Editor’s note: Part 2 of a 2-part series on William Holland Thomas and the Thomas Legion

Last week we discussed the long and eventful life of William Holland Thomas, perhaps the most influential individual in WNC during the 19th century. This week we will take a look at a remarkable crossing of the Smokies by the Thomas Legion. That crossing occurred at Indian Gap, which is situated at 5,317-feet high between Clingman’s Dome and Newfound Gap along the high divide between North Carolina and Tennessee.

In the dead of winter, a Confederate battery of artillery and about 650 men under the command of General Robert B. Vance crossed the Smokies at the gap in an attempt to secure provisions, screen the main approaches to North Carolina, and guard the left flank of Longstreet’s main Confederate force at Greeneville, Tenn. As we shall see, the primary military objectives failed miserably, but the crossing itself — accomplished under the most severe conditions — deserves to be remembered and the route maintained for public use for several reasons. It has been called one of the most “heroic episodes” to take place during the Civil War in WNC. It involved the Thomas Legion, certainly one of the most colorful forces in the Confederacy since it consisted of a unit made up of mountaineers and Cherokees.
And it took place over the old Oconaluftee Turnpike, sections of which can still be visited in the Smokies.

Most contemporary accounts of the crossing imply that the road was built by Thomas’ forces during the Civil War. It was, however, commissioned by the N.C. General Assembly more than three decades prior to the war. Tom Robbins, a ranger/historian stationed at the Oconaluftee Visitor Center in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, has a long-standing interest in the history of the road and early settlers of the Oconaluftee River Valley.

In the Summit Magazine (Summer 1986), he published an account of the road’s early history: “The valley was Cherokee land for hundreds of years before it was given up in a treaty in the 1790s. By the beginning of the 19th century, the first permanent white settlers were occupying land along the banks of the Oconaluftee River. Like many areas throughout the mountains, as the population of the valley grew, so did the need for roads to provide a better means of trade and communication.”

In 1831, the N.C. General Assembly authorized the formation of the Oconaluftee Turnpike Co. to build a road through the valley to the top of the Smoky Mountains. Road commissioners were selected from the local community and authorized to sell stock and collect tolls. Construction of the road was difficult and time consuming. Cliffs and the river had to be avoided, thus lengthening the route. Blasting involved hand-drilling holes in rocks and packing the holes with black powder. Large rocks were sometimes split by burning logs on them, then pouring cold water on the hot rocks.

“The road, completed in 1839, followed an older Indian trail along much of its route. It crossed the Smokies at a point called Indian Gap. Initially, the principal traffic on the turnpike was livestock being driven to market. But not long after the road’s completion, several men living in the valley formed the Epson Salts Manufacturing Co. in an attempt to tap the mineral resources on the southwestern side of Mount LeConte in Tennessee.”

Robbins believes the turnpike gate was probably situated beside the Oconaluftee River about where the present boundary is located between the park and Cherokee lands. He has walked the old road up the north bank of the river from the Pioneer Homestead to the Smokemont Campground area on to Kephart Prong where it “sort of gets lost” in the old roadways cut there during the CCC days of the 1930s.

Two of the most visible and accessible sections of the Oconaluftee Turnpike are to be found alongside U.S. 441 at Kephart Prong (cross the footbridge, proceed 100 yards along the main trail, then follow a side trail to the right where the old trace is obvious as it is worn up to 5-feet deep) and at the Oconaluftee Overlook just below Newfound Gap (a clearly defined section winds up from the overlook area toward the Clingman’s Dome road along the main ridge). Historical accounts differ as to just when Thomas and his men started improving and using the road during the Civil War as part of his strategy to guard all of the mountain passes into North Carolina. The one provided by John Preston Arthur in “Western North Carolina: A History from 1730-1913,” (1914) is perhaps the most detailed and accurate. Arthur states that Thomas obtained “an order from General Kirby Smith in the spring of 1862 to raise a battalion of sappers and miners ... and put them to making roads, notably a road from Sevier County, Tennessee, to Jackson County, N.C. This road followed the old Indian trail over the Collins Gap (another name for Indian Gap), down the Ocona Lufty river to near what is now Whittier, N.C.”

Other accounts would indicate that the road was utilized as a military route by various small forces during the war and as a route to obtain minerals (alum, saltpeter, magnesia, etc.) from Alum Cave. The Indian component of theThomas Legion was initially comprised of 130 Cherokees recruited in April 1862. That story — involving their use as scouts, the alleged “atrocities” involving scalping by “red savages” made by the north, and the war’s aftermath of poverty and devastating illness on the Qualla Boundary — is fully told in Vernon Crowe’s Storm in the Mountains: Thomas’ Confederate Legion of Cherokee Indians and Mountains (1982) and John Finger’s The Eastern Band of Cherokee, 1819-1900 (1984).

In January 1864, the 58-year-old Will Thomas and 125 of the Cherokees joined about 100 infantry, 375 calvary, and one section of artillery Vance had marched from Asheville to acquire provisions and take up positions in Tennessee. By all accounts, the winter of 1864 was unusally cold with considerable snow in the higher elevations. The Confederates and their Cherokee allies worked their way up the Oconaluftee Valley to about where the present Oconaluftee Overlook is located toward Indian Gap 1.7-miles down the divide. Many accounts of what happened from there on have directly intimated that it was “Hannibal crossing the Alps in minature.” William R. Trotter Bushwackers! The Civil War in North Carolina (vol. 2, 1988) writes: “The Indian Gap road that Thomas and his engineers had been hacking through the mountains toward Sevierville was passable as far as the crest of the Smokies, but beyond that the route was little more than a mule-path: steep, rocky, and too narrow even for an ox cart. But what oxen could not do, men could. At the crest, Vance’s men dismantled their artillery.
Teams of men carried the wheels, axles, rigging, and ammunition. The gun barrels themselves were harnessed to ropes and rolled, pushed, or dragged down the far side, gun metal screeching on naked rock. The march was characterized not only by Homeric physical exertion, but also by vile weather; Vance and his men did all this into the teeth of savagely cold winds that scoured the mountain tops like a sand-blaster ....”

After re-assembling their equipment at the base of the Smokies, Vance’s men had initial success on Jan. 13 with the capture of a Union caravan of about 30 wagons “that were a Godsend to the Confederates.” But shortly thereafter, flushed by his “little victory,” Vance was smashed at Schultz’s Mill on Cosby Creek by Col. William Palmer’s 15th Pennsylvania Calvary.

(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., 287713, or at ellisongeorge@cs.com

 

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