Although its name dates back only as far as the 1890s, human activity in what became my home town dates back to early colonial days. It was well known to the English before Daniel Boone's famous trail into Kentucky passed through it. A main road is still called Daniel Boone's Trail, and a neighborhood is still called after Daniel Boone.
In colonial days the high Blue Ridge Mountains were a natural boundary among tribal territories. There were Yuchi people to the south and east, Cherokees to the south and west, Shawnees to the north and west, and Delawareans and the occasional Iroquois to the north and east. Some people were also documented as "Mingo," which was a general name for indigenous people whose ancestors came from different tribes and nations, and "Melungeon," which was properly the name of a specific community whose genealogies included descendants of Vardy Collins and/or Shepherd Gibson, but the name was sometimes used to mean anyone of mixed race. Of these groups the Cherokee Nation recognized the Iroquois as a related ethnic group, considered the Yuchi and Delawareans uncivilized, and seem to have had the most wars with the Shawnees, but generally the land around the Virginia-Tennessee border was where people came to trade. Sometimes young men challenged each other to fight for sport, or people quarrelled about their trades. Mostly the place was peaceable. People don't find fields of arrowheads marking the sites of large-scale battles.
The Melungeons became legendary because White Americans wrote such ridiculous twaddle about them. They were newcomers to the area and tried to behave like good neighbors; they weren't at war with anybody. They were not and are not a particularly strange group. They were merely multiethnic. Their predominant cultural influence was English. From the unusual given names of the group's founders and the connection with a family called Moore, some have inferred that their freedom from race prejudice had something to do with their ancestors having been Gypsies, or Spanish Moors, or at least Italians, and thus having felt exotic even in England; but this is uncertain. Very little about the Melungeons ever was certain. At some point some Collins and Gibson heirs are thought to have married stragglers from banished indigenous groups and runaway slaves.
Young people from the group are invariably described as handsome or pretty, often with references to the fineness of their bones as compared with stereotypically big-boned Cherokees. Older members of the group tended to wear well, some being disabled or disfigured by illness, many living well beyond age seventy. People wanted to believe that some very bad or at least grotesque-looking traits would appear in any of the so-called "triracial isolate" groups in the Eastern States. That didn't happen. Polydactylism is thought to have entered the group from the Bolling family, the best known member of which was Anne Boleyn. Where thalassemia, a "Mediterranean syndrome" of depression and illness, came in is unknown. One member of the group was the fattest woman in Tennessee in her time; more of them are slim. In the early twentieth century two of my father's cousins married Gibsons, and in mine one married a Collins, and those who presumed to comment seem to have agreed that they might have done worse.
"Melungeon" was what the group, clan, tribe, whatever, called themselves. It means mixed. It is not a term of contempt, but there used to be people here, and there still are a few, who use the name of some other group to disparage styles and behavior that they can't say are immoral, but that seem strange to them. For those people any name of any ethnic group might be considered a term of contempt. Some people who bought into theories about "race" wanted to believe that all members of all of America's "triracial isolate" groups would be subject to "strange" disease conditions. It can be gratifying to observe that, while some hereditary diseases are found in such groups, many individuals of "triracial isolate" descent live long healthy lives.
Melungeons have, however, been the topics of some ridiculous fictions and fantasies, along with a group who lived further north and called themselves Susquehannocks. (Susquehanna meant the river, Susquehannock meant a person who lived near it.) In the Bible an enemy chief the Israelites were able to defeat was a giant with twelve fingers and twelve toes. Some have extrapolated from that tidbit of history a belief that there are or were a "race" of evil polydactyl giant humans. The Susquehannocks weren't polydactylic and fossil remains indicate that they'd be described as big and tall people, but not pathological giants, today. Supposedly their average height was about six feet, men often taller, women usually shorter. They looked like giants because, at this period, European men measured their height in inches above five feet. My father, at 6'2", was taller than most Cherokee men but his White ancestors were blamed. The man known to cyberspace as my Significant Other, at 6'4", heard occasional remarks about ancestors who might have been Susquehannocks.
Indigenous marriage customs were different from European, leading to the saying that Native Americans never got married. As a matter of historical record, they did. Cherokees had recognized the danger of inbreeding before contact with European immigrants. They had an idea that it was good for the nation if people married foreigners in alternate generations. On contact with Europeans, they made a rule that Europeans could enter their territory if married to Cherokees. This suggests that there were many Cherokee young people who were considered too closely related to marry each other. Many Southern families had, by the eighteenth century, a Cherokee grandmother. Even more claimed to have had a Cherokee grandmother, when actually the woman had belonged to a different tribe, after the Cherokees were forcibly resettled in Oklahoma and struck oil.
