In his youth Daniel Trabue (1760--1840) served as a Virginia soldier in the Revolutionary War. After three years of service on the Kentucky frontier, he returned home to participate as a sutler in the Yorktown campaign. Following the war he settled in the Piedmont, but by 1785 his yearning to return westward led him to take his family to Kentucky, where they settled for a few years in the upper Green River country. He recorded his narrative in 1827, in the town of Columbia, of which he was a founder. A keen observer of people and events, Trabue captures experiences of everyday life in both...

Though the tragedy of the Trail of Tears is widely recognized today, the pervasive effects of the tribe's uprooting have never been examined in detail. Despite the Cherokees' efforts to assimilate with the dominant white culture--running their own newspaper, ratifying a constitution based on that of the United States--they were never able to integrate fully with white men in the New World.

In An American Betrayal, Daniel Blake Smith's vivid prose brings to life a host of memorable characters: the veteran Indian-fighter Andrew Jackson, who adopted a young Indian boy into his...