Travel is Fatal to Bigotry, Prejudice, and Narrow-Mindedness

It is About the Journey Not the Destination

It is time for a vacation from the daily news. Join me in a journey from the northeast mountains to the southwest corner of the state as I flow south down the Alabama watershed all the way to the gulf... where I'm spending the week. Alabama is not only alphabetically gifted, it also has a diversity of ecosystems and an extensive river system. This journey focuses on natural history and curios along the way.

There's no turning back...Here we go over the waterfall...

Let's start with a little local music from Lookout Mountain, well Rising Fawn...three tunes ...
Over the Waterfall, Opera Reel, and Cherokee Shuffle
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBS3VTMLmgw (4 min)

The picture is Little River Falls and the start of “the Canyon”. Water is the great leveler, cutting it's way down off the mountain to the Coosa River. Now it flows into Weiss Lake which was flooded about 1960. It is odd for a river to flow on top of a mountain, but really Lookout Mountain is a 80 mile long plateau.

Little River flows into....

The Coosa River
An interesting timeline of the river's history
http://www.caria.org/caria-timeline/

DeSoto was the first European expedition to explore the free flowing river.. DeSoto's route is hotly debated, but many think the first nation town of Coosa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coosa_chiefdom which DeSoto encountered lies under the lake. One of DeSoto's swords was found up river in the 1980's near Rome, Georgia, and another was found buried in a mound in the 1920's.

The Coosa River drops 450 feet in elevation between Rome and its confluence with the Tallapoosa.

Hundreds of years later steamboats plied the river for a hundred mile stretch from just south of Gadsden to Rome. Shoals and waterfalls such the Devil's Staircase along the river's lowest 65 miles blocked the upper Coosa's riverboats from access to the Alabama River and the Gulf of Mexico. The first steamboat was called The Coosa. In the 1840's the small riverboat had been built in Cincinnati, had been steamed down Ohio and Mississippi rivers to New Orleans, through inland passages of the Gulf of Mexico to Mobile, and up the Mobile, Alabama and Coosa rivers to Wetumpka. At Wetumpka she had be taken apart and hauled piecemeal on heavy wagons drawn by oxen over wretched roads around the rapids and rocks to Greensport near Gadsden. Then the small steamer was reassembled and made ready for the first journey. Whether or not she carried a small cannon to announce her presence as she steamed up the river, as was the custom of steamboats of those early days, is not known. But the fact that a steam propelled boat was on the way upstream brought settlers to the river for miles around.

At Double Springs (now Gadsden), a tiny relay station on the stage line from Rome to Huntsville, a motley crowd from the mountains and valleys gathered to meet the boat. Many of them were clad in frontier garments , with caps of coonskin, the tail hanging down the back.

The steamer had a contract to carry the mail from Greensport to Rome, and on the sides of the engine house was painted U.S.M. Coosa. Since only a few of the assembled crowd could read and write, one very consequential and highly educated patriarch, Squire Bogan of Cedar Bluff, volunteered to give the assemblage the benefit of his learning. "Let's see" he said, " U.S.M. usem, C double-o-s-a, Susie,--yes, boys I've got it! 'Usem Susie.'" The name was not so inappropriate and by many of the inhabitants the Coosa was known by no other name for a long time.

Planters up and down the river were quick to use steamboat transportation to haul their products to market and the traffic tendered the little Coosa was enormous. She could handle only a small fraction of it. More boats joined the river fleet. Some boats were party vessels where people came to celebrate from all over the region (as though is were international waters).
http://www.northwestgeorgianews.com/rome/opinion/columns/guest-column-go...