On the other hand, patrilineal (and racist) record keepers may also have obscured whether the woman's mother had been Cherokee; Cherokee records were matrilineal. And, since the Cherokee word translated as "chief" meant any leader of a group of ten Cherokees, probably more of them than not really were chiefs' daughters--though not "Principal Chiefs'" close relatives.
In the early eighteenth century "Donelson's Indian Line" was marked out as the border between Cherokee and unclaimed land. It passed through what became Gate City. The land on the unclaimed side was not considered very valuable--too steep, too cold in winter, too hard to plough in summer, and too far from the Cherokee settlements in what became the Tennessee and North Carolina border. European immigrants did not always appreciate this land either. Many stayed for a short time before moving further west. Land might have changed hands ten times before enough people settled here to decide to organize a town.
Because what became Scott County was a border area rather than anybody's home, the high cliff called the Lovers' Leap is usually said to have been named for a couple who were not allowed to marry each other because they belonged to warring tribes. Which tribes those were, nobody knows. Cherokee and Shawnee are usually considered most likely, but in fact, despite their frequent border conflicts, Cherokee and Shawnee people seem to have taken each other as they found each other. Some members of those groups did marry. The Yuchi tribe seem to have been more conscious of their separate identity. Maybe the couple were a Cherokee and a Yuchi. Anyway nobody knows their individual names, or more of their story than the cliche that has been attached to the highest cliff in every town, worldwide. Most urban legends really happened somewhere. I'm sure the Lovers' Leap story happened somewhere, but who knows whether it happened here..
Shawnee and Cherokee people seem originally to have been different enough ethnic groups that it would have been possible to tell by looking which group a person belonged to. By the time Europeans came here, their looks and lifestyles were similar. Cherokees considered themselves more civilized and, in some ways, they were, but people in both groups hunted and gathered the same foods. In their border wars the Cherokees probably did better, and both groups were big enough to coexist despite frequent border disputes, but in the end it could be said that the Shawnees, or a Shawnee, defeated the Cherokee Nation.
This was a wretched woman whose name nobody seems to want to remember. The Shawnees were not, at this stage, a nation--though it could fairly be said that their chief Tecumseh made one of them, for a few years. They didn't have a civilization to speak of, so they couldn't have offered dual citizenship to multiethnic children if they had wanted to. They did not want to. They did not have that custom of outbreeding in alternate generations. This Shawnee woman took up with a Scotsman who signed his name "Robert Bench," who treated her badly especially after she gave birth to a little red-haired son. Neither the other Shawnees nor the other immigrants had much compassion on the abandoned wife and her two children, boy and girl; they went down to the border, and the woman took a job as domestic help in a Cherokee family. The little boy, who wrote his name "Bob Bench," was generally agreed to say it more like "Benge." He was smart, bold, and tough. He never forgave his father. His favorite thing was killing White men. His role in the Cherokee-US war seems more important when people from Gate City are telling it, but everyone agrees he was one of the two or three most feared leaders of Cherokee war parties. Brant and Tecumseh are usually regarded as bigger threats to Anglo-American society; though allies, they never claimed to be Cherokee. (Tecumseh was, however, briefly married to a Cherokee.)
The family who could afford a housemaid with children were obviously well off, and Benge claimed kinship by adoption to some of the most influential members of the Cherokee Nation, including Sequoya, who also had reddish hair. (Sequoya blamed a different White ancestor for his hair.)
Benge was said to have found a silver mine, possibly in Scott County. That was probably a smarty-pants answer he gave people who were imprudent enough to ask where he got his gold and silver. The obvious answer was that he took the hoarded cash from the immigrants he murdered, though there is some possibility that he earned some of it by honest work or trade. Anyway, he was sometimes said to have barrels or big oldfashioned tubs full of gold and silver and sometimes jewels, buried in a cave somewhere. Later his treasure was said to have been found and hauled further east by Thomas Beale, who had gone to Colorado in search of gold and silver and, supposedly, stopped in Scott County on his way home.
The Beale Treasure has never been reported as found. The usual explanations are that either it never existed, or it was found and not reported long ago. Tourists continue, nevertheless, to have a good time looking for it. Usually they look near Roanoke or Bedford. Some say that a previous owner, possibly Benge since he was evil enough, had laid a curse on the treasure, that this had something to do with Thomas Beale's death shortly after Beale reported having hidden a treasure. There are all kinds of stories about Beale and the clues to his treasure that he released to a newspaper, including a popular theory that Beale never actually had any treasure and left the clues as a hoax. The clues consisted of three code messages, two of which were easily decoded, the third of which supposedly contained clear directions to the treasure and has never been decoded.
