Native culture in Floyd County
Our community is rich in Native American culture, yet it is a culture that most of us know very little about. Thursday night, Romans had a fascinating opportunity to learn more about Cherokee culture thanks to a new online lecture series that is being offered by Chieftains Museum.
Allen Bryant is a professor at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. He has close ties to the Eastern Band of Cherokee and has brought Cherokee teenagers to visit Chieftains Museum and Rome on numerous occasions.
Bryant conducted a remote, online program Thursday to detail the efforts made by early Moravian missionaries to educate the Cherokee.
He said that the attempt to use education as a means of erasing Cherokee culture failed and eventually became an engine for cultural renaissance among the Cherokee.
But the native history of Rome and Floyd County goes way back beyond what I might suggest were modern Cherokee times.
Way back. I mean really way, way back. If you are among the handful of folks who have floated from Neels Landing on the Etowah River to Dixon Landing just east of Rome, you’ve encountered fish weirs. Most historians believe those were constructed between 500 and 1,000 years ago.
Given the location of the numerous fish weirs, it’s pretty easy to imagine that who knows how many native settlements were located along the rivers way back when.
One could not imagine funneling fish through the weirs for capture and then having to haul them who knows how far back to the settlement. It stands to reason the settlements would have been located very close to the weirs.
Then there is the case of the DeSoto sword.
The sword was dug up, and damaged, by a farmer getting a field ready for planting. The sword was later determined to have been made in northern Italy or perhaps Germany. It was thought to have been left behind by a member of Hernando DeSoto’s band, which traveled through the area in the middle of the 16th century.
Archaeological digs on the farm in the 1970s and again in the 1990s turned up evidence of quite a substantial village in that bend of the Coosa River.
Somewhat more contemporary than that is the Battle of Hightower, which resulted in the death of Cherokee leader Kingfisher in the fall of 1793. A band of volunteers led by Gen. John Sevier, (later the first governor of Tennessee) followed some marauding natives back from the East Tennessee foothills and engaged in a battle royal that may have stretched from the confluence of the rivers up the
Etowah to where Silver Creek dumps in, and around the bed where Central Plaza shopping center is currently located.
This kind of stuff fascinates me, always has.
I was fortunate enough to have served on the Chieftains Museum board for a couple of years about a decade ago. That would have been about 25 years after I moved to Rome. I hate to say it, but I never knew that Chief John Ross had a plantation right across the Oostanaula River from Major Ridge. His home is thought to have been somewhere in the area of a knoll between the Fifth Avenue Nursing Home and Floyd Medical Center. Ross also ran a ferry in Rome and was a postmaster here.
I’ve been very fortunate in recent years to have written a number of stories when Cherokee scholars were in town for events at Chieftains and to have been able to spend some time with them before their presentations. Bryant is one; Tom Belt, from Western Carolina University, is another.
Belt is an extraordinarily gifted Cherokee who gave me a much better understanding as to why Major Ridge is still vilified by the Cherokee today.
As an old white guy, I’ve always been under the impression that Major Ridge knew perfectly well that Andrew Jackson was capable of annihilating the Cherokee culture if they did not leave their native land across North Georgia. I’ve always felt that Ridge was acting to protect his people when he led the party that ratified the Treaty of New Echota and forced the Cherokee on the now infamous Trail of Tears.
Belt helped me understand that the land was not Ridge’s to give away and he knew it.
“I think he truly believed he was doing the right thing,” Belt said two years ago. But he reminded me that as many as 60 head men in tribal communities around the region disagreed. He said Ridge lost sight of the Cherokee sense of place. “Their place not only where they lived, but their place in the universe and their place on a spiritual plane,” Belt said.
I suspect that may have stemmed from his fighting alongside Jackson.
Personally, I still believe Ridge’s betrayal of his people may have saved the culture, but I do have a much greater appreciation for the Cherokee point of view. You and I might call that “principles.” Sometimes you’ve just got to stick to your guns, even when you’re unquestionably outgunned.