A Scottish-Cherokee boy accompanies his grandparents on the Trail of Tears in this “superb” novel by the New York Times–bestselling author of The Ordways (Time).
Twelve-year-old Amos Ferguson is a blond, blue-eyed boy of mixed Cherokee and Scottish heritage, the son of a physician and the grandson of a gentleman farmer. Despite wealth and education, however, the family has no recourse when a drifter forges a bill of sale to their plantation: Georgia state law forbids anyone with Native American blood from testifying in court.
Amos and his grandparents are relocated to a squalid internment camp and forced to join their tribe on a long and brutal march to the Indian Territory west of the Mississippi. Along the way, the doctor’s son tends to the sick as thousands perish from disease, starvation, and exhaustion. In the Republic of Texas, he bears witness to the doomed last stand of Chief Bowles and his band of Cherokee, who refuse to sacrifice the lands promised them by Sam Houston.
More than a century later, Amos’s great-great-grandson narrates the story of his ancestor’s harrowing journey and heroic survival, in “a novel every American should be required to read” that brings a shameful chapter of US history to life (Los Angeles Times). From the National Book Award–nominated author of Home from the Hill and Farther Off from Heaven, No Resting Place “is more than one boy's story; it is the story of a nation dispossessed and brought to its knees by the greed and power of another” (Library Journal).
This ebook features an illustrated biography of William Humphrey including rare photos form the author’s estate.
William Humphrey (1924–1997) was born in Clarksville, Texas. Neither of his parents went to school beyond the fifth grade, and during the height of the Great Depression his father hunted in the snake-infested swamplands of the Sulphur River to help feed the family. Humphrey left Clarksville at age thirteen and did not return for thirty-two years. By then he was the internationally acclaimed author of two extraordinary novels set in his hometown: Home from the Hill, a National Book Award finalist that became an MGM film starring Robert Mitchum, and its follow-up, The Ordways, which the New York Times called “exhilaratingly successful.” Eleven highly praised works of fiction and nonfiction followed, including Farther Off from Heaven, a memoir about Humphrey’s East Texas boyhood and his father’s tragic death in an automobile accident; The Spawning Run and My Moby Dick, two delightful accounts of the joys and travails of fly fishing; and No Resting Place, a novel about the forced removal of the Cherokee nation along the Trail of Tears.
A longtime professor of English and writing at Bard College and other schools, Humphrey was the recipient of awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Texas Institute of Arts and Letters.