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The once proud and powerful Cherokee culturally disintegrate by 1838. Ella Waters (18), the Georgia daughter of a Freedman and a Cherokee, with her slave and childhood friend Ezra (27), witness her parents' murder, unseen by a hired assassin warrior, Tesali (29). The young woman assumes family leadership and probates her estate in progressive Bennett Steel's court and frees her slaves. General Winfield Scott's deportation capture the matriarch, her sisters Bella (16) and Lisa (14) in a holding camp with her father's old friend and medicine man, Didiyohvsgv (62.) For the self-defensive murder of a tormentor, her parent's executioner bullwhips her beloved Bella until dead. Ella vows to discover and establish a new life and home.
Included in the first departure led by her father's and sister's murderer/executioner turned scout and the white profiteer, she suffers starvation, pestilence, bigotry, and prejudice during the forced removal. She nears an emotional break and sinks into alcoholism. In a drunken haze, she self-challenges her culture and religious beliefs as she searches her soul for integrity and direction. A freak accident rescues Ella from the icy trails and provides a life-saving Conestoga for their protection. The wagon incident, mid-trip, discloses Ella Waters to Tesali as the daughter of the freedman he murdered. After that moment, wrenching fear complicates Ella's intense search for identity. Unsatisfied, the morally heroic woman empathizes with her personal and her people's pitiful plight. She establishes a healing wagon alternative to the Army's primitive white man's medicine and earns the moniker "Cherokee Rose" from her grateful fellow deportees. Arrival in the Territory offers hope, provisions, and reunification with Ezra who now studies law and clerks for Judge Steel's court in Fort Smith. The fledging attorney travels to Ella's land allotment and helps his old friends build their homestead. With the help of her clan and a runaway slave, Ella plants a corn crop and creates a fresh life. A dark storm cloud of locusts descends and devours her farm, and Tesali slave-captures and returns her worker. Devastated by her crop's destruction and the retaliation execution of her abducted friend, Ella resigns her heritage and leads her family to jump their reservation.
During the escape, the greatest wise father in the tribe, Sequoyah, counsels and advises Ella that her people and the whites confront separate civil wars, and he encourages them to seek a secure life in their ancestral homeland. They attempt a riverboat return but Colly, now a law enforcement officer, captures and returns the territorial escapees to custody in a Fort Smith internment camp. Judge Steel and his inexperienced attorney protege, Ezra, press the first Habeas Corpus action on behalf of an Indian. Tesali, imprisoned for political murder, escapes confinement and Marshal Colly attempts capture. Ella settles their standoff, which proves the profiteer sponsored her father's killing. With disjointed misgivings, she witnesses Tesali's hanging and his mystical flight to the Upper World. The following contentious Waters trial explores nineteen-century native mores, questions tribal conversion to the white man's spirituality and sets national precedents for Cherokee rights. Ella wins her case and celebrates freedom from government oppression as hostile white's socially attack and nationwide newspapers exalt her victory. Liberated, Ella the Cherokee vows a return to her ancestral home as her Freedman's half faces an uncertain future.
