Appalachia:
A History of Mountains and People
By Jamie Ross and Ross Spears
A James Agee Film Project Production
Narrated by Sissy Spacek
OPENING – Part One
E.O. Wilson
Ordinarily when we say history, we mean the arrival of the first colonists --in the
late 1700’s for Applachia. And then if we’re going to be real generous, we try to
take into account the Native Americans, who may have arrived back as far as
10,000 years ago--we don’t know for sure. But we should bear in mind history is
much deeper than that. A history of a region includes not just a people, but the
creatures and the living environment people find themselves in. That has a
history too.
1. Planet Earth and Opening Sequence
We see the earth and its moon in space. We see the rotating earth and a zoom
into the region of Appalachia. We see the main titles of the series and the title of
Part One.
Appalachia: A history of Mountains and People
Part One: Time and Terrain
Narrated by Sissy Spacek
Opening Voice-over
For myself, mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural
scenery. They seem to have been built for the human race--at once
their schools and cathedrals.
Full of treasures of illuminated
manuscript for the shcolar, quiet in pale cloisters for the thinker,
glorious in holiness for the worshipper.
Loveliness of color, perfectness of form, endlessness of change,
wonderfulness of structure, are precious to all human minds; and the
superiority of the mountains in all these things is as measurable as the
wealth of a museum compared with that of a simply furnished room.
But this I also know, that no good or lovely things exists in this world
without its correspondent darkness.
--John Ruskin
Robert Zahner
Well, yea, they came to be here a long long time ago. These mountains right here
are considered some of the oldest in the world. There not necessarily the oldest
rocks in the world, but they’re the oldest mountains in the world. The
Appalachians--the southern Appalachians in particular--have undgone uplifts
and erosion, uplifts and erosion for well over 500 million years--a half a billion
years. That’s a long time.
Denise Giardina
I think it has to do with identity, and it’s something about who I am. The
mountains here are so old and there‘s a mystery to them. They’re kind of scarred
and they’ve got these rocks jutting out of them, and they seem to change shapes
in some ways at different times of the day--the light’s different and they aborb
the light sometimes, and sometimes they’re just an outline. I feel them as a
presence; I feel them as almost a living presence that’s so unimaginably old that
I’m a little blip on the radar screen compared to them. They’re just very, very
powerful.
Lamar Marshall
Go there and here’s something bigger than you are. Here’s something that’s
ancient and primeval and it takes you back. There’s nothing like it.
Judy Bonds
Living in a hollow feels like a hug from God. It feels like you're secure and safe
and just hugged from God.
Beuna Winchester
I've been to the Outer Banks a time or two. We we go there and come back, I say,
"Hello mountains, did you miss me?" I miss them. My love for the mountains is
just a dear as love for life.
Barbara Kingsolver
Somehow being enclosed in the mountains you can always feel like there's
something just over the ridge, something waiting for you.
Narration #1
They are the Great Smokies, the Alleghenies, and the Poconos; the whites, the
Greens and the Blacks; The Warriors, the Snowbirds, the Craggies, the
Shenandoahs and the Cold Hollow Hills.
The Appalacbian Mountain chain stretches nearly unbroken for more than two
thousand miles--from the farmlands of central Alabama to Belle Isle off the
farthest tip of Newfoundland. They're old as the Earth itself reckons time,
spawned by colliding continents in a global dance, buckled into five mile high
peaks long before the dinasaurs, ground down by hundreds of millions of years
of wind and rain.
It is one of the oldest and grandest geological features on the planet. The lower
half, from Pennsylvania on down, is the region called Appalachia. And it has
been said that more is known about Appalachia that is untrue than about any
other place in the United States.
2. Creation and the Mountains
Laura Pennix
(As she tells the creation story in Cherokee, we hear her telling it also in English in VO.)
A long time ago all the people, all the animals and birds lived in the upper
world, and below here was all water. There was no land. So the water beetle
called Dele-elushi came down to this world, came down to the water rather, to
see if he could find some land. He couldn’t find any land so therfore he dove to
the bottom of the water and found some mud and brought the mud back to the
top, and he kept doing so until it became land, or an island here. Once this
island became a big piece of land, they waited for it to dry.
They sent Shula-ava, the great buzzard, to come down to check for the dry
place of land that was around there somewhere. So he came down and as he was
flying around he got very tired. As he became tired, his wings began to hit the
mud. And where his wings hit there was a hill, a valley, and where his wings
went back up came the mountains. And so he did this several times. His wings
would get tired and he’d go back down and hit the land and would create lots
and lots of mountains, until we have the mountains that we have today. And
also, for this reason, we call this the center of our world.
Narration #2
Science often confirms what mountain myths have whistered for millenia: that
the mountains are the soul and spine of the land and people of Appalachia. They
impart both physical boundary and spiritual definition. And fundamental to the
mountains is rock, the only substance in creation that can remember a billion
years.
Scott Southworth
The entire history of the earth is preserved in the rocks, and the way that man
has developed the area and how he uses it today is all really controlled by that.
The oldest rock we know that's out there is over 1.1 billion years old.
So if you ask me how did the Appalachian Mountains form, you have to go back
to at least a billion years ago, and realize that in many ways they’re still forming
today.
CUT TO montage of Professor Robert Hatcher with his graduate students hitting rocks and
looking at rocks--music under, voice over.
