The Long Bitter Trail
The Long Bitter Trail: Andrew Jackson and the Indians written byAnthony Wallace is a wonderfully written novel that focuses on therelationship between the White Americans and the Native Americans duringthe 1830s. The novel emphasizes on the government policy that was imposedduring 1830 to forcefully remove thousands of Indians especially theCherokee and the Choctaw from the American east to west of the MississippiRiver. Through this magnificent novel, the readers learn about the NativeAmerican history and their story of the trail of tears. Compared to hisother research on the Native Americans, the author exclaims the epoch inthis novel with a pessimistic approach. The author of the novel has toldhis point of views to the audience in a straightforward manner. Even thoughthe author refers to certain renowned white historians who give shortshrift to this history, he on certain points has exaggerated thepeculiarity of his study. On the whole, the novel is balanced and presentsin an explicit manner the influences that gave rise to a governmentalpolicy that coordinated the banishment of Native people from the American
In this, as we now know, the Eastern Indianswere typical of horticultural or "neolithic" level communities around the world. Nor did Cass think that Whiggish do-gooderswould soon be able to civilize them, despite a few local successes (Anthony Wallace,The Long Bitter Trail: Andrew Jackson And The Indians, Pg. The novel also illustrates how the Indians respondedto the entire movement by taking legal action. Wallace in his novel writes, Cass paid scant attention to one major fact: throughout the areaoccupied by the Eastern Indians, horticulture, not hunting, actually provided thestaple foods of the native diet-corn, squash, and beans-and fish and shellfish were asimportant as venison in supplying protein. The facts are presentedas facts and the truth is not obliterated. Wallace'swork in the novel can be compared to Ronald N. Nor did Cass pay much attention to the fact that thishorticultural economy was carried on in the Northeast, both in pre-Columbian times andafter, exclusively by women, and by both women and men in the Southeast. Instead ofagriculture, fishing provided the excessive products for the maintenance ofa chiefly caste that might have matured into true class during the era ofthe Marxists. The Indians of Eastern North America, both in the North andin the South, he believed, still remained in the hunter state" (AnthonyWallace, The Long Bitter Trail: Andrew Jackson And The Indians, Pg. The novel has been written with so much of brilliance that as a readerI was greatly enthralled in each and every word. I could actually feel whatthe Native Americans went through and how it must have felt to be thrownout of their own homes and their own territory. Leacock pointed out that theNorthwest Indian tribes were already at the inception phase of a sort oftributary class society when Columbus discovered the New World. 1200, the Mississippian Tradition producedwhat anthropologist Charles Hudson, a specialist on the SoutheasternIndians, has called, perhaps too enthusiastically, the highest cultural achievement . It can easily be said that the author has very well made use of theevidences.
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