Wofford’s Blood

Wofford's Blood, an epic family saga saturated in Cherokee and North Georgia history, is based on the true history of James Daugherty Wofford, who led a detachment on the Trail of Tears and was one of the main informants for Smithsonian ethnologist James Mooney's History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In 1815 in the contested borderland between the state of Georgia and the Cherokee Nation, thirteen-year-old J.D. Wofford, son of a Cherokee mother and a white Intruder father, must choose where his loyalties lie. He spends his winters in his mother's Cherokee world and his summers in his father's world: Wofford's Settlement, the most notorious Intruder outpost in North Georgia. In the Cherokee world, J.D. is a tsila, an apprentice to a medicine man. A trip with his uncles to Kentucky to kill a buffalo earns him his Cherokee name, Tsuskwanunnawata, and his manhood ceremony. In the white world, J.D. and his best friends Jimmy and Tony, who is an enslaved member of the household, call themselves the Thunder Boys. All part Cherokee, they swear an oath of loyalty to one another. When J.D.'s cousin Meley Jane is abducted and Tony's father Carolina is falsely accused, the three boys must ride into the Cherokee Nation to rescue Meley Jane from a band of white outlaws and save Carolina from being lynched. At the end of the fateful journey, the boys have become men. Rifts over Cherokee identity and slavery have forever splintered the Wofford clan.