Nancy’s War, The Last Cherokee Warrior Woman, a novel by Stan Rice, part five. The Incredible but True Story of Lydia Russell Bean

 

Author Stan Rice has just published the first of three novels, Nancy's War, in the series Trail of Tears: Novels of Cherokee Identity. Because Kindle has unreliable availability and formatting, the author has also posted a free PDF download. The first novel is about the life and struggles of one of the most famous figures of Cherokee history: Nancy Ward. She is so famous that there is an association of her descendants. She lived at the same time as the “founding fathers” of the United States, and was just as important to the Cherokee Nation (which was not part of the United States) as the founding fathers were to the United States. She started off as a war hero, at exactly the same age as Joan of Arc, then she became a lifelong zealous advocate for peace. All her life, the Cherokee tribe revered her, even when they began to disregard her opinions.

 

During a raid on a white outpost, The Canoe, the Cherokee war leader, captured Lydia Bean, the wife of the white leader. The Canoe ordered her burned at the stake. Remember that this bit of savagery—burning prisoners at the stake—is something Europeans had long done, only the Cherokees never did it for religious reasons; to them, heresy was an unknown concept. But Nancy Ward was Lydia’s friend. When Nancy saw Lydia starting to burn up, she ran into the fire and stamped it out, then released Lydia.

This story is so outlandish that it would be unacceptable as fiction. But, apparently, it really happened, according to Cherokee accounts.

This reinforced a lifelong friendship not only between Nancy and Lydia but also between whites and Cherokees. Nancy Ward learned a lot about cows, butter, cheese, and textiles from Lydia, and she passed this knowledge on to the other Cherokees. This friendship, saved from the fire, was one of the main ways in which the Cherokee tribe became more and more culturally white. By the early nineteenth century, the Cherokees were mostly white in all ways but the color of their skin, and even this was not a complete difference. Many of the tribe’s important leaders, such as their Chief John Ross, were partly or largely white; Ross was only one-eighth blood quantum Cherokee. He didn’t even speak Cherokee.

Alas, this friendship and others did not allow the Cherokees to stay in their homeland. The postscript to Rice’s novel is written from the viewpoint of a great-granddaughter of Nancy Ward. Elizabeth Hilderbrand Pettit had to give up her land and migrate on the Trail of Tears with the rest of her tribe in 1838. She looked white, was seven-eighths white, but in the eyes of the United States government she was Cherokee, and was forced from her land. At the end of the novel, she sees her great-grandmother’s spirit animal, the white wolf, who now looks defeated, like a bedraggled dog.

Nancy’s War, The Last Cherokee Warrior Woman, a novel by Stan Rice, part four. Bryan Ward, Surprised by Love

 

Author Stan Rice has just published the first of three novels in the series Trail of Tears: Novels of Cherokee Identity: Nancy's War. Because Kindle has unreliable availability and formatting, the author has also posted a free PDF download (https://stanleyrice.org/wp-content/uploads/PDF_manuscripts/Trail-of-Tears-Nancys-War-2026.pdf). The first novel is about the life and struggles of one of the most famous figures of Cherokee history: Nancy Ward. She is so famous that there is an association of her descendants. She lived at the same time as the “founding fathers” of the United States, and was just as important to the Cherokee Nation (which was not part of the United States) as the founding fathers were to the United States. She started off as a war hero, at exactly the same age as Joan of Arc, then she became a lifelong zealous advocate for peace. All her life, the Cherokee tribe revered her, even when they began to disregard her opinions.

Like all frontier traders, Bryan (or Bryant) Ward was a practical man. He knew that, to make deals with tribal villages, he had to not be seen as an outsider. Even the traders who, like Ward, were married to white women outside of the Cherokee Nation, took Native wives. By American law, the Cherokee women were not really wives. This practice continued until the Cherokee government outlawed it.

So Bryan Ward decided he had to have him a squaw. It was just part of business.

He was, in Rice’s novel, astonished when Nanyehi took an interest in him. He was expecting an ordinary, dumpy woman. But Nanyehi was beautiful as well as famous. He fell in love with her, which he was not expecting. He had to earn her trust, which he did by telling her he was an Irishman, not an Englishman, and his people were as much oppressed by the English as hers might soon be. This formed a bridge of empathy between them. This link, sealed by marriage, saved his life when strife became intense between the Cherokees and the whites; in her official capacity, she protected him. This is a love story that Rice presents with great tenderness.

We cannot know if maybe Nanyehi, in becoming Nancy Ward, was also acting in her own interests by marrying Ward. This marriage gave her a connection with the white world that eventually helped her and her tribe survive.

