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 25th largest of its kind in the United States and Lake Cumberland is over 100 miles long and over a mile wide. It is the 9th 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:
Rowena, Kentucky, photo by Darlene Campbell
Cumberland Falls, first three photos by Scott Harris, fourth photo by Darlene Campbell
Big South Fork, photos by Darlene Campbell
Wolf Creek Dam, Photo by Scott Harris
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.)
My grandfather was born in the early 1900s in a school for “Coloreds” and was delivered by local African-American women who were friends and neighbors of his parents. His father was half-Mexican and maybe they were the only Mexican family in Kentucky at that time in history. I really don’t know. I say he was half-Mexican because his father, who may have been born in South America, actually grew up in Mexico and came here as an orphan at the close of the Mexican-American War with a soldier named James. My great-grandmother died in childbirth, died right there in that school building, or at least that’s what the birth record says. Later, his father remarried a woman who was said to be half-Cherokee and she raised my grandfather. My dad would later be born in a Share Cropper’s shack that had once served as a slave cabin, about two miles up the road.
I have heard all of my life how my dad considered the Garnet girls to be his “sisters,” and how when their daddy was dying he sent word down the hill for Daddy to bring his guitar and come “sing him home.” So Daddy did. He took his guitar to “Uncle’s” house and sang to him just before he died. In the 1950s my dad’s siblings attended the Rosenwald School that replaced the schoolhouse where their father was born. They may have been the only “White” kids in the school at that time. I never understood any of this as a child. All I knew was that the people living in that community were my dad’s friends.
Seems like that’s the way it should always be, people just being good to each other. Some of the people in the community were my dad’s friends up until the day they died. Most of them passed away before Daddy. I still remember Billy in his wild colored clothes catching a ride into town with Daddy on Saturdays and Cat that Daddy hung around sometimes. The Gradys, the Dudleys, the Franklins and Richards from Gradyville and Jones Chapel Road, from Flatwoods—they were all friends and family.
When I was a kid, my mom and I spent hours putting together jigsaw puzzles. I got pretty good at it. This week I put a puzzle together and as I did, I had a Forrest Gump’s Momma kind of moment, but instead of thinking that life is like a box of chocolates, I thought, “Life is like a jigsaw puzzle.”
WE PUT IT TOGETHER WITHOUT A BOX LID TO GUIDE US
Except we don’t get to look at the picture on the the box, because we left it somewhere. And we can’t remember where. We are aware that it had an image on it, but we can’t remember exactly what it looked like. The nuances escape us. We may have some idea that it was a garden or a yellow cat or whatever, but we don’t have the exact image to go by, just some vague memory.
So, we look at the pieces in front of us and try to fit them together. Sometimes, the colors, shapes and patterns match up perfectly and sometimes, they don’t. Often, we’re like nine-year-old children, trying to cram pieces together that don’t really go together and then we get mad because our picture isn’t unfolding in a way that makes sense to us.
It’s not impossible to put the puzzle together without the complete picture to guide us. I have done that a time or two. It just takes quite a bit of slowing down the mind and allowing intuition to come into play, paying attention to those subtle variations in colors, sizes, patterns, and shapes of the pieces. I mean you must analyze every piece in relation to the last piece you put down and the surrounding pieces. When we do this, without trying to force the pieces together to create the immediate results that we want, we soon see a true picture unfolding and each time we fit one piece with another that naturally goes with it, we feel a small sense of exhilaration and triumph.
WE HAVE AMNESIA AND LEFT IT SOMEWHERE.
We sort of come into this world with spiritual amnesia and the older we get, the longer we go without a view of the “box lid,” the less we remember. We start listening to other people tell us how we’re supposed to be and what the pictures of our lives are supposed to look like. We start trying to fit the pieces into place according to what others say, but here’s the thing. They lost their box lids, too, and most don’t even know what their own puzzles are supposed to look like, let alone yours! So, they try to tell you how to put your puzzle together based on what they think theirs are maybe, possibly, supposed to be. It doesn’t work. It leads to frustration and to anger. Some people get so mad that you’re not putting your puzzle together like they think it ought to be that they try to force you, even hurt you. Some go so far in their need to control as to destroy another person’s puzzle. They may try to control you, trick you, manipulate you, intimidate you, threaten you—all because it unnerves them that they might not actually be the master puzzle solvers they have believed themselves to be. They might get so fearful that somehow it is going to hurt them if they allow you to put your own puzzle together. They might also get afraid someone else is going to damage their puzzles or steal their pieces, so they set up a guard and vehemently guard their puzzles, not allowing anyone in who doesn’t follow their prescribed rules for solving puzzles. Others scream at you and tell you how bad you are because your picture isn’t looking the way they think it’s supposed to look.
