From dust jacket: "Archilla Smith, signer of the Cherokee Treaty of New Echota under which the Cherokees were moved to the West, in 1840 slew John McIntosh with a knife, and was arrested and tried for the crime under the Cherokee Constitution which had been adopted a year earlier. In the trial, which took place at Tahlequah, Stand Watie, later Confederate general and war chief of the Cherokees during the Civil War, defended Smith, and Jesse Bushyhead, perhaps the best beloved of the early Cherokees, was the judge during the latter part of the trial, and pronounced sentence upon Smith. The proceeding occurred under the shadow of the famous Cherokee political assassinations of 1839, and was electric with Cherokee party politics. The report of this trial, made in the minutest detail by John Howard Payne, present among the Cherokees as the guest of Chief John Ross, constitutes one of the most remarkable documents in all literature applicable to Oklahoma."