18th Annual National Indie Excellence®Awards Finalist: "Cherokee Reel."
A sweeping historical drama, Cherokee Reel follows Cherokee, freedmen, and mixed heritage lives through slavery, war, political division, and survival in a changing nineteenth century Indian Territory.
SYNOPSIS
Lisa Waters, a half native American married to a freedman attorney, becomes the social queen of Fort Smith. She forms a lifelong friendship with the wife of John Ross, the Cherokee political giant but alienates the opposition, Treaty Party leader Standhope Watie. Her famous Trail of Tears sister’s cruel murder exposes simmering public tension that forces a move to Tallequah, her mother’s ancestral home. Business and commercial growth propels the family’s prosperity but prompts an identity struggle. Influenced by Ezra, her husband; Moss, a fiddler ex-slave activist; and Mary Stapler, the nation’s first lady, she organizes a freedom railroad and founds a women’s rights movement. Unrest disrupts these efforts and thrusts her confused personality into the civil war as a US army nurse. She loses a beloved spouse and sense of reality at the Battle of Pea Ridge, then adopts a grief driven quest for blood lust vengeance.
The freedman musician rescues the widow and flees the conflict to a secluded valley sustained by a Union affiliated indigenous minority. Pin guerrilla fighters gather to resist Stan Watie’s First Cherokee Mounted Rifles. Social strife consumes and divides native Americans, but Lisa’s motherhood instinct adopts an orphan, James, and his sisters. The grieving woman’s hatred of her husband’s killers motivates vicious attacks against Confederates and earns a title, the Judaculla, after a mythic warrior. She assumes leadership of the unit but loses the fiddling savior, captured and imprisoned at the infamous Fort Davis Detention Camp. She begins an aggressive campaign against General Watie and his nephew, Elias Boudinet. The rebels capture her surrogate son, and the Pins imprison the General’s kin. A prisoner exchange negotiation confirms the general murdered her sister years earlier.
Stimulated by the revelation, Lisa and her fighters join Federal troops at the Battle of Honey Creek, where Confederate military domination ceases. That success does not stop Watie. He burns the capital at Tallequah, the Park Hill Ross estate and captures the President. Appomattox ends official conflict, but General Watie refuses armistice. She releases her devotees and returns to the valley. Without Yankee help, massive indigenous rebel support creates masked night riders and battles Reconstruction. Northern sympathizers suffer from victory, including veterans living in Lisa’s basin. Winter’s starvation forces the head to abandon her wards and hunt for food with James. She fails and succumbs to disease, which delays a return. Arriving in the Spring, the leader discovers a devastated graveyard with a few survivors alive, nourished by cannibalism. Losing her followers and adopted daughters destroys the woman’s soul and sends her on a desperate search for redemption.
Lisa obsesses on the education and care of Cherokee children along with the released but destroyed prisoner, Moss. James devotes himself to a girl disturbed by eating her relative’s flesh. A Union army group returns to the recovering encampment with financing for a field hospital. The Waters matriarch sees harnessing steam to manufacture railroad ties and coal leases in Choctaw territory as a profitable opportunity to service an expanding rail network. Enterprise stimulates the native American economy. Political stress against Reconstruction destroys the business and her relationship with her son. She retires to her defunct wood mill and her home. A deranged impoverished Stanhope Watie attacks his old enemy with imaginary troops and kills Moss, her last defender. She captures the General and returns her foe to hang before his family. As the noose tightens, she questions her similarity to his evil and cuts him free. She retreats and asks her son’s forgiveness. Their indigenous culture and the two as family welcome the turn of a new century.
HISTORICAL SETTING
By the early 19th century, a wealthy mixed-blood Cherokee elite embraced the southern plantation model. Figures like James Vann accumulated over 100 enslaved African Americans and built commercial estates rivaling those of neighboring white planters. This slaveholding class produced the "Treaty Party" — Major Ridge, John Ridge, Elias Boudinot, and Stand Watie — whose 1835 Treaty of New Echota triggered removal. After resettlement, plantation slavery was rebuilt in Indian Territory, and by 1861 Cherokee planters held roughly 4,000 enslaved people.
When the Civil War erupted, the Nation split along the old fault lines. Principal Chief John Ross first declared neutrality, but pressure from Watie — who raised the 1st Cherokee Mounted Rifles for the Confederacy — forced Ross to sign a treaty with Richmond on October 7, 1861. In February 1863 the National Council repudiated that alliance, abolished slavery, and rejoined the Union; Watie fought on as the last Confederate general to surrender, on June 23, 1865.
