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| Toe River Valley during the War |
This was the topic
of my facebook live program this past Sunday evening: does "little history'"matter?
Lately, I've been tracing this story from a neighboring county. As the local
story goes, during the war, a group of "Indians" crossed over the
Tennessee border into the Toe River Valley area of North Carolina. Their
mission was to look for and detain deserters. They were camped on the
Nolichucky River, or, along the North Toe River.
So, this group was
sent into the Toe River Valley to look for deserters (and there were a fair
number of deserters and dissidents hiding out in the area). As the story goes,
someone alerted the local home guard that a group of Union soldiers was camped
in the area. The home guard took up a position and attacked the camp, killing
three and mortally wounding four. One version of the story has dead bodies
floating down the Nolichucky River. Another story has the Natives being buried
by local people.
In the existing
literature, I see nothing to back up any of this story: nothing in Volume 16 of
the North Carolina Troop book series, nothing in Crow's Storm in the Mountains, nothing in period letters or newspaper
accounts. It could be that this story is simply folklore, a ghost story. Of
course, I often state that in every piece of folklore resides some piece of
truth.
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| Thomas's Legion fighting the 14th Illinois in 1864 |
We know that at
times, the Cherokee of Thomas's Legion roamed the mountainsides. In January
1863, following the salt raid in the town of Marshall, North Carolina, portions
of Thomas's command were sent with other Confederate troops to the Shelton
Laurel area to respond to the events in Marshall. At the same time, Thomas
himself was ordered to take "200 whites and Indians of his legion, is operating
in Madison, and will go into Haywood Jackson, and Cherokee Counties, North
Carolina, and Clay County, Georgia, with orders to arrest all deserters and
recusant conscripts and all tories who have been engaged in unlawful practices
on the Tennessee line of the mountains...." (OR ser 1, vol. 18, 810-811.) Dan Ellis, the
Union guide, reported in May 1863 that Carter County was full of Indians.
(Ellis, Thrilling Adventures, 147) Part
of Thomas's Legion was back in the Laurel community of Madison County in
January 1864, looking for outliers and deserters. (NC Troops, Volume 16, 145-146) These stories alone place the
Cherokee right on the border of the Toe River Valley.
Will I ever be able
to prove this story? Maybe... Probably not... But back to my original question:
does little history matter? This is not Gettysburg, or Chickamauga. A huge
percent of those reading this will have never heard of this story, and many of
you will not even be familiar with the Toe River Valley. For those who might have been killed, and
their families back at home, this little piece of the war was just as important
in their lives as Gettysburg or Chickamauga, a place many of them never heard
of until some story of those great battles filtered back into their
communities.
To answer my own
question, yes, "little history" does matter.
2 comments:
The "little history" of the Eastern NC towns of Kinston, New Bern, and Goldsboro has been parleyed into an economic resource of sorts. Aside from Bentonville and Fort Fisher, the Civil War in Eastern NC gets little mention in most general Civil War literature. But local efforts in researching the events and restoring the battlefields in those places have ignited a growing Civil War tourism industry in those towns.
Yes it does!Little History fascinates me.It makes me want to get up and do personal research because of little to no legitimate information.I am currently researching the Confederate deserters executed in Dalton which brought me here.Thank you so much for your blog!
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