Scott Southworth (VO)
You’re really trying to unravel the history of an area. Much like you’d see police
at the scene of a car wreck, taking measurements and studying things to
determine how it happened, we do that through the study of the rocks. There’s
much that I can do by walking up and looking at the rock. To really get into the
history then we go in and analyze crystals and minerals that are in the rock, to
date when they cooled or crystallized. So we are writing a book, but we have to
pick up the clues as we go along.
Robert Hatcher
I realize it’s very difficult for anyone, including myself, to visualize how long a
million years is, or a hundred million years, or a billion years. Astronomers tell
us now that the universe is 13.7 billion years old. They’ve just refined that from
earlier estimates. The earth itself is 4.5 to 5 billion years old. The rocks we have
here in east Tennessee, southwest Virginia range in age from a billion years up to
300 million years old. This is “deep time.”
Scott Southworth
There are these great time scales in textbooks that show geologic time, and man’s
presence is always the tip of the ballpoint pen. For me personally it’s always
been a very sobering thing to put my life in a perspective.
Dissolve to animated image of the earth with plates and continents moving around. Music
underneath.
Robert Hatcher (VO)
The very beginnings of the Appalachians go back to the break up of a supercontinent. The super-continent called Rodenia formed about a billion years ago,
but involved all the continents as we knew them at that time. Then that
continent broke up about 600 to 550 million years ago.
Scott Southworth (VO)
So there was a rifting event, and the continent opened, created an ocean that we
call Iapetus, and for probably 80 to 100 million years there was a teaming sea
with fossils and life.
Robert Hatcher (VO)
Then about 450 to 500 million years ago, the process reversed itself and an island
arc formed. And this then was added to the North American margin at about
450 million years ago. So then we had the beginnings of mountain building here.
Then about 350 million years ago in the southern Appalachians again an ancient
island arc collided with North America again. And this produced additional
uplift of mountains. It produced formation of a lot of metamorphic rocks.
Scott Southworth (VO)
As that basin the Iapetus Ocean closed we collided with Africa, and a large
mountain range formed. Its counterpart would be the Atlas Mountains in
Morocco and West Africa.
Robert Hatcher (VO)
And this collision took place from north to south, closing the last ocean like a
zipper, and producing head-on collision in the southern Appalachians beginning
about 300 million years ago, pushing huge blocks of crust out onto North
America and forming the super-continent of Pangia.
The process of collision in the south involved the formation of a huge sheet of
crust, slab of crust tht was pushed some 300 kilometers, 200 miles onto the North
American platform.
Scott Southworth
When they collided the analogy could be to two cars that do a fender bender in
traffic like you were in today. You literally displace parts of the car and crust, so
that it’s buckled, folded, and sometimes dislocated, and that accordion effect
raises the crust and creates the mountains.
Narration #3
The Ancient Appalachian Mountains were titans. More than six thousand miles
long and nearly one thousand miles wide, with peaks ranging from fifteen to
thirty thousand feet, they bisected the greatest landmass the earth has ever
known. Straddling the equator, awash with abundant rain, they dominated the
super-continent of Pangea for 100 million years. As African crust piled on top of
the North American crust, the mountains buried ancient sedimentary and
volcanic rock deeper and deeper. The rock was folded, faulted, buckled and
baked. Sandstone turned into quartzite, limestone was baked ito marble,
mudstone squeezed into slate. Gold, copper, iron, mica, and feldspar percolated
throughout. And deeply buried ancient forests turned into Appalachian coal,
which would one day change the world.
Robert Hatcher
This super-continent then broke up to form the modern Atlantic Ocean the
dispersal of continents occurred up the present time.
Plates move 5 to 10 centimeters a year--about the rate your fingernails grow.
Your fingernails grow about 10 centimeters a year and that’s roughly the rate of
plate motion.
Scott Southworth (VO)
So you’re talking about close to 600 million years of mountains being formed,
and then a few other million years of it being eroded away. The mountains
today, the latest we see up there is a result of about 200 million years of erosion
on that composite mountain range.
Robert Hatcher (VO)
So again, a very slow process.
Map of the World fades out. Music fades out.
Ed Bernbaum
There’s a wide range of responses to mountains. They’re the highest feature of
the landscape, so they automatically send your eye up toward the sky, and in
many religions, of course, the sky is heaven and the gods are up there, so they
automatically evoke a powerful response--the response can be positive or
negative. For some people, the mountains are very dangerous places--and they
are dangerous places. For a long time, in Europe for example, mountains were
considered ugly, or else they were considered places where witches hung out, or
demons or dragons, and that sort of thing. Or where heretics live. For example,
there were heretical groups in Europe who would go and seek refuge up in the
mountains, in the Pyranees and the Alps.
At the same time, mountains are divine and evoke the response of being close to
god. They are the largest features of the landscape that you can see as a whole,
so you get a sense of wholeness that comes out of them. They tend to be places
where you can go away and get solitude. So they are places of power which can
inspire you and can also kill you.
3. The Forest Evolves
Opening scene of water and rocks and young plants with music.
Narration #4
Appalachia is the oldest available land habitat in North America, but it existed
for two hundred million years before terrestrial organisms evolved to occupy it.
The first living creatures were the plants. With their invention of wood cells that
could defy the flattening power of gravity, the plants assembled vascular
systems to transport food and water up through their bodies. They were called
lycopods, and they grew to enormous heights, but they needed constatn access to
water to reproduce. The gymnosperms next came along with their invention of
the naked seed, and as wind and rain broke down the rock, the trees marched
across the mountains creating the Great and Ancient Appalachian Forest.
