The Cherokee Phoenix Printers
A Novel of New Echota

About this book:

In the winter of 1828, a wagon crested the north Georgia hills bearing five hundred pounds of lead type—eighty-six characters of a language the state of Georgia insisted did not exist. In a rough-hewn shop at New Echota, young printer Elijah Cornsilk and a handful of Cherokee and white allies assembled the first Native American newspaper: the *Cherokee Phoenix*, printed in Sequoyah's syllabary and English, side by side. But the Georgia Guard is already watching from the crossroads, the governor denounces the press as treason, and every ream of paper, every jar of ink, every pull of the iron Washington hand press becomes an act of defiance.

*The Cherokee Phoenix Printers* immerses you in the clang of the composing room, the smell of lampblack and turpentine, the weight of a syllabary cast in Boston and carried a thousand miles through mud and sleet. Here are Elias Boudinot, burning with the conviction that truth set in type can shield a nation; Samuel Worcester, mixing ink by the stove while the law closes in; Stand Watie, watching his brother gamble everything on a machine that "cannot be hanged from an oak tree"; and Sequoyah himself, testing the Boston letters against the curves he drew in the dirt, demanding: *Make it speak the truth.*

From the first fumbling proof pulled on coarse wrapping paper to the midnight smuggling of galleys beneath floorboards, this is the story of a people who refused to be un-named. When the sheriff comes for the type, when the pressroom comes under siege, when the final edition must be printed on borrowed time—what does a free press sound like in a land that has outlawed your sovereignty? It sounds like the click of a composing stick, the heavy sigh of the platen, and a voice that says: *A lie needs a thousand voices. The truth only needs one.*