Nancy's War, The Last Cherokee Warrior Woman, a novel by Stan Rice, part six. Thomas Jefferson and the Origin of Democracy

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.

 

One of the great white admirers of the Cherokees was Thomas Jefferson, long before he was president, long before he wrote and signed the Declaration of Independence, back when he was a student at the College of William and Mary. He heard the Cherokee leader Ostenaco giving a speech to his tribe. He was a surveyor like his father Peter, and Ostenaco had been a frequent guest at his house. Jefferson was deeply impressed by the way Ostenaco commanded the assent of his tribe without the use of force, but just persuasion. If the Cherokee tribe can do this, why can’t European colonists create a democracy in North America?

Is it too much to say that the Cherokees inspired the concept of democracy in the mind of Thomas Jefferson? Jefferson admitted as much in his writings, and Rice champions this viewpoint in his novel. Jefferson really said most of these things that Rice put into the novel. In particular, I found an almost word-for-word excerpt of an 1810 Jefferson letter to Governor Langston online. I am glad this quotation has been saved from historical obscurity. Apparently Rice just made up the part about Henry VIII, who was so fat that Dr. Newton should have taken his mass into account when calculating the orbit of the Earth; “but I digress,” Jefferson ends. Rice got into Jefferson’s mind.

To Nancy Ward, Thomas Jefferson was just Peter Jefferson’s little boy who had grown up and done something or other, she wasn’t sure what.

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.

Nancy's War, The Last Cherokee Warrior Woman, a novel by Stan Rice. The Cherokee Joan of Arc

Author Stan Rice has just published the first of three novels in the series Trail of Tears: Novels of Cherokee Identity. The first novel is Nancy's War, about the life and struggles of one of the most famous figures of Cherokee history: Nancy Ward. Because Kindle has unreliable availability and formatting, the author has also posted a free PDF download. 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.

 

 

Nanyehi, who only later became Nancy Ward, was an unusually brilliant child, and wandered a lot in the forest, hence her name Wanderer. When she was about seventeen (remember that number), she married a young warrior named Tsula (Kingfisher).

About that same year, 1755, the Cherokee tribe (in southern Kentucky and northern Georgia) went to war with the Muskogee tribe (in southern Georgia) in a dispute over hunting territory. Part of the white image of Natives is that the tribes were always at war. This was, however, no more true of the Cherokees and Muskogees of Nanyehi’s time than of the English and French of Joan of Arc’s time. And it was partially the fault of the European invaders. The tribes had reached an uneasy truce about which one had which territory for hunting and agriculture; but as the whites took over land, going westward from the Atlantic, they displaced eastern tribes into the territories claimed by other tribes. Among the warriors who had to fight was Tsula.

Nanyehi was not the kind of girl to stay home when her husband went to war. And she did not just tag along and fix lunch for him. At the Battle of Taliwa on the Etowah River, she was right up at the battle front with him. Cherokees and Muskogees both had guns, but they were not rifles. The guns had long barrels but no rifling on the inside to give the bullets more deadly accuracy. When she saw Tsula shot, Nanyehi did not collapse into helpless emotion. She grabbed his gun and started running and shooting and yelling. Legend has it that some of the Cherokees had already turned back in defeat until they saw her and followed her example, giving the Cherokees the victory. She became a war hero, like other women before her, and perhaps the youngest Cherokee war woman. She was, in fact, the last war woman when she died in 1822.

Rice described the Battle of Taliwa, Tsula’s death, and Nanyehi’s transformation, in terms too dramatic and colorful to actually be true, but he was unabashedly trying to get into Nanyehi’s head by doing so.

The stories of Joan of Arc and Nanyehi are similar enough that one could imagine that the Nanyehi story was a recycled Joan of Arc tale. Both Joan and Nanyehi were seventeen when they became heroes, a lone girl leading an army of men to victory. But there are good reasons to believe that Nanyehi’s story was not just a retelling of Joan of Arc. The main reason is that the historicity of Nanyehi was widely-held in the Cherokee tribe long before there had been enough Christian instruction to make this possible (especially since most missionaries to the Cherokees were Protestant, not Catholic). There are many other differences. For example, Joan was a virgin while Nanyehi was a mother. Joan was burned at the stake, while Nanyehi remained a hero for the next seventy years.

