As I work my way through my writing of the book version of A Delicious Country, I have the pleasure or reliving some of my favorite parts of my journey retracing Lawson, though also sometimes in focusing on things not so pleasant. I've just been writing about my visit to the Native American Studies Center of the University of South Carolina Lancaster, where I received exactly the kind of welcome and hospitality Lawson did, though at the time (it was late March 2015) it was one of the stories I skipped telling because of its complexity. So reinvigorating my notes into narrative for the book has reminded me of both some vastly pleasant interactions and a rather terrible story. I'll briefly tell you about both.

Which he did, of course, and we had a large time. We walked along the old roads that had been sidling along the river since Lawon's time -- and long before, and he tole me how he wanted a new generation of leadership to emerge for his tribe. There's more to say, and in the book I say it. But though I was grateful at the time, only now, as I've been writing, have I spent any real time with Catawba history. Regarding which, oy. So just listen to this for a second.

In my journal I at one point wrote down the series of transitions I'm making as I follow Lawson's path, seeing the vast differences between the landscape I traverse and the one he did.

Lawson left Charleston and went from ocean to marshland to river to swamp to forest, and as far as that goes so did I: a week along the Intracoastal Waterway by canoe, a day up the Santee still by canoe, then a few days messing around in the cypress-tupelo swamps of the Francis Marion National Forest and the Wee Tee State Forest as the Santee traveled northwest towards its formation at the confluence of the Wateree and the Congaree, visiting the High Hills of Santee and the 150-foot tupelos and acres of cypress knees in the swamps of the Congaree National Park.

Then it was towns. I had cake and coffee in the tiny crossroads hamlet of  Jamestown and slept in the church, visiting little Randolph's Landing, the spot at the end of the road where the government plonked Lake Marion, widely regarded one of the Army Corps of Engineers' worst mistakes in history, drowning an ecosystem and its culture and damaging not only the Santee River but the Cooper River Basin, where it ships some of its water in a wrongheaded attempt to improve Charleston Harbor.

From there I walked on to the tevolutionary town of Camden, where I was treated like a king and slept in the basement of the rebuilt Kershaw House, and from there to Lancaster, where I met not only the delightful people at USC-Lancaster but the Catawba Indians themselves, who treated me as well as they had treated Lawson three centuries ago, and then on up to Pineville, the last little stop before Charlotte.

And this time I walked into Charlotte. So I've gone ocean, marsh, river, swamp, hills, town, city, and now big city. The best surprise I had in Charlotte was the sidewalks. Throughout my walk I have complained, pretty

much constantly, about the lack of sidewalks and capacity for pedestrians to share the roads. Some of that comes simply from walking through very rural territory. But the approach to every city has meant running for my life, and approaching Charlotte from Pineville, where I stopped last time, was no different. Pineville is a little comfortable suburb, with streets and sidewalks and shops, and then you run out of sidewalk and you cross I-485 and you just pray that you stay lucky. And then you walk along a strip of soul-sucking highway with about 16,741 car dealerships (that's an estimate; I might have missed a couple)

But then an astonishing thing happens. You find yourself on South Boulevard and ... there's sidewalk. And I'm here to tell you, that for the ten-or-so miles it takes you to get into Charlotte, you have sidewalk the whole way, and for that I could just weep with gratitude.

That was hardly the first thing I noticed about Charlotte. First, even as I approached Pineville, I left for the time being any semblance of rural land, as I discussed here. Before the Charlotte metro area, everywhere I went was plantations and forests and pine tree farming and meadows: South Carolina is rural. Starting to near Charlotte, instead of hitting large areas of land and seeing cows and trees and granite, I saw an endless parade of subdivisions -- of Glen Laurels and Clairemonts, of Fox Trails and Bridge Hamptons, Farringtons and Almond Glens. Those are all names of subdivisions I jotted down as I walked past. We've all heard the famous joke that a subdivision is named after the geographical feature they bulldozed and the wildlife they killed to make it, but once you've got to Parkway Crossing (real place!) you have to understand that they're just building them faster than they can name them. I mean what's next: Don't Walk Acres? The Glen at Traffic Circle?

Which brings us to Charlotte! Charlotte's origin story is that Trade and Tryon, the main downtown crossroads, has been a crossroads for time out of mind. Tryon is pretty much the Trading Path, which I've been following (and Lawson followed) since about Camden, SC. Trade was another path, running between the Cherokee settlements to the west and the coast. At the crossroads was a Catawba settlement, and that made a great place to hang out and wait for whatever was next.

In fact, at that point Lawson met someone he didn't expect. Lawson, like me, knew he was coming into the city: "This day, we pass'd through a great many Towns, and Settlements," he says. "About three in the Afternoon, we reach'd the Kadapau King's House, where we met with one John Stewart, a Scot, then an inhabitant of James-River in Virginia ." Stewart was one of the Indian traders from the Chesapeake who made their way up and down the Trading Path, bringing European goods and returning with deerskins and furs. Stewart was waiting around with the Catawbas because a Seneca raiding party was in the area and he didn't care to travel alone. Lawson mentions that Stewart had heard of the approach of Lawson's group nearly three weeks before and had waited for him, giving a little sense of how effective Indians communicated without any help from the Internet. Stewart joined Lawson's gang and they agreed to journey forward together.

