A shallow rectangle, only one hundred miles from north to south, TENNESSEE stretches 450 miles from the Mississippi to the Appalachians, and divides into three distinct regions. The marshy western third of the state occupies a low plateau edging down toward the Mississippi. Only in the far southwest corner do the bluffs rise high enough to permit a sizeable riverside settlement - the exhilarating port of Memphis . Tennessee's largest city is a magnet for music fans, as the birthplace of urban blues and long-time home of Elvis . The fine plantation homes and tidy old towns of middle Tennessee 's rolling farmland reflect the comfortable lifestyle of its pioneers; smack at the heart of this is Nashville , still country music's capital, despite upstart competition from Branson and Myrtle Beach. The mountainous east shares its top attraction with North Carolina - the peaks, streams and meadows of Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

Tennessee's first white settlers, most of them British Protestants, arrived from across the mountains in the 1770s to settle in the hills and hollows of the Appalachians. Initially relations with the Cherokee were good. However, demand for land increased, and confrontations throughout the state culminated in 1838 with the forced removal of the Indians on the "Trail of Tears." One of the main congressional opponents of this process was Davy Crockett , familiar from legend as the heavy-drinking hunter in a coonskin cap. When Civil War came, the plantation owners of the west maneuvered Tennessee into the Confederacy, against the wishes of the nonslaveholding smallhold farmers in the east. The last state to secede became the primary battlefield in the west, the site of 424 battles and skirmishes.

Despite economic development to rival any in the country, soil erosion and farm mechanization led to a mass migration to the cities in the years before World War I. The fundamentalist beliefs of these transplanted hill-dwellers (whose folk and fiddle music served to spark Nashville's country scene) influenced a prohibition movement that kept all of Tennessee bone-dry until 1939, and still sees a majority of counties forbidding the sale of alcohol. The New Deal of the 1930s brought significant changes. In particular, the Tennessee Valley Authority , created in 1933, harnessed the flood-prone Tennessee River , providing much-needed jobs and cheap power, and ignited the transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy.  TOP

Eastern Tennessee
Until the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority, the opening of Great Smoky Mountains National Park and the building of the interstate highways, life had continued in the remote hills and valleys of eastern Tennessee in much the same way as it had ever since the arrival of the first pioneers. Now visitors flock here for its endless expanses of natural beauty; and as a result, especially in the fall, the Smokies can get clogged with traffic. Most communities are small, and either over-touristed or just bland. The two main cities, modern Knoxville and picturesque Chattanooga , have much in common, including healthy post-World War II industrial growth, thanks to cheap TVA power.

Shiloh National Military Park
Approximately 110 miles east of Memphis and twelve south of Savannah, Tennessee, via US-64 and Hwy-22, SHILOH NATIONAL MILITARY PARK (daily 8am-5pm; $2; tel 901/689-5275) commemorates one of the most crucial battles of the Civil War. After victories at Fort Henry and Fort Donelson, General Grant's confident Union forces were all but defeated by a surprise early-morning Confederate attack on April 6, 1862. A stubborn rump of resistance held on until around 5pm, and the Confederates elected to finish the task off the next morning rather than launching a twilight assault. However, Grant's decimated regiments were bolstered by the overnight arrival of new troops, and instead it was their dawn initiative that forced the tired and demoralized Confederates to retreat.

Shiloh was the first encounter on a scale that became common as the war continued, putting an abrupt end to the romantic innocence of many a raw volunteer soldier. Over 20,000 men in all were killed. Even the war-toughened General Sherman spoke of "piles of dead soldiers' mangled bodies ? without heads and legs ? the scenes on this field would have cured anyone of war."

The visitor center displays artifacts recovered from the battlefield and shows a twenty-minute film. A self-guided ten-mile driving tour takes in the National Cemetery , whose moss-covered walls contain thousands of unidentified graves.  TOP