John Rollin Ridge: His Life & Works

Abstract

This answers call for biographies of leading Cherokees of nineteenth century such as John Rollin Ridge. It should be of interest to Native scholars, historians of California, and those interested in ninteenth-century literature. - William L. Anderson, Western Carolina University. fine book providing valuable information about an important Cherokee writer and politician. - A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff, University of Illinois at Chicago. A cross between Lord Byron, romantic poet who made things happen, and Joaquin legendary bandit he would immortalize - that was John Rollin Ridge. His was kind of life that inspires ballads an dsagas. He was born to a prominent Cherokee Indian family in 1827, a tumultuous time when state of Georgia was trying to impose its sovereignty on Cherokee Nation and whites were pressing against its borders. He grew up amid violence of removal and post-removal factionalism. murder of his father (which he witnessed) and of his grandfather and uncle, who had advocated removal to West, marked him permanently, activated his mental and spiritual powers to make him someone to be reckoned with. John Rollin Ridge: His Life and Works is first full-length biography of a Cherokee whose best revenge was in writing well. James W. Parins places Ridge in circle of his family and recreates circumstances surrounding assassination of his father, John Ridge; grandfather, Major Ridge; and uncle, Elias Boudinot, by rival Cherokees led by John Ross. Eventful chapters portray boy's flight with his mother and her family to Arkansas; his surprisingly good classical education there; his killing of a Ross loyalist and his exile to California during Gold Rush; his talent as a romantic poet and as author of The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit (1854), one of first novels ever written by an Indian; and his career as a journalist. Newspaper editing and politicking (he was anti-Lincoln and anti-Abolitionist) suited Ridge's passionate temperament. To end of his life in 1867 he advocated Cherokee' assimilation into white society. Parins takes full measure of a controversial, contradictory, celebrated, self-cast exile. James W. Parins is a professor of English and director of Native Press Archives at University of Arkansas at Little Rock. His publications include Biobibliography of Native Writers, 1772-1924 (1984, 1985) and American Indian and Alaska Native Newspapers and Periodical, 1826-1985 (1985, 1986), both with Daniel F. Littlefield, Jr.