By Stephen Smoot, The Pendleton Times
FRANKLIN, W.Va. — According to Cherokee lore, in the old days animals could speak in the same tongues as the human beings with whom they lived in harmony. “But as time went on,” it reads in James Mooney’s “Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees,” “the people increased so rapidly that their settlements spread over the whole earth and the poor animals found themselves beginning to be cramped for room.”
At “the Mulberry Place,” the bears first met in council and resolved on war with the human race, but could not come up with an effective weapon with which to fight. Deer, fishes, birds, insects, and reptiles also came together to form a strategy. Eventually “the assembly then began to name and devise various diseases. One after the other, and had their invention finally failed them not one of the human race would have been able to survive.”
Mankind did have its advocates in the world of plants. “Each tree, shrub, and herb, down even to the grasses and mosses, agreed to furnish a remedy for each one of the diseases named and each said, ‘I shall appear to help man when he calls on me in his need.”’
One of those herbs carried the name a’tali kuli, which in the Cherokee language means “it climbs the mountain.” Today most refer to it by its Chinese name “ginseng.”
Starting on Sept. 1 and extending through Nov. 30, many in West Virginia and throughout the Appalachians will climb the mountain in search of this root coveted on both sides of the Pacific Ocean.