A Voyage Long and Strange

by Tony Horwitz

  I’d heard the neo-Confederate dogma many times before, but never from a ponytailed Indian who was also a fervent environmentalist. Val had recently returned to his Catawba family land, and was trying to restore it to a pre-European state. “Selective burning, planting native species, restoring full wildlife diversity,” he said, sounding like a Sierra Club spokesman. “Undoing all the damage that’s been done over the past four or five centuries.”

  Marty, who had been listening quietly, wondered what it would be like if Cofitachequi could be magically restored, too. “I think the Lady knew her culture was waning, like Mary Chesnut,” she mused, walking me outside. The moon had risen, casting a yellow glow across the boxwood garden and avenue of live oaks. “Beautiful but doomed, in one era and then another. That’s always the Southern story, isn’t it?”

  LEAVING COFITACHEQUI, DE Soto marched northwest, across the piedmont of present-day North Carolina, and then into “very rough and lofty” mountains. To pioneers in later centuries, the Appalachians presented a formidable barrier. But De Soto, who had scaled the much taller Andes, wasn’t deterred by mountains; he was drawn to them. Since skyscraping Peru had yielded a fortune in gold and silver, the Spanish equated mountains with mineral riches. Indians along De Soto’s route had fed this belief, telling of mines in the hills that produced a mixture of copper and gold.

  Approached from the east, the mountains of North Carolina unfold in a series of ranges: first the gentle, azure Blue Ridge, and then the Smokies, their midsection wreathed in haze. If the Spanish found beauty in this vista, they didn’t say so in their writing, which told instead of exhaustion and hunger. The men could find little food apart from wild turkeys, and their horses became so weak that “they were unable to carry their owners.”

  Reading these lean accounts over a heart-stopping lunch at Hillbilly Barbecue and Steaks, I resolved to get off the road and do some serious walking. Rather than stick to the Hudson Route, which led along a major tourist highway through the mountains, I plotted a short detour, heading for the rare patch of ground where it seemed possible to glimpse the landscape as it might have appeared in De Soto’s day.

  Most of the old-growth forest that once blanketed the Appalachians was logged long ago. But deep in the Nantahala Wilderness, in the southwest corner of North Carolina, a timber company went bankrupt during the Depression before cutting all the land it owned. Purchased by the government, the remote plot became the Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest, named for the author of the poem “Trees.” Seventy years later, the park encloses one of the last stands of virgin hardwood forest in the eastern United States.

  The park felt different as soon as I hiked into it. Kept as a primitive wilderness area, its paths were unmarked and dead trees lay where they fell: moss-slick giants slowly rotting into the forest floor. One tree, severed midway up, stood as a simple monument to Kilmer, who was cut down during combat in World War I, at the age of thirty-one.

  In much of the modern South, the woods are a monotonous expanse of “plantation pine,” sown in croplike rows, so they can be easily harvested as soon as the trees mature. The Kilmer forest, by contrast, blended oak, hemlock, beech, birch, ash, and other species. The oldest trees dated almost to the time of De Soto’s expedition.

  Towering over all of them were the tulip poplars, 150 feet tall and ten feet in diameter. Often growing in pairs or triplets, they sprang straight up, with no branches for the first fifty feet. The effect, as I walked beneath their dizzying loft, was of touring an outdoor cathedral. A fitting tribute to the man who wrote: “Poems are made by fools like me, / But only God can make a tree.”

  After hiking a few miles, I reclined on a poplar root as big as a chaise lounge. The woods were hushed in late-autumn silence, except for a lone woodpecker and the distant rush of a mountain stream. During my brief tramps in the arid Southwest and the stifling swamps of Florida, I’d pitied the Spanish, and felt glad to live in an era of bug repellent, ice cubes, and climate-controlled cars. Now, for a moment at least, I envied their long-ago trek, across a continent as yet unconquered by chain saws and interstates.

  CHAPTER 9

  THE MISSISSIPPI

  CONQUISTADOR’S LAST STAND

  . . . the river

  Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable

  —T. S. Eliot, “The Dry Salvages”

  BY THE TIME De Soto’s men arrived at the far side of the Appalachians, one Spaniard wrote, “the horses were tired and thin, and the Christians likewise fatigued.” Reaching a peaceful settlement in present-day Tennessee, the army feasted on native cuisine: corn porridge sweetened with honey, “butter” made of bear grease, and oil extracted from acorns and walnuts, which was nourishing but caused “some flatulence.”