Chris Bolgiano
One acre of cove forest in the Smokey Mountains has more species of trees than
all of Europe. Hundreds of species of trees. And it's believed that trees actually
evolved here about 200 million years ago, from the palms and the palm-like
cycads, and the horsetails and so on, into the pines and then eventually into the
hardwoods, over this period of 200 million years.
Harvard Ayers
The diversity is just utterly incredible--especially with the vertical zonations.
You have the spruce fir up here and you come down to the northern hardwoods
and then the more typical oak hickory forests. So you get a lot of different life
zones.
Trees and Music Montage
Chris Bolgiano
The fact that mountains are these massive blocks of earth and stone jutting into
the air. You have all these different aspects. You have a southern aspect. You
have a ridge top. You have a northern aspect.
Steve Wallace
The peaks have different vegetation and temperatures than you do down in the
valleys. It really breaks up the environment so you can have lots of little
ecological niches for animals to live in.
Chris Bolgiano
You have so many different kinds of microclimates--moist northern areas that
don't get exposed to the sun and keep their moisture, dry southern areas. You
have all these different kinds of microclimates, and that really enhances the
development of species particular to that area. So not only do you have the long
time span, but you have all these different niches all over the place where species
can grow into them.
Shots of more trees and plants and habitats.
George Constanz (walking in the Joyce Kilmer Forest)
Another big giant tulip poplar... The tulip poplar, by the way, has an interesting
story that goes with it. The scientific name of this tree is leareodendren
tulapifira, and the genus leareo dindren has only two species in it--tulapifera
here in the eastern deciduous forest--and there's another species in southeastern
China. And the genus leareo dindren appears no where else on earth. That's an
example of a disjunction. The idea is, if you hold up the sphere of the earth, the
genus appears over here and over here, but no where in between--not in Europe,
Africa, or western North America. So how did that happen? Well, once upon a
time all the plates were together in the super-continent called Pangea, and then
about 300 million years ago these things drifted apart, carrying the plants and
animals with them. Then, once they're separated, they can no longer interbreed
and they follow different evolutionary paths.
Well. so what about the disjunction of leareo dindren? It's not just that. It's that
you can literally get off a plane in Hubye Province in China and it looks a lot like
this right here in southern Appalachia. Because the disjunction occurs among a
lot of different living things, like in trees, it's... in addition of leareo dindren,
magnolias, and witch hazel, and red bud, and in the ground cover, it's lady
slippers, orchids, and jack-in-the-pulpit. And there's even some disjunctive
animals--like the copperhead, is in the genus eggkistradon. There's an
eggkistradon here and a closely related eggkistradon in southeastern China and
no where else. And the hellbender, that great big salamander that occurs here,
that's in the genus cryptabrankus. Here, there--it's disjunct too. You've heard of
this concept, sister cities? American towns have sister towns in England or
Europe. Well, Appalachia has a sister ecosystem in southeastern China, centered
in Hubye Provence....
Narration 5 --- The Ancient Animals
The first animals to venture onto land in Appalachia were the millipedes, about
380 million years ago. Protected from gravity and aridity by their external
skeletons, they were essentially mobile living ponds. Next came fish with lungs
and their descendants, the amphibians — especially the salamanders, who made
the creeks of Appalachia their primary headquarters. Food was so plentful that
early predators grew to fantastic lengths, but twice in life's long history,
catastrophic mass extinctions nearly wiped the slate clean. But each time
survivors discovered myriad new directions to explore -- and each time the
overall richness of life in Appalachia flourished. By thirty million years ago, the
age of mammals had arrived.
The Gray Fossil Site -- A Miocene Snapshot
Steve Wallace
It’s not what you find that’s exciting. It’s what you might find. It’s the thrill of
the hunt.
What we’re working on now is actually a rhino. It’s the genus Teleoceros. I like
to refer to it as pot-bellied rhino. It’s a very squat, stocky little rhino.
Basically every discovery is basically by accident, but we’d been working in this
pit for about a month, and hadn’t really found much of anything, just a few
bones here and there, when we started to encounter one large bone, and it turned
out to be the pelvis. Of course we got more people in the pit. We started
opening it up and exploring it, and we ended up finding the entire pelvis, both
hind legs, and the tail. Right away we recognized it is a rhino. Once we took out
the hind end we took out the vertebrae which led to more vertebrae, led to ribs
and eventually the head. It is the most complete skeleton of Teleocerous in
eastern North America.
Steve Wallace
What this really was was essentially a sinkhole. All a sinkhole is is a place where
a cave gets too close to the surface. When it first forms, it’s like a natural trap.
Things fall in; they can’t get out. If you imagine a single animal falling in every
year, in a hundred years you get a hundred animals. In a thousand years you get
a thousand animals.
There are no other sites in this country that are that age. And so it’s our own
little snapshot of history that’s unique for this part of the country.
Steve Wallace
If you could go back in time and stand right here on this site and see what did it
look like at that time. The forest itself would have looked very similar to what
you see today. // But what would be interesting would be the animals
themselves. The animals would be so different. You’d have camels running
around. You’d have rhinos running around. You’d have your little red panda
running around.
