The Great Escape: River Run from Crockett

Black Warrior Town, located at the confluence of the Sipsey and Mulberry Forks of the Black Warrior River in Walker County, was the northernmost settlement of the Creek Nation.

In the fall of 1813 Andrew Jackson, then a general, sent the Tennessee Militia to destroy the town. Davy Crockett led the way. Over 800 troops arrived, surrounded the village, observed it through the night while fires burned and people milled about, and then invaded at dawn. The town was eerily quiet and deserted. The troops flushed out five or six old men, but every other man, woman, and child was gone. The militia stole the food stores, which sustained its soldiers for a year. Colonel John Coffee ordered the town burned which had over sixty houses. We were able to gain a historical marker regarding this in 2017.

We knew that the micalgi (lesser chief), Oceochemathla, had prepared for this and was instrumental in leading the people to safety. We have now found out that the mico (greater chief), Black Warrior or Little Warrior, and four or five elderly men stayed behind to keep the fires burning and give the impression that people were still in the town. So when the Tennessee Militia surrounded what they believed was a populated village, the residents were actually several miles down river near the present day town of Cordova. Black Warrior was shot by a young militiaman, and so he gave his life protecting his people.

This October 16th we are having a kayak race, The Great Escape: River Run from Crockett. The race will begin near the center of the former Black Warrior Town, and it will end in present day Cordova. The race commemorates this event by traveling the same stretch of river the Creeks took all those years ago to get to safety.

While we may have been almost silent, we have not been still. Delaney Childers of Sipsey, generously gave us one acre of land on the Mulberry Fork. This property will become Childers’ Landing, a kayak rest stop. Our vision is that it will be place where boaters of all types can pull over and enjoy the river. We received a $5000 CAWACO RC&D grant which enabled us to get some much needed work done with heavy equipment. Some Alabama Power guys also helped us remove some debris left over from the April 27, 2011 Tornado Outbreak. As we make progress on this front, we will post updates. We have started a fund raiser for this project, selling t-shirts that commemorate Black Warrior Town, the Muscogee Creek Settlement that was situated around The Forks. We hope you buy one or two.

Of course, we are still pursuing justice from Tyson Foods. As you are probably aware, the State of Alabama has sued the food giant. In Dennis Pillion’s AL.COM article he quoted the Alabama Attorney General’s office regarding the purpose of the state’s lawsuit, “…to see the State made whole for the damage done to our environment and to see the affected communities adequately compensated for their unique and devastating losses.” I cannot tell you how proud I am that our state is standing up to this Goliath.

In the mean time, I and one of my river-teacher friends had the privilege of introducing some of our fellow educators to the lower Sipsey Fork. Although our first trip began with someone flipping a kayak in 55 degree water, our experiences were a much needed salve in a time of upheaval and uncertainty. I will speak more about this later.

Forgive me friends, for my long absence. As an educator during these times of Covid (from March 2020 until now), the act of spending more time in front of a computer has been difficult. I am, perhaps, finally getting a handle on recreating my entire career online.

I look forward to our future progress.

I recently had the opportunity to kayak down the Sipsey Fork with three other educators. Two of our party had never been on the river in that way before. In a very short order we left the noise and stress of the present day behind us.

The river was high. The water was COLD. Poplars and sycamores and water oaks hung over the banks soothing us with multiple shades of green. The smell of honeysuckle was strong. One of my friends said, “It’s so clean.” She was so surprised. It was a great day, and I said goodbye to the group feeling completely satisfied with the experience.

That afternoon, I went to a particular spot on the Mulberry Fork a couple of miles upstream from where it joins with the Sipsey. My sister was with me. While I gathered what I needed, she watched the water. “It’s so weird,” she said.

“What?” I asked.

“There’s nothing moving in the water. There’s nothing IN the water.”

I reflected back to a couple of years ago when my daughters, my nephew, and I paddled up the Mulberry Fork. The water was noisy with fish jumping, birds calling, and turtles splashing. A family of wood ducks followed us the entire way. Occasionally something unknown would glide beside the boat. We passed a place where the trees on the opposite banks hung over the river and touched each other. Once we passed there, we were silent.

I want that back.

This past week the State of Alabama announced that it would sue Tyson Foods. It is a positive move in the midst of this great loss. We should never have to be surprised when a river is clean. We should expect it, and if needs be, we should demand it.

On February 6, 2020, my youngest daughter, Hannah, and I attended the Annual Tyson Foods Shareholders Meeting in Springdale, Arkansas.

In early January Gina Falada of Investor Advocates of Social Justice asked me if I would be interested in speaking at the Annual Tyson Foods Shareholders Meeting on February 6, 2020, regarding the impact the spill has had on our community. IASJ represents faith-based investors who want to make positive changes using their investment ability.

