One of the many puzzles I am trying to solve in my study of the Southern Highlands is the disappearance of Yuchi and Shawnee communities. The Yuchi were all over the place in the 1700s. There were large Yuchi towns even in the vicinity of Marion and Old Fort, NC (on I-40 east of Asheville) up until the mid-18th century. Joara, which the Warren Wilson College archaeologists are mistakenly calling a Cherokee town, was undoubtedly Yuchi since it was near modern-day Marion. The main body of Cherokee immigrated into North Carolina from the west during the late 1600s, and never lived east of the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina. In fact, there were only two small Cherokee hamlets in the entire French Broad River Valley(Asheville-Hendersonville-Marshall area) in the mid-1700s. The surviving Indian place names in the French Broad River valley are all Muskogean words - eg Etowah & Swannanoa (Suwanee-owa) As late as the early 1800s, we see maps of northern Georgia and western South Carolina with Yuchi and Shawnee villages on them. The Shawnee were in the Highlands long before the Cherokee. They were either allies or part of the Creek Confederacy, but ethnically not Muskogean. Suwanee, GA in north Metro Atlanta, where the Falcons have their training camp, was obviously a Shawnee town when the white settlers arrived in the 1830s. The State of Tennessee has documented the presence of ethnic Yuchi hamlets in the rugged Cohutta mountains of Polk County, TN and Fannin County, GA as late as 1911. However, by the mid-20th century these families had seemingly disappeared, and most locals today do not even know what a Yuchi is. However, POOF! All the Shawnee towns and most of the Yuchi towns disappeared once the main body of Alabama Creeks were deported to Oklahoma. The "Friendly" Hitchiti Creeks of Georgia also seemed to disappear from history. Yes, there are still Yuchi communities in Oklahoma and the Florida Panhandle, but not nearly approaching the number of Yuchi communities scattered around the Southeast in the 1700s and early 1800s. So, did the ethnic Shawnee and Yuchi just melt into the woods and intermarry with European and African neighbors? Did they cease calling themselves anything but Creek? Did they move to another part of the country? Did they merge with the Creeks, Cherokees and Choctaws in Oklahoma and lose their ethnic identity? So do any of you have ancestors, who were known to be Shawnee or Yuchi, but intermarried into Creek families and thus became known as Muscogee-Creeks in Oklahoma? Inquiring minds want to know! PS - After a month I have not received a response from Moccasin Bend National Park about us camping there this Fall, so I guess the answer is no. We will look elsewhere. Richard T. **************It's only a deal if it's where you want to go. Find your travel deal here. (http://information.travel.aol.com/deals?ncid=aoltrv00050000000047)