Sometimes, we feel horrible about ourselves, and we think that somehow, we’re just not good at putting our puzzles together and that there is something wrong with our brains or our hearts or that we are just not “good people.” We walk around feeling guilty and unworthy because we aren’t putting our puzzles together to please others, or we compared our puzzles to theirs and ours looks smaller or duller or more jumbled. We go to the puzzle “experts”, and they tell us how to put our puzzles together. But guess what? They don’t have the box lid to our puzzles either!
So, what do we do?
WE CALL THE PUZZLE-MAKER
Imagine that you know that the original creator of your puzzle and that this creator knows exactly where each piece goes. This puzzle-maker comes and whispers in your ear as you put your puzzle together and tells you which piece to pick up and how to turn it and points to the exact place where it goes. There is no stress on you. Your struggle ceases. The only way you can go back to feeling stressed, guilty, fearful, chaotic, etc. is to resist the help being offered to you, if you ignore the puzzle-maker’s instructions.
I will interject here that sometimes well-meaning people will come along and point out to you that you are in error, because the instructions you’re receiving from the puzzle-maker aren’t the same as what they think is right, so they want to remind you that there’s something wrong with your hearing and they offer their services to translate for you and tell you that you should follow their instructions as they are clearly more qualified to talk to Puzzle-Maker than you, but they’re not, because Puzzle-Maker talks to them about their puzzles and to you about yours.
So, if we trust the puzzle-maker and stop listening to everyone else, we find that we are not only putting our puzzle together almost effortlessly, without relentlessly struggling to jam together pieces that don’t belong together, we’re also having a wonderful time trusting and getting to know the puzzle-maker.
Each person’s life is a unique puzzle that is only finished when we leave our earth bodies. It doesn’t matter if anyone else in the world can see that our picture is unfolding as it should or if they can see the complete picture when we’re done. It’s not their job to see it. It’s not even ours. It’s simply our job to put our puzzle together and we can either do it without guidance, guessing our way through or we can listen to the soft guiding voice of the puzzle-maker.
TRUST THAT THE PIECES WILL COME TOGETHER
I believe that everything in my life is working out for my good, for my highest benefit, so long as I don’t get impatient and try to force the pieces together before the Puzzle-Master tells me where to put them. People can say whatever they want, do whatever they want but as for me, I will follow my internal spiritual guidance system. I paraphrase what King David of Israel once said of his puzzle-maker, “What you say, your word, is a lamp that lights my path.” There are times when I don’t know exactly what I should wish for or ask for or which way to go, but if I wait, the answer comes. The indwelling I Am in me helps me with this weakness, asking for things so wonderful and deep that my natural mind hasn’t caught up just yet and it’s not even possible for me to speak or write those deepest desires with ordinary speech. Still, they are there and if I only follow the gentle guiding of my puzzle-maker, the whole picture unfolds, a piece at a time.
So, each of us has our own life path to walk, our own puzzle to complete. The puzzle-maker is constantly whispering to us “This piece goes here,” or “no, not there. Not yet.” It’s up to us to choose whether to listen and trust enough to follow the puzzle-maker’s guidance or not. There is never any force involved. If there is force, it’s not the puzzle-maker doing the forcing, it’s another person without a box lid, another person who can’t see the big, eternal picture. If we listen to those Spirit whispers and obey them, our life-puzzles go together so much easier.
As for me, I will live my life trusting the puzzle-maker to guide me in putting every piece into its proper place. If that brings people into my life, great. If that causes some people to walk out, it doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate them, or love them, it just means that my highest call is not to complete their puzzles, it’s to complete mine.
