On Trails (24 page)

He lay on his side, propped on an elbow, telling stories from his youth. When he was in fifth grade, he said, he became obsessed with stories about American Indians; he would hide recollections of frontier life inside his textbooks so he could read them while pretending to study. Naturally, he gravitated to the Boy Scouts, where he learned to hike, canoe, and camp out. When he was eighteen, he built a raft out of fifty-five-gallon drums (complete with a sail, a detachable canoe, and a ten-foot Confederate flag), which he and two friends floated down the Alabama River from Selma to the Gulf of Mexico.

Soon after, he befriended an “old mountain man” named John Garvin Sanford. As the two went “prowlin' ” through the woods in search of ginseng and goldenseal, Sanford would sometimes lead Marshall to the site of old Cherokee villages. On one occasion, Sanford dug down into a fire pit in an abandoned village and recovered a pile of tiny, charred corncobs. (Ears of corn, he explained, were much smaller before Europeans began cultivating them.) Marshall canoed to various former townsites to see if he could find shards of pottery or remnants of tomahawks. Sometimes, standing in a plowed field, he could see the dark circles and squares where Cherokee houses had once stood; even after being tilled countless times, the ground was still blackened from centuries of cooking fires. He puzzled over the old Cherokee trails, where they went, and why.

In the following years, he drove across the country, hiking and canoeing the wildest places he could find. When his friends went off to Woodstock, he went to Canada to paddle the lakes of the Quetico.
He took up studying survival skills and opened a survival school called the Southeastern School of Outdoor Skills. For two years he made a living trapping mink, muskrat, raccoon, and fox. “Everything the Native Americans did, I wanted to emulate,” he explained. “I saw the whole world through them.”

For a long time, he had believed he was one-sixteenth Cherokee, but in 2015 he took a DNA test that suggested otherwise. “Family traditions sometimes are found to be family fantasies, I guess,” he later wrote to me in an email. More disappointing still, he had discovered that one of his ancestors, while fighting in the Revolutionary War, had helped burn the towns of the Lower Cherokee, who were then allies of the British. “I guess that my mission in life,” he concluded, “is to make retribution for the sins of my ancestors.”

In 1991 Marshall's passion for wild lands began to take on an activist edge. That year, after many years of working as an engineer for corporations that built paper mills and nuclear power plants—work he despised—he purchased a 140-year-old cabin on an inholding in the Bankhead National Forest. He moved there in the hopes of getting back in touch with the wilderness, but on his regular hikes, he was horrified to find that huge patches of the forest, including stands of old-growth trees, had been razed.

One day, he ran across an article in the local newspaper by none other than Rickey Butch Walker denouncing the clearcuts in Indian Tomb Hollow, a site containing ancient Cherokee steatite pottery. Marshall befriended Walker, who showed him the desecrated site. At first Marshall was enraged by the damage he saw, but then he had an inspiration: He decided to cobble together a newsletter called the
Bankhead Monitor,
which would chronicle the ongoing destruction of the forest. The front-page headline of the first issue read, “Alabama Chainsaw Massacre: Clearcutting a Historic Site.” (He surreptitiously printed the first copies of it at work, in the office of Amoco Chemicals.) Marshall began by handing the newsletters out for free
in parking lots, then he sold them for a dollar in local stores. They gradually caught on. Over the course of fifteen years, the four-page newsletter grew to a full color, one-hundred-page magazine with a circulation of five thousand.

In 1994 an anonymous donor offered to pay Marshall a yearly salary to ensure that he could quit his job and fight the Forest Service full-time. Marshall accepted the offer, redoubling his efforts. However, selling environmental protection to rural Alabamians proved a tricky task. At one community meeting, in a remote country church, Marshall narrowly avoided a mob beating, thanks only to the intervention of a local preacher. On another occasion, Marshall and two friends were held at gunpoint by an inebriated hunter, who ranted about how environmentalists wanted to “lock up the forest.” (They managed to escape only when the hunter bent down to draw a map in the dirt to show the location of a nearby well—where he intended to dump their bodies, Marshall presumed—and toppled over backward.)

