There were six white men and one white woman at Palmyra in 1777 - one man named Bowen was killed by a herd of buffaloes!

Three years after my mother's passing, I am beginning to dip back into genealogy.  

She was a keen genealogist for several decades.  In the last ten years, as technology outstripped her, I began to do a lot of the research for her.  What began as a filial obligation quickly turned to an historical pleasure.  Nothing like following individuals to pick up a more nuanced sense of the ebbs and flows of events.  For whatever mix of reasons, I set aside all the research when my mother passed.  

And now it is time to pick it up again.  So many stories.

3rd great-grandfather James Rasberry (1783-1868) out of South Carolina, via Georgia and ultimately into Lawrence County, Mississippi.  He married Celia Rasberry (1791-1862) in Morgan County, Georgia.  The trail of records is patchy at the beginning.  It is further muddled because a number of his siblings, instead of heading from South Carolina into Georgia, instead moved to western Tennessee, Palmyra, Tennessee in particular.

I am researching his siblings to try and fill out the picture a bit.  

I come across a note by a researcher from a few decades ago in a newspaper.  Sometimes it is the event, sometimes it is the wording.  But it is nonetheless arresting.

His Baggett forebears came to Palmyra between 1800-1805.  His great great-grandfather - Micajah Baggett married Allie Parker in 1808.  They lived on Budd's Creek.  The Sugg family lived on Yellow Creek.

All the Tennessee histories refer to six white men and one white woman at Palmyra in 1777 - one man named Bowen was killed by a herd of buffaloes!  They later moved on to New Orleans, (page 193 of Ramsey's 'Annals of Tennessee').

Poor old Bowen.  I have long known of the herds of buffaloe in Georgia at the time of settlement but had not particularly thought of them all the way up in western Tennessee.