Before I go into my spill, let me tell you a true story.

My dad used to tell me that if an animal wasn’t trying to eat me and I didn’t need to eat it, then leave it alone. That’s not to say that he never killed a wasp. He and my little brother were highly allergic to bee stings so when a nest of hornets decided to nest on our front porch, he did what he had to do to ensure that Mark didn’t get stung.

I don’t ever remember my dad killing a snake, either, and the things he did kill, we ate. Of course, our dog, Rusty (half pug, half chihuahua) had no qualms about snake killing. He once grabbed a copperhead just seconds before my brother would have stepped on it.

I do remember my daddy killing a pack of wild dogs, because one of them trapped my brother, Johnny, in the barn. Wild dog packs work in unison. One lures or traps the prey then the others move in for the kill.

If I remember correctly, Johnny had gone into the barn to feed his calf. At that time, our neighbor about a mile down the road had been having trouble with a pack of about thirteen dogs that were taking down calves and picking them clean, leaving only bones in the field. The wild dogs had become a real threat and Daddy had been telling us to stay close to the house. (Back in those days, we kids would wander a mile or more from the house, just playing in the woods and I was bad about wandering off to explore.) Johnny picked up a stick and was yelling, then my dad ran into the barn and started hollering at the dog, it ran out. I am not sure where Rusty was at, maybe off galivanting with me.

Later, Daddy made a decision that went against his nature. He and my uncle went pack hunting down on the creek. I can still recall standing on the front porch, cringing and feeling mixed emotions as I would heard gunfire and then a whimper several times. The dogs had a right to live, too, but I was relieved that my brother was alive and I knew my dad was doing what he had to do in order to protect us. This wasn’t an otherwise good dog in the henhouse like Old Yeller. This was a feral, hungry pack of predators, working in unison to bring down cattle and kids. Maybe they had once been somebody’s pets but their humans forsook them. I remember Daddy saying it wasn’t the dogs’ fault that they were hungry and wild, it was the sorry humans who dumped them.

Back then, people used to drive unwanted animals out in the “middle of nowhere” and abandon them. The dogs would find each other, form packs and attack anything that looked like a meal. We happened to live in the “middle of nowhere” and all of those strays made their way to our home at one time or another, either in the form of a friendly dog, looking for a human family or a wild pack, hoping for a meal. I used to be terrified that the pack would eat me. Even to this day, when I read a story about dogs attacking someone, it takes me months to move past it and I grieve for the families of such horrors. The story of little thirteen-year-old Cory Godsy up in Knott County still haunts me.

Then there were the CATS. In our world there was no such thing as a useless cat. They not only kept us rat-free but they also provided hours of companionship and fun. Some of my best childhood memories involve cats, but I won’t go into them right now.

………….and now………..my spill.

Proverbs 12:10 says, “A righteous man regards the life of his animal, but the tender mercies of the wicked are only cruelty.” Now, let me say that in my own words, “A person who seeks to be in harmony with God’s way respects the life of his or her animal and takes responsibility for it but a person who is out of harmony with the higher way of being does horrible things to animals and thinks of themselves as kind. They are spiritually ignorant and don’t have a clue.”

The following excerpt is from a post I did back in 2016 but it still holds true today…………………

“One after one, people are telling me of incidents where their family pets have been shot, poisoned or maimed and nothing was done, where officials brushed complaints aside and did nothing to investigate them, where people are literally afraid to come forward for fear of retaliation against their families...

…As I comb through state laws, my mouth just drops open at the unfair, lax laws and nonchalant attitudes some people hold in regards to cases involving children and/or animals...

…Let me highlight just two incidents. Someone recently told me that a little dog the children of Sparksville Kentucky’s Antioch Church liked to play with had been shot to death. Who does that? Who kills a friendly dog that an entire congregation of children love? I’m not even sorry to say that I think this is a type of cruelty, not only to the dog, but to those children!.

