Seedtime on the Cumberland

3. The First Settlers

35 CHAPTER 3 The First Settlers Once I had a garden on a bench of land on the side of a narrow valley, a valley so narrow with the hill across the way so high that, though the hillside faced west, the hill shadow would creep across my garden long before suppertime. It was then, while my husband did the barn chores and the long shadow merged into twilight, I did my gardening. Gardening went slowly at times, for my hoe was always turning up things other than dirt, and I would kneel, clean the just-found thing and study it, or even take it into the house. The place had then been farmed for more than one hundred and fifty years, and all around were the reminders of other farm wives; I smelled the tansy they had set, cared for the hop vine, cut back the honeysuckle, and rescued the burning bush from brush and saplings, for the place had long been abandoned with the Cumberland National Forest taking the fields of neighboring farms. My hoe found many things—square nails, fragments of broken dolls and dishes, small chunks of iron rusted into shapelessness, now and then an ox shoe crumbling with rust, bone buttons, or small fragments of cane splints once part of a weaving sleigh. Side by side with such things I often found reminders of those others who had known and loved the valley and maybe used the spring, long before a white woman came with tansy and hop vines and demands for a good stone spring house that in time got built, only some generations later to be scattered by tenants, the blocks used for stepping stones. Those others had been master hands at working in stone, and I found only stone reminders, usually arrowheads of flint, other times some larger shapes, flaked but seemingly unfinished and over which I could only wonder. I had, like many gardeners on the Cumberland, been finding such since childhood; as a teacher I often from my pupils had little gifts of arrowheads and larger objects of stone, smooth, with a groove around the middle. 36| Chapter 3 Other times we would, when exploring some shallow and dry cave, find flint-flakings under the blown-in leaves and thin layer of rock dust; clearly men of long ago had sat in the shelter and worked enough to replenish their supply of arrowheads, or so we thought. The spring plowing of most any garden plot or field I ever knew usually yielded some reminder of these people who disappeared before white men were around to write their history. Once, while walking over the country some years ago I came among a crew of men building a road in one of those high, wide limestone valleys up on Big Sinking. They had dug into a clay and gravel bank some distance back from the stream, and found a lot of skeletons. I selected from the scattered bones two quite good skulls and took them home to show my mother. One came all to pieces on the trip and only a part of the other was left, chiefly, the lower jawbone with the teeth sound-looking still, but sadly worn and little higher than their sockets. I had envisioned some old chief, dying ripe and filled with years, but when I took the skull to an anthropologist at the University of Cincinnati, I learned it was that of a young woman. Years later I learned from another anthropologist1 down in Tennessee that the young teeth had been worn down by gritty food; seeds, nuts, and other fare that pounded by a stone pestle in a stone mortar had got particles of grit from the stone tools, and so the teeth had suffered. When did the woman live, and of what group or tribe or nation, are all questions that cannot be exactly answered. Some of the artifacts found could have been used by modern tribes of Indians, for many hunted over the region, but for none was any part of the river basin more than a temporary home. The Cumberland from the time the French first learned of it was a no man’s land. It is doubtful, too, if much hunting was done with bow and arrow or stone club by modern Indians. The Cherokee were, by 1673, and for how much earlier we do not know, getting guns from the Spanish.2 Less than twenty years later a band of...