It is June first and twelve-year-old Mary does not really understand what is happening: she does not understand the hatred and greed of the white men who are forcing her Cherokee family out of their home in New Echota, Georgia, capital of the Cherokee Nation, and trying to steal what few things they are allowed to take with them, she does not understand why a soldier killed her grandfather--and she certainly does not understand how she, her sister,...

Describes the history of the five tribes of Southeastern America, the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole, especially their forcible removal in the 19th century to the Great Plains. The journey made by the Five Civilized Tribes in the 1830s, known as the Trail of Tears, is one of the darkest episodes in the history of North America. This book tells the tragic story of Indian removal, when the U.S. government forced sixty thousand people...