Highland Homeland
]
[Illustration]
[Illustration:
_A home in the Smokies usually meant a simple log house nestled in the
hills among the trees and amidst the haze._
National Park Service
]
Homecoming
It is summer now, a time for coming home. And on an August Sunday in
the mountain-green valley they call Cataloochee, the kinfolk arrive.
They come from 50 states to gather here, at a one-room white frame
Methodist church by the banks of the Big “Catalooch.” The appearance of
their shiny cars and bulky campers rolling along the paved Park Service
road suggests that they are tourists, too, a tiny part of the millions
who visit and enjoy the Great Smoky Mountains each year. Yet these
particular families represent something more. A few of them were raised
here; their ancestors lived and died here.
They are celebrating their annual Cataloochee homecoming. Other
reunions, held on Sundays throughout the summer, bring together
one-time residents of almost every area in the park. Some of the places
instantly recall bits of history: Greenbrier, once a heavily populated
cove and political nerve-center; Elkmont, where a blacksmith named
Huskey set out one winter to cross the Smokies and was discovered
dead in a bear trap the next spring; and Smokemont on the beautiful
Oconaluftee River, at one time the home of the Middle Cherokee and the
very heart of that Indian Nation.
These are special days, but they observe a universal experience as
old as Homer’s Ulysses, as new as the astronauts’ return from the
moon: homecoming. It is an experience particularly significant in the
Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Here, at different times and in
different ways, people of various races and heritage have reluctantly
given up hearth and farm so that today new generations can come to this
green kingdom of some 209,000 hectares (517,000 acres) and rediscover a
natural homeland which is the heritage of all.
Beginning on Canada’s Gaspé Peninsula as a limestone finger only 2.5
kilometers (1.5 miles) wide, the Appalachian mountain system that
dominates eastern America slants about 5,000 kilometers (3,000 miles)
southwest across New England and the Atlantic and border states
into northern Georgia and Alabama, culminating in the grandeur and
complexity of the Great Smoky Mountains. This range, which marks the
dividing line between Tennessee and North Carolina, is high; its
58-kilometer (36-mile) crest remains more than 1,500 meters (4,900
feet) above sea level. It is ancient--the Ocoee rocks here are
estimated to be 500-600 million years old--and its tall peaks and
plunging valleys have been sculpted by nature through the action of
ice and water during long, patient centuries. The odd and fantastic
courses of the rivers here indicate that they are older than the
mountains. The Great Smokies are a land of moving waters; there is no
natural lake or pond in this area, but there are some 1,000 kilometers
(620 miles) of streams with more than 70 species of fish. A generous
rainfall, averaging as much as 229 centimeters (90 inches) per year in
some localities and 211 centimeters (83 inches) atop Clingmans Dome,
nourishes a rich variety of plantlife: more than 100 species of trees,
1,200 other flowering plants, 50 types of fern, 500 mosses and lichens,
and 2,000 fungi. The mixed hardwood forest and virgin stands of balsam
and spruce are the special glories of the Smokies.
Many of the species of birds that make the Smokies their home do not
have to leave to migrate; by migrating vertically, from the valleys to
the mountaintops in summer and back down in winter, they can experience
the equivalent of a journey at sea level from Georgia to New England.
Animals large and small find this a congenial home, and two, the wild
boar and the black bear, are especially interesting to visitors. The
former shuns people, but the latter is occasionally seen along trails
and roadsides throughout the Smokies.
When the Great Smoky Mountains were added to the National Park System
in 1934, a unique mission was accomplished: more than 6,600 separate
tracts of land had been purchased by the citizens of Tennessee
and North Carolina and given to the people of the United States.
Previously, most national parks had been created from lands held by the
Federal Government. The story of the Great Smokies is, therefore, most
especially and significantly, a story of people and their home. Part of
that story is captured in microcosm on an August Sunday in a secluded
northeastern corner of the park: Cataloochee.
History is what the homecoming is about. The people of Cataloochee
worship and sing and eat and celebrate because they are back. And being
back, they remember. They walk up the narrow creeks, banked by thick
tangles of rhododendron and dog-hobble, to the sites of old homesteads.
They watch their small children and grandchildren wade the water
and trample the grass of once-familiar fields. They call themselves
Caldwell, Palmer, Hannah, Woody, Bennett, Messer. For exactly a
century--from the late 1830s and the coming of the first permanent
white settlers to the later 1930s and the coming of the park--men
and women with these names lived along Cataloochee Creek. But these
pioneers were not the first to inhabit a valley that they called by an
Indian name.
[Illustration:
Alan Rinehart
_With their trusty mule and sourwood sled, Giles and Lenard Ownby haul
wood for making shingles._
]
By “Gad-a-lu-tsi,” the Cherokees meant “standing up in ranks.” As they
looked from Cove Creek Gap at the eastern end of the valley across
toward the Balsam Mountains, they used that term to describe the thin
stand of timber at the top of the distant range. Later, the name became
“Cataloochee,” or the colloquial “Catalooch,” and it referred to the
entire watershed of the central stream.
The Cherokees liked what they saw. They hunted and fished throughout
the area and established small villages along one of their main trails.
The Cataloochee Track, as it came to be known, ran from Cove Creek Gap
at the eastern edge of the present-day park up over the Smokies and
down through what is now the Cosby section of eastern Tennessee. It
connected large Indian settlements along the upper French Broad River
in North Carolina with the equally important Overhill Towns of the
Tennessee River.
By the early 1700s, Cataloochee formed a minor portion of the great
Cherokee Nation whose towns and villages extended from eastern
Tennessee and western North Carolina into northern Georgia. But as time
went on, and as the white settlements pushed westward from the wide
eastern front, the Cherokees lost dominion over this vast area. In
1791, at the treaty of Holston, the Cherokees gave up Cataloochee along
with much of what is now East Tennessee. Five years later the state
of North Carolina granted 71,210 hectares (176,000 acres), including
all of Cataloochee, to John Gray Blount--brother to William Blount,
governor of the Territory South of the Ohio River, as Tennessee was
then called. Blount kept the land for speculation, but it eventually
sold for less than one cent per hectare. Now that the Cherokees had
relinquished the land, no one else seemed to want it. Even the famous
Methodist Bishop Francis Asbury, first sent as a missionary to America
in 1771, apparently wavered in his spirit when confronted with the
Cataloochee wilderness. In his journal in 1810 he lamented:
“_At Catahouche I walked over a log. But O the mountain height after
height, and five miles over! After crossing other streams, and losing
ourselves in the woods, we came in, about nine o’clock at night....
What an awful day!_”
During the 1820s, only a few hunters, trappers, and fishermen built
overnight cabins in the area. Then in 1834, Col. Robert Love, who
had migrated from Virginia, fought in the Revolutionary War, and
established a farm near the present city of Asheville, purchased the
original Blount tract for $3,000. To keep title to the land, Love was
required to maintain permanent settlers there. He encouraged cattle
ranging and permitted settlers choice locations and unlimited terms,
and by the late 1830s several families had moved into Cataloochee.
Probably the first settler to put down roots was young Levi Caldwell,
a householder in his early twenties seeking a good home for his new
family. The rich bottomlands and abundant forests of Cataloochee
offered that home, and before Levi Caldwell died in 1864 at the age of
49, he and his wife “Polly” (Mary Nailling) had 11 children. Levi was a
prisoner during the Civil War, and two of his sons, Andrew and William
Harrison, fought on different sides. Because he had tended horses for
the widely feared band of Union soldiers called Kirk’s Army, Andy
received a $12 pension when the war was over. William, who might have
forgiven and forgotten his differences with the Union as a whole, was
never quite reconciled to his brother’s pension.
Although he was older than Levi Caldwell by a full 21 years, George
Palmer arrived later at Catalooch. The Palmers had settled further
northeast in the North Carolina mountains, on Sandy Mush Creek, and
seemed content there. But when George decided to start over, he and his
wife, also named Polly, took their youngest children, Jesse and George
Lafayette, and crossed the mountains south into Cataloochee. They began
again.
Other families trickled in. As elsewhere in Southern Appalachia,
buffalo traces and old Indian trails and more recent traders’ paths
gradually became roads and highways penetrating the thick forests and
mountain fastnesses. In 1846, the North Carolina legislature passed
an act creating the Jonathan Creek and Tennessee Mountain Turnpike
Company, which was to build a road no less than 3.7 meters (12 feet)
wide and no steeper than a 12 percent grade. Tolls would range from 75
cents for a six-horse wagon down to a dime for a man or a horse and one
cent for each hog or sheep. After a full five years of deliberation
and examining alternatives, the company selected a final route and
constructed the highway with minor difficulty. The road fully utilized
the natural contours of the land and was at the same time a generally
direct line. It followed almost exactly the old Cherokee Trail.
[Illustration:
Edouard E. Exline
_Cataloochee and Caldwell--the names are nearly synonymous. The Lush
Caldwell family once lived in this sturdy log house with shake roof
and stone chimneys on Messer Fork. At another time, this was the home
of the E. J. Messers, another of Cataloochee’s predominant families._
]
The Cataloochee Turnpike was the first real wagon road in the Smokies.
It opened up a chink in the area’s armor of isolation. Travel to and
from the county seat still required the better part of three days,
however. Two of the rare 19th century literary visitors to these
mountains--Wilbur Zeigler and Ben Grosscup, whose book _The Heart of
the Alleghanies_, appeared in 1883--entered Cataloochee along this
road. Their reaction provides a pleasant contrast to that of Bishop
Asbury; they speak of the “canon of the Cataluche” as being “the most
picturesque valley of the Great Smoky range:”
“_The mountains are timbered, but precipitous; the narrow, level lands
between are fertile; farm houses look upon a rambling road, and a
creek, noted as a prolific trout stream, runs a devious course through
hemlock forests, around romantic cliffs, and between laureled banks._”
During the 1840s and 1850s, some 15 or 20 families built their sturdy
log cabins ax-hewn out of huge chestnuts and poplars, and then built
barns, smokehouses, corncribs, and other farm shelters beside the rocky
creeks. George Palmer’s son Lafayette, called “Fate” for short, married
one of Levi Caldwell’s daughters and established a large homestead by
the main stream. Fate’s brother, Jesse, married and had 13 children; 6
of these 13 later married Caldwells.
[Illustration:
_Pages 22-23: These proud people all dressed up in their Sunday best
are members of the George H. Caldwell family._
H. C. Wilburn
]
They ate well. The creek bottomlands provided rich soil for tomatoes,
corn and beans, cabbage and onions, potatoes and pumpkins. Split
rail fences were devices to keep the cattle, hogs, and sheep out of
the crops; the animals themselves foraged freely throughout the
watershed, fattening on succulent grasses and an ample mast of acorns
and chestnuts. Corn filled the cribs, salted pork and beef layered the
meathouse, and cold bountiful springs watered the valley.
The Civil War erupted in 1861. Although Cataloochee lay officially in
the Confederacy, this creek country was so remote, so distant from the
slave plantations of the deep South, that no government dominated.
Raiding parties from both sides rode through the valley, killing and
looting as they went. Near Mt. Sterling Gap at the northern end of the
watershed, Kirk’s Army made a man named Grooms play a fiddle before
they murdered him. The people of Catalooch kept his memory alive
throughout the century by playing that ill-starred “Grooms tune.”
