Luther Wilson

Adopted into the Cherokee tribe as a teenager, William Holland Thomas (1805-1893), known to the Cherokees as Wil Usdi (Little Will), went on to have a distinguished career as lawyer, politician, and soldier. He spent the last decades of his life in a mental hospital, where the pioneering ethnographer James Mooney interviewed him extensively about Cherokee lifeways. The true story of Wil Usdi's life forms the basis for this historical novella, the final published work of fiction by the late award-winning Cherokee author Robert J. Conley. Conley tells Wil's story through the recollection of the old man's memories. Wil learns the Cherokee language while working at a trading post. The chief Yonaguska adopts the fatherless Wil, seeing to it that the boy dresses like a Cherokee and, for all practical purposes, becomes one. Later, representing the Eastern Band of the Cherokees in their negotiations with the federal government, Wil helps them remain in their ancestral lands in North Carolina when most other Cherokees are sent off on the Trail of Tears to the Indian Territory. Thus, Wil becomes popularly known as the white chief of the tribe. He continues making money as a merchant and in 1848 is elected to the North Carolina state senate, where he assists in the creation of a railroad system to serve the copper mines in neighboring Tennessee. During the Civil War, he leads a Cherokee battalion in the Confederate Army and tries to persuade his cousin Jefferson Davis to expand the battalion of fierce warriors into a regiment. His achievements make his admission into an insane asylum all the more tragic. The Wil Usdi of Conley's story is in increasingly bad health, mistreated in a mental institution that to twenty-first-century readers is little more than a jail. He dreams of women and warfare and boyhood games of stickball. Yet even in his demented state, Wil is proud of his accomplishments and never loses his conviction that Indians are ""more human than whites."" Weaving together the disconnected stories of Wil Usdi's life, Conley's blend of thorough research and imaginative prose gives readers a deep sense of post-removal Cherokee history.

Legendary western author Max Evans has spent his entire life working with cows and horses. These rangeland animals, and other creatures both domestic and wild, play pivotal roles in his stories. This magnificent collection, beautifully illustrated by cowboy artist Keith Walters, showcases twenty-six animal tales penned by Evans during his long and celebrated career. Both fiction and nonfiction, the stories in this collection get us inside the heads and hearts of numerous four-legged critters - dogs, horses, burros, goats, cattle, deer, coyotes, and more. ""The Old One,"" for example, shows us the world through the eyes of a prairie dog as she watches her latest litter of pups rolling and tumbling around the mound and thinks of all the things she will need to teach them. And in ""The One-Eyed Sky,"" an aging cow with a new calf and an old coyote with a litter to feed circle each other warily, trying to protect their young, until a rancher intervenes. Not one to shy away from difficult subjects, Evans also delves into the ""animal nature"" of human beings, as in ""The Heart of the Matter,"" where two Vietnam vets and friends kill a deer and then turn their rifles on each other. These captivating tales display Evans's trademark mix of raucous humor and vivid, poetic descriptions of the high plains of West Texas and his beloved Hi-Lo Country in northeastern New Mexico. He reminds his readers of simpler times and more honorable people even as he evokes the merciless environment in which his characters, both animal and human, struggle to survive.