But not before Lawson irritated his host by refusing to enjoy the services of "two or three trading Girls" the Catawba King kept around for visitors. When Lawson politely declined -- and even one of his his most ready companions, who had recently woken up to learn he had been robbed by a trading girl he had enjoyed for the night, declined as well -- the king didn't like it. "His Majesty flew into a violet Passion, to be thus slighted, telling the Englishmen they were good for nothing." Still, they hung around a couple days, baking bread and otherwise preparing for their journey, which at this point began to turn eastward back towards the coast.

Charlotte honors its history as a place where people meet to do business -- it's an enormous banking capital now, and it has some astonishing skyscrapers to show it, along with the explosive redevelopment that tends to go with prosperous Sun Belt cities. (Read this piece to learn the weird and cool backstory on how Charlotte emerged as a banking center.) It even has a fabulous light rail transit line, which made my life extremely easy. My good friend and leader Val Green helped me leave my car at the southernmost end of the line, so when I made my way into town all I had to do to get back to my car was jump on the trolley. I was glad he helped -- walking from the end of the Lynx line the extra mile back to Pineville would have been one car-dodging trip too many at the end of the day.

Walking into Charlotte up South Boulevard is a delight, though. You walk past about a million self-storage places, which along with the limitless car lots lead a visitor to the conclusion that people in Charlotte -- and I suppose all modern people -- have cars only so they can fill them with stuff, which they then dump off in warehouses. I passed a little chemical plant after walking through neighborhoods easily identifiable through signs on restaurants and roadside stores: hispanic, asian, African-American. Then as I closed in  manufacturing plants-turned-upscale-living-and-shopping started dominating, and by the time I could get glimpses of downtown I was in neighborhoods that took serious coin to inhabit -- off the main drag, you could see one or two of the old millhouses remained, but almost everything else was a teardown. 

Once I got into downtown it was like the Peterson's Guide to the Ecosystems of the Big Cities. Sports stadium? Check (three! minor league baseball, pro football, and pro basketball!). Adorable minipark? Check: One with a literary theme and, for some reason, spitting fish. Then there was Trade and Tryon, and though no Catawba King greeted me, I had been well treated by the Catawbas already (more about that soon!). As for trading girls, I appear to have missed that neighborhood.

I'm more worried about cars than raiding parties, though we'll see how that shakes out when I hit the trail again.

You want to know how things have changed since Lawson's time? Look at the land; if I'm learning anything on the Lawson Trek it's that it all comes down to the land.

I spent my last trek focused on Lancaster, SC, where the Native American Studies Center of the University of South Carolina-Lancaster was holding, coincidentally, its annual Native American Studies Week, and the Lawson Trek got to play. As ever, I'd rather be lucky than good. I'll tell you about that soon, and about the welcome I received (again, like Lawson) from the Catawbas themselves.

Sun City Carolina Lakes is a development for adults 55 and older, and it could not be more different from the landscape it replaced. To see that land, we spent a morning walking with Jimmy White (a member of the Nisbet family), Barry Beasley of the Land Trust, and Chris Judge, of the Native American Studies Center. We walked along the Catawba River, at least a quarter mile wide and rarely more than knee deep; we saw bluffs of that piedmont granite overlooking the river. We saw eagles nesting in snags, the sites of old Catawba and Waxhaw towns, the remains of an old mill, and piles and piles of empty plastic bottles and other flotsam that comes down the Sugar Creek, which drains Charlotte and enters the Catawba just upstream. Barry told us that one dedicated paddler has pulled more than 17,000 basketballs out of the Catawba in recent years.

"It's the typical story," Barry told us. "People move into the panhandle [the portion of Lancaster County also called Indian Land] for a better quality of life." As more people come, the sprawl they fled follows them. In the early 1990s the county added sewer and water services, and once you've done that, land is easy to develop -- and mostly gone. "Now it's Charlotte," Chris says of the way northern Lancaster County has connected to the Charlotte amoeba.

Which was why Jimmy was so pleased as he showed us the territory his family owns (and even some his family sold, though with easements on it protecting the river). Until the late 1950s the Catawbas operated a one-car ferry where route 5 now crosses the river, but the new road ended that. The more than 3 miles of riverside the Nesbits own at least give open land a fighting chance. Jimmy walked us to a site that had once been a Catawba town, and doing nothing more difficult than idly kicking around dirt he unearthed 18th-century pottery fragments that he gave to me -- a connection with centuries past.

Not that the land as it is now, with lovely second-growth forest and old mills and town sites and such, would have been as it is now when Lawson passed. "The coastal plain would've been magnificent longleaf pine forests," Barry reminded us, as we followed old Waxhaw paths and double-tracks as old as horse and buggies along the conserved land.