Origins of Popeye - ever wondered why Popeye keeps running into the same characters all the time? The Popeye stories came from the river culture involving all these riverboats.
Back in 1913, the lock and dam at Mayo’s Bar in Georgia was completed by the U.S. Corps of Engineers, making navigation over the Horse Leg Shoals of the Coosa River easier. The dam raised the water levels about 10 feet. Charged to keep the channel clear, the corps used the boat “Annie M,” later re-named “Leota.”
The boat’s captain was named Sims, who was a resident of Ohatchee. His son Tom became a comic strip artist when he inherited the strip “Thimble Theatre” from creator Elzie Segar, who died in 1938.
The strip’s story line dealt with the Oyl family that owned a shipping business. Commodore Oyl had a son, Castor, and a daughter, Olive. One of the sailors that worked for the commodore was a wise-cracking and spinach-eating chap named Popeye. Tom Sims took that character, spun him off and gave him his own strip, thus creating Popeye the Sailor Man.
Tom Sims is quoted as saying, “Fantastic as Popeye is, the whole story is based on facts. As a boy, I was raised on the Coosa River. When I began writing the script for Popeye, I put my characters back on the old Leota that I knew as a boy, transformed it into a ship and made the Coosa River a salty sea.”
http://blog.al.com/strange-alabama/2014/07/popeye_alabamas_sailor_man.html

During the (un)Civil War, one of the steamboats operating on the river then was the “Laura Moore,” captained by Cummins Lay. The “Laura Moore” was tied up in Rome in 1864, when Union forces, detached from Sherman’s army, moved to take the city. When it was obvious Rome would fall, Capt. Lay, under cover of darkness, cut his boat loose and drifted downstream, out of range of the Union guns. Then he fired his boilers and headed south.
But Lay did not stop at Gadsden. Fearing Union forces would soon follow, he moved on downstream to Greensport and the rapids.
The Coosa was running high; standing waves covered the rocks. So Lay stripped the “Laura Moore” to make it lighter, then turned his boat back into the raging river. Cummins Lay did what no other pilot had done before or since. He steered his vessel around rocks, over reefs, through eddies and whirlpools, even out into flooded cornfields, until it finally reached Wetumpka. There he waited until the end of the war. Then there came a spring freshet and Lay and the “Laura Moore” rode it back to Rome. Or so the story goes. This story and more are told by historian Harvey Jackson.
https://www.annistonstar.com/steamboats-on-the-coosa-back-before-highway...

Near Wetumpka, Alabama bears the scar of an ancient event, the fall of a giant meteorite. Because this happened so long ago — near the end of the Age of Dinosaurs —scientists were slow to recognize the eroded four-mile wide crater, or astrobleme, northeast of Montgomery. Scientists were studying geologic samples from the astrobleme, searching for microscopic evidence of “shocked quartz,” uniquely fractured quartz grains that would confirm the meteoric origins of the crater. No other known earthly process, not even volcanos, can shatter the hard grains of quartz present in most rocks. They found shocked quartz collected in the drill cores from the bottom of the astrobleme —proof positive that the Wetumpka Crater was the result of the impact of a large meteorite.

The Wetumpka impact crater, which is approximately 4.7 miles (7.6 km) wide, formed during a time in geological history when the sea level was much higher than it is today. So the impact occurred about 15 miles (25 km) offshore in water about 100 feet (30 m) deep. The rim is made of hard, crystalline rocks, and the interior area is composed of softer, sedimentary materials. There is also an area of highly disturbed sediments outside the crater's rim on the southern side of the crater that were washed into place by the catastrophic resurgence of sea water forced away from the area by the impact.
http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/h-1035

Take a 3 min drone trip over the crater.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byGtQ5UImkg

After leaving Wetumpka, The Coosa joins the Tallapoosa at Fort Toulouse, later called Fort Jackson, to form the Alabama River. This river junction has been a hub for human activity for centuries. Aztec trading beads have been found. Of course most history of the site focuses on the European occupation.

During the Revolutionary War, most Creek villages remained officially neutral so they could bargain with the British and French for better prices in the deerskin trade. The Alibamu Indian village of Pakana was located adjacent to the French fort and community. Bilingual French and Indian children played among the fort ramparts and villages while their parents farmed the adjoining bottomlands around the fort and villages. The Alibamu became close allies and friends with the French, with much of this tribe following the French to Louisiana in 1763. William Bartram, a well-known botanist, visited the site in 1776 making notes and drawings of the area’s plants, animals and Native cultures.