But the war was only an interlude. Five years after its end,
Cataloochee was estimated to have 500 hogs, sheep, milch cows, beef
cattle, and horses; some 900 kilograms (2,000 pounds) of honey; and
about 1,250 liters (1,320 quarts) of sorghum molasses. Sizable apple
crops would begin to flourish during the next decade, and by 1900
the population of the valley would grow to over 700. Producing more
than they themselves could use, these farmers began to trade with the
outside world. They took their apples, livestock, chestnuts, eggs,
honey, and ginseng to North Carolina markets in Fines Creek, Canton,
and Waynesville, and to Tennessee outlets in Cosby, Newport, and
Knoxville. With their cash money, they changed forever the Cataloochee
of the early 1800s.
They sold honey and bought the tools of education. Using the tough,
straight wood of a black gum or a basswood, a farmer hollowed out a
section of the trunk with a chisel. He then slid a cross-stick through
a hole bored near the bottom. Upon transplanting a beehive into the
trunk and leaving an entrance at the bottom, he covered the top with
a solid wooden lid and sealed it airtight with a mixture of mud and
swamp-clay. In August, especially after the sourwoods had bloomed
and the bees had built up a store of the delicately flavored honey,
the beekeeper took a long hooked honey knife, broke the sealing, and
cut out squares of the light golden comb to fill ten-gallon tins. He
never went below the cross-stick; that honey was left for the bees. An
enterprising family might trade 10 tins of honey in a season. And at
the market, they would turn that honey into school supplies for the
coming year: shoes, books, tablets, and pencils.
[Illustration:
_Like many others in the Smokies, Dan Myers of Cades Cove kept a few
bees. He apparently was a little more carefree than some about the
tops of his bee gums, or hives. Some old boards or scraps of tin, with
the help of a couple of rocks, sufficed, whereas most people sealed
their wooden tops with a little mud._
Charles S. Grossman
]
There were too few families on Big Cataloochee for both a Methodist and
a Baptist church. In 1858 Colonel Love’s son had deeded a small tract
there for the Palmers, Bennetts, Caldwells, and Woodys to use as a
Methodist meetinghouse and school. Since then, the Messers and Hannahs
and several others had formed a community of their own 8 kilometers (5
miles) north, across Noland Mountain, along the smaller valley of the
Little Cataloochee. They built a Baptist church there in 1890.
But the differences were not great. One of the Big Cataloochee’s sons
became and remained the high sheriff of sprawling Haywood County with
the well-nigh solid support of the combined Cataloochee vote. Running
six times in succession and against a candidate from the southeastern
part of the county, he was rumored to have waited each time for the
more accessible lowlands to record their early returns. Then he simply
contacted a cousin, who happened to be the recorder for Cataloochee,
who would ask in his slow, easy voice, “How many do you need, cousin?”
The preacher came once a month. He stayed with different families in
the community and met the rest at church. More informal gatherings,
such as Sunday School and singings, took place each week. And during
late summer or fall, when crops were “laid by” and there was an
interval between spring’s cultivation and autumn’s harvest, there came
the socializing and fervor of camp meeting. A one-week or ten-day
revival was cause for school to be let out at 11 o’clock each morning.
The children were required to attend long and fervent services. But
between exhortations there were feasts of food, frolicking in nearby
fields and streams, and for everyone an exchange of good fellowship.
Besides these religious gatherings, women held bean-stringings and
quilting bees, men assembled for logrollings or house-raisings to clear
new lands and build new homes. One of the few governmental intrusions
into Cataloochee life was the road requirement. During the spring and
fall, all able-bodied men were “warned out” for six days--eight if
there had been washout rains--to keep up what had become the well-used
Cataloochee Turnpike. If a man brought a mule and a bull-tongue plow
instead of the usual mattock, he received double time for ditching the
sides of the road. This heavy work gave the men both a chance to talk
and something to talk about. But any of them would still have said that
the hardest job of the year was hoeing corn all day on a lonely, stony
hillside.
By the early 1900s, Cataloochee had become a mixture of isolation from
the outside world and communication with it. Outside laws had affected
the valley; in 1885 North Carolina passed the controversial No Fence
law, which made fences within townships unnecessary and required
owners to keep cattle, sheep, horses, and hogs inside certain bounds.
But other laws were less heeded; local experts have estimated that
95 percent of Cataloochee residents made their own whisky. Several
families subscribed to a newspaper--“Uncle Jim” Woody took _The Atlanta
Constitution_--and almost everyone possessed the “wish-book:” a
dog-eared mail order catalog. But no one in Little Cataloochee bought
an automobile.
The valley thrived on local incidents. A man shot a deputy sheriff and
hid out near a large rock above Fate Palmer’s homestead; Neddy McFalls
and Dick Clark fed him there for years. Will Messer, a master carpenter
and coffinmaker over on Little Catalooch, had a daughter named Ola.
Messer was postmaster, and the post office acquired her name. Fate
Palmer’s shy son, Robert, became known as the “Booger Man” after he hid
his face in his arms and gave that as his name to a new teacher on the
first day of school.
George Palmer, son of Jesse and brother to Sheriff William, devised a
method of capturing wild turkeys. He first built a log enclosure, then
dug a trench under one side and baited it with corn. The next morning
10 turkeys, too frightened to retrace their steps through the trench,
showed up inside the enclosure. But when George stepped among them and
attempted to catch them, the turkeys gave him the beating of his life.
Thereafter he was called “Turkey George.” And his daughter, Nellie,
lent her name to one of the two post offices on Big Catalooch.
[Illustration:
_“Turkey George” Palmer of Pretty Hollow Creek in Cataloochee used to
tell people that he had killed 105 bears. Most of them he trapped in
bear pens._
Edouard E. Exline
]
Yet the simplicity of life could not insulate the Cataloochee area
from “progress.” As the 20th century unfolded, scattered individual
loggers gave way to the well organized methods of large company
operations. Small-scale cutting of yellow-tulip poplar and cherry
boomed into big business during the early 1900s. Suncrest Lumber
Company, with a sawmill in Waynesville, began operations on Cataloochee
Creek and hauled out hardwood logs in great quantities. Although the
spruce and balsam at the head of the watershed were left standing, the
logging industry, with its capital, manpower, and influence, vastly
altered the valley.
With the late 1920s came an announcement that the states of North
Carolina and Tennessee had decided to give the Great Smoky Mountains to
the nation as a park. The residents of Cataloochee were incredulous.
They were attached to this homeplace; they still referred to a short
wagon ride as a trip and called a visit to the county seat a journey.
But the park arrived, and the young families of the valley moved away,
and then the older ones did the same. Gradually they came to understand
that another sort of homeland had been established. And the strangers
who now visit their valleys and creeks can look about and appreciate
the heritage these settlers and their descendants left behind.
The old families still come back. They return to this creek on the
August Sunday of Homecoming. In the early morning hours they fill the
wooden benches of tiny Palmer’s Chapel for singing and preaching and
reminiscing; at noon they share bountiful food spread on long plank
tables beside clear, rushing Cataloochee Creek; in the mellow afternoon
they rediscover the valley. For what lures the stranger is what lures
the old families back. They come to sense again the beauty and the
permanence and even the foggy mystery of the Great Smokies. And this
that beckons them back is that which beckoned the Indian discoverers of
these mountains hundreds of years ago.
Rail Fences
“Something there is that does not love a wall,” poet Robert Frost once
wrote. Likewise, many mountain people felt something there is that does
not love a fence. Fences were built for the purpose of keeping certain
creatures out--and keeping other creatures in. During early days of
settlement there were no stock-laws in the mountains. Cattle, mules,
horses, hogs, sheep, and fowls ranged freely over the countryside. Each
farmer had to build fences to protect his garden and crops from these
domestic foragers as well as some of the wild “varmint” marauders.
Rail fences had several distinct merits: they provided a practical
use for some of the trees felled to clear crop and pasture land; they
required little repair; they blended esthetically into the surroundings
and landscape. Mountain fences have been described as “horse-high,
bull-strong, and pig-tight.” W. Clark Medford, of North Carolina, has
told us how worm fences (below) were built:
[Illustration: H. Woodbridge Williams]
[Illustration: Charles S. Grossman]
“There was no way to build a fence in those days except with
rails--just like there was no way to cover a house except with boards.
First, they went into the woods, cut a good ‘rail tree’ and, with axes,
wedge and gluts, split the cuts (of six-, eight- and ten-foot lengths
as desired) into the rail. After being hauled to location, they were
placed along the fence-way, which had already been cut out and made
ready. Next, the ‘worm’ was laid. That is, the ground-rails were put
down, end-on-end, alternating the lengths--first a long rail, then a
short one--and so on through. Anyone who has seen a rail fence knows
that the rails were laid end-on-end at angles--not at right angles, but
nearly so. One course of rails after another would be laid up on the
fence until it had reached the desired height (most fences were about
eight rails high, some ten). Then, at intervals, the corners (where the
rails lapped) would be propped with poles, and sometimes a stake would
be driven. Such fences, when built of good chestnut or chestnut-oak
rails, lasted for many years if kept from falling down.”
One of the most valuable fences ever constructed in the Smoky Mountains
was surely that of Abraham Mingus. When “Uncle Abe,” one-time
postmaster and miller, needed rails for fencing, he “cut into a field
thick with walnut timber, split the tree bodies, and fenced his land
with black walnut rails.”
The variety of fences was nearly infinite. Sherman Myers leans against
a sturdy post and rider (above) near Primitive Baptist Church. Other
kinds of fences are shown on the next two pages.
[Illustration: _In this post and rider variation, rails are fastened to
a single post with wire and staples._
National Park Service
]
[Illustration: _Mary Birchfield of Cades Cove had an unusual fence with
wire wound around crude pickets._
Charles S. Grossman
]
[Illustration: _The Allisons of Cataloochee built a picket fence around
their garden._
Charles S. Grossman
]
[Illustration: _In the summer, farmers enclosed haystacks to keep
grazing cattle away._
Charles S. Grossman
]
[Illustration: _Ki Cable’s worm, or snake, fence in Cades Cove is one
of the most common kinds of fencing._
Charles S. Grossman
]
[Illustration: _Poles were used at John Oliver’s Cades Cove farm to
line up the wall as it was built._
Charles S. Grossman
]
[Illustration:
_The plight of their Cherokee ancestors is revealed in the faces of
Kweti and child in this photograph taken by James Mooney._
Smithsonian Institution
]
Land of the Cherokees
The Cherokees were among the first. They were the first to inhabit the
Smokies, the first to leave them and yet remain behind. By the 1600s
these Indians had built in the Southern Appalachians a Nation hundreds
of years old, a way of life in harmony with the surrounding natural
world, a culture richly varied and satisfying. But barely two centuries
later, the newly formed government of the United States was pushing the
Cherokees ever farther west. In the struggle for homeland, a new era
had arrived: a time for the pioneer and for the settler from Europe
and the eastern seaboard to stake claims to what seemed to them mere
wilderness but which to the Cherokees was a physical and spiritual
abode.
Perhaps it was during the last Ice Age that Indians drifted from Asia
to this continent across what was then a land passage through Alaska’s
Bering Strait. Finding and settling various regions of North America,
this ancient people fragmented after thousands of years into different
tribal and linguistic stocks. The Iroquois, inhabitants of what are
now the North Central and Atlantic states, became one of the most
distinctive of these stocks.
