What the Cherokee Told James Mooney About the Old Forest — Documented in the 1880s

[00:00:00]In the autumn of 1,887, a thin young man from Indiana stepped off a wagon at the edge of a valley in the Great Smoky Mountains of Western North Carolina, carrying a leather notebook and a small satchel of pencils, and began writing down sentences that the Bureau of American Ethnology in Washington would not know how to categorize for the next 130 years. His name was James Mooney. He was 26 years old. He had no formal training in anthropology, no university degree, and no clear instructions beyond the general charge to record what the Eastern Band of Cherokee remembered about their own past before that memory was gone. What he wrote down over the next 3 years in a series of tight cursive notebooks that are still preserved in the Smithsonian archives is a body of testimony that no mainstream historian has ever fully explained. Because the Cherokee elders Mooney interviewed, the men and women who had been alive before the Trail of Tears, and who still lived on the small reservation known as the Quala Boundary, did not describe the mountains around them as an empty wilderness that their ancestors had settled. They described the mountains as inherited ground. They spoke of an older forest, older than the Cherokee themselves, that had belonged to a people who came before, and they described that earlier people in language so specific and so consistent across informants that Mooney eventually stopped trying to fit the descriptions into any framework he had been given.

[00:01:26]The old forest, as the Cherokee described it to Mooney, was not simply the woodland that stood on the ridges in the 1880s. It was a condition of the land that had existed before the Cherokee arrived, and it had been maintained by beings the Cherokee did not classify as fully human. Three principal names came up in the elders accounts of these earlier inhabitants.

[00:01:47]The Nanihi, which Mooney rendered as the immortals or the people who live anywhere, were said to occupy invisible townhouses inside certain mountains, and to appear as ordinary travelers to any Cherokee they chose to meet. Below them in the ordering of these beings came the Yunwit Sunsi, the little people described as small and pale, no taller than a child, who lived in rock shelters and hollow places, and who taught the first medicine men the sacred formulas.

[00:02:15]A third category the Cherokee spoke of with unusual care, were a people they called the mooney ones, who had lived in the region long before the Cherokee themselves, and who could not see well in daylight because their eyes were suited to a different kind of world.

[00:02:30]Mooney recorded the accounts, noted that similar traditions had been reported to the Moravian missionary Benjamin Barton nearly a century earlier and moved on.

[00:02:39]Hiloting he did not press the elders on what it meant that three separate peoples were said to have preceded the Cherokee in a mountain range that mainstream archaeology in 1887 considered to have been continuously inhabited by a single population. To understand why Mooney was in a position to hear what he heard, it is worth pausing on the man himself. Born in Richmond, Indiana in 1861, the son of Irish immigrants, he had taught himself the rudiments of ethnology by reading in the small public library of that town while working as a printer's assistant.

[00:03:14]By the age of 19, he had memorized the names and known ranges of every North American tribe. A letter he addressed to John Wesley Powell, the founding director of the Bureau of American Ethnology requesting employment resulted in him being taken on as a junior assistant in 1885 on the strength of that letter alone. When the Quala Boundary assignment came 2 years later, Mooney had already spent months learning what he could of the Cherokee language from written sources and from the tiny circle of Cherokee speakers who could then be found in Washington. He arrived at the reservation in the company of a translator, but discharged him within a month, having decided that the presence of an intermediary was corrupting the material. From then on, Mooney worked alone, sitting in cabins by wood stoves, drinking whatever coffee was offered him, and listening. Elders who had at first refused to speak to him began to speak. Others sent word from remote coes that they wished to be visited. By the end of his second winter on the reservation, Mooney was being addressed by a Cherokee name of his own, and the notebooks were filling faster than he could organize them. The most careful of his informants was a man named Aayunini, whose name translates roughly as Swimmer, and who was already an old man when Mooney met him. Swimmer had spent his life preserving the sacred formulas of Cherokee medicine in a personal manuscript book written in the Sequoia syllary that he kept wrapped in cloth and hidden in the rafters of his cabin.

