As a teen, Sandburg rode the rails in boxcars, like a hobo, to see the country, from Illinois to Colorado. ”I’m an Idealist.” He once wrote. ”I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m on my way.”
The prize winning poet & author enjoyed solitude in nature, and he bragged that his home up in the foothills here included “millions of acres of sky”. It’s a beautiful and peaceful spot with a fish pond and goats.
It is necessary now and again
for a man to go away and experience loneliness;
to sit on a rock in the forest and as himself,
”Who am I, where have I been, and where am I going?”
Popular among war buffs, here the patriots won an impressive victory against the British. The British commander was a young hothead named “Bloody” Tarleton who had recently killed over 100 men flying a flag of truce at Waxhaws. The patriot commander was 45 year old veteran Daniel Morgan. Morgan chose the site due to thick woods and canebrakes (sugar cane thickets) that would make flanking difficult for the advancing British. His light skirmishers volleyed and fell back, and then his next line was to do similarly. They muffed it, and the British rushed forward, expecting a rout. The patriots about-faced and fired point blank. The British front line faltered while the back was still advancing, and then William Washington’s cavalry, which had emerged from a low spot to keep the enemy cavalry at bay, turned and flanked from the other side. This classic pincer or double envelopment movement is difficult and rare, yet it has won victories for thousands of years.
Tarleton was forced to retreat with his cavalry, reporting over 100 dead and 700 captured. He blamed his troops. After the war he served in the House of Commons, where he argued for continuing the slave trade.
The Mel Gibson movie “Patriot” is based in part on the battle between Morgan and Tarleton here.
After the British took Charleston, they moved inland trying to gain momentum and more loyalists. Here, they lined this narrow ridge with skilled marksmen prepared to defend the high ground. The patriots had troops moving overland from the northwest and local milita massing on the other side. Using Native American tactics of advancing from tree to tree, the patriots were able to get close on both sides and catch the defenders in a deadly crossfire. Having learned that the British commander was wearing a checkered jacket, they targeted and eliminated him, winning a decisive battle here.
The first of the three African American patriots memorialized above, Elaias Bowman, was a free militiaman, one of several who shot the British commander. For some reason that I can’t fathom, there’s a far bigger memorial to the British commander, a Scot named Ferguson, and local visitors speak of him fondly, often leaving stones near his marker. I left a stone for the patriot Bowman instead.
As at the Old North Bridge in Concord, Patriots removed many of the bridge planks and greased the beams. Once the loyalists crossed, they found themselves surrounded by Patriots behind hastily built earth walls with muskets, one medium sized cannon and a swivel gun. The British-employed highlanders attacked with broadswords, which was the last time that tactic was ever tried. Here on February 27th, 1776 the Patriots won a clear victory in the War for Independence.
Normally, I would stop here, but the ranger expressed some views which were misleading and incorrect. The battle is described in the visitor center as America’s “first civil war”. The ranger described the Patriots as ”fake news” northerners and corrupt townspeople who hypocritically denied the people in the backwoods their rights while over-taxing them, using the Regulator rebellion of 1761 to support his argument. Which is poppycock.
Let’s start by noting that the battle took place before America was a country. The Patriots were British colonists in open rebellion, and the loyalists were British mercenaries and colonists paid to put down the rebellion. Any over-taxation and denial of rights was done at the behest of the British Governor, who used a variety of means to control the colony, including bribery, hanging, and dividing the colonists into factions. Without sanctifying the Patriots, some who owned slaves, or condemning the loyalists, some who had been forced to swear oaths, there’s simply no honest way to recast this colonial battle as civil war. The Regulator history is interesting, but it was a tax revolt and was neither a part of the Revolutionary nor Civil War.
The Revolutionary War may have started in Concord Massachusetts, but it was won in the Carolinas and Virginia, at places like this. Rhode Island Quaker Nathaniel Greene was given the southern command by General Washington, and he fought a critical battle here with Cornwallis, with Washington’s cousin William leading the dragoons (cavalry). Technically, the British won the battle, but Greene inflicted more than 1/4 casualties upon them while keeping his own force ready to fight again. The British recognized it as a Pyrrhic victory, and Cornwallis had to regroup. The two sides would clash repeatedly before Yorktown.