CUT to many shots of fossil site with blue tent: Shots of people digging, plus images of the
animals from paintings, drawings.
Steve Wallace
We’ve got fish, amphibians like frogs and salamanders, reptiles like snakes and
turtles. We obviously have alligators. When you get into mammals we’ve got a
variety of carnivores. We have our lesser panda. We have a brand new species
of weasel. We have saber-toothed cat. We have a short-faced bear. // We do
have tapirs, of course, tapir's our most abundant animal. We have lots and lots
of tapirs. We’ve got camel. We do have our elephant. We have peccary out here.
In fact our peccary looks like it’s going to be a giant species, a new species of
peccary. // You’d have things like that that looked very unusual to you, in
particular because you’d look at these big animals, and you’d think, these look
like things I’d see in Africa, not things I’d see here. That’s what would really
make it neat, that although the background would look the same, the little
players would be different.
It really is just that opportunity to discover. In the back of your mind you think
if this is something new, I’m the first person to ever see this. No one has ever
seen this animal before.
Narration # 6 --- Glaciation and Refugia
Three million years ago, the earth began alternating long periods of cool and
warm climate, and as a result, glaciers sometimes covered vast areas of North
America for thousands of years at a time. These ice ages were devastating to all
forms of life, but for many species, Appalachia provided a safe haven -- a refuge.
When glaciers advanced, northern plants and animals moved south into the
many life zones of Appalachia. When glaciers retreated, southern species re-
joined their northern neighbors, creating the most diverse temperate forest in the
world. When the most recent ice age ended 12,000 years ago, however, a new
species had joined the neighborhood.
4. 1000 Generations of Native Americans
Townsend Dig Montage with Indian drumming music ----
Jefferson Chapman (Director of the McClung Museum)
What was the best thing you ever found? or the most exciting moment? That’s
really a hard one to answer. I haven’t stumbled across a Tutonkamon tomb or
anything of that nature. I think that the thing that was very exciting and did
redirect my research focus was the discovery that buried deeply in these alluvial
terraces, river bottoms, were very old sites that were preserved under six, eight
feet of sediment that went back eight or nine thousand years. That for me was a
very exciting moment when we dug down and hit this very black layer way
down below the surface and realized the material there dated roughly six to
eight thousand B.C. Which is pretty neat.
Narration #7
When the first human beings entered the New World, they began the conquest of
the largest frontier ever traversed. As one scientist observed, "Not until man
occupies another planet will he explore a domain so vast."
Jeff Chapman
Everybody agrees that humans were here 12,000 years ago and were making a
very distinctive latsilate projectile point. The question is, were there earlier
populations? And there’s a lot of tantalizing evidence. I would be very
comfortable with 14 to 15,000. There are some who want to go back 30,000.
Harvard Ayers
No, I would say the first people were here maybe 12-15,000 years ago, and they
found the Ice Age forest here-- the red spruce and the firs that we see at the tops
of these mountains were the dominant forests throughout.
George Constantz
The ice sheet came as far south as northern PA, clearly covered the upper third of
the Appalachians, so the first humans are thought to have come over Beringia,
the strait that connected Alaska to Siberia, if that’s the way they came, and they
settled here just as the ice sheet was receding, so many of them would have had
what is called a periglacial environment, tundra. // But the bonus, the bonanza
was the big animals, the big mammals...
Harvard Ayers
They found mammoths, mastodons -- all the late Ice Age favorites, // were here
at that time...
Edward O. Wilson
An amazing fauna and flora that existed in North America and that far exceeds
anything we have alive anywhere in the world today, including the Serengeti.
George Constantz
Saber-toothed tiger, giant sloths, American lion, llamas, several species of
horses. There was all this protein to eat. So the new humans must have been
going gaga, because they had the tools and the expertise from Siberia for hunting
many of those kind of mammals. They had the Clovis points. They knew how to
hunt them, stalk them, and what to do with them once they killed them. And
they found themselves suddenly in this virgin territory with millions of big
packages of protein.
Jeff Chapman
This was a time when it was a very lush, fertile, abundant environment.
Narration #8 -- Paleo-Indians come to Appalachia
The first Paleo-Indians to enter Appalachia brought with them a formidable set
of tools and skills that had been honed for thousands of years in the harsh Asian
tundra, culminating in the magnificent Clovis spearpoints. As is usually the
case when one species has a vastly superior advantage, but no notion of possible
consequences, there is an almost inevitable tendency to press the advantage
without restraint.
George Constantz
It's called the overkill hypothesis. So you put together some skilled hunters with
some big mammals that weren't very good at evading hunters, because they
hadn't co-evolved with them, and what do you have? A sudden overexploitation.
Harvard Ayers
It was a radical change. The people didn’t see it. It wasn’t like on December 31st
the mammoths died and on January 1st we had the other populations that we see
today such as deer. It was a gradual change that people probably didn’t even
realize in a lifetime, but taken in a geologic sense, it was quite a change.
Narration #9 -- Pleistocene extinctions
11,000 years ago, 17 of the giant mammal species in Appalachia became extinct,
including the mammoth, the mastodon, the horse, the camel, the giant sloth, and
the short-faced bear, plus their predators, such as the giant wolf and the sabertoothed tiger. The humans, however, adapted quickly and soon found a
comfortable niche within the mountains' natural rhythms.
