Of a Petrified Soldier and the Deep Strange Places
old souths, new souths, other souths, vol. ii
Someone had found him entombed back beyond the last reach of the sun, five years after the bitter war had ended and a sort of peace had returned, the embers of a cruel and often private war in the East Tennessee uplands still smoldering even after the last guerilla’s body had swung from the gallows. Down in the karstic refuge of Grassy Cove the war had been worn more lightly than up among the wild, scattered, and now more often than not burned out farmsteads of the Cumberland Plateau surrounding, but even in this little community ringed by mountains the war had woven its tendrils deep into the fabric of things, into the very heart of the mountains themselves. The soldier they carried out, stiff and hard—so the story goes—as the limestone rock that had formed his first tomb, had worked and guarded the saltpeter works in this cave beneath Hinch Mountain, and at some point he had died, taken no doubt by one of the many diseases that laid low more men at arms than bullets did. Perhaps his comrades had good reason for leaving his flesh and bones under the mountain, perhaps they knew something that the good people of Grassy Cove did not. The laid him in the red clay ground, at rest, they thought, no name to place over his plot. The war had consumed many things, names of the dead among them.
Soon the frightened sightings began, the troubled spirit rising up from his new plot in the little Methodist cemetery at the heart of the Cove, a half mile or so from the great sink that received all the streams draining the valley, striking fear into the hearts of those who approached his new tomb. He was clearly not happy here, taken from his resting-place within the earth, and soon old and young alike were utterly loath to pass by the place at night, or at any other time for that matter. In view of the haunting of this the ‘petrified soldier,’ yearning for reunion with the old deep land with which his body had become one, drawn into the capillaries of the calcitic lifeblood of rainwater sunk into the stone, the elders of the Cove gathered together and held secret congress. In the dead of a moonless night they swore absolute secrecy, disinterred the soldier’s body, and bore it by torchlight back up onto the slopes and buried it again—in the soil or in another cavern, no one living now knows. All the participants went to their graves keeping the secret, and so far as anyone knows the petrified soldier is once again at rest, at home not just in but as part of the mountains, sinking every year deeper into the karstic underworld into which he was first committed.
As I write we’re now a couple weeks out from Halloween, but as I contemplated resuming this intermittent series of meditations on the American South it occurred to me that I ought to try and combine a bit of the weird and spooky with a few other things I’ve been promising to write about- some travelogue, some autobiography, and a bit more on the cultural role of darkness and the underground. These themes all come together in a corner of East Tennessee with the Crab Orchard Mountains at its center, the verdant swards of Grassy Cove at the center, the high sandstone tableland of the Cumberland Plateau running east to its escarpment above the Tennessee Valley, the long narrow and arrow-straight extension of that valley, the Sequatchie Valley, starting nearby (and in—geological—time the Sequatchie will merge with Grassy Cove). I spent my childhood just west of this complex and deeply incised land, and have been circling back ever since. This stretch of mountain, plateau, and karst valley has its own special atmosphere, its own weird—energy, might be the right word. The landscape is beautiful, rich, and frequently heavy, haunted almost, at times numinious and sublime, at times ominious, hidden meanings welling up from below and within.
The Cumberland Plateau as a whole is a remarkable and striking landform, particularly the eastern rim, which plunges straight down into the Tennessee Valley, the long sandstone bluff front broken only intermittently by stream gorges—'gulfs’ as they are often called locally, the largely flat surface of the Plateau suddenly broken at their brims by plunging cliffs and rich mesic cove forests, which remain dark with eastern hemlock, even as their noble matriarchy is fading in the face of introduced insect ravages (another story for another time). South of Grassy Cove and its surrounding mountains—Brady, Black, Hinch, Bear Den, and Renegade—the Plateau is riven down the middle by the Sequatchie Valley, with the eastern flank known as Walden Ridge from there south to Chattanooga. Grassy Cove itself is an enormous sink hole, a karstic limestone window surrounded by peaks and plateau of Mississippian-age sandstone; it has no stream outlets, water instead draining underground at the center of the Cove and south to the Head of the Sequatchie, where the Sequatchie River emerges full-fledged from two huge springs.
The mountains around the Cove range from the long high flanks of Hinch, the bluffs of which give out to one of the most sublime views in the South, to the maze-like rocktown of Black Mountain, a flat-topped peak whose bluffs break out into pinnacles and clefts, monoliths and walls cut through with deep crevices, squeezes, and at least one proper cave (unusual for sandstone but not unknown—I know of a little less than a half dozen, all developed in faults in conjunction with ground water flowing through). It’s a beautiful place, but it’s also the sort of place you wouldn’t be too surprised encountering uncanny spirits. There are ruins of two houses atop the mountain, and a single springhouse still standing, adding to the slightly ominious ambience; to this day I know nothing about the people who dwelt there, or precisely when, nor why at some point they left, no one taking their place. When I was a kid there was a rumor, no doubt a lingering reverberation of the ‘Satanic panic’ of the ‘eighties, of dark arts being performed atop the mountain’s summit, and while I am pretty confident there is no truth to such rumors, it’s easy enough to see why they might be attracted to such a place. It’s beautiful, sublime, but there is a chill coming up from the deep crevices, and the presence of these mountains (Hinch and Brady have their own stories of haints and witches, rocks and crevices that can make your blood run a little cold) filters out into the lands around.