Sunday, a friend told me that her great-granddaughter… along with nine other children, was walking down the road with their dog in Columbia, Ky. The dog always walked with the children. A man came running out, screaming and cursing at the children. He pulled out a gun and fired eight shots into the dog. Eight red hulls fell to the ground. The children were about fifteen feet from him. He kept firing, even as my friend’s great granddaughter broke into a run toward the dog to try and save it. This man fired a weapon while a child was running toward it, risking her own life to save the dog she loved.  The child, terrified and wailing, fell to the ground and cradled her dead dog in her arms. The man who shot it? He had no compassion, either for the child or the dog, nor the other nine children who were terrified for their lives. The girl’s mother took photographs of the dog and of the evidence, but the police, upon arriving on the scene, refused to do anything because when the dog fell, his head landed on the man’s property. The girl’s parents said they thought it was wanton endangerment of a minor but the police went on to say that because they were only children that their testimony wouldn’t amount to anything in court, that it would simply be the children’s word against the shooters. The officer didn’t have to go home with the little girl that night and hold her when her nightmares started. The shooter didn’t have to go to the hospital with her when she became so hysterical that she needed medical help. Furthermore, when the girl’s father stated that it was against the law to fire a gun in a residential area, the officers told him that it was a “misdemeanor at best.” However, I’m left wondering. How is this NOT child abuse? Would you want your child to witness that? To go through that horrific experience? Besides, officials told the mother that Kentucky laws were on the shooter’s side. The dog had no rights. And apparently, the families of those children have no rights, either. They were brushed off and now, they are afraid to come forward with names for fear of retaliation from a gun-wielding neighborhood bully with anger management problems.….update: the shooter discovered he had cancer not long after this incident and passed away from it. Maybe he was sick at the time of the incident and didn’t know it or maybe, what he sent out into the universe came back to him. Who can say?

…according to the Animal Legal Defense Fund, Kentucky ranks 50th in the nation in regards to animal protection. And, according to the Animal Welfare Alliance, we rank 56th! Even territories have better laws regarding the treatment of animals than we do! Kentucky is a state known for famous horses and award-winning cattle. Why aren’t there better, more humane  laws in place to protect other animals, like dogs and cats?

I leave  you with this quote from the Kentucky Law Journal.

Several studies demonstrate enhanced animal protection laws could significantly impact society by decreasing human violence. As one scholar states, “[t]he [l]ink between violence to human and animal victims is undeniable.”[39] Cruelty to animals has been associated directly or indirectly with violent crime, including sexual homicide, homicide, and rape..[40]  Large numbers of violent criminals begin as animal abusers.[41] One study showed that 75% of prison inmates charged with violent crimes had an early record of animal cruelty.[42] Additionally, adults who abuse animals commonly abuse their spouses and their children, as well as elderly people for whom they are caring.[43] The FBI now officially recognizes a link between animal abuse and violent crime and has begun collecting data on animal abuse.[44] John Thompson, deputy executive director of the National Sheriffs’ Association states, that “[i]f somebody is harming an animal, there is a good chance they also are hurting a human.”[45] Thompson went on to say that “[i]f we see patterns of animal abuse, the odds are that something else is going on.”[46] Putting an end to animal cruelty has the potential to drastically reduce the percentage of violent crime.Anthropologist Margaret Mead once noted, “[o]ne of the most dangerous things that can happen to a child is to kill or torture an animal and get away with it.”

For more information, visit the Kentucky Law Journal at:

https://www.kentuckylawjournal.org/online-originals/index.php/2018/05/08/kentucky-legal-animal-abuse-or-weak-protection-laws

A note on my personal beliefs:

*I believe there are only three motivations for every act of humanity: fear, love, and stupidity which I define as the willingness to remain ignorant in order to avoid personal growth and/or responsibility. Deliberate ignorance destroys lives. 

When people fear being powerless they become greedy and cruel in order to feel that they have power, but love (gratitude, appreciation) causes faith (positive feelings and thankfulness for a thing coming to pass as if though an expectation has already been met, even before we see it with our natural eyes) to rise up within us and  when we live in love, fear has no home in us. It can’t stay. Love chases it away. Animal abuse, actually any kind of bullying, narcissism, greed, or abuse is a result of fear of being powerless or not enough. When you realize that you are enough, you no longer have to fear not being enough.  Animal neglect, however, is a result of biting off more than you can chew because you’re ignorant of your own limitations.

 

Kentucky is home to more fresh running water than any state other than Alaska. (So let me take a moment to say: when you visit our lakes and streams, PICK UP YOUR TRASH!)One of those rivers was made famous by John Prine in his song, Paradise, in 1971, when the lyrics said, “Daddy won’t you take me back to Muhlenberg County down by the Green River where Paradise lay….” But Green River is so much more than just words in a great song.