George Constantz
One way of diversifying the diet was to take advantage of seasonally available
foods, while different foods were available at different elevations at different
times. So in the summer they might be up at higher elevations picking tree nuts,
American chestnut nuts for example, and in the fall and winter they might be at
lower elevations along a river, in the flood plain, where they fished and lived off
of their stored foods. So the seasonal round is the idea that they had an annual
migratory cycle from the uplands to the lowlands around and around on an
annual basis .
Bob Zahner
They lived off the land like the black bear lived off the land. The land provided
their food, including black bear. They hunted black bear too...But their impact
on the land was very minimal, very minimal.
Narration #10
Unlike the black bear, of course, the ancient Native-Americans created a rich,
complex society and forged an extensive set of tools made from bone, horn,
wood and stone, which they constantly adapted to suit their changing needs.
[00:15]
Jeff Chapman
It is a lot harder than it looks, but we do have a number of students here who
have mastered it and can sit there and take a hammer stone such as this and a
piece of raw chert like this and begin working it down where they ultimately
reach a rough bi-face like you see here. And then using an antler billet, working
it to knock smaller flakes off, and then ultimately taking such as this, an antler
tine, and punching off flakes, ultimately producing a finished projectile point like
this. And it can be done relatively quickly if you know what you’re doing. If
you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re going to make a big mess and end up
with bloodied fingers and frustrated.
Narration #11
For thousands of years, projectile points evolved to suit the needs of a people
becoming ever more elegantly adapted to the mountains and the forests of
Appalachia. Spear-throwers, or atlatls, for instance, were discarded in favor of
much more accurate bows and arrows. Female horticulturalists discovered how
to domesticate wild seed plants like sunflowers and marsh elder, and began to
grow gardens of beans, squash and gourds. Clay pottery was invented and
refined into a brilliant artform. Mica was mined in the mountains and traded to
distant tribes for seeds. Gradually, small bands of Indians combined into
complex tribes with social systems well adapted to the forests and mountains.
Harvard Ayers
Well, I think they took the attitude that the environment was here and is our
protector and is something we have to value because it provides us with the deer
that we eat. It provides us withe the chestnuts and the acorns which we
consume from the forests. They looked at it as a long-term symbiotic process,
where the humans and the animals and the plants were all in cooperation.
The animals provided food; the plants provided medicines, as well as food. This
relationship is undeniable for people, even up to the historic peoples such as the
Cherokee.
Chris Bolgiano
There's always this tension between exploitation of the forest and worship of the
forest, of the spirits that create the forest and live in the forest. There's always
this tension, because certainly the Native Americans did exploit the forest and
use the forest in every way they could think of. They had to. They were totally
dependant on it. But at the same time they realized that dependence. They
were grateful for what the forest provided. Most Native American cultures
developed a kind of reciprocity, where they would take from the forest, but they
felt an obligation to give back.
Narration # 12 -- Corn and Chiefdoms
Around 800 A.D. corn became a reliable source of food, and Indian populations
grew quickly. Seasonal migrations ended. Walled towns were built with
ceremonial mounds at the center to honor chiefs who claimed to be descendants
of the Sun. Warriors replaced hunters as the highest status occupation, and war
became continuous. For stability, females took over the daily routines of the
tribe and kinship lines descended through the mother’s clan. Powerful
chiefdoms, such as Coosa in North Alabama, effectively dominated towns
hundreds of miles away.
Charles Hudson
Everywhere we’ve seen chiefdoms, in Europe, the Middle East, everywhere
chiefdoms have arisen, there’s an organization for fighting people in a very
deliberate and organized way. Under leadership; you have war captains, war
leaders, the role of the warrior is glorified. Young men lust for these glories.
And this was very much the case in the southeast.
I think the cultures and societies here were so qualitatively advanced over most
of the rest of North America. In fact, I would make the argument that the most
advanced societies lived here, the most complex, and that this story has not
really been told. They had really been swept aside as a people, And so the story
here was untold.
Narration #13
When humans reached the mountains of Appalachia more than 12 thousand
years ago, the forest community gained another link in its evolutionary chain.
For more than one thousand generations humans then forged their unique place
within the ecological system of the Appalachians. The complex forest and
mountain community was large and old and re-balanced easily to accommodate
the newcomers. The human footprint was small in the vast forest, and Native
Americans thrived within an environment that had welcomed thousands of
species before. All of that, however, was about to change. [00:40]
5.
Desoto Comes — Exotic Species
Montage of Spanish boats with music
Narration # 14 -- Arrival of DeSoto
The first Europeans known to visit Appalachia came in the year 1540, and
although they stayed in the region only a few months, the consequences of their
visit were felt for centuries. They were led by the infamous Hernando DeSoto
of Spain.
Charles Hudson
Hernando DeSoto participated in the conquest of Panama, and also the conquest
of the Incas. He was a rich man by his 30’s, was not satisfied with what heíd
done here, wanted a piece of the New World.
Wilma Dykeman
So what does he do? He was a wealthy man. He had plundered Peru. He could
have retired in Spain a wealthy man. But when you have a little gold, you need a
lot more gold, and you never have enough.
Charles Hudson
So he went back to Spain with his fortune, tremendously rich, and got the right
to come back and have his own province of the New World. His aim was to land
at Florida, to penetrate up into the interior, and to find a rich society like that of
the Aztecs or the Incas, where he could find a great deal of gold and silver and
precious things.
