Panoche Creek formerly known as Arroyo de Panoche Grande (Big Sugarloaf Creek) and later anglicized to Big Panoche Creek and later "Panoche Creek". For a time its lower reaches were called "Silver Creek." It is a creek in San Benito County and Fresno County, central California.
The Panoche Inn is one of few area landmarks. The bar and restaurant is busy with motorcycle enthusiasts on weekends in sunny weather. Some customers camp at Mercey Hot Springs or ride off-road vehicles at a nearby Bureau of Land Management tract. On the drive from Interstate 5, motorists will pass Little Panoche Reservoir: about 12.6 straight-line miles distant at 7.6 degrees off true north.
The Muscogee are descendants of the Mississippian culture peoples, who built earthwork mounds at their regional chiefdoms located throughout the Mississippi River valley and its tributaries. The historian Walter L. Williams and others believe the early Spanish explorers encountered ancestors of the Muscogee when they visited Mississippian-culture chiefdoms in the Southeast in the mid-16th century.
The Muscogee were the first Native Americans considered to be "civilized" under George Washington's civilization plan. In the 19th century, the Muscogee were known as one of the "Five Civilized Tribes", because they had integrated numerous cultural and technological practices of their more recent European American neighbors. Influenced by their prophetic interpretations of the 1811 comet and earthquake, the Upper Towns of the Muscogee, supported by the Shawnee leader Tecumseh, began to resist European-American encroachment. Internal divisions with the Lower Towns led to the Red Stick War (Creek War, 1813–1814); begun as a civil war within the Muscogee Nation, it enmeshed the Northern Creek Bands in the War of 1812 against the United States while the Southern Creeks remained US allies. General Andrew Jackson then seized the opportunity to use the rebellion as an excuse to make war against all Creeks once the northern Creek rebellion had been put down with the aid of southern Creeks. The result was a weakening of the Creek Nation and the forced ceding of Creek lands to the US.
In 1936, a German professor, Richard Wirth, is hosted by the Wollners, a family of German emigrants in West Virginia. The Wollners believe him to be a visiting scholar, but Wirth turns out to be a Nazi occultist who seeks a Viking runestone buried on their property. When Wirth reveals he wants to use it for evil, he is interrupted by the family, who trap him in their basement and bind him through a ritual that requires frequent human sacrifices. Linked to Wirth, the family survive through the decades, operating as both captors and servants to Wirth, who they keep weakened.