He led them toward education and rebuilding and the preservation of what could be preserved.

She was the calculation that followed from that.

She came out right.

The Final Accounting

She was born the year before her great-great-grandfather would have turned ninety, had he lived.

John Ross had died in 1866, forty-two years before her birth, in Washington D.C., still negotiating on behalf of his people — a man who spent the last months of his life, his health destroyed by the violence and losses of the Civil War years, in the capital of the country that had forced his people from their homes, still trying to secure the terms that would protect what was left.

His great-great-granddaughter was born into a changed world — Indian Territory becoming Oklahoma state, tribal sovereignty constrained, the specific political structures he had fought to maintain transformed almost beyond recognition.