Introducing the story of Tanasi
(sound of door opening and background hum)
Ariel Lavery: (sounds masked) Hello.
Campground Manager: What can I do for you?
Ariel Lavery: I have a reservation in one of your deluxe cabins, under Ariel Lavery…
Campground manager: Alright…
Ariel Lavery: Last fall I visited a lake out in Eastern Tennessee, in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains.
Campground Manager: I have so many people in my park right now that are paying $950 a month because they're in the in the area looking for a home, building a home, sold my house, I mean… (fades out)
Ariel Lavery: And I stayed at this campground filled with RVs.
Campground Manager: (fades in) …But then, you know, the, the housing market I mean, you know, I had a guy in here that was local and he sold his house. They offered him 10 more $1,000 to get out that day. He took it.
Ariel Lavery: And one of the things I noticed almost immediately was that there has been a long, long history, in this area, of people being displaced for the benefit of others.
Austin Carter: Oh, wow. What’s creating this sudden sense of urgency?
Ariel Lavery: Well, it’s the booming real estate market. People are moving in from the coasts, there are these very expensive lots that are getting more expensive by the day, there’s this interesting mix of mansions and modular homes in the area. And, when you tour around this lake you see these really eerie sites, like statues that disappear into the water. I saw part of an old bridge that dropped down below the surface, and there are silos all over the place that stick out of the middle of this lake.
(sound of boat fades in)
Female voice describing a video: jumping off the silos… that’s what people do…
Ariel Lavery: People use these markers of history today for recreation.
Male voice in the video: Here we go!
Female voice: Jump!
(sound of splash)
Male Voice: Oh he leaned backwards.
(fade sounds of people jumping off)
Austin Carter: Oh man, it’s kind of crazy to see this brick silo coming up like twenty feet out of the water.
Ariel Lavery: Yeah, and when you learn the story behind these silos it might give you pause before climbing on them. Kinda like you would the gravestones in a graveyard.
Austin Carter: Right, because those silos used to belong to families, to farmers.
Ariel Lavery: That‘s right. These silos hold stories of something that happened to these family farmers fifty years ago when they tried to defend their land and their way of life.
(mellow acoustic music starts)
Carolyn Ritchey: … because it was either go to jail, or, not resist, but say “here, have it.”
(musical pause)
Ariel Lavery: Up until the 1950s the valley that used to be here was one of the largest single swaths of undeveloped, rural land in the country. The people who lived here often had large families where the oldest children would help raise the youngest, they lived in small farmhouses they built, and they farmed the land.
Zyg Plater: The land was richer than I'd ever seen up north. I mean, 15 feet deep of Grade A, USDA soil, just, just unbelievable. After a rain in the plowed fields, there would be arrowheads and pieces of pot shards, you know it. It was an amazing place.
Ariel Lavery: This valley was home to what has been described as the heart of the Cherokee Nation, before the Revolutionary War. Chota was the Overhill town around which they organized.
Bob Blankenship: Chota was the capital.
Ariel Lavery: I spoke with several members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee, and I visited what is left of this capital.
Gene Branson: sound of insects in the background) You can't get any more important than these sites here.
Ariel Lavery: It’s now a memorial site with short pillars that suggest the townhouse that once stood and a grave marker for Oconastota, a chief of the 18th century. There is also a museum dedicated to Seqouya, who was one of the most important Cherokee in history. There’s a replica of part of the Tellico Blockhouse which was a British-Cherokee trading post, and a small memorial that remembers the original Cherokee Overhill city in this valley, which is now under water.
Austin Carter: That’s Tanasi right?
Ariel Lavery: That’s right. Tanasi. The town for which the Tennessee River, The Tennessee Valley and the State of Tennessee are all named.
Austin Carter: And the Little Tennessee River which is the one that used to flow in place of this lake.
Ariel Lavery: The river that is now impounded, forming the Tellico Reservoir.
Austin Carter: And I know the damming of this river was one of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s most controversial projects.
Ariel Lavery: Yes. It was protested for over a decade.
Jeff Chapman: We knew that there was a great deal of opposition by the residents there in the valley to lose their lands that had been in their families for many generations.
Carolyn Ritchey: We lived in that area and had roots back to the Revolutionary War and beyond. We were invested deeply in the community. We were rooted and it was a wonderful place to live.
Ariel Lavery: But the TVA had a huge vision for how they might help this valley catch up to twentieth century modernity.
John Cartwright: Planners and people that think about the future always have this vision of a perfect town.
Ariel Lavery: Build a perfect new town.
Carolyn Ritchey: And they put out signs that said “building a better environment.”
John Cartwright: So it was gonna be sort of an industrial boom and then there was going to be housing developed for people that worked at these factories around the lake. At the same time TVA was going to save the history.
