These families, Goins, Bolin, Helton, Fields are from the Melungeon families of East Tennessee
THE TENNESSEEAN
24 May 1891
ABORIGINAL RELICS
A Melungeon Tribe on the Ohio River
In Illinois
The interest aroused by Miss Will Allen Dromgoole's sketches of the Melungeons of East Tennessee, has been widespread. It has inspired study of local peculiarities in many Southern districts, and the following letter, from Illinois, is of interest, especially to show how common these wandering relics of the savage tribes are.
The name given to these people by Miss Bondeau recalls the Gan tribe of Southern and Middle Tennessee, which has many of the Melungeon attributes. The religious tendencies of the Illinois people are distinctive.
Dear Miss Dromgoole:
I fear you will think I-a stranger-am taking a great liberty in writing to you, but I have read with much interest your articles on the "Melungeons" in the March and May numbers of the Arena, and I want to tell you about a people here who, I think, must belong to that race.
For many years, just how many I cannot tell, but certainly since the early sixties, a set of people known as the Goinses, or Goins tribe, have lived her in Pope County, Ill., and just across the Ohio River in Livingston County, Ky.
The came, they say, from Tennessee. They claim to be of Cherokee descent, and many of them show traces of this in their tal, spare frames, high cheek bones, straight black hair and keen eyes, while others have the kinky hair, flat noses and thick lips of the negro. All have reddish brown skins. Some are darker than others, but it is the same color and differs from any shade of the negro.
They hold themselves utterly distinct and apart from their white and black neighbors, marrying each other.
There are exceptions, but this is the rule, and one girl, now living with the negroes in this town was cut off by her family on this account.
The greater number of these people are named Goins, and they are always spoken of collectively as the Goinses or the Goins tribe but there are other family names among them. Of these the principal on is Helton. Then there is Boulden or Bolden, a Still and a Fields.
Some years ago there was a Goins settlement in Pope County and one in Livingston County, besides families living on the farms lying along the river. Here they rented from the owners or worked, the men as farm hands, the women about the house.
I passed through Kentucky settlement about eighteen years ago. It was a row of dilapidated log cabins set down any way on either side of the road which lay along the top of a ridge about a mile from the river. Some of the homes had little vegetable gardens [truck patches, they were called] around them, but it looked a poverty stricken place and people. There was also a log cabin church, for they are for the most part quiet, peaceable and deeply religious. My home, until three years ago, was on an island in the Ohio River, between these two counties, and often on summer nights we listened to their singing at their church in Illinois. Very sweet and mournful, too, it sounded across the water.
On Sundays they came in crowds to the river bank to baptize the converts, or when their were none of these, to visit back and forth across the river. They delighted in visiting.
One girlcoming fresh from Tennessee where she had been left when her people came, lived for a whiel with us. She told my mother she never heard of the "Good Man" til she came here and knew no difference between Sunday and other days. She said one day when told to close the shutters, "I done shot the blinders." The we children thought was very funny, as many of her expressions were.
One Jim Goins with his family lived some months on our island. The wife went barefooted and clad in the thinnest of cotton dresses until they left near Christmas. My mother ordered her clothes which she declined, declaring she was not cold.
George Hilton, the head of the Hilton family was considered by the white people the most intelligent of the lot. He worked for us more than a year and my father taught him to read and write a little. He looked like an Indian, tall, with straight black hair and black eyes. He was very superstitious, a strong believer in signs and omens, and a great weather prophet. He was afraid of the dark. I never heard that he feared anything else but go outside the house after dark without a light he would not. When twitted with cowardice, he would say;
"You kid call it what you please. I jus' aint a-gwine."
From the first their sole aim and desire seemed to be to "get out to the Nation" as they expressed it.
A few years ago the greater part of them went - and the Nation refused to receive them. After this they scattered. Only a few of them drifted back here where still a few were left.
It was at this place, Golconda, Ill., that [in 1839 I think] the Southern Indian tribes crossed the Ohio River when they were taken out to the reservations, and I have thought this perhaps why the Goinses came here. At least, no one seems to know anything about it, and I can think of no other reason for it.
They claim relationship with the Cherokees. They came here not many years after the crossing of the tribes. They settled on either side of the river not farther away than six or eight miles from the Indian crossing place, and afterwards went in to join them.
I have always been interested in this strange people, but never could learn anything more about them than what I have told you. Since your article appeared I truly think my Goinses must have come from your Melungeons, and this is why I have written all this to you.
Isabell J. Bordeau
Golconda, Polk County, Ill.