[00:04:41]The book contained roughly 600 formulas, some for curing illness, some for hunting, some for love, and a smaller number classified by swimmer under a category he translated as remembering.

[00:04:56]These last were not prayers or medicine chants in the ordinary sense. They were pneummonic texts in a compact and archaic form of Cherokee that recited events understood to have taken place in what Swimmer called the older time. The remembering formulas were the ones swimmer would not read aloud to Mooney in ordinary settings and the ones Mooney was permitted to copy only under conditions of considerable trust. Their content, as best Mooney was able to determine, was a compressed oral history of the period before the Cherokee arrival in the southern Appalachian, transmitted in a form designed to preserve exact wording across many generations. When Mooney gained his trust, Swimmer began dictating the contents of that book. I have to pause here for a second because what I just described, that is one case from a much larger pattern. There are 35 documented cases in a document I put together.

[00:05:49]Different cities, different decades, different types of evidence. Every single one follows the same sequence.

[00:05:55]Discovered, documented, acquired, disappeared. I could not fit all of it into a video. It's in the pinned comment below. Find it before we continue. and elaborating on what the formulas meant.

[00:06:06]He described a period the Cherokee remembered as the time before the animals were named when the world was still being organized and the boundaries between the visible and the invisible had not yet been fixed. In that period, Swimmer said, the mountains were higher than they are now. The rivers ran in different courses, and the people who lived in the forest were not yet divided into the categories of human and spirit.

[00:06:30]That division came later after what Swimmer called the Great Settling when the ground itself was rearranged and many of the earlier inhabitants withdrew into places the Cherokee could no longer reach. Mooney recorded the account with characteristic precision and added a note in the margin of his field notebook that read simply informant insists this was a physical event. The idea that a physical event had reshaped the southern Appalachians within human memory was not something the Bureau of American Ethnology was prepared to publish in 1900. When Mooney's monograph, Myths of the Cherokee, was finally released as the 19th annual report of the Bureau, the accounts of the Mooneyed People and the Great Settling were included, but presented as folklore alongside animal fables and creation stories in a framing that treated them as literary artifacts rather than historical claims. What did not appear in the printed monograph, and what has only recently been examined by researchers going back to the original notebooks, is the volume of corroborating detail Mooney collected from other informants that pointed in the same direction. A woman named Aasta described the older forest as having contained large stone enclosures that the Cherokee had found already ruined when they arrived. An elder named Suetta spoke of mounds that were not built by his people and of straight ridge lines that seemed to have been shaped rather than eroded. A man named Taguadhi, whose name means Katawaka, told Mooney that certain valleys in the Balsam range were considered unsafe to enter at night because the earlier inhabitants had not entirely left. Each of these accounts was recorded, filed, and largely omitted from the final publication. What the elders were describing, taken together, was a landscape that had been inhabited, modified, and then partially abandoned by a civilization older than the Cherokee, and that this civilization had not vanished completely, but had instead retreated into a state the Cherokee described as adjacent to their own. The Nonehe lived in townous inside mountains that could sometimes be entered, and more often could not. In the same rock shelters the Cherokee themselves used, the little people lived on a schedule that did not overlap with human daylight. As for the mooney people, they had gone west or gone under, depending on which elder was telling the story, but they were not considered extinct.

[00:08:53]They were considered relocated. And the forest itself, the deep hardwood cove forest of the southern blue ridge, was described not as a natural formation, but as the surface expression of an older system, a garden that had been tended once and had been allowed to grow wild after its keepers withdrew.

