A History of Appalachia

Richard B. Drake

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9780813137933
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de Norteamérica

Richard Drake has skillfully woven together the various strands of the Appalachian experience into a sweeping whole. Touching upon folk traditions, health care, the environment, higher education, the role of blacks and women, and much more, Drake offers a compelling social history of a unique American region.

The Appalachian region, extending from Alabama in the South up to the Allegheny highlands of Pennsylvania, has historically been characterized by its largely rural populations, rich natural resources that have fueled industry in other parts of the country, and the strong and wild, undeveloped land. The rugged geography of the region allowed Native American societies, especially the Cherokee, to flourish. Early white settlers tended to favor a self-sufficient approach to farming, contrary to the land grabbing and plantation building going on elsewhere in the South.

The growth of a market economy and competition from other agricultural areas of the country sparked an economic decline of the region's rural population at least as early as 1830. The Civil War and the sometimes hostile legislation of Reconstruction made life even more difficult for rural Appalachians.

Recent history of the region is marked by the corporate exploitation of resources. Regional oil, gas, and coal had attracted some industry even before the Civil War, but the postwar years saw an immense expansion of American industry, nearly all of which relied heavily on Appalachian fossil fuels, particularly coal. What was initially a boon to the region eventually brought financial disaster to many mountain people as unsafe working conditions and strip mining ravaged the land and its inhabitants.

A History of Appalachia also examines pockets of urbanization in Appalachia. Chemical, textile, and other industries have encouraged the development of urban areas. At the same time, radio, television, and the internet provide residents direct links to cultures from all over the world. The author looks at the process of urbanization as it belies commonly held notions about the region's rural character.

Part 1

The Contest for Appalachia

The mountainous area of eastern North America was fought over, first by numerous Indian nations. Then came the Spanish, Dutch, French and English from across the Atlantic Ocean, to establish settlement in the coastal areas, then to spread slowly into the Appalachian Mountains. Finally the European-derived United States, largely with English institutions, extended its control over this mountainous area.

1

The Indian Era

THE APPALACHIAN MOUNTAINS are located entirely within the temperate zone, from about 33 to 48 degrees north latitude. The significant climatic difference between the valley floors, some at less than one thousand feet and the peaks at six thousand feet and more, assures a great variety of natural life. All the area enjoys adequate rainfall, from 40 to 120 inches annually. The diversity of life that has developed in these mountains is spectacular. Varieties of azalea, laurel, and hundreds of other plants may have originated here. Bird life is as varied in Appalachia as anywhere in the world. And in pre—Columbian times, deer, bison, mountain lion, fox, wolf and beaver roamed the mountain forests in great variety and quantity. Humans too came to these mountains, initially in quest of fish and game and the nuts, berries, and seeds that could be gathered.

The first people who came to Appalachia were descendants of people who had migrated from Asia. It is clear that humans did not originate in the Western Hemisphere, as we have no remains of primordial apes in the New World, nor have we found any sites that can be classified as paleolithic.

Much nonsense has been written about the history of the American Indian. But the writing about American Indian history has changed remarkably over the past fifty years. As recently as 1945, Indian history was an amalgam of racial myth, arguments between feuding schools of archaeology, eyewitness accounts, papers attacking the way whites have treated Indians, and romantic musings. To be sure, there were accurate and useful descriptions that subsequent historians and archaeologists could depend upon, such as James Mooney’s studies of the Cherokee in the late nineteenth century conducted for the Bureau of American Ethnology. And in the history of American anthropology, the studies of Indian societies played a significant role in that discipline’s “Golden Age.”

On the whole, however, the literature of American Indian history still remains confusing. For examples, some supposedly authoritative books have assured us that American Indian history could not possibly be older than 10,000 B.C. Others have insisted on an ancient Western Hemisphere past beginning around 30,000 B.C. Some nineteenth-century authors were certain that, since the American Indian was of a “savage race,” the remains left by the Mound Builders must have been left by some Old World migrants, such as the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel or the Phoenecians. Other tales insisted that these Indian ruins were left by the Welsh or the Norsemen. Some recent archaeologists have even posited that the ancient Maya of Mexico gained their civilization from some Chinese monk who found his way across the central Pacific.

