Tennessee Frontiers: Three Regions in Transition

Tennessee Frontiers: Three Regions in Transition

by John R. Finger
Tennessee Frontiers: Three Regions in Transition

Tennessee Frontiers: Three Regions in Transition

by John R. Finger

Hardcover

$38.00 
  • SHIP THIS ITEM
    Qualifies for Free Shipping
    Choose Expedited Shipping at checkout for delivery by Wednesday, April 3
  • PICK UP IN STORE
    Check Availability at Nearby Stores

Related collections and offers


Overview

This chronicle of the formation of Tennessee from indigenous settlements to the closing of the frontier in 1840 begins with an account of the prehistoric frontiers and a millennia-long habitation by Native Americans. The rest of the book deals with Tennessee's historic period beginning with the incursion of Hernando de Soto's Spanish army in 1540. John R. Finger follows two narratives of the creation and closing of the frontier. The first starts with the early interaction of Native Americans and Euro-Americans and ends when the latter effectively gained the upper hand. The last land cession by the Cherokees and the resulting movement of the tribal majority westward along the "Trail of Tears" was the final, decisive event of this story. The second describes the period of Euro-American development that lasts until the emergence of a market economy. Though from the very first Anglo-Americans participated in a worldwide fur and deerskin trade, and farmers and town dwellers were linked with markets in distant cities, during this period most farmers moved beyond subsistence production and became dependent on regional, national, or international markets.

Two major themes emerge from Tennessee Frontiers: first, that of opportunity the belief held by frontier people that North America offered unique opportunities for advancement; and second, that of tension between local autonomy and central authority, which was marked by the resistance of frontier people to outside controls, and between and among groups of whites and Indians. Distinctions of class and gender separated frontier elites from lesser whites, and the struggle for control divided the elites themselves. Similarly, native society was riddled by factional disputes over the proper course of action regarding relations with other tribes or with whites. Though the Indians lost in fundamental ways, they proved resilient, adopting a variety of strategies that delayed those losses and enabled them to retain, in modified form, their own identity.

Along the way, the author introduces the famous personalities of Tennessee's frontier history: Attakullakulla, Nancy Ward, Daniel Boone, John Sevier, Davy Crockett, Andrew Jackson, and John Ross, among others. They remind us that this is the story of real people who dealt with real problems and possibilities in often difficult circumstances.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780253339850
Publisher: Indiana University Press (Ips)
Publication date: 11/13/2001
Series: A History of the Trans-Appalachian Frontier
Pages: 408
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.09(d)
Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

John R. Finger is Professor of History at the University of Tennessee—Knoxville.

Read an Excerpt

Tennessee Frontiers

Three Regions in Transition


By John R. Finger

Indiana University Press

Copyright © 2001 John R. Finger
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-33985-0



CHAPTER 1

Land, People, and Early Frontiers


People and land interact in many ways, producing fundamental changes in each. When writing of a region, then, especially of its frontier stages, it is essential to explore those myriad interactions and their consequences. In the case of Tennessee, that task is difficult because the state's 42,244 square miles encompass disparate geographic features which have attracted different peoples at different times. Scholars and politicians often acknowledge these geographic and historical peculiarities by referring to the three states or grand divisions of East, Middle, and West Tennessee.

East Tennessee, the most physically diverse of the regions, has witnessed the most complex frontier experiences as peoples of different races and cultures coped in their own ways with one another and with the dictates of nature. Officially this region stretches westward from North Carolina to the middle of the Cumberland Plateau. Its boundary with North Carolina is within a physiographic province, the Unaka Mountains, which includes the Great Smoky range and has peaks towering more than 6,600 feet above sea level. Although the mist-enshrouded mountains, lush flora, and cascading streams shaped a rich body of mythic lore for early Indians, this province offered few attractions for permanent habitation. Not until the early nineteenth century would small settlements of white pioneers intrude into narrow valleys like Cades Cove and become eddies in the major flow of westward migration.

