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Theresa
Bumppo's Tavern Proprietress
USA
Bumppo's Patron since [at least]:
May 17 2002
Status: offline
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 Posted - September 04 2006 : 09:14:35 AM
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This article was in the Birmingham News this morning. Quite a story.
FLORENCE - Stone by stone, over 27 years, Tom Hendrix has memorialized the story passed down to him of his great-great-grandmother: her forced exile to Oklahoma and her long and perilous walk back to her home on the banks of the Singing River, the Tennessee, in this northwest corner of Alabama.
At the Threets Crossroads community, just off the Natchez Trace, which itself was once an American Indian pathway and later used by settlers, Hendrix has built an unmortared wall of sandstone and limestone, with stones gathered from farmers' fields, quarries and the beds of rivers and creeks.
To build it, Hendrix, 73, has worn out four pickup trucks and more than 20 wheelbarrows. Winding through a hardwood forest, the 4-foot-tall wall, which is as wide as 14 feet in places, would, if stretched out, be about a half-mile in length.
Hendrix, who took an early retirement in his 40s when the Ford factory in nearby Sheffield closed, estimates it comprises more than 5.5 million pounds of stone.
"I had never laid a stone in my life," Hendrix said. "I built her this. She made one step at a time. I laid one stone at the time."
The wall commemorates the journey of Te-lah-nay, who was a teenager when she and her sister were rounded up along with 60 or 70 straggling Creeks, Cherokees and Chickasaws who had avoided earlier rounds of Indian removal from the Southeast.
Beginning in the 1830s, the U.S. government encouraged Southeastern Indians to move to Oklahoma. best-known phase of that removal was The Trail of Tears, which refers to the exodus of the Cherokees in 1838 during which almost a quarter of the 11,500 Indians who were marched from Georgia across north Alabama died, most from disease.
Hendrix says he came to know Te-lah-nay's story through his grandmother, who had preserved stories and folkways passed to her by her grandmother. His great-great-grandmother's story is also preserved in an account written in the 1840s by a Methodist minister. With a combination of source material and imagination, Hendrix recreated her journey in a self-published book, "If the Legends Fade."
"She was a very special lady," he says of his great-great-grandmother.
Little-known tribe:
Te-lah-nay was a Yuchi Indian, a small tribe about which relatively little is known.
They were believed to live at the time of European contact on the west side of the Appalachian Mountains along the Tennessee River.
They became dispersed in the Southeast and eventually affiliated with the Creek Indians. But their language is not related to any other American Indian language. Only a handful of native speakers survive, and they live in Oklahoma.
Hendrix feels he's doing his part to pass along the wisdom and rich mythology of the Yuchi.
"They believed they were the children of the sun," he said.
According to Hendrix, his great-great-grandmother was a healer. She had dark hair and eyes that seemed to dance.
In Hendrix's book, Te-lah-nay makes it to Oklahoma but is compelled to return home by a recurring dream of her grandmother beckoning from the river bank.
On her way back, she breaks her leg and is taken in by a friendly family. She endures difficult weather, hunger, dangerous terrain and threatening travelers.
Along the way, she carries a round rock she rubbed smooth, a stone Hendrix shares with visitors.
When she got back to the Shoals area, she married Jonathan Levi Hitt, a blacksmith.
Hendrix relates her story as he walks the path formed by the In one special spot, the rocks all appear to have faces. In another, the wall bows out into a prayer circle. In another, the wall forms an amphitheater where marriages and music can be performed.
Underfoot, the Tennessee River gravel includes the shells of periwinkles and mussels.
"This is symbolic of her journey, as if you are walking with her," he says.
Pain in l
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