American Sabbatical 100: 4/23/97

4/23... Oklahoma Mountains.

Spanish voices awoke us in Texarkana. We were crossing boundaries again. The instructions in the motel room were in English, French, and Spanish, and the local cuisine ranged from longhorn burgers to crawfish to Tex-Mex. The kind of place where you might learn about diversity. Hope, Arkansas, is only 30 miles away. Boulder is a thousand and thirty, however, so we didn’t go looking for Hope, or take the cure at Hot Springs. We were galloping toward Eastern Oklahoma. The end of the Trail of Tears. Indian Country.

The road ran uphill. We’d crossed into sedimentary uplands, where layered orange outcrops break surface, and three woodland domains overlap. The great Eastern woodlands, the Southern forests, and the Texas brush country. Hickories and maples and the whole tribe from Tennessee mingled with the low country evergreens, pines and live oaks, while the edges were tangled in hackberries, buttonwoods, scrub oaks. Not at all my image of Texarkana.

Logging country, big rigs in your face, and a Georgia-Pacific megamill sulfuring the air.. waters too, no doubt. I’d assumed that our homegrown paper plantation was relatively unique. Nowhere else but Maine was the pulp trade so pernicious. Now we’ve seen that money grows in trees everywhere trees grow. Deep South, Pacific Northwest, and now in Arkansas and Eastern Oklahoma. These wooded hills stink of papermaking just as bad as Plantation Row smells of oil refineries. Whenever Peggy rhapsodizes about the lovely pines, I see monocropping, and get nervous. I remember the spruce budworm in Washington County, and the resulting fastbuck economy of liquidation clearcutting. Which excess will we choke on first, petroleum or paper?

The woods ARE lovely, though. Not all pine plants, either. As we elevate, we’re rolling the calendar back again, to young pastel leaves and blooming hardwoods, to Spring. An occasional pecan grove, even, to hush my mouth. In Arkansas the pecans are in bloom. Not showy flowers but dense bronze droops, and the groves are carpeted in blue and scarlet flowers.

North of Texarkana we followed a red road until the heavy breathing truckers made us want to hang up. Then we cut west on lesser arteries, and crossed into Oklahoma. Red flashes flicked across our peripheral vision: courting cardinals. Egrets policed the pastures among Red Angus and crimson clover. Every dozen miles or so the shoulder flowers would change, mingle, permute.

Fifty miles north of Broken Bow our ears started to pop. We were climbing into serious mountains. In Oklahoma? Sure enough. The Kiamichi Range of the Ouachita Mountains. You might be in New Hampshire. Leaves just peeking on the northern slopes. Sweeping vistas across crooked lakes at receding rows of peaks. Mr. and Mrs. Hillhungry pulled down a logging road, and let the Owl cool, while they stretched a limb or two. Communed with the orange god. Broke bread. And finished the morning tea. I put on my vest. So long sultry sunlands. Hello hill breezes.

If you squint, the country from Big Cedar to Poteau could be highland Georgia or Alabama, and we kept encountering Choctaw Nation sites. I was quickly modifying my image of woodland Indians being driven out onto treeless prairies. Granted, the Choctaws removed here early enough to get first dibs, but the hardship of leaving rich familiar lands seems less cruel when you see how fine upland Oklahoma is.

Now these lakes and mountains are trying to attract tourists as recreational resort areas, and the sideroads invite us with wave-runner rentals, and bait for sale signs. Maybe it’s early in the season, but this Native American destination looks a bit seedy and down-at-heel to me. We didn’t want to buy a pontoon boat, either.

We’d climbed out of the Red River Valley. Now we descended toward the Arkansas, and another visit to the Mississippian era. The westernmost outpost of that far-flung culture sat on a bend in the Arkansas at Spiro, Oklahoma, circa 1000 AD.

4/24.. cont.

Peggy’s memo doesn’t do Spiro justice. It looked like the Memphis of the Mississippian. Gravediggers have looted the pyramids, and the city fathers have torn down all the old buildings. Collapsing signs in flat fields described mounds that HAD been there. What lumps were left were deeply gnawed and eroded. The one staffer guarding the entrance for the State of Oklahoma was busy watching a gameshow on his portable TV, and couldn’t answer a single question about the collection or the site.

If Kate Chopin’s House was a Mom Museum, Sequoyah's is a Pop Shop. The caretaker took Peggy around the sacred ground. But I’ll let her tell the tale.

It is an astounding story. Sequoyah was an illiterate Cherokee who learned about reading and writing from missionaries and decided his people needed to have them. He clearly saw the connection between literacy and empowerment. So he invented an alphabet (some call it a syllabary - more on that below). It took him twelve years. Sequoyah is said to be he only INDIVIDUAL in history known to invent an alphabet.

Although his alphabet is shown at every site associated with Cherokees in Georgia and Oklahoma, the only site I’ve seen associated with Sequoyah himself is his home in Oklahoma. We had been unable to stop on our fast trip east in December and I have been looking forward to a promised return ever since. The Cherokee sites in Georgia were so exciting (see Memo #85) that Oklahoma seemed an ideal end to our second trip.