[00:09:10]Physical evidence for what the Cherokee described was and is scattered across the southern Appalachians in a form that mainstream archaeology has never adequately explained. At Fort Mountain in northern Georgia, a serpentine drystone wall running for nearly 900 feet along a ridge was attributed by the Cherokee to the Mooneyey people, and no confirmed builder has ever been established. Further west, the Old Stone Fort in central Tennessee, a 50 acre enclosure of earth and stone walls with a single narrow entrance, has been radiocarbon dated to the early centuries of the common era, but has no clear cultural affiliation with any known regional population. At Judicola Rock in Jackson County, North Carolina, the petroglyphs, which the Cherokee attributed to a giant named Tusul Carlu, who lived in the older time, contain symbols that do not match any documented indigenous writing system in the eastern woodlands. Mooney visited Judicola Rock himself in 1888 and recorded the elder swimmer's explanation that the marks had been made when the mountains were still soft before the world hardened into its current form. Mainstream interpretation treats that phrase as mythological.

[00:10:22]Mooney's marginal note treats it as an unresolved question. Tul Carlu himself, the being to whom the Judicula petroglyphs were attributed, is worth considering carefully because the Cherokee accounts of him are unusually specific. He was said to have been a slanteyed giant, sevenfingered on each hand, who lived on a mountain called Sunaguni, which Mooney identified with the modern Balsam range in Jackson County. His hunting pack of dogs was so large the animals could be heard for miles when they ran a deer. In his house, whose doorfaced east, the stones had been fitted without mortar, and he was said to have taken a Cherokee wife once in the older time, and to have offered her family a bride price of game meat piled higher than a townhouse roof.

[00:11:08]The story, in its full form, as recorded by Swimmer, contains details that read less like folklore than like an inventory of a specific individual known to a specific community. Mooney noted in the margin that Swimmer used the past definite tense throughout, the grammatical form the Cherokee reserved for events considered to have actually occurred rather than the past indefinite used for stories understood as instructive fiction. The distinction is a fine one in translation but sharp in the original language and Swimmer was consistent about it. In his account Tulcu had lived, his house had stood, the pile of game meat had been assembled and had been counted. There is a specific detail in Mooney's notebooks that has drawn increased attention in recent years. In an entry dated November of 1,888, Mooney recorded that Swimmer had described the old forest as having once been open beneath, meaning that the ground between the trees had been kept clear by burning, by the removal of undergrowth, and by the deliberate maintenance of what the elder called walking rooms. Swimmer said that when the Cherokee first arrived in the mountains, they had found forest that a person could ride a horse through at speed for miles. Forest with a canopy so continuous that no rain reached the ground and no undergrowth grew. Forest that was in effect a cultivated park stretching for hundreds of miles in every direction. He described the ground beneath as covered in a soft carpet of leaf litter that had built up over centuries and that concealed in many places level stone floors and cut steps and the traces of paths that ran in straight lines up hillsides too steep for casual travel. The Cherokee, Swimmer said, had not built these features. They had inherited them, and within a few generations of their arrival, before European contact, the forest had begun to close in. The undergrowth had returned, and the walking rooms had been swallowed by the same process of natural succession that any abandoned garden undergoes when its keepers stop tending it. The description matches in precise and unsettling detail the accounts left by the first European explorers who saw the southern Appalachians in the early 16th century. Hernando Dotto's chronicers passing through what is now Tennessee and North Carolina in 1540 described riding for days through open forest beneath massive canopies, forest so clear beneath that they could see for a mile between the trunks. Later English traders described the same conditions in the 17th century. And the naturalist William Bartum in the 1770s wrote of oak and chestnut forests in northern Georgia so open and parklike that he compared them to a nobleman's estate in England.

[00:13:54]The standard explanation offered by 20th century historical ecology is that indigenous peoples maintained the open forest through regular controlled burns.