As the fight intensified, Marshall began receiving death threats. He took to wearing two guns whenever he was in public, a 9mm Glock and a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum. His then-wife bought a gun as well. For a time, he hired off-duty police officers to guard his property. Local residents boycotted his business—a small country store called the Warrior Mountains Trading Company—which he was eventually forced to sell. All told, he lost $400,000 over the course of those years, the bulk of his life savings.

Marshall had started out life “as rightwing as they come,” he says: In his twenties, he was a member of the John Birch Society and a campaign volunteer for Ronald Reagan. In the years since, his beliefs had occasionally drifted leftward, but not by much. “Conservation,” he liked to say, “is conservative.” It came as a shock, then, when his opponents in the fight over Bankhead National Forest tried to paint him as a leftist radical. “It was like I was the most
evil, liberal, godless person ever to exist,” he recalled. “They called me a communist!”

Marshall eventually came to describe himself as a “conservationist” rather than an “environmentalist.” Within the larger environmentalist community, he was something of an enigma, he said. As a Christian and a sportsman, the biocentric approach of Deep Ecology, then in ascendance, held no interest for him. He loved the woods because it was a place for humans to roam free, to hunt, and to fish. Environmental activists from the North seemed to come from a different planet. At one Greenpeace training camp he attended in Oregon, he was surprised to realize that he was virtually the only person in attendance who ate meat. While there, he took a workshop on how to climb trees and hang protest banners. A public radio reporter asked him if he was going to use those skills when he returned home to Alabama. “Oh hell no,” he replied. “If you climbed a tree in Alabama, they'd cut the tree down. If you chain yourself across a road they'll run over you. You can't do that kind of stuff in Alabama.”

In the end, it was Rickey Butch Walker who cracked the code of how to convince Alabamians to fight for their wild places. Having grown up in those woods, Walker knew that for many people, the wilderness did not represent an otherworldly sanctum of ‘biodiversity,' as it did for many urban environmentalists. Rather, it served as the birthplace, staging ground, and repository for the area's deepest traditions. Walker urged Marshall to shift his focus from protecting endangered species to protecting local traditions. Hunting and fishing were considered sacrosanct, and, in an area where roughly a quarter of the residents claimed some form of Cherokee ancestry, historic tribal sites were fiercely guarded. Marshall quickly saw the merits of Walker's approach. “You go on down to Alabama, and people don't give a damn about endangered squirrels or whatever,” he told me. “But if you go up there and want to mess with that hill where they killed their first deer, boy, they'll
kill
you. Everything has to be
framed in personal language. The more educated people are about their roots, the more connected they're going to feel to their land. And then they're going to stand up and
fight
for their land.”

That fight ultimately proved successful: a moratorium was placed on the cutting of eighteen thousand acres of public land, the conversion of Bankhead Forest into commercial pine plantations was halted, and a number of sacred sites have remained untouched ever since.

Looking back, Marshall said, his entire life could be seen as a preparation for the wildly multidisciplinary work of mapping ancient trails. The years of hiking taught him to navigate cross-country, the career in trapping taught him about lines of habitual movement, and his lifelong study of American Indian cultures taught him why a Native trail might go somewhere a European trail would not. Working on surveying crews taught him how to read geographic surveys and draw maps. And years spent hunting, fishing, attending Baptist church services, and cussing liberal bureaucrats—in short, living the life of a red-blooded son of the Southland—allowed him to talk with hillbillies and Cherokee elders alike, gathering information a desk-bound academic might otherwise miss.

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In the end, Marshall concluded that the trail we'd walked that November morning was among the best preserved Cherokee trails in western North Carolina. He later found mention of it in an account written by an army captain named W. G. Williams, who led a secret reconnaissance mission into Cherokee country in 1837 in preparation for the infamous Cherokee Removal. (Williams described it, tersely, as a “very rugged trail.”)

Initially, Marshall had dubbed it the “Big Stamp Trail,” because it eventually climbed its way to a high grassy summit called Big Stamp. A “stamp,” in local vernacular, is a place where large numbers of deer
(or formerly, buffalo) gather to graze or access salt licks, stomping down vegetation in the process.

