On Trails (23 page)

“Everything gets mapped, everything gets drawn, all the waypoints, contours,” he explained. He flipped through the pages. “Every trip since I've been up here: Little Frog, Big Snowbird, Devil's Den Ridge . . .”

Marshall shuffled between copies of historical maps and hand-written historical accounts. On one large modern map, he showed me the trail we would be hiking that day. It ran beside Fires Creek and up over Carvers Gap, connecting the old Cherokee set
tlements of Tusquittee Town and Tomatly Town. Our walk was only the iceberg's tip of the trail-finding process: the bulk of the work consisted of archival research. He regularly drove to libraries across the country, including the National Archives in Washington, DC, where he and an assistant would spend days paging through old records and snapping digital photographs by the thousands. Once he had confirmed the location of a trail in the historical record, he would use a digital mapping program to plot a tentative route. Then he would hike through the woods searching for it. If he found a trail on the ground that followed his hypothetical line, it was a good indication that it was the old Cherokee trail, but he would still have to perform a transect, walking in a straight line from ridge to ridge, to see if the area contained other potential candidates. “If there's ten trails in there, you say all right, which one was the real trail?” Marshall said. “But if there's one trail in there, then you're pretty sure that's it.”

He also paid close attention to the surrounding area, to discern if it was an untouched Native American path, or whether it had been converted into a wagon road, a fire line, or a logging road. (You can identify wagon roads, for example, because they are wider and deeply rutted; you also tend to find piles of rock lying beside them, marking where the road builders tried to flatten the road surface.) Sometimes, he would find three iterations of a trail—the original trail, a wagon road, and then a modern road—laid out side-by-side, like afterimages.

Though his research was best known for helping reveal the startling degree to which our road network was inherited (or more accurately, purloined) from Native Americans, Marshall's top priority was to find those few remaining ancient Cherokee trails that had remained undisturbed. His motivations were (at least, in part) environmentalist: if he could locate a historical Cherokee footpath, federal legislation mandates that the Forest Service must protect a quarter of a mile of land on either side of the trail until it has undergone a proper archaeological survey (which, in certain cases, can take
decades). And if the site is ultimately found to be historically significant, then the state can take steps to ensure that the trail's historical context—which just so happens to be old-growth forest—remains intact. By locating and mapping old Cherokee trails, Marshall had so far been able to protect more than forty-nine thousand acres of public land from logging and mining operations.

Marshall's work shook up certain fundamental assumptions about the nature of conservation work. Conservationists generally fight to protect
blocks
of land, whereas Marshall fought to conserve geographic
lines.
Since Cherokee paths often followed game trails, they provide ideal corridors for wildlife to move between ecosystems. The paths also tend to travel along dividing ridgelines, which provide scenic overlooks for future visitors. Even more radically, by showing that human artifacts can serve as the linchpin of wilderness areas, Marshall was bridging an old divide between culture and environment. That dichotomy is familiar to Americans today, but it would have been wholly foreign to precolonial Native Americans. Mile by mile, Marshall was incorporating the human landscape back into the natural one.

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We walked down the dirt road, looking for openings in the trees. Soon we discovered a trail branching off to the right. It was lovely—open, airy, carpeted with the duff of the overhanging cherry trees, oaks, and pines—but to Marshall it felt not quite right. For one thing, it was too wide. The Cherokee trained themselves to walk heel-to-toe, like tightrope walkers. As one Cherokee man explained to me, “There's no need for a big wide road. All you're going to do is go there, and the things that are there”—plants, medicine, game animals—“won't be there if you make the road wide.”

Marshall ventured a guess that this trail was once widened by loggers, and that it would narrow as we neared the top of the ridge.
Five minutes later, though, we ran across a blue plastic rectangle nailed to a tree—a blaze. Marshall's confusion deepened; the trail wasn't supposed to be designated as a hiking trail. And yet, when he consulted his map and the GPS, it appeared we were on course.