[00:14:04]And this explanation is partially correct. But it does not account for the Cherokee elders own testimony that they were not the ones who had established the pattern. They were the inheritors of a much older maintenance regime, one that had been operating for so long before their arrival, that the forest had settled into a shape that could only be sustained by continuous human effort at a scale the Cherokee themselves had never matched. If the Cherokee testimony is taken at face value, the implication is that the eastern hardwood forest of North America from the Mississippi to the Atlantic was for an unknown length of time before recorded history a managed landscape on a continental scale. Someone or something had cleared the undergrowth, maintained the paths, tended the mastbearing trees, kept the fires cool and regular, and produced a forest that functioned more like an enormous cultivated grove than a wild eco. Before I go further, that that document in the pinned comment. If you have not found it yet, go there now because everything I cover in these videos is one piece of a pattern that only becomes visible when you see all 35 cases together. The document shows you the full pattern. What I can show you here is the surface. What is down there is everything underneath it. Pinned comment now. Then come back system. And that regime had been in place long enough and had ended long enough before the Cherokee arrived that even the memory of who had established it had passed out of direct recall. What the Cherokee retained was the after effect, the inherited park, the traces of stone floors under the leaf litter, and the names of the peoples the elders believed had built it, the Nanahi and the little people and the mooneyed ones, who were spoken of not as legend, but as former neighbors. The parallel to what alternative history researchers have called the Tartaria question is difficult to miss. In both cases, the pattern is the same. A landscape of apparent age and grandeur. A built environment of stone and earth that exceeds the reported capacity of the peoples who inherited it. A body of oral testimony from the inheritors themselves that credits the construction to earlier populations who have since withdrawn or vanished. And a mainstream framework that has consistently declined to engage with that testimony except as folklore.

[00:16:27]The old forest of the southern Appalachian is not in the strict sense an architectural artifact, but it functions as one. It is a shaped environment on a continental scale, and its shaping is attributed by the Cherokee themselves to peoples they did not identify with. Whether those peoples were the mooney inhabitants Barton recorded in 1797, or the Adena and Hopewell mound builders whose earthworks predate the Cherokee arrival, or something else entirely that has left no bones and no burials, is a question that Mooney's notebooks raise but do not resolve. Barton is worth mentioning in his own right because his account is the earliest European reference to the mooney people in print and it predates Mooney's fieldwork by 90 years. Benjamin Smith Barton was a Philadelphia physician and naturalist who had studied under Lanaeus's students in Edinburgh and who in 1797 published a small volume titled New Views of the Origin of the Tribes and Nations of America. In that book he included a paragraph that has since been quoted often but examined carefully only rarely. Barton wrote that the Cherokee had informed him through interpreters at meetings held in the 1780s of a race of small, pale, bearded men who had inhabited the southern Appalachians before the Cherokee themselves, who could not endure the light of the sun, and who had been driven out of the region by Cherokee warriors and forced to travel westward. Barton speculated that these people might have been a Welsh colony descended from the legendary Prince Maddock, a theory that has since been thoroughly dismantled and that need not detain us. What is relevant is not Barton's speculation, but the underlying testimony he was recording. Cherokee informants in the 1780s were describing to a Philadelphia physician a pre-Cherokee population with distinct physical characteristics, a preference for night activity, and a specific historical trajectory of displacement. 90 years later, entirely independent Cherokee informants were describing to Mooney the same pre-Cherokee population with the same physical characteristics, the same nocturnal habits, and the same westward departure. Two ethnographic snapshots separated by nearly a century taken from different communities of the eastern band produced the same account. The Cherokee themselves in the tradition Mooney gathered from several elders and cross- refferenced against older written sources did not consider themselves indigenous to the southern Appalachians in the sense that mainstream archaeology has assumed. Their migration account, as Swimmer and others told it, described a movement from the north and east into the mountains, at a time understood to have been perhaps 20 or 30 generations before the arrival of Europeans. That count would place the Cherokee entry into the region somewhere in the range of 500 to 800 years before Mooney's fieldwork, which is broadly consistent with the linguistic evidence that the Cherokee language is Iraquoan in origin and its speakers had migrated south from an ancestral homeland in the Great Lakes region. When the Cherokee arrived, according to the elders, the mountains were already occupied, and the occupants were the peoples Mooney would later record under the names of the Nanahi, the Yunwits Sunundi, and the Mooneyeyed Ones. The Cherokee had not exterminated these predecessors so much as displaced them, forcing them into remote coes, and eventually into the invisible or subterranean condition in which they were said to persist. This is not a comfortable account for anyone committed to the idea of continuous indigenous occupation and it has been treated in the professional literature as a mythological gloss on what must have been a straightforward process of cultural continuity. Mooney's own reading of the material was more cautious. He noted that the elders were consistent about naming their own arrival as an arrival and about naming their predecessors as predecessors and that whatever the historical reality behind these accounts, the Cherokee themselves had not understood themselves as the original people of the mountains.

