Three years in the making, Secret History of the Cherokees spans over one-hundred years of Cherokee and American history. From the birth of the Cherokee slave-holding republic in 1808 to the high tide of the Civil War in Indian Territory, Secret History of the Cherokees tells the hidden stories of how the Cherokees came to be the largest and most diverse of North American Indian nations. The result of exhaustive research, close examination of the culture and incisive analysis, Secret History of the Cherokees is certainly Cherokee history has it has never before been written. Robert J. Conley (author of A Cherokee Encyclopedia and The Cherokee Nation - a History, writes of the novel - “There has never been anything quite like it before and there probably never will be again.”Secret History of the Cherokees is a historical novel without naivety or sentimentality. Equal parts Twain, Faulkner, Forrest Carter and Cormac McCarthy, the novel is a postmodern southern western with a strong feminist sensibility and multicultural focus. The book spotlights key events in the tribe’s development, and the historic players who set them into motion, as the Cherokees evolve from a totally matrilinear society to a male-dominated governance patterned after that of their white southern neighbors.