The story of the American Indian is still an uncertain one. Records are spotty. We have only recently begun to read the ancient languages of Central America; however, all Indian societies in the eastern part of the present-day United States were preliterate. But thanks to the significant researches of a host of scholars—Charles Hudson, Francis Jennings, James Crawford, Charles Faulkner, Raymond Fogelson, Jack F. Kilpatrick, Theda Perdue, Whitcomb Washburn, John R. Swanton, John Finger, Roy S. Dickens Jr.—as well as Native American scholars finding their own voice, Indian history has finally “arrived.” No longer can students of American history ignore the Native American past and present.

Archaeologists generally divide Indian time in eastern North America into five cultural periods: 1) the Paleo–Indian Period, 2) the Archaic Period, 3) the Woodland Tradition, 4) the Mississippian Period, and 5) the Historic Era. The Paleo–Indian Period is the most ancient. During this phase of time, the American Indian followed large game across the plains and forests of North America. In eastern North America, it appears that the Ohio Valley was peopled by these ancient Indians, who were constantly on the move.

More information is available about the Archaic Period. Beginning about eight thousand years ago, societies that had become less dependent upon hunting large animals developed a more diversified economy of gathering various vegetables, fishing, and hunting small game. Such a society could settle a specific area and establish a home.

Appalachia was occupied by Indian societies at least as early as the Archaic Period. At the Russell Cave site in Madison County in northern Alabama, particularly rich remains indicate that the site was occupied as far back as 6000 B.C. The Quad site near Birmingham, Alabama, may in fact date back to the Paleo–Indian Period. In this more settled period, caves were carefully selected for more-or-less permanent homes. Certain areas of Appalachia would be most attractive to such societies, as in the Red River Gorge area of Kentucky, where about one hundred appropriate caves are concentrated, and which evidence suggests was inhabited by a sizeable population during the Archaic Period.

The Woodland Tradition in eastern North America began around 1000 B.C. and dominated the area until about A.D. 700 or 1000. Charles Hudson calls this culture “the most completely indigenous culture ever to exist in eastern North America,” for it enjoyed not only the traditional agricultural culture of the American Indian, based on growing corn and squash, but it also developed in unique ways through its pottery, cooking, building, and earthworks. It was within this Woodland Tradition that the several mound builder cultures developed.

The Woodland Tradition developed most notably in the Mississippi and Ohio Valleys, but it spread widely into Appalachia. One of its finest sites, Old Stone Fort, is in central Tennessee near Manchester. There, a fifty-acre area is protected by cliffs on two sides, and rambling earthwork walls enclose it on the other two. One wall is forty-six hundred feet long. In the case of Old Stone Fort, the earthwork mounds were probably defensive, but other mounds built by Woodland folk were for other purposes—burial, religious, civic, etc. Some were built in animal effigy shapes.

The Adena culture in southern Ohio, West Virginia, and Kentucky is one of the most interesting societies of the Woodland Tradition. The Adena were farmers and built their villages along rivers in clusters of round houses made of saplings and bark. These communities were gathered about a conical burial mound sometimes seventy feet high, and often were surrounded by an earthen wall. Furthermore, the Adena were excellent potters, who may have learned their technique of limestone tempering from the small Candy Creek culture in East Tennesee. Adena stonework and ornamentation in copper and mica was outstanding.

One of the most remarkable of all Woodland Indian societies was the Hopewell culture. Like the Adena, the Hopewell built mounds, though they were far more elaborate than those of the Adena. The Hopewell’s period, from A.D. 900 to 1300, is usually referred to as the Burial Mound II Period. Southern Ohio was also the center of Hopewell influence. But this culture spread to Illinois, West Virginia, and perhaps into Kentucky and Tennessee.

The Hopewell mounds are their most impressive ruin. Indeed, these people seem to have been so enamored by their burial rites that a high proportion of their surplus was spent on death, particularly for the burial rites of their chieftains. In Hamilton County, Ohio, mounds can be found that span a mile and more. Hopewell burial remains within the conical mounds have yielded copper and iron breastplates and necklaces, antlered head-plates made of copper, rings, beads, necklaces of pearls—one site yielded forty-eight thousand pearls—elaborate obsidian knives, conch shells, and alligator teeth. These artifacts indicate an active trade system stretching to the Rocky Mountains, northern Michigan, and south to Florida.

