About the Author

Linda Reese is a retired history professor who has taught at the University of Oklahoma and East Central University. She has published two books with the University of Oklahoma Press and has written scholarly articles, book reviews, and Internet entries on Women’s history, the West, and Oklahoma.

Reviews

Trail Sisters is particularly informed by the invaluable oral histories collected in Oklahoma during the New Deal era . . . rich documents that Linda Williams Reese has brought to life. We hear the voices of those many women who personally witnessed upheaval or became repositories for the stories their mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, and great-grandmothers and great-grandfathers passed on so that all could learn, and remember. -John Wunder, from the Plainsword

In this riveting story, Linda Reese focuses on the epic journey of what some Oklahomans endured as their status changed from being enslaved, freed, and then, finally, free black women. Faced with the violence of slavery, civil war, and post-war segregation, they find comfort and security in work, families, black towns, and black women's clubs. A fascinating and profound way to understand what journeys of this type mean for all of us. --Joan Jenson

Linda Reese's Trail Sisters: Freedwomen in Indian Territory, 1850-1890, is a long-awaited and much needed addition to the literature on black women enslaved by the Five Tribes and freed by the Civil War. Taking advantage of a surge in sophisticated scholarship over the last decade which provides deep analysis of the complex relationships between native people and their African bond servants, Reese explore the nature of those relationships, reminding us that black women in Indian country were at once enslaved servants, sexual objects, wives, daughters, and sisters of their owners who were far more integrated into their societies at the most intimate level than their counterparts in the surrounding slaveholding states. Equally important, she explores the contradictory nature of freedom that challenged those earlier relationships with Indian people while simultaneously introducing them to the cultural attitudes and practices of both white and black settlers who flooded into the Territory after the Civil War eventually overwhelming both the Indian and freedperson population. --Quintard Taylor, Scott and Dorothy Bullitt Professor of American History, University of Washington, Seattle