I was surprised when the Western Writers of America chose Knoxville, Tennessee as the location for their annual meeting. Most western stories and movies are set someplace west of the 98th meridian, a long way from the green hills of Tennessee.
But Knoxville was, at one time, part of the Old West. In 1763, King George III ruled that the crest of the Appalachians was the western border of the colonies. At that time the American colonies were but a long, thread-like strip along the Atlantic seaboard. Settlement had halted at the foot of the mountains. Any place beyond the Appalachian summit was the western frontier.
As so often in our history, hunters couldn’t stay away from the green valleys, the hunting grounds of the Cherokees. Soon they took their families along, across the invisible boundary of the Proclamation Line. They built an illegal settlement in Indian country, Watauga Old Fields, near modern Elizabethtown, TN, on land that the Cherokees had cleared.
In 1772, the settlers formed their own government, the Watauga Association, with five magistrates who meted out punishment – whipping for horse stealing, hanging for murder. The settlers leased the Old Fields area from the Cherokees. The articles of the Watauga Association were the first constitution west of the Appalachians, a historic event.
War with the Cherokees was inevitable. A sad, familiar story.
This early history is well told in Brenda Calloway’s book, America’s First Western Frontier: East Tennessee (The Overmountain Press, Johnson City, TN, 1989. (See my Shelfari page).
And I wonder how my friends in Knoxville will take to a bunch of overdressed cowboys when WWA meets there next month.
Dac
5/20/2010
"Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other." - Benjamin Franklin