week of 10/2/02
 
 
 

Nantahala caves well know to locals, Cherokee
By George Ellison

The Smokies region evidences an overlapping of the natural world with ongoing human uses and events. I like to explore the places where these forces intersect. They aren’t hard to find. Take, for instance, the Nantahala Gorge, that modern day epicenter of the whitewater industry.

The Nantahala Gorge was in one sense a “chasm of horrors” to the ancient Cherokee; so much so, indeed, that they associated the place in their legends with four mythic monsters — most especially with the Uktena, the giant serpent with a flashing quartz crystal embedded in its forehead. Such associations exemplified an atmosphere of gloom and sinister foreboding that one can still feel in the Nantahala Gorge, especially in winter.

But there is much more to the Nantahala Gorge than thick fog and dark swirling pools. It seems clear enough that the Cherokees also felt back then — as we do today, at times — a sense of spiritual exhilaration in the gorge.

There can be little doubt that they knew the extensive cave systems which occupy the slopes in the marble-limestone-talc formations that run eight miles from the present day raft put-in to Wesser, where the Nantahala Outdoor Center is located. Indeed, it’s not unlikely that they penetrated these systems more fully than is now possible after 150 or so years of blasting by various mining operations.

The caves known as Flowstone, Lost Nantahala, Flint Ridge, Blowout Springs, Old Timbers, Talc Mountain Blowing Cave, and others may in places form a connected cavern system. It’s rumored that the largest cave in North Carolina is in the gorge. I have heard persons speak of cavern rooms as large as football fields. Well, maybe or maybe not. Who knows?

For good reason, the Cherokees apparently kept their specific knowledge of cave locations and contents mostly secret, as we do today. For them, the caves may have possessed religious significance. They probably provided places of refuge during times of invasion and maybe even during the removal period of the late 1830s.

The specific location of one set of caves is known to just about every Swain County resident since their entrances can be clearly viewed across the river from U.S. 19. These are known locally as the Indian Caves or Rock Houses. The designation “Devil’s Kitchen” has been, insofar as I can determine, recently coined by someone who wanted something more catchy for the tourist trade, as per the fancy names applied to various sections of the river.

The Indian Caves do not penetrate very far into the mountain slope. There are two room-like cavities, with the one on the left-hand approach being the largest. It is about 50-feet deep by 25-feet wide. The front opening is more than 25-feet high, with the “ceiling” at its rear maybe 8 to 10-feet high. The two rooms are connected by a doorway-like connecting passage so that one can move easily between them. In addition there are various window-like openings and alcoves.

Newspaper accounts from the 1940s describe “hieroglyphics carved on the walls.” There is about the place an air of suggestiveness that might make “hieroglyphics” appropriate, but, alas, none are to be seen today.

The caves are carved from what appears to be slate, schists, and, maybe, some steatite. When the river was higher many thousands of years ago, it clearly ate into these soft formations, creating the rooms as well as the passageway.

Another explanation for the origin of the Indian Caves is provided by Cherokee legends that credit them to the Little People. These folks were the Cherokee equivalents of Irish leprechauns. According to one authority on the Little People, their “stature ranges from slightly more than one foot to about three feet. They occupy a variety of habitats, including laurel patches, the areas behind waterfalls, and rock slides. They are notorious rock throwers, though their aim is erratic.”

But the Little People were mostly benevolent, if mischievous, folk. Their main task was to look after Cherokee children lost in the woods. The Cherokees fell into the habit of blaming anything they couldn’t readily explain on the Little People. So they naturally figured that the Little People had dug the caves.

Carl Lambert, the revered Cherokee historian and storyteller, now deceased, told me back in the mid-1980s that the Little People inhabited the gorge.

“The old Cherokees,” he said, “would never pass the Indian Caves without leaving some fish they had caught or game they had killed for the Little People. You don’t want to make them mad. You want them on your side.”

Another Indian Cave anecdote was collected by the anthropologist Frans Olbrects, a disciple of James Mooney, who worked in the Big Cove section of the Qualla Boundary in the late 1920s. From either Will West Long or his half-brother, Morgan Calhoun, Olbrects heard a story called “The Dancing Ghosts:”

“Once a few hunters went there and built a fire in one of the rooms. Later a few more hunters came. They all lay down to sleep. But one of them was playful, and he began to sing the “Adahona” (Women’s Dance). He kept singing ‘Dit-nv-sv-dhv-ga!’”

In this dance the women wear box turtle leg rattles, which are clusters of four or five dried shells filled with pebbles that have been sewn onto leggings. By skillful movement the women dancers can pound out a vigorous rhythm.

The well-known Cherokee artisan Lloyd Owle has captured the spirit of those long ago rhythms in one of his poems:


Indian Turtle Shells


As Indians dance

The turtle shells rattle

To create a rhythm

A rhythm the Indians dance by.


As the Indians dance

Empty shells begin to rattle

The turtle’s life is gone

The turtle rattles of death.


The Indians dance

The turtle shells rattle

Who cares for death?

This is a happy time.


But it wasn’t a happy time for the hunters sleeping in the cave. They feared that the woman dancing to the rattle of shells in the adjoining room was a ghost dancer.

“Let’s get away from here!” they all shouted, and fled into the night.

The construction of the Western North Carolina Railroad through the Nantahala Gorge during the late 1880s was much delayed at Red Marble Gap in the western end of the gorge due to the steep gradient. Some of the convict labor brought in to construct the appropriately-named Hawknest Trestle (now destroyed) as a way of getting to Topton was housed in the Indian Caves under armed guard.

On Sundays the convicts were preached to in the caves by the Rev. Joseph Wiggans, a favorite historical figure of mine.

Shortly after the Civil War, some bushwackers in the area advised the minister that he would be “ridden on a rail” out of one place if he dared to preach there. Not perturbed in the least, Rev. Wiggans arose, placed his six-shooter on the pulpit, and casually remarked by way of preface to his sermon, “I do not ride rails.”

Later settlers in the Nantahala Gorge used the caves as shelter for their livestock, or their children used them as ready-made hideaways. Today thousands of whitewater enthusiasts float by each year unaware that a stone’s throw away are ancient shelters created by the unrelenting forces of nature. What next?

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