Greetings from Wilson, North Carolina, where the Lawson Trek is four hiking-days from its arrival in little Washington and the completion of this journey. 

I want to tell you all about Wilson, a small city struggling to reinvent itself in the wake of the loss of tobacco farming and other traditional rural vocations that made it a coastal plain capital. Wilson is working hard on its downtown, encouraging the arts, and looking forward. 

I want to tell you about Clayton, a smaller city (Wilson has close to 50,000 people; Clayton is closing in on 20,000), which is trying to combine a downtown focus on small business with the advantages it has by being part of the metropolitan Raleigh tech hub. I want to tell you about how it's felt to walk away from even the last hills and into the coastal plain, where the clouds put on a show every day and the land spreads itself out before you like a beach blanket. I want to tell you about the fried bologna sandwich I had in Papa Jack's, in Buckhorn Crossroads and the barbecue I ate at Parker's in Wilson, about what seems to be Lawson's crossing of the Neuse River and what may or may not have been Wee Quo Whom, a waterfall whose location has always presented a significant problem for route tracers.  

And yet instead I need to address an issue I thought we had resolved already. I'm talking, once again, about the possible hanging tree in Salisbury, which sparked a discussion -- a highly respectful discussion on all parts, I might add -- about the confederate flag and the history of racism in the Carolinas. (I updated things a bit here.)

Once again: by far the most delightful aspect of this discussion -- at least in these pages -- is the decency with which it's been carried on. I have spoken with people who vigorously support the flying of the confederate flag and people who think (as I do) that the flag represents a legacy of hatred and white supremacy. And we shook hands and we kept our voices modulated and we listened and smiled. We didn't change our minds much, but we engaged in civil discourse.

So then yesterday I got this comment on the blog.

I hate to allow Mr. Mathews, whoever he is and wherever he comes from (the return address on his comment came up as "server unknown" or some such), to kidnap this discussion, but I found it so heartbreaking that I wanted to put it out there rather than bury it: I've always believed that you expunge corruption by exposing it, not by hiding it.

It's scarcely worth pointing out the tide of irrationality in his comments -- he seems to think that his ancestors stole the land of the United States from the Indians fair and square (and tried to seize it again through treason) so that means those of us who don't share that background are somehow, I don't know -- well, gutter degenerate filth, so the United States is his country and not ours. We see so much of this now and I find it heartbreaking. I will point out that the word "gutter" is commonly attributed to Louis Farrakhan about Judaism (whether he ever said it or not is another entire question. And meanwhile, the Nazis famously despised "degenerate" art, so once you're using code words like degenerate and gutter, you're aligning yourself with some pretty troubling things.

I need to tell you this: I have sat across from Peggy Scott of the Santee Indians, who was kind and decent and delightful, across from John Jeffries of the Occaneechi, who was kind and decent and delightful. (I haven't been able to tell you about him yet, but take a look at this until I can.) If anyone -- anyone -- could complain about people showing up and ruining a country -- well, you know. The point is, Mr. Mathews is spewing a kind of vicious, ignorant, cowardly hatred that pollutes everything it touches, and it hurt my spirit to leave it rotting in the comments thread of this blog, and it hurt even worse to delete it, as though I were afraid of it. 

So I'm sharing it here. And in that spirit I also say, once more: the vast majority of people with whom the Lawson Trek has interacted -- in fact, simply everybody else -- has shown such kindness and generosity that this ugly attack so near to the end of the project serves only to underscore that. I am grateful for that more than I can express.

To cleanse the stain of Mr. Mathews' vileness from our spirits, I will do something I should have done much more of throughout this project but only just thought of literally this very second: I'm going to share a bunch of photos and captions to show what it's looked like from the Lawson Trek the least couple hikes. Thanks for reading. And as for Mr. Mathews and his ilk, I suggest we just do what his favorite song asks us to do anyhow: look away.

