Billy Bartram

In 1775, an unlikely explorer named Billy Bartram, crossed a ridge and found, the Smoky Mountains. He wasn’t a frontiersman or a mountain man, but he ventured where very few white men ever dared to go, with nothing more than his love of nature and what it held in store for him, he ventured deep into the heart of Cherokee territory, the Cherokee called him “puc puggee” the flower hunter.

Billy Bartram was a small, quiet Quaker, probably not the first person anyone thought of when they heard the term adventurer, but he loved nature and felt most at home in the forests. Being more of a failure, from a well known family in Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin once offered Billy a job as a printer, but all he was really interested in was hunting flowers and drawing pictures of various wild things. A trip from Charleston, heading north brought Billy here. The Indian agents told him not to come, stay away from Cherokee country, but up the Savanna River he went, crossing the Little Tennessee River and into North Carolina, past Franklin, just south of Bryson City, exhausted, he rested for a while. Once again, Billy was warned not to continue, but Billy continued on, worn out and alone, but what Billy found were forests older than dinosaurs, Pines, Poplars, and Oaks, flowers like Mountain Iris, Rhododendrons and Dogwoods everywhere, the Flame Azaleas scared him, colors so vibrant he thought the hills were on fire, giddy with joy over his new discovery he just knew he had discovered something, like a new world, this is what Billy found when the land still belonged to the Cherokee.

But Billy also came to see the Cherokee too. He once said the Cherokee was the largest race of men he had ever saw, in a cove called “land of the noon day sun”, Billy came face to face with the great Chief of the Cherokee nation Attakullakulla. The Cherokee wars were raging in 1775, but here in the heart of Cherokee territory was Billy, a lone white man, you can imagine that Billy’s heart must have been racing 90 miles a minute when he came upon the fierce Cherokee Chief Attakullakulla, but there must have been something the chief sensed in the small Quaker’s nature, maybe it was his child like excitement over natures beauty. But Billy and the chief crossed each other’s path and somehow, the chief knew that Billy was a man of peace, the chief simply smiled, Billy waived, and then they parted. Billy eventually wrote his book “The Travels of Billy Bartram” the book that influenced poets, philosophers, and even politicians throughout the western world.