On the Trail of Tears

Buried in an unexpected corner of the National Archives – in the “Records of the Accounting Officers of the Department of the Treasury” – are some of the most detailed eyewitness accounts of the Cherokee “Trail of Tears,” on which about 12,000 Cherokees were forced by a fraudulent treaty to leave their ancestral home in the southern Appalachians and march a thousand miles west to Oklahoma.

These long-overlooked documents describe in granular detail the difficult conditions of that cruel trek across the country in the winter of 1838-1839 – harsh cold and snow, sudden melts and flooding rivers, delays, and food shortages. They’re tucked away in the records of the Treasury because, unsurprisingly, the costs of moving, feeding, and ensuring the safety of thousands of people on a forced march in winter escalated far beyond what the federal government had budgeted. Chief John Ross and his brother Lewis, who were permitted by the US to in charge of the Removal in hopes it would make the Cherokees more willing to remove, were initially denied payment for the cost overruns. They appealed the decision and made their case through depositions by eyewitnesses.

One of the most dramatic depositions came from Thomas B. Emmerson, a white man from east Tennessee hired by Lewis Ross to be the “commissary agent” for one of the dozen wagon trains, called “detachments,” that led the Cherokees to the west. This detachment (led by an Anglo-Cherokee named James Brown) was made up of about 800 people and half that many animals – horses and oxen that hauled the wagons. Emmerson, with no storage capacity, had the difficult job of keeping all the humans and animals fed each day.

Even though he bought only three basic foodstuffs – corn meal, wheat flour, and bacon – his deposition tells of shortages and the extravagant prices he had to pay on the road due to harsh weather, local crop failures, and price gougers. His statement also offers a devastating account of the conditions the Cherokees had to endure on the long march, even when those in charge were doing their utmost to try to make the journey safe.

Emmerson started his narrative when they left their camp near Chattanooga, Tennessee on October 25, 1838. Dozens of wagons carried food, blankets, camp supplies, and those Cherokees who were too aged, weak, or young to march. They took a northern route through Nashville Tennessee, Hopkinsville Kentucky, and up to Illinois. Along the way they had to cross three major rivers (on ferries) – the Tennessee, Ohio, and Mississippi – and to ford innumerable streams and smaller waterways. In perfect conditions it took them two and a half days simply for the whole detachment to cross the Tennessee; the Ohio took more than a week due to high winds and a burst boiler on one of the ferry boats. But that was nothing compared to what they would face in southern Illinois as they neared the Mississippi River. On Christmas day, winter crashed down on them with a blizzard that stopped them in their tracks. Emmerson wrote:

“The snow being very deep, the conductor deemed it dangerous to travel as the roads were in the most desperate order & the dangerous places thus covered with snow, which rendered it impossible to see them. The Detachment consequently remained in camp until the morning of the 3rd of January up to which time the most excessive cold weather was experienced.”

When the weather warmed a bit, Brown ordered the march to continue, but this was done, Emmerson said,

“at the imminent hazard of the lives of those who were in the wagons. The road being entirely covered with frozen snow & ice, several of the wagons were upset [i.e. turned over] by sliding from the road in steep places. The next day the conductor thought it best to remain in camp as the roads were no better, the snow & ice still remaining.”

Meanwhile, Emmerson wrote,

“I had great difficulty in procuring the regular supplies. Nothing but the most extravagant prices would induce persons to haul [food] to us, so cold was the weather & so bad the roads. By constant exertion & extravagant offers I was enabled to furnish regular supplies…”

Eventually when those supplies ran out, he had to buy “corn on the stalk as it stood in the field,” which turned out to be strangely plentiful in Illinois in early January. Then the weather suddenly turned warm – good news you would think, except that it released an avalanche of ice in the Mississippi River.

“The ice in the river above us gave way & on the morning of the 7th was coming down in such quantity as to render it impassable. The ice continued running for several days which prevented our crossing until the evening of the 9th when crossing was again commenced. The last of the Detachment finally got over on the evening of the 11th.”

