Sophia Alice Callahan was born in Sulphur Springs, Texas in 1868, to a father who was culturally Muscogee and mixed-race, with Creek and European ancestry; and a white mother, daughter of a Methodist missionary. Her father, Samuel Benton Callahan, was one-eighth Muscogee-Creek and enrolled in the tribe. He lost his own father during Indian Removal of the Creek to Indian Territory in the 1830s, when the elder man died on the journey. Sophia's mother was Sarah Elizabeth Thornberg.
She completed the novel and published it six months after the Massacre at Wounded Knee at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and the year following the Ghost Dance, major events in Native American history. Her novel offered "the first fictional re-creation of both the messianic religious movement that reached the Pine Ridge Reservation in the spring of 1890 and the infamous slaughter of Lakota men, women, and children that occurred on December 29 of that same year."
The timing of the publication of Callahan's novel in the spring of 1891 shows that she had to decide to incorporate the events of Wounded Knee into her novel, as they took place in December 1890. A. Lavonne Brown Ruoff says this section appears to be tacked on to the novel, which otherwise has a classic romantic structure that was resolved with the marriages of Wynema and her white Teacher friend Genevieve.
Sophia Alice Callahan went East for part of her education. After having studied for nearly a year at the Wesleyan Female Institute in Staunton, Virginia, she was qualified in grammar, arithmetic, physics, geography and history. She subsequently taught at several different boarding schools in the Creek Nation of Indian Territory. She worked at Wealaka Mission School in 1892-3, where her father was the superintendent. Late in 1893 she moved to the Methodist-sponsored Harrell International Institute in Muskogee. She also published articles in the school journal, Our Brother in Red.
After being discovered in the late 20th century, the novel was reprinted in 1997. It has been the subject of scholarly studies.