Socially, the Hopewell lived in an elaborate and stratified society, with considerable local control in the hands of the chieftain. The various villages in the Hopewell system appear to have been held together in a loose confederacy. It may have been that the only thing that held the far-flung Hopewell together was the burial cult and the elaborate system of trade that was necessary to support it.

For some reason, from 1200 or 1300, the Hopewell culture went into decline. It may have been that the riches they had gathered for their dead were too attractive to their more military neighbors. Or perhaps their institutions could not handle their enlarging populations. In any event, raiding and warfare became endemic, and the Hopewell sites moved away from riverbanks to hilltops, which they fortified with elaborate earthworks, as at Fort Ancient just north of Cincinnati. It may have been a remnant Hopewell group in this declining military period that fortified an Appalachian mountaintop in southern Madison County, Kentucky.

With the decline of the Hopewell, though the Woodland culture remained a strong tradition throughout the north, the major cultural event in the southern area of the present United States during the subsequent years prior to the coming of the Europeans, was the emergence of the Temple Mound culture, or the Middle Mississippian Tradition. One of the most dramatic ruins of this culture is at Cahokia, near East St. Louis, Illinois. Eighty-five mounds and a large city extended along the river for six miles. The largest mound at Cahokia was one hundred feet high and covered sixteen acres at its base. The mounds built in the Mississippian Tradition were square or rectangular and built in truncated pyramid fashion, with a ramp leading to the top—perhaps an influence of the Mayas and the Aztecs. It is likely these mounds were used for chief’s houses or temples.

The Mississippian Tradition persisted into historic times, as did the Woodland Tradition. Many European accounts describe societies that shared both cultures. The Mississippians were apparently organized into village, even city-states, and the impressive earthen walls seem to imply much warfare. The size of some of these settlements and the earthworks that surrounded them indicate that they were the products of sizeable populations. At Cahokia estimates are that thirty-eight thousand people lived within the five-and-one-half square miles of the city walls. Within the Appalachian region, the principal society influenced by Mississippian culture was the Cherokee.

Mississippian sites that have been excavated in Southern Appalachia include the Tellico and Dallas sites in East Tennessee, the King site in northern Georgia, and the Koger Island site in northern Alabama. This variant of Mississippian culture has been termed “Southern Appalachian Mississippian,” which modified the flat-topped pyramidal mound and also retained some Woodland characteristics. Sites of this Southern Appalachian Mississippian culture have been found in Georgia, South Carolina, and in western North Carolina. Its best examples are in northern Georgia—in the Nacoochee Valley near Cleveland and at Etowah near Calhoun. In fact, most of the Southeast Indians in historic times—the Cherokee, Creek, and Choctaw—were essentially Mississippian in culture.

Clear archaeological scholarship traces Cherokee beginnings back at least to the beginning of the Mississippian Period, or to about A.D. 1000. By 1650, the Cherokee economy had developed upon a broad agricultural base and had a sophisticated trade system that dealt with Europeans and a wide variety of Indian nations—some of them quite distant.

When Europeans came into these mountains, the Cherokee dominated the Southern Appalachians by means of a loose confederacy held together by ties of language, kinship, trade, and custom. Alien and hostile groups surrounded the Cherokee—the Creeks, Catawba, and Chickasaws mainly to the south, west, and east. Although most shared a common Temple Mound culture, they were of different language traditions. After the year 1600, until about 1780, the Cherokee were the dominant power in the Southern Appalachians.

For most of the period of their major importance the Cherokee were situated in some seventy towns, with a total population of perhaps twenty thousand, though some estimates exceed ten times that population before European contact. These towns were clustered in four general areas—the Lower Cherokee on the upper Savannah River in Georgia and South Carolina; the Middle Cherokee on the Tuckasegee and the headwaters of the Little Tennessee in western North Carolina; the Upper Cherokee on the Hiwassee, also in North Carolina; and the Overhill Cherokee on the Lower Little Tennessee. Cherokee used lands that were far more widespread, and at the height of their population, they hunted and gathered regularly in Kentucky, half of West Virginia, as well as parts of northern Georgia and northern Alabama.

