AS I STEERED THE PATIENCE around the scenic bends along the Indiana and Kentucky banks, everything I was seeing and reading confirmed that the impact of the flatboat era was vast and enduring. By the end of the 19th century, the growth unleashed by the wooden flats had mushroomed into a 200,000-mile network of rivers, tributaries, canals, and railroad connections that made America a colossus of transportation. But that was all about the epic America of accepted myth, Horatio Alger’s America. That was the America of fortunes being made from the humble beginnings of a single slaughterhouse beside the river, or a Monongahela boatyard evolving from building scrappy little pioneer arks to turning out two-hundred-ton paddle wheelers capable of carrying a thousand bales of cotton and a full complement of 175 passengers downriver.
But there was another America created by the flatboat era. The land rush unleashed by the transportation boom between the Revolution and the Civil War ignited a frantic national campaign to annihilate the Native American tribes throughout the inland river country. The Trail of Tears–forced relocation of the Cherokees and other southeastern tribes in the 1830s not only cleared the frontier of traditional peoples so that the one big event that drove America’s industrial revolution—the rise of King Cotton—could proceed. The template for clearing the rest of the West of native peoples became embedded in our national character. That is the burden of the 19th-century, trans-Mississippi frontier. Our thriving as a people depended on our destruction of the people who were already here, and were now considered in America’s way.
The clamor to occupy the rich new soils of the inland river country began even before the American Revolution was over. Squatters, Continental army veterans anticipating land grants for their military service, fur trappers, and even organized-church groups had been trickling through the Cumberland Gap and down the Ohio in flatboats as early as the 1770s. This trickle became a flood by the 1790s. Skirmishes between the scruffy bands of white pioneers and the indigenous tribes over land use boiled over into massacres, and then revenge massacres committed by both sides. The chaotic situation in the West, and the federal government’s realization that it couldn’t restrain its own citizens as they streamed over the Appalachians, ignited the Northwest Indian War, a bloody conflict against a confederation of Shawnees, Delawares, and Creeks that would drag on for ten years after the Revolution, by default determining American policy toward the native tribes. The precedent for development of the West was established. As soon as the disruptive waves of white settlers got into trouble, the central government intervened on their behalf, sending troops, building forts, and militarily subjugating the tribes. The defeated chiefs were forced into signing treaties that ceded vast reaches of their lands to white Americans. During the War of 1812, Shawnee chief Tecumseh briefly revived organized resistance to white settlement with a broad confederation of tribes, but the Native American defense of their lands collapsed after his death at the Battle of the Thames in Canada in 1813.
The rivers became bloody scenes of conflict. During the Beaver Wars fought between the Great Lakes and the Ohio River, which had begun as early as the 1630s, the tribes had been fighting each other, or European trappers, for two centuries, endlessly forming new alliances between themselves and with the French, Dutch, and British traders. The tribes of the Ohio country were extraordinary watermen and experienced warriors. They were master canoe builders whose smaller boats glided over the worst rapids as if they were flying carpets, and their longboats, up to thirty feet, were capable of effortlessly carrying more than fifteen braves, or a two-ton load of furs, over the same white water. The big dugouts were easily emptied of their cargo, then filled with weapons and warriors, to join fighting expeditions. For more than a century, new battles to protect fur territories broke out every few years and violence via tomahawk or flintlock was a way of life.
The inland river tribes had long been accustomed to the presence of non-native Europeans. But these were mostly French trappers, who traveled in small, nonthreatening groups of canoes, and who were more than willing to intermarry with the tribes, live together, and share both the work and the bounties of building fur-trading villages together. For a generation or more, the inland river country of Indiana, Illinois, and Kentucky became a network of mixed-race fur-trapping hamlets generally free of conflict. But this changed dramatically during and just after the Revolution, when large expeditions of flatboats began to arrive south of the Ohio River. The new arrivals were predominantly English-speaking Virginians, intent on permanently settling the land for farming. In 1779, land speculator John Donelson led a large flatboat group that founded Nashville, Tennessee, along the Cumberland River. In 1785, Revolutionary War captain Richard Spurr led a group of thirty Virginia veterans and their families who floated down the Ohio and then traveled overland from Maysville, Kentucky, settling the Lexington area. The white man was now arriving in massive arks that resembled floating farms, and these newcomers were determined to own the land themselves and to live far apart from the tribes. They cleared the forests and carried diseases that were often fatal for the Shawnee, Cherokee, and Creek villagers whose land they were now claiming. The flatboat became a potent symbol of a new kind of white invasion, and the pioneer flotillas were vulnerable because they were so identifiable and restricted to the course of the water, where escape was nearly impossible. This produced tragic results for both the white settlers and the tribes.