I agreed. She explained that logistically, this would be a complicated undertaking. By February 2, I knew that I would be allowed to attend by proxy in the place of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd. Hannah would be able to attend for Mercy Investment Services. By this time, it was too late to get an affordable flight (pre-quarantine), so we left on February 5 and drove straight there.

Springdale, Arkansas is a quaint town. It’s clean and well kept, and it’s all about Tyson. Hannah and I met with Gina that night after we had checked into a hotel. She informed me that I would be one of three people speaking. My time limit was firm. When we left Gina, Hannah and I went back to our hotel. We worked on my speech, making certain it was within that limit.

That morning it snowed. Hannah and I arrived at the Tyson Foods Headquarters about 20 minutes before I was to speak. The particular building we visited was for Tyson’s IT employees. It was a beautifully refurbished building. When we arrived in the parking lot, the police presence was obvious. A uniformed officer exited his vehicle as we exited ours. Protestors were being contained across the street from the IT building.

We entered the building. I was struck by the beauty of the natural light on what looked like refurbished wooden walls. A woman met us after we passed through security. “You’re Martha,” she said to me. I admitted my identity, and she directed me to Gina Falada, who was already there. As we approached Gina, I became aware of Tyson IT employees watching the proceedings on the mezzanines of the second and third floors.

Several Tyson executives came up and shook our hands. There was a moment, facing these tastefully dressed people, that I had the strong sense that this was not a place where I should be; this was a place where my people didn’t belong.

As the proceedings got underway and Tyson’s accomplishments were being lauded, I thought about our river. I thought about how it feels to be in a kayak, watching my paddle cut into the smooth water, so I can pull myself downstream. I thought about my father, my mother, and my grandfather.

When it was my time to speak, I spoke. I made eye contact with the three Tyson executives who sat in chairs on an elevated platform.

After the meeting, John Tyson, Chairman of the Board, shook our hands and stated his commitment to “make things right.”

We spoke with Kevin Igli, Sustainability and Chief Environmental Officer. He told also told us that they want to make things right regarding the “Hanceville Spill.” He seemed like a very nice, genuine person. During our conversation, I explained that it was the people downstream who were most affected. I mentioned Colony, Arkadelphia, Bremen, Sipsey, Empire, Coon Creek, Dilworth, Dora, Sumiton, Cordova.

I hope John Tyson and Kevin Igli are genuine. I hope good things can come from this meeting. Regardless, we are the ones who have to exercise our voice, even in those places where we don’t belong. Without OUR voice, hope means nothing.

Teachers tend to have interesting conversations with their next door school neighbors. In high school we have a few minutes between classes as students exit and enter the classroom. During that time, we supervise the hallway in front of our doors, greet students, answer numerous student questions, and communicate useful, interesting, and sometimes funny information with each other. 

For the past two years my next door school neighbor has been a history teacher who is also a local pastor. I taught one of his daughters. His wife works with one of my good friends. Like me, he has been teaching long enough to see the ebb and flow of change. He and I have made multiple observations about trends among our students and in society in general. 

One topic that has risen to the top is the seemingly lack of outside activity in which our students voluntarily participate. He remarked that he and his childhood friends were outside at every opportunity. They came in to eat, and when that was done, they were back in the yard, on their bikes, or in the woods. They had adventures, and on special occasions they fished. The one rule the children had was that they were to be on their way inside by the time the street lights came on. 

Perhaps parents have more reason to keep children inside now, or perhaps they are overprotective. We both agreed that our students miss out on opportunities for character building, problem solving, and physical benefits that outdoor activity provides. By not allowing children to explore nature, we limit them. We make their world much too small. Children and adults alike crave adventure. It’s hard to have that today, unless it’s in a video game, which probably accounts for that industry’s huge popularity.

However, here locally we have the river. Even now, it is an adventure for me to get on the Sipsey or Mulberry Fork. Mark Twain once compared a river to a book, “it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.” The Black Warrior River is like that. It is never the same river twice.

This description could fit every river in our state. Rivers are constant sources of adventure. They provide opportunities for family and friends to bond, offering physical and mental exercise. The view from the river can help us see things in a way that no video game can. You need only take a friend who has never been on the river to see this in action. The river can restore us, and it gives us the very water we drink.

As incomprehensible as it is to believe, here in Alabama we have people in high positions in our state government that place no value on this resource. On Friday, October 18, 2019, the Alabama Environmental Management Commission unanimously voted to keep Lance LaFleur as the director for the Alabama Department of Environmental Management. This is after multiple complaints of his ineffectiveness from all over our state.

According to ABC 3340’s Cynthia Gould, the commission’s decision “took just three minutes of the meeting with no discussion and no questions.” 

