We're newcomers to "The Mountain," even families who've lived here long enough to count time through generations of Alleghany residents.

What drove the first settlers to these mountains? What did they find up here worth enduring harsh and wickedly long winters? Certainly not the deer, turkey and smaller game, which were plentiful from the Piedmont to the sea. Perhaps they, too, became captives of these grand, rolling mountains.

Long before our European forefathers set foot on this nation's eastern shores, others handed down stories of ancient ancestors who heard a distant land's call to, "Come and see!"

Thousands of them walked across a miles-wide land bridge between the European continent and North America, then scattered to the winds. These people with broad faces and dark eyes moved cautiously through unknown wilderness, settling near creeks and rivers. Years passed by the tens of thousands from the Paleolithic Period of 9,000 to 40,000 years ago, through the Archaic, Woodland and Mississipian, to the Historic, between 1500 and 1800 A.D. But these nomadic, searching people who called themselves "Cherokees" left tangible evidence of their lengthy presence.

I'm holding a stone ax head the length of my palm. A deep groove near one end goes all the way around, made for lashing the head to its split-limb handle. The head's smooth surface suggests long hours of grinding stone against stone until its maker was satisfied. The cutting edge is still sharp.

A foreleg bone of a fox or similar animal was trimmed into an awl's shape while still soft, then burned hard for use. Its large end is rough and cupped where bone once rubbed bone, yet the cups' edges are smooth, worn down by years of pressure against a callused palm. A brown clay bowl 10 inches in diameter and eight high remains intact despite the centuries. If these simple objects were accidentally left behind, how great was their loss?

Three dozen arrowheads in my lap have distinctly different shapes, varying from the pattern we would draw, to ovals two inches long and a fourth that wide. They appear to be functional, not artistic. Their bases are fluted or short, straight and flat like stems. The difference tells more of the period in which they were used than the way they fastened to the arrow's shaft. Colors and material range from white milk quartz to jet black chert, depending upon where the stone was found. Most have rippled edges worn smooth by years spent underground. An oval stone three inches long and just over an inch wide may have been a small hide-scraping tool or an unfinished lance point. A small stone drill resembles a flattened golf tee, but its sharpened point and sides served a much different purpose.

Books about arrowheads include color pictures of delicately shaped points that would grace a modern jeweler's display case. One resembles a dark, rust-colored, miniature Christmas tree. Radiocarbon dating says it's 1,400 years old. Dark shadows are buried deep within arrowheads and knives made of obsidian, the hardened and glassy result of volcanic activity. Hair-like veins of several colors appear in a nearly transparent stone knife used more than 5,000 years ago. Tiny arrowheads often called "bird points" may be those, or tips for arrow-like "darts" used with primitive throwing sticks called "Atlatls," simple predecessors to the more familiar bows and arrows.

Several Alleghany residents search for ancient artifacts in freshly plowed fields and, ideally, right after a steady rain. Some months ago, students in ASU's School of Archaeology had a "dig" in this county and found several samples of our history used centuries before Columbus "sailed the ocean, blue" and "discovered" America.

By the very early 1800's, the Cherokees had become a largely agricultural society living in 200 scattered villages, each of which had 50 or more stick-and-mud homes resembling overturned bowls. No longer nomadic wanderers, they soon adopted a constitution similar to our own, had criminal and civil courts, churches and schools.

In 1819, white settlers mined for gold on Cherokee land in North Georgia. The gold rush that followed pitted fortune-seekers against the Cherokee Nation over land owned by treaty with the United States. President Andrew Jackson – whom the Cherokees helped to defeat the Creeks at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend — signed the "Indian Removal Act" of 1830.

On May 17, 1838, the "Treaty of New Echota," passed by one vote in the U.S. Senate, sending nearly all of the Cherokee people along the "Trail of Tears" to a reservation in Oklahoma. Most walked, the same way their ancient ancestors reached Alleghany County. But these pilgrims had no choice, having been forcibly evicted from the land they settled thousands of generations before. Inadequate provisions and winter's cold killed 4,000 of their number along the route.