In the spring of 1779, as the twenty flatboats and supply scows of the Donelson Party proceeded down the Tennessee River from the Cumberlands, smallpox broke out on a few boats and, to prevent a larger outbreak, the expedition leaders decided to quarantine everyone showing symptoms on a single boat, which trailed at a safe distance behind the flotilla. The drifting Donelson boats approached their first Native American villages, occupied by the Chickamauga tribe, along a winding, breathtaking formation of limestone cliffs now known as the Tennessee River Gorge, near present-day Chattanooga. A few years before, the Chickamauga clans had broken off from their Cherokee relatives and moved downriver to escape the white settlement streaming over the Cumberlands, and were known to be hostile to flatboat groups. When a group of mixed-race villagers and Chickamauga braves approached the settler flotilla and warned the settlers about approaching the native villages, Captain Donelson hurried his boats to the rapid currents on the north bank of the Tennessee and swiftly left the villages behind. But the smallpox boat, lagging behind the main group, was defenseless and a Chickamauga war party in canoes soon overtook it, killing or capturing the twenty-eight pioneers on the boat.
The Chickamauga had inadvertently allowed themselves to be lured into an epidemiological trap. The warriors returned to their villages infected by smallpox, and the disease quickly spread not only through their villages, but to the upstream villages of their neighbors and close relatives, the Cherokee and Creeks. The pandemic that raged afterward in the native villages along the Tennessee might have killed only hundreds of Chickamauga, Cherokee, and Creek, but it was probably thousands. Disease, and the fear of disease carried by white settlers, became a major disruptive force along the west face of the Cumberlands, which was now a mixed space comprised of the old Native American lands and the new wilderness roads of the white pioneers. Recurrent epidemics of smallpox and rubella sweeping through tribal lands turned initially friendly villagers into hostile warriors, and the decimation weakened tribal resistance to the white invasion.
As they continued down the river into Alabama, the Donelson group skirmished with several more bands of Cherokee and Chickasaw warriors, losing six more settlers during attacks. The boats reached the Ohio and then turned south to follow the Cumberland River, finally reaching the large bend in the river at French Lick, now Nashville, by the end of April 1780. About thirty-five members of the original two hundred travelers in the Donelson group had been killed during the thousand-mile flatboat journey. For years afterward, sensationalized accounts about the casualties among the Donelson settlers, circulated widely in the eastern press, contributed to suspicions about the safety of flatboat migration and fueled a growing national hatred for the western tribes.
Historian William Heath has estimated that between the late 1780s and the early 1790s, more than five hundred settlers were killed along the Ohio when their flatboats were ambushed by Native American warriors. The deadly mayhem on the frontier was clearly not working as a development program, and the response of the interim government in Philadelphia, the Confederation Congress, was contradictory. A series of land acts passed after 1785 established a clear path for the new territories to apply for statehood. Congress also settled the problem of retiring the country’s Revolutionary War debts by establishing the economic model America would use to push west for the next century. The government sold large parcels of frontier property to wealthy investors and land companies, who in turn were authorized to resell parcels at a profit to pioneers, or to issue deeds to the war veterans and their heirs who held warrants for farmland. Treaty after treaty during the long Northwest Indian War and Tecumseh’s rebellion delivered the bulk of western lands to white settlement, while relying on the tribes to vacate their traditional space, generally by disbursing northwest across the next river or two. There was no specific policy, no consistent plan about where the tribes would go, except that in several cases the government paid token amounts for the land, or agreed to fund the cost of moving. There was simply the practice of native retreat. It came to be called “voluntary removal.”
By the turn of the 19th century, the first Kaintuck subsistence farmers, and slaveholding planters making excursions into the alluvial plateaus west of the Cumberlands, had discovered that the limestone-rich, loamy soils of Kentucky and Tennessee, and the Mississippi Delta farther southwest, were ideal for cultivating row crops like cotton, hemp, sugarcane, and rice. Westering Americans were anxious to leave the exhausted land east of the Appalachian barrier behind for the better soil over the mountains. The early surveying parties sent into the inland river country in the 1790s discovered another critical benefit that accelerated the march of settlers southwest toward the Mississippi. Tributary rivers like the Wabash, the Kentucky, the Cumberland, and the Yazoo were navigable deep into the interior, sometimes for hundreds of miles, providing reliable cargo routes to the Ohio and the Mississippi and thus to New Orleans, the gold pot of global trade. The race was on to join America’s agricultural bonanza.
Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase in 1803, encompassing 828,000 square miles west of the Mississippi, which would provide enough land for fifteen new states, also provided a convenient bonus. Now there was plenty of new land west of the Mississippi, and that was where the tribes should be sent. Successive American presidents assumed an attitude of paternalism toward the native people. The American presidents were also notably unembarrassed about misstating the facts to their own political advantage. In a letter to Andrew Jackson written from his plantation, Monticello, in 1803, Jefferson offered the comforting thought that the Louisiana Purchase would benefit the tribes. “It [the purchase] will also open an asylum for these unhappy people, in a country which may suit their habits of life better than what they now occupy, which perhaps they will be willing to exchange with us: and to our posterity it opens a noble prospect of provision for ages.” In fact, the southwest tribes were aggressive and quite successful farmers, and the barren land where they were sent—the “Indian Territory” of Oklahoma—was vastly inferior for both farming and hunting.
It is significant that Jefferson addressed these sentiments about Native Americans to Jackson, who rose in Tennessee politics as a loyal protégé of Nashville powerbroker Governor William Blount. Jackson was then a former U.S. senator and congressman who had returned to Tennessee to build his fortune, eventually riding his fame as an Indian fighter and the hero of the Battle of New Orleans to national prominence. As historian Sean Wilentz has pointed out, “Jackson’s deepest passion was for the military.” During the Creek War of 1813, after a violent faction of the tribe called the Red Sticks massacred more than five hundred white settlers at Fort Mims in southern Alabama, Governor Blount ordered Jackson to mount an offensive with one thousand members of the Tennessee Volunteers, to protect the state’s southern border. During two decisive battles at the Creek villages of Tallushatchee and Talladega, Jackson surrounded the Red Stick warriors and slaughtered about five hundred of them, suffering modest casualties of his own. Jackson’s rampage against the Creeks, Wilentz writes, made him look “like a military genius. But the reality was more prosaic: Jackson, when provoked, was an unterrified and accomplished killer.”
Authorized by President James Madison to “negotiate” a treaty with the Creeks, Jackson imposed an agreement on the humiliated tribe that ceded 22 million acres of native land to the United States—most of present-day Alabama and western Georgia. Jackson would spend the next six years fighting a complicated series of battles against the remnant British and Spanish colonial forces, and their Seminole allies in Florida and Alabama, culminating in the Transcontinental Treaty of 1819, under which the United States purchased the entire Florida peninsula. Jackson’s bloodthirsty tactics were controversial, but he was lionized by southern settlers and plantation owners for extending American territory from Florida to Texas. Thanks to Jackson and his treaties, southern cotton and sugarcane growers had obtained millions of new acres to plant. Within a decade, Jackson, now the most celebrated American general since George Washington, would ride his military fame into the White House.
During the 1820s, as white settlers continued to crowd the Ohio and the Mississippi with flatboat convoys, American attitudes hardened toward the remaining indigenous tribes in the South. Since colonial times, the southern native peoples had been called the “Five Civilized Tribes” because settlers found large groups of them unusually willing to assimilate and adopt white ways. (They were the Cherokees of Georgia and North Carolina, the Seminoles of Florida, the Creeks of Alabama, and the Chickasaw and Choctaw of Mississippi and Louisiana.) The five tribes adopted Euro-American styles of dress, built log cabins in villages, frequently intermarried with frontiersmen and settler families, and often converted to Christianity in large numbers. Most impressive to the rude Scotch-Irish settlers and the desperate, tidewater planters converging en masse on the Deep South, the Cherokee, Creeks, and Choctaw cleared large forest tracts for cotton, tobacco, and indigo and owned African American slaves to work their plantations. But this just proved to the white settlers congregating on the frontier that the Ohio and Mississippi valleys were ripe for large-scale plantation development. The American agenda was now clear. As long as the tribes occupied cotton country, they were in the way of white settlement.
