A confederate soldier, pioneer merchant, rancher, newspaper publisher, and town builder, George Washington Grayson also served for six decades as a leader of the Creek Nation. His life paralleled the most tumultuous events in Creek Indian and Oklahoma history, from the aftermath of the Trail of Tears through World War I. As a diplomat representing the Creek people, Grayson worked to shape Indian policy. As a cultural broker, he explained its ramifications to his people. A self-described progressive who advocated English education, constitutional government, and economic development, Grayson also was an Indian nationalist who appreciated traditional values. When the Creeks faced allotment and loss of sovereignty, Grayson sought ways to accommodate change without sacrificing Indian identity. Mary Jane Warde bases her portrait of Grayson on a wealth of primary and secondary sources, including the extensive writings of Grayson himself.

"The publication of George Washington Grayson's autobiography brings to light perhaps the only existing written account of a nineteenth-century Indian leader. Born in 1843 near present-day Eufaula, Oklahoma, Grayson served as a Confederate army officer during the Civil War and in various offices of the Creek Nation from 1870 until his death in 1920. . . .Baird has produced an excellent edition that makes Grayson's autobiography more accessible and that should bring it the attention it deserves."–Montana: Magazine of Western History

"The publication of George Washington Grayson's autobiography brings to light perhaps the only existing written account of a nineteenth-century Indian leader. Born in 1843 near present-day Eufaula, Oklahoma, Grayson served as a Confederate army officer during the Civil War and in various offices of the Creek Nation from 1870 until his death in 1920. . . .Baird has produced an excellent edition that makes Grayson's autobiography more accessible and that should bring it the attention it deserves.""-Montana: Magazine of Western History" "This is an interesting and entertaining work. Grayson provides an intimate and comprehensive view of Creek history from the inside, and Baird has made a significant contribution to Creek studies by making the autobiography widely available.""-Journal of Southern History."

Finalist for the 2018 National Book Award for Nonfiction. In this sweeping new biography, Colin Calloway uses the prism of George Washington's life to bring focus to the great Native leaders of his time--Shingas, Tanaghrisson, Bloody Fellow, Joseph Brant, Red Jacket, Little Turtle--and the tribes they represented: the Iroquois Confederacy, Lenape, Miami, Creek, Delaware; in the process, he returns them to their rightful place in the story of America's founding. The Indian World of George Washington spans decades of Native American leaders' interactions with Washington, from his early days as surveyor of Indian lands, to his military career against both the French and the British, to his presidency, when he dealt with Native Americans as a head of state would with a foreign power, using every means of diplomacy and persuasion to fulfill the new republic's destiny by appropriating their land. By the end of his life, Washington knew more than anyone else in America about the frontier and its significance to the future of his country. The Indian World of George Washington offers a fresh portrait of the most revered American and the Native Americans whose story has been only partially told. Calloway's biography invites us to look again at the history of America's beginnings and see the country in a whole new light.

Deceit, compromise, and betrayal were the painful costs of becoming American for many families. For people of Indian, African, and European descent living in the newly formed United States, the most personal and emotional choices--to honor a friendship or pursue an intimate relationship--were often necessarily guided by the harsh economic realities imposed by the country's racial hierarchy. Few families in American history embody this struggle to survive the pervasive onslaught of racism more than the Graysons. Like many other residents of the eighteenth-century Native American South, where Black-Indian relations bore little social stigma, Katy Grayson and her brother William--both Creek Indians--had children with partners of African descent. As the plantation economy began to spread across their native land soon after the birth of the American republic, however, Katy abandoned her black partner and children to marry a Scottish-Creek man. She herself became a slaveholder, embracing slavery as a public display of her elevated place in America's racial hierarchy. William, by contrast, refused to leave his black wife and their several children and even legally emancipated them. Traveling separate paths, the Graysons survived the invasion of the Creek Nation by U.S. troops in 1813 and again in 1836 and endured the Trail of Tears, only to confront each other on the battlefield during the Civil War. Afterwards, they refused to recognize each other's existence. In 1907, when Creek Indians became U.S. citizens, Oklahoma gave force of law to the family schism by defining some Graysons as white, others as black. Tracking a full five generations of the Grayson family and basing his account in part on unprecedented access to the forty-four volume diary of G. W. Grayson, the one-time principal chief of the Creek Nation, Claudio Saunt tells not only of America's past, but of its present, shedding light on one of the most contentious issues in Indian politics, the role of "blood" in the construction of identity. Overwhelmed by the racial hierarchy in the United States and compelled to adopt the very ideology that oppressed them, the Graysons denied their kin, enslaved their relatives, married their masters, and went to war against each other. Claudio Saunt gives us not only a remarkable saga in its own right but one that illustrates the centrality of race in the American experience.

Color of the Land: Race, Nation, and the Politics of Landownership in Oklahoma, 1832-1929

Winner of the 2014 Oklahoma Book Award for nonfiction Winner of the 2014 Pate Award from the Fort Worth Civil War Round Table. When the peoples of the Indian Territory found themselves in the midst of the American Civil War, squeezed between Union Kansas and Confederate Texas and Arkansas, they had no way to escape a conflict not of their choosing--and no alternative but to suffer its consequences. When the Wolf Came explores how the war in the Indian Territory involved almost every resident, killed many civilians as well as soldiers, left the country stripped and devastated, and cost Indian nations millions of acres of land. Using a solid foundation of both published and unpublished sources, including the records of Cherokee, Choctaw, and Creek nations, Mary Jane Warde details how the coming of the war set off a wave of migration into neighboring Kansas, the Red River Valley, and Texas. She describes how Indian Territory troops in Unionist regiments or as Confederate allies battled enemies--some from their own nations--in the territory and in neighboring Kansas, Missouri, and Arkansas. And she shows how post-war land cessions forced by the federal government on Indian nations formerly allied with the Confederacy allowed the removal of still more tribes to the Indian Territory, leaving millions of acres open for homesteads, railroads, and development in at least ten states. Enhanced by maps and photographs from the Oklahoma Historical Society's photographic archives, When the Wolf Came will be welcomed by both general readers and scholars interested in the signal public events that marked that tumultuous era and the consequences for the territory's tens of thousands of native peoples.