The Trail of Tears NHT started in Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee and terminated in eastern Oklahoma. In 1838-1839, the US government forced more than 15,000 Cherokee people to leave their ancestral grounds, march across Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Missouri, Illinois and Arkansas, to be relocated in Oklahoma. They traveled by foot, horse, wagon or steamboat. The Trail of Tears NHT is approximately 4,900 miles long, over land and water routes in nine states.

The Chickamauga and Chattanooga NMP (ChChNMP) is comprised of four major elements. They are Lookout Mountain Battlefield, Missionary Ridge and the Moccasin Bend NAD in Tennessee and, Chickamauga Battlefield in Georgia. Chickamauga will be discussed in the Georgia gallery. In 1863 Union and Confederate forces fought for control of Chattanooga, a key rail center and the gateway to the heart of the Confederacy. ChChNMP had some of the hardest fighting in the Civil War. About 36,000 men were killed in the battle, 19,000 on the Confederate side and 17,000 on the Union.

Lookout Mountain rises almost 1200 feet above the Tennessee River at Chattanooga. The other famous battle for Chattanooga, in Tennessee, was Missionary Ridge. Much has been written about these significant Civil War battles. I will not try to summarize them.

For those of you, like myself, who keep track of their NPS visits by the National Parks Passport stamps; there are seven different stamps for the ChChNMP.

While in the Chattanooga area we visited Ruby Falls, an underground waterfall, 1120 feet deep inside Lookout Mountain. The falls are 145 feet tall. The falls is reached from Cavern Castle, the Ruby Falls entrance building. An elevator takes you to the falls level, where a walkway leads one towards the center of mountain.

At the foot of Lookout Mountain is a beautiful arboretum with many different plants in a wooded surrounding. The arboretum also has a family of Red Wolves. In 1980 there were fewer than 20 Red Wolves that were rounded up the USFWS for captive breeding. During that time the Red Wolf was declared extinct in the wild. The reintroduction was successful and there are currently 50 to 80 Red Wolves in the wild. Today there are a few wolves roaming free in the Alligator River NWR in North Carolina.

Leaving Chattanooga, we next stopped at Gatlinburg, TN to visit the Great Smoky Mountain NP (GSMNP) at the Sugarland Visitors Center. Gatlinburg is a tourist town with little public parking. Nearby in Pigeon Forge is Dolly Parton’s Dollyworld amusement park. After visiting the GSMNP visitors center, we drove to Clingman’s Dome to see the vista to the east, but the fog (or low clouds) were so thick that we had difficulty parking between the stripes in the parking lot. Clingman’s Dome is the third highest peak east of the Mississippi at 6,643 feet above sea level. While driving up the mountain to Clingman’s Dome we stopped at a picnic area near Newfound Gap where the Appalachian NST crosses route 441.

Our last NP unit in Tennessee is in Greenville. Greenville was the home of Andrew Johnson NHS, the nations 17th president, who became the president when Abraham Lincoln was assinated. Before stopping at Andrew Johnson NHS, we new very little about Andrew Johnson. During our visit to this NHS, we became much more aware of the person.

The “courageous commoner” was tailor and self-taught. On his way to the presidency, he held nearly every political office available-without attending a single day of school. Andrew was a staunch constitutionalist, states rights advocate and vetoed more bills introduced by Congress than any other president before him. He fought hard against military reconstruction of the confederacy because the act was treating the southern states as if they were conquered territories. An apparent fascinating man.