That was not the end of their ordeal, however. Next came the rain.

“For two days, after we crossed the river, it continued to rain so incessantly that the conductor did not think it prudent to leave the camp. [On the] 14th, the ground having become so thoroughly wet, rendered traveling almost impossible, several wagons having sunk so deep in the ground as to make it impossible for the teams to draw them. Others mired down on the road & remained all night in that condition. So muddy was the road that up to the 19th the Detachment had only been able to travel 16 miles [from the Mississippi].”

Eventually the road got easier. But Emmerson had to pay ever steeper prices as they moved through Missouri to the Arkansas territory. Finally in early March they arrived at their destination in present-day Oklahoma.

The horrific conditions in December and January must have taken their toll in human life. On their own ancestral land, the Cherokees had generational knowledge of how to survive harsh weather and even famine conditions, but they did so with a deep knowledge of their local environment and forest resources that could carry them through the disasters of war and nature. The Trail of Tears, however, was unlike anything they had experienced. They were herded into wagon trains, unable to freely hunt or forage, dependent on official suppliers for their diet and their medicine. And, even if they had been allowed to forage and hunt, the terrain and plants were unknown to them.

 It is impossible now to know how many Cherokees succumbed to exposure, fatigue, and illness along the way. The stated numbers are unreliable. For example, Emmerson reported over one hundred more Cherokees on the detachment than the figure usually cited – which tells us that the official numbers were significantly off. As demographers have demonstrated, the overall death toll of this forced march into exile was far larger than the official statistics show. The toll on the survivors, likewise, is immeasurable. But documents like Emmerson’s help us understand, at least a little better, what they experienced.

Family madlibs

Today I came across yet another narrative recounting how my extended family “settled” the frontiers of western Virginia and North Carolina. In this, as in every one of these stories, my ancestors were described as brave, doughty settlers taming the wilderness and bravely fighting off “warlike” Indians. We’ve written before in this blog, about reevaluating the language that we use, not in an effort to be “politically correct,” but to be historically correct.  If you want a serious thoughtful examination of those words, revisit the entry, “The words we use, the stories they tell.” http://tangledhistories.org/cherokee/the-words-we-use-the-stories-they-tell/

 

But if you want a frivolous but fun little exercise, read on.  Today, in a fit of annoyance, I decided to replace all the “brave settler” language with historically accurate terms and descriptions. The result was both silly and yet deeply satisfying.

 

So here’s a recap of some of the most common “brave settler” vocabulary with my replacement term.

Settlers and pioneers = “invaders”

To call a people “settlers” implies that they are moving into a land that is not already settled. I’m replacing those terms with “invaders.

Hardy or restless pioneers = “desperate”

My Scotch-Irish forebears are frequently referred to using words like hardy, restless, and independent.  What those terms really mean is that they were so desperate for land that they were willing to live in areas where they might be killed by justifiably angry Natives. I’m replacing those terms with “desperate.

Frontier = “Native homeland”

Implies the edge of OUR territory rather than the place where YOU fight to maintain your territory. Instead I describe what the land was being used for by the Natives or call is simply “Native homeland.”

 

 

Here’s the original:
“Soon after his marriage to Ann Johnson in December 1766, Martin Gash moved to Virginia. This move was on the western frontier in an area then known as Augusta County.  The Dennis families were hardy adventurers, brave enough to move where few white men ever lived before.  These pioneers were often forced to barricade themselves in a community fort for protection against the fierce warlike Indians who continuously stalked the white invaders of their land.”

 

Here’s the translation:
“Soon after his marriage to Ann Johnson in December 1766, Martin Gash moved to Virginia.  This move was to an area then called by the English  “Augusta County,” but was situated along the Great Indian War Path and within a well-used tribal hunting ground.  The Dennis families were desperate for land, desperate enough to move to Native territory.  These white invaders were often forced to barricade themselves in a community fort for protection against the justifiably angry Indians who tried to push the white invaders from their homeland.”

