One fall morning Jerry Ellis donned a backpack and began a long, lonely walk: retracing the Cherokee Trail of Tears, the nine hundred miles his ancestors had walked in 1838. The trail was the agonizing path of exile the Cherokees had been forced to take when they were torn from their southeastern homeland and relocated to Indian Territory. Following in their footsteps, Ellis traveled through small southern towns, along winding roads, and amid quiet forests, encountering a memorable array of people who live along the trail today. Along the way he also came to glimpse the pain his ancestors...
One fall morning Jerry Ellis donned a backpack and began a long, lonely walk: retracing the Cherokee Trail of Tears, the nine hundred miles his ancest...
Responding to the enduring lure of the West that captured his imagination as a child, Jerry Ellis decides to follow the trail of the Pony Express, a short-lived, hell-for-leather mail delivery service that lasted just one and a half years starting in 1860 but has marked itself in national memory ever since. Starting his journey in St. Joseph, Missouri, Ellis follows the Pony Express trail across Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada to the end of the line in San Francisco. Ellis succeeds in completing his twenty-one-hundred-mile journey by foot, horseback, covered wagon,...
Responding to the enduring lure of the West that captured his imagination as a child, Jerry Ellis decides to follow the trail of the Pony Express, a s...
In 1864 William Tecumseh Sherman made Civil War history with his infamous March to the Sea across Georgia. More than a century later, Jerry Ellis set out along the same route in search of the past and his southern and Cherokee heritage.
On Ellis's trek by foot from Atlanta to Savannah, he confronts the contradictions and complexities of his native region as he reflects on his own. From Macon's fabled Goat Man to Arthur "Cowboy" Brown, the Savannah street musician, we meet a vibrant, unregimented people, all of whom, like Ellis, are looking for their place with one eye on the past and one...
In 1864 William Tecumseh Sherman made Civil War history with his infamous March to the Sea across Georgia. More than a century later, Jerry Ellis s...