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A Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award 2001 winner
Excerpt
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The
Cherokee Lottery
A Sequence of Poems
by William Jay Smith
“William Jay Smith has been one of our best poets for more than sixty years, and The Cherokee Lottery is his masterwork: taut, harrowing, eloquent, and profoundly memorable.”
—Harold Bloom
(View all blurbs.)
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For the first time in poetic form, The Cherokee Lottery treats one of the greatest tragedies in American history, the forced removal of the Southern Indian tribes east of the Mississippi. When gold was discovered on Cherokee land in northern Georgia in 1828, the U.S. Government passed the Removal Act, and 18,000 Cherokees, along with other Southern tribes—Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and—were forcibly relocated to Oklahoma territory. Herded along under armed guard, they traveled in bitter cold weather and as many as a quarter died on what became known as “The Trail of Tears.”
In powerful poetry of epic proportions, which Harold Bloom has called his best work, Smith paints a stark and vivid picture of this ordeal and its principal participants, among them Sequoyah, the inventor of the Cherokee alphabet, and Osceola, the Seminole chief.
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