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over there.”
    At first Jack thought it was just a pile of rocks Merle pointed to, then he realized it was stones mortared together. “That’s what’s left of the chimney,” Merle said. “This used to be the Chapman family farm. My great-granddaddy built a house here, cleared the land, and raised kids and cows and corn.”
    â€œIt’s mostly trees now,” Jack observed.
    â€œYeah, but not back then. My granddaddy grew up here. When he was a kid, he’d hoe corn for 12 hours a day and get paid just 25 cents, he told me. And when he got bigger he carried hundred-pound sacks of sugar, one on each shoulder, for the moonshiners.”
    Ashley looked puzzled. “What are ‘moonshiners?’”
    It was Yonah who answered, “They’re the lawbreakers who made their own whiskey in illegal stills, until they were arrested by federal agents.”
    â€œNah, they hardly ever got arrested,” Merle said. “And they weren’t criminals. Even during Prohibition, every family in these mountains grew corn and made moonshine from it, either to drink or to sell. City folks were always willin’ and waitin’ to buy ’shine.”
    Merle seemed to be admitting that his kinfolk were lawbreakers. “If they had farms here,” Jack asked, “why did they leave?”
    Yonah was the one who answered. “Look around you. You’re now standing in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. How do you think it got here?”
    Merle nodded. “The landowners got kicked out so the U.S. government could turn all this scenery into a national park. It was back in the Depression, and my family had to sell the land dirt cheap. Great-granddaddy put the money into a bank, and then the bank went bust. So there he was—no money, nine kids, and no job ’cause all the other people were looking for jobs, too.”
    Yonah’s face screwed up as he mocked, “Oh, boo hoo hoo! So your kinfolk got kicked off the land. Hey, Jack, want to know how Merle’s kinfolk got the land in the first place? They stole it from the Cherokee Nation! The Cherokees happened to be here first, and they got run right off this land, with guns pointed at their backs!”
    Now it was Yonah who threw out his arms. “About a thousand years ago the Cherokee people settled all the land from the Ohio River to South Carolina. They were doing just great…’til the Europeans came.”
    The way he said “Europeans” made Jack uncomfortable. After all, his own ancestors came from Europe.
    â€œThis was our sacred ancestral home,” Yonah went on. “And listen to this, Ashley—the Cherokee men treated their women as equals. Yeah! And that was long before white men did that.”
    â€œSo what happened?” Ashley asked softly. “What happened to all of them?”
    â€œThe U.S. President Andrew Jackson sent American soldiers to force 14,000 Cherokee from the land around here. And those tribes didn’t get paid in dollars—they got paid nothing . The soldiers marched them all the way to Oklahoma. In winter!” Yonah was growing agitated. “Thousands of Cherokee people died along the way, mostly women and kids.”
    Even Merle was silent now, staring at the ground. Jack wondered which of the two guys had won the argument. Not a good kind of argument—a “my folks were treated worse then yours” contest. No real winners.
    â€œHey, check over there,” Ashley said, walking a little way ahead. “It’s like there’s an old pot or something behind those trees. Maybe it got left behind when everyone had to move away.”
    That Ashley—she had sharp eyes! Jack wouldn’t have noticed the slight gleam of copper barely visible through the brush; in fact, it looked as though brush had been deliberately piled on top of it.
    â€œUh-oh,” Merle muttered.
    â€œI know what it is,” Yonah yelled.