Day 10 Begins With A Dead Satellite Communicator and Ghost Stories

Began walking approximately 8:30 a.m.

Hi, Kim here!

I just spoke to John Fox and Curt’s satellite communicator is dead. John is going to charge it in his car for a while and then get it back to the men. For now, they are leaving Raccoon Springs and headed toward London. They will be picked up by car and taken to a Chamber of Commerce meeting and then returned right back to the spot where their feet left the trail. I’ll update everyone once his communicator is back up and running. Day 10 begins!

Ghost Stories

Today we enter the Daniel Boone National Forest and tonight we sleep in the wilderness known to be a hot spot for Bigfoot sightings. Before reading on, close the curtains and turn off the lights because I have a ghost story that will make even ole’ Sasquatch peer nervously into the shadows.

Before the white man came to this land there were no villages or settlements of any kind south of the Ohio River and north of the Cumberland River. The Native American’s would pass through, but no Shawnee, no Cherokee, no living souls whatsoever, paused there for more than a brief visit. Why?

Listen as Chief Black Fish stands in the glow of the fire, and the shadow of the flames and smoke animate the birch bark walls of the wigwam:

“The Shawnees cannot tell you that you are allowed to settle in the Can-tuc-kee lands. We have never owned that land. It belongs to the ghosts of murdered Azgens – a white people from an eastern sea. Their bones and ghosts own and occupy every hill and valley of the country. They protect the game there and have more and better right there than any of the Indian tribes, including our own Shawnee nation, because they do not need or use material food themselves and do not like it. Long ago our fathers and our grandfathers killed off the Azgens, but we now fear more the spirits of these people than our fathers and grandfathers feared them when they were flesh.”

Black Fish paused and there was a murmured assent and nodding of heads among the assemblage.

“When our food is all gone,” he continued, “and our squaws and children starving, we appeal to the ghosts of the white mothers who were killed there and, by saying the right words, we are allowed to kill an elk or deer or bear or buffalo. But,” and now his voice lost its almost chanting quality and he fastened an unfriendly gaze, “we are never allowed to kill the game wantonly and we are forbidden to settle in the country of Can-tuc-kee. If we did, these ghosts would not rise from their caves and mounds and slay us, but they would set father against son and son against father and neighbor against neighbor and make them kill one another.”

The Shawnee and Cherokee both revered this legend and did not make settlements in the Can-tuc-kee lands. When the Transylvania Company made the purchase the Cherokee chief, Dragging Canoe, pointed to the west and warned that a “dark cloud hung over that land”, which was known as the “bloody ground”. In the years that followed that forewarning, many more ghosts, of Native American’s and pioneers, were added to these mountains. That is, if you believe in ghosts. (scary music, maniacal laugh, disembodied scream, fade to black)

Chief Black Fish of the Shawnee, quoted from Allan Eckert’s The Frontiersmen, pgs. 65-66

For more about the legend of the Azgen follow this link-

http://ohioexplorer.blogspot.com/2010/07/legend-of-azgen.html

Walk on,

Curtis