"A Dark and Bloody Ground" Was a Promise, Not a Curse

One of the most common myths you'll hear about early Nashville history is that, when white settlers were negotiating for the land here, a Cherokee leader, Dragging Canoe, tried to warn the white people that this land was cursed. He described it as "a dark and bloody ground." (Back up off our origin myth, Kentucky!)

Dragging Canoe wasn't describing a curse. He was making a promise—settle here and I'm going to turn the ground red with your blood. Earlier this month, Albert Bender had a really nice write-up on Dragging Canoe over at The Tennessean.

He led Cherokee war companies against encroaching white settlements all over the Southeast, particularly settlers in upper east Tennessee, but also in Kentucky, Virginia, Georgia and North and South Carolina. He continued to conduct operations against the settlements in Middle Tennessee, which he kept in a virtual state of siege. In April 1781, Cherokee forces led by him nearly wiped out Fort Nashboro. He was everywhere and planned, directed and led warrior forces in saving the Cherokee people.

Some latter-day historians call Dragging Canoe "The Red Napoleon.” Many white settlers of the times, in terror, referred to him simply as "The Dragon.” He is now considered a military genius.

Dragging Canoe was a military genius and, if he'd lived farther into 1792, it's hard to know if Nashville would have survived. He certainly wouldn't have made the kinds of mistakes the young upstart leaders of the Creek and Cherokee forces made at the

.

Sherry Teal at MTSU's Center for Historic Preservation is working on researching Dragging Canoe. On Tuesday, she wrote about thinking about Dragging Canoe's life and times in terms of the environment. It's not a long post, but it's well worth your time.

Look here at this part:

Examining the Treaty of Sycamore Shoals invites additional questions about how the environment affected events related to Dragging Canoe. This illegal land deal between Richard Henderson and some of the Overhill Cherokee chiefs occurred near present-day Watauga, Tennessee, in March 1775. Dragging Canoe vehemently opposed the deal, and his reported words loom heavy in historical accounts of the event.[3] However, in the winter of 1774, Richard Henderson and Daniel Boone had visited Attakullakulla, Dragging Canoe’s father, to show the Cherokee peace chief and others the goods that they would receive in the deal. This means that Richard Henderson traveled more than 150 miles over the Appalachian Mountains from North Carolina into the Overhill Cherokee territory during the winter to show goods to these chiefs. Winter in the Appalachians can be deadly. Snow and ice sometimes do not melt on the Foehn wind side of the mountains until April. Even during mild winters, the crossing is treacherous. Why did the land speculators from North Carolina make the journey at this exact time?

Thomas Jefferson’s diary may hold a clue. For decades, Jefferson kept meticulous records concerning temperature, rainfall, and a wide variety of agricultural activities. At Monticello in Charlottesville, Virginia, he recorded a late and devastating frost in the spring of 1774 that was “equally destructive thro the whole country and the neighboring colonies.”[4] This would have been a significant disruption to subsistence and of grave concern to all people living in the region. Monticello is 281 miles from Watauga, Tennessee. Both sites share the same hardiness-planting zone of 7a. However, the elevation at Monticello is 524 feet, compared to Watauga’s elevation of 1,453 feet. If Monticello and “all surrounding colonies” experienced this frost, it is very likely that the Overhill Cherokee experienced it as well. Also, prior to the killing frost, there had been a historic three-year drought. The effects of the frost and drought upon the Cherokee would have lessened their resources during the winter, or at the very least strained them. It is probably not a coincidence, then, that Boone and Henderson visited the Cherokee during a lean winter, perhaps speculating that the pressure for Cherokee leaders to agree to a deal would have been strong.

We're really protected from the weather in ways our forebears were not, so I think it's quite easy for us to discount the huge role weather, ordinary weather, not natural disasters, played in history. Boone and Henderson show up with a deal for the Cherokee made sweeter by bad weather.

And then don't miss her awesome discussion of how Dragging Canoe situated his town so brilliantly, by basically making it impossible to get through his territory without him knowing you were in it, because of his use of the landscape to his advantage. Ugh. It's just so brilliant.

It reminds me of a story I've not yet been able to verify (though, my god, if you know if this is true, please let me know). I heard that there was a runaway slave hideout just north of Nashville, in the holler Sulphur Creek Road now winds through. Supposedly, even though everyone knew they were there, no one could get in and get them because the entrances to either end of the holler are narrow passages through steep hills and two people at any given time would sit, one at each end of the holler up on that steep hillside and shoot at anyone who tried to come near. The vantage points being such that any approach was impossible.

I've driven out there a lot and the geography does seem to be right for it.

That's a sidetrack, but I think there's probably a lot about our history we don't quite get because we don't take into account the natural world. I'm glad to see historians like Teal taking a closer look.