ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to thank Carol Lee Lorenzo and the Children’s Writing Group at Emory University for all of their help and encouragement.

I also wish to thank Sarah Helyar Smith, my editor at Peachtree Publishers, for her guidance and support, and my agent Joan Brandt for her warm enthusiasm and her advocacy.

For their assistance on historical research, I am indebted to James Crutchfield and the Williamson County Public Library; the National Park Service staff at the Natchez Trace Parkway; the Historic Natchez Foundation; the Natchez Public Library; Meyers Brown of the Atlanta History Center; the Mississippi Department of Archives and History; Bob Ferguson and the Choctaw Museum in Philadelphia, Mississippi; and Ken Knopp for his help on horses and saddles of the period.