On a Lonely Road

I went down to Fort Mill to be interviewed for an article in a local magazine. I ended up arriving there about an hour and a half earlier than I was supposed to, so I went for a drive in the rural areas around the town. I had my GPS device hooked up on the dash, but I just cleared it and drove aimlessly.

Somehow, I ended up on a very lonely stretch of a (to me) nameless road that went through forest and farmland. It stretched between a weird little industrial/warehouse district and the downtown of Fort Mill. I encountered not one single other vehicle while I was driving on it.

As I drove leisurely along I noticed an historical marker on the opposite side of the road so I turned around and went back to it. Sometimes I like to stop and read these markers and find out what they are and why they are there. In this case, it was to mark again and honor the Catawba Indian Nation. I've read that there are something around 2500 self-identified Catawba natives remaining on Earth, and that less than 200 of them actually live on the Catawba Indian Reservation in South Carolina. The plaque there claims that in return for the friendship and loyalty of the Catawbas, the whites would give them a 15-square-mile reservation. I don't bloody think so.


The lonely stretch of country road where I found the little monument.

For some reason the locals felt the need to erect two monuments. One is the classic cast iron sign and then there was this little carved granite stone.

Yep. The road was so lonely that I could walk out into the middle of it and take photos. I kept thinking about Wile E. Coyote doing this kind of thing and getting run down by suddenly appearing Mack trucks.

This sign looks to have seen better days. I think it's been hit a few times.

Catawba Indian Memorial

It took a few days to get back to this subject. I have even more to say about it in future and I'll try to finish posting some photos and comments tomorrow. For now, I have to rewrite a short story for an anthology. The editor asked for some logical changes and I need to finish that project.

As I said earlier, this is one of the more unusual Confederate Memorial parks that I have ever seen. One of the monuments there is dedicated to the local Catawba Indian nation. Like all of the nations that were here before the Europeans, the Catawbas have suffered terribly. One thing that they did--probably in an effort to ultimately survive--was to bend before the white man. That is, they largely sided with whites against other Indian nations and did their utmost to keep from being wiped out by the flood of Europeans. This they have (barely) managed to do. Of course there hasn't even been a fluent speaker of their native tongue since some time in the 1950s, and most of the Catawbas I've met look whiter than I do. But they still have a dab of a reservation and there is something remaining of their culture. So in that respect I reckon that their ploy to survive worked.

To this end, the local folk who created the park to honor the Confederacy erected a monument there for the local Indian tribe. To pat them on their collective head for being good neighbors, I suppose. Still, it's an unusual marker to see in what in most southern cities is a uniquely white-boys-only club.

Robert Garrett Marks informed me that the statue (unfortunately cast from concrete rather than carved of marble) was vandalized by local kids when he was in high school. It has since remained ruined. I guess there's no money in the box to fix Indian monuments.

The Catawba Indian monument in the Confederate park.

Details on the marble support column.

Closeup of the statue itself. Garrett told me that the arms were hacked off by teens some years back and that repairs have never been deemed important enough to tackle. I wonder if those cast concrete limbs are still in the possession of some dim-bulb asswipe.