The Banks of Lick Creek are Sacred Ground. Imagine, if you will, it is May in the year 1432. You are a young Cherokee woman (or young man), about 15 or maybe 16. You are in love and have plans to marry soon. Your favorite pastime is sitting on a hilltop around present-day John Graham Road in the Ottway community of Greene County, Tennessee.
During the daytime, your view is specular. In the horizon to the north, the splendor of the Clinch mountain range provides the skyline an outline with Bays Mountain and Fodderstack Mountain. You can see the meandering Lick Creek and the fertile fields sitting along one side of the creek and on the other side, it is lined with steep rock walls.
In your sight is the small summer camp where you live for a few months each summer while the Great Hunt is happening. You hear the happy giggles and the “I dare you to jump” temptations by the children swimming in Lick Creek. You look at the bluest sky, and just every now and again, a fluffy white cloud slowly passes over.
The small gray line of smoke from your camp’s fire hither and thither into the atmosphere before disappearing. At night the summer sky is magical, dotted with fireflies and crowned by the stars of the milky way. The tall grasses sway in the light breeze. You can hear the elders sitting before the fire chanting and asking prayers to the Great Spirit as they pass the sacred pipe. The sounds of the wild bound you to a night of peaceful sleep on the banks of Lick Creek.
While the Great Hunt is going on, you live on the banks of Lick Creek. Every summer, your tribe sends the best hunters with their families. Each family member has an assignment so that the Great Hunt is a great success. The survival of your people depends on you.
This hunting ground is sacred land. You board the canoe to travel the waters of Lick Creek downstream. As you paddle along, you see magnificent forests. Chestnut trees so thick and standing so tall you wonder if they are reaching to touch the Great Spirit’s heart.
Spring has brought forth so many blooms and flowers. The air smells sweet and full of life. At times you wonder if there is enough clearance to pass through areas while floating downstream.
The mighty forests so thick in places that their limbs and branches overhang, draping the passage of Lick Creek’s flowing body of water. You float slowly, bowing your head in reverence as you travel by the several burial mounds built by your ancestors. Further down you pass by wide open fields with herds of buffalo for as far as the eye can see. Deer graze and black bears hunt.
Waterfowl, geese, and ducks line the passage along Lick Creek’s banks. The fish are so numerous it’s as if they jump to greet you as you pass by. Lick Creek is an old waterway. In her eons, she has witnessed mankind from its humble beginnings to the proudful modern man. In her wisdom, she has nurtured both.
Next time Lick Creek floods and comes out of her banks, think about this: maybe she is dreaming of her former life and reaching out to try to regain her youth. I’ve included a story I wrote about Lick Creek a few years back. Here it is:
WHAT I’VE LEARNED ABOUT LICK CREEK
Being a lifelong resident of Greene County, Tennessee, and being primarily raised in the areas of western and northern Greene County, the lands on which Lick Creek flows, I got to thinking and thought, “I really don’t know much about her”. This creek, which in my past, has many times ruled my life with school closures, road closures, etc.
She has made many farmers “make it” or “break it.” She has ruled the farmer’s work, when to plant, when to harvest, and when to get the hell out of her way. Her waters have turned mill wheels that fed our ancestors. She has been a swimming hole and a fishing hole to many of us. Hundreds of years ago, the Native Americans built camps on her banks.
During the time of the Civil War, Potters used her clay to make their wares and many are still around today. Blood has been shed over the trestles and bridges that cross her. And many have dedicated their lives to the one whose blood was shed on the Cross for us by being Baptized in its waters.
She has been a boundary on properties for hundreds of years, and still today, her name is mentioned in Deed books, and what she says goes. And still, she meanders on doing what Lick Creek does. Kind of a mysterious creek, I think. But, I wanted to know more . . . . Lick Creek is west and a little north of Greeneville, in the northwest corner of present-day Greene County, Tennessee and runs to the northeast corner of the county. Some family names that settled on her banks before 1800 include the families of Carter, Crumley, Doty, English, Conway, Gass, Hardin, and Malone. Add Wagoner, Webster, English, Stanfield, Paterson, and Morris. Before the white man, her banks were the favorite spot of the Woodland and Cherokee Indians to have their hunting camps and even their homes.
