Chinotahishetha

I often ask myself, when the work of the day has settled down and things grow quiet and still, how did I get there? How did any of us get there, to that river valley in eastern Kentucky and western West Virginia, scattered along these creeks and streams like so many seeds, sprouting wildly in the deep shadows of hollows that for centuries knew only the footfall of bear and fox and mountain lion, and for more centuries after that the occasional band of Shawnee hunters, building fires in the shelter of overhanging rocks? Perhaps as they slept, they dreamed of their homes, along the Ohio River near Portsmouth, or west, in Clark County, the village they called Eskippakithiki, the Place of Blue Licks. They had other names that hide behind the places we know: Eskalapia, Tywhapita, Tyewhappety. Or the name they gave, half mockingly, to the Kanawha River - Chinotahishetha, which seems to mean, "He, the Shawnee, is guarding that which is his."

Then they were gone, defeated at the Battle of Point Pleasant, overwhelmed by history, and soon the land itself was neatly divided into tracts by Thomas Jefferson's Land Ordinance of 1785 and sold for as little as $1 an acre. After that, my ancestors came, Hatfield and Ball and Blankenship, Farley and Ferrell and Dotson, Runyon and May, McCoy and Smith, beginning, timidly, in the late 1790s and gaining momentum in the first decade of the new century. Hungry for land and, I can only assume, space, primal emptiness, they come, clearing back the virgin forest, building homes, planting things, naming things. By 1810, they've established themselves in the hollows of Pike County, from Buskirk on the banks of the Tug River, all along Blackberry Creek, Pond Creek, Pinsonfork, McVeigh. And there, despite the steep hillsides and narrow hollows, the thin soil, the difficulty of getting anywhere, the isolation, they survive. One might say, looking at the census rolls from 1820, 1830, 1840, seeing the number of children in their homes grow to 10, 12, 15, 18, that they even prospered. Certainly, as William Faulkner might say, they endured.

From that point on, I can trace their comings and goings by way of census rolls, church records, the occasional deed or court document. I can watch them intermarry and mingle, see how their children spread out along the hollows, each generation carving the land into smaller (and less productive) portions, but at the same time note how the family networks grow more complex and intertwined. I don't really know anything about these people. They are little more than names, dates scribbled in census books, but something of them survived in their children and grandchildren and great grandchildren; in the songs my great grandmother might have sung to herself as she weeded her garden, in the stories she told about her great grandfather, in the knowledge my grandfather had of the hillsides around his house - where to find gingseng, which tree the squirrels came to feed at early in the morning, where the chestnut trees had been before the blight in 1933.

I know a few things for certain. They came and they stayed. They changed the land and the land changed them, individually and collectively, until some times it is difficult for me to tell where one ends and the other begins. I honestly can't say that I understand the forces that drove them to make the choices they made, but I can say without exaggeration that I am the result of those choices. All I have of them are my own personal memories and the more tenuous memory of historical research, the bone-deep memory of culture, which molds us the way the contours of the hillsides direct the path of the streams. But this memory, whether personal or historical or cultural, is important, since it is the one way that we can keep faith them and with the Shawnee who were here before them - we too, in our stories and our songs and our boxes of old photographs and faded documents, guard that which is ours.