Green River is one of the most biologically diverse rivers in the world! It is 384 miles long and flows through a KARST landscape, the limestone of which gives it a green hue, and it has caves that open into the river bottom. Entire teams of horses, wagons and drivers have vanished in the “bottomless areas” of Green River. One such place that this occurred was Hidden River Cave in Horse Cave, Kentucky, where my brother, Mark aka Modo, was born! https://hiddenrivercave.com/

Green River is home to more than 150 fish species, more than 70 mussel species, and 43 endemic species (species existing nowhere else in the world; rare and exotic snails, mussels and fish). This includes nine endangered mussel species and endangered freshwater shrimp (the Kentucky cave shrimp). It is a 9,230 square-mile watershed. There are some pretty strange fish in that river, like the gar. An assortment of birds, such as the Little Blue Heron and the Bald Eagle frequent the river to “fish.” Green River gives life to more species of plants and animals than any other Ohio River tributary.

The portion of the Green River that occurs within Mammoth Cave National Park is designated as a Wild River. Green River is one of the best locations in Kentucky to view bald eagles (one man in Campbellsville photographed 14 at once) and contains the only known location in Kentucky for a rare plant species in the pea family.

Russell Creek, in Adair County, Kentucky, is a major contributor to Green River and Native American tools and artifacts have been found along the river.

Muhlenberg County’s, (once the largest coal-producing county in the nation) coal industry depends greatly on access to the river, as does the aluminum industry in Henderson County. The river rises from Kings Mountain, Kentucky, and winds along, fed by multiple streams until it reaches the dam at Green River Lake near Campbellsville. It then continues west and is fed by Little Barren River before entering the Mammoth Cave National Park where it is fed again by the Nolin River. Then continuing westward it is joined by the Barren River. It then takes a more northwesterly turn as it proceeds through western Kentucky. *original photographs taken by Darlene Campbell where Adair County’s Snake Creek empties into Green River.

https://www.britannica.com/place/Cumberland-Plateau

In his book, Upper Cumberland Country, William Lynwood Montel talks about a culture that permeates Northern Tennessee and parts of Kentucky that stretches from Adair County at the edge of the Pennyroyal Region across Russell, Casey, Pulaski, Wayne, Clinton, Cumberland and eastward to the Cumberland Gap and on down into Tennessee. He calls this region the Upper Cumberland and says that in this region people are “wed to the land.” I suppose one could say that for those of us who’s ancestors arrived during the 1700 and 1800s , the land is sacred. There is a “spirit” in this place that has been here since long before the first European settlers arrived and once you fall in love with this land, it remains with you forever, no matter how far you travel. It calls you back. In that sense, those of us who understand the richness and the history of this place and what it meant to our ancestors, truly are wed to the land. The land which now forms the border between Kentucky and Tennessee was once the southwestern border of North Carolina and Virginia.  Eventually, Tennessee and Kentucky were carved out of Virginia and North Carolina. If Virginia is Kentucky’s mother, then North Carolina is her father and Tennessee is her sister.

This region is known as the Cumberland Plateau which technically encompasses areas of West Virginia, and Alabama, as well. The river that flows through this land is now called the Cumberland, but that was not always the case. Once it was called Wasioto by the Shawnee men, women, and children who LIVED there (not just hunted or camped but LIVED). Wasioto was home to Mound Builders before the Shawnee. The river was sacred to all tribes in the area. One legend has it that there was a terrible massacre there when an encampment of Cherokee women and children were slaughtered at Yahoo Falls near what is now the Kentucky/Tennessee border.

In the late 1700 and early to mid1800s people settled along the Cumberland River in such places as Hawkins, Hancock, Scott, Fentress and Campbell counties in Tennessee and of course, there were no state lines drawn, so some of these families also settled in what is now Leslie, Harlan, Pulaski, Wayne, Clinton, Cumberland, Adair, Russell, Johnson, McGoffin, Whitley, McQueary, Bell, Knox, Laurel, Floyd, Johnson, Perry, Knott, and Casey counties in Kentucky. They came from the New River area of Virginia and North Carolina, many of which were descendants of the White Top Band of Sizemore Indians, some of which are documented as old “Cheraw” or remnants of the Saura people who had been decimated by smallpox. Other were documented as having been born at Fort Christana and a place called Catawba Town. They were a mixture of Tutelo, Saponi, Catawba, Saura and other tribes of the area which had come together due to being decimated by diseases brought over from Europe (mainly Smallpox) for which they had no immunity. Some had Algonquian ties, as well. In time, many of them referred to themselves as “Cherokee” because Cherokee became synonymous with “Indians from the Southeastern U.S.” And, in fact, many of these families did have people of mixed Cherokee, Shawnee, Chickasaw, Creek, and Algonquian tribes marry into their lines.