Ariel Lavery: The early history of the British and Cherokee who occupied the valley.
John Cartwright: This was kind of a utopian vision of how East Tennessee would be.
Ariel Lavery: But when the families that lived here realized how this was going to change their lives forever…
Carolyn Ritchey: That was my first horrible gasp of “what is this gonna do in my world?”
(sparkly string music fades in)
Ariel Lavery: This story of the death of Little Tennessee Valley and the formation of the Tellico Reservoir has been my obsession for the last eight months. It’s a story about a community coming together while being ripped apart.
Carolyn Ritchey: You couldn't organize a fight.
Ariel Lavery: It’s about the ways our environment can clue us in to the destruction we unknowingly cause.
Zyg Plater: They found an endangered species in the Tellico project… What is going wrong with the rivers?
Ariel Lavery: And what those clues can tell us about everything going on around us.
Zyg Plater: Water reflects everything around it; history, politics, ecology, economics, humans and non-humans. Reflected in a river is a way of capturing the fact that this wasn’t just one little case.
Ariel Lavery: And how these news media, NBC and CBS, covered those clues.
NBC News broadcast: It was the little fish versus the big dam builders in the Supreme Court today, and the fish won-for now.
Carl Stern: Well I think anybody that anybody that is stupid enough to let a little tadpole kill that project over there don’t have no business in the Supreme Court.
Dan Rather: But as Bernard Goldberg reports, it looks as though the only casualties of Tellico are human beings.
Carolyn Ritchey: The title is “Tellico Dam battle, it’s not just snail darter.”
Zyg Plater: The farmers knew it. For 19 years they knew it. They did everything right.
Bernard Goldberg: But a few held out, bitter that they had to leave against their will.
Burl Moser: (tapping sound) Hell of a country ain’t it? (car engine starting)
Zyg Pater: This is dimension after dimension after dimension.
(theme music starts)
Zyg Plater: Coulda, shoulda, woulda is just heartbreaking to me. I can't let go of it.
(theme music swell)
Ariel Lavery: This is The Story of Tanasi. This is the story about an epic battle to save the Little T. Over the next four episodes we follow the story from an ancient fertile valley all the way to the Supreme Court. We talk to the few remaining people around who remember the river valley as it once was. Today, we relive the foregone life of the Little Tennessee River, from the river’s beginning to the rise and fall of the Cherokee, in Part 1 of our series: Birth of a River.
Austin Carter: On Middle of Everywhere, sharing big stories from the small places we call home. I’m Austin Carter.
Ariel Lavery: And I’m Ariel Lavery.
(theme music ends)
Part 1: Birth of a River
Scene 1: A River Valley is Born
Austin Carter: Rivers are both ancient, and ever-evolving. So how do we begin to tell the life story of a single one?
Ariel Lavery: Let me just take you on a journey. And start with some description of the river.
(sound of page turning/ book opening)
(slow, thoughtful acoustic music suggests going into the recesses of deep history)
(woman’s voice, reading)
“The Little Tennessee is not a river to be taken for granted.”
Ariel Lavery: This text is from the book Valley So Wild, by Alberta and Carson Brewer. In it they describe a river that is older than the land, and saws through the rising mountains of Appalachia. The peaks of the Smokies once towered high above where they are today, with vegetation clinging to the barren rock faces and crevices between. The vegetation and animal life found here was largely “spared the ravages” of the ice and oceans that covered much of North America. Thus, the Little Tennessee has seen plant and animal life thrive here longer than most other rivers of our country.
Woman’s voice, reading: “Season after season, and eon after eon, leaves came green in spring, turned gold in autumn and fell to the forest floor by the billions of tons. Trees sprouted, grew large and old and then fell in springtime gales, contributing to the deepening humus.”
Ariel Lavery: Then came the people.
Scene 2: Valley of Cherokee
Gerald Schrodl: In the Little Tennessee River Valley we have an archeological record that goes back at least, uh, 12,000 years.
Ariel Lavery: Artifacts uncovered and salvaged from the valley tell the story of early Paleo-Indian and archaic cultures that hunted and gathered the native flora and fauna. From there the archeological record shows culture developing from small camps into small villages, domesticating plants, and the beginnings of burial practices. By 1,000 AD, Mississipian cultures, which are known for building the large mounds in the midwest, south and southeast, had developed into…
Gerald Schroedl: A complex social and political organization that we generally refer to as chiefdoms. And then it was those Mississippian period chiefdoms that were first encountered by the early Spanish explorers.
Ariel Lavery: This is our Cherokee archeological expert for the Little Tennessee Valley, Gerald Schroedl.
Gerald Schroedl: I'm a professor emeritus at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee.
Ariel Lavery: Gerald grew up with an interest in indigenous peoples.
