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For Those Slower Tales of Yore - BIAD - 03-12-2024
In my opinion, a very lucky man. (Link)
RE: For Those Slower Tales of Yore - Ninurta - 03-12-2024
Quote:After all, no civilized man wants to understand technology!
He's obviously a very cultured, intelligent, and civilized man!
I miss keeping horses. They're useful for everything. I used to ride them, Dear Old Dad used the same horses to plow and cultivate the garden. We had an open-top wagon for hauling in the summer, and a home-made sled with half sole runners (we'd split a hickory sapling lengthwise and use one half of it to "shoe" the runners, tacking them on with wooden pegs so they were easier to change out when they got worn out).
Just as he mentions there, we have two sorts of roads here- the ridge-top roads (following water sheds rather than waterways) that follow old "buffalo roads" made by woods bison in their migrations - improved of course for horse travel in the 1700's - and river-bottom roads (following waterways rather than watersheds) winding through the valleys along waterways. Over time,the modes of transportation have changed, but the same old roads are still in use here, sometimes reconfigured to accommodate newer means of transportation.
Many of our roads in this neck of the woods follow the same pathways as the old Indian Trails. Highway 11 running through Virginia along the length of the Appalachian ridge and valley region - also known as the "Lee Highway" - follows along the old "Warrior Path" from the Iroquois country in New York to the Cherokee Country on western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee, for example. They became Indian trails to begin with because the woods bison first trampled them out during migrations, leaving a path that was easier for people to follow without having to hack out a trail through it. The Warrior's Path was later known as "The Great Wagon Road" once the white settlers coming into this region started using the same trail to get here.
Interstate 81 follows substantially the same trail, paralleling Highway 11 through Virginia - it's just a more modernized version of the exact same route.
Another service the buffalo provided was finding the low gaps through the mountain ridges where it was easiest to pass through the mountains. Those were later pressed into service by Indians traveling from one tribe to the next, secure in the knowledge that the buffalo had already found the easiest travel path and trampled the road out well enough to travel. One such path is now Route 19, branching off from the Warrior's Path (route 11) at Abingdon, VA, and running up through Little Moccasin Gap in the southwestern end of Brumley Mountain of the Clinch Mountain range, and after passing through the gap, running up the valleys to Bluefield, VA.
On the northeastern end of Brumley Mountain we find Hayter's Gap, with route 82 passing through with much the same history as the Little Moccasin Gap trail. On the western end of both gaps, there once stood Indian villages that were perfectly placed to control traffic through both gaps. I suspect most gaps were probably so guarded.
At Witten's Fort in Tazewell County, VA, we find yet another ancient Indian village - later re-occupied by white settlers who built the fort there, that guarded yet another branch off of Route 19 that ran northwestward through low gaps in the mountains that at one time were called "The Sandy War Passes", because they contained the Indian trails from the Ohio country into southwestern Virginia that were used by the Shawnee and allied tribes to raid the Virginia settlements, coming up along Big Sandy River and it's branches into Virginia out of northeastern Kentucky.
A branch of the Warrior's Path led from the Ohio Country down through Kentucky, crossing through Cumberland Gap in southeastern Kentucky, and then through Big Moccasin Gap several miles southwest of Little Moccasin Gap through Clinch Mountain and tying in to the Warrior Trail near Bristol, Virginia. This was the same trail that Daniel Boone and company cleared for wagon use to facilitate the migration of whites into Kentucky. After Boone cleared it, it became known as "The Wilderness Road".
Here again, in Lee and Scott Counties in Virginia, in the lands between the Cumberland Gap and the Big Moccasin gap, we find ancient Indian villages situated to control traffic through the Cumberland Gap coming from Ohio into the Cherokee country, and through Big Moccasin Gap running towards the Cumberland Gap. Those villages had a different character from the Little Moccasin Gap and Hayter's Gap villages to the north - the Lee County villages had mounds, and were an outlying development of the Mississippian culture, outpost communities if you will.
