"But Pleaz's Zooseum can't hold a candle to the curiosities down in the Holston and Tennessee River country," his neighbors say. "Looks like they just naturally turned loose the briny deep in that country. When they started in on the job old Grandpap up and spoke his mind. Said he, 'Sich carryings on is destructuous of the Master's handiwork and I don't countenance it.' He'd set there by his log fire in his house all his endurin' life. The fire had never went out on that hearth since he was borned and he told the goverment he didn't aim the embers should die down whilst he lived. Well, sir, to pacify the old man they up and moved him, house, log fire and all, up higher in the mountains and him a-settin' right there by the fire all the time. Now he can look down to them mighty waters and them public works with his door open and never jolt his chair away from the hearth." If Daniel Boone could retrace his steps along the Holston and Tennessee Rivers perhaps he would gape, too flabbergasted to utter a word. Or he might ask in dismay, "What's become of my elbow room?" The country he once roamed with gun and dog has been transformed into a mighty flooded area to make way for the world's largest project of its kind. At first much was said back and forth about the Tennessee Valley Authority. Some viewed it with a dubious eye, called it names--a New Deal experiment, a merchant of electricity, a threat to private ownership of business, or again merely a new series of letters in alphabetical government, the TVA. To isolated mountain folk who came to look as time went on, it was the plum biggest public works they had ever set eyes on. Eight years after it was begun--by the middle of 1941--with war threatening the civilized world, the TVA has become a defense arm. Uncle Sam at once cast his discerning eye down Tennessee way and his National Defense Advisory Committee designated the TVA as one of its defense industries, and an appropriation of $79,800,000 was granted the Authority, and a call from the defense power program went out for TVA "to add to its system of ten multi-purpose dams the Cherokee Power Dam on the Holston River, to build another near the Watts Bar Dam and to advance work on the Fort Loudoun Dam on the Tennessee River." "About the only things unchanged are the caves under the earth and the forests, I reckon," an old mountaineer observes. "They won't never dig away them Great Smoky Mountains, I'm satisfied, though they've got a roadway on the very top from Newfound Gap Highway to Clingman's Dome. And they've got what's left of the Cherokees scrouged off to theirselves in Qualla Indian Reservation." Wise and far-seeing men have looked to the preservation of much of nature's beauty through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which embraces Little Pigeon Gorge, and Chimney Tops, which command a breathtaking view of the surrounding country.