Twisting Air: Native Southerners and Their Encounters with Tornadoes

In 1834 John Ross, principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, facing tremendous pressure to relocate his people to the west, wrote a bitter letter to a Seneca delegation lamenting their peoples' common historical plight: "The tradition of our Fathers and the written history of the whiteman tells us, that this great and extensive Continent was once the sole and exclusive abode of our race." He continued,

The whiteman came; and lo! The animated chase, the feast, the dance, [the] song of fearless, thoughtless joy were over. And ever since, we have been made to drink of the bitter cup of humiliation; treated like dogs; our lives, our liberties, the sport of whiteman; our country and the graves of our Fathers torn from us, in cruel succession; until driven from river to river, from forest to forest, and thro' a period of upwards of 200 years, rolled back, nation upon nation, we find ourselves fugitives, vagrants and strangers in our own country, and look forward to the period when our descendants will perhaps be totally extinguished by wars, driven at the point of the bayonet into the Western Ocean, or reduced to a State still more deplorable and horrid [than] the condition of slaves.

Ross then described the situation facing his people: while the South's Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and even some of their own tribe had already "emigrated West of the Mississippi," Ross noted that the majority of the Cherokee "still remain firmly upon our ancient domain. And our position there may be compared to a solitary tree in an open space, where all the forest trees around have been prostrated by a furious tornado—save one."¹

Chief Ross's description of the United States' removal policy as "a furious tornado" was an odd metaphor, unless one considers how these storms must have impacted the communities of the Cherokees and other peoples in the Native South. At a time when the hard and social sciences are increasingly focusing on extreme environments and climate change, it is perhaps time for historians of Native America to consider how catastrophic weather phenomena affected Indigenous peoples and their communities over the course of their histories. This article examines how a particularly devastating weather event, the tornado, affected American Indians in the South and influenced the community psyche. Following is a discussion of how Native southerners conceived of tornadoes and fit them into their language, cosmology, and worldview; how the storms impacted their lives; and how they endeavored to protect themselves from these frightening and unpredictable visitors from the sky. In the end, we see that the Native nations of the South, exerting their burgeoning powers of sovereignty, have recently adopted extraordinary measures to protect their people from the dangerous funnel clouds when the state and federal governments have failed to do so.²

To a considerable extent, chasing tornadoes in the past is just as difficult as it is in the present, though decidedly not as dangerous. Although 90 percent of the world's funnel clouds appear in North America, with most of them developing in the "tornado alleys" of the Plains and the semitropical South, references to specific storms are extremely difficult to find in archaeological and early American historical records. Because of the particular construction of residential and civic buildings in the precolonial Native South, archaeological evidence of the destructive storms is essentially nonexistent for that period. Documentary records in the colonial and pre-removal eras are also almost entirely bereft of evidence of tornado damage within Indian communities. The storms are so fleeting and move so fast that the odds disfavor an abundance of preserved eyewitness accounts. Consequently, finding tornadoes in the past is akin to spotting a meteorological shooting star. As we will see, we do have evidence—from linguistic and oral traditions—indicating that tornadoes were a serious concern for Native southerners.³

Indeed, tornadoes were just as common in Native southerners' traditional territories as they have been in those regions since newspapers and the National Weather Service started reporting them consistently. In 1993 Thomas P. Grazulis, a serious student of the funnel...