When it became clear that even Nancy could not protect him, Bryan left and returned to his white wife. Rice presents this as a sad resignation on his part. Rice got into Bryan Ward’s head, thinking and talking like an Irishman. As most novelists would do, Rice is probably using wishful thinking about this famous love story.

The Thinking, Walking Biped, part seven. Famous nature walks: Alexander von Humboldt and John Muir

Alexander von Humboldt was one of the great travelers of world history. He went all over the world, hiking in mountains everywhere. His spirit of exploration inspired generations of scholars after him, including Charles Darwin who took Humboldt’s book with him and followed his footsteps in South America.

But Humboldt did not just travel and hike. He made scientific observations which would later prove fundamental in the study of geography, particularly plant geography. Lots of people have noticed that trees tend to be found higher on mountain slopes, but Humboldt was the one who discovered that trees were higher on the south-facing than on the north-facing slopes. This is evidence that temperature and humidity are the important factors: the trees prefer the cooler temperatures and more humid conditions of the north slopes. After Humboldt’s detailed observations, the patterns of nature started to make sense.

Perhaps most famously, Humboldt ascended the slopes of the Andean volcano Chimborazo, in Ecuador. Because the top is covered by a glacier, and because of the crevasses, Humboldt could not actually reach the top of Chimborazo. When I climbed up the slope of Chimborazo in 1989—likewise not reaching the top—I felt inspired not just by the amazing geography but by the fact that almost two hundred years earlier, Humboldt had stood in that very spot.

 

It is particularly inspiring to stand in the exact location of an historical event. I have had this experience numerous times, including when I walked on part of the Cherokee Trail of Tears, but also on a remnant of the Native American trails near Tulsa, Oklahoma, and also a World War One graveyard in the Vosges Mountains of Alsace, France. I walked to these places.

The image of John Muir is inseparable from the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California. It seems that he walked practically everywhere in the Sierras, and not just during nice weather the way I did in my Sierra explorations. He would not hesitate to climb a tree during a fierce snowstorm and revel in the forces of the wind. He seemed to need only a blanket for shelter and only bread and tea for nourishment.

The Thinking, Walking Biped, part six. Famous Nature Walks: Rosseau's Passion for Botany

In his Reveries of a Solitary Walker, Rousseau was depressed nearly all of the time until he was rescued by botany. The study of plant diversity in nature saved him from complete depression. It works for me, and I highly recommend it. Botany is, among many other things, the pursuit that saved Rousseau from insanity.

Rousseau did not just glance at flowers and grass and say, yeah, they are pretty. He looked closely at them. He observed them and thought about them. Above all, he wanted to know what they were. In Walk 2, he describes his joy at seeing Picris hieracioides the hawkweed; Bupleurum falcatum, the hare’s ear; and Cerastium aquaticum, the mouse-eared chickweed. These are all very common weeds, but Rousseau noticed their beauty. Alas, in Walk 2, he slipped back into depression, and these flowers just reminded him of how much of his life he had wasted by not being a botanist. I think.

Rousseau spent the two happiest months of his life on St. Peter’s Island in Lake Bienne in Switzerland. He thought that, on that isolated island, he was free from the condemnation of the government authorities in Berne. In Walk 5, he describes his “botanical fervor.” He was particularly enchanted by the alder-buckthorn (Frangula alnus), the willow-weed (Epilobium ciliatum), and wild thyme. He also mentioned the toothwort (Dentaria), wild cyclamen, the bird’s-nest orchid Neottia nidus-avis (which has no chlorophyll), Laserpitium gallicum, and the lycopodium clubmoss. He ate the very tart berries of the sea buckthorn tree (Hippophae rhamnoides). I tried them, and didn’t like them, but they are raised commercially for cosmetics. He was as happy as a child playing with the exploding capsules of the Himalayan balsam (Impatiens glandulifera). I can attest to the surprising joy of having these capsules explode in my hand, and my grandkids liked it even more. Rousseau briefly returned to childhood happiness. This was his one happiness, aside from sex.

I got lucky. My job (as a university botany professor) required me to spend a lot of time looking at and for plants in natural habitats, and leading students on field trips.

But Rousseau’s stresses could not be completely forgotten, even in paradise on St. Peter’s Island. Actually there were two islands, and Rousseau imagined that, because the big and the powerful always consume and destroy the small and weak in this world, the big island would someday consume the small one. My own experience coincides with Rousseau’s. When I was sitting on a rock in the middle of a rushing stream in Wyoming, in the middle of teaching a field botany course to some of the best students I have ever had, I could not ignore the pain I felt from the office politics back at the university where I worked, where our department chair enjoyed making people feel bad about themselves (according to other people who knew him).