The year 1828 proved fateful. Andrew Jackson was elected president, shortly after gold was discovered in northeast Georgia, on land guaranteed by treaty to the Cherokees. Overwhelmed by the anarchy of a gold rush on Native American lands, the Georgia legislature promptly passed legislation establishing a lottery to distribute the native land to the white miners, and forbidding Cherokees from claiming legal title to land or mining for gold. The Georgia legislature had endorsed a massive land grab.
Jackson wasted no time affirming Georgia’s actions. He spent his first year as president, 1829, methodically laying the groundwork for what would eventually be called the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which provided for native lands in the southeastern states to be exchanged for lands in a new “Indian Territory” along the arid plains of Oklahoma. The usual “pensive nonsense about noble savages,” as one historian put it, was spouted to defend the forced transport of the tribes to the West. The Cherokees, the Creeks, and the Choctaws, even though most of them were farmers by now, would be happier as hunters and foragers on the dry Oklahoma land, and the tribes would enjoy the “advantage” of having their transportation costs paid for by the federal government. In 1829, when Jackson delivered his Indian Removal Act to Congress with a letter of intent, he was blunt about his intentions. The inland river country populated for centuries by the southeastern tribes would now become, by deliberate government action, the exclusive preserve of white settlers and plantation owners.
“What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages,” President Jackson wrote, “to our extensive Republic, studded with cities, towns and prosperous farms embellished with all the improvements which art can devise or industry execute, occupied by more than 12,000,000 happy people, and filled with the blessings of liberty, civilization and religion?”
The Indian Removal Act was narrowly passed in March 1830, largely on regional lines, and the forced relocations to Oklahoma during the Jackson presidency and that of his successor, Martin Van Buren, were undertaken by a ruthless series of forced marches and water passages that stretched more than a thousand miles between Florida and Oklahoma. At rifle point, U.S. Army troops and state militia forced between 80,000 and 100,000 members of the five tribes from their homes, usually without notice, to prevent the tribes from organized resistance. All of the river resources developed over the past forty years would be devoted to the removal effort. The tribes were “escorted” into unsanitary, diseased wooden stockades that served as holding pens, or concentration camps, before they were herded along combined flatboat and land routes west. During an era before bridges were built across rivers and large streams, water crossings during the Trail of Tears were made on open ferries, or fording by foot, which often meant that large bands of Trails of Tears travelers crossed barefoot on the ice. Thousands of Trail tribal members died from exposure and starvation. Some flatboat expeditions were assigned a single doctor, but a lack of government funds prevented the hiring of nurses and medical assistants who could have cared for tribal members during the inevitable outbreaks of disease. Cholera, dysentery, and whooping cough raged through the flatboats and camping spots along the journey. Overall, among the five southwestern tribes, almost a quarter of the marchers, an estimated 16,000 to 24,000 people, died.
The sinking of the steamboat Monmouth above Baton Rouge in 1837, which killed over 350 Creek tribal members, symbolized the horrors of Indian Removal.
The worst disaster along the water route to Oklahoma occurred in October 1837, when a 135-ton steamboat, the Monmouth, was steaming upriver past Baton Rouge with seven hundred Creeks crammed on its decks, part of a three-boat removal convoy contracted by the U.S. Army. During their land march to the Mississippi, the Creeks had already lost one hundred members to yellow fever. On a rainy, cold autumn night with low visibility, as the Monmouth rounded the Profit Island Bend, it collided with the sailboat Trenton, which was being towed downriver by another steamboat. More than two hundred Creek were thrown overboard into the frigid waters by the initial force of the crash. The steamboat, now broken in two, floated downriver with the rest of the Creeks and the crew, eventually breaking up and sinking. At least half of the Creeks on the Monmouth, between 360 and 400 souls, drowned in the Mississippi that night. The high death toll was blamed on overcrowding, the ineffectiveness of kerosene running lights in foggy conditions, and a failure to observe navigation rules on the river, which required boats moving downriver to remain in the middle of the channel, while upriver boats were supposed to travel closer to the banks.
One of the Creeks, David Barnett, later wrote an account of that night on the Monmouth. The Creeks, like most of the five civilized tribes, were experienced canoeists and water travelers. Barnett and his father, Timbochee Barnett, warned the crew of the steamboat that it was unwise to steam upriver on a stormy night when the Mississippi was obscured by fog. But the crew insisted that “the boat is going tonight.”