 

 

 

Handy Glossary of replacement words: (Try it with your own family myths! It’s kind of fun!)

 

Terms describing slavery:

 

Plantation – forced-labor camp

 

Master/mistress – wardens

 

Slave – enslaved person, prisoner, forced laborer

 

Overseer – prison guard or labor-camp guard

 

Sex between owners and enslaved – rape

 

 

Terms describing colonial expansion:

 

Colony – usurped land

 

Settler – invader

 

Pioneer – invader

 

Hardy – desperate

 

Restless – forced to move

 

Indian fighter – Indian murderer

 

Frontier – native land

 

(military) expedition – violent invasion

 

Civilization – lifeways the colonizer values

 

Savages, barbarians, etc. –

Those who live on land colonizers want

Those who live in ways different from the colonizers

Those who worship differently than the colonizers

 

“No people. Only Indians.”

HOO BOY! There’s a lot going on today and every day lately- and mostly I’m trying to hunker down and get as much writing done as possible. But this Laura Ingalls Wilder controversy (her name is being stripped from a prestigeous literary prize because of racial language and stereotypes) goes straight to the heart of what I’m writing about now – colonialism, its offshoot Manifest Destiny, their hierarchical view of both people and land use, and the linkage of all those things to white supremacy.

Ingalls wrote that the character “Pa” wanted to go where “there were no people. Only Indians lived there.” Ouch. But that bald, painful sentence goes right to the heart of the resettlement of North America by white Anglo-Europeans. “There were no people. Only Indians.” That’s a myth that is still active. I have been told, within the last six months, that America was “empty” when the settlers got here or that our ancestors took land that no one was using.

The truth is that the land was very much in use, but in ways that colonizing whites could not “see” – by which I mean they did not see it as of any value.  Land was hunted and farmed communally; fields were left intentionally fallow to regain fertility, complex ecosystems were stewarded to the benefit of the group.  The colonizers, on the other hand, were part of centralized states that needed bounded, taxable land in order to generate revenue through taxes. Communal land can’t be enumerated and taxed, just as hunted or foraged food can’t be easily counted and taxed.

By the way, this isn’t directly about whiteness. This was the pattern when the English colonized Scotland and Ireland and it continued in North America.  It’s not about “whiteness,” but it is about hierarchies of who and what is valued. Land use customs originally defined it, but skin color became inextricably bound up with it, and through that colonization became a tool of white supremacy.

So what about Laura Ingalls Wilder?  What do we do with these parts of our culture – books that use racial epithets to describe groups of people; monuments that lament the South’s loss of the Civil War; or even words like “boy,” “cotton-picking,” “pickaninny” that were once used without thought by whites and are now understood to be racist?

Many people say that we “shouldn’t erase our history.”  But that’s the problem; it’s OUR version of American history, but it’s not necessarily theirs – whoever “they” might be. And, all too often, “our” history erases “their” history.

Laura Ingalls Wilder isn’t, by the way, being banned or erased.  She’s just not going to have a prestigious literary award named after her any longer.  Her books, thought problems and all, will still be on the shelves of your local library. Children will still read them and dream.  But we, as a nation, do need to reckon with what we did: we did not “settle” an empty land, we took land from people who were actively using it.  What we saw as pristine forests with no troublesome undergrowth, were actually territorial hunting grounds the Native population had carefully stewarded with controlled burns so they could hunt more easily.

Some of my family say we need to give up “white guilt,” and you know what? I agree. But I mean it differently. I mean we have to stop passing on the stories we’ve used to make ourselves feel better.  Many of these are stories my beloved mother told me, and that her mother told her –  that our ancestors were the “good masters,” that “a lot of slaves were happy,”  that the Civil War wasn’t about slavery, or that the land was empty when we got here.  We need to accept the truth of what we as a nation have done, good and bad.  It’s the only way we can move on to the future.