As their freedoms and rights dwindled in Virginia and the Carolinas, as their lands were stolen, they pushed westward into the mountains, cliffs, caves, valleys, swamps, and gorges of the Cumberland Plateau. They were seeking a place just “to be.”

Thanks to the Racial Integrity Act in Virginia that affected all the surrounding areas, census takers labeled these people based on their own impressions of them. There was a deliberate effort to eradicate the “Indians” by making them either White citizens or designating them as “Mulattos” or “Free People of Color.” It was a time period where being White meant you got to keep your family together, own land and vote. Being mulatto meant you got to live “free,” but you had no legal rights and being Indian meant you didn’t exists unless you agreed to go to a concentration camp (well, they were called Reservations but they were the equivalent of concentration camps.) So, it came to be that Kentucky, once a part of Virginia and North Carolina, had “NO INDIANS.” Of course not, they were politically ripped asunder, buried, ignored, and forgotten.

Due to their inability to point to themselves on Cherokee rolls, they were often denied tribal membership, not because they were not Native American but because they were not documented Cherokee. The descendants of these people make up much of the Upper Cumberland area today. They handed down legends, year after year, generation after generation, of a great-grandmother or great-grandfather who was “Indian.” Some of them remembered they were not Cherokee and used terms like Blackfeet, but many genuinely believed they were Cherokee because it was the only name they had heard repeated. They were made fun of and accused of being wannabe Indians, but the truth is that their heritage was stolen through genocide, sometimes accidental, sometimes on purpose, and in time, they assimilated and became “White” or “Black” just like the government had always wanted them to do.

Sizemore Indians and their kinfolk and neighbors—they often traveled in groups from the same areas, being a mixture of multiple Native branches and Scotch-Irish, Quakers, French and German–and their neighbors settled along the Cumberland River in what is now southern Kentucky and Northern Tennessee. Family names included Riddles, Starnes/Stearns, Bowman, Bolin/Bowling/Bollin, Cox, Wallen, Leach, Harris, Choate, Turner, Gipson, Sizemore, Greene, Smith, Marsh, Moore, Collins, Mullins, Phelps, Phipps, Tallant, Ramsey, Cooper, Harmon, Neal/Neil, Denny, Downey, Wells, Brown, Graham, Blevins, Fields, Fugate, White, Adams, and more.

Now back to the Cumberland River itself, Wasioto is almost 700 miles long and drains from a whopping 18,000 square miles! Multiple rivers and streams flow into the Cumberland River including the Red River, Big South Fork and others. At one point there is only about 2.8 miles of land between the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers (which is fed by the Holston River, flowing out of what is now North Carolina and the French Broad River.)

The Cumberland Plateau, the world’s longest hardwood forested plateau, is home to many plants and animals found nowhere else.

The Cumberland Plateau rises more than 1,000 feet above the Tennessee River Valley to a vast tableland of sandstone and shale dating as far back as 500 million years. The rivers of this region, have eroded away the softer rock beneath, leaving rock houses (natural bridges), caverns, cliffs and caves along the river and stream beds. “From Williamsburg, Ky., above the falls, to the Kentucky–Tennessee state line, the Cumberland crosses a highland bench in the Cumberland Plateau and flows in a gorge between cliffs 300–400 feet (90–120 m) high.” (encyclopedia Britannica)

In 1952, Wolf Creek Dam was built to create Lake Cumberland, caves with petroglyphs (according to older local residents that I’ve interviewed) were flooded, never to be explored again. The community of Rowena as evacuated and flooded. The graves were dug up and moved to the nearby Watauga community and the community’s official records were sent to Burnside, Kentucky, a few miles upstream.  Wolf Creek Dam is the 25^th largest of its kind in the United States and Lake Cumberland is over 100 miles long and over a mile wide. It is the 9^th largest lake in the U.S. and the larges man-made. It has a capacity of 6,100,000 acre-feet of water, enough to cover all of Kentucky in 3” of water.

