William Humphrey brings a shameful chapter in US history—the removal of the Cherokee nation along the Trail of Tears—to vivid life in his powerful final novel. Twelve-year-old Amos Ferguson is a blond, blue-eyed boy of mixed Cherokee and Scottish heritage, the son of a physician and the grandson of a gentleman farmer. Despite wealth and education, however, the family has no recourse when a drifter forges a bill of sale to their plantation: Georgia state law forbids anyone with Native American blood from testifying in court. Amos and his grandparents are relocated to a squalid internment camp and forced to join their tribe in a long and brutal march to the Indian Territory west of the Mississippi. Along the way, the doctor’s son tends to the sick as thousands perish from disease, starvation, and exhaustion. In the Republic of Texas, he bears witness to the doomed last stand of Chief Bowles and his band of Cherokee, who refuse to sacrifice the lands promised them by Sam Houston. More than a century later, Amos’s great-great-grandson narrates the story of his ancestor’s harrowing journey and heroic survival. Meticulously researched, ingeniously crafted, and profoundly moving, No Resting Place transcends the boundaries of fact and fiction to shine a brilliant light into a dark corner of the past.