“The ship was the kind that had an upper and lower deck. There were great stacks of boxes which contained whiskey in bottles. The officers in charge of the ship became intoxicated and even induced some of the Indians to drink. This created an uproar and turmoil.” The Creeks begged the crew to take more care as the Trenton moving downriver was seen through the fog, but the Native American passengers were ignored. Barnett could never forget the mayhem on board once the Monmouth collided with the towed boat, which severed the steamship about thirty feet aft of the bow.
Then there was the screaming of the children, men, women, mothers and fathers when the ship began to sink. Everyone on the lower deck that could was urged to go up on the upper deck until some of the smaller boats [from the banks] could come to the rescue. The smaller boats were called by signal and they came soon enough but the lower deck had been hit so hard it was broken in two and was rapidly sinking and a great many of the Indians were drowned.
Some of the rescued Indians were taken to the shore on boats, some were successful in swimming to shore and some were drowned.
The dismembered remnants of the Monmouth drifted downriver and sank. By dawn, the storm had passed over and the fog had cleared. The impact of one of the great disasters of Indian Removal, and American history, was now clear to everyone.
“The next day,” Barnett wrote, “the survivors went along the shore of the Mississippi River and tried to identify the dead bodies that had been washed ashore. The dead was gathered and buried and some were lost forever in the waters.”
One of the more remarkable tales of the Trail of Tears was told by John G. Burnett, a young U.S. Army private in a mounted infantry unit that was sent to the Smoky Mountains in May 1838 to help escort a large party of Cherokees to Oklahoma. Burnett recorded his memories of being a Trail of Tears escort soldier fifty years later, on his eightieth birthday, because he wanted his children and grandchildren to know the truth about a shameful period of American history that he had witnessed firsthand.
Burnett was an interesting fellow, a multicultural archetype of his day. He had grown up in the 1820s in a white settlement in Sullivan County in eastern Tennessee, near several Cherokee villages along the Tennessee–North Carolina border, in the prime hunting country on the west face of the Cumberland ridge. He was reared according to the assimilationist values on the frontier. As a teenager he was devoted to hunting and fishing and, while roaming the forests, he befriended many Cherokee tracking parties, “hunting with them by day and sleeping around their camp fires at night.” He became fluent in Cherokee and beloved by the tribe after he rescued a young Cherokee who had been seriously wounded while hunting in the Cumberlands, building him a shelter in the woods and nursing him back to health on a diet of chestnuts and roasted deer meat. Later, when he was a U.S. Army recruit barely twenty years old, his military superiors learned that Burnett spoke the language of the tribe and assigned him to the troop removing the Cherokee.
Burnett spent the fall and winter of 1838 acting as the interpreter for the mounted unit escorting a group of Cherokees from the Smokies on the North Carolina border to Oklahoma. The forced transportation was massive—the captive Cherokee train that Burnett helped escort was 645 wagons long. (During the fabled Oregon Trail migration of the 1850s, a fifty-wagon train was considered large.) It’s clear from his account that he would have been an unusual soldier anyway, but Burnett’s earlier fellowship with the Cherokees made him particularly sensitive to their plight. He often worked guard duty at night in just his government-issue blouse because he had lent his overcoat to a sick Cherokee child who needed extra warmth. Along the trail to Oklahoma, Burnett assisted at Cherokee burials and at night he enjoyed flirting with the Cherokee girls, often sitting up with them while they sang traditional songs. He was disconsolate about the “cargo of suffering humanity” that he witnessed along the long journey through the inland river country to Oklahoma and felt violated as an American soldier assigned to the duty.
“I saw the helpless Cherokees arrested and dragged from their homes, and driven at bayonet point into the stockades. And in the chill of a drizzling rain on an October morning I saw them loaded like cattle or sheep into six hundred and forty-five wagons and started toward the west.… Many of these helpless people did not have blankets and many of them had been driven from home barefooted.” The route west, Burnett said, “was a trail of death,” especially after the winter sleet and snowstorms began to fall on the Cherokee party while it crossed the Mississippi. Most of the Cherokees slept in their wagons or on the ground without fires. During a single night that winter, Burnett said, twenty-two Cherokee died of pneumonia. He saw a Cherokee widow with one infant child strapped to her back, and holding the hands of her two older children, forced by his fellow soldiers to cross a creek at high water. She drowned with her three children in the icy rapids. Burnett was briefly detained and threatened with court-martial after he intervened when he saw a government teamster whipping “an old feeble Cherokee” into a wagon and knocked the teamster to the ground.
