Nearly a century after John Muir's death, his works remain in print, his name is familiar, and his thought is much with us. How Muir's life made him a leader and brought him insights destined to resonate for decades is the central question underlying this biography by Thurman Wilkins.

Profoundly attached to dramatic wild places and plants, and to the Sierra and the redwoods in particular, Muir spearheaded efforts to protect forest areas and have some designated as national parks. Muir's wilderness ethic, as revealed in his books, letters, and journals, rests on his conception of the proper relationship between human culture and wild nature as one of humility and respect for all life.

This extensively revised edition of Thurman Wilkins's masterful and engaging biography - well illustrated in color and black-and-white - draws on new information and recent scholarship to place Thomas Moran more securely in the milieu of the Gilded Age. It also portrays more fully the controversies that surrounded the art of Moran's time, as he became "the Dean of American Painters."
The American West was the subject of Thomas Moran's greatest artistic triumphs - Yosemite, the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, Zion Canyon, the Virgin River, Colorado's Mountain of the Holy Cross, and the Grand Tetons - but his travels with Ferdinand V. Hayden's geological surveys of the Upper Yellowstone were matched by trips to his native Britain and to Venice, Florida, the Spanish Southwest, and Old Mexico. These scenes inspired memorable landscapes and seascapes, as did the sojourns of the Moran family in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and East Hampton, Long Island, when they retreated from the demands of the New York art scene. In the 1880s Moran and his artist wife, Mary Nimmo Moran, also threw themselves into the etching craze of the period, creating some of the finest prints produced in the United States.
Moran was an artist happy in his work. He wrote, "I have always held that the grandest, most beautiful, or wonderful in nature, would, in capable hands, make the grandest, most beautiful, or wonderful pictures." The New York Times said of the first edition of this unique account of his life, "Moran's mastery comes through clearly and awesomely and often, pleasurably." Readers will find the new edition equally enjoyable.

Beginning with the birth of the Cherokee patriarch Major Ridge in the 1770's, Thurman Wilkins tells the events that led to the Trail of Tears, through the eyes of the illustrious Ridge family. Major Ridge and his Connecticut-educated son John were willing to abandon the rich tribal homelands in North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia and emigrate west to the Indian Territory to escape the white invaders.

During the decades of fruitless negotiations that culminated in the infamous Treaty of New Echota, Georgia, in 1835, the Ridges and their relatives Elias Boudinot and Stand Watie became persuaded that further protests by the Cherokees would lead only to their annihilation at the hands of the whites. The pro-treaty Ridge faction was opposed by fiery John Ross, the leader of the majority National Party, who wanted to stay and fight in the Southeast against all odds.

In this revised edition of his great work, Thurman Wilkins addresses the new scholarship of the past fifteen years and reconsiders the important questions raised by Cherokee history aficionados: Were Major Ridge and John Ridge paid off by the United States for their support of removal? If not, how did these Cherokee patriots come to change their minds about emigrating west? Was Chief John Ross a hero or a villain?

Since "Cherokee Tragedy" was first published in 1970, it has been valued as a penetrating social and political history of neither the whole Cherokee Nation-nor just the Ridge family- from the last quarter of the eighteenth century to the 1838 Trail of Tears and the subsequent "execution" of the Ridges in Indian Territory.