I recently did, on the Lawson Trek, something I've wanted to do my whole life: I walked for a day until I was tired, and when weariness and exhaustion came upon me, I spent my last mile looking around. I eventually found a pleasant, secluded spot where I could see I was bothering nobody, disturbing neither crop nor yard, visible from neither home nor road. In a copse of pines I set up my tent in the dusk. Then I ate, then I slept. When I woke, I packed up and was on my way. I had no idea on whose land I had slept; I asked no permission and I begged no forgiveness. By day I walked the earth; at sunset I lay down upon it; at dawn I arose from it and walked on.

The response I've received as I've told people about that one-night adventure shows me how much this trek -- like Lawson's -- is about the land, and who owns it and is allowed to use it and for what purposes. One person who heard about my decision to sleep right on a piece of unused ground in a cluster of pines was so affronted that she instantly refused my request to walk across hers. This land business? It's powerful stuff.

One of my many friends in the small burg of McClellanville, north of Charleston, quoted another friend, speaking of Lawson and his unpleasant death at the hands of the Tuscarora a decade after his journey. "He was a land developer," my friend quoted his friend. "And he got what they all deserve."

And to be sure, at the base -- literally -- of Lawson's journey was land. What kind of land was Carolina? Who lived there? Who owned it? How could colonists get it? How and where could you cross it? What were the obstacles? What grew there now, and what would grow there under ideal (read: English) stewardship?

That's nothing like an exaggeration. Lawson describes one area he sees as "curious dry Marshes and Savanna's adjoining to it, and would prove an excellent thriving Range for Cattle and Hogs, provided the English were seated upon it." He admires the Indians, and he's often very critical of the way they're treated, but Lawson says stuff like this a million times, and I quote it just to remind you: yes, Lawson was interested in the science and the anthropology and the botany and all the other wonderful stuff on his wonderful adventure, but he was also interested, like every single colonist to North America, in land, and in getting it away from its current inhabitants. Land acquisition was what was going on, and however much we admire Lawson's admiration for the Indians and his curious and questing spirit, he was involved in the same continental land-grab everyone else was, and he could see as well as anyone else how that worked out for the current occupants. "These Sewees have been formerly a large Nation," he says of his first Indian assistants, "though now very much decreas'd, since the English have seated their Land, and all other Nations of Indians are observ'd to partake of the same Fate, where Europeans come."

That was kind of new for the Indians. Not that they didn't have boundaries and territories and markers and all that, but people -- especially people of the same group -- were expected to move about the land, and the idea that one would not have been allowed to cross and seek shelter would have bordered on the absurd. "This night we got to one Scipio's Hutt, a famous Hunter," Lawson says somewhere among the Santee Indians. "There was no Body at Home; but ... we made our selves welcome to what his Cabin afforded, (which is a Thing common) the Indians allowing it practicable to the English Traders, to take out of their Houses what they need in their Absence, in Lieu where of they most commonly leave some small Gratuity of Tobacco, Paint, Beads. &c."

Mind you, when land is posted  -- or trees are decorated with purple stripes, which is the equivalent of 'No Trespassing' signs -- the Lawson Trek does not cross. That said, when the Lawson Trek finds itself lost, or misguided, or confused, if the solution to a problem appears across a field or or other small parcel of even posted land, I do not hesitate to allow common sense to outweigh the sanctity of private property.

Again: laying down where I found myself when energy and sunlight diminished was a longstanding goal of mine. I can remember as long ago as early childhood, when during family car rides I would imagine walking instead of driving, and the idea of setting out cross-country first began to attract me. I thought about the obvious utility for camp shelter of those little clumps of trees near highway exit ramps; I looked at the borders of trees along roads, separating farmed fields from the highway and thought the same. To me, walking along until it was time to rest, and then resting until it was time to walk again, seemed exciting and humane and fundamental.

