INTRODUCTION

AN INVITING SPOT

OCONALUFTEE VALLEY has simple, direct appeal: it is a beautiful, wide V-shaped valley formed by a river of the same name flowing down the North Carolina side of the main ridge of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The river, the largest on the North Carolina side of the park, gathers from streams coming off Richland Mountain and Thomas Ridge and broadens and deepens as it follows a southern course through the park and then through Cherokee, North Carolina. Its largest tributaries, memorializing the mountain family history of the valley, are Bradley Fork and Raven Fork, but plenty of other creeks flow into the Oconaluftee, such as Upper Grassy and Lower Grassy Branches, Sweat Heifer Creek, Coon Branch, Kephart Prong, Beech Flats Prong, Smith Branch, Kanati Fork, Cliff Branch, Jim Mac Branch, Shell Bark Branch, Will Branch, and Collins Creek—all coming off Richland Mountain. Outside of Cherokee, the Oconaluftee turns west until its confluence with the Tuckasegee River at Ela, North Carolina, which flows into and through Bryson City, emptying, eventually, into the Little Tennessee. Formed by the river’s erosion, Oconaluftee Valley opens gracefully via curves to east and west. Today, park visitors trace these curves as they descend along Highway 441 from Newfound Gap to the base of the mountains. Each curve yields a terrace along the spine of the highway, often a shelf cleared at some point for a camp or home. As one descends, the clearings enlarge into broad floodplains, and these are the locations of prehistoric villages, mountain family farms, and twentieth-century towns.

Cherokee legend tells us that, as the earth was forming, a buzzard created the mountains and valleys. Sent by all the other animals to look for dry, habitable land, the buzzard had to fly for a long time, and, becoming tired, it gradually drifted lower and lower over the wet clay of the world. Its wings touched the earth, shaping the valleys on the downstroke and the mountains on the upstroke. Oconaluftee looks like a place made by the flight of a large, weary raptor, so the tale accurately captures the mood of the landscape. According to another cosmography, geologists explain that a fault (eponymously titled the Oconaluftee Fault) lying along the floor of the valley is primarily responsible for the area’s topography. As the valley broadens along this fault, the two dominant rock formations of the Smokies are exposed: Thunderhead Sandstone and the highly acidic Anakeesta Formation. Both metamorphosed formations are late Precambrian, that is, more than 570 million years old. Even older rock appears south of the Smokemont Campground where the oldest rock of the park, the Precambrian basement complex, begins to become visible in roadcuts. This rock, also metamorphic, is more than 1 billion years old and composed largely of granite gneiss, formed over eons by heat and pressure on granite. As geologist Henry Moore explains, the basement complex comprises “the ancient crystalline foundation on which all the other strata of the area have been deposited.”¹ In other words, it is the rock bottom of the park and of the valley. Of course, much of it is covered by stream sediment and forests, allowing for the arable fields of Mississippian cultures, Cherokees, and, later, mountain families of European descent.

The buzzard- or fault-formed slopes lining the valley sides welcome human habitation in their gentle S-curve outlines. The river offers the necessities of life: freshwater, good soil for crops, forest for game hunting and timber for manufacture, and comforting views of surrounding, protective mountains to the east. Rattlesnake Mountain dominates the vista east from the park’s visitor center in Oconaluftee. Anyone looking for a place to live would recognize the valley as a premier choice. Many people from prehistory until the establishment of the park in 1934 did just that. They came here to live and farm and have families, so the valley that today looks open and uncluttered by the trappings of human life is very different than it was for centuries, when human occupation teemed in dozens of camps, villages, and towns.

Which brings us to the name: Oconaluftee. Could its euphony be more inviting or entrancing? One must slow down to say the name, forming five long vowels in turn, easing the pace of thought and then the pulse. In Cherokee, the word means “by the river.” Egwâni is Cherokee for river, and nu’lti or nulti means “near” or “beside.” That word, Egwânul’ti, first referred to a Cherokee village outside the park area that had a sizable mound and was located by the river as it turns west in Nick Bottom, close to present-day Bird Town in the Eastern Band’s Qualla Boundary.² As the years passed, colonial landowners and mountain families mistakenly applied the name of the village, which was destroyed during a Revolutionary War raid, to the river. So, odd as it is for a river to be the “by the river river,” that’s literally what one says when one says “Oconaluftee River.” But to the ears of English speakers, the name’s sonority suggests the river’s character: a sparkling, wide, often friendly stream for fishing, swimming, and wading. Fittingly, people have always wanted to live in the valley’s fertile bottomlands.

