In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Chapter One East Tennessee Beginnings: Cherokee and Pioneer Legacies and the Births of Three Representative Communities For countless millennia before my ancestors joined the great human migration into and beyond the Appalachians, today’s East Tennessee was home to a diverse , ever-evolving array of humans. The first epoch in East Tennessee history began when prehistoric nomads arrived at an uncertain date in a misty past, and it ended with the tragic removal of most of their Cherokee heirs in 1838. For East Tennessee’s native inhabitants, the appearance of Spanish explorers in the midsixteenth century, and the arrival of permanent British settlers two centuries later, produced dramatic, uneven, ultimately tragic consequences. Encounters between the “Overhill Cherokees” and the array of Europeans who invaded East Tennessee over the course of more than two hundred years were, however, far more complex than either mythical accounts from our great national saga or popular recollections of our region’s pioneer past suggest. Although the Cherokees and their Caucasian competitors held radically different worldviews and understandings of land and nature, a similar intent to control East Tennessee’s terrain became the focal point and ultimate prize of their cross-cultural collision . Insights from that encounter offer glimpses of patterns pervading much of East Tennessee’s subsequent history. Although details are debated, consensus suggests that nomadic hunters arrived in the Appalachian region 12–13,000 years ago. Over the course of several millennia, populations increased and levels of culture became increasingly sophisticated . This ascendant course peaked in the Mississippian era (ca. 900–1300 AD) when mound-builder cultures from the Mississippi Valley spread their influence into the Appalachian foothills. As their characteristic mounds reveal, these peoples developed a sophisticated worldview and a degree of social stratification that enabled them to construct impressive structures and urban centers. Surplus cultivation of corn and widespread trade networks (stretching as far as the high cultures of Meso-America) sustained Mississippian chiefdoms that peaked East Tennessee Beginnings 26 around the fourteenth century. But then, two centuries before Columbus’s arrival , a mysterious array of interrelated economic, political, and environmental stresses initiated a slow decline of the Mississippian cultures. When the Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto trekked through what is now East Tennessee in 1539– 40, he encountered the consequences of this cultural devolution. Throughout the two and a half centuries after de Soto’s visit, the “Overhill Cherokee” were the dominant (but never the sole) native presence in what became East Tennessee. In response to unprecedented challenges, the Cherokees displayed a remarkable capacity for cultural adaptation that demands we put away mythical understandings of Native American–white interaction. Neither longstanding images of bloodthirsty savages who deserved an unfortunate, inevitable fate, nor the more recently fashionable charges that greedy, aggressive whites unmercifully annihilated innocent Indian victims accurately capture what transpired. Despite disease-imposed demographic devastation, instinctive adaptive skills made the Cherokees surprisingly resilient. By developing sophisticated trade, diplomatic, and marital relationships with French and English intruders , the Cherokees forged a mutually beneficial “middle ground,” which assured them a prominent role in East Tennessee’s increasingly complex, intercultural politics, and introduced them to new cultural traditions. The ultimate collapse of the middle ground during the critical era leading up to the American Revolution has blinded some observers to its relative effectiveness. Until the final third of the eighteenth century, balancing old with new enabled the Cherokees to delay dependency on outsiders and minimize debilitating internal divisions. The Cherokees were only the first East Tennesseans to face such challenges. The political key to the middle ground was a relative balance of power between the various groups occupying early East Tennessee. For two and a half centuries, Cherokee diplomats effectively played Spanish, French, and English interests—and those of their varied native neighbors—against one another to enhance Cherokee wellbeing. But the clear-cut British victory in the French and Indian War, and the subsequent flood of land-hungry settlers in today’s upper East Tennessee—in defiance of Britain’s ineffective Proclamation of 1763—upset that balance. For the first time, a large, permanent body of Caucasian neighbors lived among the Cherokees. When British-colonial relations ruptured in 1776, many Cherokees sided with the British. Ferocious native attacks on the burgeoning Watauga, Holston, and Carter’s Valley settlements made the backcountry one of the bloodiest theaters of the Revolution. The attacks also affirmed both the settlers’ allegiance to the patriot cause and their enduring enmity for the Cherokees. When the British sought peace...

Share