Not, mind you, that it's wrong to develop housing subdivisions, or that it's wrong to sell your land when your land is your only resource. But what the Land Trust does, with and families like the Nesbits, is preserve an earth that can retain its memories of the Lawsons and Waxhaws and Catawbas (and Nesbits!) of this world. There's an enormous value to that.

After all, you need somewhere to dock your kayak when it's time to gather the basketballs. 

Lawson, as he goes about his business, speaks mostly of visual observations. Of the Indians he meets, he describes their clothing (they almost always wear "match coats," a sort of toga-style piece of fabric worn connected over one shoulder):

Their Feather Match-Coats are very pretty, especially some of them, which are made extraordinary charming, containing several pretty Figures wrought in Feathers, making them seem like a fine Flower Silk-Shag; and when new and fresh, they become a Bed very well, instead of a Quilt. Some of another sort are made of Hare, Raccoon, Bever, or Squirrel-Skins, which are very warm. Others again are made of the green Part of the Skin of a Mallard's Head, which they few perfectly well together, their Thread being either the Sinews of a Deer divided very small, or Silk-Grass. When these are finish'd, they look very finely, though they must needs be very troublesome to make. Some of their great Men, as Rulers and such, that have Plenty of Deer Skins by them, will often buy the English-made Coats, which they wear on Festivals and other Days of Visiting. Yet none ever buy any Breeches, saying, that they are too much confin'd in them, which prevents their Speed in running, &c.

He describes the forests and greenery he encounters, in this part of the world noticing an end to the Spanish Moss: "From the Nation of Indians until such Time as you come to the Turkeiruros in North Carolina, you will see no long Moss upon the Trees," and he's exactly right -- we saw Spanish Moss at the beginning of the trek that took us from the High Hills of Santee to the town of Camden, and I haven't seen a strand of it since. He notices that the Indians have a special mark of respect:  "At Noon, we stay'd and refresh'd ourselves at a Cabin, where we met with one of their War-Captains, a Man of great Esteem among them. At his Departure from the Cabin, the Man of the House scratch'd this War-Captain on the Shoulder, which is look'd upon as a very great Compliment among them. "

Something about that shoulder scratch appeals to me; Lawson mentions it more than once, and it seems like such a lovely predecessor of the vaguely uncomfortably two-guy sidehug or the performance level shoulders-touching-two-thump handshake that it reminds me: Lawson was a guy just like I am, and the people he met were just people. Just like the people I meet.

Joanna Craig gave us a mile-a-minute explanation of the history of Camden, which, founded in 1732, was the first inland Carolina town settled by Europeans. King George II was looking to get the Indians off prime riverside land and spread English settlement. The town was first planned as Fredericksburg, right on the Wateree River, then called Pine Tree Hill, then finally put in its current spot (actually rather swampy; it still floods, Joanna assures me) in 1758, when Joseph Kershaw arrived from England, established a store, and got things going. The town was called Pine Tree Hill until it was renamed after Lord Camden, a supporter of colonial rights. Its downtown main street -- Broad Street; Lawson would have walked the Indian trail on which it's lain -- is filled with buildings designed by Robert Mills, the designer of the Washington Monument and many other neoclassical buildings, to say nothing of the author of the 1825 Mills Atlas of South Carolina, from which the wonderful description of the rock house near Forty-Acre Rock comes.  The revolutionaries lost the Battle of Camden, by the way, lost it big time. Cornwallis took over the Kershaw house and imprisoned its owner for the duration; "hundreds of unhappy prisoners" of the revolutionaries had the same fate penned in the yard.

So anyhow, into, and through, and past, Camden we went, and in Camden as in Charleston and in McClellanville and in Jamestown and in Horatio we found friends to help us out. I've already mentioned Joanna Craig, who helped and organized and gave us warm and dry sleeping quarters, but at Books on Broad we met owner Laurie Funderburk, who organized a meet-and-greet that was absurdly well attended, the Camdenites coming out and introducing themselves en masse and in all ways making the Lawson Trek feel welcome. 

So we wandered. A day into Camden, a day in Camden, then another day north, partway to Lancaster. We visited Boykin on our way into town, where we met Susan Simpson, the broom lady, going about the business of making brooms in a little cabin that had housed slaves in 1740, and saw the mill pond, there since 1792 and the church built six years earlier. 

Lawson met tremendous hospitality among the Catawbas (as he did everywhere), though not long after Lawson passed through things got less cheerful. King Haigler, a revered Catawba chief, would have been an infant when Lawson passed through -- he was born in 1700, so Lawson may have chucked him under the chin or dandled him on his knee. In any case, in 1754 he became chief, and he was evidently much beloved: he's considered the "patron saint" of Camden and he's in the South Carolina Hall of Fame. His image is everywhere in Camden. 

Fat lot of good it did him. He's the chief who signed the treaty that supposedly provided a 15-square-mile reservation for the Catawbas in South Carolina. That didn't work out too well (long story, but the Catawbas finally regained federal recognition in 1993), and Haigler was killed by a band of Shawnee.