Burnett was wistful about his years with the Cherokee and often reunited with them as an older man. Fifty-two years after his participation in the forced march of the Cherokees to Oklahoma, Burnett wanted his children and grandchildren to know about Andrew Jackson’s genocide against the five tribes. Burnett is still revered among the Cherokee as a lonely voice of decency during the tragedy of the Trail of Tears.
“At this time,” Burnett wrote, in 1890, “we are too near the removal of the Cherokees for our young people to fully understand the enormity of the crime that was committed against a helpless race. Truth is, the facts are being concealed from the young people of today. School children of today do not know that we are living on lands that were taken from a helpless race at the bayonet point to satisfy the white man’s greed.… Murder is murder, and somebody must answer. Somebody must explain the streams of blood that flowed in the Indian country in the summer of 1838.… Let the historian of a future day tell the sad story with its sighs, its tears and dying groans. Let the great judge of all the earth weigh our actions and reward us according to our work.”
Today, along the inland rivers and the highways of Kentucky, Tennessee, and southern Illinois, it is hard to miss evidence of the Trail of Tears. In 1987, Congress enacted the Trail of Tears National Historic Trail, under which the National Park Service has designated about thirty locations along the major routes, which are supported by dozens of highway trail markers, and artfully designed and informative interpretive signs describing the various phases of the forced migration. But this is highly curated evidence, designed to appeal to modern-day tourists and visiting school groups. At major trail stops, paved roads beside manicured lawns twist through the woods to clusters of attractively designed “interpretive centers” and restored barns and log cabins. I ran into several of these during brief stops or layovers at Golconda, Illinois, along the Ohio, and at Helena, Arkansas, and Memphis, Tennessee, along the Mississippi. But I found that the attractive signage and carefully worded government narratives at these trail crossings, like those at so many historic sites, mainly seemed to sanitize the past and convert these trail locations into textbook landscapes that showcase the National Park Service’s undeniable skills at presentation. The tragic drama of the Trail of Tears, and its sharp abnegation of America’s constitutional values, is mostly lost.
I felt a stronger attachment to what was lost during Indian Removal in the middle of August, when I made an impromptu Huck-and-Jim camp along a lovely island below Owensboro, Kentucky. Mike Binkley had left the boat and Danny wouldn’t be back for a few days, but I was comfortable enough on the Patience by now to navigate alone downriver, at a modest pace of just fifteen or twenty miles a day. In the afternoon, simply because it looked so idyllic, I pulled into a small cove on Scuffletown Island, tied up to trees, and then savored an evening of solitude along the river. The random stop introduced me to a brief hiatus during the flatboat era. At places like Scuffletown, America seemed to pause and consider a kind of rough-hewn but peaceable multiethnic future before descending into an all-out war against the native tribes of the southwest.
The term “scuffletown,” more or less equivalent to “redneck town,” was an 18th-century description carried over the mountains from colonial North Carolina and Virginia. It referred to rude settlements in the mountain wilderness with just a dry-goods store or two, a blacksmith, and a tavern, famous for their “scuffles” because their remote locations were beyond the pale of the law and harbored cockfights, moonshine stills, and gambling. Because the mountain streams attracted a lot of beavers, the scuffletown hamlets attracted French trappers who intermarried with the Cherokee and Choctaw. The secluded villages also drew large numbers of runaway slaves who sought protection by melting into the sparse local population, relatively protected from the bounty hunters. Marriage between runaway slaves and members of the southwestern tribes was common, and each tribe had their own name for the children of these unions—the Cherokee “maroons,” the Seminole Blacks, and the Chickasaw Freedmen. Scuffletowns were rough, hard places, but they were also idyllic, forested refuges where the quilt work of mixed-race peoples knew they were safe from reenslavement or being hauled back to civilization to face the law.