Sequoyah’s life shows the complexity of Cherokee history. His mother was Cherokee and his father was white. He was born in Tennessee about 1775 and known in English as George Guess. He fought in the War of 1812. He was one of the Cherokee who moved west before the Removal, to Alabama in 1800, then to Arkansas in 1822 (having visited first). He apparently had a salt making business in Arkansas. He signed the Treaty of 1816 and was a representative of the Arkansas Cherokee (known as “Old Settlers”) who went to Washington in 1828. The Cherokee immigrants were forced out of Arkansas (another removal!) and Sequoyah came to Sallisaw, Oklahoma around 1828. Sequoyah exchanged his Arkansas salt works for one near Sallisaw Oklahoma that he operated until his death. The Dwight Mission was located near Sallisaw and Sequoyah apparently used its press. He died in Mexico (!) where it is said he had gone to locate a “lost band” of Cherokee.

We drove out the roads from Sallisaw. The small lane to the homestead is marked with a sign in English and Cherokee. The site has stone walkways and a romantic bronze status of Sequoyah. The D.A.R. has a stone fountain by a walkway.There is a separate office in a log cabin, the spring that Sequoyah dug still bubbles at the bottom of the hill and a small ”Sequoyah” tree is fenced in nearby. The California trees were named in his honor - I’m not sure why a tree.

Sequoyah’s cabin is in a “shrine”, a stone building that totally encloses it and was built as a CCC project in the 1930’s. Far from sitting in a bucolic clearing or field, Sequoyah’s cabin is in a temperature controlled stone container like a second skin that only allows you to stand about fifteen feet back from it (so you can’t take a full picture). It was weird especially since the building is way out on a country road in Oklahoma ranch country. It is definitely a museum with an exhibit rather than a “site”. After the buildings at New Echota dispersed along dirt roads in woods and fields, it was very disconcerting to tour a cabin by artificial light inside a building. There are a number of exhibit cases. The most interesting held a Cherokee typewriter with his characters. There are a few objects he made, including a plow and a spinning wheel. The cabin is simply but completely furnished with “period” items - table and chairs, bedstead, frontier items like a gun and churn. You see it from the doorstep. There was a chart showing alphabets of the world.

Sequoyah’s 1821 system has about 85 “characters”, some are from English, some look Greek, some are unique. There are ones that are identical in form to the English letters D,R,T, L,G,V (although they stand for other “sounds” in Cherokee). Usually Sequoyah’s invention is called an “syllabary” because each written symbol stands for several sounds. For example, the curly E symbol stands for “que” (three English “letters” make up the “syllable”). I find the argument (alphabet or syllabary) silly. It is an example of categories which divide and perhaps devalue. WE have an “alphabet”, the Cherokee have a “syllabary” (they also had 95% literacy long before we did). Some call it an “alphabet” as I will.

Whatever you call it, Sequoyah created a written system for a language that was simple and effective. The manager said it was basically “Hooked on phonics”.The system was adopted by the tribal council in 1821. His people became literate in ten years and started publishing a newspaper (still published today), books and pamphlets, Bibles and laws in their own language developed by one of their own people. The Cherokee taught his system in 18 schools and two seminaries (colleges) by 1851! The Creek have adapted his system for their language. The Cherokee use his system today and you see Cherokee writing everywhere in eastern Oklahoma..

4/24.. cont.

Peggy came back to the Owl biting her lip. She began giggling uncontrollably as we pulled away from Sequoyah’s shrine. All the anticipation for an historical climax, and whatdaya get? Another roadside attraction. What should lawn ornament connoisseurs expect?

We might have suspected. We’d started seeing yardart this morning, and it got thicker all the way up Eastern Oklahoma. Whirligigs and outlandish metalwork. Even the houses were outspoken. The older ones are faced with large flags of the local orange sedimentaries, and we’d OOed and AHed over hill and dale.

On the way back into Sallisaw Peggy began reading from a state brochure of attractions in Oklahoma she’d picked up at Sequoyah’s. “The Central High School Museum, with the Class Ring Collection, yearbooks and photos; The Timberlake Rose Rock Museum, a house build of thousands of stones from historic places.. dedicated to Oklahoma’s official State Rock (the barite rose); Showman’s Rest/Mt. Olivet Cemetery, unusual monuments of circus performers.. burial place of champion bull riders Freckles Brown and Lane Forest; the National Lighter Museum, firestarters of all kinds; the Higher Education Hall of Fame; the Lee Way Motor Freight Museum, Inc.. memorabilia from a trucking corp... featuring tire irons; the USS Batfish, a WWII submarine; the Oklahoma Prisons Historical Museum; the Percussive Arts Society Hall of Fame; the Laverne Museum, with Miss America Jane Jayroe items, and a 1000-plus shoe collection..” Peggy was laughing uncontrollably.

We decided to simply stay in Oklahoma, and report on all these sites for you. There’s really too much to see here, so what’s the point of rushing on to “see America?” THIS IS IT. Special events coming up are the Rattlesnake Roundup, and the Annual Outhouse Race. We think Bowdoinham should institute the Annual Smelt Shack Race, and invite Oklahoman outhouse race winners to come as a special attraction. Oklahoma obviously has a lot to teach Maine about tourist attractions. Who says the Indians stopped raiding the wagontrains?

Our Trail of Tears ended here. We laughed so hard we cried. To cap it off we recrossed the Arkansas in Sallisaw to chow down at another restaurant recommended by the roadfood guide. The Wild Horse Barbecue. Pork ribs (we hoped) and hot sauce with beans, served on styrofoam at picnic tables. MMmm. We’ve really found the heart of America.