Rousseau would use his botanical ecstasies to launch into thinking about other topics. Walk 6 begins with a wildflower hike near Fontainebleu. He was enjoying doing this good thing—but did it really count as personal goodness if he enjoyed doing good things? He wanted his enemies to suffer—but he could think of no greater suffering to visit upon them than for them to know he was happy in spite of them.

He wished he could know all the plants on Earth. They are, he said, the clothing of the Earth. They are the only spectacles of Nature of which we cannot grow weary. He much preferred the Greek philosopher-botanist Theophrastus, who loved plants for their own sake, over Dioscorides, for whom plants were only valuable because of the medicines they contained.

 I find this 1888 line drawing fascinating. Notice the botanist, despite his serious demeanor and despite the shabbiness of his house, is happy explaining a thistle (?) to two fellow seekers of wisdom. One of them is a winsome young woman. The wonders of botany can, in fact, attract a mate—worked for me. But notice also that Karl Marx is listening to him! I didn’t think Karl Marx listened to anyone! Oh, the wonderful things that botany can do!

It turns out that St. Peter’s Island was actually part of Berne, and the authorities made Rousseau leave. He went back to being depressed. But years later, he would look at his herbarium (pressed plant) specimens and relive his erstwhile joys. I have done this also. I could not bring my specimens with me to France, so I left them in university herbaria, as shown in these photos.

These specimens are: Acer macrophyllum, Alnus rhombifolia, Umbellularia californica (all from California), Rumex venosus (Nebraska), and Ipomopsis aggregata (Oklahoma).

“I see only animosity on the faces of men, whereas nature always smiles at me,” Rousseau wrote.

The Thinking, Walking Biped, part five. Famous Nature Walks: Rousseau Thinking about Himself

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (he called himself J.J.) was a famous writer and thinker of the eighteenth century. His specialty was to pugnaciously disagree with political and religious philosophers. One of his ideas was the social contract. He said that humans were basically good—not passionately good, but inclined to enjoy being good to one another. They did not need political systems (kings, knights, dictators, etc.) or religions (the threat of excommunication and hell) to be good, but just to be given the chance to form a contract of goodness with one another. I realize the full idea is more complex than this, and you are welcome to read more about it.

Rousseau was a great and almost daily walker. It is easy to assume that he used his daily walks to think of new and inspiring ideas about which to write. He stopped in a wooded area after visiting Diderot in prison in 1749. The hike was only three miles, but it is where he had his revelation about the social contract. This was not a wilderness area, but within metropolitan Paris. Still, it was not in a house or library or church, at least. Many writers, including myself, get a lot of ideas while walking. Is this why Rousseau walked?

For the most part the answer is no. His personal views can be kindly described as utter despair, and were most likely paranoia. His daily walks were to forget his past and to be the good man that Nature intended him to be. He described ten walks in his Reveries of a Solitary Walker. None of them were actual walks that he had taken, but were mostly unsorted piles of gripes and complaints. In his First Walk, Rousseau said that nobody could force you to be miserable. He was calm, because, he said, there is nothing more his enemies could do to him. He continued his self-pity in Walk Three, where he said he hoped for little, and received less. But he kept walking, saying that “I need to endure the miseries of my life.” He almost gave up trying to figure out his tribulations; I found myself wishing he had, in fact, given up. He said Solon, the Roman thinker, learned something new every day. But Rousseau said his old brain was worn out and he could not learn anything new. I just hope that as I get older I will never believe this about myself. He believed himself to be the most miserable of humans because literally everyone hated him, except his wife. And so on, with Walks 8, 9, and 10. He had to be a solitary walker, he said, because to understand society he had to stand outside of it. Also, I’m not sure he would have been such a good traveling companion for anyone.

He had some reason to be paranoid. When he lived in Môtiers, France, his house was stoned, breaking his window. The hostility of the local people was probably because he questioned the goodness of religion. During Rousseau’s life, many pamphlets were published against him. Some were apparently written by Voltaire. As Will and Ariel Durant describe it,

In Voltaire and Rousseau we see again the old clash between intellect and instinct. Voltaire believed in reason always; but Rousseau had little faith in reason; he desired action. In spite of his disagreement, Voltaire respected Rousseau’s right to speak what he believed in… Voltaire didn’t agree with Rousseau’s denunciation of civilization. He informs Rousseau that man is by nature a beast of prey, and that civilized society means a chaining of this beast…

But I have not seen evidence (not being an historian, this is not surprising) that people were preparing false and defamatory documents to be inserted into his works to be “discovered” upon his death. Rousseau was not an easy man to like; he could like you and then, as with David Hume and Dénis Diderot, change his mind about you completely.

For most of his life, Rousseau’s walks were nearly blind, as he thought only about himself. He looked at his path only enough to keep from tripping over sticks and stones. But for a brief time, this was not the case. See the next essay.