This site is operated by Cherokee Gadugi of Tarrant County as a chartered satellite, non-profit, non-political organization of the Cherokee Nation. Its mission is dedicated to providing history, culture, heritage, tradition, language, and fellowship to our members who reside outside the Cherokee Nation boundaries.
James A. Humphrey, Author
My name is James A. Humphrey, but the folks in Gadugi know me as Jim. I am the author of the Cherokee Trilogy, historical fiction books that follow the fictional extended Waters family through the turmoil and crises of Cherokee history from 1779 through Post-Civil War Reconstruction. Told from the Cherokee point of view, "Cherokee Rock," "Cherokee Rose," and "Cherokee Reel" were inspired by my grandmother, Ella Waters, a Dawes Roll signee, and I attempt to tell her people's story with authenticity, reality, dignity, and respect.
My Stories:
My trilogy opens in Northwest Georgia as the Cherokees in 1779 confront colonial expansion seeping over the Appalachians and follows the decline of Cherokee power, language and culture through internal discord, the forced relocation, Civil War and Reconstruction. An extended Waters family battles personal demons, nature, and white man’s pressure, exploring a path to survive into the future.
“Cherokee Rock” opens my trilogy as exploitation sweeps westward over the Appalachians in 1779 and engulfs a boy who loses his mother to smallpox, allies with a mentor squirrel, trains as a medicine man teacher, and who blood-brothers with a freedman, Benjamin Waters, the founder of the Waters family. The two, led by the teacher through decades of pestilence and war, lose the people’s trust to a malignant medicine man before the enemies collide in an epic good-versus-bad wolf revelation.
“Cherokee Rose” tells the epic story of a Benjamin Water’s half Cherokee daughter, Ella, who battles pestilence, bigotry, alcoholism, starvation and a record cold 1838 winter during a forced removal led by white profiteers and her father’s murderer to Indian Territory. She earns her people’s respect and adoration as the Cherokee Rose, then illegally jumps her land allotment and faces a white jury in a trial that sets national precedents for the rights of Native Americans.
“Cherokee Reel” follows the third and more frivolous daughter of Benjamin as she strives to imitate a white socialite philanthropist but cultural conflict, the civil war, her sister’s murder and the death of a beloved husband compels a basic “Who am I?” confrontation with a Confederate demigod’s racist immorality that avenges her loved one’s deaths and molds her individual and indigenous identity.
The trilogy’s books standalone and do not have to be read chronologically to understand and appreciate their encompassing story. A family and its culture dissolves under incomprehensible historical pressure but survives tenaciously to the dawn of the twentieth century.