By Stephen Smoot
During the summer, regulars frequenting the Smoke Hole region noticed a small change in the trail name. A trail linked to the North Fork Mountain Trail, named after Redman Run, had its name quietly altered to Hickory Trail.
Residents noted that they feared that the forest service had made a mistake, misinterpreting the name of the creek and trail as originating in a slur against American Indians, rather than honoring a black family that repeatedly made history in the Potomac Highlands.
Andrea Brandon, public affairs officer for the United States Forest Service office for the Monongahela National Forest, confirmed this did, in fact, happen.
“In 2021,” she explained, “Forest Service Chief Randy Moore issued a letter supporting Department of the Interior Secretarial Orders addressing derogatory geographic names.” Those came from Deb Haaland, then United States Secretary of the Interior. She opened by declaring the word “squaw” derogatory and working to remove it from areas under that department’s purview.
The United States Forest Service operates under the United States Department of Agriculture, but followed suit.
“Our nation’s lands and waters should be places to celebrate the outdoors and our shared cultural heritage — not to perpetuate the legacies of oppression,” Haaland said in a statement. “Today’s actions will accelerate an important process to reconcile derogatory place names and mark a significant step in honoring the ancestors who have stewarded our lands since time immemorial.”
According to “How Indians Got to be Red” from Nancy Shoemaker in American Historical Review, using the word “red” to describe American Indians came first from the Indians themselves. They used it to distinguish their people from Europeans and Africans. One of the first recorded instances of this came from a Creek representative in 1726 who communicated “We are the Red People now met together.”
Shoemaker went on to explain that “later in the council, the Creek-allied Cowetaw Warrior called the Cherokees ‘those Red People,’ and another Indian speaker remarked that ‘the great men of the white and red people are now friends, and it shall never be my fault if this peace is broke.’ In the council transcript, the phrase ‘red people’ appears only within the speeches of Indian delegates.”
She adds that in the 1700s, Europeans tended to prefer the word “tawny” as a description and that many Indian languages in the future southeastern United States used the term “man-red” as a self-descriptor.
Indians also used versions of the term “red man” through the 1700s to distinguish warriors from others. Shoemaker notes that the term became appropriated as derogatory by the mid-nineteenth century, well after the settlement and naming of places in the Potomac Highlands area.
Conversely, the family name Redman has strong historical basis in Virginia and West Virginia. According to the Revolutionary War Journal, John Redman, born in Hampshire County in 1760, served with the Fifth Troop of the 1st Continental Light Dragoons. His military service was recorded in a pension application submitted to the Hardy County Court where in 1823 Judge Charles Lobb approved his $8 per month earned pension.
The family of John Redman going into the twentieth century includes some famous Americans. Don Redman of Piedmont earned a music degree from Storer College and was one of the early pre-World War II celebrity jazz musicians. Another member of his later family is Henry Louis Gates Jr., notable Harvard University academic.
No specific connecting point exists to link the name “Redman Run” to the Redman family, but that origin point seems far more likely than an attempt to name the creek after a slur. The word as a slur likely did not even exist until well after the naming of the body of water and the place naming conventions in this region lean more toward using proper Indian geographical and other names instead of slurs.
Brandon stated that the forest service conducted research and found no direct ties between the name of the creek and the family. They then “consulted tribal leaders and recommended names based on native tree species found locally,” which led to the naming of Hickory Trail.