And I know that those childish thoughts need to coexist with individual property rights. And a cool study shows that even people who post their property will allow people to hunt it almost half the time; they just want you to ask permission. Which is totally reasonable. And were I going to make a common practice of just laying down where I found myself I would expect, sooner or later, to offend the actual owners of the land on which I lay, not another landowner on their behalf. And part of what I'm doing as the Lawson Trek makes its way across the land is finding out not just what it feels like to walk the earth (it feels great!) but to see what it feels like for others when we show up, like Lawson did, and need to eat, or sleep -- or park a car or use a restroom or get a ride to Pack's Landing.  

So far we've almost never been denied permission to walk, rest, or sleep, but it's a complicated world. Some churches have opened their chapels for us to sleep in; others have denied our requests to camp on a corner of their land. Most people meeting us seem cheerful, and when they learn of our project are delighted to share

In my first two treks I spent quite a bit of time with the descendants of the French Huguenots, settlers along the lower Santee River who welcomed and housed Lawson after he had made his way down the coast and started up the Santee. Just like their ancestors, the Huguenot descendants fed me, found me places to sleep, directed me, and wished me well.

From the Huguenot settlement Lawson continued north, likely following an Indian path along the edge of the swamp on the northeast bank of the Santee River, now called the Santee Swamp. The first native people he met there were the Santee Indians, whom he described as "a well-humour'd and affable People; and living near the English, are become very tractable."

Lawson talks about Santee skills in making corncribs, on stilts and daubed with mud, that kept out rodents, thus enabling them to leave them unguarded, "always finding their Granaries in the same Posture they left them."  They needed significant corn storage, "there being Plantations lying scattering here and there, for a great many Miles [along the Santee River]." Especially beans and corn, the Santee, whose name means something like "river people," were great farmers in the rich bottomlands near the Santee River.

Says Lawson, "They came out to meet us, being acquainted with one of our Company, and made us very welcome with fat barbacu'd Venison," and let me promise you, Carolinians have been welcoming visitors with barbecue ever since. 

All of this is to say, from the wonderful hospitality of the Huguenots (which their descendants recreated with me), Lawson advanced to the wonderful hospitality of the Santee, and I was anxious to see if I could meet their descendants and see how time had treated them. I was thus thrilled when Chris Judge of the Native American Studies Center of the University of South Carolina-Lancaster gave me contact information for the current chief and vice-chief of the Santee, Randy Crummie and Peggy Scott. Chief Crummie was working seven days a week keeping body and soul together, so he asked me to reach out to vice-chief Scott, whom I now think of as Peggy and regard as a friend, and who welcomed me to her region just as openly as her ancestors did centuries ago.

Given that the U.S. government has a Bureau of Indian Affairs, I'm loth to get offended on anybody's behalf. And when I asked Peggy whether she'd grown up identifying as a Santee, she said, "We were identified as a derogatory name, that I don't choose to repeat."

She attended an Indian school, segregated and denied resources to the point where she says "I didn't know what a gymnasium was. I didn't even know what a library was." A couple of her friends went to the high school but were treated so badly they left. She says when she was in fourth grade the Indian school closed and she moved into the middle school, where she describes a segregated system having white and black drinking fountains. If an Indian child was thirsty? "The teacher or principal would go get you a paper cup of water."

It's no surprise, of course. Indigenous peoples like the Santees were already reeling from the results of European contact by the time Lawson met them in 1700. Smallpox had devastated them, rum had taken them unawares, and they had been not only uprooted from their land but commonly enslaved -- Indian slavery was such an enormous undertaking that before 1715, Charleston actually exported more Indian slaves than it imported African slaves. The Santees numbered around 1000 in 1600 but declined as precipitously as their neighbors. In 1711 they fought with the British against the Tuscarora (who had killed Lawson), though by then their number was so reduced that according to The Indian Slave Trade they sent only a portion of a group of 155 that comprised at least seven tribes' worth of warriors. in the 1715 Yamassee War in South Carolina that finally sealed the fates of the Southeastern tribes, they fought with their Indian neighbors against the colonists, but it was basically over when the Yamassee lost. The remnant of the Santee (80 or so people in two villages) moved up the river to join the Catawba or melted into the swamps, just trying to keep away from the colonists, over the years mixing with other outcasts like escaped slaves and poor whites. The wonderful Those Who Were Left Behind tells the story of the South Carolina tribes who remained, explaining how the current Santees may descend from a group of indeterminate Indian background who found themselves a small piece of land southeast of the Santee River in the mid-1700s and have been around there ever since, reasserting the name "Santee" in the 20th century. Exactly what blood runs in whose veins is a subject for debate -- constant debate, given that the Santee Tribe is currently recognized by South Carolina but not the federal government -- but Peggy has no doubts.

