natural histories: river cane

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"On a raw January morning 165 years later, I stood on the water’s edge at Blythe’s Ferry gazing across the river. It was bitterly cold perhaps a lot like that winter of 1838-39. A biting wind blew in from the west chapping my exposed face. Snow was forecast for later in the week. The remains of a campfire and broken beer bottles littered the shoreline. At this spot on the river the east shore is rocky; large limestone boulders garnished with spindly red cedars dominate the hilly location. A new Cherokee Removal Memorial Park to commemorate the dark episode is under construction; a park pavilion on the bluff among the cedars overlooks the river.

"At times like these, you pause to listen to the murmur filtering through the trees. It had been over a century and a half since the last of the valley’s original inhabitants had spent their waning days in their homeland. At the site, they had slept in guarded camps, not knowing what the next day would bring. In the end, as the drought of 1838 gave way to autumn and the late season rains, the last of the natives gathered their precious few belongings and turned west to ford the river beginning what was later called nu-no-du-na-tlo-hi-lu, literally “the trail where they cried.” The Cherokee way of life--river cane, locust posts and clay mud lodges--had come to an end in the Tennessee Valley."


Excerpt from Natural Histories published by the University of Tennessee Press

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