By the year 1000, the Cherokees, a tribe of Iroquoian origin, had
broken off the main line and turned south. Whether wanting to or being
pressured to, they slowly followed the mountain leads of the Blue Ridge
and the Alleghenies until they reached the security and peace of the
mist-shrouded Southern Appalachians. These “Mountaineers,” as other
Iroquois called them, claimed an empire of roughly 104,000 square
kilometers (40,000 square miles). Bounded on the north by the mighty
Ohio River, it stretched southward in a great circle through eight
states, including half of South Carolina and almost all of Kentucky and
Tennessee.
Cherokee settlements dotted much of this territory, particularly in
eastern Tennessee, western North Carolina, and northern Georgia. These
state regions are the rough outlines of what came to be the three
main divisions of the Cherokee Nation: the Lower settlements on the
headwaters of the Savannah River in Georgia and South Carolina; the
Middle Towns on the Little Tennessee and Tuckasegee rivers in North
Carolina; and the Overhill Towns with a capital on the Tellico River in
Tennessee.
Between the Middle and the Overhill Cherokee, straddling what is
now the North Carolina-Tennessee line, lay the imposing range of the
Great Smoky Mountains. Except for Mt. Mitchell in the nearby Blue
Ridge, these were the highest mountains east of the Black Hills in
South Dakota and the Rockies in Colorado. They formed the heart of the
territorial Cherokee Nation. The Oconaluftee River, rushing down to the
Tuckasegee from the North Carolina side of the Smokies, watered the
homesites and fields of many Cherokees. Kituwah, a Middle Town near the
present-day Deep Creek campground, may have been in the first Cherokee
village.
[Illustration:
National Park Service
_Adventurers were drawn to the Great Smoky Mountains and the
surrounding area in the 18th century. In 1760 a young British agent
from Virginia, Lt. Henry Timberlake, journeyed far into Cherokee
country. He observed Indian life and even sketched a map of the
Overhill territory, complete with Fort Loudoun, “Chote” or Echota, and
the “Enemy Mountains.”_
]
For the most part, however, the Cherokees settled only in the foothills
of the Smokies. Like the later pioneers, the Cherokees were content
with the fertile lands along the rivers and creeks. But more than
contentment was involved. Awed by this tangled wilderness, the Indians
looked upon these heights as something both sacred and dangerous. One
of the strongest of the old Cherokee myths tells of a race of spirits
living there in mountain caves. These handsome “Little People” were
usually helpful and kind, but they could make the intruder lose his way.
If the Cherokees looked up to the Smokies, they aimed at life around
them with a level eye. Although the Spanish explorer Hernando DeSoto
and his soldiers ventured through Cherokee country in 1540 and
chronicled generally primitive conditions, a Spanish missionary noted
17 years later that the Cherokees appeared “sedate and thoughtful,
dwelling in peace in their native mountains; they cultivated their
fields and lived in prosperity and plenty.”
They were moderately tall and rather slender with long black hair and
sometimes very light complexions. They wore animal skin loincloths and
robes, moccasins and a knee-length buckskin hunting shirt. A Cherokee
man might dress more gaudily than a woman, but both enjoyed decorating
their bodies extravagantly, covering themselves with paint and, as
trade with whites grew and flourished, jewelry.
The tepee of Indian lore did not exist here. The Cherokee house was a
rough log structure with one door and no windows. A small hole in the
bark roof allowed smoke from a central fire to escape. Furniture and
decorations included cane seats and painted hemp rugs. A good-sized
village might number 40 or 50 houses.
Chota, in the Overhill country on the Little Tennessee River, was
a center of civil and religious authority; it was also known as a
“Town of Refuge,” a place of asylum for Indian criminals, especially
murderers. The Smokies settlement of Kituwah served as a “Mother Town,”
or a headquarters, for one of the seven Cherokee clans.
These clans--Wolf, Blue, Paint, Bird, Deer, Long Hair, and Wild
Potato--were basic to the social structure of the tribe. The Cherokees
traced their kinship by clan; marriage within clans was forbidden. And
whereas the broad divisions of Lower, Middle, and Overhill followed
natural differences in geography and dialect, the clans assumed great
political significance. Each clan selected its own chiefs and its own
“Mother Town.” Although one or two persons in Chota might be considered
symbolic leaders, any chief’s powers were limited to advice and
persuasion.
The Cherokees extended this democratic tone to all their towns.
Each village, whether built along or near a stream or surrounded by
protective log palisades, would have as its center a Town House and
Square. The Square, a level field in front, was used for celebrations
and dancing. The Town House itself sheltered the town council,
plus the entire village, during their frequent meetings. In times
of decision-making, as many as 500 people crowded into the smoky,
earth-domed building where they sat in elevated rows around the council
and heard debates on issues from war to the public granary.
Democracy was the keynote of the Cherokee Nation. “White” chiefs
served during peacetime; “Red” chiefs served in time of war. Priests
once formed a special class, but after an episode in which one of
the priests attempted to “take” the wife of the leading chief’s
brother, all such privileged persons were made to take their place
alongside--not in front of--the other members of the community.
Women enjoyed the same status in Cherokee society as men. Clan kinship,
land included, followed the mother’s side of the family. Although the
men hunted much of the time, they helped with some household duties,
such as sewing. Marriages were solemnly negotiated. And it was possible
for women to sit in the councils as equals to men. Indeed, Nancy Ward,
one of those equals who enjoyed the rank of Beloved Woman, did much to
strengthen bonds of friendship between Cherokee and white during the
turbulent years of the mid-18th century. The Irishman James Adair, who
traded with the Cherokees during the years 1736 to 1743, even accused
these Indians of “petticoat government.” Yet he must have found certain
attractions in this arrangement, for he himself married a Cherokee
woman of the Deer Clan.
[Illustration:
Smithsonian Institution
_A Cherokee fishes in the Oconaluftee River._
]
[Illustration:
Charles S. Grossman
_A team of oxen hauls a sled full of corn stalks for a Cherokee
farmer near Ravensford, North Carolina. Oxen were more common beasts
of burden in the mountains than horses mainly because they were less
expensive._
]
Adair, an intent observer of Indian life, marveled at the Cherokees’
knowledge of nature’s medicines: “_I do not remember to have seen or
heard of an Indian dying by the bite of a snake, when out at war, or
a hunting ... they, as well as all other Indian nations, have a great
knowledge of specific virtues in simples: applying herbs and plants,
on the most dangerous occasions, and seldom if ever, fail to effect
a thorough cure, from the natural bush.... For my own part, I would
prefer an old Indian before any surgeon whatsoever._...”
[Illustration:
_Pages 40-41: At Ayunini’s house a woman pounds corn into meal with a
mortar and pestle. The simple, log house is typical of Cherokee homes
at the turn of the century. This one has stone chimneys, whereas many
merely had a hole in the roof._
]
The Indians marveled at nature itself. A Civil War veteran remarked
that the Cherokees “possess a keen and delicate appreciation of the
beautiful in nature.” Most of their elaborate mythology bore a direct
relation to rock and plant, animal and tree, river and sky. One myth
told of a tortoise and a hare. The tortoise won the race, but not by
steady plodding. He placed his relatives at intervals along the course;
the hare, thinking the tortoise was outrunning him at every turn, wore
himself out before the finish.
The Cherokees’ many myths and their obedience to nature required
frequent performance of rituals. There were many nature celebrations,
including three each corn season: the first at the planting of this
staple crop, the second at the very beginning of the harvest, the third
and last and largest at the moment of the fullest ripening. One of the
most important rites, the changing of the fire, inaugurated each new
year. All flames were extinguished and the hearths were swept clean
of ashes. The sacred fire at the center of the Town House was then
rekindled.
One ritual aroused particular enthusiasm: war. Battles drew the tribe
together, providing an arena for fresh exploits and a common purpose
and source of inspiration for the children. The Cherokees, with their
spears, bows and arrows, and mallet-shaped clubs, met any challenger:
Shawnee, Tuscarora, Creek, English, or American. In 1730, Cherokee
chiefs told English emissaries: “Should we make peace with the
Tuscaroras ... we must immediately look for some other with whom we can
be engaged in our beloved occupation.” Even in peacetime, the Cherokees
might invade settlements just for practice.
But when the white man came, the struggle was for larger stakes. In
1775 William Bartram, the first able native-born American botanist,
could explore the dangerous Cherokee country and find artistry there,
perfected even in the minor arts of weaving and of carving stone
tobacco pipes. He could meet and exchange respects with the famous
Cherokee statesman Attakullakulla, also known as the Little Carpenter.
And yet, a year later, other white men would destroy more than
two-thirds of the settled Cherokee Nation.
Who were these fateful newcomers? Most of them were Scotch-Irish, a
distinctive and adventuresome blend of people transplanted chiefly from
the Scottish Lowlands to Northern Ireland during the reign of James
I. Subsequently they flocked to the American frontier in search of
religious freedom, economic opportunity, and new land they could call
their own.
In the late 1600s, while the English colonized the Atlantic seaboard
in North and South Carolina and Virginia, while the French settled
Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana ports on the Gulf of Mexico, and
while the Spanish pushed into Florida, 5,000 Presbyterian Scots left
England for “the Plantation” in Northern Ireland. But as they settled
and prospered, England passed laws prohibiting certain articles of
Irish trade, excluding Presbyterians from civil and military offices,
even declaring their ministers liable to prosecution for performing
marriages.
The Scotch-Irish, as they were then called, found such repression
unbearable and fled in the early 18th century to ports in Delaware and
Pennsylvania. With their influx, Pennsylvania land prices skyrocketed.
Poor, rocky soil to the immediate west turned great numbers of these
Scotch-Irish southward down Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley and along
North Carolina’s Piedmont plateau. From 1732 to 1754, the population
of North Carolina more than doubled. Extravagant stories of this new
and fertile land also drew many from the German Palatinate to America;
during the middle 1700s these hardworking “Pennsylvania Dutch” poured
into the southern colonies.
Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia were colonies of the crown, and
the Scotch-Irish and Germans intermarried with the already settled
British. These Englishmen, of course, had their own reasons for
leaving their more conservative countrymen in the mother country and
starting a whole new life. Some were adventurers eager to explore a
different land, some sought religious freedom, not a few were second
sons--victims of the law of primogeniture--who arrived with hopes of
building new financial empires of their own. They all confronted the
frontier.
They encountered the Cherokee Nation and its vast territory. Earliest
relations between the Cherokees and the pioneers were, to say the
least, marked by paradox. Traders like James Adair formed economic ties
and carried on a heavy commerce of guns for furs, whisky for blankets,
jewelry for horses. But there was also deep resentment. The English
colonies, especially South Carolina, even took Indian prisoners and
sold them into slavery.
The Spanish had practiced this kind of slavery, arguing that thus the
Indians would be exposed to the boon of Christianity. The English
colonies employed what were known as “indentured servants,” persons who
paid off the cost of their passage to America by working often as hard
as slaves. And in later years both the white man and some of the more
prosperous Cherokees kept Negro slaves. Such instances in the Nation
were more rare than not, however, and a Cherokee might work side by
side with any slave he owned; marriage between them was not infrequent.
