Unconquerable: The Story of John Ross, Chief of the Cherokees, 1828-1866

By John M. Oskison
Edited and with an Introduction by Lionel Larré
University of Nebraska Press (2022)
276 pages

Review by Herman Peterson

Probably written in the 1930s and unpublished until now, the editor Lionel Larré used John Milton Oskison’s original manuscript on John Ross, which is housed at the University of Tulsa Library. It remained unpublished during the author’s lifetime because several of the reviewers thought it needed more scholarly apparatus, which Oskison, a popular author and journalist, considered unnecessary. The book also includes a few fictionalized conversations. Oskison did not claim to be a historian, but that is what the reviewers would have preferred.

However, Oskison (1874-1947) was a “man of letters,” as college graduates were called in his day, earning his degree from Stanford University in 1898. He wrote short stories, novels, historical fiction, and biographies. He worked for the New York Evening Post and Collier’s Weekly. He said that in all his writing he tried to be “an interpreter to the world, of the modern, progressive Indian.” His autobiographical novel, Brothers Three (1935), is considered by many to be his best work.

The editor, Lionel Larré, is an associate professor of Native American studies at the University of Bordeaux in France, where he is now serving as president. His research centers on Native American autobiography. He previously published an anthology of Oskison’s shorter unpublished works, Tales of the Old Indian Territory and Essays on the Indian Condition in 2012. His introduction to this book includes an in-depth look at the circumstances surrounding its original non-publication by examining the primary sources.

John Ross (1790-1866) was the principal chief of the Cherokee Nation from 1829 to 1866, serving in that position during both the Cherokees’ removal to Indian Territory and the Civil War. He was the first principal chief elected under the new Cherokee constitution. His life, as told by Oskison, emphasizes the Cherokee conflict with the state of Georgia and their removal. He died in Washington, DC, while negotiating for the Cherokees after the Civil War.

Oskison’s biography of Ross would have been a significant contribution to the understanding of the principal chief at the time of its potential publication. Since that time, two major biographies on Ross have been published: Gary E. Moulton’s John Ross: Cherokee Chief (1978), which is still the best scholarly work on the man, and Brian Hicks’s Toward the Setting Sun: John Ross, the Cherokees, and the Trail of Tears (2011), which is well-researched but more popular. Oskison’s work is still very relevant today as a measure of the way Cherokees felt about their long-time principal chief in the years following his death, i.e., very sympathetic, but not without recognizing that he had faults.

Herman A. Peterson, PhD (Cherokee descendant) is the director of libraries, an associate professor of humanities at Diné College, and author of The Trail of Tears: An