Pointing the way

Hundreds of years before a network of highways and interstates crisscrossed the country, a system of trails connected the Cherokee to Indians throughout the nation.

Marking those trails were oddities that hikers may still come across on their treks in the woods—trees whose trunks run low along the ground before shooting upward again. Researchers believe the Cherokee shaped the trees to form a system of signs pointing to things that hunters, gatherers and warriors needed on journeys that could entail hundreds of miles.

Called by names that include “bent,” “yoke” and “marker” trees, the survivors are now two or more centuries old. Many are dying, including some scarred with Cherokee carvings, lending urgency to a project attempting to catalog them before they’re gone. Adding mystery to the endeavor is that many of the trees that would seem to qualify may be, in fact, only freaks of nature.

A nationwide mapping effort now has 1,985 trees in 40 states in its database. The Trail Tree Project, organized by Mountain Stewards, has associations with tribes throughout the country, including the Comanche, the Senecas, the Muscogee and the Osage. In the Southeast, project researchers have had several interviews with Cherokee elders and examined 200-year-old maps that indicate, among other things, that U.S. 441 over Newfound Gap may be on top of an old Cherokee trail.

Don Wells is president of Mountain Stewards, a Georgia-based nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving traditional trails in the Southern Appalachian Mountains. Mountain Stewards is working to learn more about the history of the bent trees and, with Wild South, a regional conservation organization, it is working to map the Indian trails in the Southeast, some marked by the crooked trees.

Network of trails

Native Americans used an extensive network of trails to trade and make war among themselves and with settlers who coveted their lands. Like today’s interstate system, the network ran north to south, east to west. The Warrior Trail, a famous Cherokee trail that ran from Georgia to what is now Pennsylvania and New York, at times saw huge detachments of Cherokee warriors racing off to fight their foes, the Iroquois, in the north. A major trail out of the Charleston, S.C., area into northwest South Carolina’s Oconee County and Western North Carolina allowed Cherokee traders to brings goods back from the coast. 

Bronze from Michigan and shells from Florida have been found at Cherokee sites in Alabama, undoubtedly carried there in the animal skin bags of Native Americans hoping to bring home items equally as exotic. Wells, whose research on Indian trees and trails has taken him throughout the country, once was in a Colorado town in the high desert of the Ute nation when someone approached him and an archeologist with an arrowhead made out of dark black rock. The archeologist looked at the artifact and said it wasn’t made out of local material, Wells remembers. It likely came from far away, carried along an Indian trail by someone from another tribe. That trail may well have been marked by rock cairns or bent trees.

“In the 1600s to 1800s, there was no sextant that the Cherokee could use when they traveled,” Wells said. “How could they go hundreds of miles and come back to their villages? They had to have had some methodology to do this. They looked for signs that would guide them.”

Called signal trees, prayer trees and thong trees elsewhere in the country, they may have been called another name by the ancient Cherokee, but Wells doesn’t know what that name is. “When we interviewed the elders, they called them ‘the bent trees,’” he said. 

The Cherokee left no written record of the trail trees, which they considered sacred, nor did they talk about them with white people because they wanted to protect the trees and they distrusted the colonizers, Wells said. This distrust was earned, as disease wiped out ninety percent of the Native American population after Columbus and the Europeans landed in the New World. Exploitation and massacres further reduced their numbers. 

From the late 1800s to mid 1900s, in an attempt to assimilate the Cherokee into white culture, Indian children were taken from their parents, sent to boarding schools and forbidden to speak their own language. These children returned to the reservations resolved that their own children would not go through the same horrors, Wells said. Consequently, there is a generation gap in Cherokee knowledge and lore. 

“We’ve talked to several people who said their parents didn’t talk to them about this,” Wells said. “Now they’re trying to get it back. When you’ve lost elders, you lose the culture.” 

Trail trees have been found as far west as Utah. They’ve been located in Wisconsin, Ohio, Illinois and Indiana. But the greatest concentration of discoveries that Mountain Stewards has catalogued has been in Cherokee lands in the Southeast, most notably in the borderlands where Georgia and North and South Carolina come together.

The Cherokee used young poplars and supple white and red oaks, species that can live hundreds of years. Saplings would be bent parallel to the ground and tied down, the crook sometimes being formed with a yoke or Y-shaped branch. A year or so later, the trees would be trained upward and tied off so that the leader pointed upward. If a branch or shoot had begun growing vertically, the leader would be cut off, creating a “nose” that is one of the bent tree’s distinctive features.    