Be that as it may, the deplorable colonial policy of enforced servitude
at any level, which continued into the late 1700s, sowed seeds of
bitterness that ended in a bloody harvest.
Like the pioneers, the Cherokees cherished liberty above all else and
distrusted government. Both left religion to the family and refused
to institute any orthodox system of belief. Even the forms of humor
were often parallel; the Cherokee could be as sarcastic as the pioneer
and used irony to correct behavior. As one historian put it: “The
coward was praised for his valor; the liar for his veracity; and
the thief for his honesty.” But through the ironies of history, the
Scotch-Irish-English-German pioneers of the highlands, who were similar
to the Cherokees in a multitude of ways and quite different from the
lowland aristocrats, became the Indians’ worst enemy.
Their conflict was, in a sense, inevitable. The countries of England
and France and their representatives in America both battled and
befriended the Cherokees during the 18th century. Their main concern
lay in their own rivalry, not in any deep-founded argument with the
Indians. As they expanded the American frontier and immersed themselves
in the process of building a country, the colonists inevitably
encroached upon the Cherokee Nation.
[Illustration:
Smithsonian Institution
_In 1730, Sir Alexander Cuming took seven Cherokee leaders to England
in an attempt to build up good relations with the tribe. Among the
group was the youth Ukwaneequa (right), who was to become the great
Cherokee chief Attakullakulla._
]
In 1730, in a burst of freewheeling diplomacy, the British sent a
flamboyant and remarkable representative, Sir Alexander Cuming, into
remote Cherokee country on a mission of goodwill. After meeting with
the Indians on their own terms and terrain, Cuming arranged a massive
public relations campaign and escorted Attakullakulla and six other
Cherokee leaders to London, where they were showered with gifts and
presented at court to King George II. The Cherokees allied themselves
with Britain, but this did not discourage the French from trying to
win their allegiance. When the English in 1743 captured a persuasive
visionary named Christian Priber who sought to transform the Cherokee
Nation into a socialist utopia, they suspected him of being a French
agent and took him to prison in Frederica, Georgia. He was left to die
in the fort.
The British soldiers were not as friendly as British diplomats. During
the French and Indian War of the late 1750s and the early 1760s, when
England battled France for supremacy in the New World, English soldiers
treated the Cherokees with disdain and violence. The Cherokees returned
the atrocities in kind. The frontier blazed with death and destruction;
each side accumulated its own collection of horrors endured and meted
out. Although Cherokee chiefs sued for peace, Gov. William Henry
Lyttleton of South Carolina declared war on them in 1759. The Carolinas
offered 25 English pounds for every Indian scalp. A year later the
Cherokees, under the command of Oconostota, captured Fort Loudoun at
the fork of the Tellico and Little Tennessee rivers. But in June of
1761, Capt. James Grant and some 2,600 men destroyed the Nation’s
Middle Towns, burning 600 hectares (1,500 acres) of corn, beans, and
peas, and forcing 5,000 Cherokees into the forests for the winter.
After the English defeated the French in 1763, the British government
moved to appease the Indians and consolidate its control of the
continent. A British proclamation forbade all white settlement beyond
the Appalachian divide. But the proclamation was soon to be broken.
Pioneers such as Daniel Boone and James Robertson successfully led
their own and neighbors’ families through Appalachian gaps and river
valleys until a trickle of explorers became a flood of homesteaders.
During the next decade, settlers poured across the mountains into
Kentucky and northeastern Tennessee.
While England was regaining the friendship of the Cherokees, the
American colonists were alienating both the Indians and the British.
In the late 1760s a group of North Carolinians calling themselves
Regulators opposed taxation, land rents, and extensive land grants
to selected individuals, and caused unrest throughout the Piedmont.
In 1771, at Alamance, an estimated 2,000 Regulators were defeated by
the troops of British Gov. William Tryon. Thousands of anti-royalist
North Carolinians fled westward as a result of this battle. Alexander
Cameron, an English representative living in the Overhill Towns, wrote
in 1766 that the pioneer occupation of Cherokee lands amounted to an
infestation by villains and horse thieves that was “enough to create
disturbances among the most Civilized Nations.”
The protest spirit of the Regulators spread to the New England colonies
during the early 1770s. By 1776, when the American Revolution began,
the Cherokees had understandably but unfortunately chosen to take
the British side. Britain issued guns to all Indians and offered
rewards for American scalps, yet this was not enough to secure the
over-mountain territory for the English crown. Within a year, American
forces were fighting for the frontier, and in a coordinated pincer
movement, Col. Samuel Jack with 200 Georgians, Gen. Griffith Rutherford
with 2,400 North Carolinians, Col. Andrew Williamson with 1,800
South Carolinians, and Col. William Christian with 2,000 Virginians
demolished more than 50 Cherokee towns. Two treaties resulted from this
campaign; more than 2 million hectares (5 million acres) of Indian
land, including northeastern Tennessee, much of South Carolina, and all
lands east of the Blue Ridge, were ceded to the United States.
[Illustration:
_Ayunini, or Swimmer, was a medicine man. He was a major source of
information about Cherokee history, mythology, botany, and medicine
when James Mooney of the Bureau of American Ethnology visited the area
in 1888._
Smithsonian Institution
]
Peace did not follow the treaties, however. Dragging Canoe, pock-marked
son of Attakullakulla, decided to fight. Against the wishes of many
Cherokee chiefs, he organized a renegade tribe that moved to five
Lower Towns near present-day Chattanooga where they became known as
the Chickamaugas. But the eventual outcome of the drama had already
been determined. Despite conflict and danger, the settlers pushed on.
In 1780 the Tennesseans John Sevier and Isaac Shelby joined forces
with those of William Campbell from Virginia and Joseph McDowell from
North Carolina and managed to win a decisive victory over the English
at Kings Mountain, South Carolina. By fighting Indian-style on rugged
hillside terrain, they overwhelmed a detachment of General Cornwallis’
southern forces under Col. Patrick Ferguson. These over-mountain men
immediately returned to Tennessee and in reprisal for Indian raids
during their absence destroyed Chota and nine other Overhill Towns,
slaughtering women and children as well as Cherokee warriors.
In 1783, with the end of the Revolution, all hope for the survival
of the original Cherokee Nation was extinguished. Although the newly
formed American government attempted to conciliate the Indians, it
could not prevent its own citizens from hungering for ever larger bites
of land. Treaties with the loose Cherokee confederation of clans became
more and more frequent. As if by fate, a disastrous smallpox epidemic
struck the Cherokees; the number of warriors dwindled to less than
half of what it had been 50 years before. The Cherokee capital was
moved from Chota southward into Georgia. In 1794 Maj. James Ore and 550
militiamen from Nashville, Tennessee, obliterated the Chickamaugas and
their Five Towns.
Most of the Cherokees parted with the Smokies. At the Treaty of Holston
in 1791, they gave up the northeastern quarter of what is now the park.
Seven years later, they ceded a southern strip. And at Washington,
D.C., in February of 1819, nearly a century after their first treaty
with the white man in 1721, the Cherokees signed their 21st treaty.
This time they parted with a quarter of their entire Nation, and they
lost the rest of their sacred Smoky Mountains. Scattered families
continued to live in the foothills. But the newcomer--this pioneer
turned settler--had arrived.
[Illustration:
_Between her many had-to-be-done tasks around the house, Mollie
McCarter Ogle rocks her daughter Mattie on the porch._
Laura Thornborough
]
The Pioneers Arrive
Into the Smokies they came, but the coming was slow. The early pioneers
of the Old Southwest had conquered the lowlands of North Carolina and
Tennessee with relative ease. The higher country of the Great Smoky
Mountains, set into the Southern Appalachians like a great boulder
among scattered stones, would yield less quickly.
The pioneers began, as the Cherokees had done, with the most accessible
land. The level Oconaluftee valley, stretching its timbered swath
from present-day Cherokee, North Carolina, on up into the forks
and tributaries of the Great Smokies, beckoned with at least some
possibilities to the hopeful settler. As early as 1790, Dr. Joseph
Dobson, a North Carolina Revolutionary War veteran who had accompanied
Rutherford on his 1777 campaign against the Cherokees, entered into
deed a tract on the Oconaluftee. But the claim was void; the valley
still belonged to the Indians.
John Walker had also ridden with Rutherford. His son Felix, a student
and friend of Dr. Dobson, lawfully received in 1795 a sizable land
grant to the valley. Young Walker was more than willing to let settlers
attempt development of this wild area. Two North Carolina families
decided to try. John Jacob Mingus and Ralph Hughes took their wives and
children and journeyed into the “Lufty” regions of the Smokies. They
cleared small homesteads by the river; they were all alone.
In 1803, Abraham Enloe and his family moved up from South Carolina and
joined the growing families of Mingus and Hughes. Enloe chose land
directly across the river from John Mingus, and by 1820 Abraham’s
daughter Polly had married John, junior. “Dr. John,” as the younger
Mingus was respectfully called in his later years, learned much about
medicine from the scattered Cherokees remaining in the area.
Other families, Carolinian and Georgian and Virginian alike, arrived
and stayed. Collins, Bradley, Beck, Conner, Floyd, Sherrill: these and
others settled beside the river itself, and their children moved along
the creeks and branches. Fresh lands were cleared, new homes built; the
Oconaluftee was being transformed. And further to the southwest, Forney
Creek was being claimed by Crisps and Monteiths, Coles and Welches;
Deep Creek had already been colonized by Abraham Wiggins and his
descendants.
The Tennessee side of the Smokies, furrowed by its own series of
rivers and creeks, awaited settlement. By 1800 a few Virginians and
Carolinians were drifting into the four-year-old state of Tennessee,
willing to settle.
The first family of Gatlinburg was probably a mother and her seven
children. This widow, Martha Huskey Ogle, brought five sons and
two daughters from Edgefield, South Carolina. Richard Reagan, a
Scotch-Irishman from Virginia, and his family joined the Ogles and
began to clear land. His son, Daniel Wesley Reagan, born in 1802, was
the first child of the settlement and later became a leading citizen of
the community. The elder Reagan was fatally injured when a heavy wind
blew the limb from a tree on him, reminding the little community once
more of the precarious nature of survival in this free, stern country.
Maples, Clabos, and Trenthams followed the Ogles and the Reagans into
the Gatlinburg area. Nearby Big Greenbrier Cove became known as “the
Whaley Settlement.” Some settlers traveled directly across the crest
of the Smokies, via Indian and Newfound Gaps, but these old Cherokee
trails and cattle paths were rough and overgrown. Horses could barely
make it through, and most possessions had to be carried on stout human
shoulders. Besides the usual pots, tools, guns, and seeds were the
Bibles and treasured manmade mementos.
Many settlers, having been soldiers of the Revolution, had received
20-hectare (50-acre) land grants for a mere 75 cents. They pushed along
the West Prong of the Little Pigeon River, past Gatlinburg, up among
the steep slopes of the Bull Head, the Chimney Tops, the Sugarland
Mountain. This narrow Sugarlands valley, strewn with water-smoothed
boulders and homestead-sized plateaus of level land, attracted dozens
of families. But this rocky country forced the settlers to clear their
fields twice, first of the forest and then of the stones.
