Buried Alive in WNC

 [From November 8, 2017]

This evening, I was watching a documentary on Edgar Allen Poe (1809-1849) when something caught my attention.  The narrator mentioned Poe’s 1844 story “The Premature Burial,” which was based on a phenomenon often reported in the nineteenth century – the burial of those who were not yet dead.

Flashing across the screen was the image of an old newspaper article, dateline “Asheville, NC.”  Thank goodness for DVR! 

After collecting a few details, I found the article, published February 21, 1885 in the New York Times under the headline “What His Friends Discovered When the Coffin Was Opened”

ASHEVILLE, N.C., Feb. 20 –A gentleman from Flat Creek Township in this (Buncombe) County, furnishes the information that about the 20th of last month a young man by the name of Jenkins, who had been sick with fever for several weeks, was thought to have died. He became speechless, his flesh was cold and clammy, and he could not be aroused, and there appeared to be no action of the pulse and heart. 

He was thought to be dead and was prepared for burial, and was noticed at the time that there was no stiffness in any of the limbs. He was buried after his supposed death, and when put in the coffin it was remarked that he was as limber as a live man. There was much talk in the neighborhood about the case and the opinion was frequently expressed that Jenkins had been buried alive. 

Nothing was done about the matter until the 10th inst., when the coffin was taken up for the purpose of removal and internment in the family burying ground in Henderson County. The coffin being wood, it was suggested that it be opened in order to see if the body was in such condition that it could be hauled 20 miles without being put in a metallic casket. 

The coffin was opened, and to the great astonishment and horror of his relatives the body was lying face downward, and the hair had been pulled from the head in great quantities, and there were scratches of the finger nails on the inside of the lid and sides of the coffin. These facts caused great excitement and all acquainted personally with the facts believe Jenkins was in a trance, or that animation was apparently suspended, and that he was not really dead when buried and that he returned to consciousness only to find himself buried and beyond help. 

The body was then taken to Henderson County and reinterred. The relatives are distressed beyond measure at what they term criminal carelessness in not being absolutely sure Jenkins was dead before he was buried.

Apples

 [From April 13, 2008]

"...We fall asleep in a room fragrant with the scent of apples and pears, and when I wake up during the night I think for a moment that I am a boy again. For then my father not only had an orchard of his own, but purchased the fruit of other orchards....Every bedroom had heaps of apples on the floor, as well as those adorning the window-sill. At bedtime my brother and I had to pick our way between the piles of Tom Putts, Beauty of Baths, Orange Pippins, Bramleys, and the rest, all of which we could then identify by taste in the dark..."

- Ralph Whitlock, A Little Heap of Apples Under the Stairs, Letters from an English Village, Bradford on Avon




Francis Orray Ticknor (1822-1874) was a country doctor in Columbus, Ga., who wrote poetry and submitted horticultural articles to southern agricultural journals. This Ticknor poem is from April 1, 1859:

NANTAHALEE

A famous Apple

You’ve heard, I think, of the beautiful maid
Who fled from Love’s caresses,
Till her beautiful toes were turned to roots,
And both her shoulders to beautiful shoots,
And her beautiful cheeks to beautiful fruits,
And to blossoming sprays her tresses!

I’ve seen her, man! She’s living yet
Up in a Cherokee valley!
She’s an apple tree! and her name might be,
In the softly musical Cherokee,
A long-drawn "Nantahalee!"
‘Tis as sweet a word as you’ll read or write;
Not quite as fair as the thing, yet quite
Sufficient to start an old anchorite
Out of the ashes to bless and bite
The beautiful "Nantahalee!"

Tsatugi Afternoon

 [From October 24, 2008]

Call me greedy, but I’m getting to the point where I don’t want to talk about my favorite places in the mountains. Some things are best kept secret, lest throngs of visitors descend upon them. But at the risk of contributing to that traffic in some tiny way, I can’t resist talking about the Chattooga River.

I’ve not had a particularly successful season of fall photography. When the pictures turn out "blah" I can always resort to my standard, "The light just wasn’t quite right that day." That’s a lot easier than acknowledging my creative and technical deficiencies. So, on this rainy October afternoon, I decided to go for as close to a sure thing as I know: the Bullpen bridge across the Chattooga River. I arrived there under my favorite lighting conditions, a steady drizzle, and commenced to shooting. (Apologies to my poor mistreated Nikon.)

The Chattooga is gorgeous any time of year. The Chattooga has a spirit to it that I won’t even attempt to describe. And the recorded history of the Chattooga is endlessly fascinating.

Intending to pluck out some tidbit of Chattooga lore to accompany these photos, I turned to James Mooney and what I have touted (ad nauseum) as the most indispensable book ever written about the place we inhabit, his Myths of the Cherokee.