Both whites and Indians favored the gentler, more productive landscape of the Ridge and Valley Province immediately west of the mountains. A series of valleys on a northeast-to-southwest axis separated by low ridges, this region is commonly known as the Great Valley of East Tennessee and is an extension of the Great Valley of Virginia. This is where Tennessee's first European visitors interacted with complex and highly accomplished Indian societies. The well-watered valleys were generally fertile, and around Indian villages they featured extensive fields of corn. Timber was abundant: thick forests of deciduous species like oak, chestnut, and poplar, as well as scattered expanses of conifers such as pine, cedar, hemlock, fir, and spruce. River cane flourished along the streams, providing forage and protection for livestock and wild animals alike. Game was plentiful and included turkey, squirrel, black bear, white-tailed deer, elk, and wood bison (buffalo).

Linking the valleys of East Tennessee is a broad network of streams coursing toward the southwest, some bearing Indian names, some rechristened by presumptuous whites. Among them are the Powell, Nolichucky, and Watauga rivers; they comprise a litany of frontier experience and flow into the even more famous Holston and French Broad rivers, which join to form the Tennessee just above Knoxville. (Tennessee is itself a probable bastardization of "Tanasee," the name of a Cherokee town.) Flowing southwestward, the Tennessee swells as it absorbs the Little Tennessee, Clinch, and Hiwassee rivers. At Chattanooga it takes a sharp jog to the northwest and makes a deep cut, the Grand Canyon of the Tennessee, into the Cumberland Plateau; it then loops southward and westward through Alabama and northward across Middle Tennessee and Kentucky to meet the Ohio River.

The Cumberland Plateau, an ancient elevated tableland, includes parts of northern Alabama and Georgia, widens through Tennessee, and expands even more to cover much of eastern Kentucky and a smaller area in Virginia. In Tennessee its breadth ranges from about forty to fifty-five miles, and its midpoint is the demarcation between the eastern and middle parts of the state. The plateau is steepest along its eastern front, Walden Ridge, which rises northeastward toward the Cumberland Mountains. At about 3,500 feet above sea level, these mountains are the highest part of the plateau. Separating Walden Ridge from the southern portion of the plateau is the narrow valley of the Sequatchie River, which follows a leisurely southwesterly course and joins the Tennessee near Chattanooga. The western part of the plateau is drained by numerous streams that flow into Middle Tennessee and is more broken and eroded than the eastern half. Throughout the plateau are countless caves, caverns, waterfalls, and narrow canyons, as well as many varieties of trees and wildlife.

Despite its natural beauty, the Cumberland Plateau has the dubious historical distinction of being an obstacle for humans wishing to go elsewhere. To the first white settlers, it was the "Barrens" or the "Wilderness," a dangerous and inconvenient barrier to the fertile valleys and basins beyond. This explains why the plateau's most famous feature is Cumberland Gap, that point in the Cumberland Mountains where Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee meet. For many generations the gap has offered Indians and whites convenient access to the Kentucky Bluegrass and Tennessee's Central Basin, also known as the Nashville or Cumberland Basin.

Resembling "the bottom of an oval dish," the Central Basin is roughly one hundred miles by fifty to sixty miles in dimension and has an elevation of about six hundred feet. It is the central feature of Middle Tennessee, which extends from the Cumberland Plateau to the Western Valley of the Tennessee River. Completely encircling the basin is the Highland Rim. On the east the rim is a transitional link to the plateau; about twenty-five miles wide, it consists of gently rolling plains and hills about four hundred feet above the basin and one thousand feet below the plateau. On the northwest the rim broadens into a slightly lower belt some seventy-five miles wide that separates the basin from the Tennessee River. Early white hunters were amazed by the basin's abundance of game and by its springs, streams, timber, and natural grasslands. They viewed the area as a hunter's paradise and extolled the rolling, fertile land — more abundant and better than that of East Tennessee. The basin became a symbolic Garden of Eden, with dangers nearly as ominous as those confronting Adam and Eve.