The work of clearing demanded strong muscles, long hours, and sturdy
spirits. It meant denting the hard armor of the forest and literally
fighting for a tiny patch of cropland. Men axed the huge trees with
stroke after grinding stroke, then either wrenched the stumps from the
earth with teams of oxen or burned them when they had dried. Some
trees were so immense that all a man could do was “girdle” them, which
meant deep-cutting a fatal circle into the bark to arrest the flow of
sap. Such “deadenings” might stand for years with crops planted on the
“new ground,” before the trees were finally cut and often burned. Logs
and stumps from the virgin forest often smouldered for days or weeks.
[Illustration:
Edouard E. Exline
_Uncle George Lamon sits next to one of his honey bee boxes at his
home in Gumstand, near Gatlinburg._
]
The soil itself was rich and loamy with the topsoil of centuries.
Land that had produced great forests could also nourish fine crops.
During the first year of settlement, all able-bodied members of the
family helped cultivate the new ground. Such land demanded particular
attention. Using a single-pointed “Bull tongue” plow to bite deep into
the earth and a sharp iron “coulter” to cut tough roots left under the
massive stumps, a succession of plows, horses, and workers prepared
and turned the newly cleared field. The first man “laid off” the rows
into evenly spaced lengths, the second plowed an adjacent furrow, and
the wife or children dropped in the seed. A third plow covered this
planted row by furrowing along its side. A short while later, the same
workers would “bust middles” by plowing three extra furrows into the
ground between the seeded rows. This loosened the soil and destroyed
any remaining roots.
While fields throughout the Smokies were yielding to the plow, even
more isolated coves and creeks were being penetrated and settled.
Gunters, Webbs, McGahas, and Suttons found their way into Big Creek.
And in 1818, John Oliver walked into a secluded Tennessee cove, spent
the night in an Indian hut, and then became familiar with one of the
most beautiful and productive spots in all the Great Smokies. This
broad, well-watered basin of fertile land was named after the wife of
an old Cherokee chief; it was called Kate’s Cove, later Cades Cove.
John Oliver settled in that cove. Three years later--two years after
the decisive 1819 treaty with the Cherokees--William Tipton settled
there legally, bought up most of the land, and parceled it out to
paying newcomers. David Foute came and established an iron forge in
1827. By mixing iron ore with limestone and charcoal, this “bloomery
forge” produced chunks of iron called “blooms.” The forge, similar to
many which sprang up throughout Appalachia, was indeed an asset, but
its low-grade ore and the cost of charcoal forced it to close only 20
years later.
[Illustration:
Edouard E. Exline
_Most families had several scaffolds in their yards on which they
dried fruits, beans, corn, and even duck and chicken feathers for
stuffing pillows._
]
[Illustration:
Charles S. Grossman
_Near most houses was a smokehouse in which meat was cured and often
stored for later use._
]
[Illustration:
Charles S. Grossman
_Fruits and other goods were stored in barns or sheds, often located
over cool springs._
]
Russell Gregory built a homestead high in the cove and ranged cattle
on a nearby grassy bald. These mysterious open meadows scattered
throughout the Smokies were of unknown origin. Had Indians kept them
cleared in years gone by? Had some unexplained natural circumstance
created them? Pioneers and later experts alike remained baffled and
attracted by the lush grass which, growing among forest-covered crags
and pinnacles, provided excellent forage for livestock. The present-day
Parson’s and Gregory Balds were named for enterprising farmers who made
early use of this phenomenon. Peter Cable, a friend of William Tipton,
joined the valley settlement in Cades Cove. Cable’s son-in-law, Dan
Lawson, expanded Cable’s holdings into a narrow mountain-to-mountain
empire.
Cades Cove, with its vast farmland, soon rivaled Oconaluftee and
Cataloochee. The lower end of the cove sometimes became swampy, but
this pasture was reclaimed by a series of dikes and log booms. To
escape an 1825 epidemic of typhoid in the Tennessee lowlands, Robert
Shields and his family moved up into the hill-guarded cove. Two of his
sons married John Oliver’s daughters and remained in Cades Cove. A
community had been formed.
But the life in these small communities was not easy. Each family
farmed for a living; each family homestead provided for its own needs
and such luxuries as it could create. Isolation from outside markets
made cash crops, and hence cash itself, relatively insignificant.
The settlers of the Great Smokies depended upon themselves. They
built their own cabins and corncribs, their own meat- and apple- and
spring-houses. They cultivated a garden whose corn, potatoes, and other
vegetables would last the family through the winter. They set about
insuring a continuous supply of pork and fruit and grains, wool and
sometimes cotton, and all the other commodities necessary to keep a
family alive.
Living off the land required both labor and ingenuity. These early
settlers did not mind fishing and hunting for food throughout the
spring, summer, and early fall, but there were also the demands of
farming and livestock raising. They carved out of wood such essentials
as ox yokes and wheat cradles, spinning wheels and looms. Men
patiently rebuilt and repaired anything from a broken harness to a
sagging “shake” roof made of hand-riven shingles. Children picked
quantities of wild berries and bushels of beans in sun-hot fields and
gathered eggs from hidden hen nests in barn lofts and under bushes.
They found firewood for the family, carried water from the spring,
bundled fodder from cane and corn, and stacked hay for the cattle,
horses, mules, and oxen.
[Illustration:
Edouard E. Exline
_Food also was stored in pie safes. The pierced tin panels allow air
into the cabinet but prevent flies from getting at the food._
]
[Illustration:
Aiden Stevens
_In the days before refrigerators, many methods and kinds of
containers were used in preserving and storing foods. Corn meal, dried
beans and other vegetables, and sulphured fruits were kept in bins
made from hollow black gum logs._
]
Women made sure that the food supply stretched to last through the
winter. They helped salt and cure pork from the hogs that their
husbands slaughtered. They employed a variety of methods to preserve
vital fruits and vegetables. Apples, as well as beans, were carefully
dried in the hot summer or autumn sun; water, added months later, would
restore a tangy flavor. Some foods were pickled in brine or vinegar.
Women also used sulphur as a preservative, especially with apples.
Called simply “fruit” by the early settlers, apples such as the
favorite Limbertwigs and Milams gave both variety and nutrition to the
pioneer diet. A woman might peel and slice as much as two dishpans of
“fruit” into a huge barrel. She would then lay a pan of sulphur on top
of the apples and light the contents. By covering the barrel with a
clean cloth, she could regulate the right amount of fumes held inside.
The quickly sulfurated apples remained white all winter and were
considered a delicacy by every mountain family.
Food, clothing, shelter, and incessant labor: these essentials formed
only the foundation of a life. Intangible forces hovered at the edges
and demanded fulfillment. As hardy and practical as the physical
existence of the pioneers had to be, there was another dimension
to life. The pioneers were human beings. Often isolated, sometimes
lonely, they yearned for the comforts of myth and superstition and
religion--and the roads that led in and out. The Cherokees in their
time had created such comforts; they had woven their myths and had
laced the Smokies with a network of trails. Now it was the white man’s
turn.
The early settlers of the Great Smoky Mountains were not content to
remain only in their hidden hollows and on their tiny homesteads.
Challenging the mountain ranges and the rough terrain, they
constructed roads. In the mid-1830s, a project was undertaken to lay
out a road across the crest of the Smokies and connect North Carolina’s
Little Tennessee valley with potential markets in Knoxville, Tennessee.
Although the North Carolina section was never completed, an old roadbed
from Cades Cove to Spence Field is still in existence. When Julius
Gregg established a licensed distillery in Cades Cove and processed
brandy from apples and corn, farmers built a road from the cove down
Tabcat Creek to the vast farmlands along the Little Tennessee River.
By far the most ambitious road project was the Oconaluftee Turnpike. In
1832, the North Carolina legislature chartered the Oconaluftee Turnpike
Company. Abraham Enloe, Samuel Sherrill, John Beck, John Carroll, and
Samuel Gibson were commissioners for the road and were authorized
to sell stock and collect tolls. The road itself was to run from
Oconaluftee all the way to the top of the Smokies at Indian Gap.
Work on the road progressed slowly. Bluffs and cliffs had to be
avoided; such detours lengthened the turnpike considerably. Sometimes
the rock was difficult to remove. Crude blasting--complete with
hand-hammered holes, gunpowder inside hollow reeds, and fuses of
straw or leaves--constituted one quick and sure, but more expensive,
method. Occasionally, the men burned logs around the rock, then
quickly showered it with creek water. When the rock split from the
sudden change in temperature, it could then be quarried and graded
out. Throughout the 1830s, residents of Oconaluftee and nearby valleys
toiled and sweated to lay down this single roadbed.
This desire and effort to conquer the wilderness also prompted the
establishment of churches and, to a lesser extent, schools. In the
Tennessee Sugarlands, services were held under the trees until a small
building was constructed at the beginning of the 19th century. The
valley built a larger five-cornered Baptist church in 1816. Prospering
Cades Cove established a Methodist church in 1830; its preacher rode
the Little River circuit. Five years later, the church had 40 members.
Over on the Oconaluftee, Ralph Hughes had donated land and Dr. John
Mingus had built a log schoolhouse. Monthly prayer meetings were held
there until the Lufty Baptist Church was officially organized in 1836.
Its 21 charter members included most of the turnpike commissioners plus
the large Mingus family. Five years later, the members built a log
church at Smokemont on land donated by John Beck.
Nothing fostered these settlers’ early gropings toward community more
than stories. Legends and tall tales, begun in family conversations and
embellished by neighborly rumor, forged a bond, a unity of interest,
a common history, in each valley and on each meandering branch. For
example, in one western North Carolina tradition that would thrive well
into the 20th century, Abraham Enloe was cited as the real father of
Abraham Lincoln. Nancy Hanks, it was asserted, had worked for a time in
the Enloe household and had become pregnant. Exiled to Kentucky, she
married Thomas Lincoln but gave birth to Abraham’s child.
Stories mingled with superstition. The Cherokees dropped seven grains
into every corn hill and never thinned their crop. Many early settlers
of the Smokies believed that if corn came up missing in spots, some
of the family would die within a year. Just as the Cherokees forbade
counting green melons or stepping across the vines because “it would
make the vines wither,” the Smokies settlers looked upon certain events
as bad omens. A few days before Richard Reagan’s skull was fractured,
a bird flew on the porch where he sat and came to rest on his head.
Reagan himself saw it as a “death sign.”
Superstition, combined with Indian tradition, led to a strangely exact
form of medicine. One recipe for general aches and pains consisted of
star root, sourwood, rosemary, sawdust, anvil dust, water, and vinegar.
A bad memory required a properly “sticky” tea made of cocklebur and
jimsonweed.
A chief medicinal herb was an unusual wild plant known as ginseng.
Called “sang” in mountain vernacular, its value lay in the manlike
shape of its dual-pronged roots. Oriental cultures treasured ginseng,
especially the older and larger roots. Reputed to cure anything from
a cough to a boil to an internal disorder, it was also considered an
aphrodisiac and a source of rare, mystical properties. But scientific
research has never yielded any hard evidence of its medicinal worth.
