In
2002, a group of retired men began hiking together once a week in
the Southern Appalachian Mountains and started finding old, scenic
trails they claimed nobody knew about. They decided to revive these
trails and make them available to the public, first forming a nonprofit
group called Mountain Stewards, headed by president Don Wells.
Operating initially under an agreement with the Georgia Department
of Natural Resources, the Mountain Stewards began work on their
first trails in 2005. With the help of grants and private donations,
the group has refurbished and interconnected more than 70 miles
of hiking and water trails in Georgia, and constructed a number
of bridges and canoe launch sites, providing safe outdoor recreation
to the public and preserving the region's cultural and historic
beauty.
"It's refreshing; you get out in nature. It's like our own personal
health-care program," the 73-year-old Wells says by way of explaining
what motivated this "trail crew of nine old men" to work two days
a week, 46 weeks a year for about five hours a day.
During some of their hikes, the Mountain Stewards discovered
something unexpected. "We started finding Indian trails that we
could document from historical maps
and we were locating oddly
shaped trees on these trails that had been bent by Indians," Wells
said, adding that Native Americans used these trees like ancient
global positioning systems, to help them find their way to and from
a particular destination.
Realizing they had stumbled upon living Native relics, the Mountain
Stewards, in collaboration with Wild South, and people from five
other states, started the Indian Trail Tree Project and Indian Trails
Mapping Program that aimed to map Indian trails and document these
amazing trail trees not only in Georgia, but all across the country,
in the highly confidential National Trail Trees database that now
includes 2,034 trees in 40 states.
Now known as the Indian Cultural Heritage Program, these trail-saving
efforts have evolved into a book written by Wells and his wife,
Diane. Mystery of the Trees, published in December 2011, caught
the attention of Sam Proctor, an elder and culture consultant with
the Muskogee (Creek) Nation in Okmulgee, Oklahoma, who had a dream
about a particular bent tree more than a decade ago. "When I was
visiting down in south Georgia, I dreamed that my ancestors showed
me a trail they used back and forth from the village to the watering
hole. They also showed me this oddly shaped tree and I never even
thought anything about it until I saw Don Wells's book," Proctor
said.
Wells
knew the exact spot Proctor had seen in his dream, and on a visit
hosted by the author and his wife, they found the bent tree and
watering hole once used by the Muskogee (Creek) Indians. "It was
a very spiritual experience," Proctor recalled.
Since then, Wells has confirmed seven other Muskogee (Creek)
trail sites in Georgia and Alabama, and is making plans with Proctor
for future visits. Wells has also helped elders from a number of
other tribes find their ancestral rootsliterally.
ICTMN talked with Wells about the Indian trail trees. A documentary
about them is also in the works.
What are Indian trail trees?
Back in the 1600s and 1700s, when Indians were traveling from the
Atlantic to the Pacific, and from Canada to Mexico, there were trails
all over the United States. They didn't have GPS or a map, so to
find their way from A to B and back home again, they had marker
trees, or trail trees, or a signal tree or a yoke treethey
had all kinds of different names for them. These trees would be
bent as saplings, when they were about ¾-inch in size, and
tied down. They would be left that way for a year and lock into
that position. They used them to mark trails, crossing points on
streams, springs to find water and medicinal sites where they would
get plants.
Are these trees sacred?
The Indians believe the trees are sacred, and one reason it was
hard to find a lot of information about them is because Indians
didn't want the white folks to know about them. Because, like everything
else we've touched, we destroyed. When Indians are standing near
these trees, they believe their ancestors are there or nearby. Particularly
the Ute Indians, who call their trees prayer trees. They think these
trees are very sacred, so we treat them that way.
Does your book tell people where these trees
are?
No, it does not. These trees are not protected by national preservation
laws, so people can cut them down, damage them or do bad things
to them. You can go to our website
and get a bigger picture,
but all you know is that tree is somewhere within 1,000 square miles
in a certain state. You will never be able to find it from the information
that we show. People call us all the time and say, "Please tell
us where this tree is, we want to go see it." And I say, "No, I'm
not going to tell you because I don't want you to go destroy them."
How do you find these trees?
Not easily. With urban development and agriculture, we have lost
hundreds, if not thousands of them. So where you can find them is
in national forests and areas that have not been greatly disturbed,
mountain community areas. We also rely on the public to tell us,
if someone comes across one.
How does someone report a tree to you?
Go to our website MountainStewards.org,
and under Trail Tree Project, click on Submit a Tree. Then we dialogue
with you. We have some researchers scattered around the country,
and if one is near that tree, we'll ask them to go look at it and
collect data.
How
do you confirm that the tree is an authentic Indian trail tree?
The ideal way is to core the treefind out the age of the tree
to determine if it would have been there around the time of the
Indians. But we can't go all over the country coring trees. Second
way is to look for artifacts around the area. We collect as much
information as we can, then make the best judgment call.
What is the most spectacular trail tree you have
seen?
Probably the one that is on the front cover of our bookit
is in northeast Georgia. That tree is roughly three feet in diameter,
bent fairly close to the ground, and stretched out about 20 feet
before it goes up vertically. You look at that and say, "No way
in heck could that have ever been done by mother nature."
What do these trees tell you about Native Americans
from many years ago?
That they were very smart and very close to the Earth. They could
name every plant and know what they could use it for. They knew
the trees and could use them to their benefit. That's why pioneers
hired Indians as guidesthat's the only way they could get
around. These people knew a lot and they were very smart and very
knowledgeable. Unfortunately, a lot of knowledge is gone now because
we lost the elders.
Tell us about the documentary.
About the same time we were publishing the book, a friend named
Robert Wells (no kin to me), who is a filmmaker, said we needed
to make a documentary about the trees. So in 2007, we started traveling
across the Southeast and out West to interview Native American elders
from numerous tribes who have confirmed that their ancestors bent
the trees. We have 80 hours of film in the can, and about half is
edited. We are in the script writing stages right now, and we have
narrators and a music guy lined up. Hopefully by this summer, we
will have the first hour of a three-hour series that will be in
a DVD format, to go with the book. We also want to produce a 21-minute
version that will go into a half-hour TV program, and a 42-minute
version for a one-hour show. Then we'll take it to PBS or some public
TV group and get them to air it.
So far, you have identified 2,034 trees in 40
states. How many more do you think are still undiscovered?
Every year, I say, "This must be the end of it. We don't have any
more." Then we find another hundred or so. I don't know if we will
ever find the end of it. They haven't dried up. There are another
12 states that we haven't looked in yet. We're also finding them
in Canada.
Mountain
Stewards
The desire to share the richness of the mountain environment and
the need to mark and connect trails in order to make them easily
available to others led to the creation of the Coalition of Southern
Appalachian Mountain Stewards, Inc. with this as the organization's
vision: "Create and preserve an interconnecting network of
trails and ecosystem study areas for increasing awareness of the
unique Southern Appalachian Mountain natural, cultural and historical
environment and for providing outdoor recreational opportunities."
http://www.mountainstewards.org/
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