Swindled!

From the diary of Lt. John Phelps, serving in Cherokee County, NC during Cherokee removal

Thursday 21st June 1838

On the 12th inst the Regiment with the exception of one company left camp under the command of Col. Fanning, and marched out among the mountains five or six miles to the east. Some of the Indians were already coming in, and being informed that many of them were collecting at a place of worship of theirs, seven companies of us marched thither and bivouacked. By night fall about a hundred had assembled, and when the camp was hushed they held a prayer meeting. They are of the Baptist persuasion.

A mural by artist Elizabeth Janes depicts the arrival of the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma in the 1830s. Painted from 1938-39, the 8-by-15-foot mural is on display at the Oklahoma Historical Society in Oklahoma City. (Image courtesy Oklahoma Historical Society)

One of them opened his prayer by saying that it was probably the last time that they should ever meet at their wonted place of worship; but he exhorted them and prayed that they might not be led astray in the western wilderness.

The twilight was gleaming faintly upon the old hills about them, where they had strayed when young, and formed their earliest and dearest associations; they had left their homes, their neat gardens and fields, their stock and poultry, as tho’ they were going to church, and even thus were they to set out upon their journey for the land from which they expected nothing but sickness and death.

Some of their people as well as whites had returned from that country, and told them that it was very unhealthy. But they must leave their solubrious hills and go to it, tho’ they had never given their consent; they had been belied by one who professed to teach the religious whose rites they were celebrating. The Occasion was deeply affecting, and Indians tho’ they were, the congregation were all in tears. They sung some appropriate hymns and then retired.

As the ceremonies were conducted in Cherokee I was obliged to rely upon an interpreter for what little information I could get concerning their import. It was with much difficulty that he could express the substance of the prayers, tho’ he said that they made one feel quite smart, by which I was pleased to understand that they were thrilling even to him. The next day several whites came about in order to get claims on their property.

The manner in which they had been cheated was various and the cases were numerous. For instance, a white would purchase their improvements, get a deed signed by creditable witnesses, pay a dollar or two down, and promise to pay the remainder when they started for the west. This would be the last of it.

But in general their property was wrested from them with less ceremony than this. It was in vain that we told them not to trust to the whites, that the government would fairly compensate them for every thing that they abandoned; they preferred to make sure of one tenth even of the value of their property than to rely upon the promises of the government which had cheated them more cruelly than the individuals who were prowling among them.

Timberlake Map of 1762

 [From 6/14/2007]

In the spring of 1761 Lieutenant Henry Timberlake kept notes of his time among the Overhills Cherokee (eastern Tennessee). This is an account of his visit to the village of Settico:

About 100 yards from the town-house we were received by a body of between three and four hundred Indians, ten or twelve of which were entirely naked, except for a piece of cloth about their middle, and painted all over in a hideous manner, six of them with eagles tails in their hands, which they shook and flourished as they advanced, danced in a very uncommon figure, singing in concert with some drums of their own make, and those of the late unfortunate Capt. Demere; with several other instruments, uncouth beyond description. Chuelah, the headman of the town led the procession, painted blood-red, except his face, which was half black, holding an old rusty broad-sword in his right hand, and an eagle’s tail in his left.

We then proceeded to the door, where Chuelah, and one of the beloved men, taking me by each arm, led me in, and seated me in one of the first seats; it was so dark that nothing was perceptible till a fresh supply of canes were brought, which being burnt in the middle of the house answers both purposes of fuel and candle. I then discovered about five hundred faces; and Cheulah addressing me a second time made some professions of friendship, concluding with giving me another string of beads, as a token of it.

He had scarce finished, when four of those who had exhibited at the procession made their second appearance, painted milk-white, their eagle-tails in one hand, and small goards with beads in them in the other, which they rattled in time with the music. During this dance the peace-pipe was prepared; the bowl of it was red stone, curiously cut with a knife, it being very soft, tho' extremely pretty when polished. The stem is about three feet long, finely adorned with porcupine quills, dyed feathers, deers hair, and such like guady trifles.

After I had performed my part with this, I was almost suffocated with the pipes presented me on every hand, which I dared not to decline. They might amount to about 170 or 180; which made me so sick, that I could not stir for several hours.

The Indians entertained me with another dance, at which I was detained till about seven o’clock next morning, when I was conducted to the house of Chucatah, then second in command, to take some refreshment.