For these reasons, the valley has been an important location to the Eastern Band for centuries. In addition, everything that happened in the park’s history happened here, one way or another. That is, all the periods of the region’s history have a chapter or two set in Oconaluftee: prehistoric civilizations, traditional Cherokee culture, fur traders and trading posts, colonial conflict and settlement, Trail of Tears–era drama, mountain farming communities, Civil War soldiers and raids, logging camps, New Deal Civilian Conservation Corps camps, World War II–era conscientious objectors, tourists, and descendants of a distinctive triracial community, some remaining in the parts of the valley that were not absorbed into the park and others returning to annual church revivals to remember a lifestyle that has been curtailed. The park portion of the valley has been unsung, but it offers legends and historical accounts of watershed events and influential individuals. It is the famous place you drive through without knowing its distinction, perhaps because it is a gateway to the high peaks, but perhaps also because the tale is so long and old that much of it no longer comes to mind. The Cherokee portion, of course, has been much celebrated, though the association between the two dominant ethnic groups has been somewhat neglected. The simple appeal of the valley lulls us into vague reminiscences and nostalgia. Brought to light, one finds much to take in about personal and community resilience in the face of international, national, and regional external forces and trends.

Horace Kephart, the influential park proponent and journalist, called the high peaks of the Smokies “an Eden still unpeopled and unspoiled.” He referred to his camp on Hazel Creek as the “Back of Beyond” (capitalized as a proper noun), a title that has become an alluring phrase to characterize the whole park area before commercial logging arrived in the last decades of the nineteenth century.³ This term suggests isolation and autonomy, but neither was absolute, particularly for a watershed such as the Oconaluftee Valley. Perhaps valley residents felt distant from village, county, and city doings as they tended their farms and sat on their front porches spinning fiber into thread, churning butter, playing music, and attending to all the essential chores of keeping a home repaired and a family fed. But they were not beyond the reach of outside political, administrative, economic, and social forces. At turns, they faced challenges, gained support from government agents, and were swept into systems, conflicts, and initiatives that they did not seek and did not have a part in creating. Though remote, the valley’s location and resources situated its residents within transformational events, sometimes centrally, rather than exempting them from involvement and participation. Further, the vision of the valley as an isolated place inhabited by self-sufficient yeoman farmers was never true because its denizens willingly engaged in far-reaching trade networks throughout decades, even centuries.

When I began this project, I was advised to focus on the part of the valley that became parkland, which meant a story of white families who bought land from the federal or state government and settled in the valley. For a brief time, I thought this approach was possible. But as I began to recognize the significant, numerous, and consequential interconnections between them and the Cherokee community, this approach became untenable. There is simply no way to separate the two ethnic groups and chronicle the valley’s history; further, attempting such an effort would only diminish its value and meaning for readers today. Similarly, understating the presence and impact of slavery in the valley (and region, for that matter) would be misleading, inaccurate, and insulting. Though the white mountain families and the Cherokees may not always have preferred their propinquity to another ethnic group, and though their different status meant that they faced different challenges and options in response to crises, they were and behaved as neighbors. The groups were not fully integrated into all aspects of one another’s lives, but ongoing connections with few hostilities among residents marked life in the valley. The records about the two groups are largely separate, yet I suspect that there was far more personal contact and everyday community between the Cherokee and white families than I have discovered. Most of the individuals included in this history were not public figures and would not have anticipated the appearance of their names in a book decades after their deaths. They lived private lives.

This book offers an account of the lives of all the people of the valley that can be constructed from published and archival sources. It traces events that illustrate how people were confronted with situations that they could only partly define but that tested individual and social morality, ethics, and justice. In quests for security, people exercised their power—physical, material, economic, and political—so that their dreams could take shape and their families, communities, and cultures could survive. Although open questions abound, what can be learned is entertaining and informative, especially in regard to how people survive and thrive when overtaken by external forces.