Some myths – those that have been turned into literal monuments, do need to be reevaluated honestly by the communities they exist within. Some of them will be removed, some will remain.  Laura Ingalls Wilder and her myth of a land that was empty – because the Indians who lived there weren’t “people” – can and should stay on the shelf.  But the myth she romanticized so compellingly – the myth of an empty America waiting for white settlers to take it – does need to be questioned.  Literature is complex and imperfect, just like the people who create it. We should allow it to be so – by critiquing what is untrue or wrongheaded while valuing skill and artistry, and the joy they give us.

Laura Ingalls Wilder will not be hurt by the stripping away of her name from a prize. And her readers, those dreamy little boys and girls, wandering along the shelves of their public libraries, looking for worlds to escape into, certainly don’t care.

Refugees, immigrants, and intolerance: as American as apple pie

Immigrants

 

Kirk and I live in Western Pennsylvania which is, coincidentally, where both our respective ancestors lived when they first emigrated to the North American colonies. This was in the early 1700s, when America was a fragmented European proto-colony being fought over by England, France, and Spain, like dogs over a dropped steak. Maryland, under the Catholic Calverts, was trying to annex William Penn’s Quaker colony, especially the valuable port of Philadelphia. Kirk’s ancestors, the German Protestant refugees called Palatines, having exhausted their funds buying passage to Pennsylvania, were called “beggardly,” though the governor defended them as “clean and orderly” if “strange.”

 

Nevertheless, those nice Quakers (some them Scotch-Irish themselves) worried that the swarms of German and “Irish” immigrants would imperil the colony. “[We are] invaded by those shoals of foreigners, the Palatines and the strangers from the North of Ireland that crowd in upon us.” The Scotch-Irish had, at best, “little honesty and less sense.” At their worst they were “capable of the highest villainies,” and “the very scum of mankind.”

 

In 1729, even the usually admirable Benjamin Franklin joined in and wondered why the Scotch-Irish migrants continued “to come to these Parts of the World” whose inhabitants held a “Disrespect and aversion to their Nation.” Franklin warned his fellow Pennsylvanians of the noted “impenitency” of the newcomers, implying they were like an infectious disease when he said, “The smallpox spreads here.”

 

The immigrants were also routinely criticized for keeping to themselves, not assimilating (does that sound familiar?). But they had neither incentive nor ability to stay in the settled areas where, in any case, they faced a great deal of prejudice. And financially they had little choice. My ancestors, like most Scotch Irish, moved fairly quickly west, to less settled parts of the colonies where colonists were needed as a bulkhead against the Indians and for the English – simply because that was all they could afford. In the far western edges of the colony, there was land they could squat on or buy at low cost, so that was where they went.  The landowners hoped that, eventually, “more industrious and able Persons will [move here], such idle trash being generally the frontiers of an Improving colony.”

 

The isolation probably suited them in part because everyone around them hated them so much. Though they also simply wanted land where they could live without the rents being constantly raised, which was their experience in Ulster. “We having been, before we came here, so much oppressed under Landlords, [we] came with the principal view of being freed from such oppression.” (Meanwhile, of course, oppression through racial slavery, of both Africans and Native Americans, was growing. Those Native Americans who weren’t being captured and enslaved were desperately trying to push back against a slow inexorable wave of Eurotrash pushing them off their ancestral land.)

 

One of the great ironies of our current wave of Trumpian hatred of immigrants is that a significant percentage of Trump supporters railing against Mexicans are descendants of the Scotch-Irish who were once themselves viewed as “the scum of mankind.” Our ancestors – poor, unwanted, desperate, and sometimes resentful – settled in the hard lean lands of the Appalachian range stretching from Pennsylvania to Alabama, and many of them stayed. Apparently many still feel unwanted and resentful. Though they think they own the place now and don’t want any other poor and desperate people crowding in.  These Appalachian descendants of the original Scotch-Irish migrants are now Trump’s deepest red vein of support, as this map shows:

 

Screen Shot 2016-07-21 at 4.19.23 PM

 

But I would remind my fellow Scotch-Irish Americans of the words of the Bible many claim guides them. In Exodus we’re told, “thou shalt not oppress a stranger: for ye know the heart of a stranger, seeing ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.” And in the New Testament Matthew says, “For I was hungry, and you gave me meat: I was thirsty, and you gave me drink: I was a stranger, and you took me in.”  We were once the nation’s “trash,” the poor hungry strangers we now fear.

