Appalachian History

Today realtors tout the Dingle neighborhood west of Cumberland, MD for its charming Craftsman houses of the early 20th century. But this placid upscale neighborhood was a fierce wilderness when Nemacolin, a Delaware chief, and Thomas Cresap, a Maryland frontiersman, first blazed a trail through here in 1749 or 1750.

The trail ran between the Potomac and the Monongahela rivers, traversing the land beneath this Cumberland neighborhood and leading on to the mouth of Redstone Creek, near Brownsville, PA.

Site of the Dingle in Cumberland, MD. Braddock Road is on the right and it's heading up Haystack Mountain. Today, right behind where the car is in this photo is a modern Maryland Historical Road Marker reading: "The National Road (called The Cumberland Road) was the first of the internal improvements undertaken by the U.S. Government. Surveys were authorized in 1806 over the route of "Braddock's Road" which followed "Nemacolin's Path", an Indian trail over which George Washington Travelled in 1754 to Fort LeBoeuf." Photo by Ernest K. Weller.

In 1755, during the French & Indian War, British General Edward Braddock of the Coldstream Guards led a 2,100-man army from the Washington DC area to what was then Fort Cumberland. The troops intended to dislodge the French from Fort Dusquesne on the “Forks of the Ohio” (now Pittsburgh) roughly 100 miles away.

Braddock had received important assistance from Benjamin Franklin, who helped procure wagons and supplies for the expedition. Setting out from Fort Cumberland on May 29, 1755, the expedition faced an enormous logistical challenge: moving a large body of men with equipment, provisions, and (most importantly for the task ahead) heavy cannon, across the densely wooded Allegheny Mountains and into western Pennsylvania.

Braddock’s aide, Captain Robert Orme, duly recorded the army’s 30 wagons, 400 horses, siege artillery and tons of supplies. Braddock built a road over Wills Mountain, across the Cumberland Narrows, continuing over Haystack Mountain through (what was not yet) the Dingle, close to Nemacolin’s path, and ending ultimately in Great Meadow, near Union Town, PA.

By the time he was ready to leave his 4th camp, Braddock acknowledged the ongoing challenge posed by advancing such a massive retinue, and so took a young George Washington’s advice and created a flying column, “leaving the heavy artillery and baggage behind to follow by easy stages under Colonel Dunbar,” according to the General Braddock's 5th Camp Maryland Historical Road Marker.

Among the wagoners, incidentally, were two young men who would later become legends of American history: Daniel Boone, and Daniel Morgan.

Braddock met defeat east of Fort Duquesne and was fatally wounded. He was buried in the middle of the road he built and his soldiers marched over the grave in hopes of concealing its location from the Indians.

More than 150 years after Braddock’s march to his disastrous fate, John Kennedy Lacock, a Harvard Professor hailing from Amity, PA, led an expedition to retrace the original route of Braddock’s Road. Lacock spent countless days scouring the countryside and was able to identify the exact path of Braddock's march.

“From Fort Cumberland westward Braddock had to make a road for his troops across mountains divided by ravines and torrents, over a rugged, desolate, unknown, and uninhabited country. The history of the construction of this road and a description of its course it is the purpose of this paper to set forth; for the growing interest with which the routes of celebrated expeditions are coming to be regarded, and the confusion that attends the tracing of such routes after a lapse of years, make it altogether fitting that the road by which the unfortunate Braddock marched to his disastrous field should be surveyed, mapped, and suitably marked while it is yet possible to trace its course with reasonable definiteness.”

'Braddock Road' by John Kennedy Lacock

Lacock hired photographer Ernest K. Weller of Washington, PA to document the road. Fortunately, Weller's photographs survive in the form of postcards which Lacock published between 1907-1914 (see above).

The Dingle development then being built around Braddock’s historical path was no doubt one motivator for Lacock and his survey. The president of The Dingle Company, Tasker Gantt Lowndes, was the well-connected son of a recent Maryland governor, and contesting his development was probably difficult.