There was some disagreement, however, over the name. On the morning of our hike Marshall had met a bear hunter named Jimmy Russell, who corrected him when Marshall said he was hiking up toward Big Stamp. “We call it Big
Stomp
,” Russell said. Marshall scribbled this down in his notebook.

A few hours later, Marshall received a call on his cell phone from his neighbor, Randy, who happened to be another bear hunter. (Bear hunters, Marshall explained, were an excellent and underutilized intellectual resource—because they had to scramble cross-country in pursuit of their quarry, they knew every trail in the mountains, even the abandoned ones.) Marshall told Randy we were surveying the trail up to “Big Stomp.”

Randy interrupted him. “We call it Big
Stamp
,” he said.

“Well, the map calls it Big Stamp, but we were corrected,” said Marshall. “That mountain guy told us they call it Big
Stomp
.”

“Aww, well we always call it Big
Stamp
. That's what
we
call it,” Randy said.

Marshall made a note of this, too. (He ultimately stuck with “Stamp.”)

In this line of work, names matter. In the absence of reliable maps, Marshall was often forced to stitch together prospective paths from the town names he found in written records. This task was made exponentially more difficult by the fact that explorers and surveyors tended to err badly (and often, bizarrely) when transliterating Cherokee place names. For example, the Cherokee village of Ayoree Town was inaccurately renamed Ioree, which then became the Iotla Valley. George R. Stewart pointed out in his masterful
Names on the Land
that Europeans, accustomed “to names like Cadiz and Bristol which had long since lost literal meaning,” were often content to mangle Native Americans' highly descriptive, intricately wrought place names,
using them as mere tags, much like how an archaeologist might use a Stone-Age knife as a paperweight.

Sometimes when Marshall was stuck on a curious place name, he would take it to a Cherokee linguist named Tom Belt, who could decode it. Not long ago, for example, Belt informed him that Guinekelokee (what is now the West Fork of the Chatooga River) meant, “where the trees hang over the sides.”

I visited Belt one afternoon at his office at Western Carolina University. He wore cowboy boots, blue jeans, and a silver belt buckle. Around his neck, over a purple dress shirt, hung an abalone pendant engraved with woodpecker heads. A mop of gray-streaked hair was cut just above his boyish eyes. His voice had a warm, dark, smoke-rasped, far-off quality.

Belt was born and raised in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. His ancestors were brought there in the decade following the signing of the widely reviled Indian Removal Act of 1830 by President Andrew Jackson. (Belt's feelings about Jackson were plain: on the wall of his office hung a photo of Jackson that had been fashioned into a WANTED poster.) Some of the Cherokee had gone west peacefully, but many were moved by force, shuttled under armed guard along what they called
Nvnohi Dunatlohilvhi
, “The Trail Where They Cried,” or as it is more commonly known, the Trail of Tears. Sixteen thousand Cherokees were driven from their homes; while some were carried on riverboats, others were forced to walk almost a thousand miles across inhospitable country. Perhaps as many as four thousand men, women, and children died, mostly of disease.

The full ramifications of the Removal, and the pain it inflicted, are difficult for non–Native Americans to grasp. As Belt made clear to me, our two cultures have a drastically different “sense of place.” To Euro-­Americans, places are most often regarded as sites of residence or economic activity—essentially blank backdrops for human enterprise. As such, Euro-American places are largely ahistorical,
replaceable
; they change hands, and their names can change too. By comparison, the Cherokee conception of place is more fixed, specified, eternal. “In the native world, places don't change identity,” Belt said. “We are more in touch with place as where things
have happened,
and where things
are,
as opposed to where
we
are.”

The Cherokee derived their tribal identity from an ancient townsite twenty-five miles west of where we were sitting, called Kituwah, “the soil that belongs to the creator.” Cherokee villages once ranged across the Southeast, from Kentucky to Georgia, but, according to Belt, if you had asked any of those villagers where they were from, they would have told you they were
Otsigiduwagi
, the people of Kituwah. On a ceremonial mound in the mother town burned an eternal flame. Once a year, coals from that flame were carried to the various towns. Thus was the vast Cherokee nation strung together: by language, by narrative, by ancestry, by tradition, by glowing embers carried along a network of trails.
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