"I was born in the middle of my tribe," she says. "My father and the elders delivered me in my mother's bedroom."

Of that new building, Peggy told a an amazing story. Much of our discussion had to do with persecution, with the difficulties of gaining recognition, with the troubles of growing up Indian in a country that has never known what to do with you. "Even as a child it used to irk me," she recalls. "You came here, you tell us we're savages," she says. And then, when you try to get recognition for your tribe, "now, hundreds of years later, they say go find your history, your heritage -- that we took from you."

Some of it they can't have, though. 

"I'm part of the South Carolina Native American Ladies Traditional Dance group," she says. There was a time, after a significant accident, when Peggy could barely function, much less dance. But as her rehabilitation continued, she ended up able to dance, and a dance was scheduled at a pow wow the Santee hosted.

Let her tell you about it.

The Santees have waned and waxed again, growing stronger in recent years -- from only a few in the 1700s back to near a thousand now, the Santees remain by the river. Peggy brought us their welcome, and we certainly can be no less grateful for it than Lawson was.

The morning after his stay with Mons. Gallian, Lawson was ferried across the engorged Santee by an Indian guide, whereas Katie and I just walked across the Route 17A bridge, though the river was plenty high for us too. As we continued walking we stumbled into some kind of farm development that included horses and a lake that was completely not on the map and had to scramble around to figure out where the hell we were. At approximately this point Lawson too found himself stuck. With the Santee in enormous flood, his group of six explorers and their lone guide (they had left their four canoe guides behind when they began walking) disputed about the way to the home of Mons. Gallian the younger, evidently one Barthelemy Gaillard,.

Lawson and two associates remained behind on a knoll, while the others paddled along to see if they could find their way. "We had but one Gun amongst us, one Load of Ammunition, and no Provision. Had our Men in the Canoe miscarry'd, we must (in all Probability) there have perish'd," Lawson says.

Six hours later the Indian did come back in the canoe -- "being half drunk, which assur'd us they had found some Place of Refreshment." That place was Mons. Gallian the younger's, where one drunken canoe ride later ("several Miles thro' the Woods, being often half full of Water") Lawson found "our comrades in the same Trim the Indian was in." They passed a merry evening there. 

Val tells me that this house -- of Bartholomew Galliard -- was soon inhabited by a young woman who married Bartholomew. A daughter of the Guerry family, into whose family the house passed. Which is to say, there's great likelihood that the blood of Bartholomew Gallian (or Galliard) and his Guerry wife flowed through the veins of our hosts as we drank coffee and ate cake.

I suppose it's not an enormous deal, but it feels like one to me. We didn't get drunk with the Guerrys -- Lawson and his party were so drunk leaving their party that as they walked that night towards a Santee Indian camp, one of his compatriots fell off a log that was the only way across one of the creeks -- probably what is now called the Wee Tee. Lawson, "laughing at the Accident, and not taking good Heed to my Steps, came to the same Misfortune: All our Bedding was wet." Served him right, of course, but a cold northwest wind blowing "prepar'd such a Night's Lodging for me, that I never desire to have the like again." Which makes our snug night safe from downpours on the padded pews of the St. James Church all the more delightful in retrospect.



I set out along Lawson's path to see if I could have the kind of fun he did. I had no idea.