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WCU - Great Smoky Mountains - A Park for America

Early Explorers in the Great Smokies

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Item 1 - Early Explorers in the Great Smokies
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Early Explorers in the Great Smokies

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Item’s are ‘child’ level descriptions to ‘parent’ objects, (e.g. one page of a whole book).

  • 60 East Tennessee Historical Society's Publications was to pursue its course unto "the place where it is called Great Iron or Smoky Mountain". During territorial days and a few years subsequently various treaties were entered into with the Cherokee Indians, ceding to the whites large tracts of land. In one of these, the Holston Treaty of July 2, 1791, negotiated by William Blount, the line bounding the Indian lands was to pass over the Smoky and Chilhowie mountains. However, all this line was not surveyed at the time, for Governor Blount's letter to the War Department, accompanying the report of the commission, says in part: "As the* geography of the country cannot be known to you, there being no correct map of it, I think it necessary to inform you that the country to the east, or rather southeast of the Chilhowie -mountains, through which the line reported upon, if continued beyond it, will pass, for fifty or sixty miles, is an entire bed, or ledge after ledge, of mountains. . . near which no settlements can be formed, hence, I conclude, it will not be essential to extend it".20 From this description one is forced to the conclusion that this section of the Smokies had not yet been explored to any great extent, but that the extreme roughness of the region was well known. There later came a demand that the line be actually surveyed, and Colonel Benjamin Hawkins was charged with this duty. His journal does not give any record of the survey beyond Southwest Point at the mouth of Clinch River, but a manuscript map in the Office of Indian Affairs plainly shows a line running a course S y6° E. from Southwest Point to the Great Iron Mountain, marked "Hawkins Line".21 This line as marked was not in accordance with the exact terms of any treaty, and there has been revealed no authority for Colonel Hawkins action in running it in this location, yet it received official notice to the extent that in the treaty concluded on October 2, 1798, a part of the Indian boundary was "continued along Chill-howie Mountain until it strikes Hawkins's line. Thence along said line to the Great Iron Mountain", etc.22 Later, Return J. Meigs was appointed commissioner to see that such lines were surveyed. Whether Meig's party succeeded in following the route outlined by Hawkins has long been a subject of bitter controversy, and more than one lawsuit, upon which the possession of thousands of acres of valuable timber land depended, has hinged on the precise location of Meigs' Post, the assumed end of Hawkins' Line on the 20 American State Paper, Indian Affairs (Washington, 1832), I, 628-31. 21 Officer of Indian Affairs, manuscript map No. 749. »U. S. Statutes at Large, VII, 62,
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Great Smoky Mountains - A Park for America

This digital collection was created to contribute to the public's understanding of the forces and ideas that led to the establishment of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 1934. The most vi...

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