The trees and the trails they marked were as informative to the Cherokee as GPS devices are to us today, Wells said. The trails took hunters to fields and forests that were rich in game, sometimes on journeys that lasted months and took them far from their villages. Closer to home, the trails guided women into the woods to collect edible plants and medicinal barks. Children scampered down them in search of playmates and firewood.

The Cherokee pointed the trees in specific directions for a variety of reasons, and trying to discern what they point to presents Wells and other researchers with some of their biggest challenges. Some bent trees point toward known Indian settlements, burial sites and artifacts, but others point toward destinations unknown. Trees on ridge-top trails may have guided hunters toward water sources that weren’t visible, researchers believe. Others may have directed scouting and war parties toward shelter and stream crossings. Warriors pursued by Indian fighters and U.S. troops might have looked for trees that pointed toward caves where they could hide.

Researchers know that Daniel Boone and other pioneers followed Cherokee trails deep into the wilderness. Nearly two decades before the American Revolution, British troops widened some of these trails so their horses could pull cannons to Fort Loudoun, in what is now Monroe County, Tenn. In 1813 the Unicoi Trail, which the Cherokee used from east Tennessee to north Georgia to interact with the Creek Indians, was opened to settlers’ wagons, becoming a toll road about six years later.

Cherokee trails linked villages and settlements for gatherings both social and ceremonial. Each fall, Indians in WNC walked along them to Kituwa, an ancient settlement or “mother town” between Cherokee and Bryson City, N.C., for the Green Corn ceremony to give thanks for the corn harvest, said Barbara R. Duncan, education director at the Museum of the Cherokee Indian in Cherokee. She is coauthor of The Cherokee Heritage Trails Guidebook, which purposefully does not include the location of trail trees. “All it takes is one vandal, and this incredible, historical tree is gone,” she said. 

Duncan said she sees the trees often when she hikes in the woods, but whether they were shaped by man or by nature is often hard to tell. “It’s a murky subject,” said local heritage consultant Tom Hatley. The shape of the trees may be just the result of gravity—and man’s desire to find spiritual significance in an earthly existence. “Trees grow in ways for us to give meaning to them, but there’s no doubt that people marked these trails in different ways,” Hatley said. “We just don’t see these things. There’s this whole cultural fabric in our landscape that is invisible.”

Hand of man or freak of nature? “That’s the big question,” said Lamar Marshall, cultural heritage director of Wild South, a nonprofit organization that works to protect the public lands and biodiversity of public lands in the South. “If they are young trees, maybe a tree fell on them and bent them. But these are older trees, some of them very venerable, ancient trees. I’ve seen beech trees bent like this, and they live 400, 500 years.”  

Wells said some of the Cherokee elders he talked to don’t believe in marker trees. Tommy Cabe, the environmental preservation and planning officer for the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, heard about trail trees when he was in forestry school. He said he sees bent trees “all the time” when he’s in the woods, but whether they were altered by hand or by accident is hard to say. They might have been bent by small earthquakes that altered their root systems, he said. “That’s not to say bending trees isn’t true,” he added. “The Cherokees’ means of travel and navigation were pretty ingenious for the time.”

Duncan has reviewed colonial military documents that suggest Cherokee soldiers could run the Warrior Trail into Pennsylvania in five days, averaging at least 100 miles a day. One historical record from the 1750s that Duncan reviewed stated that Cherokee warriors were in Maryland, ready for battle, within days of being summoned by the British, who wanted help in their fight against the French. The British commander marveled that the warriors had arrived far earlier than British troops garrisoned not far away. 

About the only way to ascertain whether trees might have been shaped by hand is to drill into the core. Counting the rings reveals whether it was growing before the first known incursions by non-Indian people, Wells said. But corings often yield incomplete records because the trees die from the inside out, creating a rotten center that yields gaps in the historical record. Taping into the bud of a branch also skews the results, as does passing through sections of decay. Some property owners don’t want their trees cored, and some don’t allow testing because they don’t want to believe that they have Indian relics on their land, Wells said.

People have guided the researchers to some of the trees, including one, forked into the shape of a football goalpost, that marks the site of a legendary battle between the Creek and Chickasaw Indians in what is now the Bankhead National Forest, Ala. A couple of years ago, Marshall and Wells were mapping two crooked trees north of Franklin when a woman came rolling down the road in her wheelchair. She told them there used to be a bent tree in her driveway that was part of an Indian trail. That tree and the trees they were mapping were part of an old Cherokee trading route that appeared on maps dating back to the 1720s, Marshall said. 

