The Wolf River Valley is tied to the earliest history of Tennessee. Long before Europeans explored the region, Indians hunted the valley, fished in the river, and blazed trails there. Daniel Boone and his brother Squire spent the winter of 1769 in a cave in Pall Mall and named a number of places in the Upper Cumberland, and many longhunters followed them, including Coonrod Pile, a German ancestor of Alvin C. York and the first permanent settler of Pall Mall around the time Tennessee became a state. One of Pile's neighbors and contemporaries was John Marshall Clemens, who is credited with naming Pall Mall after an elite London neighborhood; Clemens held numerous positions in early Fentress County and was the father of Sam Clemens, known as Mark Twain, who later wrote about the area as the "Knobs of Obedstown" in The Gilded Age. The Civil War deeply divided the region, with families fighting and killing each other, while Tinker Dave Beaty and Confederate guerilla Champ Ferguson used the conflict to settle personal scores. Governor Isham Harris established Camp McGinnis in Pall Mall near Rotten Fork, where more than 10,000 soldiers gathered, the largest number of people the valley had ever seen at one time. On Sept. 29, 1861, the first military action of the war in Tennessee took place at Travisville, five miles north of here, when 100 soldiers from Camp McGinnis returned from a raid into Kentucky, where they had surprised Federal troops and stolen hundreds of pounds of gunpowder. Believing they had escaped pursuit, they camped around Travisville Methodist Church along Caney Creek, but Federal troops soon descended on them. Four Confederates were killed and the rest retreated into the surrounding hills. "Uncle Billy" Hull, father of Cordell Hull, was left for dead after being shot in the face, but lived and later tracked and killed the would-be assassins. In another episode of wartime violence, Coonrod Pile's grandson Rod was hauled from his home, shot 13 times, and left in the road by six of Champ Ferguson's men; his mother Rebecca recognized the attackers and vowed revenge, and after the war Rod's brothers pursued and killed five of the six men.