Wheezer And The Painted Frog

Wheezer And The Painted Frog

ABOUT Kitty Sutton

Kitty Sutton
Kitty Sutton was born Kathleen Kelley to a Cherokee/Irish family. Both sides of her family were from performing families in Kansas City, Missouri and Kitty was trained from an early age in dance, vocal, art and musical instruments. Her father was a Naval band leader. During the Great D More...

Description

Wheezer And The Painted Frog is a Native American historical fiction mystery set in Indian Territory, now Oklahoma.  It begins in the spring of 1839, immediately after the last group of Cherokees, removed from their homeland in the east, were unceremoniously left to fend for themselves after an over 1,100 mile march called the Trail of Tears, where over 4,000 Cherokee died. 

To tell you a little more about my book, I would like to first say that this is a story based on an event that has never been written about before.  I know this because the months of research I did to find out about this event revealed the absence of either fiction or historical literature based on this it.  The event began in 1839, so that is where I began my story.  The Cherokee were promised by Treaty to receive food supplies that would get them through the first year.  Some of the Cherokee camps, though, did not receive food supplies that were edible.  In fact they were rotten or full of bugs, the meat putrid.  The reason for this was that the funds for these allotments were being drained off which by greedy white men.  The same men who were charged with protecting them.  Their greed caused the deaths of another 1,000 Cherokees in that first year.  They died of starvation.


Sasa (Swan) a thirteen year old Cherokee girl finds herself alone after all in her family dies.  She finds and saves a lost dog who she names Wheezer.  He is an extremely smart dog and he soon smells a human rat, but struggles to  find a way to communicate what he senses is dangerous.  His original owner, Jackson Halley, looks desperately for him, and when he finds Sasa and Wheezer together, they all become fast friends and soon set about solving the mystery of the reason why her five year old brother Usti Yansa (Little Buffalo) died. 

     Healthy little boys shouldn't grow weak and die when they have shelter, food and the care of their families, yet Sasa's little brother, the last of her family, sickens, mumbling the mysterious "I didn't do it right, I didn't do it enough.  Why didn't it work?"   Left alone, mourning and trying to survive in a new place with new ways, Sasa seeks answers with the help of her new friends, Wheezer and Jackson.  The Jack Russell Terrier seems too wise, too fierce and too loyal to be just a dog.  Did the Creator send Wheezer to Sasa and if so, how can a dog, albeit a smart one, help to solve a murder?  Together, they discover a vast network of systematic plundering of the  government funds earmarked for the Cherokee called the Allotment.  Can they discover who is at the root of it all?  We shall see.