Fork River North Whiteoak Creek Pine Creek Station Camp Creek Parch Corn Creek No Business Creek Williams Creek Troublesome Creek Bear Creek Roaring Paunch Creek Rock Creek Wolf Creek Kogar Creek Water quality is generally good, but may be negatively affected by mine drainage, logging, poor road quality, and ground disturbances. The river contains about two times as much suspended and dissolved solids at a comparable river basin which does not have a history of mining. Both Tennessee and Kentucky have designated their respective portions of the Big South Fork as Outstanding National Resource Waters, and cleanup and reclamation efforts by a number of organizations have been made. History It is likely that the area surrounding the Big South Fork was frequented by Paleo-Indians, which continued up until early colonial times, although it is not clear that the area was permanently inhabited by prehistoric peoples. No intensive surveys of archaeological sites had been conducted as of 1977, when the Army Corps of Engineers published their comprehensive study of the area, although one study from the University of Tennessee along with one inter-agency governmental report had identified 21 total sites. A 2005 report by the National Park Service however estimated a total of 10,000 archaeological sites, evenly split between pre and post European contact. The first permanent European settlement was likely in 1769 in modern day Wayne County, Kentucky. By 1798, the Treaty of Tellico had officially expelled the native Cherokee peoples from the river basin, although the land, which was not well suited to agriculture, was mostly passed over by settlers until the founding of the ultimately failed colony of Rugby, Tennessee, by Thomas Hughes in the 1880s. Blue Heron The mining community of modern day Blue Heron, Kentucky, was established in 1937 along the banks of the Big South Fork, and operated until 1962 when it was abandoned by the Stearns Coal and Lumber Company. The site was later recreated in the 1980s and reopened as an outdoor museum. National River and Recreation Area The Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area was established by the United States Congress as part of the Water Resources Development Act of 1974. According to the text of the act, the purpose of the establishment was for: conserving and interpreting an area containing unique cultural, historic, geologic, fish and wildlife, archeologic, scenic, and recreational values, preserving as a natural, free-flowing stream the