This Is The End My Friend, The End, The End

A first-hand account of the extermination of the last little enclave of rural America - Northeast Tennessee.

Northeast Tennessee is a place off the beaten path. It is where the sun goes after it drops behind the soaring purple smokey mountains, where the pavement ends and the country roads begin, a magical place where a million fireflies sparkle on warm summer nights and the smell if jasmine fills the air. A place where you once felt as if you had traveled back in time. In a way you had. Back before it all began…

To understand America, and what is happening to it, you have to come here because the transformation is still in somewhat in its infant stages. But before you venture into these mountains adorned with American, Marine Corps, and tattered rebel flags, hippies, transient wanderers with their giant backpacks, wild-west gun-toting liberties, cabins and condominiums, trailer parks and train tracks, interspersed with multi-million dollar lakeside mansions, country clubs, and the last paint chips of the antebellum south, you first have to understand the history and how the last sliver of unmolested America will soon all be just a memory.

It’s a story of adventure, exploration, grandiose illusions of wealth and prosperity, and levels of profound cruelty that would make Genghis Khan blush. Back in 1765, a scuzzy coterie of frowzy European land surveyors in search of fertile farmland and future plots for high-end condos found themselves here, rummaging through the enchanting, yet uncharted forests and mountain passes of this once untamed wilderness.

While they were fumbling through the woods, one young member of the party was lagging considerably behind, supposedly bird-watching and maybe collecting herbs. I imagine he was a romantic, the Audoban of this time, a notebook in hand filled with sketches and wondrous examinations of this new miraculous place of strange flora and even stranger fauna.

What he didn’t know at the time, he was quietly being observed and stalked by some local Indian (Native American) warriors. You can only imagine the conversation back and forth in hushed whispers of Tsalagi (the now endangered Iroquoian language of the southern Cherokee) as they watched this weirdly dressed, hairy-chested guy with skin the color of a spitball, disturbing the tranquility of their venerable hunting grounds.

“They with hairy chest have hair as red as a fire ant.”

“And we shall squish them like hairy-chested fire ants.”

“I heard from a ditlihi (warrior) to the east they keep arriving in giant canoes. They have no plans to leave.”

“They with hairy chest must die.”

“This one will have my blade.”

“Ho, ho, don’t even think about it. I called the scalp!”

The warriors no doubt would have heard stories of European conquest in other parts of the country to east. Maybe traveling nurse Indians visited the village and warned them that trouble was coming and they were not there to vacation on Boone’s Lake for a weekend fishing trip.

At some point, they made their move. The doomed explorer never stood a chance, and his buddies, a considerable distance ahead, couldn’t save him. His screams echoed through the hollers of Buffalo Mountain as he was filleted, bludgeoned, scalped, and left a mangled bloody mess along the path.

The man’s name was Jesse Duncan. He is forever memorialized on an aged-brass plaque along a built-up country road in the small mountain town of Johnson City, Tennessee. In fact, there are several plaques erected in his honor as being the first white man to die in the state of Tennessee. Though, technically, back then it was King George’s land, more or less considered a part of North Carolina. Then around 1784, it was the unofficial “State of Franklin;” nearly the 51st state.

To the Native Americans, there was no North Carolina, State of Franklin, King Whoever, or Tennessee for that matter. Duncan was a feculent trespasser- captured, tried, convicted, sentenced, and punished on site.

Duncan was not the last to meet such a grisly fate, either. Entire families are said to have disappeared in these mountains at the hands of “hostile Indians”. There are rumors on the colors of the wind that it still happens today…

Duncan’s grave still exists. It is a lonely slab of worn limestone on a small ridge enclosed by a rusty old fence off a narrow winding country lane known as Carroll Creek Road. It sits a mile or so from the creek bed where fellow interloper Daniel Boone hid for his life from a vehement band of ditlihi intent on delivering him the same fate.

Duncan is spoken of as if he was the first European scouting party to venture into the area. That is probably not true and there is evidence that Daniel Boone had been here five years earlier. There supposedly exists a carving on a tree that states something to the effect of “D. Boone kilt a bar in this spot 1760.” Whether that is accurate or not is up for debate and another such tree and message exists in Kentucky.