The Cherokee called themselves “Aniyunwiya,” meaning “the principal people.” Probably, they had moved to their southern home from the north, where they had been part of the Iroquois people. The Cherokee speak an Iroquoian language, and linguists believe the Cherokee separated from the main body of Iroquois even thousands of years ago. The Cherokee believe that their original town in the south was Kituwah in Swain County, North Carolina, from which they grew to their later strength.

There is now a general consensus that the Cherokee were in the mountains at the time of the de Soto expedition in 1540. The Cherokee political system and method of warfare were largely male-oriented and involved organization to overcome perceived insult and vengeance. War to the Cherokee was not conceived of as having long-run effects and was organized more as a retaliatory raid. Generally, Cherokee warriors fought one battle and promptly returned home.

During the time when the Cherokee were in firm control of Southern Appalachia, they principally contested with the Catawba, centered in the Carolina Piedmont, and with the powerful Creek, centered in tidewater Georgia and Alabama on their south and west. But the Cherokee were also confronted by a development of Indian nations on their north as well. To the north of the Cherokee nation in the mountainous areas of Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Virginia was a complex of mostly migrating Algonquian groups, particularly the Shawnee, Delaware, and Conestoga. From about 1630 to 1730, a kind of “Indian haven” emerged in Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna Valley that connected Cherokee trade with the powerful Iroquois Confederacy in what is now the state of New York. These various Indian nations all shared the Woodland cultural tradition and fit together a temporary concentration of Indian peoples who, though some had been driven from their original lands along the Atlantic coast, fit themselves into a British–Iroquois alliance system some scholars refer to as the “Covenant Chain.” This Covenant Chain was disrupted in Pennsylvania by the grants of land made by the sons of William Penn in the 1730s, and the affected Indian groups were forced to migrate again into areas farther west, particularly the mountains of West Virginia and southern Ohio. The Covenant Chain remained in effect for another generation or so with the Iroquois in western New York State.

During the sixteenth century in New York, meanwhile, the politically powerful Iroquois Confederacy was pieced together so effectively that no Indian power during the seventeenth and eighteenth century in northeastern America was able to stand against them. It had been around 1570 that the prophet Deganawidah, about whom tradition claimed a virgin birth, established the “Great Peace” between the squabbling five tribes of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca nations. He had a dream in which a giant evergreen tree reached into the sky as far as the hand of the Master of Life. The roots of the tree were the Five Nations of the Iroquois. Deganawidah’s vision became reality through the labors of a Mohawk statesman, Hiawatha, who is said to have argued so persistently for union that he was banished by his own tribe and was forced to live with another. But years of traveling from one Iroquoian nation to another resulted in an unwritten constitution that established a Great Council for the making of decisions about common war policy. In the late sixteenth century, the Iroquois Confederacy had become a fact. By the time Europeans had arrived in Quebec, Massachusetts, and New York, the Iroquois preeminence was a reality with which the Europeans had to deal.

Some admirers claimed that the power of the Five Nations, the confederacy of five Iroquoian-speaking Indian nations in the north, influenced the political affairs of Indian peoples as far east as New Brunswick, as far west as Nebraska, as far south as Carolina and the Cherokee lands, and north to Hudson Bay. The warriors of the Iroquois’ Five Nations, in fact, developed a frightful military reputation that struck terror into the hearts of their enemies. Cadwallader Colden, an English governor of New York and great admirer of the Iroquois, said of them in the 1760s: “I have been told by old men in New England, who remember the Time when the Mohawks made War on their Indians, that as soon as a single Mohawk was discovered in the Country, their Indians raised the cry from Hill to Hill, A Mohawk! A Mohawk! Upon which they all fled like sheep before wolves, without attempting to make the least resistance, whatever Odds were on their side.”

