Of the Five Civilized Tribes of Indians the Cherokees were early recognized as the greatest and the most civilized. Indeed, between 1540 and 1906 they reached a higher peak of civilization than any other North American Indian tribe. They invented a syllabary and developed an intricate government, including a system of courts of law. They published their own newspaper in both Cherokee and English and became noted as orators and statesmen.

At the beginning the Cherokees' conquest of civilization was agonizingly slow and uncertain. Warlords of the southern Appalachian Highlands, they were loath to expend their energies elsewhere. In the words of a British officer, "They are like the Devil's pigg, they will neither lead nor drive."

But, led or driven, the warlike and willful Cherokees, lingering in the Stone Age by choice at the turn of the eighteenth century, were forced by circumstances to transfer their concentration on war to problems posed by the white man. To cope with these unwelcome problems, they had to turn from the conquests of war to the conquest of civilization.

Dispelling the clouds of romance and legend that have surrounded Pocahontas throughout the more than two centuries since her death, Grace Steele Woodward here re-creates the life of the Powhatan Indian princess. Indeed, the true story, as it emerges from these pages, is probably more dramatic and certainly more significant for American history than the legend.

The story of Pocahontas coincides with the founding of Jamestown, the first permanent English colony in the New World. Her story begins with her first visit to the colony as a child of ten and ends with her journey to England with her English husband, John Rolfe, and their young son.

The event which catapulted her to fame was, of course, her rescue of Captain John Smith from murder at the hands of her father, Chief Powhatan, and his warriors. But the more significant contribution she made was her almost singlehanded deliverance of the Jamestown colonists from starvation and massacre. Without her compassionate gifts of food and warnings about her father's plots against them, the Jamestown settlers would probably have met the same fate as that of the Roanoke settlers.

Pocahontas' visit to London was arranged by the Virginia Company, which established the Jamestown colony, not only as a gesture of appreciation to the young princess but also as a means of stimulating further interest in New World colonization. It was Pocahontas' final act of devotion to the colonists. She was never to see her homeland again.

In preparation for writing this biography, Mrs. Woodward searched out the Virginia settings where Pocahontas lived as a child and those in England which she visited in adulthood. The author studied every pertinent document of the period, from official records of the Virginia Company to letters of highborn Londoners telling about Pocahontas' visit to England and its sorrowful aftermath.

In August of 1942, Great Britain faced a desperate situation. German bombers hammered the nation's industrial cities and towns daily, and the toll in loss of life and resources rose steadily. Guy H. Woodward and Grace Steele Woodward tell for the first time the story of how the British, with the aid of forty-four oilfield roughnecks from the United States, developed vital shallow pools of oil in Britain's famed Sherwood Forest. THE SECRET OF SHERWOOD FOREST is based on thousands of reports, letters, and documents released to the authors in 1968. Guy H. Woodward was a lawyer, former general counsel for the Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association in Washington, and former chair of the American Petroleum Institute's production section. Grace Steele Woodward was the author of numberous books, including THE CHEROKEES and POCAHONTAS also published by the University of Oklahoma Press.