Once again, Mooney came through, with his reference to Tsatugi as the name commonly written Chattooga or Chatuga. Mooney offered possible Cherokee derivations:

From words signifying respectively "he drank by sips," from gatugia…or "he has crossed the stream and come out on upon the other side," from gatugi.


But according to Mooney, Tsatugi was a name of foreign origin, specifically from the Creeks who laid claim to at least a portion of the Chattooga River during the first half of the eighteenth century. More often than not, the Cherokees contested the claims of the Creeks in North Georgia and Western North Carolina:

The ordinary condition between the two tribes was one of hostility, with occasional intervals of good will.


Mooney listed several place names reflecting the former presence of Creeks, among them Coweeta, Tomatola, Coosa, and Chattooga. All this time I had never thought that Chattooga, or those other names, might be anything other than Cherokee.

So much for today’s toponymy lesson. While perusing this topic, I discovered another bit of Chattooga trivia. In June 2002, some Atlantans travelling the Chattooga made a remarkable discovery. An odd-shaped log protruding from the riverbank was, in fact, a 32-foot long dugout canoe constructed in the Cherokee style, but with metal tools. Carbon dating of the yellow pine canoe suggests it was crafted around 1760. The ancient canoe is on display at the Oconee Heritage Center in Walhalla, South Carolina. Now that I’ve learned about the old canoe, it’s gone straight to the top of my list of things to see in Walhalla.

The Ghosts of Straight Fork

[From October 19, 2009] 

Straight Fork, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, October 2009

Among the many eye-witness accounts of the giants of the Appalachian forest, this one, written by Henry Seidel Canby and published in Harper's in 1916, is one of my favorites:

We rode up Straight Fork through a sun-spangled grove of chestnuts, then left the trail to Cataloochee, splashed noisily across green water, burst horse and man through a screen of rhododendron, and entered the dark forest. It was an open forest beneath its high roof. The eye went freely once we were past the door of rhododendron, and at first, in intervals of guiding our scrambling horses, we looked vainly for the poplars. Hemlock shafts, oak bolls aplenty; and then on the upper slope I saw the first, a smooth tower, its head lost above the leafage, and beyond another, and below in the hemlocks a group of four, like cathedral piers beyond the pillars of a nave.

We rode to the first in view. Twenty-one feet in circumference, it rose massively for seventy feet perhaps without a branch; how much above one could not tell in that forest. For as in the redwood groves of California, so here, the eye can seldom take in a whole tree when in its forest setting, the camera never. Indeed, the habit of the great poplar is curiously like that of the giant sequoia. Like the sequoia it rises above lesser neighbors, and flings from the capital of its great trunk a crown of heavy limbs that turn and lift nobly above the forest roof. From an opposing hillside you can pick out these crowns of light-green foliage above the oaks and chestnuts, just as across a Sierra canon one sees the sequoias lift above spruce and fir. Only these two trees, in my experience, have this regal habit. And if the sequoia is vaster, it is less graceful.

Deciduous Cascades, or the Falls of Fall

 [From October 1, 2009]

It is often forgotten that [dictionaries] are artificial repositories, put together well after the languages they define. The roots of language are irrational and of a magical nature.
-Jorge Luis Borges, Prologue to "El otro, el mismo."

Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth's marvels, beneath the dust of habit.
-Salman Rushdie


Thurston Hatcher Falls

Pardon my imprecision. I should have known the difference between waterfalls and cascades. A cascade of water doesn’t leave the surface of the rock, while a waterfall does. At least, that's how I heard it explained this week.

CASCADE. A lovely word. With a slightly better grasp of its meaning I began to consider its origin. Perhaps it was a compound of two roots, cas + cade, and if so, what did they mean?

But I was wrong. The English word cascade dates back to 1641, from the Italian word cascata, which was derived from the Latin verb cadere, “to fall.”

I found this information at the Online Etymology Dictionary.
http://www.etymonline.com/abbr.php

Digging a little deeper at that site, I learned that our word fall came from the Old English feallan. As a name for the season, it is short for fall of the leaf (1545).

Fall, in the sense of a waterfall or cascade, dates from 1579. Most of the figurative senses of fall developed in the Middle English: to fall asleep (1393), to fall in love (1530), to be reduced, such as a fall in temperature (1658).

Deciduous plants are the botanical show-offs of fall and the word deciduous is closely related to cascade.

Deciduous, as a reference to trees, dates from 1778. The word came from the Latin decidere “to fall off” which was a compound of de- “down” and cadere “to fall.” And so, when we speak of deciduous trees and cascading water, both words can be traced back to that same Latin root, cadere.