Scuffletown Island derived its name from nearby Scuffletown, Kentucky, a small but busy flatboat landing on the Ohio, nine upriver miles from the confluence with the Green River, a sizable tributary that reached more than three hundred miles into interior Kentucky, abundant trapline country that drew Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, and also French trappers in profusion, spawning the mixed villages of the 18th-century wilderness. The frontier settlement was founded around 1800 by the Scotts, a mixed family of Cherokee, Shawnee, and Scotch-Irish blood typical on the postrevolutionary frontier. By the 1820s, the Scotts were known along the lower Ohio for running a lively trading post and tavern popular with the residents of the mixed-race Kentucky hinterlands, as well as the swelling ranks of Kaintuck flatboatmen drifting down the Ohio every year. The Scotts’ tavern became a popular rendezvous point and drinking spot, famous for hundreds of miles upriver and down. The “French Islands” just upriver had become busy cargo ports and a half dozen or more flatboats left the Frenches every day after unloading and cruised downriver, their crews flush with cash. During low-water periods or at the end of the traditional drift seasons in the fall and spring, a riotous mix of French trappers, wandering Shawnee and Cherokee, and alligator-horse flatboaters would camp for weeks, even months, often wintering over until the water rose again.
Despite Scuffletown’s rough-hewn environment and reputation for lawlessness, traces of civilization slowly emerged, and the town soon enjoyed the economic benefits spread by flatboat traffic. A school was built in 1813 and a church was built in 1830. Scuffletown became famous for two unique local products. The Cherokees and the Creeks taught the white settlers pecan husbandry and by the 1850s the Scuffletown groves were legendary for their quality throughout the South. By the Civil War, the surrounding swamps of Henderson County had been drained and the land cultivated for a “dark tobacco” strain that became famous throughout the world and was particularly prized in the capitals of Europe. Stripping barns for tobacco leaves, called stemmeries, were built in the 1860s, and Scuffletown eventually shipped more than five hundred barrels of tobacco to European markets every year, a significant export for an area with only two hundred inhabitants. Water-powered and later steam gristmills were built in the 1870s, and Scuffletown had two blacksmith shops and a barrel factory.
Scuffletown briefly achieved national fame after 1893, when the descendants of Cherokees exiled to Oklahoma during Indian Removal in the 1830s traveled back to the Ohio River valley and declared themselves a “returned tribe.” The state of Kentucky, now chastened by its past, quickly recognized the “Scuffeltown Cherokees,” and two other repatriating groups, reacknowledging them as lawful tribes. These returning groups, and the thousands of Cherokee who never left, spending the 19th century hiding in the mountain hollows and intermarrying with whites and African Americans, eventually formed the nucleus of today’s Eastern Cherokee band.
But the river that once so generously gave could savagely take away. In 1913, a massive flood wiped out most of Scuffletown and its pecan groves, and the town was largely abandoned. The great Ohio River flood of 1937 obliterated all Scuffletown remains. The Scuffletown Bottoms area on the Kentucky banks, and Scuffletown Island, are now a preserved space of natural wetlands and cypress groves maintained by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The sandbars and mudflats along the Ohio and its confluence with the Green, where the Scotts once ran their lively drinking hole, are now considered vital habitat for several species of rare terns, bats, and mussels.
I didn’t know about the ghost town of Scuffletown the night I parked alone on the Kentucky side of Scuffletown Island, just across the inner passage on the Ohio where the Scotts’ old tavern and the famous pecan groves once stood. I only knew that I was enjoying my solo camp lashed to the trees of an idyllic island on the Ohio, grilling some chicken and sliced summer squash on my Coleman cookstove while a refreshing breeze blew over from the Scuffletown Bottoms. The winds from the Kentucky banks gently swayed the Patience on her lines and I enjoyed how the simple pleasures of a river trip could deliver such deep satisfaction. As the Patience rode the winds, my hickory rocker effortlessly tilted back and forth on the bow deck.
Downriver, over the next few days, I read more about Indian Removal, and the one-century rise and fall of Scuffletown, in the local history rooms at libraries on both sides of the river. Reading about the tragedy of the five civilized tribes, and imagining it in my head, seemed to recast it more powerfully than visiting the tastefully designed National Park Service sites. When I left on this trip, I had anticipated that descending the inland river country would be a lyrical journey following Jacob Yoder’s route to New Orleans. But now, on the middle Ohio, I realized that I was making a passage through the darkest chapters of American history. Strangely, I felt good about that, more profoundly informed about the country I love.
And I realized that Scuffletown represented something even more important. For a brief interlude, just one hundred years, the descendants of the Cherokees and the Chocktaws, and the descendants of the alligator-horses, had paused to pursue coexistence, building a school and a church, discovering prosperity in tobacco, and collaborating on pecans. Then the river rose and carried it all away, obliterating all evidence of accord, but the experiment had been a lot more interesting and fruitful than removal.