No wonder it was a favorite spot, with her prizes of catfish and venison, since the Deer had chosen her banks as a home as well. I guess it’s safe to say she has nurtured mankind and the animals around her. A “Mother Creek.” Hmmmm. Now to get a little technical, this is the “proper” way to discuss her.
According to the USGS office their data states: This stream site, maintained by the USGS Tennessee Water Science Center (identifier USGS-TN), has the name “LICK CREEK NEAR MOSHEIM, TN” and has the identifier USGS-03466895.
This site is located in Greene County County, Tennessee at 36.24287706000000 degrees latitude and -82.9401585000000 degrees longitude using the datum NAD83.
The horizontal location collection method was “Interpolated from MAP.” and the accuracy is 1 second. This site is at an elevation of 1060.59 feet . The Creek drainage area is 220 square miles. I’m like, “Alrighty then.” Lick Creek enters Greene County up about the Jearoldstown Community.
Jearoldstown sits on her 60 mile marker. Mile 57 is Pyburn. Mile 54 & 55 is Lost Mountain. Mile 50 is close to Locust Springs. Mile 45 near Wesley’s Chapel and Kennytown. Nile 40 is in Ottway. Mile 35 is near Carter’s Chapel.
Mile 25 is near Harmon’s Chapel church, Mosheim area on Highway 11E. Mile 20 is Mohawk. Mile 10 is near Thula and Concord. Mile 6 is near Beulah and here she is starting to flow parallel somewhat with the Nolichuckey, where in Cocke county, she empties her waters. Today, she holds in her bottom lands the Lick Creek Bottoms Wildlife Management Area.
Now, I don’t know bout you. but I feel like I know Lick Creek a little better, but that does not change the fact that she will never be changed or tamed by mankind. She’s as beautiful and wild as she has ever been. Don’t think I’d want her any other way!
And so it is, I find myself on this summer day, 2022, sitting on a grassy knoll off of John Graham road, out in fabulous Ottway, I watch the clouds roll by as Lick Creek performs the true meander.
Flowing over gently sloping ground, then she begins to curve back and forth across the landscape. The spirits of the Great Hunt are heard in the sounds of the tall swaying grasses, the chirping birds, and seen in the bashful deer and the soaring bald eagle.
Nature here, on the banks of Lick Creek is as it has always been, not proud or haughty, not arrogant or assertive. It is reflecting, expressing, and giving peace. The picture is Lick Creek where she starts which is located in the Lovelace community.
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Wataugah, Nonachuckie, & Carter’s Valley Settlements. So do you really wish you could have lived in the olden days? The misty fog that rises up and crawls throughout the hills and hollers during late summer mornings seem to be measuring up the landscape and calculating for the vibrant autumn that is soon to come.
The fog clutching the entire expanse has everything in its field of vision under a mystical appearance. They say if’n you look close enough into the foggy mist you might see their ghostly figures. The figures of those determined men and women who were the first white settlers into the lands we know today as upper east Tennessee. They say their ghosts still walk the city streets of Jonesbourgh, Greeneville and Elizabethton, looking for their home, looking for the Republic of Watauga.
Look deeper into the mystical mist and you will see the ghosts of the Cherokee Beloved Man and his band of Dahnawa Danatlihi (warriors). Their spirits are still makin’ war and still makin’ treaties. In these hills and hollers the warriors are said to be roaming and looking for trespassers on Cherokee lands. Gallivanting the white-water rapids just for good measure, because they can. Taking risks and taking lives . . . . their only chance to save their beloved homeland.
Back before Tennessee was even thought about and North Carolina was still a colony held by the British Crown. Back before the United States of America was a country even. This is a short story of the people who called this land home. The Cherokee who believed land is not something one should own, for it belongs to everyone.
The White Settlers who believe the dream is to own property, to control it just for one’s use, as they see fit. It was during these times that settlers were pouring into this area. Back in 1752, and for eons before, what we know today as upper East Tennessee, was such, that the earth lay without much of its soil ever having been harrowed, since its void was turned into a creation. Indian villages and Indian towns up and down the Nolichucky Riverbanks dot the wilderness landscape.
A few long hunters and explorers have crossed the Appalachian Mountains. The first white people are just starting to come across the mountains and settle. Two races of people lived here, the natives, who could endure the climate, but were idle and passive, and the settlers who came from England, Scotland and Ireland and from the northern colonies of America, the latter being too poor to buy land there.
