HOLLOWS, PEEPERS, AND HIGHLANDERS: AN APPALACHIAN MOUNTAIN ECOLOGY

22. Highlanders

151 22 Highlanders I do not know when humans first set foot in Appalachia. Most anthropologists agree that we have been here since the last ice age, about twelve thousand years ago; a few argue for a far more ancient colonization, possibly one hundred thousand years ago. I cannot settle the question, but I can suggest a sequence of human habitation in the Appalachian Mountains: indigenous Americans, European settlers, and mountain lovers. Continuing the confessional, a second issue I cannot resolve is how our mountains got their name. In one history, Native Americans named the mountains Appalachia, or “endless mountains.” Alternate history posits that as Spaniards probed for gold in the 1500s, the Appalachee Indians of northwest Florida pointed towards the distant mountains, the southern Appalachians. A little later, European maps started carrying various forms of the name. Maybe both stories are true — perhaps it’s best left a mystery. In pre-Columbian times, eastern North America was covered by a seemingly endless forest. Closer examination may have revealed a mosaic of different forest communities interspersed with occasional openings. North American Indians used broadcast fire to clear the woods of underbrush and preclude the clandestine approach of raiding tribes. Because new grass attracted grazers such as deer, Indians used fire to maintain the wild game habitat along the forest-grass edge. They also may have used fires to drive deer to waiting hunters . In the late seventeenth century, several tribes inhabited the Blue Ridge. The Cherokee, for example, were numerous in southern 152 Appalachia, especially between today’s Asheville, North Carolina, and the Great Smoky Mountains. One census estimated twenty-five thousand Cherokee thinly dispersed through the region. Humans have also occupied West Virginia for at least twelve thousand years. This time of first colonization, which is fairly typical of many North American sites, coincides with the existence of Beringia, a land bridge that connected Russia and Alaska during the last ice age. Most anthropologists think that Asians colonized North America ten thousand to fifteen thousand years ago. Based on gross anatomy, the closest relatives of Native Americans are Siberians. After crossing the north Pacific, the first people swiftly dispersed southward to inhabit the entire western hemisphere. At first, American aborigines lived as nomads and hunted large mammals, but by 4,000 BC they adopted a semi-sedentary life-style. The hunting-gathering economy of pre-1,000 BC was gradually supplemented by small-scale horticulture. Around 800 to 900 AD, the Mississippian Mound Builders grew corn, beans, and squash. By 1,000 AD, dense populations of the Late Prehistoric Village Farmers lived in permanently stockaded villages and practiced intensive agriculture . Such evidence has led some archeologists to identify eastern North America as one of the world’s four centers of plant domestication . Paleontological evidence suggests that prehistoric Appalachian humans consumed a varied diet. During the Pleistocene, from about 1.8 million to ten thousand years ago, North America supported a community of large-bodied mammals as diverse as that roaming Africa. The southern Appalachians sustained ninety species of mammals , more than any other area of eastern North America. The large seeds of some North American plants, such as Kentucky coffee tree, osage orange, and paw paw, seem out of ecological context — no extant animals eat and pass their seeds. This incongruity suggests that recently extinct, large-bodied herbivores dispersed their seeds. Likewise, the extreme spininess of some trees, such as honey locust, does not make sense without invoking the existence of large mammals . It is not unreasonable to surmise that humans, an opportunistic omnivore, dined on this diversity. Hollows, Peepers, and Highlanders 153 Europeans began to move into Appalachia in the early 1700s. The first settlement in eastern West Virginia was built near Shepherdstown in 1719. Settlers invading the hunting grounds of the Kanawha, Mingo, Delaware, and Shawnee peoples found the forests little disturbed. The lush wildlife that provided sustenance to early European settlers apparently depended on habitat that the Native Americans had been sustaining with fires. Fires also helped maintain grassland corridors, such as the Shenandoah Valley that provided a major thoroughfare for the dispersal of settlers. As seen through my zoologist eyes, European immigrants, like other dispersing animals, may have been escaping environments that limited their survival and reproduction. Restated in the words of history , people were eager to escape intolerance, taxes, and other forms of oppression. Playing a major role in the peopling...