Creek Mary’s Blood was published by Holt, Rinehart & Winston in 1980. The novel is narrated by Dane, the last surviving descendant of Creek Mary — Amayi, a Creek woman born in the 1750s whose life intersected with the American Revolution and whose descendants were swept through every major crisis in Native American history for the next 140 years. Dane tells the family story to a young journalist, and the narrative unfolds across five generations.
The historical sweep is enormous: the Creek wars of the late eighteenth century, the removal of the Southeastern tribes to Indian Territory (the Trail of Tears), the Civil War (in which Native Americans fought on both sides), the buffalo-hunting cultures of the Great Plains, and the final military campaigns that ended at Wounded Knee. Brown weaves real historical events and figures (Tecumseh, Andrew Jackson, Sitting Bull) into the fictional family narrative, creating a multigenerational epic that personalizes the history he documented in Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.
The novel’s achievement is to make the reader feel what the nonfiction book demonstrated: that the destruction of Native America was not a single catastrophe but a recurring pattern — each generation faced its own version of the same betrayal, adapted, survived, and passed the story on to the next.
Collecting Creek Mary’s Blood
First edition (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, New York, 1980): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $20–$50
- Very good/very good: $8–$20
- Signed: $40–$100