Chattanooga is situated on the Tennessee River in east
Tennessee along the Georgia state line . During the Civil War it was of
strategic importance as a major railroad center in the South. Chattanooga and
Chickamauga Battlefield Park takes in some of the Civil War battlefields in
northern Georgia and the Chattanooga area that were part of the campaign.
Chickamauga was actually the first military park established after the Civil
War to memorialize the battle and those who died in it in 1863, a very bloody
high-casualty battle that was a significant Confederate victory. Union troops,
however, were victorious several months later in storming Lookout Mountain high
above Chattanooga, a win which set the stage for the Union forces movement
towards Atlanta and across Georgia in 1864. Point Park on Lookout Mountain is a
spectacular viewpoint over the city, the Tennessee River Valley, and Cumberland
Plateau.

I stopped in Dayton, Tennessee on the route north, the location
of the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial in which John Scopes was put on trial for
teaching evolution in a public school . This was an episode in American history
I remember well from AP history class. The judgment in the high publicity trial
was in favor of the prosecution and Scopes was convicted of the evil deed of
teaching science in school, but the trial made a mockery of William Jennings
Bryan’s fundamentalist religious views. The locals must have agreed with the
result since it’s Bryan’s statue rather than defense attorney Clarence Darrow’s
outside the courthouse.

Almost 90 years after the trial much of the South still doesn’t
teach evolution as science, and not only as it pertains to humans. Ignoramuses
throughout the region (and elsewhere in America) preach so-called “Creation
Science”, an oxymoron if there ever was one, and there’s even a museum to
creationism in Kentucky, a place I’ve joked that I’d like to visit for some
good laughs some day in my travels across the country. America’s ignorant “bubocracy”
(to use H.L. Mencken’s term” remains alive and well in 2014.