Soon after this, Timberlake prepared his famous map of 1762, shown here next to a contemporary Google Earth image.

The left side of the map is north.

At lower right, the Tellico River meets the Little Tennessee.

At upper left, Chilhowee Mountain.

Trading paths from Virginia and from Charleston, SC converged just down-river from Settico, located on the south bank of the Little Tennessee.

(Click on either image to enlarge)

To Learn a Fern (Aarnivalkea)

 [From June 27, 2010]

When I went out walking the other day, I brushed up against four or five different types of ferns within the space of fifty yards.



I was ready to return with my fern book and finally start learning their identities, yet I didn’t realize how little I know about ferns.

Maidenhair Fern, April 23, 2010.

I figured that the distinctive silhouettes of the fern fronds would be enough to arrive at a positive ID, but no. In many cases, you have to turn the fern and study the pattern of bumps, called sori, on the underside of the leaf.

A sorus (pl. sori) is a cluster of sporangia.

In ferns, these form a yellowish or brownish mass on the edge or underside of a fertile frond. In some species, they are protected during development by a scale or film of tissue called the indusium, which forms an umbrella-like cover.

Dicksonia antarctica. Picture taken by DanielCD on 17 May 2005. Picture is of the underside of a fern frond. It shows a fertile frond which is covered with sori (sing. sorus)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SoriDicksonia.jpg

Sori occur on the sporophyte generation, the sporangia within producing haploid meiospores. As the sporongia mature, the indusium shrivels so that spore release is unimpeded. The sporangia then burst and release the spores.

The shape, arrangement, and location of the sori are often valuable clues in the identification of fern taxa. Sori may be circular or linear. They may be arranged in rows, either parallel or oblique to the costa, or randomly. Their location may be marginal or set away from the margin on the frond lamina. The presence or absence of indusium is also used to identify fern taxa.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorus

The best time to identify ferns is when the sori are fully developed. Here’s one more description of what to look for:

Many ferns bear their spore cases (also known as sporangia, sori, or fruit-dots) on the undersides of some of the leaflets—turn over the leaves and look for small dots, often brown. Other species have separate stems devoted to holding spore cases. These structures have fertile leaves that usually look like miniature versions of the larger plant but later turn brown and curly.

Identification of many of the twice-compound species requires examining placement of spore cases; comparison of sizes, shapes, veining patterns, and numbers of leaflets; and other meticulous evaluations, which obsessive botanists usually enjoy.

Read more at Suite101: How to Identify Ferns: Primitive and Beautiful Plants of Woods and Meadows http://botany.suite101.com/article.cfm/how_to_identify_ferns#ixzz0rvFoo332

Sori (containing spores) on the underside of a curling Polypodium fern.
Catskill Mountains, New York, USA
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fern_Sori.JPG

I had already been contemplating the fractal* quality of ferns, even before stumbling onto the bit about spore cases with leaves that resemble the larger plant.

[*Fractals being processes or images that exhibit something called self-similarity, something made up of a reduced version of itself.]

Trees and ferns are fractal in nature and can be modeled on a computer by using a recursive algorithm. This recursive nature is obvious in these examples—a branch from a tree or a frond from a fern is a miniature replica of the whole: not identical, but similar in nature.

The connections between fractals and leaves are currently being used to determine how much carbon is contained in trees.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal#cite_note-4

Barnsley's fern computed using an iterated function system

I haven’t been back to the ferns, but I’ll find them in due time. I still don’t know much, but more than I did before.

Two lessons, for now.

One, when you look at a fern, you’re looking at mathematics in action.

And two, always look on the underside of the leaf!

The Great Smoky Mountains All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory reports 53 species of ferns representing the Pteridophyta division of plants (within the national park).
http://www.dlia.org/atbi/species/Plantae/Pteridophyta/index.shtml

Finally, as if that’s not enough reason to go out and learn a fern, there’s this:

Finnish tradition holds that one who finds the "seed" of a fern in bloom on Midsummer night will, by possession of it, be guided and be able to travel invisibly to the locations where eternally blazing Will o' the wisps called aarnivalkea mark the spot of hidden treasure. These spots are protected by a spell that prevents anyone but the fern-seed holder from ever knowing their locations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fern

Peacocks on Pigeon River

[From June 17, 2008]

Two books about Western North Carolina, both published in 1913, are still in print: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders, and Margaret Morley’s The Carolina Mountains. I suppose that the arbiters of taste in such matters favor Kephart’s book by a wide margin, and I can understand why it has aged well despite its shortcomings. Morley indulged in flowery prose that was fashionable in its time, but turns off most modern readers. I like it, though. Her chapter on The Forks of the Pigeon River showcased her talent for describing mountain scenery, and you could do much worse than to read it while traveling from Canton to Cold Mountain.