The story of a lone girl leading armies of men is irresistible. An early example is the probably fictional Chinese story of Mulan. But like much fiction it may have a little bit of truth in it. There is no shortage of military heroes who were women disguised as men. But everybody knew Nanyehi and Joan of Arc were women.

Human history has mostly been the story of men abusively ruling over women. But sometimes women have fought back and commanded the admiration, and even the obedience, of men.

=============================

Nancy's War: The Last Cherokee Warrior Woman, a novel by Stan Rice. A Little Cherokee Girl Comes of Age

Author Stan Rice has just published the first of three novels in the series Trail of Tears: Novels of Cherokee Identity.

The first novel, Nancy's War, is about the life and struggles of one of the most famous figures of Cherokee history: Nancy Ward. Because Kindle has unreliable availability and formatting, the author has also posted a free PDF download. 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 (as explained in the next essay), 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.

Before she was the great Nancy Ward, she was the little girl and then the young woman Nanyehi in her village of Chota. Chota was a large village, and the closest thing the Cherokee Nation had to a capital city. The leaders of the tribe—including her uncle Attakullakulla—lived there. Nanyehi’s name translates roughly wandering rose, which is what she was like, wandering everywhere and looking closely at everything, and turning up in surprising places, like a wild rose. The little animals, such as insects and birds, talked to her, but the big animals hid from her. Also, she was aware that there was something important, something about her, a secret that the grown-ups were not telling her.

Then, in the novel, Nanyehi took a trip with her uncle Attakullakulla to Charles Town, the biggest English city near her Cherokee village. She was twelve years old, just on the cusp of becoming a woman. Attakullakulla had been to London years before. Little Nanyehi had a lot of things to learn all at once on that trip. In this part of the novel, Rice confronts us with the numerous differences between Cherokee and white society, through the eyes of the little Nanyehi. It is typical, in white novels, to treat Natives and other people of color as primitive and inferior. But that is not how Nanyehi saw it. Rice introduces these things through her eyes, not his.

For one thing, Nanyehi could not understand why white people always did things the hard way. Instead of planting corn with a digging stick, they would hack all the vegetation away and plow the ground. Instead of having trails that curled among the trees, they cut the trees down and built straight roads. The white world was a world of straight lines, while the Cherokee world was curves. And instead of having a few people in small villages, where nature could process their wastes, the whites built big cities, and stored their wastes in porcelain chamber pots until they could dump them in the street. Nanyehi was astonished at how filthy the streets of Charles Town were, in contrast to Cherokee villages that were cleansed each year during the Green Corn Festival. Many other things Nanyehi saw that were, to her view, very humorous, such as wigs, which she thought were scalps. As Nanyehi saw it, the whites worked very hard to create a world inferior to the Cherokee world.

For another thing, Nanyehi could not understand slavery. Natives sometimes had slavery, but not as brutal and absolute as white ownership of black slaves. She was particularly puzzled at how whites calculated slavery based on blood quantum: a half-black, half-white person was a slave if the mother was black, and so on down the generations. A seven-eighths white person could be a slave in a matrilineal line. How could a white person have a slave as a half-sister? This made no sense to the Cherokees, in whose society a slave could either become free or whose enslaved status was not hereditary. This is a question Rice also addresses in his short novel Plantation Odyssey.

Most relevant to Nanyehi’s story, she could not understand why whites suppressed their women. In Cherokee society, women’s opinions were important and part of the process of government. Her uncle had been to England and was puzzled that Parliament had no women. Nanyehi was to be perhaps the most important woman leader of her tribe.

Just at the time Nanyehi was reaching puberty, she was also learning about the strange and dangerous white world just beyond her village. She learned just how dangerous it could be when a white man tried to kill her and her uncle.

