RE: The best toy you can get your puppy is another puppy!
Sounds like a book I need to read.
White County was named for John White, a Revolutionary War hero who was given a large land grant, and had the good sense to treat the Cherokee and Creek in the area with respect, so they cooperated with him.
They taught the settlers a lot about the local plants and food sources, which no doubt they regretted, once Andrew Jackson signed the order removing them all to Oklahoma.
My mother's father was born and raised in Ripley, Tennessee, just North of Memphis, so we actually have Tennessee roots. He told me a few years ago that the French and Irish ancestors on their dad's side intermarriage with the Cherokee and Creek, and one other tribe, in the way 1700s in the Carolinas.
Which might be why this place spoke to me so strongly from the start, because we are smack in the middle of what were Cherokee lands at the time. It's a gorgeous area, and we have no light pollution, so most nights we can clearly see the Milky Way.
Ugh, *intermarried. I despise autocorrect.
This totally belongs in a novel. Memoirs, I tend to avoid, no matter who wrote 'em, but fictionalize it, and I'm hooked. John Sedgwick makes "Blood Moon" read like fiction. Which can be troublesome, because he's in the POV of someone who didn't read or write, in the 19thC, describing the weather, inner monologues, dialogue - well, can take away from the authenticity of a history book, even though it's bringing dry, dead history to life. Anyway: you might like Laura Frantz, a descendant of Daniel Boone, and her novel "The Frontiersman's Daughter." - I love that one!
Links, comments on Blood Moon here - Just FYI! - no obligation to slog through a long review:
https://steemit.com/writing/@carolkean/blood-moon-by-john-sedgwick-keangrooview-21-march-2018
Funny, one of my grandmother's friends, when I was growing up, was Laura Geronimo, Geronimo's daughter. She was in her nineties at the time, but still had her wits about her, and was a wise woman in every way.
Places really can speak to us. Strongly. It's as if those who lived there before us do live on in spirit!
Indeed they can. That much I've known since childhood.
Calfkiller has spoken to me since we got here, long before I knew of him, or what little I know of his story, I kept seeing him mentally as a young man, sitting cross-legged with his eyes closed next to the spring in our cave by the river.
The funny thing is that, when I once asked his name, I literally got the mental image of a raised eyebrow, as if to say, "Do you really need to ask?" His home was along the banks of our river, and so our small cave would doubtless have been well known to him.