And why, exactly, was it named ‘The Dingle’? “After a beautiful private estate on the outskirts of Liverpool, England,” said Lowndes in a 1926 letter. “The Dingle lies between two roads (McMullen Highway and Braddock Road), and means a 'Hollow between the Hills' which is very appropriate". When it was first developed it was a gated community that excluded Jews and African Americans.


sources: "Redcoats in the Wilderness: British Officers and Irregular Warfare in Europe and America, 1740 to 1760", Peter Russel, The William and Mary Quarterly > 3rd Ser., Vol. 35, No. 4 (Oct., 1978), pp. 629-652
Who's who in Finance and Banking, By John William Leonard, Who's Who in Finance Inc., 1922
http://www.whilbr.org/itemdetail.aspx?idEntry=535&dtPointer=0
Allegany County, by Albert L. Feldstein, Arcadia Publishing, 2006
Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies, and Tribes in the Seven Years War in America, by Francis Jennings,New York: Norton, 1988.
www.route40.net/ history/ braddock-lacock.shtmlJohn



General+Edward+Braddock the+Dingle Cumberland+MD John+Kennedy+Lacock appalachia Benjamin+Franklin Daniel+Boone appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

Long before it became the brand of a search engine, the creature whose uttered cry gave it a name haunted Kentuckians. Daniel Boone told tales of "killing a ten-foot, hairy giant he called a Yahoo," says John Mack Faragher in a 1992 biography of Boone. The Yahoos are hairy man-like creatures in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, one of Boone's favorite books. Boone and his explorer companions, it should be noted right from the get-go, threw around many of the terms used in that book rather liberally.

“[Boone] was encamped with five other men on Red River,” Theodore Roosevelt relates in his Daniel Boone's Move to Kentucky (1897), “and they had with them for their amusement 'the history of Samuel Gulliver's travels, wherein he gave an account of his young master, Glumdelick, careing [sic] him on a market day for a show to a town called Lulbegrud.’

“In the party who, amid such strange surroundings, read and listened to Swift's writings was a young man named Alexander Neely. One night he came into camp with two Indian scalps, taken from a Shawnee village he had found on a creek running into the river; and he announced to the circle of grim wilderness veterans that ‘he had been that day to Lulbegrud, and had killed two Brobdignags in their capital.’ To this day the creek by which the two luckless Shawnees lost their lives is known as Lulbegrud Creek.”

Folktale scholar Hugh H. Trotti suggests that Boone's tall tales may be the origin of some of the Bigfoot tales in North America. Could the term "Yeahoh" used for such a creature in the following story simply be a corruption of Swift's “Yahoos”?

Once upon a time they's a man layin' out, and he went to a cave. And he was layin' out in there and the Yeahoh come and throwed a deer in to him -- something would come every day and throw a deer into him, and leave out. On time that Yeahoh come and got down in there wuth him and not long after that she had a kid. Then one time he took a notion to leave her and he would go to leave and she wouldn't let him go. She'd make him come back. A-finally he got out and he got on a ship going to cross the waters. And he got started and rode off and left her. And she stood there and hollered and screamed after him. And when she seen he'd got away from her and she couldn't go, why she tore the baby in two and throwed one half in after him.

---Told by Nancy McDaniel of Big Leatherfoot Creek, Perry County, KY to folktale collector Leonard Roberts, who published it under the title "The Origin of Man" in South From Hell-fer-Sartin (1955).

So okay, if Kentuckians heard it passed down from Boone, who got it from Swift, how did Swift learn of Yahoo tales? Or did he simply spin them from his imagination? One possible clue: though Nancy McDaniel’s tale is told in the hills, it mentions ships and “crossing the waters” as the escape route for the captive human.

Tales of women shipwrecked or marooned on an island populated by monkeys or apes, fed and housed by a dominant monkey and forced to cohabit and bear it offspring, before escaping and seeing their hybrid children murdered by the irate simian parent, may have arisen in early 16th century Portugal, and also exist in similar forms in the Americas and across Asia. The idea of a “semi-human” was also floating through scientific circles in the first half of the 18th century: in 1758 Carolus Linnaeus theorized that a form between man and ape existed, which he named Homo troglodytes.

Linguist Richard Stoney carefully states that Swift, a lover of wordplay, drew from many language sources, each of which refer to various personality facets of the Yahoos. But he also turns up the following morsel published in Australian Aboriginal Words in English (1835): “The natives are greatly terrified by the sight of a person in a mask calling him 'devil' or Yah-hoo, which signifies evil spirit."

And from the 1844 edition: "They have an evil spirit, which causes them great terror, whom they call 'Yahoo' or 'Devil-Devil': he lives in the tops of the steepest and rockiest mountains, which are totally inaccessible to all human beings, and comes down at night to seize and run away with men, women or children, whom he eats up, children being his favourite food...The name... of Yahoo being used to express a bad spirit, or 'Bugaboo', was common also with the aborigines of Van Diem[e]n's Land [Tasmania]..."

The tribes mentioned here are located in the region around Botany Bay (near Sydney and slightly westward), site of the first British settlement in Australia in 1788. Gulliver’s Travels was written in 1726. Did the aborigines, like early Kentuckians, absorb Swift’s tale from the new colonists and make it local, or did Swift, to create his characters, draw on much older aboriginal folktales, possibly passed along to him by seafarers pre-dating Cook? The debate continues.