Wilma Dykeman
So he had to come and find the gold, and coming with the ships, and with the
armor, with even the savage greyhounds that had been trained to go out and kill
the native Americans.
Charles Hudson
They wore body armor: They wore steel helmets. They had swords. They had
crossbows. They had arcubus weapons; crude matchlock weapons. I think the
most crucial thing they had were horses, horses they could put mounted lancers
on their backs and ride down against Indians who had no previous experience
against horses or anything of the sort.
Wilma Dykeman
And with the chains and the collars to put on the people he would find. He was
not interested in what their culture might be, and what they were as human
beings. They were just taken for the gold. So they start out from Florida across
the South in that summer. And can you imagine what it must have been like
with that armor.
Charles Hudson
They struck up through Georgia, up near what is now Macon GA, went over
across the Savannah River over into South Carolina, crossed over the mountains
into the TN Valley, started down the Tennessee Valley towards the southwest,
went toward Knoxville, further down into what is now Cartersville, Georgia.
Wilma Dykeman
And everytime they went to a village, where’s the gold? If they could not
produce the gold, they burned, they looted, they killed, they captured the chief
women in one of the villages there and took her with them.
Charles Hudson
They went from one big chiefdom to another, always asking where’s the next
rich prince, where’s the next rich society, and they never found what they were
looking for, which was portable wealth.
At the end DeSoto was very cruel. He was losing patience. I think he realized
he’d lost his fortune. He’d bet all his money on this expedition. So did the men
who went with him. There was increasing desperation, and he began killing
Indians just to terrorize them, to deter them from trying to attack him in any
way.
Wilma Dykeman
Nobody remembers, cares about, he left nothing. He came into this country, he
could have discovered myths, he could have discovered the religion, he could
have discovered about the whole life.
So eventually, they get to the Mississippi. DeSoto dies of putrid fever and all is
lost. Nobody remembers, cares about, he left nothing.
Narration # 15 -- What DeSoto Left
Unfortunately for Native-America, the DeSoto expedition, and the Spanish
expeditions that followed, left behind a legacy even more destructive than that of
cruelty, murder and greed — a legacy that would wreak havoc among the
chiefdoms of the Southeastern Indians, including those in Appalachia.
George Constanz
An exotic species is a species that naturally lives elsewhere, and whether on its
own or by human transport arrives in the place that you’re interested in. So it’s a
species of plant or animal or microbe that is new and may not have predators or
constraints that naturally limit it in its native place. So it's able to take off and
explode in its new habitat.
Narration # 16 -- Exotic Species
With the arrival of the Spanish conquistadores, viruses that had evolved in highdensity European populations were suddenly introduced into groups of NativeAmericans having little, if any resistance. Diseases such as measles, chicken pox,
influenza, and smallpox wreaked havoc among the tribes of Appalachia and the
Southeast, and during the next century more than half the native population
perished. Entire tribes vanished. Social systems collapsed. Mound building
came to an abrupt end.
Theda Perdue
Everyone agrees that the impact of disease was something that modern people
cannot imagine. Diseases did not hit everyone equally; they tended to kill the
very old and very young disproportionately. This meant that European diseases
robbed the native people of their past.
Charles Hudson
They were pre-literate societies. They didn't have a writing system, so all of their
knowledge was in people's heads. And as people died so did the knowledge.
Theda Perdue
The elderly were the archives, they were the repository of knowledge, and when
they died they took with them many of the ceremonies, the sacred formulas, the
knowledge of the world and how it came to be, But they also lost their future,
because children died in high numbers, and took with them the lives of the
children they would have had if they had grown up.
Charles Hudson
There was a tremendous population collapse as a consequence of the diseases.
Narration # 17 - - Lost tribes
Many tribes became refugees in their own land. Others disappeared altogether.
They include: The Saponi, the Eno, the Sugeree, the Cheraw, the Koasati,
the Yuchi, the Napochi, the Alabama, the Yadkin, the Occaneechi, the
Oconee, the Congaree, the Wateree, the Wax Haw, the Shawananah, the
Keyauwee, the Tutelo, the Pedee, the Coosa. Names that now are only
whispers in legends.
One name, however, acquired an entirely new significance -- due to a comedy of
errors and the almost magical powers of mapmaking.
Charles Hudson
Appalachia got its name from the Appalachee chiefdom, which was a particular
society of Indians. The capitol is in what is now Tallahassee Florida. Fairly small
discrete territory in northern Florida. When the French Huguenots got to the
Florida coast, they heard that these Appalachee Indians had gold. So the French
assumed that Appalachee also included the mountains themselves. They really
didn't know who lived where. So in this way the name of the Appalachee
Indians got transferred to the Appalachian Mountains by this misunderstanding
on the part of the French Huguenots in the 1560's.
Narration # 18
Thus did the name "Appalachia" enter into recorded history — a place of
mountains, a place of Indians, a place of wilderness, a place of treasure, a place
beyond the edges of the known world. And except in the imaginative
mapmaking studios of Germany, Holland, and France, almost no European
would re-enter Appalachia for nearly a century. When the door opened again
in the late 1600’s, it was an altered landscape.
6. The Real People — Cherokee, Shawnee, Iroquois
Jerry Wolfe
We're called aneechelaki – aneechalaki.
Cherokee people.
And that means the Cherokee, the
Freeman Owle
The Cherokees lived in the vicinity that are now called North Carolina, South
Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia.
