By DAVID KITTREDGE
A couple of decades ago, before smartphones and Google maps, I was running some errands in downtown Newport when I was approached by a lost tourist. He was holding a hand-drawn map of the area roads when he asked for directions to Newbury Harbor. I started to explain the way by pointing to Sunapee Street and telling him that was Route 11-103 which would take him through Guild and that he wanted to bear right when he got to the traffic circle in Wendell which would get him onto Route 103 to Newbury. I then explained that when he got to the next traffic circle on the edge of Newbury that he was to go straight through and that a couple of miles further he would be in Newbury Harbor. The tourist became irate and informed me that there couldn’t be any rotaries on the way to Newbury because no rotaries had been drawn on his map/napkin while he was waving it in front of my face as definitive proof of his statement. I emphatically but politely replied, “Sir, there are two rotaries on the way to Newbury Harbor, you bear right at the first rotary and go straight through at the second rotary,” further explaining that his map/napkin was not drawn in full detail. He became even more heated, now implying that I was lying to him and I finally said loudly, “Good luck!,” then turned and grumbled the rest of my thought to myself as I walked off to return to the errands I was running before I was so rudely interrupted.
This scenario reminds me of the old “Burt and I” records from the sixties which related stories by two down east Maine fishermen, some of which had to do with dealing with lost tourists. In one skit, a tourist asks, “Which way to Millinocket?” The reply is the precious statement, “You can’t get there from he-ah.” In another, a tourist asks, “How far to Jonesboro?” The rejoinder is, “Don’tcha move a damned inch!”
In Vermont, you might hear directions such as, “Take a left where the old church used to be” or “Take a right at the rock that looks like a bear and then take a left at the bear that looks like a rock.” Looking back, I suspect that my lost tourist, with his know it all attitude, had probably run into statements like these before he had met up with me and had become directionally challenged.
Bob Hope told a joke about a lost tourist in Memphis, Tennessee who asked a pedestrian, “How do I get to Nashville?” The reply was, “Sing through your nose!”
I started thinking about the lost tourist situation when I came upon a map of Conquistador Hernando de Soto’s meanderings through the southeastern United States in his search for gold. Conquistador is the Spanish word for conqueror. Now that is a heck of an attitude to have when visiting a foreign country for the first time. As the conquistadors roamed the countryside, bullying the Cherokee people by enslaving the native men and women to perform menial tasks and worse, they were also pumping the tribal leaders for information on where the gold was located. He and his men wandered thousands of miles in their search, never finding any large caches of the precious mineral. Gold was not considered all that valuable to the natives and was viewed merely as decorative or ornamental. The tribesmen considered materials such as flint or obsidian which could be used for tool making far more valuable than gold. So it stands to reason that if the conquistadors had been more humane and respectable in their treatment of the indigenous people that any information concerning the whereabouts of the gold they sought might have been a bit more reliable. I can just imagine the reactions of the tribesmen when the Spanish tourists pumped them for information about gold and where it was located. They might have told the tourists to, “Take a right at the log that looks like an alligator and to take a left by the alligator that looks like a log.” And perhaps, the natives may have thrown in some hand gestures and some sign language telling the conquistadors just where to get off, just for good measure,
Ironically, the Spanish were surrounded by the precious mineral as wandered right smack dab into the area which later came to be known as the ”Gold Belt” which ran through the Carolinas and down into Georgia. In 1799, a 17-pound gold nugget was found laying in a creek in Cabarrus County in North Carolina. In 1803, a 28-pound gold nugget was found near the sight of the first nugget mentioned and the Carolina Gold Rush was on. Next came the Georgia gold rush which netted about 48,000 pounds of gold.
It is satisfying to know that the Cherokee tribes people did much of the gold prospecting and mining during these two gold rush periods and became experts at it. By the time these two gold rushes played out, gold was discovered in California. The Cherokee went on to take advantage of the new strike and established the town of Cherokee, California.
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