An episode on the Little East Fork of the Pigeon demonstrated how Morley’s high-flown idealism was at odds with the gritty reality of mountain life. Morley was surprised to encounter a gang of peacocks:

When we admired them with a sort of anticipatory pleasure in the time to come, when peacocks will sun themselves on the walls of the charming gardens that charming people will make here, we were brought violently to earth by learning that the real value of the peacock is in its superiority to chicken meat.

As with almost any outsider writing about Appalachia, Morley starts skating on thin ice when she gets into social commentary. Though not as guilty of condescension and caricature as the parade of writers that preceded her to these mountains, Morley adopts a certain tone in discussing “the mountaineer” that some might find objectionable. On the other hand, she was witness to a period of social, environmental and economic change in the mountains not unlike our own. This passage caught my attention because it hints at the complexities of what we call “property rights”:

The mountain people are many of them poor and ignorant, but the ill-clad man, who to the city visitor may look like a vagabond, is not to be treated as such; he knows some things the fine-appearing stranger does not know, and is well aware of the fact. The mountaineer is very old-fashioned, so old-fashioned that he values native shrewdness above what he calls "book-larnin"'; so old-fashioned that he thinks his neighbors as good as himself, and himself as good as his neighbors, irrespective of who has the biggest cornfield; and so old-fashioned that he believes progress to be a menace against his personal freedom, a thing to be combated at every point.

His long-continued, almost communal life in a free wilderness, where every one had a right to do what he pleased, — hunting, fishing, pasturing, even cutting down trees wherever it happened to suit his convenience, — made for him the acceptance of other ideas of property rights peculiarly difficult. He gladly sold his land to the newcomer whose slaughter of the forests he understood, but if the purchaser, instead of destroying, tried to preserve the forest land, prohibiting, burning-over, pasturing, and common use of the territory — then there was trouble. Also the inalienable right to hunt and fish when and where he pleased was a part of the faith of the mountaineer, whose long sojourn in the wilderness had ingrained in him primitive ideas which the gradual filling-up of the country did not change, although his methods were rapidly exterminating both fish and game animals.

Morley came to the mountains from the intellectual circles of New England. She settled into the artists’ colony of Tryon after she had already gained some notoriety in Victorian America for writing sex-education books for children. She must have been an object of curiosity, traveling difficult mountain terrain in the cumbersome clothing of her time, and taking amazing photographs along the way. It’s likely she was an object of scorn for being a part of the invasion that she derided. Even so, I find something timeless and hopeful in the words she left us:

For Nature is long-suffering and very kind, so kind, indeed, that in moments of discouragement one has only to remember that even if the worst were to happen, and these beautiful mountains become devastated by ignorant invaders, when the time came, as come it would, that the profaner depart, nature would begin anew her beneficent task of creating beauty.



East Fork of the Pigeon, oil, 16"x20"

Kep' and Kelly

[From 6/28/2007]

 

Been to any good cemeteries lately? I rank "exploring cemeteries" right up there with "reading the dictionary" on my list of most fun things to do. Way up there. Really.

Just the other day, I took a stroll around the Bryson City Cemetery on Schoolhouse Hill and discovered something quite remarkable about the place. I don’t know of any other cemetery from which you can view, not one, but two mountain peaks named after people buried in the cemetery.

Both individuals so recognized played significant roles in the establishment of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. "The Apostle of the Smokies", Kelly Bennett (1890-1974) was a local pharmacist, a mayor of Bryson City and an enthusiastic booster when the Park was proposed in the 1920s. Looking toward the west from his grave, you’ll see Kelly Bennett Peak.

Just a few feet away lies Horace Kephart (1862-1931), a Saint Louis librarian and writer who came to the mountains more than a century ago. His story of life in the Smokies, Our Southern Highlanders, is a classic of Appalachian literature.

If you look toward the high ridge of distant mountains northeast of town, you can pick out Mount Kephart, named in his honor just a couple of months prior to his death in 1931.