These little potentially exaggerated mysteries are part of what makes history of these off-the-grid places so intriguing- as long as it’s not happening to you. Most likely, there was an encounter with a bear that day in 1760, however it wasn’t extinguished with a properly applied rear naked choke or stabbed in the heart with a butter knife. The bear was probably gunned down from a short distance by three or four slugs from .44 caliber Kentucky long rifles. The legend is better though.

In today’s volatile landscape of recognizing the injustices of underrepresented people of the past, it draws surprise, for me anyway, that the plaques have not been sawed from my their perches as no doubt Duncan’s presence in these highlands represented the inevitable demise of its Native populations through forced removal, peremptory religious conversion, fanatic brutality and the intemperate spread of disease, among other misadventures. Their spears and arrows never stood a chance.

After Duncan, the Europeans, of primarily Scottish and English descent, flooded the area and set up shop calling these highlands their own, as they provided the settlers a blast of nostalgia with the similarities to the highlands back home.

Today, Northeast Tennessee represents the transformation from the old to the new, and it can’t be ignored. Take stock of some of the other areas of the country that have been pulverized by the new world order, the Maoist upending of local traditions, values, land, and culture. These places are now drowning and gasping for life. Examples include drug-riddled and garbage-strewn San Francisco; violent crime-mutilated Chicago and Camden; the murder capital that is Jackson, Mississippi, and the quintessential wasteland that is Detroit. Is Northeast Tennessee safe from the same type of grotty metamorphosis? Is it so remote and off the beaten path to avoid the inevitable? Duncan and his pals found this place in 1765 and look at it now. Give it twenty years and without the native warriors around anymore to terrorize and scalp the plunderers, Northeast Tennessee, and all its history, culture, and enchantment, is doomed. A quick glance through the kaleidoscope of the past is a bleak snapshot into the future. Funny how that works. And honestly, I’m not so sure I want to hang around and find out what it will be like.

Ask the average millennial on the streets of New York, Washington D.C., or even nearby Charlotte to point on a map where the Appalachian Highlands of Northeastern Tennessee is and they’ll likely gawk, shrug, and point at the entire continent of Africa or maybe Tasmania. Even the former planet known as Pluto is more familiar. Who could have predicted the massive resettlement to this area, refugees fleeing the cultural hegemony and the whoring of their pocketbooks by the historically unreliable push for the “mores of the ruling class.” It’s not mystery meat or a who-done-it novel, the footprints are right there in the red clay.

Northeast Tennessee isn’t immune, nor do they want to be. They have giddily jumped on the band-wagon, with as much enthusiasm and energy as the eager ordinary German oppidans at the behest of the blood-thirsty Nazi vultures to “round up all the filthy” gypsies, catholics, queers, and jews and stuff them hand-over-foot into ghastly Polish perogie ovens. A once fertile and unmolested landscape of emerald green rolling hills, magical forests, and leaping mountains, the Northeast Tennessee Appalachian highlands has since taken on the manifestation of China’s “Great Leap Forward (1958-1962);” a rife cauldron of accelerated gangrenous development, lawless bumper-to-bumper traffic, the denuding of wood from timeless ancient forests, a city skyline intent on being wrought with “factory chimneys everywhere;” the once flowing meadows and flowering fields beset by over-priced sub-divisions, “luxury” apartment complexes, townhouses, condominium complexes and the horrid plethora of chain outlets.

A quiet hillbilly community quickly steamrolled, and injected with a healthy dose of centralization - which is when a central government (town officials) establish economic policies and then local people in power (ruthless developers and land purveyors) use what autonomy they have to implement those policies at their discretion, regardless of public outcry and dismay - and this practice generally focuses on economic development, for them. There is little left here to the imagination. The manifestation of excrescency abounds. Bulldozed farmland and construction projects now pockmark the hollers and valleys like jagged mustard-gas smeared bomb craters.