Sources: Curious Legend of the Kentucky Mountains, by Leonard Roberts, Western Folklore, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Jan., 1957), pp. 48-51
The Element Encyclopedia of Magical Creatures by John Matthews, Caitlin Matthews, 2006, Sterling Publishing Company, Inc.
www.geocities.com/sanskritpuns99/yahoo1.html
www.nationalcenter.org/BoonebyRoosevelt.html
www.geocities.com/ruritanian_muglug/monkey-spouse.pdf
Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer, by JM Faragher, 1992, New York: Henry Holt & Company
Did fiction give birth to Bigfoot?, by HH Trotti, 1994, SKEPTICAL INQUIRER 18(5): 541-2.


Daniel+Boone Yeahoh Yahoo Nancy+McDaniel Perry+County+KY appalachia appalachian+mountains+history appalachian+history

Breaks Interstate Park, located astride the SW Virginia/eastern Kentucky border along the Russell Fork of the Big Sandy River, is one of only two interstate parks in the nation. Perhaps the scale of the 5-mile-long, .25-mile-deep gorge that forms the park's centerpiece cannot rival that of the Grand Canyon, but the 250 million year old "Grand Canyon of the South" IS the largest gorge east of the Mississippi.

The park takes its name from this gorge, which forms a “break” in Pine Mountain. Passes through these rugged mountains were called breaks by early settlers. Where the raging waters have carved the solid sandstone to break through Pine Mountain, nature has dressed the canyon walls in some of the region’s most spectacular scenery.

Daniel Boone is credited with discovering The Breaks in 1767 as he attempted to find ever-improved trails into Kentucky and the Ohio River Valley beyond. Both he and Simon Kenton explored here in the last quarter of the 18th century.

Because of elevation and moisture differences, the park contains various biospheres, ranging from oak/hickory climax forests on the drier ridge tops to a laurel/hemlock environment in the bottoms and along the creeks. This biodiversity results in an amazing display of spring wildflowers, including rare plants like yellow lady’s slipper and Catawba rhododendron.

The region was a hunting ground for Cherokee and Shawnee Indians. It is the home of Pow Wow Cave, used by the Shawnees.

The crown jewel of the park is the Towers, an imposing pyramid of rocks more than half a mile long and a third of a mile wide. The area around the Towers is said to contain the lost silver mine of Englishman John Swift. In the late 1700s Swift supposedly had one or more silver mines that were subsequently lost. He spent the last part of his life trying to relocate them. The lost mines are one of the great –and recurring- legends of southeastern Kentucky.

Public Law 275 created the park on August 14, 1953, and today, the 4,600-acre Breaks accommodates more than a third of a million visitors annually.

Sources: “Hiking Kentucky” by Brook Elliott (1998, Human Kinetics)
www.virginia.org/site/features.asp?featureid=283
www.breakspark.com
www.parks.ky.gov


Breaks+Interstate+Park Grand+Canyon+of+the+South Daniel+Boone Simon+Kenton Cherokees Shawnees appalachia +appalachia+history appalachian+geology

NY TIMES (Oct 24, 1936): "Further evidence of Hollywood's knack of distorting historical characters into stock figures of blood-and-thunder fiction is presented at the Palace in "Daniel Boone," which purports to be a reasonably accurate chronicle of the frontiersman's trek with a party of settlers from Yadkin, N. C., across the trackless Cumberland Mountains up into the fertile country that now is Kentucky.

"Though the film is supposed to be a chapter from the trapper's life, it resembles a dozen others of a genre which languished when the screen started to talk. With such hoary tradition behind it, the new photoplay could not have failed to be a visually exciting cowboy and Indian drama.

"Among the stock story devices note Daniel tied to the flame-encircled stake, his miraculous escape when the faithful Black Eagle tosses a tomahawk from a cliff and cuts the ties that bind him, Daniel's flight through underbrush and over mountain with five tribes on his trail, and finally the hand-to-hand struggle with the renegade Simon Girty on the edge of a cliff.

"For all his physical prowess, George O'Brien manages to project Daniel Boone as a shy, unassuming adventurer, which is presumably what the man was. John Carradine plays Simon Girty with all the malice he can command, and sets a new high in facial contortions. Helpful bits are contributed by Heather Angel as the dreamy-eyed girl who wins Boone's heart, George Regas as Black Eagle, Ralph Forbes and Clarence Muse."


Daniel+Boone George+O'Brien appalachia appalachia+history appalachian+culture appalachian+mountains+history