Mount Pleasant, An Eighteenth-Century Yuchi Indian Town, British Trader Outpost, and Military Garrison in Georgia

It was on a hot July morning in 1736 when the German Baron Frederick Von Reck arrived on foot with his party at the Yuchi Indian village. Although several Indians rushed to greet him in hopes of receiving gifts, many others were busy preparing for the Busk, or Green Corn ceremony. Women and children cleaned out the debris from around their houses, while the men kept busy painting their bodies and decorating their hair. After a formal greeting with their King Senkaitschi, Von Reck found a suitable vantage point and prepared his sketch book and water colors. The tribe began to gather around an open large hut, as excitement hung in the air. Both the men and women smoked their clay tobacco pipes and spoke in a strange tongue. Suddenly, a group of young men began chanting and beating out a steady rhythm. The scene excited Von Reck as he thought how different these people were from those living only a few miles downstream in the town of Ebenezer. Hurriedly he began to sketch the scene on paper, but the movement and activity began to intensify, frustrating his attempts to completely capture all that he was witnessing. Within an hour more than a hundred people gathered on the bluff, creating a mass of frenzied excitement. The festivities continued late into the night as Von Reck squinted by the firelight to add the finishing touches to his painting. He thought to himself that he would add many details in the comfort of his cabin back at Eben ezer. He lay down his sleeping pad beneath a large oak and lit up his pipe as exhaustion overtook him. On the mat beside him a drunken English deerskin trader snored loudly. All night he dreamed of the exotic scenes that he had witnessed earlier. This was Mount Pleasant-the Yuchi Town as it might have appeared when the adventurer Baron Von Reck visited the town in 1736. The description of his visit described above is conjecture based on historical and archaeological facts. Von Reck left behind a diary and several fascinating watercolors and drawings of his visit, but most of what he witnessed went unrecorded. Reconstructing these events at Mount Pleasant now falls to the historian and archaeologist. Two hundred and fifty two years after Von Reck's visit, on a cold March afternoon, the Yuchi drums on the Savannah River are silent. Light sleet begins to fall and the sounds of the hoot owl, echoing across the swamp, mingle with the sound of the archaeologist's spade as it cuts through the earth. Two chilled, but determined researchers labor to unearth and rediscover the lost Indian town of Mount Pleasant that Von Reck had described so vividly. One of them lets out an excited gasp as glass beads, pottery, and deer bones suddenly appear in the shaker screen. Elated, they both smile as they realize that the important site indeed had been found, and now a new chapter in the Mount Pleasant adventures will be told.