Creek Mary's Blood Author:Dee Alexander Brown The proud and beautiful Creek Mary, daughter of a Muskogee chief, was the matriarch of a family of warriors, hunters, traders, and even some Christian converts. Staunch husbands and courageous wives, they fought in the American Revolution, the War of 1812, on both sides of the Civil War, and against the hated Bluecoats - the army that inexorably... more » decimated their numbers and stole their land, ostensibly in the name of progress and civilization, but in reality at the bidding of inexhaustible greed and avarice of the white invaders.
Creek Mary charmed all the male colonists of Georgia from General Oglethorpe to the white trader she married. As the colonists usurped the Creek hunting grounds, she fled the isolated village of Okelogee and married again, the Cherokee Long Warrior. From these two marriages emerged the twin branches of her family, the half-blood son, Opothle, and his children, who were content to live in the territory of the Cherokee Nation after being evicted from their Georgia homeland, and her full-blood son, Talasi, whose progeny roamed the West as far as Santa Fe, married into the wild Cheyenne, fought the white man on the Great Plains at the Little Big Horn, fled to Canada, and finally, except for a few survivors, were massacred at a creek called Wounded Knee.
The characters and events of Dee Brown's unforgettable novel are part of our own violent past; Tecumseh, Andrew Jackson, Teddy Roosevelt, the great chiefs Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, the broken treaties and endless lies of rapacious settlers and politicians. But it is Brown's inspired storytelling and fictional characters - Creek Mary and her "blood," especially old Dane who, in 1905, tells anewspaperman the story of his indomitable grandmother and her far-flung family - that elevate Creek Mary's Blood to the level of an American epic.« less