Some of these were refugees from justice, had fled from debt, or had left wife and children elsewhere and sometimes to escape the penalty of some crime. Horse thieves infested parts of this area. It was the great hideout for many outlaws of that day.
During these times the land of this area was Indian land and on this land is where the following accounts take place.
Here, where the state of Tennessee, its infancy was spent, and early statehood formed. The first republic established west of the Appalachians was the Watauga Association, which was formed in May 1772 under the shade of an old Sycamore tree, located on the banks of the Doe River in present day Elizabethton, Tennessee, Carter County.
They are told by the sibilant sea of the solemn Blue mountains whose summits ascend to the sky, Where, cradled in solitude, world weary pilgrims might find perfect rest, undisturbed by a sigh.
They told of savannahs as smooth as a carpet, of golden fruits breaking their branches in twain; Of vast flocks of wild fowl, the sunlight obscuring, And buffalo haunting the billowy plain. They told of a land where the sweet scented wildflowers Flash fair as the flame of a taper-lit shrine, Bedecking the meadows, bespangling the valleys, and climbing the mountains, the sun to outshine . . .
The story of the settlement named Watauga and the people who lived there, starts with the journey by a forty-eight year-old Scotch-Irish militia captain, planter, and long hunter named William Bean. Captain Bean and his wife Lydia Russell traveled the Great War Path, following the Appalachian Mountains southwest through the Shenandoah Valley, in the British Colony of Virginia, with their four children in tow.
The Bean family was accompanied by several other families. Bean is believed to be the first white man to permanently settle in the Tennessee frontier. Soon hundreds of families followed the Beans into the heart of the southwestern frontier to stake their claim in the glory-lands that would later become the Great State of Tennessee. The journey across the Appalachians was not an easy one.
The people told of climbing up indescribably steep mountains and “part of the way we had to crawl on hands and feet and sometimes we had to take the baggage and saddles and the horses and drag them up the mountains (for the horses were in danger of falling down backward—as we had once had an experience), and sometimes we had to pull the horses up while they trembled and quivered like leaves.” recalled Bishop Spangenberg, one of the first to visit and explore.
Wagons hauling their every belongings had to be abandoned. What they could carry on their backs and in their arms is all they had when arriving at their new homes.
He went on to write in his journal, “Arrived at the top at last, we saw hundreds of mountain peaks all around us, presenting a spectacle like ocean waves in a storm. We refreshed ourselves a little on the mountain top, and then began the descent, which was neither so steep nor as deep as before, and then we came to a stream of water. Oh, how refreshing this water was to us! The next day we got into laurel bushes and beaver dams and had to cut our way through the bushes.
Then we came to a creek so full of rocks that we could not possibly cross it and on both sides were such precipitous banks that scarcely a man, certainly no horse could climb them. There were countless springs but no reeds, but so much grass land that Brother Antes thinks a man could make several hundred loads of hay of the wild grass. There is a magnificent chestnut and pine forest near here.
Whetstones and millstones which Brother Antes regards the best he has seen.”
Cutting through the untamed jungles of mountain laurel and pushing farther and deeper into the dark unbroken forests Crossing mountain after mountain, and led by Capt Bean, the group settled on the Watauga River.
A short distance above the spot where Boone’s Creek empties into the Watauga River, near present day Johnson City, Tennessee. Lt. John Bean, a brother of Capt. William Bean Jr, while on a hunting trip some years before, had built a small cabin on a Daniel Boone campsite. Boone was a good friend of the Bean brothers and they often hunted together. After arriving, Mrs. Bean gave birth to a son named Russell, the first white child born on the wilderness frontier.
Soon after, more and more European settlers began arriving and settling in the Watauga, Nolichucky, and Holston river valleys. The rich agricultural area along the Watauga River was known then as the Watauga Old Fields.
The name given by the Cherokee. Within a few years, the British government determined that the community of settlers violated the Treaty of Hard Labor, an agreement between British and Cherokee that established a line west of which white settlers were not to go. British authorities ordered the settlers back from Watauga. Not to be deterred, the Watauga settlers made their own agreement with the natives to lease the lands, and the community continued to prosper in spite of its outlaw status.