Anyway, Benge became what the Cherokee called a chief: a leader of a group of at least ten Cherokee people. White people feared "Chief Benge" as they feared the wolves and cougars said to live in the Blue Ridge Mountains. When people are that deep in fear they can overlook details, such as Benge's not actually being a Cherokee. Real Cherokee chiefs, most notably Dragging Canoe, allied with other indigenous leaders like Joseph Brant, made war on the immigrants. Benge was a terrorist who, among other things, ate parts of the bodies of White men he had murdered.
Another part of the legend was the story of Clara Talton Fugate. Real Cherokee culture showed respect to women, as Shawnee culture did not. Benge's party attacked a settlement and slaughtered all the men, but a Cherokee who fancied Mrs. Fugate's sweet youthful face proposed that they take the women and sell them as slaves. Mrs. Fugate was apparently not raped or even badly beaten, and was given enough of the war party's provisions to maintain her strength, while the party walked southwest for a few months. At last her admirer worked up the nerve to propose to her--after all, she could have done worse, and her stamina would have won respect in Cherokee country. The widow Fugate, however, turned him down and said she would walk back to Virginia alone. And she did.
Then there was the story of Hungry Mother State Park. For some reason tourists always expect this story to be even worse than it is. Benge's party attacked a settlement near what became the town of Marion. In this battle the women tried to fight beside their men, and were killed along with them. The version of the story I learned at school had an English-speaking man who arrived after the battle finding alive only one toddler, who was trying to rouse his dead mother, repeating what the man reported as some infantile attempt to say, "I'm hungry, Mother! Hungry, Mother!" Another version has the mother and child having escaped from the battle, perhaps taken as prisoners or just hiding in the woods, and the mother having collapsed or died in the woods. Some say the woman's name was Molly, or Marley, or perhaps Molly Marley. In any case there is agreement that the toddler was found squeaking that he was hungry. I have never read or heard what became of the child. The story tourists seem to expect would have been very unlikely in the Blue Ridge Mountains, nor would the name of a nice place commemorate it if it had ever happened.
Those who live by violence generally die by violence. Everyone in the Blue Ridge and Smoky Mountains wanted the honor of killing Benge. A relatively obscure pioneer, Virgil or Victor Hobbs of what would later become Estilville, took some helpers and provisions sent from Back East and trailed Benge through what is now known as the Jefferson National Forest. They hiked along what is still a deliciously spooky wooded trail bordered by mostly inedible or poisonous plants, and Hobbs challenged Benge to a duel, supposedly on a big flat-topped boulder that can be seen from across the valley. Winning what was said to be a fair fight, Hobbs delivered Benge's scalp to the leaders of the new United States army. The boulder is still known as Benge's Rock and is marked with a giant American flag. Tough hikers can still walk out "Chief Benge's Scalp Trail" and climb up to the rock today; though, due to concerns about park liability, they are discouraged from climbing on Benge's Rock.
Nevertheless, the damage was done. Dragging Canoe might have been seen as an isolated malcontent but his cause being taken up by Benge (and some others) roused the immigrant hordes to wage a real war against the mostly peaceable Cherokee. A miserable Shawnee housemaid and her son can be blamed for the Trail of Tears.
With the terrorist threat out of the way, the town was surveyed in the early nineteenth century by one of my ancestors and one of another local family's ancestors. It was named Estilville, in honor of a long-gone Judge Estil. Later it became the county seat of what was named Scott County, in honor of General Winfield Scott. Neither of them had actually lived here. Both were admired.
A portrait of Winfield Scott at what anyone else would have called retirement age, in 1855. Born in 1786, Scott was still active in the US Army in 1861. He was a big man, reportedly a little taller and considerably heavier than Lincoln. He ran for President of the United States four times. His abolitionist views were unpopular in eastern Virginia but less so out here on the Point. He was the commanding officer to whom General Lee addressed his resignation in the Civil War. It is interesting to consider the possibility that, if Lee and Scott had stayed on the same side, the War might have been won in a few weeks. Scott was a hero of the Mexican-American war and was regarded as a local man in the Point of Virginia. His illness and death contributed much to the way Northerners and Southerners felt, in 1862 and 1863, that the Confederate side might actually win.