Both East and Middle Tennessee were crisscrossed by a network of well-traveled Indian trails that linked Native American societies in every part of the Southeast and well beyond. Because of the surrounding terrain the Chattanooga and Nashville areas became hubs of aboriginal travel, with trails radiating in all directions. The most important and famous was the Great Indian Warpath — or simply the Warrior's Path — which extended from Chattanooga up the Great Valley of East Tennessee into Virginia and then down the New and Kanawha rivers to the upper Ohio. One major branch continued down the Shenandoah River and into Pennsylvania, and another led through Cumberland Gap and Kentucky to the Ohio opposite the Scioto River. The latter route became increasingly important in the eighteenth century for red and white Tennesseans alike.

Though the Warrior's Path was used for every purpose, including trade and diplomacy, its name suggests a more dramatic import: it provided access for wide-ranging war parties on campaigns of blood revenge and martial glory. Cherokee and Iroquois warriors walked hundreds of miles between the southern Appalachians and upstate New York to sustain bloodletting campaigns so ancient that both groups understood them only imperfectly. Other important trails led from Chattanooga and the mouth of the Clinch River across the Cumberland Plateau and into the Central Basin. Another well-traveled route crossed the Tennessee River at Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and linked Middle Tennessee with the Chickasaw and Choctaw villages to the southwest. This would become part of the famous Natchez Trace. Farther to the west a trail connected the site of Memphis, a major crossing point on the Mississippi, with the Alabama-Tombigbee river systems and Mobile Bay.

Indians often combined these overland trails with the ample waterways, relying on dugout canoes — sometimes carrying twenty or more men — or lightly-framed craft covered with elm or hickory bark. The Cumberland and Tennessee rivers were particularly important for extended travel. The former is laced with treacherous rapids in the plateau but becomes more domesticated and navigable as it enters the Central Basin. Both the Cumberland and the Tennessee cut large arcs through Middle Tennessee, and the distance between them gradually narrows until the Cumberland empties into the Ohio a few miles upstream from the Tennessee. Those three streams offered direct access between most of Tennessee and the Illinois Country and Mississippi Basin.


Natural Regions of Tennessee.

Early settlers usually entered East Tennessee by way of the Great Valley of Virginia and its extensions or by narrow trails from North Carolina through the Blue Ridge and Unaka Mountains. Most travelers going to the Central Basin followed the Warrior's Path through Cumberland Gap into Kentucky and then turned southward across the barrens to French Lick, a large spring where Nashville would arise. Others heading to the basin chose to float down the Tennessee. At optimal times the Tennessee's head of navigation was the Long Island of the Holston (present-day Kingsport), but low water often necessitated embarking well downstream. Then travelers had to brave two natural obstacles: first a gigantic whirlpool or "suck" in the narrows of the river's canyon and soon afterward the shallow and tricky stretch of water called Muscle Shoals. For those who successfully navigated these dangers, there usually followed an uneventful though arduous trip up the Ohio and the Cumberland to the basin. En route they would pass the mouth of the Red River, another navigable stream and the future site of Clarksville. Whatever route one took, the Central Basin — or simply "the Cumberland" — became a magnet even before East Tennessee was well into its frontier phase.

West Tennessee is bounded by the Tennessee and Mississippi rivers, and most of it is part of the much larger Gulf Coastal Plain. Its easternmost component is a narrow zone of hilly, broken upland bordering the Tennessee. From there the terrain gradually slopes downward to a series of bluffs above the Mississippi Bottoms, which are part of the Mississippi River Flood Plain. Those promontories include the Chickasaw Bluffs, which touch the Mississippi at four points from Memphis northward and are famous landmarks for river travelers. Major Tennessee tributaries of the Mississippi include the Big Hatchie, Forked Deer, Obion, and Wolf rivers. All offered access eastward a short distance into the interior, but they sometimes overflowed, and much of the surrounding terrain was swampy and marshy. The bottomland, though often unhealthy, was home to one of the most interesting and advanced prehistoric Native American communities in the state. White explorers, however, were more impressed with the geopolitical significance of the Chickasaw Bluffs, and they periodically built fortifications there. Later, speculators and settlers would extol West Tennessee's agricultural and commercial potential. The cession of the last Indian claims in 1818 opened the door to a new settlement frontier and the eventual emergence of Memphis as the state's largest city. By 1840 West Tennessee's cotton production was integrating the region into the national and world economies.


