Chapter IV: Part 2 (2)

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.

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._ ]

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.

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.

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.

National Park Service
]

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.”

_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.

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.

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.

Smithsonian Institution

_Elias Boudinot (top), editor of the_ Cherokee Phoenix, _bowed to pressure and joined those willing to move west_. ]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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._ ]

_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.

_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
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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.

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.

_Page 80: Aunt Celia Ownby cards, or straightens, wool fibers that have already been washed._ ]

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._ ]

Charles S. Grossman

_Wash day was a laborious one of lifting large buckets of water and stirring steaming kettles of dirty clothes._ ]

Maurice Sullivan

_Over another fire, Mrs. Kate Duckett and daughter Tennie of Coopers Creek make hard soap. Mrs. Duckett stirs the lard with a wooden paddle as Tennie fans the fire with a hawk wing before dipping into the kettle with a gourd scoop. It was a five-hour process._ ]

The war’s severest hardships followed in the wake of the outliers, or the bushwhackers. These scavengers favored no cause. As the war dragged on, they ambushed and raided, stealing meat from the smokehouse, corn from the crib, and farm animals from barn and pasture. Scarcity and want became commonplace throughout the mountains. In North Carolina’s Madison County, a group of citizens broke into a warehouse and laid claim to a valuable commodity, salt. Economic want enflamed political emotions. In Tennessee’s Sevier County, controversial “Parson” Brownlow, Methodist circuit-rider turned newspaper editor turned politician, sought refuge in the shadow of the Smokies with Unionist sympathizers when Knoxville came under Confederate control.

A well-known army unit operated in the Smokies: Col. William Thomas’ Confederate 69th-N.C., known as Thomas’ Legion of Indians and Highlanders. “Little Will,” as he was affectionately called, had become the effective spokesman in Washington and at the state level for the eastern remnant of the Cherokee. When the Civil War came and he chose to stay with the South, the Cherokees chose to stay with him. For a while, they secured mineral supplies for the Confederacy, including alum and saltpeter for gunpowder. The Legion guarded Alum Cave in the Smokies. Under Thomas’ direction, his unit also worked on the Oconaluftee Turnpike.

In December 1863, after Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside had secured Knoxville for the Union, Col. William J. Palmer and the 15th Pennsylvania Cavalry attacked Thomas’ camp near Gatlinburg. After a short battle, Thomas and his troops retreated across the mountains into North Carolina. One month later, Confederate Gen. Robert P. Vance decided to remedy the situation in the mountains. With 375 cavalry, 100 infantry, and artillery, he marched from Asheville, joined Thomas and 150 Indian troops in Quallatown, and crossed the Smokies during a bitterly cold spell. While Thomas remained in Gatlinburg, Vance proceeded toward Newport, camped on Cosby Creek deep in the Smokies, and was surprised there by none other than Colonel Palmer and his 15th-Pa. In the resulting rout, General Vance was captured along with about everything else: men, horses, medical supplies, food, ammunition. In February, Thomas and his Legion were engaged once more, in the Great Smoky Mountains near the mouth of Deep Creek. The result was another defeat, this time by the 14th Illinois Cavalry under Maj. Francis Davidson.

Thomas and his Legion did not win mighty military victories for the Confederacy; Governor Vance even accused Thomas’ command of being “a favorite resort for deserters.” But it appears that this strange little mountain force did act as a deterrent against wholesale raids in the Smokies by Federal sympathizers, and to some extent, raids by marauding bushwhackers. As for “Little Will” himself, mental disorder in later years brought him his own personal civil war and its losing battles. He died in a North Carolina hospital.

An equally well-known force in the Great Smokies during the war was a band of Union raiders led by Col. George W. Kirk. One contemporary called him “Kirk of Laurel,” referring to a remote watershed in Madison County where the colonel often camped. Kirk’s most effective march into the Smokies came near the close of the war, in the early spring of 1865. With 400 cavalry and 200 infantry he entered the mountains through East Tennessee’s Cocke County, via Mt. Sterling, and marched into Cataloochee. Turning aside a Confederate company there, he went on to Waynesville, then proceeded to Soco Valley and back across the Smokies.

Kirk raided, released Federal prisoners, skirmished with home guards, and scattered general fear throughout the mountains. In fact, his main achievement for his cause lay in diverting Confederate troops and keeping them scattered on the home front rather than mobilized on the battlefields where they were desperately needed. Try as they might, the Confederates could not find enough of the “silver-greys” or the “seed-corn”--as those too old and too young for regular service were called--to totally protect their homeland from Kirk’s men, or from renegade bushwhackers who had no cause but plunder and pillage.

As the Civil War drew toward its final convulsion, the mountain area engaged in a more familiar struggle for survival. Food was scarce, soda and salt almost non-existent. Women leached lye from wood ashes and made soda. There was no substitute for salt; when available, it cost a precious dollar a pound. Bitter enmities divided families, communities, and counties. Life had never been easy in the mountains; now it was rigorously difficult. And the people in this land of “make do or do without” learned new ways to make do. Continuing old habits and traditions up their isolated coves and along their steep hillsides, they created a life that was distinctive, rugged, and adapted to its natural surroundings.

One historian, John Preston Arthur, has described the mountain woman’s day as follows: