Tempest, West Virginia

**Tempest** is the county seat and largest town of Adkins County, West Virginia. The population was 1,203 at the 2010 Census. It is the hometown of three of the four main protagonists of *The Dogs*: Bligh Lynch, Andrew and Stephen Lightfoot, as well as several other supporting and peripheral characters, and much of the action of *Before Time After* takes place there.

## History

### Prehistory

Like much of West Virginia, the area was geologically part of the Teays River, of which Dog's Creek and its underground spring source is but a tiny vestige. *Megalonyx* (giant sloths) and mastodons flourished in the area, the bones of which were later used for shamanic purposes by the settling Dogfolk, and much later for trophies by visiting coal magnates.

### Early human activity

Also like much of what would become West Virginia, Native Americans had little more than nomadic settlements in the area, making use of the forest and the Greenbrier River as hunting grounds and watering holes. Many hunting artifacts, such as arrowheads, have been found in the vicinity. Due to much of the land being rocky, harsh, and unfit for farming, few attempts were made by the Native Americans to settle there.

### Discovery and settlement by the Dogfolk

Sometime before the middle of the Sixth Century, a lost group of Irishmen, having gotten separated by Saint Brendan the Navigator, came upon the area.

### Native American conspiracy with Lightfoot's forces

Even as far back as the 1640's, when Turner Jack, the freedman of Nicholas Tucker II, a.k.a. the infamous Nicky Lightfoot, made extensive contact and communication with the local Native American tribes, it was thought by the local tribes that Dog's Creek was poisoned, or at least somehow cursed. At any rate, any efforts to found communities were met with repeated failure because of the fierce territorialism of the Dogfok, whom the local tribes (such as the Iroquois) considered a vexatious nuisance.

### Post-1666

Following the apparent extermination of the Dogfolk, the area was the personal fiefdom of the Lightfoot dynasty and Barnes family until the mid-1700s, the area was known as Dog's Creek until an influx of Irish, Italian, and other immigrants when it turned into a moderately prosperous coal town in the Nineteenth Century, officially being renamed after a legendarily terrible storm in the 1830s. However, it was afflicted with the same statewide malaise after the coal industry began to collapse in the Twentieth Century, resulting in a steady population loss that plateaued after the successes of Bernard Barnes III, Junior Lynch, and the latter's best friend Archibald Lightfoot in the 1970s and 80s. The town appears to be experiencing a modest, if slow, recovery.

## Geography

Although situated along Dog's Creek, for which it was once named, Tempest derives most of its water from underground wells, as well as from the Greenbrier River, which bends into the town limits and helped its development as a coal town by providing transport and communication via water. This is despite Dog's Creek having a reputation for being a beautifully clear and seemingly pure water source; the folk memory of the Massacre of 1666 remained as the townsfolk believing that the clarity of the creek was because it was impregnated with arsenic from the groundwater, something which, owing to Tempest's geographical isolation, has never been tested (but which was manifestly false).