But they told of a cruel foe lurking in ambush. For whose treachery nothing but blood could atone. Of fierce Chickamaugas and Cherokee bowmen, Whose swift, stealthy darts sang a dirge all their own. But the rivers and mountains, the dim, distant mountains, Rising range upon range to the ultimate sky. Could women and children surmount those blue masses? Could even strong men defy those grim rock-cliffs?
Life on the frontier in upper east Tennessee was very hard. With worries of starvation due to crop failures to death by being burned at the stake or scalped by Indians during attacks, the determined men and women continued on making a life in the wilderness. In July 1776, the Cherokee invaded the Nolichucky, Holston, and Watauga settlements.
Although the settlers were chased out of Carter’s Valley and the Nolichucky valley, the Holston settlers managed to thwart Dragging Canoe at the Battle of Island Flats, we know today as Kingsport, Tennessee. They murdered, scalped and carried into captivity the inhabitants. They burned their crops and drove off their animals.
The settlers fled in terror across the North Fork of Holston. The triumph of the Cherokees was short lived. Virginia and North Carolina joined hands and gathered a force of 1800 men at Long Island in the summer of 1776. The army was of such size that the Indians fled to the woods, and the command had to content itself with marching to the Cherokee towns of Little Tennessee and destroying them.
The Chiefs of the Cherokees hastened to treat for peace and at Long Island they agreed to deliver up all horses and prisoners and to refrain from attacking the settlements. Dragging Canoe, the Chief who headed the unruly portion of the tribe, alone held out and with his followers and the lawless Chickamauga Indians hid out in the mountains around Chattanooga. Nancy Ward, Beloved Cherokee Woman, had warned the Settlers at Watauga of the planned attacks.
Ward also used her powers as a Cherokee Beloved Woman to spare the life of Lydia Russell Bean (wife of early settler William Bean), who had been captured during the invasion and had been sentenced to be burned at the stake. The Cherokee laid siege to Fort Watauga for about two weeks before retreating.
According to stories told generation after generation, a picture is painted in our minds of the Bean cabin. The cabin or little fort stood very close to the river and on the side of the river where there are high rocky cliffs. It is said that the Indians used to come from down about the “Nolla Chuckey” river (Nolichucky River). Following an old trail that ran near this place.
Then up to the Watauga river, where there they would hide themselves on the high cliff opposite Bean’s cabin and watch for a chance to shoot at some of them when they came out. Many stories are recorded about the Bean and other first families in their battles with the Indians. Another account of living in Watauga goes like this.
From a narrative of a man who lived long ago “One day as one of the girls was going to the spring an Indian lying high up on the opposite cliff picked her off with his long range rifle. The daughter of Bean was killed. Capt Bean determined to have revenge and so going down the river to the shoal he waded across and getting ahead of the Indians lay in ambush by the side of their trail and when they come in sight marching in single file he fired at the foremost warrior and killed him.
The Indians gathered up their dead brother and continued their march towards the Nona Chuckey. Bean ran off to one side and as he ran loaded his gun and then came in ahead of them he killed another ‘heap good Indian.’ They picked up this dead one and moved forward Bean ran in ahead of them again and getting a good chance fired and this time killed two at one shot! Four dead out of a band of perhaps eight so demoralized the remaining Indians that they broke and fled leaving the dead to bury the dead!”
On another occasion some of the boys told Bean that they had heard a turkey gobbler over on the cliff and asked if they might go over and shoot it. He told them no that if they went over there they would never get back alive.
Bean himself went down the river and crossing over at the shoals came up on this side and guided by the peculiar “gobble” of the turkey he slipped up towards the cliff with the stealthiness of a cat and there behind a log lay not a turkey gobbler but a great big Indian hidden behind a log and with his bead-like eyes fixed on the little fort across the Watauga watching for someone to come out so that he could shoot him. Bean put an extra charge of powder in his rifle and took a good dose himself to steady his nerves fired with deliberate aim and there was one more “good Indian” gone.
He then cut off the warrior’s head and took it back over the river to the boys telling them “here is your wild turkey!” They rafted the rivers and conquered the Smokies, From whose peaks they first saw the new homes they had won. They girdled the forests, they drained the morasses. They builded of rude logs the Church and the Home Through labor and sorrow and sore tribulation — Faith for the foundation and love for the dome. And in tears and in blood, with the lead of the rifle.
