Little Tennessee River

It was just sort of a dream I had of creating a literary journal for the school called Spotfin Literary Journal.

Spotfin's a rare fish that just lives in the Little Tennessee River watershed, which is a pretty big drainage.

It's like 450 square miles in size.

Its range within that watershed is pretty limited, but it's an endemic fish.

You've got this book coming out in October, but then there's more works ahead.

Yeah.

I mean, I've always wanted to do kind of a deep time study of the Little Tennessee River Valley.

I don't know if that'll go anywhere, but I've wanted it to be more of an artistic and historical rendering of the Little Tennessee River Valley that...

It was part of the Smithsonian's Barothnology's Mound survey that Cyrus Thomas was leading to try to understand what they call at the time the mystery of the mound builders, of who actually built these things.

And one of those excavations was done in Loudoun County, Tennessee, at the intersection of Bat Creek with the Little Tennessee River.

And they excavated a couple of mounds there, and one of them was a burial mound where they actually found the Bat Creek stone.

A scientist named Cyrus Thomas was in charge of the mound survey.

Like I could develop my own three-day canoeing course.

And we'd spend two days on the Little Tennessee and then come over to the Nantahala and run the Nantahala River, you know.

And it was really great fun.

So I worked those two years.

It washed while I was on the river, which was just amazing.

You know, I ran a bike shuttle, which is easy to do.

And I had just a great time, took out right there at Topoco Lodge, because the next rapid is not that much further down to the Little Tennessee River, you know, from Topoco Lodge.

You familiar with it? Anyway, the whole river constricted, and there's a hole probably 20 feet deep.

The mound is gone now, but there is a marker for where it used to stand.

By the early 18th century, the Cherokee controlled the Tennessee Smokies with their principal towns along Little Tennessee River and a trade network that ran through the Great Indian War Path, a corridor that connected the Southern Appalachian all the way up into the Ohio Valley.

Also, So many people are like, it's Appalachia, or they say Appalachia.

I don't know.

The Smithsonian excavation sought to debunk those theories.

One dig happened in East Tennessee on the banks of Bat Creek, which is a tributary of the Little Tennessee River.

A field assistant named John Emmert said he found a stone lodged underneath a skull, and that stone was etched with eight symbols that appeared to be some kind of writing.

The interpretation the scientists on hand took, and that they published, was that this was an early example of the Cherokee writing system.

And she does a great job of.

You know, allowing the horses to go through the Little Tennessee River and different parts of the farm and different parts of the land.

And you're able to see the valley and experience horseback riding at a whole different level.

You get to see, you know, the Dillard House, a mountain farm resort at the same time experiencing the river and parts of the valley.