lake, to beautify its borders, A Fight and to make for it Primitive Rights.
more attractive to the wild fowl named, by sowing rice and other grain of like nature along its shores and shallows. Hardy back woodsmen erected their humble cabins near by, and by means of rod and gun augmented their annual incomes from a pleasureable source; this — for several generations past. With the lapse of time, however, the great forests along the shores of the lake were de nuded of their more valuable timber, and the agents of the lumber milling interests began prying into the secrets of nature, and trying to see the forest trees that had gone down in the cataclysm that formed the lake. Their efforts were rewarded with the knowl edge that the trees were still sound beneath the waves. Wealthy agriculturalists looked longingly at the shallows of the lake, and dreamed fond dreams of the fertility there submerged, and the possibility of its being bared to the plow and the harrow. And then, like a thunder-clap from a clear sky, came the announcement that " Reelfoot Lake " had been quietly bought up by some unknown agency, and was to be drained I The prime mover of the scheme was hastily ferreted out, and legal action to restrain such an unpopular action was taken by the men who regarded it as an infringement on their sacred rights as freemen. A great legal battle was on. The people who lived in the vicinity of the lake felt that they were fighting for their natural, or primitive rights, and they were warmly seconded and abetted by the sporting, or rather, sports men's fraternity from several of the adja cent towns and cities, and by those who were interested in tourists and other visitors during the gaming season.
The defendant was such in the fullest 487 sense of the word, and he was thrown on the defensive from the very first. While it was very probable that the lake could be drained by means of ditching to the river, aided by hydraulic pumps, yet the people looked upon the whole thing as some thing sacrilegious. God, in his wisdom had so recently formed the great body of water, and it had been a source of so much pleasure and profit to the people, that to turn the waters away that He had thus gathered to them could not result in other than evil, — and the people would not have it so. The first legal bout was won by the plain tiffs, the lower court rendering a decision in their favor. The defendant, however, noth ing daunted, appealed the case to the Su preme Court of the State of Tennessee. There the fight was a strong one, and long drawn out. The plaintiffs, however, won again. The Court held that, while " Reelfoot Lake " is not a navigable body of water in a technical sense, it is so in the ordinary sense; and that the riparian owners have such rights in the waters that the owners have no right to drain it. And thus the American lake that " came after," the one body of water in this coun try that was not here when the white man first penetrated "beyond the Mississippi," will, by the grace of the law, continue to exist as a great living monument to the greatest natural convulsion of the earth in Northern America since the advent of the white man therein; and further, as evidence of his love of the primitive and the natural in his surroundings.
