Signal trees — sometimes called trail trees — are important historically and are interesting to look out for. To make them, Native Americans forced trees to grow in certain shapes so as to serve as signals marking trails, hunting grounds, hideouts, camping areas, shallow fords, tribal territories, sacred places, etc. They made them by bending a sapling and holding it by some means until the first curve was fixed by growth. So as to hasten the fixation, they tied the sapling in some manner with rawhide, sinew rope, or stout vines.

I once owned a pamphlet about signal trees of the southern mountains that I’ve misplaced. But there is a Web site dedicated to “Indian Trail Trees of Georgia” that can be accessed at http://home.att.net/~trailtrees. Here are some of the points made the site’s creator.

“What are trail trees and what do they look like? There are many different configurations, but probably the trail trees that are shaped alike also point to the same thing. Variations in shape depend on the type of tree used, the tribe bending them, the geographic area of the U.S., the age of the tree (styles varied over the hundreds of years that they were bent), what they point to, etc. Trail trees will be bent and will have some evidence of a ‘nose’ on the pointing end of the tree trunk. Sometimes, you can actually see the scars left by the tie-down sinews. Shorter trees are from the time period when Indians traveled by foot; the taller trees — known as horse-and-rider trees — are younger trees that were bent after the Indians began to use horses.

“Is every bent tree I see a trail tree? No — trees can become bent from many causes (storms, ice, wind, another tree falling on it, crowding in the forest, etc.) Look for the characteristic shape, plus the knob or “nose” on one end. Sometimes the nose is not very obvious, but there will be at least some characteristic scarring or healed-over part where the tree was cut. Once you see a few trail trees, either in person or from photos, you will begin to recognize them and they will literally jump out at you.”

“What kinds of trees were used to make trail trees? Oaks, especially white and red oaks, and other hardwood trees.”

I’ve never located a bent tree that I was sure was a signal tree. Almost every high-elevation ridge here in the southern mountains has trees (often chestnut oaks or northern red oaks) that are grotesquely shaped, many of them with limbs that seem to point in a certain direction. But all of these are surely the result of high winds that sweep over the ridges in winter.

I once taught at a site in Georgia that featured Native American programs. One of the highlights of each week’s workshop was a visit to a secluded rock shelter where it was asserted that Cherokees had found refuge during the 1838 removal of most of the tribe to Oklahoma. Along the way, the tour guide (one of the owners) always stopped at a place on a wind-swept ridge where there was a scraggly oak with a limb that pointed in the general direction of the rock shelter. This, he explained in great detail, was a signal tree made by the Cherokees to indicate the location of the place of refuge.

I always kept my mouth shut, but there were two obvious problems with this tale. First, the Cherokees didn’t know until the spring of 1838 that the U.S. military was actually going to enforce a removal. There would have been no time to prepare a signal tree. And second, the tree obviously wasn’t more than 75 years old.

In Western North Carolina: A History (From 1730 to 1913), John Preston Arthur described in 1914 a grotesquely-shaped tree known locally in Swain County as “The Triangle Tree.” It was situated on the north bank of the Little Tennessee River about where Fontana Dam is located today. As there was a major Cherokee trail in this area that connected the Middle Towns in present-day Western North Carolina with the Over The Hill Towns in present-day eastern Tennessee, I’ve often wondered if this wasn’t some sort of genuine signal tree. Here’s Arthur’s description:

“The Triangle Tree. Almost one mile above Fairfax post office on the Little Tennessee river, in Swain county, stood, until a great freshet came and washed it away eight or ten years ago, one of the most unusual and remarkable freaks in the shape of tree growth in America. But so isolated had it become by reason of the practical abandonment of late years of the wagon road from Bushnel to Rocky Point that few strangers ever saw it, while to the few natives of region, who had seen it for years and years, it called marked attention. It was a large spruce pine [i.e., eastern hemlock] at least three feet in diameter five feet above the ground where a limb or branch of a diameter of at least eighteen inches left the main trunk at an angle of about forty-five degrees and extended out toward the river, while three feet above its point of departure from the main trunk a second limb or branch, twelve inches in diameter, shot out in the same direction as the first, but at an angle of seventy-five or eighty degrees and joined itself to the first limb six or seven feet from its base so perfectly that it grew into and had become a part thereof, thus forming with the main trunk a perfect triangle of living wood. It was easy to climb into this triangle and by sitting astride the first or lower limb to hold the body erect against the trunk of the tree immediately under the second limb. It is a pity it was never photographed, but the dimensions given above are accurate, since they were carefully measured and noted while the tree was still standing in all its glory.”

George Ellison is a writer who lives in Bryson City. He wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C. 28713, or at ellisongeorge@cs.com.