What she might have been:
As she left her home with her new husband a man of Scotch Irish roots like her beloved Papa she knew she would proably never see her beloved family again in the hills of North Carolina.She was of a Scotch/Irish father and a Cherokee mother.She had learned from her mother and grandfather the wisdom and knowledge of the healer/medicine man and she had the second sight as they called it. This knowledge of the herbs and plants that helped to cure sickness were her trademark and would later bring people for miles around to her home on the Tennessee river for healings in a time and place where there weren't any doctors. She would take whatever they could pay:chickens,eggs,bread and also would care for them when they couldn't pay.She was as respected as our modern day doctors in her time. She would during the years during and after the civil war open and run a ferry over the Tennessee river and would be respected by men and women alike. In later years she would pass this knowlegde onto her daughter and on thru the generations.This love of healing and growing things and the wanderlust would lead her great-great granddaughter to begin on just such a journey 170 years later to the west and the home of the Pacific Ocean she never saw.
She was my great-great-great grandmother and she was indeed a Cherokee Indian who operated a ferry and was a healer.I come from a family of strong women just like her . I hope to do her proud in the future as I hope I have in the past.
For Sunday Scribblings
1 comment:
Hi,
I love this, and the fact that it means someting to you. I too, have a Cherokee hertiage, but my line comes down from the western band, who settled at the end of the trail of tears in Oklahoma. The town my family lives in still is Tahlequah, the headquarters of the western Cherokee nation.
Please write more about your family history, I would love to read it.
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