[00:20:32]There is one further account in the notebooks that resists any easy classification. In a series of entries dated to the winter of 1,889, Mooney recorded a story that Swimmer told him with unusual reluctance, insisting that it be written down only once and never spoken aloud in the Cherokee tongue in Mooney's presence.

[00:20:53]The story described a location in the Balsam Mountains, which swimmer would not name precisely, where a level plateau of stone had been found beneath the leaf mold, a stone floor of perhaps an acre in extent, with the remains of low walls at its edges, and a shallow basin cut into the center. The Cherokee, who had discovered it several generations before Swimmer's own lifetime, had understood the plateau to be the floor of a townhouse belonging to one of the earlier peoples, a townhouse whose walls and roof had long since gone, but whose foundation remained.

[00:21:26]They had not built anything on it, had not disturbed it, and had marked it as one of the places where the older forest was still nearer than usual. Swimmer told Mooney that the plateau was still there, that any Cherokee of the older generation could find it if they had reason to, and that no one had reason to. Mooney recorded the account, drew a rough sketch based on Swimmer's description, and never returned to investigate. The sketch is preserved in the archives. Its location has never been identified in modern times. Similar accounts appear in the oral traditions of neighboring peoples, and Mooney was aware of this. Among the Creek Confederacy, whose territory lay to the south of the Cherokee, migration narratives named preak inhabitants of the Gulf Coastal plane, who had built the great platform mounds at sites like Etawa and Okmalgi, and who had withdrawn or been displaced before the Creek arrival. Further west, the Chop spoke of an earlier people they called the Nahulo, described as tall, fairs skinned, and possessed of skills the Chopto had not inherited. Among the Delaware, whose Wam Olum tradition Mooney regarded with cautious interest, described a westward migration from an ancestral homeland across a great water and the encounter with pre-existing populations whose civilizations were absorbed or overrun. What emerges from a careful reading across these traditions is a broadly consistent picture in which the people's European colonizers found in Eastern North America in the 16th and 17th centuries were themselves the inheritors of a landscape whose earlier occupants had left substantial physical traces and whose memory was preserved in oral form. Mooney assembled the parallels in his private correspondence but never published them as a comparative study and the material remains in the archive largely unexamined. The mainstream position on all of this is straightforward and worth stating fully. Professional archaeologists and ethnoistorians who have worked with Mooney's material have generally interpreted the accounts of the Mooneyeyed people, the Nunahi, and the older inhabitants as mythological in character, comparable to the folklore of other cultures in which earlier populations are remembered as spirits or fairy peoples after a period of contact and displacement. The stone structures at Fort Mountain and elsewhere are attributed to indigenous groups whose specific identity is uncertain but whose existence within the standard chronology of eastern woodlands prehistory is not in doubt. The open forest described by Dysotto and Bartram is understood as the product of indigenous burning practices carried out by populations whose sophistication has been progressively better recognized over the past several decades. Under this framework, the Cherokee testimony recorded by Mooney is valuable as ethnography, but not as a literal historical account, and the pattern of an inherited managed landscape is real, but its inheritance is from other indigenous peoples rather than from any pre-indigenous civilization. That position accounts for most of the evidence. What it does not fully account for is the specificity and the physical language of the Cherokee testimony itself. The elders did not describe their predecessors in the vague terms that mainstream analysis assigns to folklore. They described a mooney people with a described physical trait.

