Biography
Who Was John Rollin Ridge? The First Native American Novelist
The whole life in one place — Cherokee birth, the murder of his father, the road to California, and the book that made him the first Native American novelist.
Short, sourced pieces on John Rollin Ridge — the Cherokee writer who signed himself Yellow Bird — and the outlaw he made famous. The research underneath the forthcoming novel Yellow Bird.
Biography
The whole life in one place — Cherokee birth, the murder of his father, the road to California, and the book that made him the first Native American novelist.
The origin wound · 1839
How a treaty almost no one wanted led to the Trail of Tears — and to the morning in 1839 when a twelve-year-old watched his father stabbed in the yard.
The book · 1854
The strange, slender book Ridge wrote as "Yellow Bird" — the first novel published in California, and the seed of an American myth.
The question
A real crime panic, five different Joaquíns, a head in a jar of whiskey, and a state that needed proof. What the record actually supports.
The afterlife
How a broke editor's 1854 novel became a folk hero in three countries, a Neruda play, and a thread running straight into Zorro.
The name
Cheesquatalawny — the name his people gave him, and the one he signed to his fiction. Why the writer hid behind the boy's name.