Scott was less of a hero to the Cherokee, his Army career including "supervising" their deportation from their ancestral land. The many routes various indigenous groups took toward Oklahoma were known collectively as the Trail of Tears. From Virginia to Oklahoma was a long trek; many indigenous people died on the way. Cherokee people were, however, known for the stone-faced and stoical attitude they presented to outsiders, and some say the literal tears were shed by the biracial and White people watching them go. Mourning for their elders and children would have been a show of weakness to be concealed from enemies.
Not all Cherokees left when told to leave. The Eastern Band on the North Carolina border stayed in the woods. Nobody was looking for them and they stayed there for years. Euro-Americans now, however, thought of Cherokees as enemies, and the feeling was mutual. The Eastern Band didn't try to make war in any overt way, though there are legends like the one about a Cherokee storekeeper who lived near a river and rented leaky boats to White travellers..It's hard to be sure about stories from that period. A real undeclared war had happened. Survivors would naturally have feared and detested each other. In order to survive the Eastern Band had to be a bit of a legend in their own time. Cherokee people did not look all that different from English people when they started wearing the same sort of clothes. Some people, whether mixed or "full blood" Cherokee, had been accepted as citizens of the United States rather than the Cherokee Nation. Most mountain people were self-sufficient and went into town only a few times in a year. So it was possible for people who were supposed to have left, to have stayed, and for a while they were left alone. Then fear and hate arose, accusations were made, the government sent out soldiers to enforce the law and banish the Eastern Band, and a man called Tsali ("Chief Charlie") offered to surrender if his group were granted the right to live on some land in peace. This is the story of Cherokee Town on the border between North Carolina and Tennessee. The version of that story they reenact, regularly, for tourists, is based on history, unlike The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, which everyone always recognized as sentimental fiction.
During the Civil War, all able-bodied Southern White men were drafted into the Confederate army--though not all of them fought. Some Scott County men and boys did enlist under General Lee. In fact some teenagers, who weren't supposed to be accepted as recruits but who wanted to prove themselves equal to adults, resorted to dodges like putting something with the number 18 on it in their shoes, so that they could say to recruiting officers under oath that "I am over eighteen."
Such a boy was my great-grandfather--
"Great-great-grandfather, you mean?"
No; according to record he was my great-grandfather. He joined the Confederate army and was promptly captured by the enemy. Some other prisoners of war, older and more responsible, probably deserve credit for the party's escape with valuable information for General Lee...but they did follow my great-grandfather to the cave near his home. It is not a large cave, not easily found and not easily imagined to be a place where two dozen grown men could hide, but it is deep and the soldiers had had plenty of practice hiding by the time they reached the cave.
The Yanks tracked them to a little place called Bray, not ten miles west of Estilville and, at the time, about as close to becoming a town. Nobody in Bray admitted any ideas about where a lot of missing Confederates might have got to. There were some steep cliffs further west. Maybe the deserters had fallen over them. The Yanks were apparently starting to steam when they came to a house where the wife was from the North. She served them a nice dinner. The enemy soldiers sat down and refreshed themselves, then got up and burned all the other houses in the settlement except the one where they had been fed.
People still live in Bray, though any aspirations to making it a town have long been forgotten. The bus I rode to school used to stop there. I have been inside the oldest house in Bray, which was built from hewn logs and looks pre-war all right. Some say the soldiers were served their dinner in the yard because there wasn't room for them inside the house, and this I could believe. Big houses were usually built either on the site of, or around, the kind of houses hill farmers had built in the 1860s.
The leader of the escapees waited for the Yanks to move on, then went into Estilville and posted his message to General Lee, whose letter of commendation to the escapees used to be displayed in the library. Some of them apparently went back east to rejoin the army. My great-grandfather, having seen enough of war to appreciate that he was still too young to fight legally, stayed in the cave until the war was over. Then he went home, apologized for running away, and promised to stay at home and do his chores if his parents would let him.
So he stayed at home and did chores for another forty years. Then he inherited the farm and found someone to marry. She was only in her early twenties; he, in his mid-fifties. They produced fifteen babies, of whom eleven lived to be teenagers, nine to be active grandparents, and eight stayed in Gate City. All of the children who lived to grow up were said to look just like their father, and as the ones I had a chance to see all looked very much alike I believe this must have been true.
Around the time my great-grandparents married, Estilville officially renamed itself Gate City, seeing its role in history as a "gateway to the West." Stories about our history now enter the territory of what the grandparents of living people told them.
(Most of the paragraph about Tsali did not display for the first few days this post was visible. It should be visible now.)
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