Blue Highways (12 page)

When I went back for more, the water pressure shifted, answering some change in the aquifer deep below. I wondered how old the water was, how long it had taken to get down and back up. I’ve never drunk glacier water from snows that fell a thousand years ago, but I couldn’t imagine it being any better than the South Carolina water what come up of his own mind.

Out of the pines it was fifteen degrees hotter. A car passed, the driver slumped under the steering wheel, his left shoeless and sockless foot stuck out the window. Southern comfort. Four words describe the history here of the last three centuries: indigo, rice, cotton, tobacco. One crop yielded to another as economics, society, science, and the land changed. In the last generation alone, erosion control, crop rotation, fertilizer, and pesticide have changed the face of the South, and the people’s lives showed it. Along the highway stood remnants of a Reconstructed South: sharecropper cabins. Many, like the ones in North Carolina, had been deserted for a subdivision green prefab next door, but not all. On one slanting porch, a woman worked at her wringer washer and on another a man sat at the ready with a flyswatter. The Old South disappears. Yet, the cabins, once an emblem of a land and a way of life, were something you couldn’t see in Provo or Fort Wayne. Only on humanitarian grounds can a traveler approve the nationally standardized boxes replacing them.

I crossed the Wateree River, which meets up with the Congaree to the south and forms the Santee. South Carolinians like their rivers with paired Indian vowels: the two Pee Dees (Big and Little), the Combahee, Keowee, Tugaloo, Ashepoo. In Kershaw County, the land began rising once more as the road went into the eastern foothills of the Appalachians. I’d come again to the Piedmont Plateau. The people call it the Up Country and the coastal plain the Low Country. Oak and pine covered the slopes except where sections had been logged out or a pasture opened. In the sunny flats, kudzu from last year had climbed to wrap trees and telephone poles in dry, brown leaves. Whole buildings looked as if they had been bagged. Introduced from Japan in the thirties to help control erosion that had damaged eighty-five percent of the tillable land, kudzu has consumed entire fields, and no one has found a good way to stop it. Kudzu and water hyacinth, another Japanese import, have run through Dixie showing less restraint than Sherman.

The heat held until sundown in Newberry. There, wearied from the eighty-five degrees, the glare, the racket of wind, I stopped. Newberry was a town of last-century buildings, old trees, columned houses with cast-iron fences, and gardens behind low brick walls. A lacy town. Old people moved along old sidewalks or pulled at greenery in old flowerbeds; they sat on old porches and shook the evening paper into obedience, or they rocked steady as old pendulums and looked into the old street as if reading something there. Living out the end of an era.

I
DIDN’T
know until ten o’clock the next morning that Captain George Chicken, the Indian fighter, killed a buffalo in 1716 at Ninety Six, South Carolina. Not at new—1855—Ninety Six up on highway 34, a living town along the railroad tracks, but at old Ninety Six—1769—two miles south on route 248, a road from the eighteenth century.

I drove up next to a pickup under the trees. Bent over a fender, half buried in the engine well, a man tinkered and cursed. I called to him, “Is this old Ninety Six?”

He pulled himself out. He wore a National Park Service uniform. “This truck runs about as well as the government. Got a Crescent wrench?” I went to my tool kit for the wrench. “Would you hop in and crank it?” The engine turned hard, then started, and I goosed it pretty good to clear it. He closed the hood. “Now, what was it you asked?”

“Is this old Ninety Six?”

“Almost. Actually, it’s back in the woods. This is where Cambridge was. Old Ninety Six was the courthouse town, but they moved it out here after the Revolutionary War and renamed it. Even had a college. Then the courthouse was moved two miles north where the railroad passed through, and they had an epidemic down here. All that killed off Cambridge, but it saved old Ninety Six from being built over. It’s alive today because it died a hundred and some years ago. But nothing’s left of Cambridge as you see.”

“What about the log cabin?”

“We hauled that in for a temporary visitor center. Old Ninety Six is the newest historical site in the Park Service. Just added last year, and things are still backward. Want to see it? Haven’t given a tour today.”

His name was something like Rocky Durham. He’d worked at old Ninety Six for two years, starting when Greenwood County still held title to the site. It was time for the morning rounds, so we went off in the government-green pickup on a jolting, crashing ride through pines and brambles. I rolled up the window to keep from lacerating my eyeballs.