Unlike the trees, the record of the Cherokee trails is well established, and Marshall and Wells are using it to help map the Cherokee Trails Project, an ambitious effort funded by the Eastern Band to find and mark ancient trails that the Cherokee used to move around in and venture forth from the Appalachian Mountains.

Finding the way

WildSouth and Mountain Stewards began work in 2009, searching for trails in Western North Carolina, particularly within the Qualla Boundary, as well as the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The team of half a dozen people, led by Marshall and Wells, pulled old maps of land that the state of Georgia and the federal government confiscated from the Cherokee before forcing them to lands west of the Mississippi. The maps, which marked the locations of Indian trails, included land lottery surveys done in Georgia between 1805-1832 and government land surveys done in northeast Alabama between 1820-1840. 

The team also used a map that civil engineer Henry Mouzon created of North and South Carolina just before the start of the American Revolution, as well as trail data reported in the late 1830s by an Army lieutenant with the last name of Williams. Williams surveyed Indian trails in Clay and Cherokee counties in North Carolina, as well as elsewhere in the state and in Georgia. 

Over the course of three years, Williams noted the location of each Cherokee family along the trails—information Wells believes was later used to round up the last of the Cherokee (those who hadn’t hidden) for the forced march to Oklahoma, a tragic journey along a route commonly known as the Trail of Tears. Clusters of trail trees have been found in Arkansas, on reservation land the federal government established for the Cherokee once they had been forced from their homeland in the Southeast.

Using the old maps and surveys, as well as Google Earth and a discipline called “georeferencing,” Wells and Marshall walked suspected trails on state and national property, using a GPS device to compare position points along the trails to the old maps and the data extracted through Google Earth. If they had a match, they validated the trail. 

In that way, they documented 153 miles of old Cherokee trails on public land, as well as other miles on land held by the Eastern Band, which now has their findings. Of the 153 miles, about 50 are in Western North Carolina, Wells said, but few are open to the public. The 1.6-mile graveled path that runs along the Oconaluftee River at the Great Smoky Mountains National Park visitors center near Cherokee is associated with what was once the Indian Gap Trail that went over Newfound Gap to Gatlinburg, Tenn. In South Carolina, one 3.5-mile stretch of Cherokee trail exists along the Winding Stairs trail over Oconee Mountain in Sumter National Forest.

Many of the old Cherokee trails have become WNC’s roads, Duncan said. “The Cherokee found the best way to go, the easiest, most efficient routes to travel on,” she said. “You really have to admire their understanding of geography.” Case in point is a particularly admirable bit of trail-building—what is now the road over Stecoah Gap near Robbinsville, N.C. 

The Cherokee excelled especially in finding the simplest routes over gaps between watersheds, Duncan said. They created a portion of what is now U.S. 19, she said, which was built upon an important trail that once connected the Tuckseegee and Pigeon River watersheds and passed Judaculla Rock, a rock bearing ancient petroglyps in the Caney Fork community outside Cullowhee, N.C. 

“We think of Judaculla Rock and the headwaters of the Pigeon River as being far apart, and they are if you’re driving. But if you go over the gap, it’s only about 10 miles,” Duncan said. Stretches of U.S. 441 through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and Interstate 40 in Haywood County are on top of Cherokee trails, she said. The Warrior Trail is now part of Interstate 81, Wells said. 

Many of the old trails have disappeared, and many of the old trees are dead. Wells and Marshall have validated just a few of them in WNC. Two exist just off the Qualla Boundary, a little south of Cherokee. About six feet apart (and dying), the beech and oak trees point downhill toward a stream. Another one is west of Robbinsville, and there’s one near Andrews. “Unfortunately, because of age, farming and urban development, we’ve lost a lot of them,” Wells said. He desperately wants to record the locations of the remaining trees before they’re gone. “We’re losing part of history,” he said. “We want to tell the story of this history.”  

“I’ve seen many of these trees die in my lifetime, and then there goes the record,” Marshall said. “They’ve been here for hundreds of years. So it’s very important to record and document where all these trees were so in the future, when more research is uncovered about how the Indians used these trees, there will be a record of them.”

Duncan marvels how elegantly the Cherokee created a system of trails and trail markers, all with little impact on the ground they loved so much. “Bending a tree to show which way to go, it’s not like carving a giant sign in the mountain side—it’s altering nature by working with it,” she said.