It is the new world order. The zombie apocalypse has arrived. The AI generation. Despite the plastic surgery already done so far on this once rural and rustic paradise, it’s not totally downtown Oakland. There are still little magical pockets of nature clinging for dear life. Small, fiercely defended demesne, forgotten by time and the corrosive destructive psychosis of modernization, where the sound of a rushing unpolluted stream or wind whispering through the dogwood trees can still be heard. I have honestly never met anyone that has spent considerable time here ever say they didn’t like this place. It has always had a beating heart, a personality, a warm and welcoming disposition and incidentally, is very easy on the eyes.

The multitudes of Native American tribes that inhabited the area thought the same, however they were more or less eradicated with the migration of strange pioneers, and the incessant disease of development. History is consequently repeating itself before our eyes.

In all the years I have lived here, I have never once seen a feather-clad Indian in traditional garb speaking Tsagali or any other Native dialect anywhere in Northeast Tennessee. I say Indian, as if they are all the same but there were several prominent tribes in this area. You had the Cherokee, Choctaw, Shawnee, Muscogee (Creek), Seneca, Yuchi, and Chickasaw to name a few major players. Each had their own customs, creeds, traditions, idiosyncrasies, recipes, etc. Each tribe made up of people just like you and me, with the same human wants. They lived to laugh and have families, make love, eat good food and protect their homes, worldly possessions, and land. Is that wrong? Would you not do the same?

The Cherokee were the predominant tribe in this region residing in Overhill settlements on the western side of the Appalachians along the lower Tennessee River (Chota settlement, Citico, Chilhowee, Mialoquo, Tanasi, Tallahassee, Tomotley, Toqua, Tuskagee), lower Hiawasse River (Hiawasse, Chestowee) and Tellico River (Chatuga, Great Tellico). The communities were called “overhill” by traders who had to travel over the hills (Appalachian Mountains) to get to them.

And just like in societies today, the Cherokee back then had amongst their ranks political mischief going on. In 1835, a small collection of Cherokee representatives, unbeknownst to the rest of the tribe and the majority leaders, and acting outside the authority of the Cherokee government, secretly met up with some conniving settlers and signed the Treaty of New Echota, a lopsided document that blindsided the rest of the tribal communities ultimately purging them from the area.

The Cherokee leaders that betrayed their brethren, their culture, history, and outright identity did it for the coin. Does that surprise you? It shouldn’t. It is happening right now under our noses. Northeast Tennessee is shredding its identity for tax revenue and “growth” to bring more money, money, money into the pockets of the local fat cats. A few scoundrels, political greed-hungry animals within the Cherokee nation, imagining themselves more profound than they actually were, sold their souls, and those of the Cherokee precinct of Northeast Tennessee for the almighty dollar. $5 million to be exact.

Their legacy didn’t come cheap, and whether or not they even got that much is up for debate. No doubt it was astonishingly taxed. And that’s as human as it gets. For all we know, it was that smutty council of trouble makers that got the ball rolling for the absolute removal of all local Native Americans from the region and beyond. And roll that ball did.  By 1838, federal troops were literally physically wrenching people from their homes. In all, more than 15,000, most protesting the legitimacy of the unscrupulous treaty, were forced to march in what we know today as the Trail of Tears.

Families were separated, never to see each other again. The brutal march and conditions took its toll as those too weak or sick to continue were left to die along the side of dusty roads out to the barren windswept plains like the Bataan death march through the sweltering malaria-infested jungles of the Philippines. History is full of death marches, population purges, eminent domains on an epic scale, insatiable development, and mericless slaughter. It’s just what humans do. And yet, we call the pig population, swine.

I was sitting around pondering the endless cycles of vapid change and realized that history truly is repeating itself. Only now, I’m the Indian. I’m agitated. I’m frustrated, watching the end approaching like a wagon train stretching across the horizon. Will my neighborhood get annexed, my home subject to eminent domain so a new four-lane interstate can be built on top of it to help proliferate the growth?

When you think of the Native Americans pulled screaming from their tipis to join detachments destined for “Indian Country,” (Oklahoma); them being pulled from their homes screaming part is true, but not necessarily from tipis. Many of these “natives” were established citizens, business owners, living on plantations with seats in local government with white people names like Gary, James, and Hair. With their greased combovers, in tweed herringbone suits and alligator leather shoes they were rounded up, with their wives, children and elderly parents and sent packing. Money, land, and status didn’t change the fact that you were an injun. And injuns had to go. Somebody always wants your stuff- your land, your business, your money, and your status, and if they are powerful enough, they will take it.