[Illustration:
Alan Rinehart
_Aunt Sophie Campbell made clay pipes at her place on Crockett
Mountain and sold them to her neighbors and to other folks in the
Gatlinburg area._
]
Settlers used ginseng sparingly, for it brought a high price when sold
to herb-dealers for shipment to China. The main problem lay in locating
the five-leaved plants, which grew in the most secluded, damp coves of
the Smokies. Sometimes several members of a family would wait until
summer or early fall, then go out on extended “sanging” expeditions.
The search was not easy. During some seasons, the plant might not
appear at all. When it did, its leaves yellowed and its berries
reddened for only a few days. But when a healthy “sang” plant was
finally found, and its long root carefully cleaned and dried, it could
yield great financial reward. Although the 5-year-old white root was
more common, a red-rooted plant needed a full decade to mature and was
therefore especially prized. Greed often led to wanton destruction of
the beds, with no seed-plants for future harvests. Ginseng was almost
impossible to cultivate.
Ginseng-hunting became a dangerous business. Although Daniel Boone dug
it and traded in it, later gatherers were sometimes killed over it. One
large Philadelphia dealer who came into Cataloochee in the mid-1800s
was murdered and robbed. Anyone trying to grow it, even if he were
successful, found that he would have to guard the plants like water in
a desert. Indeed, the rare, graceful ginseng became a symbol for many
in the mountains of all that was unique, so readily destroyed, and
eventually irreplaceable.
As much as the pioneers drew on Indian experience, they also depended
on their own resourcefulness. One skill which the early settlers
brought with them into the Smoky Mountains involved a power unknown to
the Cherokees. This was the power of the rifle: both its manufacture
and the knowledge of what the rifle could do.
The backwoods rifle was a product of the early American frontier.
Formally known as the “Pennsylvania-Kentucky” rifle, this long-barreled
innovation became a standby throughout the Appalachians. To assure
precise workmanship, it was made out of the softest iron available.
The inside of the barrel, or the bore, was painstakingly “rifled” with
spiralling grooves. This gradual twist made the bullet fly harder
and aim straighter toward its target. The butt of the weapon was
crescent-shaped to keep the gun from slipping. All shiny or highly
visible metal was blackened, and sometimes a frontiersman would rub his
gun barrel with a dulling stain or crushed leaf.
But the trademark of the “long rifle” was just that: its length.
Weighing over 2.5 kilograms (5.5 pounds) and measuring more than
1.2 meters (4 feet), the barrel of the backwoods rifle could be
unbalancing. Yet this drawback seemed minor compared to the superior
accuracy of the new gun. The heavy barrel could take a much heavier
powder charge than the lighter barrels, and this in turn could, as an
expert noted, “drive the bullet faster, lower the trajectory, make the
ball strike harder, and cause it to flatten out more on impact. It does
not cause inaccurate flight....”
The Pennsylvania-Kentucky rifle became defender, gatherer of food,
companion for thousands of husbands and fathers. Cradled on a rack of
whittled wooden pegs or a buck’s antlers, the “rifle-gun” hung over the
door or along the wall or above the “fire-board,” as the mantel was
called, within easy and ready reach. It was the recognized symbol of
the fact that each man’s cabin was his castle.
Equipped with a weapon such as this, pioneer Americans pushed back
the frontier. The fastnesses of the Great Smoky Mountains gradually
submitted to the probing and settling of the white man. The fertile
valleys were settled, the hidden coves were conquered. The Oconaluftee
Turnpike to the top of the Smokies was completed in 1839. And in that
fateful year, disaster was stalking a people who had known the high
mountains but who had not known of the ways of making a rifle.
[Illustration:
National Park Service
_A young Smokies lad stands proudly with his long rifle and powder
horn before heading off to the woods on a hunting excursion._
]
Rifle Making
Of all the special tasks in the Great Smoky Mountains, rifle making was
perhaps the most intricate and the most intriguing. From the forging of
the barrel to the filing of the double trigger and the carving of the
stock, the construction of the “long rifle” proved to be a process both
painstaking and exciting. After the barrel was shaped on the anvil,
its bore was cleaned to a glass-like finish by inserting and turning
an iron rod with steel cutters. When the rod could cut no more, the
shavings from the bore were removed. The rifling of the barrel, or
cutting the necessary twists into the bore, required a 3-meters-long
(10-foot) assembly, complete with barrel, cutting rod, and rifling
guide. The 1.5-meter (5-foot) wooden guide, whose parallel twists had
been carefully cut into it with a knife, could be turned by a man
pushing it through the spiral-edged hole of a stationary “head block.”
The resulting force and spin drove the cutting rod and its tiny saw
into the barrel, guiding its movement as it “rifled” the gun.
[Illustration:
National Park Service
]
[Illustration]
Most of the rifles in the Smokies had an average spin or twist of about
one turn in 122 centimeters (48 inches), the ordinary original length
of the barrel. A later step--“dressing out” the barrel with a greased
hickory stick and a finishing saw--usually took a day and a half to be
done right. Likewise, the making of a maple or walnut rifle stock, or
the forging of the bullet mold, led gunsmiths to adopt the long view
of time and the passing of days in the Great Smoky Mountains. Two such
gunsmiths were Matt Ownby and Wiley Gibson. Ownby (above) fits a
barrel to an unfinished stock as the process of rifle making nears
its end. Gibson (below), the last of four generations of famous Smoky
Mountain gunsmiths, works at his forge in Sevier County, Tennessee.
Over the years Gibson lived in several places in Sevier County, and
in each one he set up a gun shop. As he tested one of his finished
products (above), Gibson commented: “I can knock a squirrel pine blank
out of a tree at 60 yards.”
[Illustration: Charles S. Grossman]
[Illustration:
_Walini was among the Cherokees living on the Qualla Reservation in
North Carolina when James Mooney visited in 1888._
Smithsonian Institution
]
A Band of Cherokees Holds On
The Cherokees who remained in the East endured many changes in the
early 1800s.
As their Nation dwindled in size to cover only portions of Georgia,
Alabama, North Carolina, and Tennessee, the influence of growing
white settlements began to encroach on the old ways, the accepted
beliefs. Settlers intermarried with Indians. Aspects of the Nation’s
civilization gradually grew to resemble that of the surrounding states.
The Cherokees diversified and improved their agricultural economy. They
came to rely more heavily on livestock. Herds of sheep, goats, and
hogs, as well as cattle, grazed throughout the Nation. Along with crops
of aromatic tobacco, and such staples as squash, potatoes, beans, and
the ever-present corn, the Cherokees were cultivating cotton, grains,
indigo, and other trade items. Boats carried tons of export to New
Orleans and other river cities. Home industry, such as spinning and
weaving, multiplied; local merchants thrived.
Church missions and their attendant schools were established. As early
as 1801, members of the Society of United Brethren set up a station of
missionaries at a north Georgia site called Spring Place. And within
five years, the Rev. Gideon Blackburn from East Tennessee persuaded his
Presbyterians to subsidize two schools.
In 1817, perhaps the most famous of all the Cherokee missions was
opened on Chickamauga Creek at Brainerd, just across the Tennessee
line from Georgia. Founded by Cyrus Kingsbury and a combined
Congregational-Presbyterian board, Brainerd Mission educated many
Cherokee leaders, including Elias Boudinot and John Ridge. Samuel
Austin Worcester, a prominent Congregational minister from New England,
taught at Brainerd from 1825 until 1834. He became a great friend of
the Cherokees and was referred to as “The Messenger.”
In 1821, a single individual gave to his Nation an educational
innovation as significant and far-reaching as the influx of schools. A
Cherokee named Sequoyah, known among whites as George Gist, had long
been interested in the “talking leaves” of the white man. After years
of thought, study, and hard work, he devised an 86-character Cherokee
alphabet. Born about 1760 near old Fort Loudoun, Tennessee, Sequoyah
had neither attended school nor learned English. By 1818, he had moved
to Willstown in what is now eastern Alabama and had grown interested in
the white man’s ability to write. He determined that he would give his
own people the same advantage.
[Illustration:
Smithsonian Institution
_Sequoyah displays the Cherokee alphabet he developed._
]
The first painstaking process he tried called for attaching a mark to
each Cherokee word. These marks soon mounted into the thousands. As
he sensed the futility of this one-for-one relationship, he examined
English letters in an old newspaper. His own mind linked symbols of
this sort with basic sounds of the Cherokee tongue. After months of
work, he sorted out these sounds and assigned them symbols based, to
a large extent, upon the ones he had seen in the newspaper. When he
introduced his invention to his fellow Cherokees, it was as if he
had loosed a floodgate. Within the space of a few weeks, elders and
children alike began to read and write. The change was incredible.
Sequoyah himself vaulted into a position of great respect inside
the Nation. One of his many awestruck visitors, John Howard Payne,
described him with the finest detail and noted that Sequoyah wore
“... _a turban of roses and posies upon a white ground girding his
venerable grey hairs, a long dark blue robe, bordered around the lower
edge and the cuffs, with black; a blue and white minutely checked
calico tunic under it, confined with an Indian beaded belt, which
sustained a large wooden handled knife, in a rough leathern sheath;
the tunic open on the breast and its collar apart, with a twisted
handkerchief flung around his neck and gathered within the bosom of the
tunic. He wore plain buckskin leggings; and one of a deeper chocolate
hue than the other. His moccasins were unornamented buckskin. He had
a long dusky white bag of sumac with him, and a long Indian pipe, and
smoked incessantly, replenishing his pipe from his bag. His air was
altogether what we picture to ourselves of an old Greek philosopher.
He talked and gesticulated very gracefully; his voice alternately
swelling, and then sinking to a whisper, and his eye firing up and then
its wild flashes subsiding into a gentle and most benignant smile._”
During the 1820s, Sequoyah moved west to Arkansas. Preoccupied with the
legend of a lost band of Cherokees somewhere in the Rocky Mountains,
he initiated several attempts to discover the group. But age caught
up with him. He died alone in northern Mexico in the summer of 1843.
He had brought his Nation a long way. His name would be immortalized
in the great redwood tree of the Far West, the giant sequoia. And
in a sense his spirit lived on in the first Cherokee newspaper--the
_Cherokee Phoenix_--which was established in 1828 at New Echota, with
Elias Boudinot as its editor and Samuel Worcester as its business
manager.
[Illustration:
Smithsonian Institution
_Students stand before the original school building at Dwight Mission,
the first Cherokee mission west of the Mississippi River. The one-room
log schoolhouse is very much like those the white settlers built and
used for years in the Smokies._
]
The Cherokees also made remarkable changes in government. In 1808, they
adopted a written legal code; a dozen years later, they divided the
Nation into judicial districts and designated judges. The first Supreme
Court of the Cherokees was established in 1822, and by 1827 the Nation
had drawn up an American-based Constitution. The president of the
constitutional convention was a 37-year-old leader named John Ross. A
year later, he began a 40-year term as principal chief of his people.
But whatever the progress of the internal affairs of the Cherokee
Nation, political relations with the United States steadily
disintegrated. Although the first quarter of the 19th century saw a
sympathetic man, Return Jonathan Meigs, serve as America’s southern
Indian agent, even he and his position could not prevent the relentless
pursuit of Indian territory.
In 1802 and 1803, the U.S. Government set a dangerous precedent for
the Cherokees. In return for Georgia’s abandonment of her claims to
the Mississippi Territory, the United States agreed to extinguish all
Indian titles for lands lying within Georgia. This indicated that the
government was no longer prepared to defend the Cherokee Nation.
