Moccasin Bend: Twelve Thousand Years on the Tennessee River

From the crest of Lookout Mountain, the Tennessee River traces a wide, boot-shaped curve below. Native Americans named this bend for the shape of a moccasin, and for twelve thousand years, human beings have returned to this loop of water and bottomland.

Archaeologists have identified traces of nearly every major cultural period in North American prehistory at Moccasin Bend: Archaic encampments from eight thousand years ago, Woodland-era mounds from the centuries around the start of the common era, and the most visible remains of all, the earthworks and structures of the Mississippian culture, which flourished here from roughly four hundred to one thousand years ago. A platform mound on the bend's interior supported the structures of a chiefly society whose trade networks reached across the continent. Congress designated the area a National Archaeological District in two thousand three, one of only a handful of such districts in the country.

In eighteen thirty-eight, Moccasin Bend became part of one of the darkest passages in American history. The federal government was removing the Cherokee nation from the southeastern United States by force, driving families from their homes in Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina, and Alabama toward a territory in present-day Oklahoma. Cherokee families were herded across Moccasin Bend and down to Browns Ferry on the Tennessee River, where flatboats waited to carry them westward. The journey became known as the Trail of Tears. Thousands died along the way from cold, disease, and exhaustion. The National Park Service opened a commemorative trail across Moccasin Bend in two thousand thirteen for the one hundred seventy-fifth anniversary of the removal.

Five years after the Trail of Tears, Union and Confederate forces fought across the same ground during the Chattanooga campaign. The land holds all of it: twelve millennia of continuous human presence, stratified in the soil.