Originally published: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971.

On July 16, 1839, more than 700 Texas Cherokees and allies from a dozen other Indian tribes made their final stand against a force of more than 900 Texas Rangers, Texas Army soldiers and Texas Militia volunteers. The Battle of the Neches was the largest conflict ever fought between Native Americans and Texans. The Cherokees were led by 83-year-old Chief Bowles, who had tried in vain to secure clear land title rights for his people in East Texas from both the Mexican and Texas governments. Author Stephen L. Moore traces the history of the Cherokees' migration across the United States, their entry into Mexican Texas and the subsequent difficulties they encountered with the Republic of Texas. Drawing on archival documents and participant accounts, The Last Stand of the Texas Cherokees relates the inevitable showdown between Chief Bowles and the Texas frontiersmen he challenged during the so-called Cherokee War of 1839. Armed with sophisticated Garrett metal detectors, search teams return to the Neches battlegrounds 170 years later and successfully recover dozens of artifacts which helped pinpoint the key areas of combat. These relics have since been put on display with the American Indian Cultural Society and with the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum so that future generations can appreciate the significance of the largest battle involving Indians and Rangers ever fought in the Lone Star State

In 1819 to 1820 several hundred Cherokees-led by Duwali, a chief from Tennessee-settled along the Sabine, Neches, and Angelina rivers in east Texas. Welcomed by Mexico as a buffer to U.S. settlement, Duwali’s people had separated from other Western Cherokees in an effort to retain the tribe’s traditional lifeways. As Dianne Everett details in The Texas Cherokees, they found themselves "caught between two fires" in many respects: between the Cherokee ideal of harmony and the reality of factionalism, between white settlers pushing westward and western Indians resisting incursions, and between traditional ways and the practical necessity of accommodating to whites.

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

126 myths: sacred stories, animal myths, local legends, many more. Plus background on Cherokee history, notes on the myths and parallels. Features 20 maps and illustrations.

Includes treaties, genealogy of the tribe, and brief biographical sketches of individuals.

The story of Texas is the story of struggle and triumph in a land of extremes. It is a story of drought and flood, invasion and war, boom and bust, and of the myriad peoples who, over centuries of conflict, gave rise to a place that has helped shape the identity of the United States and the destiny of the world. “I couldn’t believe Texas was real,” the painter Georgia O’Keeffe remembered of her first encounter with the Lone Star State. It was, for her, “the same big wonderful thing that oceans and the highest mountains are.” Big Wonderful Thing invites us to walk in the footsteps of ancient as well as modern people along the path of Texas’s evolution. Blending action and atmosphere with impeccable research, New York Times best-selling author Stephen Harrigan brings to life with novelistic immediacy the generations of driven men and women who shaped Texas, including Spanish explorers, American filibusters, Comanche warriors, wildcatters, Tejano activists, and spellbinding artists—all of them taking their part in the creation of a place that became not just a nation, not just a state, but an indelible idea. Written in fast-paced prose, rich with personal observation and a passionate sense of place, Big Wonderful Thing calls to mind the literary spirit of Robert Hughes writing about Australia or Shelby Foote about the Civil War. Like those volumes it is a big book about a big subject, a book that dares to tell the whole glorious, gruesome, epically sprawling story of Texas.