The French Colonial Connection

A treasure trove of French books, maps, eyewitness accounts, official reports and memoirs, produced between 1534 and 1763 have been intentionally left out of history books and anthropology texts, published in the United States. The result has been an incomplete, often inaccurate, portrayal of the Native American peoples of Eastern North American during the Colonial Period.

As a result, I learned French history the good ole fashion way . . . by falling in love with a brainy mademoiselle from Champaigne-Ardenne, who happened to have majored in Early European History and minored in French Renaissance History at the Sorbonne. Never dreamed that loving history and old buildings would be a “turn on” for such a special lady.

The photo was made on December 19, 1990 in the restored summer kitchen of my former 1754-1770 farmhouse in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. I assumed that I would never see Vivi again, after we toured the National Museum of American History on Sunday afternoon, Dec. 16th. 

She headed to Los Angeles to audition for singing soundtracks on a movie. I headed back to the goat farm on Toms Brook. She couldn’t believe that I was real, so intentionally rented a taxi van at Dulles Airport to visit my colonial farm, before flying back to Paris. She is singing “Some Enchanted Evening” in the photo.

More than once, Vivi told me that she was convinced that I was born on the American frontier 250 years ago and had come to her as a time traveler.

by Richard L. Thornton, Architect & City Planner

The Forgotten Native American History of the Southeastern United States – Part 15

During the latter half of the 1990s, I lived in walking distance of Etowah Mounds National Historical Landmark. During that period, I bought all of the books being produced by professors in Southeastern universities on Native Americans and the Colonial Period. The most pertinent to this series is The Forgotten Centuries, edited by Charles Hudson and Carmen Chaves Tesser. It contains a series of academic papers by anthropology and history professors on the period between 1521 and 1704. Until 1670, when Charleston was founded, it is based almost entirely on Spanish colonial archives.

This book states emphatically, more than once, that there is no information on the interior of Eastern North America between around 1600 and 1671. It also states that no Europeans explored that region during that period. You will learn that those statements are absolutely false. 

I quickly noticed the lack of French maps and references in The Forgotten Centuries, but in that period, I was primarily focused on getting my architecture practice going again in Georgia . . . and didn’t dream that I would soon become so immersed in Architectural History and Native American History that I would be devoting the rest of my life in that area of research. I certainly didn’t dream that I would be publishing a series of books on those subjects!

During the latter half of Winter 2024, each article will examine an individual French document from the Colonial Period to determine what their eye witness accounts can tell us today. You will be astonished at how much the “American History” textbooks have left out or even lied about, when discussing the Colonial Period in North America.

Par exemple . . .

During the late 1600s and early 1700s, there was a large French fort and trading post on an island, where the Tennessee and Little Tennessee Rivers join in eastern Tennessee. It was connected by the Unicoi trail to the Spanish fort and trading post near Helen, GA, which I discovered in late 2023 with LIDAR. I suspect that it received most of its European goods from St. Augustine, via the Unicoi and La Cota Trails. There were two Kusate (Upper Creek) villages on this island.

The fort and trading post appears on several French maps and at least one British map, published in 1715. J. W. Emmert of the Bureau of Ethnology, Smithsonian Institute, excavated the fort in 1887. Mark Harrington of the Heye Foundation, excavated some of the fort and one of the Upper Creek villages in 1919. Archaeologists from the University of Tennessee excavated the other Upper Creek village in the 1970s. 

There is no mention of this fort in any book, published in the United States. The official Tennessee History textbook tells their students that the Cherokee occupied all of eastern Tennessee from the 1600s onward, even though both British and French maps label most of eastern Tennessee to be occupied by Upper Creeks and Uchees until around 1725. The maps show the part of Tennessee, south of the Hiwassee River as being Upper Creek until after the American Revolution. In his manuscript, ”History of the Cherokee People,” (1826) Cherokee Principal Chief Charles Hicks stated that the Cherokee did not arrive in northeastern Tennessee until after Charleston was founded.

You will notice in the Wikipedia article that contemporary anthropology professors, in order to not offend the Cherokee, do not use the words “Creek” or “Uchee” in their discussions of Tennessee’s past. They also left out any mention of several other tribes in Northeastern Tennessee. They use the word, “Mississippians” for all Early Colonial and Pre-Columbian town sites, even though maps labeled these sites as Cusate (Upper Creeks) or one of the branches of the Uchee. The Cherokee now claim to have occupied most of the Southeast at one time and to have been the ones who were visited by the De Soto Expedition . . . even though their towns had Creek names and their leaders, Creek titles.

Here is the URL for the Wikipedia article.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bussell_Island

Until next time . . . when we examine the reports of Samuel Champlain