Flat Creek (Heintooga)

Such are the crooked paths on which my curiosity sends me. While using this website, I became curious about who created it, and was delighted to learn the story of Douglas Harper:

I began this project after I looked one day for a free dictionary of word origins online and found that there was none. You could subscribe to the Oxford English Dictionary for $550 a year. There were free dictionaries with definitions, some lists of slang words and their sources, and some sites that listed a few dozen of the strangest etymologies of English words. But there was no comprehensive public list of the words we use every day -- words like the and day -- that told what they used to be before we got them.

For some reason no university has seen fit to shackle its graduate students to the cyber-mill, grinding out an online etymology dictionary. So I decided to do it for them. I also did this to increase my understanding of the language, and its ancestors and relatives. As a writer and editor with an amateur's passion for linguistics, I took this as a joy ride more than drudgery. And I know so much more useless trivia than I did when I started (applaud is related to explode; three people can have a dialogue; and if anyone calls you feisty, slug him).

Etymologies are not definitions; they're explanations of what our words meant 600 or 2,000 years ago. Think of it like looking at pictures of your friends' parents when they were your age. People will continue to use words as they will, finding new or wider meanings for old words and coining new ones to fit new situations. In fact, this list is a testimony to that process.


Chattooga at Bullpen

I suspect there’s a name for the subgenre of autobiography devoted to the author’s background of books and reading, but I don’t know what it is. I do know that Douglas Harper shares a terrific example of that form:

http://www.etymonline.com/columns/bio.htm

For a reader who loves words and loves reading the words of a writer who loves words, Harper’s Online Etymology Dictionary warrants a leisurely visit.

Colors of October

 [From October 10, 2009]

Autumn is a second spring when every leaf's a flower.
- Albert Camus


Near Beech Gap, October 2009

All those golden autumn days the sky was full of wings. Wings beating low over the blue water of Silver Lake, wings beating high in the blue air far above it . . . bearing them all away to the green fields in the South.
- Laura Ingalls Wilder

Change is a measure of time and, in the autumn, time seems speeded up. What was is not and never again will be; what is is change.
- Edwin Way Teale

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.
- George Eliot


Looking Glass Rock, October 2009

October. This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August, and February.
- Mark Twain

Youth is like spring, an over-praised season more remarkable for biting winds than genial breezes. Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.
- Samuel Butler

"reckon up all the names of these wild apples"

 [From October 18, 2008]

So as I say poetry is essentially the discovery, the love, the passion for the name of anything. – Gertrude Stein



The odd perversity of human nature. How else can you explain it? The fruit associated with our expulsion from Paradise is the fruit we hold in highest regard.

The forbidden fruit,
The golden apples,
The apple of discord,
Adam’s Apple,
William Tell’s apple,
Isaac Newton’s apple,
Johnny Appleseed’s apple,
Apple of my eye,
Apple a day,
Baseball hot dogs apple pie and Chevrolet,
An apple for the teacher,
The Big Apple
And one bad apple.
How ‘bout them apples?

On a brisk October afternoon in the 1850s Silas McDowell wandered the Cullasaja Valley searching for wild apples. On that same afternoon, hundreds of miles to the north, Henry David Thoreau set out from Concord searching for wild apples. Silas left us the Nickajack, the Alarkee, the Equinetely, the Cullawhee, the Junaluskee, the Watauga, the Tillequah and the Chestooah. Henry left us a treatise on Wild Apples in which he contemplated the naming of them.



Oh, the delights of pomaceous nomenclature! When enthobotanist Gary Nabhan visited Highlands recently, he spoke of the many varieties of apples originating from the Southern Appalachians:

I think the names of these apples are interesting because some of the varieties go by multiple names. The Nickajack apple that was first promoted in Franklin was also known as Carolina Spice, Spotted Buck, Colonel Summerhour and World’s Wonder. What a great name for an apple – World’s Wonder. You have things like Hubberson’s Nonesuch and Seek-No-Further. Just park yourself under that tree and wait for them to fall into your lap! That’s about the highest compliment you can give another species. Seek No Further!




When apple breeders breed apples they must eventually name those apples. That was the challenge facing some Minnesota apple breeders after they crossed a Gala with a Braeburn:

We put a very scientific 'keep an eye on this one' note on the Sugar Shack tree. Of course, we hadn't named it yet, and we are the type of people who would name an apple 'Keep An Eye On This One,' but we later thought 'Sugar Shack' was a better name. The guys who named the apple variety 'Westfield Seek-no-further' in Connecticut 'way back in the mid-1700's didn't do too bad with a novel name, though. Antique apple collectors are still growing the variety, and the intriguing name certainly has something to do with that. We could name an apple 'Minnesota Never-stop-growing-this-one' and then hang around a few hundred years and see if it worked. It's worth a shot.