The terror loosed by the Iroquois was most effective for centuries. However, Francis Jennings, the principal historian of the Iroquois, claims that their hold on such a vast area was based less on military success than upon diplomatic effectiveness through the Covenant Chain relations with the British colonies of Pennsylvania and New York. The Hurons, Erie, Neutrals, Delaware, and Conestogas, however, were unfortunate enough to be outside the confederacy itself, and to be occupying adjoining lands in Ontario or Pennsylvania; these nations were defeated and in some cases utterly destroyed. The Cherokee were indeed fortunate to have established themselves in the southern mountains by 1600, but even the Cherokee carried on intermittent warfare with their northern cousins throughout most of the eighteenth century.

Most of the Indians of eastern North America spoke languages included in the Algonkin family of languages. On this sea of Algonkin tribes, the Iroquoian-speaking nations of Appalachia sat in troubled domination—the Iroquois Confederation of the Five Nations to the north in Appalachian New York, and the Cherokee to the south, centered in East Tennessee, northern Georgia and western North Carolina. Politically, however, the most significant and most persisting threat to the Cherokee in their southern mountain homeland was the Muskogean-speaking tribes that dominated the southern coastal plain, particularly the Creeks. Culturally the Cherokee and the Creeks were similar—they had both adopted the ways of the Mississippian culture. Their villages had temple mounds and were walled when appropriate. Elaborate assembly halls were prominent. William Bartram, who visited the Cherokee town of Whatoga in the 1770s, wrote the following about that town: “Riding through this large town, the road carried me winding about through their little plantations of corn, Beans, and up to the councilhouse, which was a very large dome or rotunda, situated on the top of an ancient artificial mount, and here my road terminated. All before me and on every side, appeared little plantations of Corn, Beans and divided from each other by narrow strips or borders of grass, which marked the bounds of each one’s property, their habitation standing in the midst.”

Bartram also visited the Overhill Cherokee town of Cowe, which consisted of “about one hundred dwellings, near the banks of the Tanase.” The homes were “one oblong four square building” made of logs “stripped of their bark, notched at their ends” in a manner by then imitative of European log buildings. In the midst of the dwellings was a “town-house,” a large rotunda capable of accommodating several hundred people which was built “on the top of an artificial mount of earth … the whole an elevation of about sixty feet.”

Unlike the Cherokee, the Five Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, as well as the Shawnee, Delaware, and Conestoga, had adopted few Mississippian customs and retained most of the older Woodland Tradition. Their villages, though often fortified by wooden stockades, were collections of log houses built of saplings and bark. No burial or temple mounds appear in Iroquois or Shawnee villages. Though they were agriculturalists as well as hunters, fur traders, and fisherman, the Five Nations appear not to have had much artistic or architectural genius. Their accomplishments were primarily political and military.

Both traditional Iroquoian and Cherokee societies were matrilineal; in other words, both arranged family and social connections according to female ancestry. Women served as heads of households in charge of houses, the agricultural and economic arrangements, as well as child rearing. The sexual division of labor in Cherokee society meant that farming was the responsibility of the women, while the men hunted and fought the wars of vengeance. Among the tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy, the military and diplomatic functions were so time-consuming that the men were constantly traveling among the groups tributary to the Iroquois. Their diplomatic and military duties so totally dominated their time that Iroquoian society at home came to be dominated by the women, who also carried on local governance. On the other hand, historian Theda Perdue is of the opinion that the power of Iroquois women, which was derived from the matrilineal kinship system and their very major role in agriculture, began to erode when the fur trade increasingly dominated the economy. Thus a complex and changing situation faced Cherokee and Iroquois society as the eighteenth century proceeded.

Indian politics and warfare were fierce enough even before 1680. By that time, the demand of Europeans for furs and deerskins, which the Indians could take from the Appalachian forests, created even more fierce economic rivalries, thus serving to reinforce traditional animosities. In the Southeast, the invasion of various Muskogean peoples, the Creeks particularly, served to disrupt the earlier control of the Shawnee and the Catawbas—the former a wandering Algonkin-speaking nation, the latter a Siouxan-speaking nation far from their fellows on the High Plains. Consequently, kinship differences combined with conflicting political and economic interests to keep warfare an ever-present possibility for Indian nations during the eighteenth century.

By modern standards, the pressure on the land and resources in this p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Maps
• Introduction
• Part 1 The Contest for Appalachia
• Part 2 The New Nation and the Appalachian Backwoods
• Part 3 Modern Appalachia
• Sources
• Index