Migrations, Forced and Natural

Birchwood, Tennessee, near the site of Blythe Ferry

1.
The Cherokee Removal Memorial Park, on a small hill where the Hiwassee and Tennessee Rivers meet, offers a solemn place for reflection. Beyond a stone map of the Cherokee removal along The Trail of Tears, marble slabs rise. Incised with the names of 2535 heads of household of the Cherokee Nation, they represent a small portion of the 16,000+ people forced out of their homelands to territory west of the Mississippi River.

The East Tennessee Geotourism MapGuide adds this: "About 4,200 of the 16,542 Cherokees identified perished as a result of the Cherokee Removal in 1838. This is the closest thing to a headstone they will have. The Memorial is intended to humanize them. They were not wild savages, but were at least as civilized as most that replaced them. According to the 1835 Census they were: farmers, mechanics, weavers, spinners and business men. Many were literate in Cherokee and/or English."

According to Wikipedia's article about Blythe Ferry, "By the Fall of [1838], some 9000 Cherokee and 300 Creek had been imprisoned in stockades in Bradley County, a few miles to the east. It took several weeks to move the entire contingent across the river, with the last detachment crossing on November 12, 1838."

William Blythe, the ferry owner, and his Cherokee wife moved west with the Cherokee. Today, a bridge spans the water over which the native peoples came.

2.
On the same spit of land, over 10,000 of the Eastern population of Greater Sandhill Cranes visit the Hiwassee Refuge for food and rest before heading further south to Georgia and Florida. After breeding in Canada, the Great Lakes area, and the Upper Midwestern states, the begin migrating in the fall on a route that takes them through Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Even here in Sewanee, early in the morning some days, if one is lucky, he or she can hear the unmistakable call of some flying overhead. 

According to the flyer I picked up today at the refuge ("Sandhill and Whooping Cranes in Tennessee," written and illustrated by Vicikie Taylor), the Sandhill was "suspected as migrating through Tennessee" in the 1960s, but folks rarely observed them. "In 1978, a total of 5.383 Sandhill Cranes were reported in Tennessee, with the largest flock containing 100 birds." But within twenty years, "biologists estimated that more than 40,000 Sandhill Cranes visited the Hiwassee Refuge during the 2009-2010 migration season. Of that number, approximately 10,000 wintered at the refuge," a practice that apparently continues today.

3.
J emailed this to me yesterday from The Writer's Almanac:

Watching Sandhill Cranes
by William Stafford

Spirits among us have departed--friends,
relatives, neighbors: we can't find them.
If we search and call, the sky merely waits.
The some day here come the cranes
planing in from cloud or mist--sharp,
lonely spears, awkwardly graceful.
They reach for the land; they stalk
the ploughed fields, not letting us near,
not quite our own, not quite the world's.

People go by and pull over to watch. They
Peer and point and wonder. It is because
these travelers, these far wanderers,
plane down and yearn in a reaching
flight. They extend our life,
piercing through space to reappear
quietly, undeniable, where we are.

4.
An oddly unsettling conjunction of history and nature, made more lively by reflection on current events--here and elsewhere in the world of man and nature, but a pleasant journey and interlude nevertheless.

(postscript: another Sewanee blogger today posted this with a wonderful sound recording -- Sandhill Cranes at Hiwassee Refuge, TN)