Recent notes perhaps belabored the point that breaking the connection between people and the land is a bad idea. The suffering caused when native peoples were driven from Georgia under the Indian Removal Act of 1830 was unimaginable.
The stories in history books and memoirs are horrific. But a line from a technical report about the state’s mineral springs struck me with the force of poetry:
The Indians are said to have considered these waters of great
medicinal value and when they were driven from the country it
is reported that they endeavored to stop the flow of the springs by
driving pegs in the fissure of the rock from which the water issued.
The note is about Catoosa Springs near the Tennessee border. The Cherokee people believed the waters were healing and powerful. They did not want the land and its waters to nurture the hated people who took them.
• Sources: S.W. McCallie, A Preliminary Report on the Mineral Springs of Georgia; Atlanta: Chas. P. Byrd, state printer, 1913, p. 49. This was Bulletin No. 20 in the U.S. Geological Survey. The Digital Library of Georgia has it here:
https://dlg.usg.edu/record/dlg_ggpd_s-ga-bm500-pg4-bb1-bno-p-b20
For an earlier note on the report, see “Mineral springs,” March 27, 2025.
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