A couple of elk were crossing the parkway, and I managed to take a quick photo. As I slowly started to pass, trying not to scare them, the complete idiot behind me decided that would be a good time to pass me on the right, inches from the elk, practically pushing them away into the woods. Who hates mega fauna that much? So I decided to demonstrate what instant acceleration looks like in a Tesla, and I never saw him again.
The parkway isn’t the fastest way to get anywhere. My navigation kept telling me to get off and take a straighter road, so I turned it off. Anybody who is in too much of a hurry should take another route. It winds along the ridge line from Great Smoky through North Carolina and Virginia to Shenandoah, and it is delightful. I saw some kind of light pink rhododendrons blooming along the wet ridge rocks above 5000 feet. I think Catawba, named after a local Native American tribe, or maybe Vaseyi, named after the famous botanist who discovered them 150 years ago. The former would be early, but it’s unseasonably warm now, due to the climate crisis.
The parkway is best enjoyed at leisure or in segments, and people who don’t care about nature should avoid it.
This little guy walked out on the trail through the meadows in Cades Cove. There’s a beautiful loop drive around there with an old mill, horses playing and a spectacular natural environment. Nice campground too. The road closes to traffic some days, but there are miles of trails, creeks, a lake and mountains to explore by foot, horseback, boat or bicycle. This is one of the most visited parks, one of my favorites for wildlife, a World Heritage Site and a UN biosphere, but I think most people just pass through quickly. My last trip here, I drove through far too quickly, without any idea what I was missing. Just lovely.
The view from the gap includes Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia, plus the small historic town of Cumberland Gap itself, which has a surprisingly good restaurant, Nineteen19. It’s difficult to think of a more historic spot in the country than this gap, where Native Americans, trappers, traders, frontier families, soldiers and slaves passed through over centuries. While most traffic zooms through the modern tunnel below, it’s an easy drive up near the top, where the ”object lesson” trail offers a short hike to the “saddle” of the gap or to the tri-state meeting point. In order to encourage more modern road construction techniques, the government improved the road here as an object lesson or proof of concept, that transportation can be improved even in challenging terrain. This blog is an object lesson that EV travel is possible, even over long distances cross country.
While obviously fortified, the camp is best remembered as a refugee and training site for escaped and liberated slaves to join the Union. A heartless commander here burned shelters before winter to try to dissuade refugees from staying, leading to over 100 deaths from exposure, national outrage and new legislation to build more permanent refugee shelters at many Union bases, including food, clothing & education. There’s a community nearby that persists since that time. Many of the US Colored Troops that served, especially in the second half of the war, were trained here.
Where Carlsbad is like the Mines of Moria where you’re expecting goblins to stream out of the crevices into the magnificent cathedral-sized chambers, Mammoth is definitely hollow-earth lizard people. The walls are fairly smooth and plain and the ”cave” is actually an incredibly long maze of tunnels with underground rivers. I figure since the ceilings vary in height that only lizard people who are equally comfortable either upright or on all fours would feel at home roaming the endless passageways. The ranger herding us from the back concurred and told scary stories which kept us moving right along.
The cave is a World Heritage Site. Above ground is a huge forest with miles of trails, several nice campgrounds, and the Green River which runs deep enough to require a small car ferry at one point. The clean ecosystem above helps keep rare blind cave fish and other species alive below.
The ranger leading the historic tour explained that a slave named Stephen Bishop first crossed the ’bottomless pit’ and discovered the fish while guiding tourists. His tours gained widespread fame and included luminaries like Emerson. Bishop was evidently fearless, had an unusual amount of freedom as a guide and educated himself in geology and other subjects to converse with visitors. Emerson’s tour lasted all day, and they must have had interesting discussions. Emerson and his literary friends were conductors on the Underground Railway at the time, and many slaves escaped through Kentucky in the area near the cave. Bishop must have been motivated to use his unique access into the hundreds of miles of tunnels under Kentucky, since his own children were sold away into slavery. He died shortly after gaining his freedom in unknown circumstances.
Speaking of railroads, I charged my Tesla at the Casey Jones Museum in Jackson Tennessee on the way, and got a kick out of how modes of transportation change. I also ate at the Old Country Store there, which was reasonably priced and delicious, and it surprised me. Outside it celebrated the confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest of KKK infamy, but inside it had a thoughtful and beautifully done exhibit on the Woolworth lunch-counter protests. Much like Mammoth Cave, you sometimes can’t judge what’s happening beneath the surface. Similarly, this post has been too long and meandering, but I hope somehow it’s all connected.
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