Walk in My Soul

by Lucia St. Clair Robson

First published 1985

Amazon

4.5(340)

In 1809, the teenage Sam Houston leaves his family in Tennessee and is adopted into a Cherokee community, where he is given the name Raven. Tiana Rogers, the daughter of a Scottish trader and a Cherokee woman, becomes a healer, teacher and spiritual figure whose attachment to Houston develops across his repeated departures and returns. Their relationship joins two people whose ambitions and obligations lead them toward different futures.

Houston’s rise through military service and politics under Andrew Jackson unfolds beside mounting pressure on Cherokee lands in the Southeast and Arkansas. Tiana’s family confronts treaty divisions, migration and the approach of forced removal, while Houston’s public career eventually draws him toward Texas. The novel uses their documented association to examine love across cultural boundaries, Cherokee political survival and the personal cost of American expansion.