Gerald Schroedl: Before the Dallas Dam was built on that Columbia River, you could stop and watch Indian people fish at Salida Falls.
Ariel Lavery: He went on to study and get a degree in archeology and was hired to help excavate at the Tellico Project.
Gerald Schroedl: So, as a student, and you know, having some knowledge of American history, I had heard of the TVA. I became aware in ‘60… must have been ‘68, somewhere in there, that TVA was building this reservoir, but other than that, I didn't know much about it. My initial view was I got a job. Somebody is going to pay me to do archaeology, and that's what I've been trained to do.
Ariel Lavery: This project yielded some of the most important evidence from a single excavation of early peoples living in North America.
Gerald Schroedl: And then out of those Mississippian cultures emerged by the, sometime in the 16th, 17th centuries, the historically-known Native American tribal groups that are reported in history. So, like, the Cherokees, and the Creeks and, and other native people in the southeast.
Scene 3: The River is Life
Gerold Schroedl: Water is a source of cleansing and ritual and spiritual power.
Ariel Lavery: The Little Tennessee River was a sacred source of life and spirituality.
(single-note string music fades in)
Gerold Schroedl: Amongst the Cherokee, they have a, what we would call a ceremonial ritual called “going to water,” which Cherokee people continue to do to this day. This is like us, brushing our teeth or taking a morning shower. They do this as a matter of habit and importance to their spiritual and personal well being. And then they did this for other purposes. So for example, undertaking any kind of risky activities. As part of the preparation for warfare and for stickball, games and so forth, was to go to water. Another situation that people would go to water is if this was part of a healing, if a person was sick or ill, and they were consulting a medicine man. Undoubtedly part of the ceremony or part of the ritual of curing was to take the patient to water.
Ariel Lavery: And the river had an identity for the Cherokee.
Gerald Schroedl: The river itself was a spirit known as the long man. And the long man's head was in the mountains, his feet were where the water eventually flowed into the ocean. So part of the ritual of going to water was to pray to, or ask for the assistance of, the long man or the river.
Ariel Lavery: The river was key to the Cherokees’ existence.
Gerold Schroedl: Life depends on water… period.
Scene 4: The Overhill Capital
Gerald Schroedl: In eastern Tennessee, the Cherokee are referred to as Overhill Cherokee. When the first British diplomats entered into the Overhill country, they went to talk to the head men or the chief at Tanasi.
Ariel Lavery: Tanasi was the capital at the time, where people from all the surrounding towns would gather to discuss and make collective decisions.
Gerald Schroedl: And then sometime around probably 1740, 1750, you see in the historical record that pretty soon people then start talking about, “we're going to Chota, we're going to Chota,” and you see less or fewer and fewer references to Tanasi. So something happened in probably the 1730s or thereabouts where Chota eclipsed Tanasi.
Ariel Lavery: These capitals were defined, in part by a central townhouse.
(sparkly string music)
Gerald Schroedl: A townhouse, kind of like the combination of a town hall, a community center and a church all rolled into one. So anything of any importance, any kind of decision making, took place in the townhouse. The best townhouse descriptions are for example, when Lieutenant Henry Timberlake visited the Overhill towns in the mid 18th century in 1761, 62.
Ariel Lavery: Henry Timberlake was a colonial officer and cartographer who first mapped the Little Tennessee River Valley and all the Cherokee towns he encountered.
Gerald Schroedl: He describes a townhouse. Part of what we learn there is that these are extremely big buildings, 60 feet in diameter, and they are clearly octagonal buildings, they're eight-sided buildings. And then they have a large central hearth area where the sacred fire was kept burning.
Ariel Lavery: There are seven separate seating areas in these buildings…
Gerald Schroedl: …for each of the seven Cherokee clans. Clans were matrilineal and exogamous. These clans are basically the source of the judicial process.
(colonial-style fife music)
Ariel Lavery: As the British come into the valley in larger numbers, the values of the Cherokee people changes.
Gerald Schroedl: As these towns were subject to European assaults through disease and warfare, and so forth, some of these towns were completely abandoned. Sometimes they were rebuilt elsewhere. Sometimes the population of one town moved to another town, so we would have a refugee population. And so over time, Cherokee people who had more power or more influence with respect to warfare, tended to become more and more powerful. In Cherokee culture, there were so-called red chiefs, or war chiefs. And there were so-called white chiefs, or peace chiefs. And over time, those warchiefs took on greater and greater influence in Cherokee culture, because of the conflicts and the increased interaction with the British.
Scene 5: A Disappearing Culture
(simple bass drumming fades in)
Geradle Schroedl: By the end of the Revolutionary War, 1794, the Cherokee people were on the verge of extinction. (pause) After the Revolutionary War, the population rebounded to around 16,000. Then, of course, along comes the removal.