He finally concluded that the Forest Service must have appropriated the Cherokee trail. This was unusual. Native American trails normally don't grow into hiking trails, because their objectives differ. Native trails reach their destinations as quickly as possible, sticking to ridgelines while avoiding peaks and gullies. In contrast, recreational trails, which are a relatively modern European invention, dawdle along, gravitating to sites of maximal scenic beauty—mountaintops, waterfalls, overlooks, and vast bodies of water. Modern hiking trails are also meticulously designed to resist the erosive power of hikers wearing rubber-soled boots; so, for example, on a steep hillside, they will cut long switchbacks to lessen the incline. Native trails almost never do this. They tend to charge up slopes in a straight line, following the “fall line”—the path water would take while flowing downhill.

Though Native trails prized speed over ease (and erosion resistance), they also often detoured from the most mechanistically efficient route, for reasons specific to each culture. Gerald Oetelaar, an archeologist who studied the Plains Indians of Canada, told me he became frustrated whenever colleagues relied on computer programs to map “least cost pathways” across ancient indigenous landscapes, because they were laboring under the false assumption that Native people traveled like the Mars Rover, rolling across an unpeopled and unstoried landscape. “I keep pointing out to them: All landscapes have histories!”

Among all living things on Earth, humans are, as far as we know, uniquely rich in what we call
culture
—art, stories, rites, religion, communal identities, moral wisdom—and our trails have grown to reflect this. “There are reasons why we don't do things the ‘logical' way,” observed James Snead, an archaeologist who studies “landscapes
of movement” in the American Southwest. Another way of framing this point would be to say the logic of human behavior is fantastically multiform, as are the trails it creates. A trail might go to great lengths to avoid enemy territory or detour to visit kinfolk; it might gravitate to sacred sites, or bend around haunted ones. Marshall had located a precolonial trail leading up to the crest of Clingmans Dome, where ceremonies were apparently held. If the Cherokee had been following the path of least resistance from one village to another, they would have avoided the mountaintop altogether. Elsewhere in North America, archaeologists have discovered that Native paths often veer to pass close by ritually significant sites, allowing walkers to stop and pray on their way to their destination.

Sometimes the trails themselves became cultural artifacts, much like pieces of art or religious relics. Out west, many tribes used tools to carve trails into the dry soil or stone, like giant petroglyphs. In Pajarito Mesa in New Mexico, Snead found trails running parallel to one another, redundantly, like the tines of a comb; he theorized that the construction of the trails, distinct from the walking of them, held some special significance. The Tewa people built paths, called “rain roads,” from mountaintop shrines down to their villages to direct the rain to their crops. The Numic and Yuman cultures constructed paths leading to certain mountaintops (sites of power, or
puha
),
which they believed were traveled not only by the living, but also by the dead, dreaming people, animals, water babies, and the wind. These trails existed both in the physical world and in the world of spirits and ­stories—two different landscapes that, among many Native American cultures, are inseparably entwined.

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As the trail began to ascend the ridge, Marshall became more certain that it was an old Cherokee trail and not a modern addition. For one thing, it followed the ridgeline, which is a telltale feature of Cherokee
trails. He explained that once a walker was high atop a ridge, it was possible to walk for “miles and miles and miles” without encountering serious obstacles. In wintertime, the ridges saved a walker from having to cross through frigid waters, and in summer, they stayed high above the low-lying thickets of ivy, laurel, and rhododendron, which the locals call “laurel hells.”

The trail tilted upward, slowing our progress. Marshall calculated that for every mile we hiked, we climbed a thousand feet. He said, between huffing breaths, that this was another good indication that the trail had been made by Cherokees and not Europeans. The English hated Cherokee trails, because they were too steep to follow on horseback.

Though we often speak of the “path of least resistance,” a single landscape contains countless
paths
of least resistance, depending on the mode of transportation. The Plains Indians carted goods using a sled-like device called the dog travois, so their trails gravitated to areas of slick grass, like prairie wool, and avoided steep inclines, because the travois would lift the dog's hind legs off the ground. After Europeans introduced horses to the Americas, some tribes also began using a horse travois, which can climb steeper inclines than the dog travois. However, horses cannot climb as steeply as llamas, which meant that farther south in Peru, Spanish conquistadors could not follow many of the Inca trails.