  For two weeks the Spanish farted and frolicked with the Indians, even swimming with them in a river by the settlement. Then De Soto pushed his army’s R & R too far. He asked his hosts to provide thirty women. When the Indians failed to comply, De Soto burned their corn fields, took their chief hostage, and pressed five hundred of his subjects into service as baggage carriers.

  At the next town, soldiers in the lead began looting storehouses of food, “as was their custom.” This time, natives responded with force, beating the looters with clubs and gathering up bows and arrows. 230 conquest When De Soto arrived, “carelessly and unarmed,” he found himself surrounded by a crowd of bellicose natives.

  Always at his best in a tight spot, De Soto feigned fury at his men, grabbing an Indian club and joining the natives in thrashing the looters. Then he mollified the local chief, leading him by the hand, away from the town and toward the approaching army. Once out of danger, De Soto put the chief and his retainers in chains, “and told them they could not go until giving him a guide and Indians for carrying.”

  During his stay in Tennessee, De Soto sent scouts in search of the gold he’d hoped to find in the mountains. But after discovering nothing, he swung his army south, toward Coosa, a wealthy Indian nation centered in north Georgia. Coosa’s ruler greeted De Soto “in a carrying chair borne on the shoulders of his principal men, seated on a cushion, and covered with a robe of marten skins.” His realm was rich with corn and beans and with orchards of apples and plums—“one of the best and most abundant” lands in La Florida, a soldier wrote.

  But De Soto treated this hospitable chiefdom as he had Cofitachequi. After resting and refueling his army, he seized Coosa’s ruler and enchained many of his people for the onward journey. He then marched southwest, toward the Gulf coast, where he’d earlier arranged to meet supply ships from Cuba.

  Though De Soto had yet to find gold, his expedition to this point was a modest success, certainly as compared with earlier forays in La Florida. In just over a year, the conquistador had reconnoitered a thousand miles of territory, found pearls and promising lands for settlement, and lost only a handful of men to death or desertion.

  His army was now well fed, well rested, and well served by hundreds of native porters, servants, and concubines. The Spanish were marching in late summer through a gentle and bountiful land. They were probably more content than at any time during their long journey, and utterly unprepared for the disaster about to befall them.

  ROLLING DOWN THROUGH the hills of east Tennessee, I followed a highway marked “scenic,” which it might have been if viewed from a double-decker bus affording a glimpse of the distant Smokies. At sedan level, all I could see was a continuum of trailer parks, self-storage units, and furniture and fireworks factories. The roadside scenery in north Georgia was drabber still: mostly low, windowless carpet mills. Checking into a motel with a flyswatter on the pillow and trains rumbling by in the night, I awoke to heavy rain and a dispiriting search for Coosa’s capital. My quest ended at a park beside a hydroelectric dam, where I asked a ranger for directions to the former Indian town.

  “It’s at the bottom of the reregulation pool,” he said, pointing at a reservoir. “Got a scuba suit?”

  Many other
riverside settlements visited by De Soto in Tennessee and Georgia had suffered a similar fate. But one survived, spectacularly so. A few days after leaving Coosa’s capital, the Spanish reached “a large town alongside a good river, and there they bartered for some Indian women,” in exchange for mirrors and knives. The Spanish called the town Itaba, or Ytaua, close to the name recorded by a missionary to the Cherokee who came upon Etowah 274 years later.

  “Through the thick forest trees, a stupendous pile met the eye,” the Reverend Elias Cornelius wrote. He described several “artificial mounds” and, using a vine, measured one at over a thousand feet in circumference. His Indian guides knew nothing of the mounds’ origins, telling Cornelius, “They were never put up by our people.”