President Thomas Jefferson acted to alleviate some of the Cherokee
loss. He suggested a program of removal west to a portion of the newly
acquired Louisiana Purchase. Most Cherokees hated the plan, yet some
harassed bands made the trip to what is now Arkansas. The foot was in
the door; hereafter, the government could point to a few Cherokees in
Arkansas and direct others there. Even though 800 eastern Cherokee
warriors fought alongside Americans during the War of 1812, the United
States came to recognize only the government of the Cherokees West.
But what of the Cherokees East? They waited. They pursued daily
routines while the pressures around them gathered and grew. And by
1828, these pressures had reached a degree which showed the Cherokees
that the final crush was on.
[Illustration:
Smithsonian Institution
_Elias Boudinot (top), editor of the_ Cherokee Phoenix, _bowed to
pressure and joined those willing to move west_.
]
[Illustration:
Smithsonian Institution
_John Ross remained firm in his opposition to the removal of the
Cherokees. He was in the last group to leave._
]
It began inside the Nation. In the winter of 1828, an old Cherokee
councilman, Whitepath, rose up in rebellion against the new
constitution. Suspicious of the Nation’s whirlwind progress, fearful
of the Nation’s stormy enemies, Whitepath attempted to persuade his
15,000 countrymen to hold fast to the ways of the past. He assembled
a series of localized meetings, where he advocated the abandonment of
white religion, society, economy. He called for a return to tribal
organization, but his call fell on younger ears and his plan was doomed
to failure.
The Cherokees turned to John Ross for leadership. Like Sequoyah,
John Ross possessed both grace and ability. These assets, combined
with courage, enabled him to accomplish seemingly remote goals for
his people. This handsome statesman, educated by his own father,
represented the middle ground of Cherokee policy. Though refusing the
reactionism of a Whitepath, John Ross also rejected any proposal to
move west. For he knew that his people had lived here in the Smokies
and belonged here, and he would not have them forced from their
homeland.
Andrew Jackson would. This stern Tennessee soldier and politician
began his career as a headlong Indian fighter and never lost the zeal.
Although Jackson the soldier had been aided numerous times by Cherokee
warriors, Jackson the politician was determined to move the Cherokees
west. And in the watershed years of 1828 and 1829, Andrew Jackson was
elected and sworn in as President of the United States.
Events conspired against the Nation. In July of 1829, in what is now
known as Lumpkin County, Georgia, a few shiny nuggets of gold were
discovered on Ward’s Creek of the Chestatee River. Within days, fortune
hunters swarmed into the territory; more than 10,000 gold-seekers
squatted on Cherokee lands, disregarded Cherokee rights, and pillaged
Cherokee homes. With Jackson’s support, the Georgia legislature passed
laws confiscating Indian land, nullifying Indian law, and prohibiting
Indian assembly. By the end of 1829, the script for Cherokee removal
had been blazoned in gold.
But there was more. Andrew Jackson asked Congress for “a general
removal law” that would give him prime authority in the matter at
the same time that it formed the basis for future treaty negotiation.
Congress passed the Removal Act, which included a half-million dollar
appropriation for that purpose, in May of 1830. Davy Crockett, whose
legendary exploits and down-to-earth compassion made him perhaps the
best representative of the mountain spirit, was a U.S. congressman
at the time. Although his grandfather had been murdered by Dragging
Canoe, Davy Crockett argued against and voted against the bill. He
was the only Tennessean to do so, and he was defeated when he ran for
reelection.
Cherokee leaders sought help from the U.S. courts. Their friend and
missionary, sober and troubled Samuel Worcester, fell victim to a
Georgia law “prohibiting the unauthorized residence of white men within
the Cherokee Nation.” Worcester appealed to the Supreme Court, which
in February of 1832 considered the case of _Worcester v. Georgia_. On
March 3, a feeble Chief Justice John Marshall read the Court’s decision
to a packed room: all the Georgia laws against the Cherokee Nation were
declared unconstitutional.
Elias Boudinot, editor of the _Phoenix_ and a special friend of
Worcester, wrote to his brother and expressed the Nation’s joy and
relief:
“_It is glorious news. The laws of the state are declared by the
highest judicial tribunal in the country to be_ null and void. _It is a
great triumph on the part of the Cherokees.... The question is forever
settled as to who is right and who is wrong._”
Yet Andrew Jackson would not stand for such a settlement. “John
Marshall has made his decision,” Jackson thundered, “now let him
enforce it.” This was the single instance in American history where
the President so bluntly and openly defied a Supreme Court ruling. The
situation grew more bleak. Worcester was released from jail only after
appealing to the “good will” of the state of Georgia. Matters worsened
as Georgia conducted its Cherokee Lottery of 1832, and thousands of
white men descended onto lots carved out of the Cherokee land.
[Illustration:
Smithsonian Institution
_Major Ridge signed a treaty ceding all of the Cherokees’ land in the
east to the United States. He, his son John, and his nephew Elias
Boudinot were “executed” on June 22, 1839._
]
Boudinot and several other Cherokee leaders, including John Ridge,
grew discouraged to the point of resignation. Jackson’s attitude as
President, coupled with Georgia’s unrelenting attack and the Supreme
Court’s inability to stop it, caused a change of heart in Boudinot and
Ridge. Boudinot stepped down from the _Phoenix_ and, with Major Ridge,
became an important spokesman for a minority faction of Cherokees which
was prepared to move west. However, John Ross continued to speak for
the vast majority who rejected any discussion of removal.
By 1835, the rift between the Ridge party and John Ross’ followers had
become open and intense. Seeking to take advantage of this division,
Jackson appointed a New York minister, J.F. Schermerhorn, to deal with
Boudinot and Ridge. The Cherokee supporters of Ross hated this “loose
Dutch Presbyterian minister” and referred to him as “The Devil’s Horn.”
On several occasions, Ross attempted to negotiate a reasonable solution
with Washington. He was frustrated at every turn. In November of 1835,
he and the visiting John Howard Payne were arrested by the Georgia
militia. In jail, Payne heard a Georgia guard singing “Home Sweet Home”
outside his cell. Payne asked the man if he knew that his prisoner had
written the song; the guard seemed unimpressed. After spending nine
days in jail, Ross and Payne were released without any explanation for
their treatment.
Ross traveled on to Washington to resume negotiations. While he was
there, Schermerhorn and the Ridge party drew up and signed a treaty.
Endorsed by a scant one-tenth of the Nation’s 16,000 Cherokees, this
treaty ceded to the United States all eastern territory in exchange
for $5 million and a comparable amount of western land. Cherokees
throughout the Nation registered shock and betrayal; Boudinot and
Ridge, their lives already threatened numerous times, would be murdered
within four years. Yet despite Ross’ protestations of fraud, the U.S.
Senate ratified the minority Treaty of New Echota by one vote. A new
President, Martin Van Buren, authorized Gen. Winfield Scott to begin
the removal of all Cherokees in the summer of 1838.
Scott, while determined to carry out the removal, tried in vain to
restrain his troops from inflicting undue hardships. Scott’s soldiers
moved relentlessly through the Nation. As one private remembered it in
later years:
“_Men working in the fields were arrested and driven to the stockades.
Women were dragged from their homes by soldiers whose language they
could not understand. Children were often separated from their parents
and driven into the stockades with the sky for a blanket and earth for
a pillow._”
The soldiers built 13 stockades in North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee,
and Alabama. Using these as base camps, they scattered throughout the
countryside with loaded rifles and fixed bayonets. As they herded
Indians back toward the forts, bands of roving outlaws burned the
homes, stole the livestock, robbed the graves. Throughout the summer, a
stifling drought settled over the hot, depleted Nation. By August, many
of the captured Cherokees had succumbed to sickness or even death.
Removal itself began during the autumn. A few early contingents had
been moved out along the Tennessee River in large two-decker keelboats.
The majority would travel overland. Thirteen detachments of about
1,000 each, plus 645 wagons carrying the sick and aged, departed from
southeastern Tennessee. Early on in their journey, the weather changed.
Winter stalked the doomed procession with the tenacity of a bloodhound.
By the time the Cherokees crossed the Mississippi River many had died
because of lack of food and warmth. In March of 1839, the dwindling
band reached what is now Oklahoma. Four thousand Cherokees, almost
one-third of all who left their mountain homeland, had been taken by
the cold, hard hand of death.
The tragedy would be recorded in history as the “Trail of Tears.” Along
the route, old Whitepath died. The wife of John Ross gave her blanket
to a sick child and herself suffered fatal exposure. A white Georgia
volunteer summarized the needless pain in one short sentence: “That
Cherokee removal was the crudest work I ever knew.” But disaster was
not the final conqueror. For out of that cruelty came sacrifice; out of
that death came rebirth.
[Illustration:
Smithsonian Institution
_Ginatiyun tihi, or Stephen Tehee, was born in Georgia six months
before the removal of the Cherokees to the West. He served as a tribal
delegate to Washington in 1898._
]
The improbable source of that rebirth was a farmer named Tsali. Old
Man Charley. Until October of 1838, he was simply another Indian to
be herded to the stockade. A lieutenant and three other soldiers
were assigned to capture all Cherokees along the headwaters of the
Oconaluftee. As the patrol traveled up the Little Tennessee River, it
rounded up Tsali, his family, and a few friends. The soldiers prodded
the Indians with bayonets and forced Tsali’s wife to hasten her steps.
Driven to anger and desperation, Tsali called the other warriors to
action. In the quick, sudden tangle that followed, at least one soldier
was killed. Tsali and his small band fled across the river high into
the Great Smoky Mountains. They hid in a massive rock shelter at
the head of Deep Creek. Located on top of a steep cliff, the actual
camping place lay in the midst of extensive, thick laurel and hemlock
“roughs.” Several hundred other Cherokees escaped from the soldiers or
the stockades and found similar hiding places on the rugged, overgrown
sides of the Smokies. Most of them lasted out the winter, subsisting at
a near-starvation level on roots, herbs, nuts, and small game.
[Illustration]
Confronted with such determination and the likelihood of a prolonged,
wearisome mission of search and arrest in the rugged mountains, General
Scott offered a compromise. If Tsali and his small party would come
down and give themselves up for punishment, the rest of the Cherokee
fugitives would be allowed to stay in the mountains until a solution
could be reached by all sides. Scott sent W. H. Thomas, a white man who
had grown up with the Cherokees, into the Smokies to present the terms.
Thomas found Tsali, who silently listened and decided on his own accord
to accompany Thomas out of the mountains. Early in the year of 1839,
Tsali and his brother and his eldest son were shot by a firing squad.
The youngest son, Wasituna (for Washington) was left to take word of
the deaths back to the Cherokees who remained in their hills.
They had held onto their homeland in the Great Smoky Mountains. By
nothing more than the thin grip of desperate determination, they had
held on, and they would remain. Reinforced by General Scott’s promise,
scattered friends in the East, and Thomas’ political negotiations
with Washington and North Carolina, the Cherokee remnant soon became
the Eastern Band. Their homeland would now be known as the Qualla
Reservation. So the Cherokees East, along with the white pioneers of
the Great Smokies, turned together to brace the mountainous challenge
of the 19th century.