Over the years the dam has had a multitude of problems and issues, including that fact that 19 years after it was built, sinkholes developed around the electrical grid near the base of the dam and caused a near failure of the dam. In the late 1960s, liquid concrete was pumped into the dam but that didn’t stop the leaks, so in the 1970s a concrete wall was inserted in the earthen part of the dam, but that didn’t work, either. Uncontrollable seepage continued all the way up until 2005 when the dam was on the verge of collapsing and obliterating the town of Burkesville, Kentucky. In 2007, the lake was lowered to 40 feet and a seven-year, $309,000,000 rehabilitation of the dam included a longer, deeper wall built into the dam’s earthen section.  This wall, completed in 2014, is two feet thick and extends 300 feet into the limestone base. The dam is now considered safe by the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers. However, they say if the dam were being built today, it would not be built in its current area due to the nature of limestone and karst formations. 

Not far from Wolf Creek Dam is the Dale Hollow Dam which forms Dale Hollow Lake. Clinton County, Kentucky, sits between the two lakes with Dale Hollow to the south and Lake Cumberland to the North.

Rich in history, beautiful beyond belief, wild and rugged, a tremendous area for trout fishing, home to abundant wildlife and trees found nowhere else in the world, the Cumberland River and surrounding plateau have their enemies, TRASH, DEBRIS, and GRAFFITI. The trash is a result of human carelessness, laziness, and ignorance. The debris is a result of homes too close to the riverbanks and the graffiti is a result of stupidity and ignorance. There’s just no other way to phrase that one.  I end this little essay with a plea, if you swim the waters, or fish, or kayak or go white water rafting, if you live on the banks, or go on a picnic or a hike or do anything at all, please, please and PLEASE pick up your trash and don’t leave a mess behind you. It is a karst landscape which means everything finds its ways into the streams, caves, earth and waterways.

Original Photos:

Cumberland Falls, first three photos by Scott Harris, fourth photo by Darlene Campbell

Big South Fork, photos by Darlene Campbell

Rock House Bottom/aka: Creelsboro Arch and Cumberland River, photos by Darlene Campbell

Left: Adair County, Kentucky, photo by Darlene Campbell. Left Paintsville, Kentucky in Johnson County, photo by Darlene Campbell and above: Old PennsStore in Casey County (part of the store and surrounding property are in Boyle and Marion Counties, as well.)

SOURCES:

https://www.britannica.com/place/Cumberland-River

https://www.somerset-kentucky.com/news/maintenance-at-wolf-creek-dam-on-hold/article_84fe4566-9167-11ea-9cb8-5f9e5b20759d.html#:~:text=The%20dam%2C%20built%20on%20soluble,lake%2C%20was%20about%20to%20fail.

https://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/map/USA/tennessee_map.htm

---

https://sherpaguides.com/tennessee/upper_cumberland_plateau/

Explore Lake Cumberland [dc1]

Explore Cumberland Plateau [dc2]

Upper Cumberland Country by William Lynwood Montell–1993 University of Mississippi Press, Mississippi

Life in These River Hills by Mary Etta Neal–2006, Old Seventy Creek Press, Albany, Kentucky

A Wandering Tribe: Dispersal of the Catawba Nation 1800 to 1900 by Steven “Pony” Hill | 2016–Backntyme Publishing, Crofton, Kentucky

Cherokee by Blood, Volume 1, Applications 1-1550 Paperback – December 30, 2019; Jerry S. Wright

History of the Cherokee Indians by Emmett Starr, originally published 1929. Now available here: https://www.amazon.com/History-Cherokee-Indians-Legends-Folklore/dp/0806317299/ref=pd_sbs_2/134-6893923-8755815?pd_rd_w=wyVES&pf_rd_p=f8e24c42-8be0-4374-84aa-bb08fd897453&pf_rd_r=X9PQGF4XQX1AZ8B6EJ4P&pd_rd_r=b0e52a4a-86f2-47e4-9ddb-48951c67f087&pd_rd_wg=fFXL2&pd_rd_i=0806317299&psc=1