Robert J Conley: 19 books

“So what does it mean to be a Cherokee?” asks Cherokee author Robert J. Conley at the start of this delightful collection of his writings. Throughout his prolific career, Conley used his art to explore Cherokee identity and experience. With his passing in 2014, Native American literature—and...

Adopted into the Cherokee tribe as a teenager, William Holland Thomas (1805–1893), known to the Cherokees as Wil Usdi (Little Will), went on to have a distinguished career as lawyer, politician, and soldier. He spent the last decades of his life in a mental hospital, where the pioneering ethnographer...

Gaming and chiefing. Imposters and freedmen. Distinguished novelist Robert J. Conley examines some of the most interesting facets of the Cherokee world. In 26 essays laced with humor, understatement, even open sarcasm, this popular writer takes on politics, culture, his people’s history, and what...

A modern medicine man portrayed through the words of the people he has helped Robert J. Conley did not set out to chronicle the life of Cherokee medicine man John Little Bear. Instead, the medicine man came to him. Little Bear asked Conley to write down his story, to reveal to the world “what...

Set against the tragic events of the Cherokees' removal from their traditional lands in North Carolina to Indian Territory between 1835-1838, Mountain Windsong is a love story that brings to life the suffering and endurance of the Cherokee people. It is the moving tale of Waguli (Whippoorwill")...

The Cherokee Nation is one of the largest and most important of all the American Indian tribes. The first history of the Cherokees to appear in over four decades, this is also the first to be endorsed by the tribe and the first to be written by a Cherokee.Robert Conley begins his survey with...

The thrilling saga of a boy turned gunslinger, and the legend that would chase him across the West... "I was a wanted killer, and that made me an outlaw, and I forced myself to think hard and to accept myself for just that. If I was to be an outlaw, I told myself, I'd be a hard one, and...

"The devil's on my tail, and he's wearing a badge. Arrested for a robbery I didn't commit, I broke out of jail and took it on the 1 a.m. I had no choice. No sheriff's going to believe I have a double-unless I find the outlaw myself. If I live that long." The Fosterville sheriff's...

He lit out of Texas with ten dollars and a swayback horse, a wanted man at age 13. Kid Parmlee's crime--he shot the man who shot his dog, Farty. Now, in the town of Fosterville, the Kid has found a hideaway--until his legend finds him. The West's scrawniest gunslinger has just been recruited onto...

When recent Harvard graduate George Tanner returns home to Tahlequah in the Cherokee nation, he finds the town bustling and accommodations scarce. The council is in session and everyone is in town. Captain Go-Ahead Rider, the district sheriff, offers Tanner immediate employment as a deputy....

Henry Starr was one of the most notorious criminals of the Old West, famed far and wide for robbing two banks in the same town at the same time—a feat even the Dalton Gang couldn’t pull off. Still, Henry Starr was a reluctant outlaw. An honest, hardworking seventeen-year-old Cherokee cowboy...

For many years Oliver Colfax worked as a hired killer. But after he developed a friendship with one of his targets, Colfax lost heart in that line of work and quit. A few odd jobs keep body and soul together, but until Colfax decides what to do with the rest of his life, he’s content sitting in...

They named him Striker, because the day he was born he was said to have tried to hit the midwife. It’s a name the young Cherokee would live up to throughout his early years, carrying with him the anger of watching his parents and best friend die on the Trail of Tears. Landing at Fort Gibson an orphan,...

Examinations of wargaming for entertainment, education, and military planning, in terms of design, critical analysis, and historical contexts. Games with military themes date back to antiquity, and yet they are curiously neglected in much of the academic and trade literature on games and game...