Story by Sasha Schroeder
Video & Photos by Ellen Campbell
Graphic by Keyshawn Garrett
Lamar Marshall and Brent Martin hike Western North Carolina with a purpose.
Brows furrowed and field notebooks in hand, the two men can be found deep in the mountains several days a week. They walk carefully, pausing every so often to deliberate, take notes or point out landmarks.
They are searching for trails that intertwine the eighteenth-century history of the Cherokee people and a prominent American naturalist. The mission: to preserve this history by documenting the ancient Cherokee paths that were used by explorer William Bartram on his journey throughout the American Southeast.
“Bartram followed Cherokee trails all the way up into North Carolina,” Marshall said. “He traveled through these towns, and he was loved by the Native Americans. He had a spirit that was different from most people. They adored him.”
Bartram’s route through Georgia and North Carolina is known as the Bartram Trail, which is approximately 110 miles long. The North Carolina section curves in a north-west direction, intersecting the Appalachian Trail twice and ending at the Cheoah Bald, the highest peak in the Cheoah Mountains of southwestern North Carolina.
Bartram’s centuries-old journal, Travels, guides Marshall and Martin as they retrace his steps to perfect the trail. The two men have joined forces to produce an official trail guide with the University of Georgia Press that backpackers can use to follow the Bartram Trail and learn about its history. They’ll follow the same Native American trade paths that Bartram did.
“We’ll have a different experience than just buying a map and going out and hiking the trail. They’ll actually get some context for the landscape,” Martin said.
‘Anomalies in the landscape’
The process of documenting these trails can be tricky.
“The goal is to go back and define all this history that fell into a black hole,” Marshall said.
To reconstruct the trails, Marshall and Martin use descriptions from Bartram’s journal along with other maps that have been made over the years. Then, they hike to see if they can find where the old routes would have been. The paths must be right in size—wide enough for a horse, but not much wider—and they must follow the natural landscape of the mountains.
“Historians before Lamar really just kind of half-guessed on where he was and didn’t give the landscape the scrutiny that Lamar has given it,” Martin said.
Marshall is producing the maps using a GPS and geographic information system software, while Martin is writing mile-by-mile descriptions of the trail.
“You just look for those anomalies in the landscape,” Martin said.
Marshall and Martin are both committed outdoorsmen and environmentalists. Martin is co-owner of an outdoor expedition company and is executive director of the Blue Ridge Bartram Trail Conservancy, which seeks to honor, establish and maintain the Bartram Trail. Marshall is the founder of Wild South, a nonprofit that works to protect public lands in the South, and has been a part of countless conservation and environmental groups.
The men met through their environmental activism in Georgia and Alabama. For decades, they recruited grassroots activists to join them in the fight against what Marshall called corporate exploitation of the U.S. Forest Service by the timber industry. Native Americans were often part of their efforts, as much of their ancestral landscapes on government-protected lands were being destroyed.
Both Marshall and Martin eventually chose to relocate to North Carolina to get away from the frustrations of their work, which Martin called ugly and divisive. Marshall even received death threats because of his efforts.
Back in Alabama, Marshall mapped over 200 miles of the Cherokee Trail of Tears. The Trail of Tears is the route that Cherokees were forced to take to Oklahoma in 1838 and 1839 after they were removed from their lands east of the Mississippi River by the U.S. government. Thousands of Cherokees died from starvation, disease and exhaustion along the way.
When Marshall arrived in North Carolina, he continued to map trails significant to the Cherokees—the Bartram Trail is just one of many. For years, he’s been making trips to the Library of Congress, universities, and national and state archives to retrace and document Cherokee trails, with the aim of taking it all back to Cherokee communities so they can pass it on to the next generations.
“My original mission was to recover the cultural traditions and the historical geography,” Marshall said. “These trails took the Cherokees from town to town; they took them to sacred places.”
‘Not your average American’
Born in 1739 in Philadelphia, Bartram set out in 1773 on a solo expedition through the American Southeast that lasted four years. Traveling by horse, foot and boat, Bartram documented and illustrated his journey in what became Travels.
“This world, as a glorious apartment of the boundless palace of the sovereign Creator, is furnished with an infinite variety of animated scenes, inexpressibly beautiful and pleasing, equally free to the inspection and enjoyment of all his creatures,” Bartram wrote.
He kept copious notes on hundreds of species of plants and animals as well as Native American communities, resulting in one of the most important collections of writings on Southeastern Native American culture from the period. Travels was beloved by the great authors of the Romantic era, including Emerson, Carlyle, Coleridge and Wordsworth.
“In every order of nature, we perceive a variety of qualities distributed amongst individuals, designed for different purposes and uses, yet it appears evident, that the great Author has impartially distributed his favors to his creatures, so that the attributes of each one seem to be of sufficient importance to manifest the divine and inimitable workmanship,” Bartram wrote.
“He was not your average American in 1775 when he came to these mountains,” Martin said. “Most colonial Americans, if not the vast majority of them, were not about sympathy towards Native American people. They were about exploiting Native American people and taking land and crooked deals.”
Kathi Littlejohn is a Cherokee storyteller and has been studying Cherokee history for decades. She said the younger generation of Cherokees doesn’t know much about Bartram, despite the many oral stories about him that have been passed down through generations of Cherokees. Bartram has left a legacy of courage, she said.
“We think that he was extremely courageous,” Littlejohn said. “For him to come by himself, with an open mind and an open heart and be so accepting of everyone that he met—that right there earned people’s admiration and respect.”
According to Littlejohn, Bartram wasn’t exploitative.
“He never took anything. He didn’t come with that agenda,” she said. “What he wrote was really valuable because he just simply recorded what he saw.”
That people have been walking the same ancient paths for hundreds of years makes perfect sense to Littlejohn. She said Cherokees don’t think of time as linear.
“Everything is connected,” Littlejohn said.