  Other mysterious mounds turned up across the American frontier as settlers pushed west from the original thirteen colonies. Pioneers found earthworks shaped like cones, or truncated pyramids, or giant animals, including the quarter-mile-long “Great Serpent Mound,” which slithers across southern Ohio. Indians dwelling nearby, like those at Etowah, claimed no connection to the mounds. Nor, in the view of whites, were Indian “savages” capable of such monumental architecture. “It seems probable,” Cornelius wrote of Etowah’s mounds, that “they were erected by another race, who once inhabited the country.”

  Unmasking the identity of this “lost race” became an early American obsession, captivating men such as Thomas Jefferson, as well as fanciful thinkers who believed the mound builders were ancient émigrés from the Old World. The list of candidates came to include Phoenicians, Canaanites, Hindus, Vikings, medieval Welsh—even refugees from the lost continent of Atlantis. In the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith ascribed the mounds’ construction to a Near East band called the Nephites, ancestors of Latter Day Saints who had been sent by God to settle America.

  Not until the late nineteenth century did archaeologists conclude that the mound builders were, in fact, Native Americans, albeit ones who lived quite differently from the dispersed tribes encountered by pioneers. Constructed centuries and in some cases millennia before Europeans arrived, mounds were the work of wealthy agricultural societies that possessed the manpower to construct huge edifices from baskets of dirt. The largest mound complex on the continent, at Cahokia, near St. Louis, covered five square miles, with a central plaza a thousand feet long. At its peak, in the twelfth century, Cahokia had a population estimated at fifteen thousand—larger than medieval London or Paris, or any city north of Mexico until Philadelphia surpassed it in the late 1700s.

  By the time De Soto arrived, the greatest of the mound complexes in the Midwest and South had been abandoned or gone into decline, possibly because they’d become too big, exhausting the readily accessible supply of wood, soil, and game. But the underlying structure of mound culture remained. From Florida to the Carolinas to the Mississippi Valley, De Soto’s men described city-states centered on the cultivation of corn, and ceremonial mounds that towered above the South’s river plains.

  Today, the mound complexes that survive aren’t quite so conspicuous. To reach Etowah, I exited an interstate just north of Atlanta’s ex-urban fringe, and wound between a chemical plant and a Glad Wrap factory before following a small road to the Bow and Arrow Mobile Home Park. I was about to pull in and ask for directions when I noticed a steep, sawed-off hill looming just behind the trailer park’s stunted skyline.

  On a wet weekday in early winter, I was the only visitor to the small park enclosing Etowah. A trail led me across a ditch ten feet deep, the remains of a moat that once guarded the town, and into a field: formerly, a plaza leading up to the largest mound. Three acres at its base, the sixty-three-foot mound had a ramp snaking up to a wide, flat top. This served as a platform for the dwellings of priests and chiefs, the penthouse dwellers of early America.

  The summit was now bare, except for grass. But standing atop Etowah’s earthen throne, it was easy to imagine a bygone ruler surveying his domain. On one side of the mound ran a swift green river, filled with V-shaped rock dams: the remains of ancient weirs used by Indians to trap fish. The cane still growing beside the river had provided raw material for baskets, mats, spears, and arrows. Beyond the river spread fertile bottomland, filled now with cows but formerly with maize. Only the mobile home park intruded on my time travel. From this vantage, the trailers looked like tiny boxes, a transient camp beside Etowah’s thousand-year-old dome.

  Retreating down the hill, I visited the park’s small museum, which displayed artifacts unearthed at Etowah’s mortuary mound. One pair of marble effigies depicted a chiefly couple: the man seated lotus style, his small-breasted mate resting on her knees, legs elegantly tucked beneath skirted buttocks. Highly stylized, the figures had flat foreheads, full lips, and pupil-less almond eyes, as striking and beautiful as Modigliani sculptures.

  Other relics revealed not only the artistry of mound culture, but its geographic breadth. Centuries before railroads, canals, or interstates, Etowah’s artisans tapped a trade network that brought copper from the Great Lakes, sharks’ teeth and sea turtle shell from south Florida, and mica from the Appalachians. Mound architecture was even more widely spread; earthworks had been found from Florida to Oklahoma to south Ontario. Touring the museum, as haunting flute music played on the sound system, I felt the same envy I had while wandering the Joyce Kilmer Forest. The Spanish were the first and last Europeans to glimpse an astonishing culture that most Americans had never known existed.