Some UK orchardists consider how the naming of apples has become yet another corporate enterprise in this fallen world:

Part of the appeal of the old heritage apple varieties is their good honest names. In the "good old days" apples were named without fuss. A common strategy was the name of the person who discovered them - Pott’s Seedling, Cox’s Orange Pippin, Kidd’s Orange Red, Granny Smith, Chivers Delight and so on. If that didn’t have quite the right ring to it, the name of the local village might suffice: Ribston Pippin, Barnack Beauty, Allington Pippin, Braeburn. Another popular strategy was to borrow the name of a famous person such as Lord Lambourne, Freyberg, Bismarck for example. If you were stuck (or not very inventive) you just went for something really simple like Red Delicious or Golden Delicious. In the 21st century however the important job of naming (or branding) new apple varieties is no longer left to the happy grower, but has been taken over by marketing departments, who see apples as just another consumer item, and might as well be naming a new car as a new apple. Thus we have Kanzi, a brand new 21st century apple, which means "hidden treasure" in Swahili - of course.

For the last word on this subject, I’ll yield to Henry David Thoreau for a passage from Wild Apples:

The Naming of Them

[73] It would be a pleasant pastime to find suitable names for the hundred varieties which go to a single heap at the cider-mill. Would it not tax a man's invention,--no one to be named after a man, and all in the lingua vernacula? Who shall stand godfather at the christening of the wild apples? It would exhaust the Latin and Greek languages, if they were used, and make the lingua vernacula flag. We should have to call in the sunrise and the sunset, the rainbow and the autumn woods and the wild flowers, and the woodpecker and the purple finch and the squirrel and the jay and the butterfly, the November traveller and the truant boy, to our aid.

[74] In 1836 there were in the garden of the London Horticultural Society more than fourteen hundred distinct sorts. But here are species which they have not in their catalogue, not to mention the varieties which our Crab might yield to cultivation.

[75] Let us enumerate a few of these. I find myself compelled, after all, to give the Latin names of some for the benefit of those who live where English is not spoken,--for they are likely to have a world-wide reputation.

[76] There is, first of all, the Wood-Apple (Malus sylvatica); the Blue-Jay Apple; the Apple which grows in Dells in the Woods, (sylvestrivallis), also in Hollows in Pastures (campestrivallis); the Apple that grows in an old Cellar-Hole (Malus cellaris); the Meadow-Apple; the Partridge-Apple; the Truant's Apple, (Cessatoris), which no boy will ever go by without knocking off some, however late it may be; the Saunterer's Apple,--you must lose yourself before you can find the way to that; the Beauty of the Air (Decus Aëris); December-Eating; the Frozen-Thawed, (gelato-soluta,) good only in that state; the Concord Apple, possibly the same with the Musketaquidensis; the Assabet Apple; the Brindled Apple; Wine of New England; the Chickaree Apple; the Green Apple (Malus viridis);--this has many synonyms; in an imperfect state, it is the Cholera morbifera aut dysenterifera, puerulis dilectissima;--the Apple which Atalanta stopped to pick up; the Hedge-Apple (Malus Sepium); the Slug-Apple (limacea); the Railroad-Apple, which perhaps came from a core thrown out of the cars; the Apple whose Fruit we tasted in our Youth; our Particular Apple, not to be found in any catalogue,--Pedestrium Solatium; also the Apple where hangs the Forgotten Scythe; Iduna's Apples, and the Apples which Loki found in the Wood; and a great many more I have on my list, too numerous to mention,--all of them good. As Bodæus exclaims, referring to the cultivated kinds, and adapting Virgil to his case, so I, adapting Bodæus,--

"Not if I had a hundred tongues, a hundred mouths,
An iron voice, could I describe all the forms
And reckon up all the names of these wild apples."

Under the Hiccory Tree

[From October 3, 2010]

If we had lived here during the hunter-gatherer days, then we would have been paying closer attention.

I’ve been thinking about this while taking short strolls on the mountain where I live.



At the very top is a secluded spot where I go to sit and listen sometimes. A large hickory tree stands tall there, and this weekend, I collected a few hickory nuts that had fallen from the tree. Hickory nuts have a delicious flavor.  However, the tiny nutmeat morsels hide inside stubborn shells.

If we had lived here during the hunter-gatherer days, then we would have known where all the productive hickory trees stood and visited them often, to get there before the small animals building their winter stores.

And we would have likely spent hours cracking out enough hickory nuts to amount to a handful.

