Andrew Jackson and the $20 Bill - nothing is simple.

I spent many years in the Cherokee Hills; as an artist, they were my 'muse.   And why not?  The beauty of the Smokey Mountains is second to nothing on this earth.

This is the actual mill of which this story speaks. According to Google Earth it no longer exists. Take a good look at this mill and tell me that stone age savages designed and built it. I was built by its Cherokee Indian Owner.

If I can trust Google Earth, this mill has been razed, it no longer exists. When you are reading this story, you have to ask yourself, why would such an exquisite, beautiful beyond measure, patch of land be razed? What is there now? A simple pond.

My good friend purchased property seized by "settlers" "confiscated" from a Cherokee family - exiled on the Trail of Tears.

It was a, very MODERN for the time, grist mill. The Indian leaving his home with his extended family, cursed the Mill and pronounced that every white owner of that property would die an "unnatural" death.



Maybe there are some cached copies of Brown's Guide to Georgia (Cherokee legends and Suches Mill) that will relate the story. My friend created, managed and produced the Cobb County Bluegrass Festival - which was the largest Bluegrass venue for many years and some have credited with saving the genera, when it wasn't popular in the seventies and eighties.

All the owners of that mill died, unnatural deaths. My friend laughed at the curse, purchased the property and lived a healthy life there. His wife died of cancer, and he remarried.

My wife and I spent days at the property, on the verge of purchasing it, but I could not "pull the trigger." I loved the place and wanted to die there - still do. The last time I saw my friend, we toured his new HUGE motor home. We talked on the porch of his house over looking the cursed grist mill, as his new wife pampered him and shaved him with a straight razor. I mocked him trusting a younger wife with a razor at his throat, and he mocked my old man's beard. We sipped bourbon and enjoyed a very pleasant afternoon.

The property soon sold and he and his new wife headed out in their huge motor home, intent to travel for ten years and then settle down in Florida. A year or so later I got the word that my friend had been murdered by his new wife. He was yet the next in the Cherokee curse.  She was a serial killer, a black widow. He was the last of seven husbands (of which they knew) she had murdered. She also had 14 different identities.

That event marked clearly in my mind the fact that anyone who can justify the dispossessing of the highly civilized, educated and technologically advanced Cherokee people from Georgia, and the surrounding Smokey Mountains is prepared to justify ANY atrocity.

There is also the matter of the massive archeological destruction at the hands of Jackson's henchmen. You see, all the signs of Indian Civilization had to be destroyed. After all, you could only justify such carnage if the victims were officially perceived as savages.

I did research on this many years back. But as a child raised on the actual grounds of the Battle of Atlanta, the neighbors house (still standing) serving as a hospital and prison for captured high ranking union officers, I was prepared for the obfuscations of "history makers." Seeing the destruction of historical Confederate artifacts contrary to the "Union" paradigm, I recognized what I was seeing about the great destruction of the artifacts of the great river basin Indian Civilization and the accompanying pyramid shaped "Indian Mounds." - Jackson's hoards blew many hundreds of them into extinction. One can only hope that in the vast vaults of the Smithsonian, something of these artifacts were actually secreted away. BTW, my research proved that the suppression of the IDEA of Indian Civilization was the official policy of the Federal Government for a century and a half.

So no, Andrew Jackson is shite to me.