* * *

Clearly Tennessee's physiography, flora, and fauna helped to shape the frontier experiences of its people. Coping with the demands of nature, seeking reconciliation with the landscape or a tenuous hegemony over it, was a major feature of a series of frontiers stretching far back in time. Each culminated in or blended with a sometimes lengthy period of stable habitation and significant attainments before giving way to a new frontier produced by exploration, trade, migration, and the mingling of different peoples and cultures. These historical processes, which we normally associate with Eurocentric frontiers, occurred also during the thousands of years of pre-Columbian habitation in the Americas. Migration legends and other oral traditions suggest that ancestors of the Cherokees, Chickasaws, and Shawnees had participated in epic frontier adventures similar to those of Euro-Americans — whose ancestors had opened new frontiers in Europe. And these Indian frontiers continued to evolve simultaneously with, and partly in response to, those of Euro-Americans. Native American adaptability and creativity amid changing circumstances is one of the great underappreciated themes of frontier history.

Tennessee's first frontiersmen were the small bands of anonymous hunters who ventured into the region some twelve to thirteen thousand years ago. These nomads, called Paleo-Indians by archaeologists, were descendants of people who had appeared in North America during the last Ice Age, a time when gigantic glaciers formed, sea levels dropped, and a wide land bridge emerged linking Siberia and Alaska. Recent genetic and linguistic analyses point to three or more major movements from the Old World to New during that time. We know that the first and most important of these migrations occurred at least twelve to fifteen thousand years ago, and some scholars argue for much earlier arrivals some thirty to forty thousand years ago. Anthropologists categorize the Paleo-Indian period as the first of four lengthy eras of human habitation in the Southeast prior to white contact; the others are the Archaic, Woodland, and Mississippian periods.

Paleo-Indian artifacts, including the distinctive projectile points of the Clovis culture, are found in all parts of Tennessee. The otherwise scanty evidence suggests that small bands of nomadic hunters operated out of temporary base camps on river terraces and upland knolls or in caves and rock shelters. In many parts of the United States Paleo-Indians hunted large game animals like mammoths and mastodons, but no prehistoric habitation sites in Tennessee are indisputably associated with mega-faunal kills, though further research at the Coats-Hines Mastodon Site in Williamson County may produce such a link. We should probably assume that early Tennessee hunters, like other Paleo-Indians, pursued large game animals when they encountered them but concentrated on hunting smaller mammals and foraging for wild plant foods. If this is so, their subsistence patterns differed from those of their Early Archaic successors only in degree rather than in kind.

By the advent of the Archaic period about ten thousand years ago Tennessee's climate, flora, and fauna were nearly identical to those encountered by the first Europeans in the mid-sixteenth century. Gone were the mega-fauna, and extensive deciduous forests were common everywhere. During the next seven thousand years or so the hunter-gatherer economy shifted from small seasonal base camps to denser populations in semi-permanent camps or villages on favored riverine sites. Indians hunted game like deer, bear, and turkey, and the atlatl, or throwing stick, enabled them to propel their spears with great force. Dramatic dietary changes came with widescale gathering of nuts and wild fruits as well as consumption of fish, freshwater mussels, snails, and turtles. At the Eva site near the Tennessee River in Benton County, large midden heaps offer conclusive proof of the variety of foods available to the many generations of settlers between about eight and three thousand years ago. The site also reveals many of the increasingly complex cultural patterns of Archaic peoples: impressive stone technology, lithic workshop areas, and ceremonial burials of bodies arranged in flexed positions. During the late phase of its occupation, the site was part of a trade network that brought a few residents prestige items like marine shells from the Gulf of Mexico and pieces of copper from the Great Lakes area.

Cultural change accelerated with the advent of the Woodland period about three thousand years ago. By now Tennessee Indians typically resided in communities on the floodplains and on terraces of major streams. Subsistence still depended on hunting and gathering, but the bow and arrow, a major innovation, emerged sometime in the first millennium A.D. Whether this technological advance arrived by diffusion from the Old World or was reinvented in the Americas remains unknown. More important, Indian villagers embarked on the road to agriculture through increasingly systematic use of domesticated native plants like sunflowers, squash, and gourds. Though Indian corn, or maize, was introduced from the Southwest at an early date, it did not become important in Tennessee Indian diets until about nine hundred A.D. Beans appeared even later.