When he traveled upriver from present-day Augusta, Georgia on his trip through the Southeast, William Bartram observed the Creeks processing great quantities of hickory nuts:

We then passed over large, rich savannas, or natural meadows, wide-spreading cane swamps, and frequently old Indian settlements, now deserted and overgrown with forests. These are always on or near the banks of rivers, or great swamps, the artificial mounts and terraces elevating them above the surrounding groves. I observed in the ancient cultivated fields:

1. Diospyros; [Persimmon, Diospyros virginiana]
2. Gleditsia triacanthos; [Honey Locust]
3. Prunus chicasau; [Chickasaw Plum, Prunus angustifolia]
4. Callicarpa; [French Mulberry, Callicarpa americana]
5. Moras rubra; [Red Mulberry, Morus rubra]
6. Juglans exaltata; [Shell-barked Hickory]
7. Juglans nigra, [Black walnut]

which inform us that these trees were cultivated by the ancients on account of their fruit as being wholesome and nourishing food. Though these are natives of the forest, yet they thrive better, and are more fruitful in cultivated plantations, and the fruit is in great estimation with the present generation of Indians, particularly Juglans exaltata, commonly called shell-barked hiccory. The Creeks store up the last in their towns. I have seen above an hundred bushels of these nuts belonging to one family. They pound them to pieces, and then cast them into boiling water, which, after passing through fine strainers, preserves the most oily part of the liquid; this, they call by a name which signifies hiccory milk; it is as sweet and rich as fresh cream, and is an ingredient in most of their cookery, especially homony and corn cakes.

In his 1873 book, Antiquities of the Southern Indians, Charles Colcock Jones described the stone implements used to crack hickories and other nuts:

We have thus, at some length, referred to the use of nuts as an article of food among the Southern Indians, because we hence derive the meaning and employment of these cup-shaped cavities. In our judgment these relics are simply the stones upon which the Indians cracked their nuts. Their cavities are so located that one, two, three, four, five, and sometimes more nuts could be cracked at a single blow delivered by means of the circular, flat crushing-stone so common, and so often found in direct connection with the rude articles now under consideration.

The cups are just large enough to hold a hickory-nut or a walnut in proper position so that, when struck, its pieces would be prevented from being widely scattered. Particularly do the soap-stones indicate the impressions left by the convex surfaces of the harder nuts. Upon some of them the depressions seem to have been caused simply by repeatedly cracking the nuts upon the same spot so that in time a concavity was produced corresponding to the half of the spherical or spheroidal nut. Such is the most natural explanation we can offer with regard to the use of these stones.

Emaline's Painter

 Here’s a panther tale...from very close to home.

What a beauty!

One of the pioneering families of the Cullowhee area used to own the land where I now live. Andrew and Pollie settled hereabouts in the 1840s and are buried on a hill nearby (a hill I can see without getting up from typing this).

Anyhow, their first child was a daughter named Emaline.

In the Jackson County Heritage Book, Ada Wall Lemmings wrote:

The small white lilies bloomed everywhere beside the Indian trail they were following, in the vast, untamed wilderness that was western North Carolina. The Indians called them Cullowhee, meaning white lily, in the Cherokee language.

[Emaline] would visit us and tell about her life as the daughter of one of the first settlers in that sparsely settled, remote, rugged area where they were miles from their closest neighbor. She told us what her father had said about the Cullowhee lilies. They were kept in our family and handed down, a living antique.

Aunt Emaline told us of the wild animals they shared the mountains with. One occasion she and her younger sister had been sent to a new ground far back in the dense woods, for a farming tool someone had left there. On their way home a huge, tawny colored cat leapt over their heads and landed in front of them.

They were too young to be afraid of it and tried to make friends.


It happened on these misty hills

Suddenly it leapt over their heads again. They turned around and kept trying to make friends. The cat disappeared in the woods as silently as it had come.

They rushed home to tell about the pretty cat. Only then, they knew they had met the dreaded mountain lion called “Painter” by the settlers and had miraculously survived without a scratch.


Emaline (1847 - 1933)

I would hope that if I ever encounter a "painter" in the woods around here, it would show me the same mercy...and give me enough time to grab the camera for a few shots!
.

Stonepile Gap and a Fountain of Youth

 [Here's the first of three stories I wrote for Smoky Mountain Living.  The article appeared in the August 2017 edition of the magazine,]

Two hundred years ago, early explorers of the Southern Appalachians pondered the piles of stone they encountered at “all the gaps in the mountains.”

While most of those cairns have disappeared, they remain a mystery. One such rock pile has survived, though, at the middle of a highway intersection in Lumpkin County, Georgia. Where U.S. 19 and GA 60 cross, 10 miles north of Dahlonega, a state historic marker designates the grave of a Cherokee princess, Trahlyta.