[00:24:50]They described stone floors under leaf litter with described dimensions. They described walking rooms with described maintenance methods. And they described a great settling as a described physical event with consequences that could be pointed to in the landscape. Mooney, who was a careful ethnographer and who had no ideological stake in producing a Tartaria style narrative more than a century before that framework existed, wrote in his own hand that his informants insisted these were not stories but memories. The distinction between story and memory is one that ethnographers are trained to preserve rather than resolve and Mooney preserved it. The broader question raised by the notebooks is whether the eastern hardwood forest of North America in its pre-Colombian condition was the product of a management regime whose origin lay before the arrival of any of the peoples still present when Europeans came. If it was, then the forest itself is a monument in the same sense that Tartarian architecture is proposed to be a monument, an inherited structure on a scale that exceeds the productive capacity of its inheritors, whose builders have withdrawn beyond the reach of direct testimony, but whose work remains legible in the ground. The Cherokee elders who spoke to Mooney believed this was the case. They named the earlier peoples. They described the earlier maintenance and they identified the physical traces that were visible in their own lifetimes.

[00:26:18]Mooney recorded what they said. The 47 bound notebooks from his quala boundary work are in Washington, cataloged in the manuscript collection of the National Anthropological Archives, available to any reader who requests them by number and who is willing to sit with them in a quiet room. The stone floors, if any survive, are somewhere under the leaf mold of the Balsam Mountains, undisturbed for reasons that Swimmer explained clearly, and that the modern reader is free to accept or reject as he chooses. What is not in question is that James Mooney wrote it all down. He wrote it in tight cursive in the winter cabins of the Quala Boundary, while the wood stove ticked, and the elder before him chose his words carefully in a language Mooney had learned well enough to catch the shades. Down went the names, the descriptions, the marginal insistence that this was physical, and the sketches of things he had not seen himself. The notebooks were filed with the bureau.

[00:27:13]The monograph was published in a form that muted the strongest claims. Then he moved on to other work, first among the Kioa and then in the ghost dance research that would consume the last decades of his life. The Cherokee material sat in the archive. The elders who had spoken to him died. Swimmer died in 1899 before the monograph appeared in print and was buried without ceremony because the traditional Cherokee funeral songs had already begun to fall out of practice. The manuscript book he had kept in the rafters of his cabin, the one that contained the sacred formulas in the Sequoia syllary was given to Mooney before Swimmer's death and is now in the National Anthropological Archives. It has been transcribed.

[00:27:56]Scholars have translated it. Researchers have studied it for its medicinal content and its linguistic value. The passages describing the older forest and the earlier peoples remain in that book and in Mooney's notebooks exactly as swimmer dictated them. The choice of what to do with that testimony has always rested with the reader. Mooney himself in a letter written to the ethnologist France Boas in 1902 made his own position tentatively clear. He wrote that the Cherokee elders had described to him a country older than the country he could see, and that he had not been able in three years of steady listening to separate what was memory from what was interpretation of memory, but that he had come to believe the distinction might not matter in the way he had first assumed. In Mooney's account, the elders spoke as if the older forest was still present beneath the current one, still available to those who knew how to reach it. And this was not a metaphor in their usage, but a statement about the structure of the land itself. His closing sentence in that letter has been quoted rarely and understood less often.

[00:28:59]If the Cherokee were right, he wrote, "The forest that Europeans thought they had discovered had already been discovered many times before by peoples whose names had passed out of the record, but whose work remained under our feet." That letter is in the archive as well. The forest is still there. What lies beneath the leaf mold in the Balsam Mountains has not been systematically surveyed, and the notebooks, all 47 of them, remain open to any researcher willing to sit in the reading room and turn the pages one at a time and read what an old medicine man in a cold cabin in western North Carolina chose to say to a young Irish American ethnographer who had come a long way to Listen.