THROUGH
MOUNTAIN MISTS
Early Settlers of
Their
Descendants...Their Stories...Their Achievements
Lifting the
Mists of History on Their Way of Life
By: Ethelene Dyer Jones
Two weeks
ago this column told of the Rev. William Jasper
Cotter, Methodist Episcopal Church South minister, who was sent to a
charge in
1846 at Blairsville. He and his wife
Rachel resided in a cabin in Union County and from there he went out to
twenty
preaching stations in North Georgia, Western North Carolina and Eastern
Tennessee.
He gave invaluable insight into his
life and times in his memoirs which he entitled My Autobiography. His descriptions of places and events were
clear and incisive. He was living with
his parents in Murray County, Georgia when the Cherokee Indian Removal
occurred
in 1838. His parents were John Vance
Cotter, born November 28, 1789 in Union District, South Carolina and
his mother
was Mary Ann Nall Cotter, born June 12, 1796 in Chatham County, North
Carolina. The Cotter family lived in
Hall County, Georgia where son William Jasper was born November 16,
1823. They moved to Murray County in
1832 and
settled in the area of the Carter Plantation (now Carter’s Lake area)
along the
old Federal Road.
In his life story, the Rev. Cotter
gave vivid accounts of what he saw and experienced as the Cherokee were
rounded
up and moved west.
When he was a teenager, he was hired
as a delivery boy to haul loads of corn to some of the posts where
General
Winfield Scott’s soldiers were encamped.
He saw first-hand much of the action of rounding up the Indians
and
holding them in forts awaiting the removal to Oklahoma.
From his book we read: “On a mild
May morning, two men stood at our
gate. Dismounted from his large,
raw-boned white horse, his bridle rein on his arm, stood General Scott,
with
White Path, an Indian, for whom White Path Gold Mine (in Gilmer County)
was
named. There was neither a white man nor
an Indian there, only two old soldiers who had met at the battle of
Horseshoe
Bend. Chief White Path exhibited a medal
that General Jackson had given him for his bravery in the battle.” (p. 42)
A quartermaster in General Winfield
Scott’s army, Colonel W. J. Howard, boarded at the Cotter’s house. It was from him that the young Cotter
received his orders to deliver loads of corn to the soldiers. The going rate for corn at that time, under
the inflated economy and the dire need for corn, was one dollar per
bushel. Young Cotter returned almost every
day he
hauled a load with five dollars for his father.
One day, he returned with thirteen dollars.
He hauled the corn on an ox-drawn wagon.
He remembers: “It was a hard day’s
work, starting early and
getting back late, and this was the daily round.” When
he was not hauling corn, he was engaged
to move the household goods the Indians had been forced to leave in
their
cabins when they were taken to the forts.
Five or six soldiers went with Cotter as guards.
The soldiers forced open the cabin doors and
left Cotter to load the meager goods. He
recalled that he could load “the stuff of two or three families at one
load.” The soldiers left him to the
sorry task of loading. He wrote, “The
soldiers galloped away, leaving me in worse danger than anyone else;
for if
there had been an Indian hiding out, I would have been the one to
suffer.” (p. 40)
The situation gave Cotter great
concern. Cows and their calves had been
apart for days and the calves were starving.
Cotter turned them together.
Chickens, cats and dogs scattered at the approach of the
soldiers and
Cotter and his ox team. Indian ponies
stood under shade trees fighting flies.
Bells around necks of cows and ponies made an eerie music in the
spring
air. Dogs howled mournfully for their
owners. As cabins were emptied, the
doors were left ajar. Cotter commented,
“To have seen it all would have melted to tenderness a heart of stone.” (p. 40)
Cotter saw fields of corn the Indians
had planted. It had been a warm spring
and they had seeded the fields early, maybe with the idea that if they
proceeded with life as usual the removal would not occur.
Cotter emphasized that the Indians
were not mistreated in captivity. “From
General Scott down, every soldier and citizen looked upon them with an
eye of
pity. The Indians were neither prisoners
nor captives. They were defenseless
wards of the government, cared for and fed from the commissary stores.” (p. 43)
According to Cotter’s account, the
Indians were not crammed inside the forts.
They were encamped outside the forts awaiting the move to Ross’s
Landing. Cotter saw the children and
youth playing and “happy as larks.” When
the move began, the ill and infirm were transported by wagons. As a first-hand observer of the action,
Cotter stated that published reports of Indians having to survive on
roots and
berries were untrue. “They felt no fear
of the soldiers, realizing at once they were their protectors. Not one of the Indians could have been
tempted to leave the camp a mile. I am
persuaded that more than half of them were glad and ready to go.” (p. 45)
Yet even with the humane treatment of
the Cherokee that Cotter observed, he noted that a pervading sadness
lingered
like a pall. The vacated Indian cabins
and deserted animals stood in stark contrast to the cultivated fields
with
crops of corn and beans growing in the spring warmth.
In addition to hauling loads of corn
from his father’s farm to the army camps, young Cotter was also hired
by
Colonel Howard on occasion as a messenger boy to take papers from
Murray County
to Fort Hartzell in Ellijay. It was a
journey of about seventeen miles across rugged mountains.
The lad encountered a huge man with a gun and
feared for his life. But the man did not
fire his gun at Cotter. The lad spent
the night in the mountains, cold and lost, but the next morning he
determined
which direction he should go and he and his horse arrived at the fort
safely.
William Jasper Cotter was fourteen
when he worked as a delivery and messenger boy during the Indian
Removal. What he saw made such a lasting
impression on
him that he could write his eye-witness accounts in his autobiography
when he
was an old man of about ninety. He died
in Newnan, Georgia on January 4, 1922.
[Ethelene Dyer
Jones is a retired educator,
freelance writer, poet, and historian. She may be reached at
e-mail edj0513@windstream.net;
phone 478-453-8751; or mail 1708 Cedarwood Road, Milledgeville, GA
31061-2411.]
Updated October 4, 2008
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