Not the whole states, but where they came together, this was Cherokee territory.
Narration # 19 - - The Principal People
For a century after the conquistadors departed, Native-Americans struggled to
recover and re-organize. At the end of 17th century, the confederation of the
Iroquois dominated the northern mountains, whereas in central Appalachia, the
Shawnee and the Miami were predominant. And in Southern Appalachia,
protected by the high mountains from the worst of the early epidemics, the
Cherokee nation emerged as the principal tribe.
Ed Bernbaum
For the Cherokee and for a lot of indiginous people, mountains are nurturing
places, places where they’re protected. They’re sacred in many cultures because
they’re literally sources of life, ‘cause life-giving waters come from them. If fact
there’s a Cherokee elder, Jerry Wolf, who talks about how the mountains are
sacred to us as the Cherokee, and the mountains take care of us, and we take care
of them. There’s a reciprocal arrangement.
Bob Zahner
And all of the mountain peaks we see--particularly this one behind me,
Whiteside Mountain -- but just about all of the mountains were sacred
mountains. There were legends that the Cherokees had about these mountains.
Wilma Dykeman
That spirits lived in the mountains, and the wonderful story about the animals
and the plants.
Freeman Owle
It was told to me by my relatives as I was growing up. They said in the very
early days that the Cherokees began to make blowguns and bows and arrows
and spears. And they began to kill the animals in abundance and without
appreciation. And they continued to to the point that the animals were almost
annihilated. But the animals dccided they were going to come back and go to
war against man.
Charles Hudson
The animals hold a congress and they decide what to do about men. Men are
encroaching upon them, taking up their living space, killing them, trampling
upon them.
Freeman Owle
And so the old bear was chief of the animal tribe, and so he decided to make
bows and arrows and spears, and he was going to do to man what they were
doing to them.
But the problem was the animals couldn’t use those weapons. The old bear tried
to shoot the bow and arrow, but he kept cutting the string with his claws.
Charles Hudson
Finally the bears shrug their shoulders and said well, we just won't do anything.
They sort of walk off without taking revenge.
Freeman Owle
But the smaller animals just continued on, and the insects, they decided to go out
in the forest and gather diseases. So they went out and gathered such things as
rabies, and the mosquitoes got the malaria and the ticks picked up diseases. All
these creatures began to bring the diseases in to men, and man began to die.
Wilma Dykeman
And they brought curses down then, the animals did on people, and they
brought warfare of ill-health and all on people. But then the plants came along
and said that they liked the people, and they had different methods of healing
then.
Freeman Owle
All of a sudden the Great Spirit felt sorry for man, and he talked to the plant
world, and he told the plants to invent a cure for all those diseases the animals
had found.
Jerry Wolfe
Like the sassafras leaves. When you get a sting, a bee bite, bee sting, or even
poison ivy on you, all you got to do is those fresh leaves, those green leaves from
the sassafras, and rub them up together and let the juice from those leaves....
Wilma Dykeman
Of course, one of the great things that the first settlers here discovered was some
of the ways the Cherokees used those plants to heal. And I think that just that
myth itself gives you a sense that the animals, the plants, the human beings all
were associated in their mind and their spiritual sense there, which gives a nice
sense, I think, of life. Those are all things that are alive: plants, animals, human
beings.
Narration #20 -- The Cherokee
Three things held the Cherokee people together: common beliefs, a common
language, and a kinship system based on the seven clans. [
Laura Pennix
One was the Bird; another is the Deer, of which I am a member of, the Blue
Clan, the Paint Clan, the Long Hair, the Wolf Clan, and the Wild Potato. And
we get our clans from our mothers, the matrilineal line.
Freeman Owle
The lineage was passed down from the mother’s side of the family. Property
was owned by that clan, the women in that clan’s system. The men basically
owned very little and they would go out and do their hunting and their fishing
while the women took care of the village.
Narration #21 -The 42 towns of the Cherokee nation lay in the shadows of the Blue Ridge
Mountains and the Great Smokies, and along the river they called The Long
Man. Three hundred miles to the East, tiny European settlements were taking a
firm hold along the coast, and by the end of the 17th Century, white visitors
were again showing up in Cherokee territory.
Theda Perdue
I think if you walked into a Cherokee village in the 1700's that you would find
people who were enormously hospitable. Hospitality was a social virtue and
Cherokees were very welcoming. They would have brought you into the town
square. You would have seen lots of children playing on the outskirts of town.
You would have seen clusters of buildings because Cherokees lived in large
extended households. Their households had several buildings: corncribs,
summer houses, winter houses. You would have seen little kitchen gardens close
to the households, but surrounding the village you would have seen large fields
of corn and beans.
Cherokee households had a sense of owning a section of the common field, On
the other hand labor was communal, and Cherokee women moved from field to
field working together, singing their corn songs, caring for their children, in a
kind of community of women. And indeed, the Cherokee's major celebration
was the Green Corn ceremony, in which the central act was the presentation of
the new corn crop by women.
Women were the farmers. Cherokees had a gender division of labor in which
men hunted and went to war, provided meat and protection, and women did the
farming. Farming was so central to Cherokee economy that the people who
produced the products of the farm were important too.
Narration 22 --- New World Coming!
The Green Corn ceremony was a glorious first fruits celebraton of renewal and
forgiveness, but no ritual, ceremony, or sacred dance existed to ease the coming
of an entirely new age.