  My reverie was interrupted by chortles in the hall. I stepped out to find two paunchy middle-aged men, clad in the green pants and khaki shirts of park employees. Their matched appearance and drawling banter made them seem twinned, like the museum’s mortuary figures. When I asked what sort of visitors Etowah attracted, the two men broke into chiming guffaws, finishing each other’s sentences.

  “There’s your Satanists, your witches, your Druids—”

  Marble effigies at Etowah Indian Mounds Historic Site, Carterville, Georgia

  “New Agers, Nuwaubians, nutcases—”

  “You name it, we get it here.”

  Ken Atkins was Etowah’s site manager; his sidekick, Steve McCarty, a veteran ranger. Despite their jocular manner, the two men weren’t pulling my leg with their catalogue of park visitors. Etowah and other mounds had become magnets for modern-day seekers—heirs, in a sense, to the nineteenth-century fantasists who attributed mounds’ construction to Atlanteans or the Lost Tribes of Israel.

  New Age visitors buried crystals by the mounds, to “reenergize them,” and plotted ley lines in search of harmonic convergence. Others interred cremated ashes, or performed obscure rites involving live gerbils and dead chickens. “We’ve had women standing on top of the mounds clutching daggers, and a guy praying over a crystal so big it looked like kryptonite,” Ken said. “No animal sacrifices that we know of, but it wouldn’t surprise me.”

  Oddest of all was the United Nuwaubian Nation of Moors, a group that claimed descent from Egyptians, aliens, and Native Americans. The nation’s leader styled himself, variously, as Dr. Malachi Z. York-El, Atume-Re, Chief Black Eagle, and an extraterrestrial from the Planet Rizq. At their Georgia compound, the Nuwaubians had built a sphinx and pyramids and adopted Egyptian dress. They often came to Etowah to commune with their kin, both earthbound and alien.

  “They said a flying saucer was going to come down and pick them up off Mound A,” Steve said, referring to the tallest mound. “It never came, unfortunately. We were going to help all these people pack up and wave good-bye to them.”

  The stream of strange visitors created management headaches at Etowah and other mound sites. Traditionally, rangers’ main concern had been catching night thieves who dug for artifacts. Now, the problem was people burying crystals and other items, which technically had to be preserved and catalogued (most mounds are state-protected archaeological sites).

  To complicate matters, Creek Indians—descendants of the Etowans, and the designated native overseers of the site—ha
d declared the mounds ceremonially closed; they regarded any ritual there as a desecration. But rangers could only issue citations for trespassing or damage to state property; they couldn’t interfere with visitors’ First Amendment right to worship as they chose.

  “It’s sad, really,” said Steve, who moonlighted as an ordained minister. “People want to make some kind of spiritual connection with these mounds, and honor the Indians who lived here. But, if anything, they’re doing the opposite.”

  DE SOTO’S ARMY spent several months crossing Coosa’s realm without engaging in a serious fight. But as they neared the Indian nation west of Coosa, signs abounded that their summer idyll was about to end. The first clue was the appearance of heavily fortified towns, enclosed in double walls of crisscrossed logs, cut through with slits for firing arrows. At one town, the Spanish were met by the son of Tascalusa, “a powerful lord and very feared in that land.” Though the envoy promised aid to the Spanish, De Soto didn’t trust him and dispatched two spies to accompany the chief’s son back to his home.

  Marching on, De Soto reached Tascalusa’s capital, and found the ruler awaiting the Spanish on the balcony of his mound-top dwelling. Tasculusa was “so large,” one Spaniard wrote, “that, to the opinion of all, he was a giant.” Clad in a full-length feather cloak and turbanlike headdress, he perched on high cushions surrounded by retainers, one of whom sheltered him from the sun with a staff topped by a deerskin battle standard.

  De Soto put on a show of his own, replaying his famed entrance before Atahualpa. He sent horsemen galloping into the plaza before Tascalusa’s mound, “turning them from one side to the other” and toward the ruler’s perch. Though “horses were held in great dread among those people,” the Spanish display left the ruler unmoved. “With great gravity and unconcern,” Tascalusa “from time to time raised his eyes and looked as if in disdain.” Nor did he rise from his cushion when De Soto dismounted and approached.