USU Scholar Rediscovers Forgotten Poem by Foundational Cherokee Writer

LOGAN — When Utah State University English professor Travis Franks came across an 1846 issue of the Arkansas State Gazette, he didn’t expect to find anything groundbreaking. Scholars already believed they knew the earliest published works of writer John Rollin Ridge, widely recognized as the first American Indian novelist.

But tucked in the newspaper’s pages was a poem Franks had never seen before — “A Light Broke In Upon My Brain.”

“I started with what we knew was the first one and then just started going back, week by week,” Franks said. “And I found this poem,” which he said wasn’t listed on any of the bibliographies and hadn’t previously been collected. “It came out in 1846 and then was kind of, you know, forgotten in a lot of ways.”

The poem’s rediscovery is a paradigm for how Franks, an assistant professor at USU, came to a related project on Ridge, now published and recently made available through “Studies in American Indian Literatures,” the leading journal in the field.

In his article, “The Elusive John Rollin Ridge: The Afterlives of ‘An Indian's Grave’ and His Ambiguous Literary Legacy,” Franks reveals a much earlier poetic voice for Ridge than scholars previously recognized and opens new conversations about how Indigenous writers navigated identity, trauma and creativity in the 19th century.

“We thought that his poetry went here,” Franks said, “but it actually extends further back.”

Franks didn’t initially set out to rewrite Ridge’s bibliography. His earlier research examined how U.S. and Australian settler authors wrote about “the vanishing Indian” through haunting or burial-related imagery. While combing through 19th-century newspapers, he stumbled on Ridge’s 1848 poem “An Indian’s Grave,” which didn’t fit his existing project but hinted at a much larger story.

Ridge’s life — marked by political upheaval, the assassination of his father, and his family’s controversial role in the Treaty of New Echota — shaped a complex literary identity. Born in 1827, he was a Cherokee writer and journalist and the first Native American to publish a novel in English. As such, his work reflects the complexities of his life amid the Cherokee Nation’s upheavals and 19th-century America.

“He wanted to be the gallant horseman,” Franks said. “He wanted to be the bandit that he wrote the novel about later … but he wasn’t that person. He was a really talented writer.”

According to Franks, most critics have usually written off “An Indian’s Grave” as a clichéd portrayal of a disappearing Native American. Franks, however, sees it as revealing Ridge’s developing perspective — one shaped by both Cherokee cultural continuity and adoption of settler-colonial rhetoric.

“You might expect that an Indigenous person would write … a resistant narrative about fighting against settler colonialism and the oppression that comes along with that and the taking of the land. But that's not Ridge's story,” Franks said, “He's much more complicated than that because of who he was in terms of his family, the role that they played in the Trail of Tears.”

Locating Ridge’s poetry is difficult. Only one collection was published in 1868, and it was assembled quickly and incompletely. Many poems circulated only in ephemeral newspapers and magazines.

“We don’t even know how many poems he’s written, what the first one was,” Franks said. “There are significant gaps, and the only way you find that stuff out is through reading tons of old newspapers.”

Franks has brought students into his investigative research process through USU’s Native American Summer Mentorship Program. After helping Franks transcribe an unpublished Ridge poem, student Tolonqua Nakai told him the work “was the most fun I've ever had doing an English project.”

The experience reaffirmed for Franks that archival work is not only scholarly but also immersive and creative.

“It forced me to be like, how do I show people what we do?” he said. “It is fieldwork, right?”

Franks calls archival work one of the “building blocks” of literary studies.

For him, Ridge’s rediscovered works are reminders that early Native literature is still an open landscape.

“We’re realizing there is still more yet to be recovered,” he said. “There are old texts out there about which nothing has been said yet.”In fact, as of this writing, Franks acknowledges that he has recently stumbled upon another Ridge poem that predates the others. He looks forward to seeing how this latest research will impact these findings and continue to evolve what is known about Ridge and his work. To read Franks' full piece on Ridge’s “An Indian’s Grave”, please visit this link: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/17/article/970022#info_wrap