Cherokee Gold
HIDDEN IN THE GEORGIA MOUNTAINS, CURSED BY A LONG DEAD CHEROKEE WARRIOR, A TREASURE WAITS FOR THOSE FOOLISH ENOUGH TO HUNT FOR IT.
JOHN COOPER is a police detective in the small town of Tahlequah, Oklahoma. Broken hearted by the death of his wife, he’s been going through the motions since her loss, avoiding relationships and chasing small time criminals through the present-day Cherokee Nation. That all begins to change the night he’s called to investigate the robbery and brutal beating of an elderly Cherokee man.
Cooper soon learns the old Indian’s attackers were after more than a little drug money. For over half a century, Edward “Flying Eyes” Blalock has guarded a secret. Days before they were rounded up and sent on the infamous Trail of Tears, Blalock’s ancestors stole a fortune and hid it in a cave. Today, the treasure is worth over a hundred million dollars, and the old man’s attackers took something that could lead them right to it.
Now, Cooper and the old Indian’s beautiful granddaughter are in a race to get there first, but as the body count climbs, one thing is certain, no one can escape the curse of CHEROKEE GOLD.
The Story Behind The Story
My family and I moved to Georgia from New Jersey in the summer of 2000.
Coming from the Northeast, I knew little about the indigenous people who once inhabited the South. My experience with American Indians had been limited to Hollywood Westerns, and my ideas and expectations about them and their culture were based on depictions of the nomadic tribes of the Great Plains. I thought all Indians wore headdresses, hunted buffalo, and lived in teepees, like those in the movie Dances with Wolves.
I’d heard of the Trail of Tears, of course, but in my mind, I’d always imagined it to have taken place somewhere out west, far away, in a place similar to where Lieutenant Dunbar (Kevin Costner) shared sugar cubes with Kicking Bird (Graham Greene). Boy, was I wrong.
As we settled into our new home, I paid no attention to the odd place names in the area. I didn’t ask why our town was named Ball Ground (it’s where Cherokee and Creek Indians played a game like lacrosse). What the city of Dahlonega was named after (Cherokee for gold). Why so many roads were called High Tower when, other than those containing water, there were no towers in our area and no evidence there ever had been. Or, why all the rivers and mountains had Indian sounding names like Etowah (pronounced by the Cherokee as Eye-Tow-ah—High Tower) and Yona (Cherokee for bear). I never wondered about these things until one of my children needed help with a school project.
It was the spring of 2004. My youngest son, Alex, eleven at the time and in 5th grade, came home from school and announced he had to create a poster on the Cherokee removal from Georgia. The poster was to include dates, facts, and the names of the key figures involved. As I helped him research the project, I discovered our area had been home to a large Cherokee population, and many of them had been held in a concentration camp near our house to await removal to Oklahoma. It dawned on me, as I helped Alex assemble his project, that the Trail of Tears did not start on a distant buffalo trodden plain. It started in my backyard.
The epiphany triggered by my son’s assignment quickly turned into an obsession. I set out to learn everything I could about this dark period in our history, amazed that I and my neighbors knew so little about what had happened to the indigenous peoples who once lived where our homes now stood. Consumed with the need to learn more, I packed up my little Triumph Bonneville motorcycle and set out to retrace the northern route of the Trail of Tears from my home to its endpoint in Tahlequah, Oklahoma.
I discovered many things on that journey that I wanted to share, but I wasn’t sure how.
I had brought a copy of Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons with me on the trip. At the end of each day, as I lay in the cheap motels and campsites where I stayed, I followed Professor Langdon’s pursuit of the Illuminati through the ancient churches and streets of Rome. I found myself not only enjoying Brown’s thrilling story but absorbed in the history of its settings. That’s when I decided how to share what I’d learned on my trip. I would create a suspense/thriller with its own hunt through historical places. But unlike Brown’s, mine wouldn’t lead the reader through an exotic European city in pursuit of a shadowy organization, mine would take the reader through the former sunset towns of the Jim Crow south and the red clay trails of my adopted home state chasing evil done for gold, Cherokee Gold.