[Illustration:
Smithsonian Institution
_Tsiskwa-kaluya, or Bird Chopper, was son of Yonahguskah, the famous
Cherokee chief and spokesman who stayed with the small group in the
Great Smoky Mountains._
]
[Illustration:
_Aaron Swaniger was an individualist who occasionally stayed in Cades
Cove. To some “mountaineers” he was a “hillbilly.”_
Edouard E. Exline
]
From Pioneer to Mountaineer
While events of the early 19th century in the surrounding southland
and the nation were moving inexorably toward conflict on bloody
battlefields to decide issues which could not or would not be resolved
in the political arena, people in the Great Smokies were pursuing their
struggle to survive and adapt to their stern and splendid surroundings.
The early explorers, the long hunters, the initial homesteaders, the
trailblazers and the groundbreakers--these had forever set a human
seal upon the wilderness. Now it was the time of pioneer becoming
mountaineer. Henceforth, as new settlers or curious travelers or
specialized seekers in a dozen fields made their way into the
mountains, they would find someone already there to welcome them.
That “someone” was becoming known by terms which might alternately
serve as a source of description, derision, or definition. Highlander.
Hillbilly. Mountaineer. The least offensive word was “highlander,”
with its overtones of the misty Scottish landscape and fierce clan
loyalties from which many of the Smokies’ family lines had recently
descended. “Mountaineer” varied. Used to denote the proud individualism
that characterized many of the stalwart men and women whose roots held
deep and fast in this isolated place, “mountaineer” was a strong,
acceptable name. But turned into a catchword for some picturesque,
inadequate character who divided his time between the homemade dulcimer
and the home-run distillery, “mountaineer” was suspect. “Hillbilly”
came to verge on insult, as it conjured up cartoons of lanky, sub-human
creatures who were quick to feud, slow to work, and often indifferent
to the “progress” by which helpful visitors would like to transform
mountain lives and attitudes.
Of course, the trouble with any single word that tried to summarize
these complex and distinctive lives was its limited ability to convey
more than a stereotype or a single facet. Yet the 19th and early
20th centuries saw the rise and wide adoption of such terms, with an
accompanying unease--sometimes outrage--on the part of those described.
This tension has persisted into the present day, for Southern
Appalachian natives often have felt they have been misunderstood, or
exploited, by the curious outlanders.
The visitors indeed were curious--curious about mountain people
but also about topography, altitudes, plants, wildlife, and the
rich variety of natural resources abounding throughout these hills.
Naturalists and botanists followed the lead of Frenchman André Michaux
and Philadelphian William Bartram, who had come collecting plants in
the Southern mountains during the previous century. It was Michaux who
had told mountain herb-gatherers about ginseng’s commercial value,
and Bartram who had discovered and described the showy flame azalea
brightening the spring woods.
[Illustration:
_Cherokee veterans of Thomas’ Legion attending a Confederate reunion
in the early 1900s in New Orleans include (front from left) Young
Deer, unidentified man, Pheasant, Chief David Reed, (back from left)
Dickey Driver, Lt. Col. W. W. Stringfield, Lt. Suatie Owl, and Jim
Keg. Stringfield was a white officer in the legion which participated
with varying degrees of success in several skirmishes in the Smokies
and, perhaps more importantly, which helped build the Oconaluftee
Turnpike across the mountains._
National Park Service
]
Among 19th-century arrivals, S. B. Buckley wrote the earliest
comprehensive botanical report of the Great Smokies. He marveled at
that scenery, “surpassing anything we remember to have seen among the
White Mountains of New Hampshire,” and at the variety of flora. “Here,”
he wrote in the mid-1800s, “is a strange admixture of Northern and
Southern species of plants, while there are quite a number which have
been found in no other section of the world.” Later naturalists would
share his enthusiasm and enlarge on his studies.
Journalists came. One was a reporter named Charles Lanman, secretary
to Daniel Webster, who rode through the hills in 1848 and wrote a book
called _Letters from the Alleghany Mountains_. Through his descriptive
adventures readers had a glimpse into a region more remote to their
experience than many foreign countries. If the Smokies were described
by him as one large upthrust, perhaps that was because he saw the range
through a purple haze. He wrote at one point:
“_This mountain is the loftiest of a large brotherhood which lies
crowded together between North Carolina and Tennessee. Its height
cannot be less than five thousand feet above the level of the sea ...
and all I can say of its panorama is that I can conceive of nothing
more grand and imposing._”
Lanman was only the first of many writers who would come seeking high
adventure and good copy, but his lack of exactitude about the physical
features of the mountains was soon to be remedied by another group of
visitors. Some scientists could not be content with hunters’ yarns
and the poetic prose of journalists; they wanted precise facts and
figures by which both native and stranger could better appreciate the
landscape.
One of these was Thomas Lanier Clingman, whose career included being
a U.S. senator and a Confederate general as well as a scientist. A
contemporary historian described him as being arrogant, aggressive,
with “more than common ability” but limited scientific knowledge,
whose chief service lay in arousing public curiosity in the mountains,
mineralogy, and geography. He became involved in a scholarly feud
with Dr. Elisha Mitchell, a transplanted Connecticut professor at
the University of North Carolina, over which peak constituted the
highest point east of the Mississippi River. While they were trying
to settle the question, Mitchell was killed in an accidental fall on
the slopes of the North Carolina pinnacle which later was given his
name. Clingman’s name came to grace the mountain he had explored and
measured: 2,025-meter (6,643-foot)-high Clingmans Dome on the crest of
the Great Smokies, only 13 meters (43 feet) lower than the lofty Mt.
Mitchell.
The most fascinated and impressive visitor during these years of the
mid-19th century came from another mountain terrain. Arnold Guyot,
remembered today by the peak at the eastern end of the Great Smokies
which bears his name, was born in Switzerland in 1807. His studies in
physical geography had won him distinction throughout Europe before he
came to America and accepted a chair at Princeton University in 1854.
Paul Fink, a historian of the Great Smoky Mountains, has said that
although forerunners of Guyot glimpsed segments of the Smokies and
described certain details,
“_it remained for this man of foreign birth to penetrate these
mountains, spend months among them, measure their heights for the first
time, and have drawn under his own direction the first map we have
showing the range in detail_.”
Clingman secured for his friend Guyot a local guide named Robert
Collins. The mountain man and the professor struggled through the
roughest laurel “hells” and up the steepest slopes, measuring,
calibrating, and finally naming many of the unknown heights. Guyot’s
journals combined precision and poetry, and they related the awesome
Smokies to the human scene in ways that had not been previously
possible. From that point on, natives and visitors alike could both
know and appreciate more of this green homeland. But, as Paul Fink
has pointed out, “With Guyot’s labors the early explorations of the
Smokies ceased.”
Why? What happened to cut off so abruptly the increasing flow of
visitors to this virgin country? The happening was war.
The Great Smokies country, with its upland farms and small home crafts,
was not in the mainstream of the decisive struggle between a plantation
South and an industrial North. Nor was it in the mainstream of the
violent action that convulsed its surrounding region. There had been
slaves in some of the more prosperous mountain households, but few
citizens in the Great Smokies area would have waged war either to
defend or abolish the peculiar institution.
What some did resist was being conscripted by either side. “Scouting”
became a well-used word defining a new experience in the Smokies. It
applied to anyone hiding out in the hills to escape going into the
Confederate or the Union army. Secretly supplied with food and clothes
by their families and sympathetic friends, such “scouts” could hold out
for years against the searches of outlander officials. Sometimes they
did in fact become scouts, guiding escaped captives from Andersonville
and other Confederate prisons through the mountains toward northern
territory, and those fleeing from Yankee prisons toward their southern
homes.
Many of the mountain people, of course, followed the example of their
neighbors throughout the region and put on the formal uniform of
blue or gray. There were sharp divisions within counties, towns, and
families in the choice between state and nation. Perhaps no single
section of the United States was as bitterly torn in its allegiance.
Tennessee and North Carolina had long held strong Union sentiments;
but when Lincoln called for troops in the aftermath of the firing on
Fort Sumter, the two states officially rallied to the Confederate
cause. North Carolinians, who had been notably reluctant to leave the
Union and who bristled at the injustices of “a rich man’s war and
a poor man’s fight,” nonetheless sent more men to the Confederacy
than any other state. Many of these were western North Carolinians,
following the leadership of their own Zebulon (Zeb) Baird Vance, born
in Buncombe County and occupying the governor’s chair in Raleigh during
the war. Yet the fact that adjoining East Tennessee was overwhelmingly
Union--and sent more men into the Federal forces than some of the New
England states--affected the North Carolinians as well. With the two
states’ actual secession from the Union, numerous mountain pockets
in effect seceded from their states and chose to remain loyal to the
Union. Thus the little rebellion inside the larger revolt compounded
the agonizing conflict of war and made every cove and community and
hearthside a potential battleground.
[Illustration:
Charles S. Grossman
_Mountain women and girls had to be proficient at making many things,
for there weren’t many--if any--stores nearby. Over the years, Hazel
Bell and many another woman spent hours and hours churning butter._
]
And no matter which army the men marched with, their characteristics
remained surprisingly intact. The historian of one North Carolina
Confederate regiment described some of the soldiers from Haywood County:
“_These mountain men had always been accustomed to independence
of thought and freedom of action, and having elected for their
company officers their neighbors and companions, they had no idea of
surrendering more of their personal liberty than should be necessary to
make them effective soldiers. Obedient while on duty and independent
while off duty, this spirit to a marked degree they retained to the
close of the war._”
The experience of Radford Gatlin concentrated in a single episode
both the sharp divisions and the ironies of war in the mountains.
Gatlinburg, now a commercial and flourishing tourist mecca at the edge
of the park, bears the name of a man who was driven out of that town
because of his unpopular stand during the war. The sturdily built,
enterprising, and somewhat arrogant Gatlin was not a man to conceal
his beliefs. With his wife and a slave woman he had come from North
Carolina by way of Jefferson County, Tennessee, to the community known
as White Oak Flats and had established a successful general store and
a less successful church: the New Hampshire Baptist Gatlinites. When
Dick Reagan was appointed postmaster for a new postal service to be
established in White Oak Flats in 1860, the office was located amidst
the axes, guns, coffee, sugar, and bells of Gatlin’s store, and Reagan
renamed the post office, and therefore the town, after his good friend
the storekeeper.
But when war came and Radford Gatlin not only supported the Confederacy
but made heated speeches in its favor, the strongly Unionist villagers
turned against him. After being beaten by a band of masked men, Gatlin
abandoned his claim to thousands of hectares that now lie within the
park and departed forever from the place that was to perpetuate his
name if not his memory.
[Illustration:
_Page 80: Aunt Celia Ownby cards, or straightens, wool fibers that
have already been washed._
]
[Illustration:
Edouard E. Exline
_Page 81: Hettie, Martha, and Louisa Walker run cotton through a gin
built by their father, John. He made the rollers out of hickory and
the rest out of oak. Three people were required to operate the gin:
one to feed the cotton into it and one on each end to turn each of the
rollers. The ginned cotton fell into a white oak basket, also made by
John Walker._
]
[Illustration:
Charles S. Grossman
_Wash day was a laborious one of lifting large buckets of water and
stirring steaming kettles of dirty clothes._
]
[Illustration: