For years, I regularly contributed articles to the now gone North Georgia Journal and Georgia Backroads. In the process, I learned much about the little known and lost history of the mountains around us and, as Governor Zell Miller famously wrote, “within me.”
One such strange tale is how Revolutionary War hero Andrew Pickens brought that conflict here, briefly, to the area that he would never know would one day be a county named for him! Northwest Georgia was settled by European Americans so late that few of these families had Revolutionary War veterans among them. Only one such soldier has been documented as buried in Pickens County.
One of the first uses of the word America appeared on the Martin Waldseemüller map of 1507 where it is shown on what is today the Southeastern United States. The French sent explorers into the mountains of the region in 1564. Because of an accident of geography, they named the mountains after a far-off Native American village called Apalachen, near present-day Tallahassee, Florida, from which came the name Apalachicola for the whole region. The French claimed that the natives mined for gold with hollow reeds.
The Spanish exterminated the French colony and established St. Augustine, today the oldest continuous European settlement in North America. Throughout the late 1500s, the conquistadors established forts as far north as Morganton, North Carolina, but these outposts were wiped out to one survivor by a Native American uprising. Overall, the Spanish sent over forty expeditions into what became Georgia.
English explorers, setting out from Jamestown and Virginia, visited these mountains in the 1600s. They, or the French or the Spanish, left a bronze posnet metal pot and other relics found in an underground village at Dukes Creek gold mine near today’s Helen in White County, Georgia. This settlement must date to the 1500s or 1600s and was found where gold was also first discovered in Georgia (or rediscovered) in 1829.
By the 1750s, despite the creation of the British colonies of Georgia and the Carolinas, as well as the trade between the Native Americans and whites, the region remained largely unknown to the English to the East and the French to the West. The Cherokees and the Creeks fought a war then, resulting in the Cherokees losing what is today Wilkes and surrounding counties in Georgia.
According to stories, the two tribes met on the Great Creek War Path from Tennessee to Alabama at Long Swamp Creek, where they fought a battle called Taliwa, or they settled their differences with a ball game. The village was on both sides of the Etowah River and Long Swamp Creek, in today’s town of Ball Ground. The great Georgia geographer Dr. John H. Goff believed that Long Swamp is a mistranslation of the Cherokee word Gatigunahita, which means long or great cane thicket, not swamp.
Etowah, also pronounced Hightower, means stony, in Cherokee. The same river has both names, the name used depends on which end of the river is referred to. The village of Etowah New Town is today’s Rome, Georgia, and may have also been called Talwa from the Creek word for “major town.” It could have been the Itaba visited by Hernando De Soto’s famous Spanish expedition in 1540.
From 1759 to 1761, after years of abuse by the white settlers on their border, the Cherokees rose up and attacked the western settlements of the Carolinas and Virginia. British troops, in cooperation with colonial South Carolina provisional troops and militia, devastated the Cherokee’s lower and middle towns and destroyed their crops. The fighting waged by both sides would qualify as ethnic cleansing and even genocide.
One of the young recruits was Andrew Pickens, born in Bucks County, Pennsylvania in 1739 but who had moved with his family to the Waxhaws community in South Carolina as a teenager. He served with his future Revolutionary War commander, an illiterate but prominent merchant, and teamster Andrew Williamson.
To the day he died, Pickens would remember what the British did to the Cherokees in that war as a lesson in abhorrent cruelty. By the time of the American Revolution, Pickens had become an ambitious, successful backcountry entrepreneur.
The Cherokees, however, attacked the frontier settlements again in what is called the Second Cherokee War, in 1776. A multi-colony expedition of the newly created states of the Carolinas, Georgia, and Virginia devasted the Cherokee nation, destroying all but one village.
South Carolina’s forces under now patriot Major Andrew Williamson and now Captain Andrew Pickens penetrated Northwest Georgia. Starting in North Carolina, the Cherokees fought a long-running battle against the advancing militia, losing hundreds of men in the fighting. Matthew F. Stephenson, the later director of the Dahlonega mint and famously misquoted as saying that there is gold in them thar hills, told that the fighting finally ended in a last stand by the Cherokees at Blood and Slaughter Mountains in Union County, where they shocked Williamson’s militiamen with a mass burning of their dead in a funeral pyre.
Because of this defeat, the Cherokees gave up the last land added to the now state of South Carolina. The state growing no further would greatly influence the politics and the society of that state to the present time. Its frontier shortly came to an end.
In the summer of 1779, Native American attacks had again reached the frontier, encouraged by the British capture of Savannah and the attempt by Americans allied with the warrior Native American bands to reach the King’s army in Georgia.
The Loyalists or Tories, Americans who supported the King, suffered a defeat by now Colonel Andrew Pickens at the battle of Kettle Creek, Georgia, on February 14, 1779. A month later Pickens led another campaign that defeated Creek warriors attempting to reach Savannah.
The following September, Brigadier General Andrew Williamson led his South Carolina militia brigade against the Cherokees again. He discovered that the Cherokees had moved their villages far to the west, onto Creek lands in what is today northwest Georgia. They sometimes took over villages that had been the homes of earlier peoples.
Meeting no opposition, Williamson and his forces reached the villages in today’s Habersham County, Georgia. His primary goal was to capture British agents operating among the Native Americans.
Scouts and spies told him that the British were two days away at Sharp Mountain, in today’s Pickens County. Colonel Andrew Pickens and 160 men were dispatched to capture the enemy, but the King’s agents had fled deeper into the mountains. Pickens had the village destroyed and returned to Williamson’s camp. This expedition then withdrew back to South Carolina, having destroyed eight villages.
This Williamson account of the campaign is the oldest recorded reference anywhere in today’s Pickens County (Sharp Mountain) and, ironically, for whom Pickens County would be named in 1853. It was all that is known of our area in the American Revolution.
Andrew Pickens would lead campaigns against the Cherokees again in 1781 and in 1782. In September-October 1782, he led more than 400 poorly supplied Georgia and South Carolina militia in search of British agent Thomas Waters among the Cherokees.
Pickens gave orders that none of the women or children were to be harmed in the campaign. Cherokee villages along the Chattahoochee River were destroyed. A surprise attack on Long Swamp village, at today’s Ball Ground in Cherokee County, Georgia, failed to capture Waters but was bloody. It is remembered as the last battle of the American Revolution.
Pickens did meet with Cherokee leaders there and had an agreement that set the boundaries of the Cherokee lands for future negotiations, the so-called Treaty of Long Swamp. Escaped enslaved persons captured in the campaign were sold at auction to pay for the services of Elijah Clark’s Georgia militia. Clarke County, Georgia, is named for Elijah Clark.
The “Border Wizard Owl, as the Cherokees would call Pickens, fought in many battles of the American Revolution, negotiated treaties with the Native Americans, and served in Congress. A county in South Carolina is also named in his honor. He died at his home on August 17, 1817, at his home in South Carolina, near the site of one of his battles with the Cherokee that almost ended his life!
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