“If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us do we not revenge?” - William Shakespeare
Back in the fall. That little phrase has a nice ring to it doesn’t it? Back in the fall. Maybe it’s because spring has finally, mercifully arrived. I do truly love the fall, but after a long hard winter and the magic of returning spring, what transpired in the last fall season is slowly becoming not much more than a series of fond and fading memories. Spring has a tendency to shift your focus and cloud the old memory bank for some reason. You forget the disappointments of a past fall and manage to remember only the good parts the most. That's the way it should maybe be.
Back in the fall, my son, son-in-law and his younger brother decided that they suddenly needed to endeavor to hunt bears and pigs in the Tellico Wildlife Management Area. The plan encompassed a long backpack into a lightly traversed area somewhere along the North Carolina border. Like all expeditions of present day, a good deal of planning for such an expedition included time spent perusing the handheld computer and all of the assorted apps designed to map the earth where bears and pigs live and thrive.
While performing this due diligence on the world wide web, my son happened to run up on a decades old and antique White Oak Mountain Ranger story about hunting in Tellico’s Kirkland Creek above the Bald River. A decades old story that I had completely forgotten was languishing in the WOMR archives.
So here it is dusted off, embellished a bit and revisited. For what it’s worth.
Return to Kirkland Creek
The last time I was on Kirkland Creek my hunting partner and I split up sides of the laurel choked dribble of a creek to accomplish a little pre-hunt scouting for a near term deer hunt. We’d both called in sick from work to get this much needed task completed. Sick leave abuse was a pretty prevalent and well cultivated work related art form of lying for both us back in those days.
About an hour into scouting upstream through the dense thicket that made up a pure laurel hell, Edro stumbled face to face with two well armed poachers carrying a dead bear on a pole. It wasn’t bear season and we were all a rather long way from the nearest road.
Edro immediately threw it in reverse and started yelling for me to cross to his side of the creek as the two guys with the bear trotted up stream on an ancient logging road, to the safety of the North Carolina line. Edro and I sprinted downstream, pistols in hand, nervously looking over our shoulders like a bear was chasing us.
We’ve been back since, with the assistance of a pack of semi-useless hounds. Figuring that these poachers had maybe grown old, thinking that with the passage of time, maybe the bear and pig density had likely recovered from a poachers ring. An odd pastime of poaching with the intent of getting rich by selling bear gall bladders to mysterious Chinese alchemists.
Kirkland is a truly wild splash of a creek that spills into the Bald River high above the Bald River falls after draining a narrow, long and laurel, rhododendron and hardwood choked lengthly drainage. A once devastated little stretch of steep mountain coves that make up the aftermath of devastating logging operations from back about the turn of the last century.
How this creek became named Kirkland is supposition on my part. But it’s a fairly safe bet, that at one time, prior the war of Northern Aggression, some many Kirklands struggled to settle in this pristine wilderness area after somehow stealing it away from the Cherokee.
Local newspaper accounts say that there were several groups of outlaws commonly referred to as ‘bushwhackers’ that prowled these mountains during the War Between the States. The ‘Kirkland Bushwhackers’ are probably the most well known and most notorious, as they were said to be the most vicious and bloodthirsty band of both Union and Confederate sympathizers known to plunder and murder in these particular mountains during that particular conflict.
Deserters from both the Union and the Confederate armies made up these bands of outlaws. These were partisans, reported to terrorize both Tennessee and North Carolina, as they routinely had running battles with, randomly murdered and harassed locals. Bands of outlaws roaming about in these high mountain enclaves, killing seemingly indiscriminately, with just about anyone who happened to be unsympathetic to either the Union or Confederate cause.
Kirkland’s Bushwhackers were led by John Jackson “Bushwhacking Jack” Kirkland. Jack was a former Second Lieutenant in Company B of the Third Tennessee Mounted Infantry and a registered deserter from the Confederate Army.
Bushwhacking Jack swore a rather deadly serious oath against the Union shortly after he had deserted from active duty with the Confederacy. That oath and act of desertion may have coincided with the burning of his cousin Bas Shaw’s mill on Turkey Creek by one of Sherman’s platoons shortly after the unionist laid waste to a Confederate iron foundry in Tellico. Sherman was on a detoured and destructive side trip after chasing Longstreet out of Knoxville. Shaw’s mill was just another defenseless southern object to torch before returning to Chattanooga and instigating the subsequent Union route at Missionary Ridge.
Bushwhacking Jack and his band took to roaming a trail of terror between Robbinsville North Carolina and Madisonville Tennessee, set on revenge and anything else that could be plundered from poorly defended mountain homesteads where dependable menfolk had gone off to war.
The Kirkland Bushwhackers apparently did not necessarily appear to feel any compunction with drawing a line at killing relatives though. The Kirkland Bushwhackers were sometimes known to murder blood kin and kin by marriage, especially if, or when, blood relatives happened to be associated, in any conceivable sympathy, with the Union cause.
The Kirklands were said to have bushwhacked Captain Joe Gray of Company H, Third Tennessee Mounted Calvary of the GAR, at his home near Sweetwater Tennessee. That night, as the bushwhackers were celebrating the murder in a wild and drunken party, it was told that the Kirkland women, took turns dancing around the big fire in Gray’s high Union calvary boots.
Sometime shortly after that celebration, the Kirkland gang was accused of murdering two of Shaw’s sons, who had inexplicably joined the Eleventh Tennessee Calvary of the Union Army. These two young lads were Bushwhacking Jack’s first cousins.
After Shaw’s sons were murdered, Bushwhacker Jack took his revenge in an October 3, 1864, with a raid on Robbinsville North Carolina, targeting Captain Tim Lyons and the Union’s faintly affiliated, Third Tennessee Mounted Infantry.
Lyons was a one eyed Irish immigrant who had deserted from the Union Army and he commanded a murderous rival mountain running gang of mostly Confederate deserters, bushwhackers and seriously muderous young boys.
Jesse Kirkland, captured and paroled at Vicksburg, reported AWOL in 1864, was Bushwhacker Jack’s younger brother. Jesses Kirkland was reportedly killed during the Robbinsville-Lyon’s raid that fall.
Bushwhacker Jack reportedly survived the war, and numerous skirmishes, ambushes and family vendetta sourced shootouts that followed. Although numerous indictments were handed down against him after the war, he was never tried, arrested, or even had papers served.
Local lawmen of the day knew that to ride deep into the mountains to serve papers for his arrest where Bushwhacker Jack lived, would have been a long uphill ride to their grave. Jack moved from Graham County North Carolina to Polk County Tennessee in 1872, where he died in 1902 at age 75.
That’s about the time that the Babcock Lumber Company built rail lines into the Tellico and Bald Rivers and commenced the rape of the old growth poplars and hemlocks. When Babcock had completely devastated the mountain lands in both states, the state of Tennessee bought the leftovers which ultimately resulted in the Tellico Wildlife Management Area in the Cherokee National Forest.
If I had known all this going in, I’d never set foot on Kirkland Creek, just like the bears and the pigs.
My guess is that old Bushwhacking Jack still prowls the mountain trails on full moon winter nights, shooting an occasional bear or two, when he gets that old bloody feeling. I’ll bet he dreams of his drunken women taking turns dancing around the moon-lit big fire on Kirkland Creek in a dead Yankee Captain’s tall boots.
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