Laura Pennix
I'm sure with the early whites coming into the Cherokee country, I'm sure they
wondered why they were so light-skinned. If I were living back then, I'd wonder
why.
Of course, the early white people were like traders that came in, and the
Cherokees adapted very well. They needed the metal pots and pans, the hoes,
the shovels, things that they had. Women liked nice looking clothing. I'm sure
the women accepted the brightly colored ribbons and the bright clothing that
was coming in. They started adapting to those things very quickly.
Narration 23 --- Trade
Trade was nothing new for the Indians, of course. A vast network of trading
paths had connected Appalachia with both the Gulf Coast and the Great Lakes
for centuries. In the early 18th Century, however, Cherokees and other
Appalachian tribes became increasingly drawn into a world market economy
centered in Europe. The Cherokees became one of the key producers for this
economy, and what they produced was deerskins.
Charles Hudson
The effect on Indian life of the deerskin trade was that all of their labor got
absorbed into it. I mean, you had to kill the deer, you had to go out and kill it,
you had to skin it, you had to have somebody to process the hide, treat it with
deer brain process to soften it up, and you then traded this into Charleston, and
at its peak hundreds of thousands of deerskin a year would be shipped through
Charleston. This was shipped to Europe and used for all sorts of purposes. They
made men's trousers out of them, they made aprons, they made gloves, they
made bookbindings. There was a vast market for leather of all sorts in Europe at
the time.
Theda Perdue
Deerskins become the currency of the Indian trade. Cherokee hunters produce
hundreds of thousands of deerskins, which were exported from Cherokee
country to Augusta to Savannah to Charleston primarily, to southern ports and
then shipped to England.
Charles Hudson
The traders would get their merchandise on credit. They'd go up into the
interior. They would trade them to the Indians who would promise to go out
and kill so many deer a year, and then if everything worked back, everybody got
paid along the line. But more and more the Indians would fall into debt.
Theda Perdue
What Cherokees received in return was European manufactured goods; cloth,
metal tools, scissors, knives, hatchets, hoes, metal tools. They received
decorative items: mirrors, beads, Most importantly, they received guns and
ammunition.
Harvard Ayers
They loved guns, because that made it easier. And so they quickly adapted to
that, but in essence it planted the seeds of their destruction in a way, because
with guns and with the European demand for furs, they wiped out the deer
populations in this area, they wiped out the beaver populations in this area--the
Native Americans did.
Charles Hudson
Once the gun was put into the equation the gun couldn't be taken out. However
they might not wish to have guns, they had to have guns, and they had to do
what the man said they had to do to get the guns.
Narration #24
By 1720, all of the Native American tribes in Appalachia were armed with guns,
and the white-tailed deer, which had been central to the Cherokee way of life for
centuries, was becoming harder and harder to find.
Theda Perdue
Cherokees begin to produce fewer of their own commodities; so many of the
skills honed over centuries begin to wane. Things like pottery making. Why
make a clay pot when you can buy a kettle from the trader?
Laura Pennix
Also it changed the social structure. You had different traders who married in
with the Cherokee women. The matrilineal ideas of the man moving in with
the woman changed. The woman started moving in with the man, toward
more of a patrilineal situation. And then children took up names of the traders,
whereas before they belonged to a clan.
Narrator 25 ---- Alliance and Sir Alex
For Indians, trade and alliance went hand-in-hand. The fur trade became an
outward manifestation of a larger alliance between cultures, which reached a
new plateau with the strange, brash, completely unauthorized visit of Sir
Alexander Cuming to the Cherokee nation in April of the year, 1730. Something
of a showman and a confidence man, Sir Alex convinced the Cherokee to pledge
their allegiance to King George of England in return for the King's undying care.
To cement the bond, Sir Alex convinced seven Cherokee warriors to
immediately board ship and go see the King!
Wilma Dykeman
He was just a flamboyant character. I think he’s one of these people who maybe
didn’t even think about a mercenary reward--this would just be an interesting
thing to do. So he took them back to London with him, and this just became a
great event, to see these native Americans, to go and visit them. They were taken
to the opera. King George entertained them. Some of the women, it was said,
the British women, really fell in love with some of these good looking young
people.
It was written up in the London papers -- just a great event. And Attacoolacoola,
who became one of the great leaders, great Cherokee leaders, was one of those
who went on that trip. And I’m sure it always made a difference in his life,
because he was a great friend and tried to always be...to intercede and tried to
get peace between the Cherokee and the settlers there.
Narration #26 - Final Narr of Part One
The seven Cherokees remained in London for three lively months and were
widely courted and admired. Other Appalachian tribes, such as the Creeks and
the Iroquois, soon followed, each inexorably drawn into the rivalry of England,
Spain and France for dominance of the Americas and its natural wealth. For
their part, the seven Cherokee warriors proudly presented King George II with a
crown of eagle feathers and a solemn promise of loyalty, and in September,
sailed to America with an equally solemn pledge from the King:
King’s Representative -- Voice-Over
The chain of friendship between the King of Great Britain and the Cherokee Nation is like the
sun, which shines both here and also upon the great mountains where they live. The King has
fastened one end of the chain of friendship to his own breast. He desires you to carry the other
end to your wise old men, never more to be broken or made loose. He declares that the
Indians and the English may live together as the children of one family… as long as the
mountains and rivers shall last, or the sun shine.
King George II, 1730
End of Part One