The punitive Reconstruction Treaty of July 19, 1866 emancipated the Freedmen, granted them citizenship, and — most consequentially — forced the Nation to grant rights-of-way for one north–south and one east–west railroad. The Missouri, Kansas & Texas (Katy) crossed the Cherokee border in June 1870 and reached the Choctaw Nation by 1872, opening Indian Territory to outside markets. That year J.J. McAlester shipped the first commercial coal from Choctaw fields, launching an industry dominated by the Osage Coal and Mining Company and, later, the Choctaw, Oklahoma & Gulf Railroad. Timber from surrounding forests supplied ties and mine props, while thousands of non-Indian laborers flooded in — pressures that would soon dismantle tribal land tenure itself.
KIRKUS Review
A fast-paced portrayal of a lesser-known corner of U.S. Civil War history and its aftermath.
Book 3 in a historical fiction series exploring the Cherokee in the 19th century. In Humphrey’s previous work, Cherokee Rose (2023), indigenous groups were forcibly relocated by the U.S. government to places west of the Mississippi. This installment begins in one of those places: Fort Smith, Arkansas.
The novel centers on Lisa Waters, a half-Cherokee woman who journeyed west with her sisters. While one sister died en route and another was murdered early on, Lisa lives a prosperous life with her husband, a freedman and attorney named Ezra. Lisa and Ezra enjoy nice parties and engage in philanthropy, yet divisions exist within the Cherokee Nation.
Not everyone within the nation supports Cherokee Party president John Ross, nor is there consensus on the legality of holding slaves. Some, like a man named Standhope Watie and his followers, are more than willing to resort to violence.
Things only get more contentious with the outbreak of the Civil War. Some Cherokee side with the Union, some with the Confederacy. Lisa becomes a nurse for the North and Ezra an army captain. After Ezra is killed, Lisa begins living the life of a guerilla fighter. Even when the war ends, plenty of danger will still come her way in a land “decimated by years of battle.”
Humphrey takes a lively look at the complexities of indigenous participation in the Civil War. From antebellum groups like the Knights of the Golden Circle to the federal government’s postwar treatment of tribes, plenty of important historical topics are dealt with here. Early in the novel, in particular, some crucial events, such as the murder trial of Standhope Watie, are light on details and can be confusing for those unfamiliar with the circumstances surrounding such episodes. Yet as the narrative progresses, the harsh realities of such a brutal period are easily understood.
TRUE VOICE REVIEW - Texas Author Magazine
James A. Humphrey’s Cherokee Reel is an ambitious historical drama set across the turbulent decades of Cherokee and American history surrounding slavery, removal, civil conflict, and Reconstruction. Centered on Lisa Waters, her husband Ezra, and the freedman musician Moss, the novel follows lives shaped by political division, racial injustice, private grief, and the ongoing struggle for freedom.
Lisa begins the story as a socially influential Cherokee woman living comfortably near Fort Smith, Arkansas. Her world changes when family tragedy and the realities of slavery force her to confront the limits of status, silence, and safety. Moss, a fiddler with ties to an escape network, gives the book its most immediate sense of danger as he guides people fleeing enslavement. Ezra, a formerly enslaved attorney, adds another layer of complexity as he balances professional success, legal risk, and moral responsibility.
The strongest feature of Cherokee Reel is its historical reach. Humphrey brings Cherokee political factions, freedmen, abolitionist resistance, military conflict, women’s roles, railroads, and postwar development into one broad narrative. The novel is particularly effective when it shows history not as distant background but as a force shaping marriages, friendships, livelihoods, and survival.
The book’s scale is both a strength and a limitation. Its many chapters, historical events, and shifting priorities give it richness, but the pacing can feel episodic. Some readers may also find the dialogue and historical explanation more direct than subtle. Still, readers interested in Indigenous-centered historical fiction, Civil War-era stories, and narratives of resistance will find a substantial and heartfelt work here.
CHARACTER HIGHLIGHTS
LISA WATERS Our hero, daughter of Benjamin Waters of Book One and sister of Ella Waters, Book Two, loses her husband in the Civil War and battles to preserve her family during Reconstruction and early Indian Territory.
EZRA WATERS Freedman attorney and husband of Lisa.
MOSS Freedman devoted to Lisa and her involvement and financing of Indian Territories Railroads, real and route for escaped slaves.
STAND WATIE Nemesis and the last Confederate General to surrender in Civil War.
JOHN ROSS Towering figure in Cherokee History and Lisa's mentor during Reconstruction.