The Cherokee traveled primarily on foot, wearing soft-soled moccasins that allowed their toes to grasp the ground. “The footwear was intimately connected with Indian trails,” Marshall said. “It's an aspect that nobody thinks about.” On his feet, he wore a battered pair of rubber-soled hiking shoes, halfway between a boot and a cross-trainer, with seams held together by yellow, foamy glue. He had tried wearing moccasins before, but he discovered that his feet weren't strong enough to grip the ground effectively.

The trail rose higher through the brightening air. Gray trees held
the husks of dead leaves, shakily. On the side of the trail lay the remains of a chestnut tree, hollowed out by fungus. Chestnut trees were once the most abundant in the region; each summer, they showered the Appalachians in flurries of pale blossoms, and they grew so large that when they toppled over, the sound was known as “clear day thunder.” But around the turn of the twentieth century, they started becoming infected with an invasive blight and died off by the millions.

In this and a hundred other ways, the forest we were walking through would have been unrecognizable to the ancient Cherokee. Tyler Howe, a Cherokee historian, pressed this point home when I spoke with him. “The forests today are nothing compared to the forests then,” he said. “The natural environment of the Cherokee world has been completely changed.” For one thing, nearly all the land had been intensively logged, so the trees would have looked shockingly young to an ancient Cherokee. Moreover, the Cherokee regularly burned the woods, which would have cleared out many of the thickets of rhododendron and multiflora rose, so, to them, a modern forest would look sloppy, unkempt.

The first European visitors to North America were stunned by the forests they found—not just by the age and grandeur of the trees, but also by the lack of undergrowth. Early observers frequently noted that the forests of the Eastern seaboard resembled that of an English park. Some stated that a man could ride a horse (or according to one source, a four-horse chariot) at full gallop through the trees without a snag. A great many colonists ignorantly assumed that this was the natural, divinely ordained state of the forests. Indeed, it may well have appeared that way, because infectious diseases, imported by the earliest explorers, had already killed off as much as ninety percent of the indigenous population before settlers arrived en masse. Those second-wave pioneers had stepped into a vast garden, it seemed, with no gardener in sight.

Even early on, though, observant Europeans cottoned to the fact that the park-like appearance of the forests was the result of careful maintenance. William Wood, who published the first comprehensive natural history of New England in 1634, noted that “in those places where the Indians inhabit, there is scarce a bush or bramble, or any cumbersome underwood to be seen in the more champion ground.”
I
Meanwhile, he noted, in those places where Native communities had died off from plagues, or where rivers prevented wildfires from spreading, there was “much underwood,” so much so that “it is called ragged plain because it tears and rents the cloths of them that pass.”

In addition to easing foot travel, fire was used to clear farmland, to hunt, to encourage the growth of berry bushes and deer grass, to drive off mosquitoes, and to deplete the natural resources of neighboring tribes. When the British put an end to the practice of strategic burning, millions of acres of open oak savannas reverted to dense forests within two decades. It is now widely understood that, rather than existing in a blissfully “natural” state, the native inhabitants of North America thoroughly altered the landscape, patiently molding it, as a foot breaks in a new moccasin—and being molding by it, as a moccasin toughens a foot.

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We stopped for lunch at the top of the ridge, where the trail crossed a dirt road. Off in the distance the mountains were isoprene blue. White sun filtered down through high clouds, as sweet and clear as ice melt.

Marshall opened his backpack and pulled out five different plastic baggies. One had a baked potato in it, wrapped in aluminum foil, still warm. Another held an apple. Another, a peanut butter sandwich.
Another held pale cloves of raw garlic, which Marshall popped into his mouth and crunched without grimacing. Another held a slab of blackened bear meat. He had smoked it for two hours then broiled it in the oven to leach out the remaining fat. He cut me off a piece. It was delicious, reminiscent of Texas smoked brisket. For himself, Marshall saved a huge bear rib, which he gnawed at like a wild, white-muzzled dog.