When newcomers Clayton and Scot Hall investigate ghosts, myths, and legends of Louisa and Fort Gay, they discover a fifty-year secret. The townsfolk don't appreciate the intrusion and do not hesitate in showing their displeasure. Soon, the brothers face more than they could ever imagine. Mysteries abound from Pine Hill Cemetery to Paddle Creek, reaching back to the Civil War and the war of Vietnam. Sometimes death has nothing to do with dying.
The Big Sandy River and its two main tributaries, the Tug and Levisa forks, drain nearly two million mountainous acres in the easternmost part of Kentucky. For generations, the only practical means of transportation and contact with the outside world was the river, and, as The Big Sandy demonstrates, steamboats did much to shape the culture of the region. Carol Crowe-Carraco offers an intriguing and readable account of this region's history from the days of the venturesome Long Hunters of the eighteenth century, through the bitter struggles of the Civil War and its aftermath, up to the 1970s, with their uncertain promise of a new prosperity. The Big Sandy pictures these changes vividly while showing how the turbulent past of the valley lives on in the region's present.
The overall objectives of the United States Department of Agriculture's participation in the salinity control study were to: 1) determine the contribution of salt loading from the irrigated cropland and related upland range areas; and, 2) determine the opportunity for reducing salt loadings to the Big Sandy River and the downstream river system.
The May 1927 issue of True Detective magazine dealt with the shooting of Tommy Evans and subsequent investigation of the case in the Old 23rd District of Henry County, Tennessee. The True Detective article read in part, "They told me of the existence of a 'whiskey ring,' in which it was estimated that seventy-five percent of the population ... was alleged to have been engaged in this illicit whiskey business. And it was contended that (Tommy Evans), a respectable and law-abiding citizen, member of the minority faction in the moonshine domain, had openly defied the moonshiners – had became a crusader against them – and died a martyr to the cause of his convictions. Thus the motive for the assassination of (Evans) was apparent." The magazine article quoted a Paris, Tenn., minister, J.H. Buchanan, as saying that, "There are twelve men in this immediate section ready to stand for 'four-square for the right,' and there are twenty-five men over there, and I might be able to name them, who are banded together to protect and promulgate the liquor interests. The remaining citizens in this district are in the middle of the road – either in sympathy with the devil's gang, or they lack the courage to say where they stand." It was amid such a climate that this book is set. South of the Mouth of Sandy focuses on the Evans family that settled near the confluence of the Big Sandy and Tennessee rivers during the middle part of the 19th century. It traces the ancestry of Tommy Evans and tells the story of his death on a dirt road and the trial of his killer.
