa, and took her B.A. and later her Ph.D. degree; she received her master's degree from the University of Chicago. Her education was combined with intervals of teaching in country schools, starting at the age of sixteen.

Miss Debo's distinguished reputation as a regional scholar has been enhanced by her book, The Rise and. Fall of the Choctaw Republic, which won the John H. Dunning prize of the American Historical Society for the best book submitted in the field of United States history in 1934, and for her later, book, And Still the Waters Run. She has been a teacher in schools and colleges both in Oklahoma and Texas and was curator of the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in Canyon, Texas. More recently she has been state director of the Federal Writers' Project in Oklahoma, in which capacity she edited Oklahoma: A Guide to the Sooner State for the American Guide Series.

Product Details

• Paperback: 422 pages
• Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press (January 15, 1974)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0806111720
• ISBN-13: 978-0806111728
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #252,048 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Comprehensive, Yet Dry and Dated Treatment of the Trail of Tears, March 3, 2009

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Gord o' The Books "Gordon" (SE Michigan) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Indian Removal: The Emigration of the Five Civilized Tribes of Indians (Civilization of the American Indian Series) (Paperback)

This elemental work, first published in 1932, had been for years the authoritative account of the Trail of Tears. But 1932 was a high-point of Progressivism in American history; right on the eve of the New Deal. From the days of Andrew Jackson, the Progressive movement in the United States, when accompanied by control of the White House and Congress by the Democratic Party, has tended to have ethnic cleansing components like the Trail of Tears, slavery, and Japanese internment.

In 1932, the country was not in the mood to look at the Trail of Tears with clear eyes focused on the hard and brutal realities of it. "Happy Days" were about to be here again, and so the textbook of the Trail of Tears could be factually correct, as this one is, yet lacking the passion and honesty of later works like "Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee" and Gloria Jahoda's superb "Trail of Tears".

The language of this work, too, is a little hard to follow from today's attention-deficit perspective. The footnotes are too long, and there are too many important but uninteresting details like numbers of people moved, quality and quanitities of supplies, etc. There are constant lists of such aspects of the story, repeated throughout the text.

I am a family genealogist searching for answers to the question: "Who is my great-great Grandmother Mattie Clemons?" Can she be found? Was she a Native American, as we have been told? Was she Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, or Creek? And so, for this purpose, I found the book illuminating. I may have made marginal gains in my search for my ancestor. But the few morsels that provided understanding of the Trail of Tears policy itself, made it valuable to me.

But, it was valuable only in the sense that Alex Haley had to sit through hours of story-telling, before finding Kunta Kinte. You have to have a purpose in reading this, and you have to know what you want out of it, before commencing.

Not a good casual read. But for people that hunger for more information on the Trail of Tears, I do recommend it.