Old-Timey Camps and Wagon Trains

It’s often interesting to take a step back and look at recent events through the lens of history. And, boy, is this ever true today in the US when it comes to the illegal immigration issue. A couple of examples come to mind. 

Take the reaction of some conservatives when confronted with the harsh conditions in which the US government is holding young migrant children along the southern border. I’ve seen some of these supposedly good Christians on social media trying to blame the immigrant parents for putting their children at risk by making a dangerous trek through Mexico to find a better life in America. We shouldn’t feel bad about children sleeping on concrete floors, they would say, because it was their parents’ choice to put them in harm’s way! What kind of parent would subject their child to an arduous and dangerous journey like that? 

And then we have the wagon train. 

By that, I mean the groups of American settlers crossing the continent by ox-drawn wagons in the 1840-50s to start a new life in Oregon or California. For the sake of safety during this 2000-mile trip, these emigrates formed groups that today might be called “caravans”. Sometimes they paid “wagon masters” to lead them across the plains. Maybe we’d call them “coyotes” or “people smugglers” today. 

The first major trek of this kind was the Great Migration of 1843, in which a thousand-odd emigrants traveled the Oregon Trail, a legendary route that all American schoolchildren learn about. Years ago, on a family road trip to Yellowstone National Park, I insisted on making a detour to South Pass, the relatively low swag in the rugged Rockies that gave Oregon-bound emigrants easy passage over the mountains. 

Another storied mountain pass in American lore is Donner, along the California Trail in the Sierra Nevada. That is where a party of emigrants, taking to the trail too late in the season, were stranded in an early snowstorm and -- as everyone in America, maybe even Donald Trump, surely remembers -- had to resort to cannibalism to survive. 

Okay, that was an extreme form of hardship, but it’s fair to say that the typical trip for these families looking for a better life wasn’t a walk in the park. It’s estimated that one out of ten died along the way. They were trudging across desolate stretches of land, passing through hostile territory, always on the lookout for Indians who didn’t take kindly to Europeans invading their land. And the environment itself could be unforgiving. I’ve heard that, as sensational as Indian attacks on the open, treeless plains could be, more emigrants died from lightning strikes than from arrow strikes. 

When I was growing up in the US, these wagon trains still held a special place in the popular imagination. There was a hit TV show about them when I was a child. In my youth, a highlight in my hometown of Ellijay, Georgia, was the yearly “Wagon Train” festival, where dozens of people, often in cowboy getups, rode horses and wagons across Fort Mountain from the town of Chatsworth. I believe they’ve long since stopped doing that, but it was a feature of our lives for many years. 

In short, white European settlers putting their children through the ordeal of a five-month journey in dangerous circumstances in order to reach a new and better home is celebrated – even cherished -- in American pop culture. It no doubt warms the hearts of those conservatives who get nostalgic over John Wayne Westerns. Meanwhile, mestizo Central Americans doing the same today are to be condemned, demonized. Could it be there is a double standard at play here? 

The other example I had in mind was “concentration camps”. This is how some Democrats have been referring to the detention centers along the southern border where migrants -- children as well as adults -- are being incarcerated, often in deplorable conditions. Conservatives have taken umbrage at any suggestion that these overcrowded facilities can be compared with the notorious concentration camps of Nazi Germany. Others have argued that using the term “concentration camp” outside the context of the Third Reich somehow insults the memory of Holocaust victims. 

A side note to this issue is the little history lesson that some folks have provided, namely that the term “concentration camp” was in fact coined some decades before the Nazis, during the Boer War in South Africa, an ugly enough episode of history where different tribes of white Europeans fought each other over the empty Veld. This factoid was even mentioned in the BBC-HBO miniseries “Years and Years”, about a Trump-like figure rising to power in a post-Brexit dystopian Britain of the near future. I highly recommend it. 

The term “concentration camp” may be modern, but the concept is not, and my own historical connection to it is the fact that my hometown in Georgia was the site of a real, actual concentration camp, Fort Hetzel. This was in 1838, when the state of Georgia, with the help of the US Army, was undertaking a gigantic land grab, a campaign of ethnic cleansing. 

Up until then, Ellijay, located in a shallow valley surrounded the Southern Appalachian Mountains, was part of the Cherokee Nation, which had been doing its best to assimilate to the invading Europeans by, for example, adopting Christianity and a US-style of government. Not that it did them much good. 

By 1838, whites had already been settling on Cherokee land in Georgia, even more so after gold was discovered there, sparking America’s first Gold Rush. Pressure had been building for the Cherokee to give up their homeland in exchange for a reservation in faraway Oklahoma. One faction of Cherokee leaders did eventually agree to this, but against the will of most of their people, who had to be removed from their farms under threat of force. Those rounded up in the mountains surrounding Ellijay where brought to Fort Hetzel, to be gathered there, or “concentrated” if you will, until time for their forced migration west. 

As far as I know, there is no historical plaque in Ellijay commemorating this event. Nothing marks the site of the stockade where over a thousand Cherokee men, women and children, forced off their land, forced to abandon their fields and livestock, were imprisoned in a confined space for months. 

Growing up in Ellijay, my only real source of information about this tragic event was "The Annals of Upper Georgia: Centered in Gilmer County" a chronicle written by a local amateur historian (and husband of my second-grade teacher) George Gordon Ward. Here’s a passage from that book about the roundup of local Cherokee: 

“Touching incidents were common during removal. An unnamed Indian mother, her violent protestations evidently having been unheeded, was driven into camp at East Ellijay, then Fort Hetzel. Her frenzied condition continued but the white soldiers could not understand her. 

“Then they called an interpreter, who translated the startling fact that when she was seized and forced from her home, some of her small children, in a panic of fear, had fled to nearby thickets and were probably still there.” 

Desperate children separated from parents being held against their will in a concentration camp. Sound familiar? 

According to Ward’s account, the soldiers returned to the woman’s home with her to locate the children. The family was reunited – in the concentration camp. No word on whether they all survived the forced march to Oklahoma. 

It goes without saying that the Removal is a particularly dark stain on American history, which isn’t that pristine to begin with. As events of the last week have shown, things haven’t necessarily gotten better.