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Mr. Albert F. Stewart, Editor APPALACHIAN HERITAGE Alice Lloyd College Pippa Passes, Ky. 41844 Dear Mr. Stewart: On a recent visit to the Public Library in Johnson City, Tennessee, I read your excellent magazine and decided to complete and submit this story which had been plaguing me for months. It 's probably a plague itself but my intention was to show the inconsistency of man, the consistency of nature and the consequences. Both Indians existed, both battles occurred—beyond that all is conjecture. As this exceptionally civilized and eloquent tribe were people of action, who thought on their feet, I've made this an action story. The tribal customs, I believe, are accurate albeit absorbed by "osmosis" through an archaeologist uncle, J. D. Taylor, whose great uncle, Nathaniel Taylor, was the first U. S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs to be sympathetic to the Redmen. You 're probably plagued with poetry as well, judging (from) the high quality I read in the Winter Issue, but I've included a short one, my first, with the prayer that you won't laugh out loud. Remember we have big ears in England. I am a mountain man, born and raised in Bristol, Tennessee, by trade an advertising copy consultant for European agencies, by desire a frustrated fiction writer who wants to be in APPALACHIAN HERITAGE. My qualifications and credits are meagre : several stories in LONDON MYSTERY MAGAZINE and a few in Manchester University's SOLEM, and one in Oxford University's ISIS here; one in Alfred Hitchcock 's MYSTERY MAGAZINE and one in SHENANDOAH of W. & L. there. In any event I hope you enjoy reading this word battle as much as I enjoy fighting it, and losing. Sincerely, Oliver J. Taylor B/M Taylor London, W. C. 1 England March 18, 1981 11 / / ^ \ / H ß \i s (, m / ?«f y €ld WAcîL· by Oliver Taylor Jjbown ¿fea&cMÁ INDIAN SUMMER 1776 Mocassins move on earth ravished by silence At Sycamore Shoals Elm and pine stand unchallenged by lust At Chickamauga while Cootclaw and Watauga rumpled and smiling Share horizon's mirror Where Cherokees hunt the morning star Down rivers knotted in Tennessee The screeching hawk unmet Till pale greed defaces the dawn Then muskets powder the arrowed peak And rapture dies on dark and bloody ground By a dismal autumn pathway Where white hate impales the red brave For a thousand dancing sunsets Sometimes his hunts took him across waves of darkening green mountains where good crystal frost cut the nose and burnt the lungs. He listened then with satisfac12 tion to the faint push of his mocassins, occasionally picking up a leaf as he passed, smelling its rusty smell. Sometimes by merely turning north his nose and eye could forecast the snow-covered web of winter and far beyond. Fifty seasons had come and gone since that early spring day in 1775 when he had forecast battle with the palefaces: "You have bought a fair land but there is a cloud hanging over it. You will find its settlement dark and bloody!" The settlers had bought Southern Appalachia from the aging Chief Oconostota. The season was harsh. Oconostota was tired and the settlers greedy so it did not surprise him that when the British government declared their purchase unlawful they had dug in badger tight, flintlocks bristling. "Take back the hills and valleys," he harangued, "taken from us for paltry wagonloads of trinkets, and gold!" Before the last echo of "gold!" died away, a handful of braves yelled "daydreamers !" at the tired old faces huddled mute and sullen around Oconostota. Nothing more passed between the tribal factions that day nor for many suns to come. Summer's end saw him visiting, pleading, persuading: "Give back the metal torn from Mother Earth! Gold cannot grow as the trees do, cannot bloom as the flowers. Give the Greedy Ones their trinkets in a blaze of thundersticks!" By the time his views had prevailed it was 1776 and few of the British-promised guns could be transported through the tightening colonial lines at Sycamore Shoals. The tribe fell back, bloodied and shambling, down Tennessee's long valley to Chickamauga only to be outnumbered and outgunned again. Cruelty...

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