It has always intrigued and disturbed me the gall of those nations and kingdoms that participated in global colonization, in this case the Europeans. I guess if it wasn’t them it would have been someone else- the Moors or the Chinese. I suspect the Polynesians gave it a shot but just didn’t have the weapons or inclination for outright domination despite their success sailing and traveling such long distances throughout the pacific. Rapa Nui (Easter Island) was far enough.

Supposedly the first settlers to Tennessee were nomadic, adventuring Paleo-Indians that set up shop some time around possibly 50,000 BCE, though some claim more like 15,000 BCE to 8,000 BCE. Nobody really knows. Imagine what they’d think of this place today?

After visiting the Smithsonian this summer in D.C. and learning about indigenous people populating the world millions of years ago, I truly wonder if that estimation of a few thousand years is way off. Who’s to say people haven’t lived around here for 2 million years. It muddles my brain to think this state has only been visited by outside invaders since the mid 1700s. It doesn’t make the nut for me. It’s just not that long ago. However this place, even today is quite remote. A couple hundred years is a pinch of sand in time. I wonder sometimes about the Native Americans that lived here before the Europeans arrived. I think of them not all that much different than us. Less stressed out I imagine.

I was at the local Olive Garden and we had a pretty waitress. Her name was Naomi. I happened to be working on this article at the time, taking notes in the restaurant. Judging by her features and skin tone I suspected she was of northern Spain or Basque decent, maybe, but easily could pass for an Indian princess with long chestnut dark hair pulled up, olive skin, coffee brown eyes, soft delicate features, and me being the inquisitive guy that I am, I wondered if she maybe was a descendant of some Cherokee queen lost to history. I imagined her existing 30,000 years ago, grinding corn and boiling raccoon stew in a short little deer skin dress with all the Indian warriors ogling her and vying for her attention which she pretends annoys her, but really she eats it up. One warrior finally gets the courage to strut over to her, “Hey baby, what do you say me and you go into that Tee-pee and get weird?”

Aside from the devastating colonization of the area, the destructive nature of ugly unwanted development, the unrelenting migration, nature is silently fighting the change. I’d like to believe it anyway. I do like it here. I liked it better before this new Fahrenheit 51, but that is inevitable anywhere. Consider places like Hawaii or the Nicoya Peninsula, formerly untouched gems now riddled with the syphilus of overdevelopment.

Imagine the Native Americans living in today’s restrictive climate? They go mad. The indigenous people were too mellow, too in harmony with the natural world for this Khmer Rouge totalitarian nightmare. But ye who holds the gun, gets the gold.

After the removal of the Native Americans, one might think the area would have become engulfed with even more migration and meteoric building projects then actually occurred, but there was a reason progress slowed. The Civil War. 

Northeast Tennessee was scraped slightly by the Civil War (or the war of northern aggression as still called by many locals). And to date still somewhat of a touchy subject. The effect of the Civil War on the area is analogous to being grazed by a musket ball as opposed to a direct hit. There were a few skirmishes, Blountville and Jonesborough, but overall, the local population was very much opposed to participation in the war. So much so, they propositioned the state government in Nashville to be allowed to secede from the state and create their own state of East Tennessee so to avoid the young men being conscripted into the bloodbath where brothers would be fighting brothers as the region was split between the Union and Confederate allegiance. Of course the state government rejected their request but allowed East Tennesseans immunity from conscription into the confederate army.

In my opinion, this was important in the preservation of the area and the lasting charm, for a while. Because unlike the leveling of other southern cities like Atlanta, and Savannah, Georgia. Northeast Tennessee was left alone. Later on, those other cities would undergo massive, if not frenetic rebuilding and industrialization. Northeast Tennessee was more or less ignored until less than a decade ago. 

So here we are, sitting on our decks watching the cranes in the distance stacking block upon block like the ghostly reconstruction of Stalingrad. A once lush mountain Eden, soon to be an austere conurbation attached to the other nearby pseudo-cities of Bristol, Elizabethton, and Kingsport until it is all one giant megacity. Waiting is all there is left.