Shadow of an Indian Star .......... Molly's Reviews

Title: Shadow of an Indian Star

The Review
When sixteen-year-old Smith Paul strode away from his North Carolina home in the darkness of a September night, 1824 he had little awareness how his precipitous behavior would shape not only his immediate life but that of generations to come. The lonely young man who found life living in a home with a recently widowed, recently married father, unkind step-mother and lonely sadness for his mother lost to lingering death unbearable; soon learned that life on his own was also fraught with sorrow. Various of the people Smith first met were not only cruel and untrustworthy; they often were also common thieves and at times thoughtless killers. Smith was fortunate to meet Hezekiah Burkitt, a knowledgeable black man, who taught him secrets of the fur trapper trade. The deaths of Burkitt and his donkey, Scrap Iron, at the hands of conniving traders sent Smith into a desperate run for his own life.

A chance meeting with an Indian caught in the jaws of a huge bear was the catalyst to propel Smith Paul into a life he had not sought, came to love, and shaped not only his fate but that of those around him. Book one of the three part narrative continues Smith Paul forward from that chance meeting with Ja-Paw-Nee to the Chickasaw removal from their ancestral lands and into Indian Territory. Smith, called Ikhimilo following his courageous face on attack upon the bear bent upon savaging Ja-Paw-Nee, lives with the Chickasaw in Mississippi until 1838 when the people of Yaneka Village begin their trek along the Trail of Tears. It is while on the journey that Smith runs into an old nemesis, this time however, Smith Paul is no longer a sixteen-year-old stripling and the meeting has a far different outcome. Book one continues the narrative into Indian Territory, death of Reverend McClure, the white man who came to preach gospel to the Chickasaw and stayed to become wainwright for the area, marriage of Smith to the woman he adores, and his young family beginning life in Indian Territory.

Book Two opens in 1858 as the Smith Paul family becomes well known, prosperous and influential in the valley still called Pauls Valley, Oklahoma. Smith