What is especially striking about this little region of the mountains, I think, is the sharpness of contrast in terms of not just geographical relief but also what we might call the relief of human history, of its sense of density or thickness upon the landscape and in memory. The part of the Plateau upon which I lived as a child was quite flat, broken by low hills and scattered sandstone outcrops, the most interesting terrain being the places where streams cut into the sandstone, their courses marked by dense eastern hemlock stands and low cliffs—outcrops, really—occasionally with overhangs, known locally as ‘rockhouses,’ many of which do indeed have long histories of human occupation as it turns out.
The Plateau’s Euro-American history has largely unfolded within living memory, having been very sparsely settled until the mid-twentieth century or so, with much of the Plateau still very sparse and wild, vast tracts of forest. When the nineteenth century naturalist John Muir traversed the Plateau a few miles north of Grassy Cove, he was struck by how under-populated it was, in part a long-standing reality, in part the result of the recent war (he made his journey in 1867); it was also a dangerous place, having been a zone of deeply lawless guerilla warfare during the Civil War, driven more by personal rivalries and desire for loot than any commitments to national causes. Muir also notes, in passing, the continued presence of open land, what sounds like prairie or savannah, along with thick forest. Furthermore, it seems likely that at the time DeSoto traversed the Valley below the Plateau was mostly grassland and savannah, rich hunting territory, and that it was exploited as such, even managed as such, by native peoples whose primary residences were in the river valleys to the east and west of the highlands.
Human traces of the long human history here are in fact everywhere, but they are not obvious. As a child I would not infrequently find projectile points in creeks, even behind our house— ‘arrowheads’ we called them, though in fact most would have been used with an atlatl, not bow and arrow. I remember with great vividness visiting a family friend’s property out along the edge of the Plateau, towards the eruption of the mountains and the valleys, and discovering a low rockhouse, a finely worked projectile point lying undisturbed on the ground within; most other rockhouses, even quite remote ones, have long since been worked over by artifact hunters and treasure seekers. It was moments like these, on top of spending a great deal of time exploring the creeks and mountains, the caves and rockhouses, of this stretch of the Plateau that instilled its features and resonances deep in my own being, moreso than any other place I have lived before or since. I learned the story of the petrified soldier, not from a book, but from being told it while crawling around inside the Saltpeter Cave itself. The meanings of the land, in other words, came to me both by transmission but also through discovery and gathered scraps of knowledge and experience, a casting about for the stories and pasts that were just barely visible, present as much in the uncanny feelings lingering around the Black Mountain crags or the yawning caves of the Cove.
All human landscapes are and have long—perhaps always—been to some degree landscapes of discontinuity, including the obviously old and deep human landscapes of Eurasia with its painted caves and monoliths and ring forts and tells and hundred thousand other ghosts traced in and within the earth. The Cumberland Plateau is however especially striking in this regard: native place names, for instance, are conspicuous for their modern-day absence north of the Head of Sequatchie, with hints of native place-making only showing up in names incorporating some variation of ‘Paint’ in them, in reference to indigenous rock-art upon the cliffs and within the rockhouses, much of which was once far more visible than is now the case. In the above 1893 map, the only indigenous place name on the map is ‘Euchee,’ probably—I was unable to ascertain for sure—marking a former town site, presumably related to the Yuchi people who had once inhabited the area before being pushed out by the Cherokee, themselves under pressure from the east by the rising tide of Euro-American settlement. Today the site is underwater, the work of the TVA.
It isn’t that places on the Plateau didn’t have names and significances—they did, and they may well have been major features in the religious and cultural lives of various people groups for millennia, the surviving rock art a reflection of those meanings, even if in many—perhaps all—cases they are now basically irretrievable. Rather, there just were no routes of transmission remaining when Euro-Americans began to settle here. Native populations had declined precipitously, or had been driven away from access to traditional hunting grounds, by the time settlement really got underway. The memories, the interpretations of the uncanny and the numinious places, were gone, or buried under the earth, obscured along forgotten stream-courses, sunk into creeks and into the soil. We can gather that a place like the Head of the Sequatchie—and probably the cove and mountains hard adjacent to it—were sites of great meaning and signifiance, worth what would have been long arduous treks up from the valley towns, followed by muddy crawling forays into the heart of the earth. But by the middle of the nineteenth century those meanings were lost, and they were not replaced, at least not explicitly, by the hard-scrabble Euro-Americans who filtered up onto the sandstone highlands or down into the limestone coves and valleys.
