Free Kinfolks by Lisa Alther Page B

break so that each can mount one of his long-suffering cows and show the other what he’s got. Then the bulls swagger back to the fence and resume their bellowing.
    Len and his father know each of these three hundred cows by name. When I was growing up, we split a cow with them every year for meat. I remember the year we ate the cow named Lisa. So do my therapists.
    I try my best to ignore all this testosterone and think instead about my Melungeon article. A few miles away, just down the road from Erwin (the town that lynched the elephant), lies an archaeological site called Plum Grove. The first time I tried to visit it, the forest ranger, worried I might loot the unguarded site for artifacts, refused to tell me where it was. I reminded him that it was located in a national forest and I was a taxpayer. He reluctantly drew me a map to the field, which sits in a wide valley alongside the Nolichucky River.
    Plum Grove has been carbon-dated to the mid-1400s. Some researchers believe it to be the ruins of a Yuchi town named Guasili, through which Hernando de Soto marched in 1540. The Guasilians gave the Spaniards baskets of puppies to roast for dinner. The soldiers enjoyed Guasili so much that after they left, they called out “House of Guasili” for good luck when rolling dice.
    The Yuchi, called the Chisca by the Spaniards, are thought to descend from the Woodland period mound builders who occupied the Southeast from around 1000 B.C . to A.D. 800. The Yuchi called themselves Tsoyaha, “children of the sun.” Other tribes and various Europeans called them the Tongora, Oustack, Tahogalewi, Hogoheegee, Rickahokan, and Hogologe.
    Some Spanish soldiers under Sergeant Hernando Moyano fought a battle with the Yuchi in 1566 at their town called Maniateque near present-day Saltville, Virginia. The Spaniards claimed to have burned fifty houses and killed a thousand people. Soon afterward they attacked a second town called Guapere on the upper Watauga River, where they killed fifteen hundred Yuchi by burning down the huts in which they were cowering.
    In 1600 the governor of La Florida (as the Spaniards called the entire Southeast), Don Gonzalo Méndez de Canco, interviewed two Indian women named Teresa Martyn and Luisa Menendez. They’d left their village in Yuchi territory to travel to St. Augustine with a Spanish exploring party. These women claimed the Yuchi were “white-skinned, blue-eyed, and red-haired.”
    In a 1714 battle with the Cherokee, a thousand residents of another Yuchi village barred themselves in their council house once it was clear they’d be defeated. The young, the old, and the women were strangled by the warriors, who then impaled themselves on arrows or hanged themselves from the rafters with their bowstrings. Some survivors were absorbed by the Cherokee. Others joined the Creek in Georgia or the Seminóle in Florida. Still others formed a fierce slave-catching tribe in South Carolina called the Westo. (I wonder if some might have moved thirty miles northwest to become the Melungeons.)
    A similar fate met many southeastern tribes when the Europeans arrived. The tribes moved to new locations under pressure from the westward-pressing settlers or from other dislocated tribes. They had multiple names in the various native and European languages. These names were rarely what they called themselves. And when these names were written down, each recorder transcribed his own phonetic version. For instance, Yuchi was also written as Hughchee, Euchee, and Uge. Reduced in numbers by epidemics, starvation, slavery, alcoholism, and war with Europeans and other tribes, the remnants of weaker tribes merged with stronger ones.
    As boys, my father and his friends collected boxes of arrowheads, spearheads, and potsherds from creek banks and burial mounds all around our area. Their collection is now housed in a museum at the University of Tennessee. My father used to lead us kids on similar