It was at this time that the large animals started showing themselves to Nanyehi, including the white wolf. This was the secret that the adults only now told her: the white wolf of peace was her spirit animal. She was to spend her long life in search of peace for her people, and never quite finding it, as explained in another essay.

Rice does not say whether this trip really occurred; he used it as a device to present the ideas that Nanyehi had to process as she was growing up. Rice does not preach what he thinks is right about slavery and the role of women. He presents the ideas through the eyes of a confused little girl.

Evolutionary Altruism and Human Genealogies

This is a letter I mailed to Tiya Miles, a Harvard professor, minority activist, and novelist, regarding her most recent novel, Cherokee Rose. I wrote on paper to her academic address, since she must be flooded with emails.

Dear Tiya Miles,

My name is Stan Rice. I am an emeritus professor of biology at Southeastern Oklahoma State University. I am the author of five popular science books about evolution, botany, and scientific thinking. I have also had a long scholarly interest in Cherokee history, due to my tribal membership, but I have no credentials in Cherokee or Native studies. I wanted to let you know how much I enjoyed reading your novel, Cherokee Rose. I immediately recognized the James Vann character. It is a story that needed to be told.

The irresistible lure of family history, of mixed racial ancestry, has recently been an important part of my life as it was for one of your main characters, Jinx, and I assume for you also. Like Jinx, my interest in Native ancestry exploded long after the death of the last person who knew much about it, my mother. I remembered and wrote down everything my mother told me about our family’s past, but I did not seek further information from her. She was not interested in asking her Cherokee father about our family history either. She and all her siblings, long after the deaths of my Cherokee grandfather (the last one to speak Cherokee) and white grandmother, wished that they had asked them about everything they knew. I have reconstructed an historical framework and filled in the rest with imagination. As with you and Jinx, my ancestry is a major part of my identity today.

Human interest in ancestry is somewhat hard to explain from my scientific point of view. My evolution books deal with the evolution of altruism. My Ph.D. advisor was on the faculty of Harvard University, your institution. Among evolutionary biologists, altruism extends in primarily one direction, forward—an animal helping its offspring and indirect descendants—and is proportional to the degree of genetic relatedness. Parents care about offspring because they have a genetic relatedness of one-half, and their nieces and nephews because they have a genetic relatedness of one-fourth. Against this background, why should anyone care about ancestors? My Cherokee genes are 17/256, just a smidgin’ over one-sixteenth. Which is, biologically, nothing. My fascination with the story of Cherokee experiences, and the nearly universal interest in genealogies, are inexplicable from the biological viewpoint. This is one reason, of many, that I not only liked your novel but strongly identified with Jinx.

I spent my life ignoring the question of Cherokee freedmen. But I know firsthand about Cherokee hostility toward Blacks. Both sides of my family, especially the Cherokee side, was strongly racist toward Blacks. I was fortunate to have escaped this influence, as far as I am aware. I think this attitude is changing in the Cherokee tribe. I heard Chief Chuck Hoskin, Jr., whom you seem to have met, give a presentation at a little rural library in Oklahoma (before I moved to France). He had just discovered that one of his ancestors was a freedman. His message was that Cherokees need to face up to the fact that some of our ancestors were slave owners. (Mr. Hoskin is the kind of positive and empathetic leader our tribe has not had since Chief Wilma Mankiller.) My sixth great grandmother, Nancy Ward, one of the most famous Cherokees in history, was apparently the first Cherokee to own slaves. As I understand, she was a little unclear on the Southern concept of slavery; she did not abuse her slaves or treat them as chattel, but as employees who could not quit their jobs. Which does not alter the facts of the case. For me, the plot of your novel (about freedmen) is a personal one.

I have written, separately, to your assistant (as per your website request) to ask if you might be interested in writing a jacket endorsement of my upcoming book, Forgotten Landscapes, about the Native American transformation of the “wild” landscape of North America. I hope this request is forwarded to you. But even if you do not have time to look at my book, I wanted you to know that I, as an informed reader, appreciated your novel not just because of its superior fictional qualities but from a personal space in my heart.