Although there are plenty of shameful incidents in the United States government’s treatment of native Americans, the “Trail of Tears” episode stands out as a particularly egregious event. In 1838, under a long-standing order from President Andrew Jackson, the entire Cherokee Nation was uprooted from its ancestral homelands in Georgia and North Carolina and marched to reservations in the hostile western territories. En route, nearly a quarter of them died from disease and exhaustion. By the time they reached Oklahoma, a once-vibrant civil- isation had been damaged beyond repair.

The novelist Charles Frazier places this calamity at the centre of Thirteen Moons, the follow-up to his bestselling civil-war drama, Cold Mountain. As with its predecessor, Frazier’s second novel is capable of considerable power when it is dramatising a great national trauma. Like Cold Mountain, it is also marred by overwriting and a tendency to wander into narrative backwaters that leave the reader feeling all wet.

The story is told by an elderly white man named Will Cooper as he looks back on his eventful life among the Cherokee. As a young orphan, Cooper was “bounded” into a seven-year stint of indentured servitude with a storekeeper at the edge of the Cherokee Nation in western North Carolina. Not long after arriving there, Cooper finds himself in thrall to two surrogate Cherokee “fathers” . The first is Bear, a wily, warm-hearted storyteller who, with a hilarious lack of ceremony, inducts Cooper into his local tribe. The other is Featherstone, a wealthy gambler and trader whose wife, Claire, becomes the love of Cooper’s long life.

The novel’s first section deals with Cooper’s deepening involvement with the Cherokee, leading to his advocacy on behalf of Bear’s clan in Washington after Jackson decrees that they must join the general Cherokee exodus from their beloved Appalachia. These scenes are ripe with anthropological interest and occasional bursts of wry humour. Frazier, who was paid an $8m advance for the book and spent the better part of a decade composing it, has clearly done his homework. Cherokee dances, folk remedies and culinary oddities are abundant, as are detailed descriptions of the mechanics of a pistol duel and “the ball game”, an early, bloody version of lacrosse. There is also a visit to Washington to meet with such historical figures as the famed senator John C Calhoun, Davy Crockett and the murderous Andrew “Stonewall” Jackson himself, who is pictured as well deserving his second nickname, “Old Possum”. “Jackson was stretched out on a chaise, alternately talking and sucking on a pastille. The pleated skin around his mouth opened and closed rhythmically as a bellows . . . he had indeed the pointed face, tiny blank eyes, and sharp snapping teeth of a possum. He blinked his little vicious dark eyes beneath his upreaching, pyrotechnic white hair and registered scant interest in me beyond an assessment of how difficult I might be to kill in a formal pistol duel.”

After a while, however, this curatorial abundance grows wearisome. Frazier’s novel only truly catches fire in its middle section, which details “The Removal”, that terrible period that saw “a whole country shed of its people in the course of a summer”. Although Cooper is appalled by what he sees, he soon finds himself forced to join the army as a scout in order to keep Bear’s tribe from being deported. Ordered to help root out stragglers, Cooper realises that he is now involved with a whole new kind of inhumanity, one that he will later see as leading to the barbarity of the civil war and beyond. “Before white men, war of Indians against Indians was very bloody and sometimes cruel to the limits of human imagination, but it was a near relative to the ball game, a form of sport. These new white people took all the fun out of war and just won and kept winning, as if that was all that mattered.”

It is during this time that Cooper loses touch with his beloved Claire, who joins the westward exodus with the mercurial Featherstone. After settling accounts with Bear and the American army, Cooper sets off in search of her in a journey that could have rivalled those described by John Ford in his great films. Instead, Frazier reverts to his folksy, meandering narrative style. The hunt for lost love turns into yet another panoramic gaze at the 19th century, at one point literally so as Cooper visits a small theatre to watch a “Mammoth Pantascope of the Mississippi River”. “The musicians struck up a solemn tune and then, out of sight, someone turned a crank. Gears engaged with a clatter, bearings began grinding just audibly beneath the music, and the canvas began moving slowly across the stage, feeding from the full spool toward the empty. The painting claimed to be three miles long and would take most of the evening to be displayed.” It is a memorable moment, not only for its historical interest, but also for the way it serves as a metaphor for Frazier’s ponderously unspooling novel.

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