Flying Off Rattlesnake Mountain

This narrative non-fiction story follows the life of Micajah Clark Dyer and how he came to have a remarkable theory about flying, the roadblocks he encountered as he toiled to bring his vision to fulfillment, and the ridicule he endured from some of his neighbors because they could not understand him and his passion. It depicts life as it was lived by the North Georgia pioneers who settled the land which had become available in the early 1800s following government removal of the native Indians. It is based on information gleaned from every available source--old newspapers, census reports, family recollections, and historical records, some copies of which are included in the Appendix. Through the story, you get a rare look into ann isolated land and era where no cameras or newspapers existed, yet where a genius--just a poor, uneducated farmer--built and flew a controllable aircraft long before anyone else was able to accomplish that feat.

Micajah Clark Dyer was a poor mountain farmer who invented, patented, built and flew a rustic aircraft off Rattlesnake Mountain in Union County, GA in the 1800s. Having limited formal education and building his craft with only basic tools, he managed to incorporate flight navigational controls on his machine that were years ahead of others trying to invent a flying machine, including the French and German inventors who only accomplished this about two decades later.After Dyer¿s death, it was said that his widow sold the craft and patent to someone from Atlanta. Without a camera or newspaper in the North Georgia mountains at the time to report the story, Dyer¿s feats were almost forgotten¿until 130 years later, in 2004, when his patent was discovered by a great-great-great-grandson as he was searching the Internet. The patent revealed the mind of a genius, and the story of his life is one you will long remember. A few month later, the family located several 1875 newspapers that reported the story of the invention.The story of this remarkable man includes many full-color photographs of the family, their homeplace, and commemorating events that have been held to honor him for his invention.

This book concerns an actual group of Native Americans known as the Toyah culture who lived in Central Texas for six hundred years, culminating with their disappearance around seven hundred years before the present. This Toyah cultures prehistoric empire began in Taylor County, Texas, and proceeded southeasterly across the Edwards Plateau through South Texas and into Northern Mexico. Their eastern boundary extended to the Gulf of Mexico while their western boundary coincided with the Pecos River basin. The book is written in two parts, with the first part taking place some seven hundred years before present and chronicling the life of Chandana, a strong young Toyah medicine woman and shaman struggling with lifes mundane things and some things quite serious and imposing. Chandanas life is written in the form of a novel as it is based upon the authors discovered evidence as to how her life may have unfolded. The second part of the book illustrates some of the authors discoveries, evaluations, and research among what was left behind by these Toyah Native Americans who lived along Bluff Creek, Flag Creek, and Elmmott Creek. Finally, the author offers direct and circumstantial evidence illustrating why and how this great Toyah Empire was replaced by other Native Americans, starting around the year 1300.

Master storyteller Don Waters returns to the desert in his third book set in the American Southwest. With the gothic sensibility of Flannery O’Connor and emotional delicacy of Raymond Carver, these nine contemporary stories deftly explore the lives of characters losing or clinging to a fleeting faith and struggling to find something meaningful to believe in beneath overpowering desert skies. Soldiers, seekers, priests, prisoners, and surfers pursue their fate amid bizarre, sometimes overwhelming circumstances. In “La Luz de Jesús,” a gutless Los Angeles screenwriter, a believer in nothing but the god of Hollywood, must reorient after he encounters a group of penitents in New Mexico’s Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The decorated soldier in “Española” faces more chaos back home than he did during his tour in Iraq. And “The Saints of Rattlesnake Mountain” pairs a “trustee” prison inmate and a wild mustang horse, both wards of the state of Nevada, as they fumble toward a spiritual truth. These stories capture the spirit of a region and its people. Once again Waters assembles an unconventional cast of characters, capturing their foibles and imperfections, and always rendering them with compassion as these modern-day martyrs and spiritually haunted survivors strive for some kind of redemption. Ingenious, sometimes forbidding, often absurd, and altogether original, The Saints of Rattlesnake Mountain is a stirring tribute to the lives, loves, and hopes of the faithful and the dispossessed.

Explores the Appalachian Trail through Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York.

A regional studies review.

Robert C. Vallieres struggled to find his ônew normalö when he returned home after serving in the military. An accident in Kuwait left him suffering from traumatic brain injury (TBI) internal injuries, leaving him in constant pain. After clinics, bottles of painkillers, and behavior modification pills, hope seemed to vanish. Then a local weekly newspaper ad caught his eye: a bird-watching trip to see raptors in the mountains of New Hampshire. An Emily Dickinson poem that states, ôHope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul, and sings the tuneùwithout the words, and never stops at all,ö sprang to his mind. Wounded Warriors is VallieresÆs story of self-healing from crippling ôinvisibleö wounds through the help of birds. The problems of TBI and post-traumatic stress disorder do not have definitive solutions. His story of recovery offers a winged hope to thousands of military personnel who suffer these physical and mental battles.