The Saxon his deeds will continue to write. Life was hard work in the Settlements. It was not uncommon to see a few enterprising and adventurous men, clustered together on the banks of the remote and secluded Watauga River, the Nolichucky River or the Holston River, felling the forest, erecting cabins, forging society and laying the foundation of a government. Hostile Indian tribes had to be repelled.
An exposed frontier had to be guarded. Aggression had to be resisted, stations protected, forts defended and emigrants encouraged. Roads had to be opened through a trackless wilderness. Public buildings erected. A system of laws had to be enacted. Now, the Cherokee tribe of Indians, at this time inhabited one of the most attractive sections of the American Continent.
There were no fortresses to be found among them. Their settlements were rude huts scattered irregularly along some water way convenient to good pasture land and hunting and fishing grounds. They usually had small clearings which were cultivated by the women and children in Indian corn and beans. Their principal town or capital city was Choto, located about five miles from the ruins of Fort Loudon, Tennessee. The Cherokee were the mountain folk of America during these days. They frequently aided the early settlers, but more often they carried death into their homes This tribe, previous to 1769, were numerous and exceedingly quarrelsome and arrogant.
For years following the venture of the first settlers into this country the Cherokees killed and scalped the inhabitants at every opportunity. James Adair, an early Indian trader who lived with the Indians described them like this:
“I have known them to go a thousand miles for the purpose of revenge, in pathless woods, over hills and mountains, through large cane swamps full of grape-vines and briars, over broad lakes, rapid rivers and deep creeks and all the way endangered by poisonous snakes, if not by the rambling and lurking enemy, while, at the same time, they were exposed to the extremities of the heat and cold, the vicissitudes of the season, to hunger and thirst, both by chance and their religiously scanty method of living when at war, to fatigue and other difficulties. Such is their revengeful temper that all these things they condemn as imaginary trifles, if they are so happy as to get the scalp of their enemy.”
Two more settlements came about, the Nolichucky (original spelling of the river was Nonachunheh). Jacob Brown cut a deal with the Indians.
He also kept goods that the Indians favored thereby keeping them somewhat happy. Carter‘s Valley settlement was started about the time of the settlement on the Watauga. Several families settled in Carter’s Valley. The first emigrants, Carter (whose name the valley still retains) and Parker, opened a store, which was robbed by the Indians ; the robbers were supposed to be Cherokees, but of this no proof was obtained.
For a time, the residents of each of these settlements had to leave their homes and live in the fort at the Watauga settlement due to Indian attacks. The sense of security following the destruction of the Cherokee towns brought all the old settlers and many new ones back to the valley. So keep in mind when you are out and about, maybe on a city street or maybe the back forty on your farm, maybe you re jest a’porch sittin’ and you hear it.
You hear it just like your Mamaw said she heard over sixty years ago. The faint cries that whimper on the winds of the little girl’s voice asking “Mommie why is he tearing off my pretty bonnet?” The loud unexplainable booms locals talk of hearing from time to time. One loud “BoOm” and followed by nothing. It is the sound of the blade making one single swipe starting at the forehead and ripping, careful with the blade . . .make it all one pretty piece . Oh! a red one too. The BoOmS will continually get louder and louder, as the sound of taking a scalp travels thought-out space and into infinity. The spirits of those first people who were determined . Those spirits of the Indian warriors who were so brave, all waited in infinity to return home.
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A LITTLE ABOUT THE BELIEFS OF THE OLD-TIME MOUNTAIN FOLK IN REGARDS TO WITCHES!
In 1679 North Carolina law directed local officers to investigate felonies, witchcraft, enchantments, sorceries, and magic arts, among other crimes.
The next year, a woman in Perquimans Precinct was jailed on a charge of witchcraft. Court records describe such women as “concerned with familiar Spirits under ye Notion of a Witch.” This caused folks, especially in the mysterious mountains, already in fear to be even more suspicious and superstitious!
The early years of Phoebe Ward, a witch, are shrouded in mystery. It is known that she was a woman of bad morals. No one seemed to know anything of her past. She was an old, old woman when this account begins. Phoebe Ward had no fixed home. She lived here and there first at one place and then at another in Northampton County, North Carolina. She stayed in a hut or any shelter whatsoever that was granted to her. She made her living begging from place to place.