All of these gap-controlling villages had been abandoned by the time white settlers came into the area, although the earliest Spanish Conquistadors probably ran into them - the De Soto expedition records an unpleasant encounter with "Chisca" Indians somewhere around the Lee County mounds in 1540, and a few years later in 1567, Hernan Moyano, a sergeant of the Juan Pardo expedition that built 6 forts in what is now North Carolina raided a "Chisca" village at Saltville Virginia, with a party of about 20 of his men and God only knows how many of the "Xualla" indians from the village of Joara, where the Spaniards had built Fort San Juan. That was near Morgaton, NC, and has been archeologically verified.,
Saltville was a salt-producing series of villages that controlled the southern end of Hayter's Gap, different from the villages controlling the northern end of the same gap which were situated in an area now known as "Elk Garden". Saltville had been occupied or frequented by Indians for thousands of years, owing to the salt deposits that drew game in from far and wide. A 14,500 year old mastodon bone was recovered there with butchering marks made upon it by ancient pre-Clovis hunters.
Over the next 200 years, all of those villages were abandoned, and the area left pristine. The abandonment was probably initiated by the Spanish attacks from the south, and finalized by Iroquois attacks from the north later, in about 1650, in what was known as "The Beaver Wars". It just wasn't a safe or secure place to be any more, so the inhabitants left for greener pastures.
Practically all of the roads we used now that were built before 1960 or so we owe to the buffalo, and later the Indians, and later still the settlers who came into this region. The same roadways have been in use for thousands of years here, just as they were in Merry Old England.
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RE: For Those Slower Tales of Yore - BIAD - 03-12-2024
Thanks Ninurta, that was extremely interesting.
But 'Wood Bison'...? I'd never heard of them before.
........................
The family of Travellers Jack Hargreaves met on that old trackway reminded me of one of my older
sisters who used to sit at the fireside of such roaming folk. They would occasionally arrive on a
particular lane just on the outskirts where my small town ended and the farming land began.
Though born with a withered arm and later suffering a shortening of her left leg due to an awful
accident with a double-decker bus, my sister would always make her way to where this privacy
-loving family and spend the evening soaking in their interesting tales.
As a side-note, I and my chin can vouch that her non-withered limb took up any slack in the
weakness department.
RE: For Those Slower Tales of Yore - Ninurta - 03-12-2024
(03-12-2024, 08:08 PM)BIAD Wrote: Thanks Ninurta, that was extremely interesting.
But 'Wood Bison'...? I'd never heard of them before.
Back in the day, there were two varieties of bison in what would later become the United States. Everyone now is familiar with the Plains Bison, which is making a comeback now from near extermination, but not many have ever heard of the "Woods Bison" or "Woodland Bison". They were exterminated in the eastern United States long, long ago, the last one being recorded as killed in 1820 in what would later become West Virginia. I'm told that a few still exist in Canada, and I saw two specimens alive and well at the Natural Science Center in Greensboro, NC many years ago.
The Woods Bison lived in the forests of Eastern North America, east of the Mississippi River. They never roamed the plains like their western brethren, but kept to the forests and tallgrass prairies east of the Mississippi. They were somewhat larger than their Plains brethren, paradoxically. You'd think having to navigate the underbrush would lead to a smaller critter, but that was not the case. Other than the slightly larger size, they mimicked their Plain brethren in about every visual particular.
They were also endemic in the canebrakes (thickets of river cane along waterways) in Kentucky, and in the forests eastward of Kentucky, in what would later become the states of the eastern seaboard. I have the records of Lord Dunmore's War, 1774, and in them are listed the sale of buffalo hides taken from Kentucky by Daniel Boone, which he sold to the militia at Russell's Fort in Castle's Woods, what is now Castlewood in Russell County, VA - so there were enough of them still at that time that a man could make a living killing them and selling the hides to the Army, which were then used as blankets and for the production of leather and leather products.
Now they are all gone... except, apparently, for a small herd still living in Canada.
I think both varieties probably originated from the ice age bison, bison antiquus, which was an even huger beast with much larger and longer horns that went extinct at the end of the last ice age, along with mammoths and saber tooth cats and dire wolves and the liek megafauna.
Wikipedia article on Wood Bison. The article mentions their original range, but neglects to mention the entire eastern woodlands of what would become the United States... however, they were here, too, as demonstrated by Long Hunters hunting them, like Daniel Boone, and eye-witness accounts from earlier colonial days, long before whites ever made it into even the Appalachians, much less the western plains where the Plains Bison lived. I've got an old illustration here somewhere from the 1600's that shows some of the fauna encountered, among which are "tygers" - probably eastern jaguars that once lived here as the illustrated critter is spotted, not smooth like a cougar nor striped like a true tiger, and a Wood Bison labelled as a "buffaloe".
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