I remember him telling how his father, John W. McDonald, nearly lost his plantation because he countersigned a note for a friend who skipped off to Alabama with his debts unpaid. As Papa further described it with a great westward sweep of his arm, that remote fastness "might as well have been the end of the world at that time.

Creek Indians and other Alabama refugees from Georgia Charles Franklin McDonald, my maternal grandfather, otherwise known as "Papa," was a landowner in Meriwether County, Georgia--but jus