About the Author: Caleb Pirtle III
Caleb Pirtle III is one of the country's most prolific writers about history and travel. He is the author of 55 books, including the award-winner XIT: The American Cowboy, Spirit of America, The Unending Season, Echoes from Forgotten Streets, and The Grandest Day.
Through the years, Pirtle has distinguished himself with focusing on the human side of travel. He has long believed, "What happens is never as important as the people who make it happen."
Pirtle has spent the past several decades writing about the South and the Southwest. He understands the people of those regions and their love for the land and its time-honored traditions.
Pirtle was an award winning feature writer for The Fort Worth Star-Telegram; served as the travel editor of Southern Living Magazine for a decade; the editorial director for a Dallas publishing house for almost 25 years; and the screenwriter for the CBS mini-series, Gambler 5: Playing for Keeps, and the made-for-television movie, The Texas Rangers. He has sold his screenplay, Wildcat: The Story of Sarah Delaney and the Doodlebug Man, to CBS, and has optioned his screenplay, Bum's Luck.
Pirtle is a journalism graduate from The University of Texas in Austin and has won the National William Randolph Hearst Award for feature writing, the Discover America Award three times for his travel articles at Southern Living, and numerous Associated Press and Headliner's Awards for his work at The Star-Telegram.
Pirtle currently lives in Texas with his wife Linda, former English teacher and school administrator, who is currently editor and art director for Venture Galleries.
It may have been the greatest injustice of all.
A nation was uprooted.
A nation was ripped apart from its ancestral lands with its peoples' feet pointed west. So many died along the way.
The Five Civilized Tribes -- the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, Cherokee, and Seminole -- rose to power on the land of their fathers, atop great smoky mountains, deep within vast timbered forests, lost among the mangroves, palmettos, and rivers of grass.
They were strong and proud -- hunters who had become farmers. Many fine plantations were firmly planted on the land they called home, and slaves picked their cotton in the fields. They had achieved self-government and prospered.
But civilization rolled selfishly into their nation.
Treaties were passed, signed, and ignored.
Promises were made and broken, sometimes just forgotten.
The removal of the tribes from their homeland in the Southeast to Indian Territory takes on a new dimension as author Caleb Pirtle relates to a culture that existed before the Europeans set foot on American soil.
The people suffered greatly from this exodus -- driven like cattle herds across frozen ground and icy rivers, families separated, children and the old ones dying -- as they struggled down a path that would forever be known as "The Trail Where They Cried."
They were victimized by America's "Indian Policy."
It was a grave mistake.
Trail of Broken Promises was written for the casual historian searching for an emotional overview of a dark era in America's past. Developed for the traveler, the book contains numerous photographs depicting the heritage and culture of the Five Civilized Tribes, as well as historical traces -- homes, council houses, prisons, and forts -- of their early days in Oklahoma.
