Introduction

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The land and the people.

The words can stir vivid images and strong emotions, perhaps because all of us are tied to a place, a people. Scratch the soil deep enough and you will likely find traces of the ties others had to the same place long before, if you know how to recognize the signs.

Exploring the lengthy chain of human links to the land occupied by Fort Benning is the purpose of this book. Fortunately, skilled observers for some time have been searching for signs left long ago by earlier people. These observers, including archeologists, historians, and others, have gathered enough evidence for a true narrative sparked with mystery and adventure, tragedy and courage.

Scientific fact and informed speculation track an ongoing human presence on Fort Benning land as far back as the Ice Age. Following in the footsteps of these prehistoric visitors were hundreds of generations who also left fragments to be found from their lives.

The proud tradition of the Infantry of the United States Army is integral to the unfolding story. Indeed, little of the knowledge in these pages would ever have come to light without efforts sponsored by the Army to investigate and document the post's rich cultural history.

Since the military arrived in 1918, tens of thousands of American soldiers have trained at Fort Benning and gone on to fight in every major conflict the United States has faced since then. In small towns and large cities across the nation, families cherish photographs of young soldiers who spent time at Fort Benning, Georgia.

Some of the most respected American military leaders in the twentieth century were stationed on the post-Omar Bradley, Dwight Eisenhower, George Marshall, George Patton, and Colin Powell, to cite only a few. Like the officers and enlisted troops today, they came to know the oak-lined streets of the Main Post Cantonment and the many other landmarks on the post's approximately 182,000 acres.

An account of how the Infantry came to call Fort Benning home comes near the end of this book because the Army's arrival occurred relatively late in the human sequence of events in the sand hills adjoining the Chattahoochee River. First there were the Native Americans who occupied the landscape until the 1800's when they were driven away to make room for white settlers.

Ongoing excavations continue to uncover artifacts dating back thousands of years when prehistoric hunters stalked game in the forests and pitched camps overlooking the winding creeks. Pieces of crude stone bowls followed in time by artfully decorated pottery document passing centuries and ways that early people learned to adapt to make life easier.

While the Creeks, Yuchis, and other Indians are long gone from the area, Fort Benning, indeed all of the surrounding region, is filled with places, rivers, and creeks bearing their names-Cusetta, Coweta, Upatoi, Ochille, Uchee, Chattahoochee. Exploring who left these words as their legacy is one facet of this volume. Indeed, descendants of Native Americans who once lived on Fort Benning land continue to show interest in historical and archeological research on the post even though their homes are now in Oklahoma, Florida, and Alabama.

There are countless others who made their marks in the earth of Fort Benning, and their times and roles are also examined. Tales of bravery fill the early colonial years when Georgia's British founder, James Edward Oglethorpe, traveled at great risk through the wilderness to meet with the Indian leaders at a village on Fort Benning. William Bartram, the famous naturalist, was another early visitor. He sketched and wrote about the plants and animals so vibrantly that some of his readers ultimately left their homes to see this new world for themselves. And there were others who dared to explore the uncharted land, including Hernando de Soto, a Spanish conquistador on a feverish search for gold. Spanish missionaries were on a different quest, a spiritual mission to convert the Indians to Christianity. Farmers, slaves, and mill families came after them. The struggle faced by colonial pioneers to scratch out their homesteads in a strange, new land mirrors similar struggles enacted across the nation. The colonists' forced displacement of the Indians also reverberated again and again.

When cotton was king in the Chattahoochee Valley, African slaves and their descendants planted and tended the fields, often under threat of the lash. They also built the houses and bridges and performed hundreds of other jobs that shaped the Columbus area into one of the South's most promising young communities in the days before the Civil War. But the cost of slavery was enormous, and its toll is part of Fort Benning's story. Sinking gunboats, blazing bridges, frightened troops caught behind enemy lines, these are the true details of a battle fought after a war stopped when word of peace came too late to the Chattahoochee River.

Once, grist mills were the centerpieces of rural life, places where farmers brought their wheat and corn to be ground into meal and stayed awhile to socialize with neighbors too rarely seen. Mills, particularly one named Eelbeck, were important in Fort Benning's history. Hubert G.. Mehaffey, Sr., the miller's son, generously shared his memories and photographs to document a cherished place and a beloved way of life that have all but vanished.

The land and the people. Turn the pages and scratch beneath the surface for traces of those who came before.

Chapter 1: Days of Giants and Ice

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