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Long before the California Gold Rush, the phrase, “There’s gold in them thar hills” was applied closer to home in Cherokee County. We will get to that.
Since the earliest days of recorded history, a major impetus to history’s exploration and discovery has been prompted by a single coveted element, gold.
The New World was opened by gold seekers. Spanish explorers Hernando De Soto and Juan Pardo, the first Europeans to step foot in our area, came here searching for gold. Pardo even built a fort near Morganton around 1567 as a prospecting base.
According to an oral family legend, that is what drew Robert Reid to come into the Cherokee lands prior to the removal. He married a Cherokee woman, established a home, and began searching for gold.
Reid knew there was gold nearby, because some of the Native Americans wore pieces of the malleable metal. He was constantly pestering his in-laws to show him gold locations.
Finally they agreed, but with conditions. They blindfolded him, put him on a mule, and leading the mule left the Hiwassee River community one morning, camped for the night and the following day removed the blindfold, where he saw the Cherokee had diverted a stream to wash away the dirt and were securing a small amount of gold.
After he saw with his own eyes what he had searched for, they replaced the blindfold, put him back on the mule, camped out a night on the return home and he was back home the following day. He spent the rest of his life searching for gold, and never found it. His nephew did the same with no results.
Maybe the family legend is a myth, but it’s within a day and a half walk from the Hiwassee Dam community to the location of one of the first gold strikes in America, Coker Creek, Tenn.
North Carolina is credited with being the first gold rush, when gold was discovered by the Reed family in 1803 in Cabarrus County. Dahlonega, Ga., claims to be the second, with gold being discovered on Cherokee land in 1829.
The size of the Dahlonega strike overshadowed a third gold rush closer to home, in Coker Creek, Tenn. While Coker Creek gets the name, many of those same gold seekers spread their prospecting into Cherokee County, and gold was also discovered in Valleytown in North Carolina.
What sets Dahlonega apart is there was briefly a U.S. Mint there beginning in 1838 – and the greed to own the gold discovery on Cherokee lands in Georgia was a major incentive for the Cherokee removal of 1830. Nothing quite like greed to stimulate outright theft, especially if politicians and government are involved.
As a child, I was entranced with a glass case in the lobby of Citizens Bank & Trust Co. in Murphy displaying Andrews/Valleytown discovered gold nuggets.
The influx of prospectors into Cherokee lands became a matter of concern that confrontations could turn into bloodshed and conflicts, so much that the North Carolina governor petitioned the President for help and he responded, sending Gen. Walker Keith Armistead with around 100 men to expunge the Cherokee lands of prospectors.
The men were headquartered at Fort Armistead, built in Coker Creek in 1832. There were not enough men to stop the gold prospectors, as the territory also included the Valleytown diggings. As a host at the Coker Creek visitors center told me, “When the troops were stopping the prospectors in Coker Creek they all moved over to Valleytown, and when the troops went to Valleytown they would come back to Coker Creek – and it went back and forth like that.
Likely the Dahlonega discovery was a factor in the end of the Coker Creek/Valleytown gold rushes, and Fort Armistead would be abandoned – but not destroyed. Only six years later, the fort would be revived for the Cherokee removal, serving as a way-point on the removal route from Murphy to Fort Cass in what is Charleston, Tenn., today.
The Armistead legacy extends beyond protecting Cherokee during the Coker Creek gold strike. Walker Keith Armistead’s brother, Major George Armistead was the defender of Fort McHenry during the War of 1812, the fort that flew the flag Francis Scott Key first saw the next morning that inspired the Star Spangled Banner.
Armistead’s nephew Lewis Armistead was in the vanguard of the Confederate troops that penetrated the deepest into the Union lines during Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg. He did not survive the battle, and a Friend-to-Friend monument was erected in recent years by the Freemasons honoring the fatally wounded Armistead being attended to by Union Capt. Henry Bingham, also a Freemason.
American history’s long tendrils often extend even into these sacred hills of Cherokee County.
Bruce Voyles’ local history column runs every other week in the Cherokee Scout. Email him questions and comments at RoadsLessTraveled@cherokeescout.com.