As it was with other Cherokee princess legends, a thwarted romance led to a tragic ending. The Trahlyta tale has one added twist: A fountain of youth conferring ageless beauty upon those who drink its waters. Trahlyta and her people lived on nearby Cedar Mountain. The resident sorcerer, now known as the Witch of Cedar Mountain, guided Trahlyta down a winding forest path to a freshwater spring. The Witch of Cedar Mountain instructed Trahlyta to drink the water and make a wish to never grow old. “You will become more beautiful with each sip,” the witch promised Trahlyta.

Sure enough, the magical waters had the intended effect. As news of Trahlyta’s radiant beauty passed from village to village, eager suitors made their way to Cedar Mountain. Trahlyta refused them all, but the Cherokee warrior Wahsega would not take “no” for an answer. He kidnapped the princess and took her back to his home far away.

Trahlyta longed for her family and friends on Cedar Mountain and begged for her freedom, but Wahsega showed no mercy. Day by day, Trahlyta’s strength ebbed, her beauty faded and her despair deepened. Crying tears of gold, knowing the end was near, she made one final request—to be buried near her idyllic mountain home, and that passersby drop a stone on her grave for good fortune.

“The Song of Trahlyta” commemorates the princess and her dying wish: 

Pass not by, Stranger! Stop! Silently bare your head, drop a stone upon her grave, and make a wish straight from her heart. The Spirit of Eternal Youth and Happiness hovers near to grant the wishes of all who love the hills and valleys of her native home. 

Seekers of good fortune, dropping one rock at a time, have turned Trahlyta’s grave into a prominent landmark at Stonepile Gap. It endures thanks to another legend, that anyone taking a stone from the pile will incur the wrath of the Witch of Cedar Mountain.

The curse packs a mighty wallop, depending on who you talk to. Some say the Georgia Department of Highways set out to relocate the grave, twice, to make road construction more convenient. On both occasions, fatal accidents occurred during attempts to move the pile of rocks.  So today the roads barely skirt the memorial and the stone cairn still stands. Even without leaving their cars, travelers can chunk another stone on the pile.  Each year, hundreds do. Or they leave other tokens and trinkets to appeal to the “Spirit of Eternal Youth and Happiness.” 

But what about that fountain of youth which proved to be a mixed blessing, at best, for poor Trahlyta? The springs, now known as Porter Springs, are located about three-quarters of a mile northeast of Trahlyta’s grave. Some folks contend that Hernando de Soto heard about the fountain’s powers in 1540 and sent his conquistadors to investigate. Reports of a Spanish helmet found close by the spring have been offered as evidence of this early search for the magical waters. 

Joseph H. McKee, a Methodist preacher who also dabbled in real estate, took note of the springs in the 1860s. Upon testing the water, he found that it contained abundant quantities of therapeutic minerals. McKee publicized his findings and people seeking cures for rheumatism, dyspepsia, dropsy and other ailments flocked to Porter Springs. They would camp nearby, bathe in the waters and take home gallons of the liquid, convinced (or at least hopeful) of its healing powers.  

Before long, a hotel was constructed to accommodate the many visitors to Porter Springs, and it became a thriving resort. Around this same time the tale of Trahlyta circulated widely, adding to the allure of the mountain spa. Though the hotel burned to the ground in the early 1900s, the spring waters continue to flow. Modern explorers, inspired by a visit to the stone pile at Trahlyta’s grave, sometimes set off to find the spring and to see for themselves if its mysterious waters still provide the gift of ageless youth and beauty.

Maybe the Witch of Cedar Mountain was right. Thanks to that legendary sip from the fountain of youth, Trahlyta will always be young and beautiful in the minds of those who hear her story or add a rock to her monument at Stonepile Gap.  

The Music of Place

“Without music, the prehistoric past is just too quiet to be believed.”

― Steven Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body

Which came first, music or language? Experts in such matters debate and disagree. 

While I can’t marshal much evidence one way or the other, my intuition leads me to believe that song preceded speech. Until now, I had never juxtaposed that supposition with my interest in toponomy, or “the place names of a region or language.”

Why do toponyms matter? Here’s one explanation from Toponyms as a Gateway to Society, An Abui Case Study:

Toponyms have been termed as “living fossils” of the study of language, history, and culture, and are particularly useful in describing the history of ethnic groups and changes in rural settlements…

- By Shaun Lim Tyan Gin and Francesco Perona Cacciafoco, in Old World: Journal of Ancient Africa and Eurasia, October 7, 2021.

