This beautifully written book now in its second edition tells the haunting saga of a quintessentially American family It is the story of Shoe Boots a famed Cherokee warrior & successful farmer & Doll an African slave he acquired in the late 1790s Over the next thirty years Shoe Boots & Doll lived together as master & slave & also as lifelong partners who with their children & grandchildren experienced key events in American history including slavery the Creek War the founding of the Cherokee Nation & subsequent removal of Native Americans along the Trail of Tears & the Civil War This is the gripping story of their lives in slavery & in freedom Meticulously crafted from historical & literary sources Ties That Bind vividly portrays the members of the Shoeboots family Doll emerges as an especially poignant character whose life is mostly known through the records of things done to her purchase her marriage the loss of her children but also through her moving petition to the federal government for the pension owed to her as Shoe Boots's widow A sensitive rendition of the hard realities of black slavery within Native American nations the book provides the fullest picture we have of the myriad complexities ironies & tensions among African Americans Native Americans & whites in the first half of the nineteenth century Updated with a new preface & an appendix of key primary sources this remains an essential book for students of Native American history African American history & the history of race & ethnicity in the United States