Blood in the Hills: A History of Violence in Appalachia

Chapter 4: The "Ferocious Character" of Antebellum Georgia's Gold Country

In 1833, a miner in Auraria, in the heart of Appalachian Georgia’s recently developed gold mining region, exclaimed in a letter home: “I have never before been amongst such a complete set of lawless beings.” At the same time and place, an exasperated judge described his fellow residents as “thieves, gamblers, and murderers—quarrelsome, drunk, and malicious— forming altogether a lawless, ungovernable community. This condition could not be tolerated by an English people.”1 With the rush of thousands of newcomers into the Blue Ridge Mountains of northeast Georgia in the months and years after gold’s discovery there in 1828, many shared the impression of these two observers, noting the many ruffians, drifters, and con men who had turned this remote frontier on the bounds of Cherokee country into an excessively violent and brutal society. Curiously, this phase of southern highland settlement, as tumultuous and colorful as it was, seems to have had little lingering effect on later perceptions of Appalachia as a violent, depraved, and backward society. This was true despite the fact that one of the earliest novels to be set in southern Appalachia focused on the gold country of Georgia’s highlands, which also happened to be the second novel of one of the antebellum South’s most distinguished and popular writers, William Gilmore Simms.2 His Guy Rivers , published in two volumes in 1834, was critically well received and sold well, especially among northern readers. It was the first of his so-called Border Romances, which Simms described as “A Tale of Georgia—a tale of the miners—of a frontier and wild people, and the events are precisely such as may occur among a people & in a region of that character.”3 The “Ferocious Character” of Antebellum Georgia’s Gold Country Chapter 4 Frontier Lawlessness and Violence in Fact and Fiction 99 John C. Inscoe 100 John C. Inscoe Simms made violence a prevalent theme of the novel; his title character, in fact, is perhaps the most ruthless criminal ever to appear in his vast fictional output. He filled his narrative with multiple forms of violence— ambushes and knife fights; lynchings and murders; pitched battles between rival gangs, vigilantes, and military forces—all of which were very real parts of the early days in Georgia’s gold country. Indeed, he so effectively captured that rough-and-tumble world that the preeminent Simms scholar, Frontispiece of William Gilmore Simms’s Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia (New York: Harper and Bros., 1834). The “Ferocious Character” of Antebellum Georgia’s Gold Country 101 John Caldwell Guilds, has called Guy Rivers a landmark in American fiction , noting that “for the first time in our literature the ugliness, the lawlessness , the brutality of the early nineteenth-century American frontier was fully exposed.”4 Yet just as this social upheaval was rarely incorporated into emerging images of southern Appalachia, so this first major literary effort to be set in the same region is rarely acknowledged in treatments of Appalachian literature .5 This essay explores why this is the case. Was there nothing regionally inherent in the nature of the violence that took place in these goldfields, or were there other, more prevailing factors in both the historical realities and their fictional re-creations that rendered the Appalachian context of Georgia ’s gold rush peripheral or even irrelevant to its subsequent characterization and interpretation? It remains unclear when gold was first discovered in the Georgia mountains . The most widely accepted account has a young resident, Benjamin Parks, stumbling upon a sizeable nugget while hunting along the Chestatee River in 1828. But it was an announcement in the Georgia Journal in the state capital of Milledgeville the following year that brought on the “rush.” On August 1, 1829, the newspaper proclaimed that two mines had just been discovered in Habersham County, and “preparations are making to bring these hidden treasures of the earth to use.” By year’s end, thousands of “twenty-niners” from throughout the Southeast fell prey to “gold fever” and converged on the region centered primarily in Habersham, Lumpkin, and White counties.6 As was true in most such situations, those who made up that “rush” represented all types of men, but drew most heavily from the lower, often unattached, classes, for whom the opportunity for fast gain and quick profits proved irresistible. They constituted the majority of the populace of the first boom towns in the...