Alabama trip, Day 5, Thursday March 30, Part 1 – Duck River

Myra drove me back to Waverly so I could begin where I had left off the evening before. It was tempting to just skip, because at the rate I was going, I wasn’t going to have any time to visit the places in Alabama that were the most important goal of this trip. But back to Waverly it was, to ride south on the Loretta Lynn parkway

A stop at Duck River had been part of the overall plan for this trip. It’s part of the Tecumseh story.

Tecumseh’s visit to Alabama in 1811 has often been described as unsuccessful in histories of the Great Lakes region. He didn’t get the Creeks to join in his pan-Indian confederacy.
Whether or not you would say he was successful, his visit was certainly influential and consequential. After the council meetings were held, some Creek men went north to consult with the British at Fort Malden in Canada. On their way back to Alabama, they stopped on the Duck River, downstream a few miles from the spot in this photo, where it empties into the Tenneesse River, and killed some settlers who lived there. And that helped ignite a civil war among the Creeks. Tecumseh had also left other fuel for the fire in his wake, waiting to be ignited, but I’ll get to that later.

I wish I knew whether those settlers who were killed lived on the north or the south side of the Duck River. It may have made a difference to the Chickasaw people, and who knows, maybe their Creek visitors decided to do something about it. But so far I haven’t found that information.

Beginning at about this point on the way south, the road was newly paved. However, the Tennessee Highway Department apparently harbors some sadistic sociopaths. There were deeply milled rumble strips that rendered the marked shoulder unusable. These rumble strips made the road effectively narrower, and I had to ride in the normal traffic lane along with the lumber trucks and semis. The road was like this for perhaps a dozen miles altogether, both north and south of I-40. This is contrary to the spirit and the letter of federal guidelines on the subject. However, Highway 13 is a state highway and I don’t know if federal funds were used in the construction.

I got to thinking about that Humphreys county historian who in 1886 wrote, “Bitter as the feeling was during the war, all animosity toward the North has long since died out of the breasts of the people of Humphreys County, and a hearty welcome is extended to all Northern men who may go among them.” I wonder if bitterness of the civil war had really died down already by 1886 considering that in 2006, 70 years after the TVA got started, there is still bitterness over the forced evacuations of the communities along the rivers. (And why would I be thinking about bitterness just now?)

Photo links fixed, 1-Aug-2007