How can it be that we continue to allow this broken system to putter along spewing poison as it goes? If ADEM is accountable to the Alabama Environmental Management Commission, to whom are they accountable? The governor appoints this board, but in the end isn’t she accountable to the people of this state? 

It’s up to us to change this situation. The citizens of Alabama are at a crossroads here. We can continue to allow certain elements of our state government to limit our rights to clean water and safe recreation. We can accept that we have lost not only our sense of adventure but our concern for our health and the health of our children.

Or, we can do the opposite. We demand that the State does right by its people. We demand our right to clean water and clean recreation. We demand our voices be heard. Our adventure is not over.

• Let Governor Kay Ivey Know what must be done. She can be contacted here https://governor.alabama.gov/contact/.

• The general contact for Alabama Environmental Management Commission is aemc@adem.alabama.gov.

• This page lists the members of AEMC. http://www.adem.state.al.us/commission/commissioners.cnt

For those of us who use and drink from the Mulberry Fork of the Black Warrior River, the past few summers have revealed the extent to which our water is being polluted. I would say the summer of 2019 has been life changing for many of us.

Unfortunately, we are not alone. 3M’s illegal chemical release into the Tennessee River was reported on social media and by the press. In South Alabama Union Town’s struggle for clean water has been well documented. On September 13, 2019, Black Warrior Riverkeeper posted that wastewater is being discharged into Freetown Creek which makes its way to the Alabama River. Improper sewage treatment has plagued Union Town in one way or another for years.

This is 2019. How can it be that we still allow the systematic pollution of our water? How can it be that we are not notified when there is a life-threatening “spill” into our waterways? I remember in school learning that there are three basic needs for survival: food, water, and shelter. Water is a basic human need, and yet, we allow companies and municipalities to pour filth into our rivers.

I suppose we all believe that our water treatment facilities can blast the filth coated water with enough chemicals that the bad stuff can be killed, or maybe we think we can filter out the bad chemicals poured in by these companies. Deep down we instinctively know how dangerous it is to ignore the pollution of our life-giving rivers.

Alabama deserves better.

Those of us at Sipsey Heritage Commission have been discussing the recent revelation (revealed by Black Warrior Riverkeeper) that ADEM was fully aware of the high e.coli levels present on the Mulberry Fork in the aftermath of the Tyson spill which occurred on June 6, 2019. ADEM withheld this information from the public.

We have heard phrases like “due process” and “open investigation” thrown around in the public discourse. These terms always seem to favor one side. It is not the side of the people who actually fish in, recreate on, and drink water from the Mulberry Fork of the Black Warrior River. Paraphrasing Jared Aaron, one of our members, ADEM really doesn’t work for us. In fact, Lance LaFluer told Brian Pia of ABC 3340 that fining Tyson for the spill is “Old School.” (Perhaps this argument can be used if we get pulled over for speeding.)

While Tyson does press releases extolling the great charity work it does, we on the Mulberry Fork continue to live in the aftermath of this environmental disaster. While Tyson reports that it has given 19,000 pounds of chicken to an after school program in Tennessee, teenagers from Sipsey and Empire are still on the river, but they are no longer able to supplement family meals with fish. Providing food for the family table should rank high among after school programs. While Tyson sends an open letter to the residents of Hanceville, this massive company goes on pretending that Colony, Bremen, Sipsey, Empire, Argo, and Cordova do not exist. It can be added here that Hanceville is above the actual spill.

Even worse is to be misled by our own people, the people who are supposed to be protecting us from companies that have no qualms poisoning us if it means a few more dollars in profit. The Alabama Department of Environmental Management is an agency that is supposed to “assure for all citizens of the State a safe, healthful, and productive environment.” ADEM has failed in its mission, and it has ignored its reason to exist.

I think a lot about time, always have. I think this stems from the fact that my grandmother was the youngest of eighteen children. Mimi’s father was 57 years old, and her mother was 47 in 1912, the year she was born. Mimi’s parents told stories about their parents, and this put her in touch with a much earlier time simply because her parents were old enough to be her grandparents.

They had a farm located on the ridge between the Sipsey and Mulberry Forks, and the rivers played a big role in their lives. Like many families of the time, Mimi’s family had a variety of crops and livestock . One of the things the women of the family were responsible for was collecting medicinal plants from the woods, especially plants that grew near the rivers. The Sipsey Fork had some types of plants, and the Mulberry Fork had others, and certainly there were some plants common to both. Mimi and her sisters would sell medicine plants every year to buy material for making clothes.

Mimi had a sister-in-law, Rinthey, who was a midwife and healer who knew how to properly dry and store the medicine plants the women collected. She was very skilled at using these medicinal plants for a variety of illnesses. People would visit Rinthey rather than going to a doctor.

They had a rhythm to their lives. Each season held a series of tasks and celebrations that marked time. Mimi thought it was important for her grandchildren to know about how things had worked when she was young. I’m sure she saw that we were losing information even as we gained modern conveniences.