“Eighteen months ago the county turned the land over to the Park Service,” he said. “Since then, the government’s put in a parking lot, graveled the trails, and started archaeological research on the Star Fort and the old stockade town where Ninety Six was.”

“I don’t know what I’m seeing. Just came down because I liked the name.”

“The name refers to what traders figured the mileage was from Keowee—the old Indian village—to here by way of the Cherokee Path. Keowee was sort of the Cherokee’s Rome. All mileages were measured from it. Traders named places along the trail to mark distances: Six Mile Branch, Twelve Mile Creek. If you like names, just up north is Gluck and Due West and Thicketty.”

Durham braked, opened the door, and swept in an empty beercan in one motion. “People still think it’s county land. They come here at night and hunt, drink, make out. Even throw a party inside the Star Fort the way they’ve done for who knows how long. All illegal now, of course.”

“What’s the Star Fort?”

Durham gave the history. Indians for hundreds of years used a long trail that ran from the Appalachian foothills to the sea at Charleston. Hernando de Soto very likely came up the path as well as everyone else going to or leaving the Up Country: traders, soldiers, settlers. Incensed by the Declaration of Independence, Loyalists wrote a Declaration of Dependence, and clashes between patriots and Tories broke out along the trail.

Just north of the stockade settlement of Ninety Six that sat astride—literally—the Cherokee Path, patriots built a fort shaped like an eight-pointed star to control the communication of goods and messages. By 1780, the British and Tories had seized it. In the spring of 1781, General Nathanael Greene, with a thousand infantrymen, moved in to recapture the outpost. But Greene had trouble because he lacked heavy artillery for a bombardment; fortunately for him, so did the enemy. He tried other means to crack open the fort and stockade. First he diverted the stream furnishing water; the British countered by digging a well inside the fort, but it proved dry, and they began sending out at night blacks of deepest hue to carry water from a nearby stream. Next, Greene tried tunneling toward the redoubt in an attempt to plant explosives under it. The Polish engineer and soldier, Thaddeus Kosciuszko, directed the excavations, but he started the twin tunnels too close to the fort. The defenders countered with an ingenious warning device, which consisted of a leather thong stretched from a lance stuck in the ground outside the redoubt to a drum that amplified vibrations in the earth. Listening to the drum skin, Loyalists knew when to send snipers up to pin diggers in the tunnels like woodchucks. While the soldiers sniped, Loyalist women inside the stockade fortified walls with sandbags made from their undergarments.

For twenty-eight days, the longest siege by the Continental Army, Greene’s troops tried to drive out the enemy. Two hundred and some men died—more from heat than guns—in the futile exchange. One minor casualty was Kosciuszko, who, a contemporary wrote, got shot in the “seat of honor.”

In June, two thousand British regulars moved toward Ninety Six, and Greene withdrew. The fort never did fall, but Greene’s continual pressure in the Up Country forced the English to weaken their position at Charleston, and soon after the siege, they evacuated the Carolina Loyalists and abandoned both fort and stockaded town. Although the conflict at this last British outpost in the interior was a battle both sides won and lost, four months later the Redcoats relinquished everything at Yorktown.

“We had some folks in from Nova Scotia,” Durham said. “Their ancestors lived here before the British moved them to Canada. Most who come in, come for specific reasons. They aren’t just sightseeing. But once the government develops the area, it’ll be another story. We’ll get vacationers who go from national park to park and see scenery and other tourists.”

We came to a small lake. A man sat in the brush with a cane pole. “Fishing’s illegal now,” Durham said, “but he’s probably been working the pond since it was built in the forties. I couldn’t tell the poor guy to clear out. A carp may be all he eats today. Old boys still slip around at night to string trotlines. It’ll always be open county land to them.”

No one had come in when we returned to the cabin. “I’ll show you the Star Fort.” An odd-looking dog named Hector led the way into the woods. “He’s been here longer than any of us, and he’ll be here after we get transferred. If his nose was a brain, he’d be the expert on Ninety Six.”

The pines had dropped a sulphurous pollen over everything, and our boots exploded little yellow puffs. We crossed the Cherokee Path. Eroded several feet into the earth, about twelve feet wide, the trail, in spite of trees and brush, was unmistakable.