We act as though the place names we take for granted have always been here and will always be here. After all, we see them on road signs and maps, and retrieve them from neatly catalogued gazetteers and databases. Around here, most of today’s place names came about within the past couple of centuries. Some originated during the colonial era, and a few others might be attributed to Cherokee or Muskogean nomenclature from a century or two earlier than that. 

Before that, words from languages long lost were used to denote different places in these mountains, though we'll probably never know what those words might have been.  Looking ahead, it is more likely than not that at some future date, the names familiar to us will be swept off the map and replaced by other names.  

But human beings have inhabited these mountain for millennia. Those past occupants had a need to make reference to specific locations, a need much greater than our own, given their subsistence lifestyle. And so, go back in time, way back in time, when singing was more common than speaking. Is it possible that different melodies represented different places? Could it be that a particular pattern of pitch and rhythm pointed to the mountain where, let’s say, the grapes were sweet and abundant?

Perhaps.

What did it sound like when every place on the landscape was a tune to be hummed or a song to be sung? And how closely would we need to listen to hear the echoes of those melodies still reverberating across these hillsides?

I would like to know.

In the darkness something was happening at last. A voice had begun to sing… It seemed to come from all directions at once … Its lower notes were deep enough to be the voice of the earth herself. There were no words. There was hardly even a tune. But it was beyond comparison, the most beautiful noise he had ever heard.

- C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew


Singing is an essential element in most Mardudjara ritual performances because the songline follows in most cases the direction of travel of the beings concerned and highlights cryptically their notable as well as mundane activities. Most songs, then, have a geographical as well as mythical referent, so by learning the songline men become familiar with literally thousands of sites even though they have never visited them; all become part of their cognitive map of the desert world.

-Anthropologist Robert Tonkinson describing Mardu songlines in his 1978 monograph The Mardudjara Aborigines - Living The Dream In Australia's Desert.


Songspirals bring Country into existence. In Aboriginal English usage, Country has a particular meaning. Country encompasses the seas, waters, rocks, animals, winds, and all the beings that exist in and make up a place, including people. For Yolŋu people from North East Arnhem Land in northern Australia, songspirals, often called songlines or song cycles, are rich and multilayered articulations passed down through the generations and sung and cried by Aboriginal people to make Country, to make and remake the life-giving connections between people and place…

- Country, B., Burarrwanga, L., Ganambarr, R., Ganambarr-Stubbs, M., Ganambarr, B., Maymuru, D., Lloyd, K., Wright, S., Suchet-Pearson, S., & Daley, L. (2022). Songspirals Bring Country Into Existence: Singing More-Than-Human and Relational Creativity. Qualitative Inquiry, 28(5), 435–447. https://doi.org/10.1177/10778004211068192

On Kuwahi

This evening, I was listening to Richard Powers' 2021 novel, Bewilderment.  Chapter 13 includes an account of a bear jam in the Smokies.  With his description of a disturbing encounter between humans and bears, Powers offers multiple perspectives on "Civilization" and "The Wild."  And my mind immediately turned to another story, from the same corner of the Smokies, a mysterious space somewhere between (and beyond) humans and bears and civilization and the wild...

[From October 4, 2009]

Because it is not seen, some people think the lake has dried up long ago. But this is not true.

-James Mooney


Sunset, and cold west winds, at Kuwahi

Anyone attuned to such things can tell there’s a special quality about the place called Kuwahi. The people who were here before us said the bears had a townhouse under this mountain, where they would hold a dance before retiring for the winter.

The chief of the bear tribe, the White Bear, resided here. Nearby is Atagahi, the enchanted lake, where wounded bears would go to bathe and heal. The way to Atagahi is so difficult only the animals know how to reach it.

With spiritual vision sharpened by prayer and fasting, a person might see the lake at daybreak, a shallow sheet of purple water fed by springs from the high cliffs. All kinds of fish and reptiles swim through the water while great flocks of ducks and pigeons fly overhead. Around the shores, bear tracks cross in every direction.

Go any place on this planet where bears have lived and you will find old stories, old stories that tell of humans transforming into bears and bears transforming into humans. The belief, ancient and universal, is that bears and people are closely related.



The Smokies, long ago, were home to the Ani-Tsaguhi people. One boy from this clan would leave home every morning and spend his days wandering the mountains. After a while, he stopped eating at home and spent a longer and longer time in the woods each day.

When his parents noticed long brown hair growing all over his body, they asked why he preferred the woods.

“I find plenty to eat there, and it is better than the corn and beans we have in the settlements, and pretty soon I am going into the woods to stay all the time.”

His parents begged him not to leave. He was determined, though, and invited his parents to come along, since there was plenty to eat without having to work for it.