Woodland cultural complexity was striking. Ceramic pottery appeared and began an evolution that proceeded through distinct archaeological phases into the historic period. As the population increased, societies moved toward social stratification and loose unification, and burial mounds for important individuals became common. Palisades around towns indicate fear or wariness of neighbors, but trading links with distant peoples brought Tennesseans new products, ideas, and cultural patterns. Ritualism became more prevalent and complex, though its many meanings are probably lost forever. One example is the misnamed Old Stone Fort near Manchester, apparently constructed over a period of several centuries and completed some sixteen hundred years ago. Most likely this large, open area bounded by steep cliffs and embankments of earth and stone served as a ceremonial center. Even more impressive are the systematically arranged Pinson Mounds near Jackson, dating mostly from about one hundred to three hundred A.D. and used for burials and ceremonies. One of these, Saul's Mound, is the second highest Indian mound north of Mexico. Indians apparently traveled hundreds of miles from other parts of the Southeast to participate in ceremonies there. Neither the Old Stone Fort nor the Pinson complex served as sites of permanent habitation.


(Continues...)

Excerpted from Tennessee Frontiers by John R. Finger. Copyright © 2001 John R. Finger. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Preliminary Table of Contents:

Foreword by Walter Nugent and Malcolm Rohrbough
Introduction
1. Land, People, and Early Frontiers
2. Trade, Acculturation, and Empire: 1700-1775
3. The Revolutionary Frontier: 1775-1780
4. Expansion Amid Revolution: 1779-1783
5. Speculation, Turmoil, and Intrigue: 1780-1789
6. The Southwest Territory: 1790-1796
7. The Social Fabric
8. The Frontier Economy
9. Statehood to Nationalism: 1796-1815
10. The Western District: 1795-1840
11. Hegemony and Cherokee Removal: 1791-1840
Conclusion
Essay on Sources
Index

What People are Saying About This

J. H. O'Donnell III]]>

Finger (Univ. of Tennessee-Knoxville) draws on his rich research into the Southern frontier to illuminate not only Tennessee's three physiographic zones but also their spheres of interaction. Inhabited by Native peoples for some ten thousand years, Tennessee was touched by the 16th-century Desoto entrada; became a cockpit of war during the imperial struggles among French, English, and Spanish for hegemony in North America; and was born in the fires of the American Revolution. The author skillfully summarizes and illustrates the complexity of Tennessee's frontier history, addressing issues of leadership (Jackson versus all rivals), land speculation (ever dominant), and Indian affairs (where he is at his best). Although a frontier until 1840, Tennessee was part of a global economic and diplomatic network from its earliest days. Like the late Stanley Folmsbee, Finger knows the three Tennessees, linguistically, geographically, politically, socially, and economically; fortunately for the reader, he has constructed a well-balanced account of them all. Maps, charts, illustrations, and 48 pages of sources enhance the volume's usefulness for collections on the American frontier. All levels and collections.

J. H. O'Donnell III

Finger (Univ. of Tennessee-Knoxville) draws on his rich research into the Southern frontier to illuminate not only Tennessee's three physiographic zones but also their spheres of interaction. Inhabited by Native peoples for some ten thousand years, Tennessee was touched by the 16th-century Desoto entrada; became a cockpit of war during the imperial struggles among French, English, and Spanish for hegemony in North America; and was born in the fires of the American Revolution. The author skillfully summarizes and illustrates the complexity of Tennessee's frontier history, addressing issues of leadership (Jackson versus all rivals), land speculation (ever dominant), and Indian affairs (where he is at his best). Although a frontier until 1840, Tennessee was part of a global economic and diplomatic network from its earliest days. Like the late Stanley Folmsbee, Finger knows the three Tennessees, linguistically, geographically, politically, socially, and economically; fortunately for the reader, he has constructed a well-balanced account of them all. Maps, charts, illustrations, and 48 pages of sources enhance the volume's usefulness for collections on the American frontier. All levels and collections.

From the B&N Reads Blog

Customer Reviews