There are many other ghosts, and traces of ghosts if one knows where to look and listen, lying over this landscape, some of which I’ve only lately discovered despite nearly thirty years’ of familiarity with this slice of land. Today the region is pretty homogenously white, both in reality and in popular imagination, but another striking feature of Muir’s journal is his encounters with black inhabitants, whose former presence is hinted in toponyms as well. That history, too, like so many other places in the South, has largely disappeared, both through deliberate effacing of memory and more innocently. Finally, it is a whole other story in itself, but like so much of the Appalachians from Pennsvylvania south to the last Alabama hills, for a few decades this obscure region was at the center of global history, as mining companies sought to extract the thin but dense veins of Carboniferous coal that wedge between the sandstone caps and the limestone below. If the troubled spirits of coal miners linger on in, and the atmospheric effects of that great release of condensed carbon become more salient with every passing day, the physical footprints of the mines, the railroads, and the company towns that sprouted like autumn mushrooms—are all but vanished, overtaken by the rich mesic cove forests that they displaced and into which they have once again sunk.
One should always be careful in interpreting ‘folklore,’ as it is easy to over-interpret and over-determine, to see things that aren’t really there. But I do wonder whether we can delve a deeper meaning in the story of the petrified soldier, deeper even than the somewhat obvious relationship between a restless Civil War spirit and what had to have been many open wounds from the trauma—and it was truly traumatic in this part of the world—of the inaptly named Civil War. That the cave was used for saltpeter mining, and guarded by outsiders—the soldier is nameless, having been dispatched from Elsewhere—is of considerable significance. The use of caves as mines for natural resources has a very, very long history in the Cumberlands, reaching back to perhaps some five thousand years ago, in the Archaic period, with native peoples venturing deep underground to extract chert cores, clays, and gypsum crystals, among other things, following a human pattern visible the world over since perhaps the Middle Paleolithic. The difference, however, between Archaic peoples mining chert nodules and Confederate soldiers extracting saltpeter from bat guano, is that the latter was very much in the vein of industrial—albiet quite primitive, with basically early modern technology—resource use, strictly utilitarian. I hesistate to use sweeping terms but for every pre-European instance of cave mining of which I am aware in the region there is a pretty clear ritual context: the cave constituted sacred space of some sort, and the resource extracted carried that sacred charge and demanded appropriate ritual action. One did not simply walk in to a cave and start ripping up the flooring, or there would be consequences.
Perhaps we should, or at least could if we so chose, see in the petrified soldier’s story a lingering sense of the cave as a sacred space, which is violated—here for purposes of prosecuting industrial warfare, the poor soldier being taken, quite literally, into the embrace of the earth and transformed, his petrified body taking the place of the petroglyphs and mud carving and painted symbols of previous Cumberland miners. Strikingly, in both nearby Devilstep Hollow and in other painted caves of the region, the motif of transformation—of humans transforming into animals, of animals changing into symbolic forms—is a recurring feature, perhaps intuited from the landscape and the underground world themselves. Devilstep, like nearly all Mississippian-period painted caves, faces south, receiving the warmth of the sun into the depths of the stone, passage upon passage, the visitor re-emerging into the heat of the day from out of the depths.
Our soldier had sunk into the underworld, into the realm of the spirits, and to wrest him back into the light of the nineteenth century day disturbed what he had become. Of course he would haunt the well meaning people of Grassy Cove, until they understood what needed to be done—returning the now cthonic spirit to the womb of the mountains, reversing the course of ‘civilization,’ which had lately proven so terribly uncivilized anyway. Elders bearing by night a weirded body into the mountain fastness—perhaps into one of the many, many other caves that ring the Cove, a few of which I frequented as a child, some of which still appear in my dreams—and returning it to the wild earth, swearing to secrecy knowledge of where: these were not the typical actions of modern Protestant men of good standing, their ritual actions impromtu, unconsciously echoing ages past, even as they lacked the vocabulary to express just what they were doing.
To live hard against the wild, the strange portals to the underworld within sight of your farmstead, requires a certain flexibility; the presence of the deep past and its ghosts of tragedies, joys, sacred sites and rites, and all, remains, even if the names and meanings have been forgotten. To be in and of, to know, a particular place—and the Crab Orchard Moutains are decidedly particular—is not a simple exercise, a work of nostalgia and comfort—it is as often to grapple with the strange and the weird, with the unquiet ghosts of the past, and the unbidden but powerful presences of the land itself, its energies and resistances, at work in your blood and your dreams, rising, rising, and settling down into the heart of the living earth.