Appalachian History

At the beginning of September 1792, John Watts gathered hundreds of Indians at Willstown to orchestrate a sweeping campaign to attack the Holston region with a substantial combined army in four bands of two hundred each.

The two diplomatic letters, or talks, as he called them, did not nearly express the Bloody Fellow’s true feelings about the state of affairs between the white settlers of the Cumberland and his own Cherokee people that September of 1792. But as a chief of the Five Lower Towns, it made tactical sense for him to extend the language of peace to Tennessee’s Governor William Blount.

If you’re anywhere in the vicinity of Cullman, AL this weekend, get yourself on over to that town’s Civic Center for the 14th Annual Alabama Gourd Show. This year’s crop of art gourds builds on a grand old Native American tradition of combining beauty with functionality. Alabama gourd artists today often draw inspiration both from Cherokee [...]

Breaks Interstate Park, located astride the SW Virginia/eastern Kentucky border along the Russell Fork of the Big Sandy River, is one of only two interstate parks in the nation. Perhaps the scale of the 5-mile-long, .25-mile-deep gorge that forms the park’s centerpiece cannot rival that of the Grand Canyon, but the 250 million year old [...]

The annual Cherokee Gourd Artists Gathering just convened last weekend in Cherokee, NC. Gourd design today mainly encompasses the arts and crafts world of vases, pots, and plates, but it has a politicized function in Cherokee history. Highly stylized gourd masks have for hundreds of years been an essential part of the Booger Dance, a [...]