This landmark two-volume set is the richest and most important extant collection of information about traditional Cherokee culture. Because many of the Cherokees own records were lost during their forced removal to the west, the Payne-Butrick Papers are the most detailed written source about the Cherokee Nation during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.In the 1830s John Howard Payne, a respected author, actor, and playwright, and Daniel S. Butrick, an American Board missionary, hastened to gather information on Cherokee life and history, fearing that the cultural knowledge...