[vance hawkins]

lately I have been researching Chickamauga Cherokee stories online. I have been in otuch with a few reseearchers the following was forewarded to me —

Apparently tehre is no historical documentation of it whatsoever, and these stories (Yahoo Falls, Cornblossom, and Tuckahoe tales). Doublehead was a real perosn but the events ascribed to him have no basis in historical documentation.

If anyone knows of documentation that IS documented, I’d like to know about it. Thanks.

YAHOO FALLS — AN HISTORICAL OVERVIEW by Samuel D. Perry

Located in McCreary County, Kentucky, Yahoo Falls is considered to be Kentucky’s highest waterfall, although it is believed that a similar waterfall in the Red River Gorge exceeds Yahoo Falls in height by a few inches. It is a very scenic waterfall and is surrounded by magnificent vistas and natural arches. In the gorge into which Yahoo Falls plunges there exists a rarity in Kentucky, a sizeable tract of virgin timber, protected from harvest over the years by the inaccessibility of the gorge.

When the Cumberland National Forest was created in 1937, ownership of the Falls and surrounding second-growth timberland passed to the Federal government and management of it was entrusted to the U.S. Forest Service, an agency of the Department of Agriculture. Always off the beaten track, so to speak, the Yahoo Falls area languished for more than twenty years as the Forest Service gave the land an opportunity to heal itself after decades of high-grade logging abuse, uncontrolled burning, and erosion.

In 1953, supervision of the Cumberland National Forest was assigned to Robert F. Collins, a professional forester, sportsman, and far-sighted manager of natural resources. Collins was also a history buff and admirer of the Kentucky explorer and pioneer, Daniel Boone. So much so, that in 1966, he was almost solely responsible for having the name of the Cumberland National Forest changed to that of Daniel Boone National Forest. In his seventeen-year tenure as Forest Supervisor, Collins made a name for himself as a progressive land manger and undertook many innovative projects that transformed the Forest from a virtual wasteland into a haven for lovers of outdoor recreation and a sustainable source of wood products.

Collins had a sincere interest in the history of the region that became the Daniel Boone National Forest and sought to establish sites on the Forest where that history could be used to attract visitors and educate the general public. As a Boone enthusiast, he was, naturally, attracted to the northern reaches of the Forest where Boone had spent most of his time while in Kentucky. However, the southern districts could not be ignored and Collins began to look around for something he could use as a basis for interpreting the history of that region. He found it in an obscure booklet entitled LEGION OF THE LOST MINE, published in 1958 by a Scott County, Tennessee resident, Thomas Harlan Troxel.

LEGION OF THE LOST MINE is a short collection of stories based upon the traditions of the Troxel family and centers around an intriguing person in the history of the Cherokee, Chief Doublehead. In the book, Troxel creates additional characters to supplement the Doublehead story. Big Jake, Princess Cornblossom, Hans Blackberne, and the romantic Brave Tuckahoe all romp through the pages of LEGION OF THE LOST MINE like characters in a Walt Disney drama. Although Thomas H. Troxel was careful to note in the foreword to his book that the names of some of the characters are fictitious, many well-meaning persons have used his work as a framework upon which to build a fraudulent history of the region drained by the Big South Fork of the Cumberland River. Robert Collins used it to create the Yahoo Falls Recreation Area on the Stearns Ranger District.

Knowing that it would be cost-prohibitive to attempt to extract the mature timber from within the Yahoo Creek gorge, the decision was made to turn Yahoo Falls into a scenic attraction and lure visitors to the Stearns Ranger District. An all-weather road was built from the Alum Ford road to the top of the gorge and a picnic area was established with sources of potable water, fire pits, and toilets. Trails were constructed and a long flight of steel stairs led visitors down into the gorge past towering cliffs and nearly vertical slopes lush with mountain laurel, rhododendron, and not a few threatened and endangered species of plants. For the history buffs, Collins ordered the construction of a cemetery at the entrance to the Yahoo Falls Recreation Area. This cemetery would contain only one grave, that of a Jacob Troxel, one of the major players in LEGION OF THE LOST MINE. With the help of a local congressman, a government-issued marker was acquired and installed at the head of the “grave”. The marker would identify Jacob Troxel as a veteran of the Philadelphia County Militia in the Revolutionary War.

Today, management of the Yahoo Falls area is the responsibility of the National Park Service and hundreds of visitors come to stand under the immense overhang beneath the Falls and to navigate the trails that penetrate the pristine creek gorge. Presumably, some of these visitors also pause at the entrance and look at the lone gravestone enclosed by a rustic fence, not knowing that the stone stands over an empty grave, and that it honors a man who, in all probability, never existed.

Shortly after his retirement, in 1970, Robert Collins was commissioned by the Forest Service to write a history of the Daniel Boone National Forest. Since its publication in 1975, A HISTORY OF THE DANIEL BOONE NATIONAL FOREST has become the definitive work (and the only work) on the subject, even though it has been the object of negative criticism within the agency, itself. In his book, Collins perpetuates the Big Jake-Princess Cornblossom-Chief Doublehead legend and enhances it, going so far as to lend credence to what is, perhaps, the most notorious of the myths, the alleged massacre of innocent Cherokee at Yahoo Falls by Indian-hating whites. This grievous indictment of the non-Indian citizens of Wayne County, Kentucky, particularly the Gregory family, is an unforgivable breach of professional ethics by Collins or any reputable historian. By making such charges without proof, Collins ensures that he can never be taken seriously as a historian and leaves all of his work open to question and debate. In his wisdom, even Thomas H. Troxel makes no mention of a massacre at Yahoo Falls in his published writings.

For many years, I was a believer in the Big Jake-Princess Cornblossom-Yahoo Falls Massacre legend. When I undertook the research which culminated in the publication of my own book, SOUTH FORK COUNTRY, I quickly learned that much of what I had believed in my younger days about the legend was based upon pure speculation, wishful thinking, and, as time went on, deliberate attempts to deceive. After much study, I concluded that, although there was, indeed, a Chief Doublehead (though bearing no resemblance to the Doublehead of the legend), both Big Jake (Troxel) and Princess Cornblossom were, both, simply, figments of Thomas H. Troxel’s imagination and that the Yahoo Falls Massacre was simply an add-on to the legend designed to serve personal agendas.

The oft-repeated (even on the Internet) story of a mass murder at Yahoo Falls is based, not upon empirical data, but upon hearsay and revisionist history. It is an unconscionable smear of the descendants of Hiram Gregory, who is charged with leading the assault upon the Cherokees, and serves, not to unite the people of the Big South Fork region, but to divide them.

In the past, good, but misinformed persons have sought to create a heritage for the people living within the drainage basin of the Big South Fork whom they regarded as having none. They used their influence to put up historical markers and headstones, wrote about the region in national forest histories, and, patronizingly, tried to give what they thought was the region’s due. They cannot be faulted for this because they did what they believed was right. But, we are at the dawn of a new era in historical research and the citizens of Wayne, Pulaski, and McCreary counties now know that their true heritage can be based upon real people and real events. We must not be afraid to subject our sacred cows of tradition to the historical method and evaluate the data objectively and responsibly. I have done that to the Chief Doublehead-Big Jake-Cornblossom-Yahoo Falls Massacre, and have found it to be what it always will be-a series of fanciful stories not based upon factual evidence.

Samuel D. Perry Copyright: 2002

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