Nancy Swimmer: A Story of the Cherokee Nation

by Clyde Bolton

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0963027336
• ISBN13: 9780963027337
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: Highland Press Ltd.
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.2" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

You Just Want to Cry

Sometimes you just want to cry. Sometimes you are just plaindisgusted. Sometimes you're just ashamed.That's how I often feltwhile reading "Nancy Swimmer: A Story of the Cherokee Nation". I either wanted to cry, shake my head in disgust or turned red-faced over what some Anglo-Saxons did to the Cherokee Nation. Dee Brown described what happened to the plains Native Americans in "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" but Clyde Bolton, through the fictional story of Nancy Swimmer, tells us the little known story of what happened to the Cherokees in North Georgia in the early nineteenth century-a precursor of events that would happen to the Sioux, the Cheyenne, the Shoshone, the Nez Percé, the Apache, the Navaho, and other Native Americans later in the nineteenth century.The humiliation of the Cherokees and the outright thievery of their land also happened to the other southeastern tribes-the Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks and Seminoles. However, those humiliations do not make the story of the Cherokees any less poignant or disturbing.Even though disturbing, I found the book also enlightening, especially if you're like me and do not know much about the southeastern tribes and their tribulations. Americans know, or think they know, a lot about the plains tribes ( the Sioux, Shoshone, etc.), and the eastern tribes (the Iroquois, Delaware and Shawnee, among others) because of movies or books like the Cooper's Leatherstocking tales, Brown's "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" or Costner's movie, "Dancing with Wolves". However, the plight of the southeastern Indians is often overlooked and Bolton does a good job, in a historical novel, of describing their travails without making history fiction.We get to know Nancy Swimmer as a child, a married teenager, and a young women, which is only a portion of Nancy's life of ninety-eight years but probably the most eventful. During this time, the United States reneges on its treaties -sound familiar--and removes the Cherokees from North Georgia because-guess what, the Georgians want it and there's gold in them thar (sic) Cherokee hills. Who said that ethnic cleansing was new?How this ethnic cleansing occurs is the most disgusting part of the book. Old Hickory, also known as President Andrew Jackson and Chicken Snake (at least by Nancy's father), contrives with the state of Georgia to expel the Cherokees, ignore the U.S. Supreme Court under Marshall, and steal the Cherokee's land. Old Hickory, I mean Chicken Snake, has gone down considerably in my estimation after reading Nancy's narrative of how he (the snake that he was) double crosses his erstwhile allies-the Cherokees. See, the Cherokees helped Chicken Snake defeat the Creeks at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in Alabama in 1814-just before Chicken Snake (or General Jackson if you prefer) defeated, as Johnny Horton sang, "the bloody British in the town of New Orleans". These shenanigans left me totally disgusted. What happened to the rule of law? Well, as they say