 

And, speaking of hungry, I could really go for some tacos right now.

In which much of what I thought I knew about Scotland turns out to be completely wrong

Since my mother’s dna is largely Scottish – 37% Highland Scots (Irish and Scandinavian dna), 56% lowland Scots, aka Scotch-Irish (a mishmash of Picts, Gauls, Saxons, and Anglos), and that mystery 6% thrown in for fun – I’ve been studying my Scottish history and have learned that most of what we assume to be Scottish isn’t!

 

  1. The kilt, as we know it, was invented in 1730 by Thomas Rawlinson, an Englishman from Lancashire. He had an iron-ore smelting business in Inverness, Scotland. The men who worked there wore the traditional “great kilt,” a long piece of cloth wrapped sort of like a sari and belted around the waist, with the extra length draped over the shoulder. It was a fire hazard, so he hired a tailor to design something safer for industrial work. So the short kilt (skirt separated from top wrap) was born and became ubiquitous.  So highlanders would have dressed more like this….wild irishman

 

than like this.kilt

 

  1. I also learned there were no distinct clan tartans. Early descriptions of Highland dress describe the men wearing wraps or cloaks of varying shades of brown, which blended in well with the heather so would be better for hunting or battle. The chieftain’s clothing was distinguished by being dyed bright with saffron. The “tartan” – which was simply a cloth woven in a geometric patterns including stripes – appeared later, and was associated with districts and weavers rather than with particular clans. Specific clan tartans did not exist until the 19th century and came about through a hoax. Two brothers from Surrey fabricated an “ancient” book they called the Vestiarium Scotium creating Tartans and assigning each to a clan. This hoax book was republished in various forms and then taken up by Scottish cloth manufacturers.
  1. Finally, my lowland Scots ancestors, who lived on the border of Scotland and England, were generally considered to be thieving scum. Many were “reavers,” or cattle thieves. The reavers raided both sides of the border with impunity and made life there unstable and passage through it dangerous. James I, who first unified England and Scotland, moved these troublesome lowland Scots to Ireland thereby solving two political problems at once; he pacified the border and established a bulkhead for colonization in Ireland.

 

So my highland ancestors were really Irish who sailed to the Scottish coast, mixed with Vikings, and didn’t wear kilts of have specific tartans. While my lowland Scottish ancestors were cattle thieves. Thereby further proving my belief that if you want to admire your ancestors, it’s best not to research them too deeply!

Rendering unto Caesar

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As I write this I’m sitting on my front porch looking at a tidy row of houses on precisely surveyed plots marked by hedges and fences. It’s a scene I take for granted and a marking of the land that seems normal to me. If I close my eyes and think beyond this porch and this street, I can see this grid of habitation and ownership extending, with variations and some interruptions, in all directions across this country like graph paper blanketing the land.

 

Four-hundred years ago this was not the case. North America, at that time, was settled as much of the world was, by various peoples who moved around as they needed to and did not answer to centralized authority. John Winthrop wrote, “The Indians … have [no] settled places, as Townes to dwell in, nor any ground as they challenge for their owne possession, but change their habitation from place to place.” And “They inclose noe Land.” Their non-ownership of individual pieces of land, more than anything else, marked the native population as “savage” in the eyes of the colonists.