Ariel Lavery: Most of the remaining Cherokee are removed and marched along the horrifying Trail of Tears, where the native people living in the Eastern United States were forced to walk hundreds of miles to U.S.-designated Indian territory.
(soft dreamy music starts)
Gerald Schroedl: And then of those 16,000 people, 8,000 of them died on the trail or as a direct result of having been removed. By 1819, essentially, all of the Cherokee towns on the Little Tennessee were no longer occupied. It is recorded that there was only one old man living at Chota.
In the early 19th century, Cherokee people began to worry about losing their culture. And one of the things that they could do then, of course, was to write things down.
Ariel Lavery: In the face of the disappearing culture of the Cherokee people, one man creates a system of symbols for the Cherokee to communicate with.
Gerald Schroedl: Sequoyah of course was one of the most famous indigenous native people in all of history, because he invented the Sequoyah syllabary. He was keenly aware and impressed by the fact that white people could write things down and send messages to one another. And so he wanted the Cherokee peoples to be able to do that.
Ariel Lavery: Seqouyah was raised by his Cherokee mother and was inspired at an early age by practices of the English. He watched as the British used language and symbols to track trade and goods and communicate through newspapers. After twelve years of toil in developing his syllabary…
Gerald Schroedl: He brought it to Cherokee leaders… there was a lot of debate over “what was this, what should we do with this?” because some Cherokees thought this was witchcraft. Some people thought this was divine, some kind of divine origin, that, you know, he had gotten some kind of special spiritual power to develop this.
Ariel Lavery: Seqouyah’s syllabary was eventually adopted.
Gerald Schroedl: Then Europeans, particularly early missionaries, began to use the syllabary. They published The Cherokee Phoenix, in English and in the syllabary, so a Cherokee person, even totally illiterate in English, could get a newspaper.
Ariel Lavery: And today you can see the syllabary at the Sequoyah Birthplace Museum at Tellico Reservoir.
Charlie Rotarmer: I’m spreading the ink evenly on the inkball. And then I would take the inkball (sound of Charlie tapping the inkball to the plate)
Ariel Lavery: In fact I was even given a copy of one freshly printed syllabary off their antique letterpress.
Austin Carter: I’d love to know what that looked like.
Ariel Lavery: Yeah, it was pretty neat. A very heavy looking solid steel frame around the printing apparatus with a kind of runway for the plate and a huge lever.
(sound of letter press closing, paper being removed)
Ariel Lavery: …and you have your beautiful syllabary.
Charlie Rotarmer: Yep.
Conclusion:
Austin Carter: You know, there’s so much history for the Cherokee in this one place, this Little Tennessee River Valley. So, how much of that history that you just recounted really felt present when you were out there?
Ariel Lavery: Well, I guess it’s sort of present in the way most of our history is present today, through museums and memorials. There’s a replica of Fort Loudon because the original site is underwater. There’s a replica of part of the Tellico Blockhouse and the original foundation is there which is pretty cool. The memorials to Chota and Tanasi are out of the way and a bit and understated. But they are quiet and overlook where the river once flowed. Yet, perhaps the most real feeling of history I got while I was there was from the remnants that still stick up out of the lake: the silos and that old bridge descending into the water.
Austin Carter: They’re kind of like the ghosts of the past, I guess.
Ariel Lavery: And we’re going to hear, from a couple of the people who remember when those silos were not being used as diving apparatuses, but rather to hold the fruits of the soil in this valley.
Carolyn Ritchey: And I am so bent on getting this story out so people can see and hear and know that there are people in this neck of the woods that lived here, and they don’t know what happened.
Ariel Lavery: That’s coming up in the next episode of our series: The Story of Tanasi.
(anxty folksy music fades in)
Credits
You can find images of Tellico Reservoir with the silos sticking out of the lake and other things we talked about on our website at middleofeverywherepod.org or on Instagram and Facebook @middleofeverywherepod, @middleofeverywherepod, and twitter @rural_stories. If you want to be even more involved in the conversation, sign up for our newsletter so you’ll always be the first to know about new episodes and interesting things going on at WKMS and in our region. This episode of Middle of Everywhere was produced by me, Ariel Lavery, with editorial help from my cohost, Austin Carter. Thank you to Asia Burnet for her voicing and to Chris Lavery for his musical mix. Our editor is Naomi Starobin. Our theme music was composed and recorded by Time on the String sound studio in Paducah, Kentucky. Other scoring was from APM music. Marketing and sponsorship support comes from Dixie Lynn. Thank you to our intern Annie Davis who has done much needed fact checking. Middle of Everywhere is a production of WKMS and PRX. This program is made possible, in part, by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private organization funded by the American people.