Most people were afraid to refuse her, lest she should apply her witchcraft on them. When she found a house at which people were particularly kind to her, there she stopped and abused their kindness. Hence the people resorted to a number of methods to keep her away. For instance, when they saw her coming they would stick pins pointing up into the chair bottoms, and then offer her one of these chairs.
It is said that she could always tell when the chair was thus fixed and would never sit in it. Also, they would throw red pepper into the fire, and Phoebe would leave as soon as she smelled it burning. Among her arts, it is said that she could ride persons at night (the same as nightmares), that she could ride horses at night, and that when the mane was tangled in the morning it was because the witch had made stirrups of the plaits.
She was said to be able to go through key holes and to be able to make a horse jump across a river as if it were a ditch. She was credited with possessing a sort of grease that she could apply and then slip out of her skin and go out on her night rambles, and on her return, she could get back again.
It is said that once she was making a little bull jump across the river, and as she said, ‘Through thick, through thin; ‘way over in the hagerleen, ‘ the animal rose and started. When he was about halfway over, she said, ‘That was a damn’d good jump,’ and down the bull came into the river. (The witch is not to speak while the bull is crossing). The witch does not necessarily have to be old; young girls are sometimes initiated into the mysteries of the black arts.
In North Carolina, the daughter of a celebrated witch got into serious trouble by accompanying her mother on one of her midnight rambles, and quite often, supernatural practices are a means of livelihood for the unprotected young virgin.
These witch-maids, however, may be identified by one skilled in the study of anatomy, for they frequently possess physical characteristics that differentiate them from the ordinary girl. The idea occurring in folk-lore and mythology all over the globe attributes some signs of ugliness, such as inverted knees or feet, to malignant spirits. Sometimes the feet alone appear distorted, for some spirits are conceived of as wearing clothes, as is the witch, and therefore, since the feet only are exposed to public view, it is but fitting that they should be marked. (This is from E.E. Bailey’s book published in 1920)
Witches may transform themselves into any bird or beast that suits their immediate cause/need. The Toad is a frequent figure in folklore. His bad reputation is established, and his association with witches is extremely long-standing. Today there are few American witches who take the form of a toad, although it is a well-known fact in the old mountain folk that
“If you kill a toad, your cows will give bloody milk, a misfortune which often results from the plots of witches.”
The mountain folk believed that witches had the power to injure the minds and bodies of men and women, to stunt the growth of children, to prevent the formation of butter and soap, and render firearms useless.
Witches were supposed not only to lay their evil influences upon human beings but also upon hogs, cattle, fowls, cats, dogs, and the like. If a cow went ‘dry’, the witches were often charged with it. If the hogs or the cattle became diseased, the witches were supposed to have been exercising their spells and the witch doctor was called in to try to restore them.
The old folk believed if a witch had possession of one’s personal belongings they could use it to cast a spell upon that person. They had the fear of giving anything to a witch or loaning anything to a witch. Or anyone who was thought might be a witch. So it was not cool back in those days to ask to borrow anything! You might be thought to be a witch if’n you did.
Just as parts of the body may be used to produce spells, so the spell may be broken by taking the clippings of the toe and fingernails of the person the spell was cast upon and burying them at midnight at the foot of a white oak tree.
Maidenhair fern, mixed with the fodder, will make bewitched cattle give milk. It was believed that Witches, in their nocturnal rambles, often “ride” humans. It is told that a girl was “pressed to death” by a witch who came night after night and sat upon her chest. The witch was in the form of a black cat.
They believed that sometimes the witch’s mount was a transformed human being, transformed by means of a magic bridle, and sometimes it was an ordinary horse. If the first is the case, the next morning, the “ridden” one will find his toes and fingers covered with dirt, his limbs scratched, and his strength exhausted; if the latter is the case, the following day, the animal will be edgy and fatigued, and will be found to have tangles in its mane, commonly known as “witch- stirrups”.
There is so much more to this story about witches you’ll have to stay tuned and watch for my posts. And maybe, Good Lord willing, I can publish a book of these stories one day! Thanks for reading, for your support, your comments, and your shares! I appreciate each one of you! You’re the best!