 

Over two hundred years ago – when New England was already full of “settled places” and “townes” – tens of thousands of Scotch-Irish, including many of my ancestors, moved into western North Carolina, which was then the western frontier of white settlement. Land was cheap and the new nation needed white bodies to displace the natives, who were oddly inclined to do things like “challenge for their owne possession” people trying to take their land. My ancestors had originally been lowland Scots who lived near the border between Scotland and England and raided both sides with impunity. To pacify the border, James I moved many of  them to Ulster in the 17th century, where they were to colonize the native population there on behalf of the English crown. Ireland was made up of multiple kingdoms or “tribes,” and like the Native Americans, the “wild Irish” were semi-nomadic. Many of them lived by “creaghting” – migrating seasonally with their cattle – and, as a result, they didn’t need permanent habitations. Cattle roamed rather than being fenced in, and the people roamed rather than being boxed in. Roaming, of course, was understood to be barbaric and wasteful, but it also made the population more difficult to control by a central authority. One of the first things the colonizers did in Northern Ireland was build stone houses and “bawns,” or stone walls, surrounding them, delineating their land and keeping the wild Irish out.

 

I wanted to understand these Scotch-Irish, my ancestors, who had colonized first the Irish and then the Cherokee. I dug deeper and found a description of lowland Scotland and its inhabitants, on the eve of the great migration to Ulster, from one of the standard sources, The Scotch-Irish: A Social History (1962), by James Leyburn, himself a North Carolinian. “Agricultural methods were of an unbelievable primitiveness. The people were utterly ignorant of any improvement elsewhere … since the Dark Ages.”  Leyburn goes on to say disapprovingly, “There were no enclosures, no dykes or hedges between the fields, or even between farms….The cattle had to be … put into the care of a cow-herd or shepherd, who took them out every morning … and who chased them out of the unfenced fields of grain.” He adds, “The dirtiness of the hovels in which people lived was accepted … as one of the inevitabilities of life,” and, “some of the people had to be content to wear skins of animals for clothing.” So the lowland Scots, like the “wild Irish” and the Native Americans, had once been semi-nomadic “savages” who did not own or fence the land they lived on. They had their traditional life and land taken from them by the English.  And then the colonized became the colonizers.

 

Who brought “civilization,” central government, and colonization to the English? The Romans, of course, who invaded what we now know as England but which was then a land controlled by multiple tribes. So I looked into the Romans and found Tacitus’s fascinating account, not of England, but “Germania,” as the Romans “discovered” it when they invaded. He writes, “It is well known that none of the German nations inhabit cities; or even admit of contiguous settlements. They dwell scattered and separate, as a spring, a meadow, or a grove may chance to invite them. Their villages are laid out, not like ours in rows of adjoining buildings; but every one surrounds his house with a vacant space,  either by way of security against fire,  or through ignorance of the art of building. For, indeed, they are unacquainted with the use of mortar and tiles; and for every purpose employ rude unshapen timber, fashioned with no regard to pleasing the eye.”

 

He goes on to say, “Nor do they attempt to make the most of the fertility and plenty of the soil … in planting orchards, inclosing meadows, and watering gardens.” And they “live in a state of amazing savageness and squalid poverty…. Their food is herbs; their clothing skins.” Once again we see a native population, living in a system of decentralized power and communal land use, characterized as ignorant and barbaric and in need of correction and control by those who are “civilized” (and who want land, resources, and the power civilization grants). So the English, like the Scots, were a colonized people who became a colonizing people.  How does that happen? How do a people forget what was taken from them by force and then use force to take those same things from others? Is it a kind of Stockholm syndrome where we identify with our captors.  Or perhaps it’s simply people doing what they must to survive.

 

Coming back to the present, to my front porch, and feel the touch of Caesar’s hand. Because in it I see Tacitus’s Roman village, “laid out … in rows of adjoining buildings” and “inclosed meadows.”  I see that my street, my world, is the result of the centralization of authority on the land, an authority that needs to commodify, count, and control the land and its people. And like my Scotch-Irish ancestors, we in America are both colonized and colonizers

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