Miss Birdie and the Story of High Rock

 

She had to knock several times to get Miss Birdie’s attention over the loud drone of the special news program. But at last, the little woman heard her, picked up the remote, muted the television, and waved her in.

“Come right in and git you a chair, honey. You’re a bright spot in a dark day. You know, sometimes I wish I didn’t have this plagued TV—the news is always so bad and now that crazy feller in Russia is trying to start another world war. And it looks like there’s some in this very country is all for it.

“Don’t they remember about old Hitler, how he got started—just taking a little bit here and a little bit there? You ain’t old enough to remember what that was like but I am. Sons and fathers and brothers going off to war and so many not coming back—or coming back awful changed. But it had to be done to stop them Nazis from spreading all over.

“I just don’t know . . . Here it is another Spring almost upon us and the daffydils beginning to show—it always makes me want to sing and dance, though I can’t hardly do neither one no more. And it seems like we’re going back to bad times.

                                                                     

“But you didn’t come here to listen to me carry on about the news. You look like you got a question.

“What do I know about High Rock? Is there some story about that place?

“Law, I ain’t thought about that story in the awfullest long time. . . Hit’s an awful sad story, most as bad as what’s there on the TV this moment. But if you’re set on hearing it. . .

“You know where High Rock is, don’t you—you go up Upper Brush creek a ways, and you’ll come to the road that leads to it. I reckon there's new people living up there these days.

"Now back most two hundred years there was a Cherokee village around there and, lower down, where the new middle school is, was where they did their farming. It was good rich flat land and there was good hunting all around. The Cherokees was peaceable folk, tending their crops–beans and corn and squash mostly – and getting along fine with what few settlers there was back. They likely had some peach trees too for the Cherokee always loved peaches, would dry them to keep through the winter. Like we still do. Law, I mind how Granny Beck used to say that biting into a dried peach hand pie in winter was like biting into a summer day.

“I’m rambling, ain’t I? So, there was these peaceable folk—the Cherokee -- living where they’d been time out of mind. But as more and more settlers started moving into the Indian lands—not just the Cherokee, but other tribes all over the South, things got kindly rambunctious when some of the settlers took a notion to have all that good land for themselves. And what happened then was that old Andy Jackson who was the president of the United States, put out an order to round up all them southern Indians and march them out west. I already told you how my great great grandfather John Goingsnake run away from that march after his wife died—run away with their little baby girl what grew up to be my great grandmother. 

“It was along about this time, eighteen and thirty-some that the soldiers swooped down on the village, tore up the houses, and rounded up the Cherokees to march them off. Can you feature it—taken away from your home and everything you owned? Turned out just like that because someone else wants your land?

“But the story goes that on the day the soldiers came, there was three young women—girls, really--that was off on a high hill, looking for things to eat. They had their babies with them and when they heard the commotion below, they hid till the soldiers was gone, watching as the whole village, young and old was rounded up and drove off like they was cattle.

“Them three was in a fix. How could they make it – three women with bitty babies and young uns? They stayed hid up on the mountain till the soldiers was long gone. And when they didn’t see nobody, they crept down to see what was left of their village. There was some food hidden away but not near enough to see them through a winter. There was nothing for it to go down to the fields every day and try to make a crop. But their little uns was just at that creeping, crawling age where they couldn’t stay out of trouble and it would take all three of them, working long and late to bring in the corn that was near ripe. So, they made them a plan.

“They took them young uns up the mountain to High Rock, for they knowed there was some places in the rock--pits, kindly, just deep enough the babes couldn’t clamber out. A kind of playpen, like. So that was what they done. Every morning they’d feed the little uns good then take them to the High Rock and leave them there so they could get their work done. I reckon they must of left them something to gnaw on to keep them satisfied but that part of the story ain’t come down.

“Time went by, the corn ripened, and the three young women had most half of the crop picked and laid by when some evil soul come along and seen them. It must have been him told the government and afore long, here come a band of soldiers. They caught the girls working in the field, tied them up, and threw them acrost their pack horses like they was sacks of meal, to haul them off to Bryson City where they was holding the Indians before marching them out west.

“Those girls wept and begged and tried to make the soldiers understand about their children up in High Rock, but they couldn’t speak English and the soldiers just laughed at their signing. And off they went . . .

“The story don’t tell did them three make it to Oklahoma. There was a many that didn’t.

“The young uns? Well, the story didn’t tell about them neither. I’d like to believe someone found them and they was taken in by kind folks. Maybe they was. But there’s folks living down on Brush Creek who swear that of a summer evening, if the wind is setting right, you can still hear them babes a-crying for their mamas. . .

“Here’s you a Kleenex, honey. I done told you it was a sad story. But it’s long past and might not be true. This here, though, this on the tv—hit’s a-going on right now.