The father and mother considered his offer and consulted the headmen of the clan. At council, it was decided the whole clan would go since scarcity had been the result of their hard labor up until that time.

After fasting seven days and nights, the Ani-Tsaguhi left their settlement for the mountains with the boy leading the way.

The people of the other towns learned of this and rushed to dissuade the clan from going into the woods to live. Messengers who found them observed the Ani-Tsaguhi were already growing hair like that of animals because they had abstained from human food for seven days.



The clan refused to turn back. “Hereafter we shall be called bears, and when you yourselves are hungry come into the woods and call us and we shall come to give you our own flesh. You need not be afraid to kill us for we shall live always.”

They taught the messengers the songs with which to call them, and the groups parted ways, After returning a short distance down the mountain, the messengers looked back and saw a drove of bears going into the woods.

(With credit to James Mooney)

The Presence of the Past

[From September 8, 2009]

 

It is possible to roam these mountains without feeling the presence of the past. It is not possible for me, though.

Yesterday, I was sitting on a front porch in Webster, North Carolina, the same front porch that was mentioned in the New York Times almost 120 years ago. But that is another story for another time.

In September of 1776, General Griffith Rutherford led a frontier militia of 2,400 men on an expedition against the Cherokees. The army departed from Old Fort on September 1, and followed the Swannanoa River, Hominy Creek and Richland Creek as they made their way west in the following days. They sighted their first Indians on September 6, not long before they crossed Balsam Gap.

Some years later, David Swain wrote about the events that occurred west of the Balsams, on Scott’s Creek:

The latter stream obtains its name from John Scott, a trader among the Cherokees – a negro of whom was shot by Rev. James Hall, the Chaplain [of the expedition], as he ran, mistaking him for an Indian.

One week later, the same Rev. Hall would deliver a sermon from atop the Nuquassee (Nikwasi) mound in present-day Franklin.

September 7, 2009 was a quiet and pleasant day in Webster. Had I been occupying the same spot on September 7, 1776, I would have seen something remarkable. One thousand of Rutherford’s soldiers marched through what is now Webster. They forded the Tuckasegee and continued up Savannah Creek. As they ascended the Cowee Mountains, they encountered a small party of Cherokees waiting in ambush.

In his diary, Lieutenant William Lenoir recorded:

[We] marcht to a little Town on Tuckeyseagey River [and] 8 miles from thence towards watauger [Watauga] saw some indians walking up a mountain & we was attacked by about 20 indians on the top of the mountain at 3 o’clock within about 7 miles of said Town. William Alexander was wounded in the foot and no visible Dammage done to the Indians only a few kettles taken & c. then marcht within 2 miles of the said Town and lay on a small Emanance – 20 [miles marched that day].

The village and mound of Watauga were located along the Little Tennessee River near where you would find Lake Emory today. But when the militia arrived there September 8, the town was already deserted. The systematic destruction of Cherokee villages on the Little Tennessee was about to begin.

On September 10, the violence intensified:

A detachment of 300 men was sent to destroy a town called Sugartown immediately above the junction of the [Little] Tennessee & Sugartown [Cullasaja] rivers. The ground on which the town was situated was flanked on 2 sides by the rivers in the form of a triangle, & the remaining angle on the third side was enclosed by a strong work of brush and timber. When the soldiers had finally entered the town a fire was opened upon them by the indians from the riverbanks and the brush works, & finding themselves surrounded by a invisible foe they took shelter in the cabins and remained there for about 3 hours, at which time they were relieved by a strong detachment from the main army from about 4 miles below, where the firing of the small army had been distantly heard. The detachment lost 18 men killed and 22 wounded. The indians did not sustain any loss that was discovered.

A prisoner, whom they had taken, upon the promise of his life, proposed to lead the army to what was called the hidden town, where their women, children, & a large number of cattle were collected. This was 7 miles distant from Nuquassee in a narrow valley on the Sugartown river and surrounded at all points by mountains and was very difficult to approach from the fact that the mountains jutted in abruptly upon the river, in many places leaving scarcely room for a foot path.

However, on reaching the town there was not an indian to be found save a few very old & decreped men and women, the other indians being discovered some hundreds of feet above them on the crests of the mountains apparently looking down & taking a calm survey of them from their secure situations. They achieved nothing but the destruction of this town & some few beef cattle by that day’s adventures.

[This account of the Sugartown excursion was based on an 1850 letter from Silas McDowell, who lived in the Cullasaja Valley just down river from the gorge. The details he had heard and subsequently shared in his letter contradict other reports. According to some histories of the Rutherford expedition, the militia suffered only a few casualties.]