Sam Houston with the Cherokees, 1829-1833

This is a lively effort to pierce the thick fog of Falsehood, calumny, ignorance, and legend surrounding the four years Sam Houston spent among the Cherokees in what is now northeastern Oklahoma, the broken years in Tennessee, and his advent in Texas on the eve of the War for Independence.–Virginia Quarterly Review

Sam Houston has come to personify the spirit of the Texas Revolution, and yet the details of his life with the Cherokee Indians have remained obscure. In the more than fifty biographies of Sam Houston, only slight reference is made to the years (1829-1833) that Houston spent with the Cherokees. To reconstruct these years the authors have examined numerous resources, including Indian agency records, Congressional documents, contemporary diaries, and unpublished letters, as well as Houston's letters and speeches. The authors scrutinize Houston's role as Indian trader, advocate in Washington of Cherokee rights, and negotiator with the Plains Indian tribes. They offer proof of Houston's marriage to the Cherokee Diana Rogers and debunk the legend that he spent the years with the Cherokees in drunken debauchery.

A legal historian of Osage and Cherokee heritage, Rennard Strickland is considered a pioneer in introducing Indian law into university curriculum. He has written and edited more than 35 books and is frequently cited by courts and scholars for his work as revision editor in chief of the Handbook of Federal Indian Law. Strickland has been involved in the resolution of a number of significant Indian cases. He was the founding director of the Center for the Study of American Indian Law and Policy at the University of Oklahoma. He is the first person to have served both as president of the Association of American Law Schools and as chair of the Law School Admissions Council. He is also the only person to have received both the Society of American Law Teachers (SALT) Award and the American Bar Association's Spirit of Excellence Award. Strickland was the dean of the law school from 1997 to 2002.