She had a friend whose family lived on the Mulberry Fork. The family supplemented their income by moonshining, a very common practice at the time. Because of this, they were very cautious about who came and went. If you visited them, you came in by river. Mimi’s father would take her in a small boat to their land. Big dogs guarded the way into the family homestead. She and the girl would play on the valley that hugged the crocked river.

I was a teenager the first time I saw the old home place of Mimi’s friend. The wide fields had been sown with corn that was about a foot high, and it appeared blue when the sun hit it a certain way. The Mulberry Fork sparkled gold beside the corn. There was an old Native American fish trap in the water, and fish were funneling through it. The scene was breathtaking. In that moment I was a part of it.

In my lifetime I have seen this place change. The Mulberry Fork still runs through it, but once it’s time for the corn to be a foot high, the river does not sparkle. The cloudy turbidity prevents that. In the Fall of 2018 I kayaked passed this spot. I could not see through the water, . But, there are times when the water is translucent.

The Mulberry Fork needs to be restored. Tyson needs to properly maintain the River Valley Ingredients plant in such a way that there are no more direct releases into Dave Young Creek. A better physical barrier between the plant and the water needs to be built. We as a community need a way to monitor the water quality by a trusted means, and we need aquatic life.

Surely, the powers that be at Tyson have familial connections with water and land. Surely, they remember grandparents that fished and swam and paddled and grew crops and visited friends. Surely they want their children and grandchildren to be able to do the same.

If not, then Tyson and all companies like Tyson are going to restrict us into such a that we lose that sense of Time and the continuity that it gives. Are we going to see a complete break between what went before and what comes after? And if that happens, whose fault it that? We can blame Tyson; they deserve it. Mostly, I blame myself in not recognizing sooner that my grandmother’s legacy is something for which I need to fight.

Maybe I was naive, but I truly believed our rivers would at least look better by now. Yesterday evening when I passed The Forks, the water had a yellowish almost mustard green look that I suppose indicates algae. Every where I go, I have overheard people talking about the spill, and the affect it may or may not have had on our drinking water.

My husband (who despises any type of waste) made a pot of coffee earlier in the week , and it tasted so strange that he poured it down the drain. I ran into an old friend in a store yesterday. She told me that she has resorted to buying the gallon jugs of water to make coffee and tea.

My father and I took a short trip to Moulton a couple of days ago to visit the Oakville Indian Mounds. We enjoyed the visit, but even in those surroundings, the Mulberry Fork was our main topic of conversation. He is 85 years old, and he cannot believe the current state of the river. He wonders if and when it will recover.

The river has been a part of so many of our family events. This stretches from the innumerable years before I was born until today. When I was very small, my mother would tell me about a flood that occurred when she was in school. She had a way of story-telling, and I could picture the water and hear its deafening rush.

The river flooded in April the year my mother died. She was very sick, and she was in a wheelchair. When she heard how high the river was, she demanded we take her to see it. She was a woman you didn’t tell “no”, so we loaded her up and rode around to every access point. Even in her suffering, she was connected to the river, and it gave her energy to see it. The river gives life.

It’s our turn now to give back to the river. We have to do for it what it cannot do for itself.

When I was a girl, my family would tell stories about my paternal grandfather, Tap, who was killed a few years before I was born. Not all of them were flattering. Even so, everyone agreed that he was a gifted fisherman. He would set trout lines and go and check them on a regular basis. He frequented the Black Water, and the Sipsey Fork. But, many of the stories about him are set on the Mulberry Fork. My grandmother thought he spent too much time on the river.

One day on the Mulberry Fork, Tap and a friend were checking trout lines. It was hot summer. Tap had an old boat (or maybe he had borrowed it) that had no motor, so they paddled. The two men had gone up river just about as far as the trout lines were set when a cotton mouth fell out of a tree and into the boat between Tap and the other man.

The other man stood up in the boat, pulled out a pistol, and promptly shot the snake which was in the bottom of the boat. “Well ain’t you just a damn genius,” Tap is quoted as saying as the boat sank. They had to walk the muddy river bank all the way home.

I had been on the river in some form or fashion all of my life: sometimes on the bank, sometimes in a boat with a motor, and sometimes in a canoe. A few years back my nephew talked me into trying out a kayak.

Kayaks are silent. On one trip down the river with family, we were all quite. A blue heron began following us almost as soon as we put in. He would fly ahead, wait till we were almost close enough to touch him, and then he would fly ahead again.

The water was like glass, and it seemed effortless to pull myself along the water. I was a part of everything around me, and I realized I was moving through the same path my grandfather would have traveled many times over. I felt a connection with him in that moment, like I really knew him. It was almost as if I paddled hard enough, He would be around the next bend in the river.