“That’s it,” he said. “Probably a thousand years old. The Cherokee chiefs, Old Hop and Hanging Maw, walked here. De Soto. General George Chicken. Millions of feet. The Park Service has plans for a visitor center and roads and more restoration. They’ve already brought in cannon replicas. If I managed the site, though, I’d leave it pretty much overgrown like it’s been for two hundred years. Maybe clear the Cherokee Path for hiking, and that would be it. I love the place too much to change it. But one day we’ll have pavement so high-heeled ladies and overweight men can tiptoe a few steps to the Star Fort, see something they don’t understand, take a snapshot of themselves, and hurry on. Without trees and isolation, you lose the mystery.”

Beyond lay the redoubt. Under the oaks was a moat-like depression surmounted by an eight-pointed mound. Trees grew from the rise and inside the earthworks; one even grew out of a concavity that had been the well the British had dug. Just north of the fort were angled banks and trenches: the freshly reconstructed patriot siege works. The original mounds, piled up hastily, had soon fallen back into the ditches. Yet, after all the years, the spirit of the place—its numen—was strong.

“Everything’s so compressed,” I said. “Firing at each other point-blank like this, how could Greene dig trenches and tunnels?”

“He built a rifle platform of logs so sharpshooters could keep the enemy ducking. But you’re right about distance—they could have fought with mudballs and slingshots. There’s a novel by Kenneth Roberts called
Oliver Wiswell
that describes the siege. Fascinating especially because it takes the Loyalist view.”

A man limped out of the woods. He once lived nearby and had returned for a look. He asked Durham what had happened to the tunnels. “We filled in the entrances for safety, but they’re still here. You’re standing over one.”

“We used to fool in them tunnels when we was kids,” the man said. “I’ll tell you, this land seen some times—cockfights, even a duel inside the fort.” He gave a broken smile. “I’ll tell you boys somethin’ else. They was some girls who got their panties took off in them tunnels.”

Durham said quietly to me, “History speaking.”

A woman joined the man and asked whether he’d found what he was looking for. He nodded. As they strolled off, he said, “They was mischief out here, honey.” He looked excited.

“I’m glad Kosciuszko’s tunneling didn’t go for naught.”

“That’s our kind of visitor—ones who remember Ninety Six from before or history buffs who come out to mentally reconstruct the battle. They give a better tour than I do. We get a thousand folks a year now, but when the site’s developed, they estimate we’ll have fifty thousand. Twenty years ago all the national parks took in seventy million people. Now it’s about three hundred million. Ninety Six will have to be standardized. Won’t be allowed off the walks.”

“Tell them to leave it alone.”

“Not possible, not now that it’s in federal hands. Some of the work the government’s done here is good though. Archaeologists have excavated and found the locations of the jail and courthouse inside the stockade. They’ve found several bivouac areas with magnetometers that detect acid in the soil from old latrines. Infrared aerial surveys have revealed a lot. We know more about Ninety Six than we did two years ago, and they’ve uncovered so many relics, we’ll never be able to display them all at once.”

The heat was up when we hiked back, and it was bringing out copperheads. Watching the trail, I saw something on the ground. A nugget of melted glass.

“Probably an old bottle,” Durham said. “One guy’s found a uniform button from every regiment that served here—just by scuffling his feet. Now it’s illegal to take anything off the site.”

Durham told about a man in the eighteenth century who lived nearby and wrote an account of the local Indians to prove they descended from a lost tribe of Israel. A crazy book, but his descriptions of their life saved crucial details of history from disappearing.

“What about Ninety Six? Will it disappear now that it’s being opened?”

“For a couple hundred years,” he said, “it’s been cared for by people of the county through a sort of benign neglect. They used it, but they knew what had happened here and didn’t disturb it much except to pick up souvenirs when they came across one. The houses are full of tomahawks and powder horns. Somebody even found a cannon in the woods years ago. But they loved the place. A guy wrote a letter in eighteen fifty and said people here considered the trees and bushes of the battleground too sacred to be ‘molested’—that’s his word,
molested
. But who knows about the Service? The boss says, and he’s been with the Interior Department twenty years, that if the feds ever need NPS land for another purpose—timber, mining—you can bet it will go.”