In May of 1814, Andrew Jackson came here to the forks of the Coosa and Tallapoosa rivers with United States Army regulars and militia units from Georgia, the Carolinas, and Tennessee after the bloody battle of Horseshoe Bend, where the power of the Red Stick faction of the Creeks was broken. In August the Treaty of Fort Jackson signed over 15 million acres of Creek lands to the U.S. government, which soon opened much of Alabama to American settlers. Alabama became the 22nd state five years later.https://fttoulousejackson.org/history/
http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/h-1417
http://www.firstpeople.us/FP-Html-Treaties/TreatyWithTheCreeks1814.html

If you are interested in the Creek Nation and how they were conned, this 50 min lecture from the archives is revealing. It is a little slow to start but improves along the way. Start 5 min in and it last about 40 min.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9KMSvnqNiU

Onward, down River, past Montgomery, the current capitol. The territorial legislature, however, had chosen Cahaba (also spelled Cahawba), at the confluence of the Cahaba and Alabama Rivers, as the site for the capital of the state, so the second session of the legislature met there in 1820. Cahaba also was designated as the temporary seat of government in the Constitution, which expressly gave the 1825-26 legislature the power to decide upon a permanent site. That session of the General Assembly took the opportunity to select Tuscaloosa for the new capital, deserting the oft-flooded and unhealthy Cahaba site.
http://archives.alabama.gov/capital/capitals.html
http://www.exploresouthernhistory.com/oldcahawba.html

The Cahaba is Alabama's longest free flowing River and tells quite a story on its own.

We're finally nearing the end our our journey. Flowing into one of the richest biological areas in the country. This river network and its surrounding forests represent the true cradle of American biodiversity. Because the Mobile River basin is home to more species of freshwater fish, mussels, snails, turtles and crawfish than any other state. And the competition isn't even close.

Alabama has 84 crawfish species. Louisiana has just 32 and California -- three times the size of Alabama -- has nine. There are 350 species of freshwater fish in Alabama, about one-third of all species known in the entire nation. The turtle population is even more singular. The system's delta, the Mobile-Tensaw Delta, has 18 turtle species. That's more than the Amazon. More than the Nile. More than the Yangtze. More than the Mekong. More than any other river system on Earth.

However, for all the majesty that the state deserves for being home to more species of fish, mussels, snails and crawfish, Alabama is also at the top of another list -- the list of aquatic extinctions. Alabama has lost more aquatic species to extinction than any other state. http://www.al.com/americas-amazon/

To really appreciate our journey, I highly recommend this 50 min. documentary
"America's Amazon" featuring E. O. Wilson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEynUn8VW3Y

...if you can't spare the 50 min how about a 5 min trailer?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXwOIqVPyDs

...and as a parting shot. A beautiful 4 min aerial view of Alabama's natural areas.

Last week we discussed the imperfection of media sources, concluding that we have to find glimmers of truth where we can. Alabama has been plagued with oligarchs, warfare against first nations peoples, slavery, sharecropping, racism, graft, horrid politicians, and more. The image many have of the state is Wallace on the steps of the University. And Alabama is all those things...but that isn't all it is. It is also a state with more miles of navigable waterways than any other. Alabama has over 77,000 miles of rivers and streams with more freshwater biodiversity than any other US state. Alabama's rivers are among the most biologically diverse waterways in the world. 38% of North America's fish species, 43% of its freshwater gill-breathing snails, 51% of its freshwater turtle species, and 60% of its freshwater mussel species are native to Alabama's rivers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rivers_of_Alabama

We have worked our way to Mobile Bay. Next week we'll explore the Gulf Coast, another national treasure. So is Twain correct...was our trip fatal to your prejudice about Alabama? Well that is asking a bit much, but I hope you enjoyed the journey!