Southern Slumber: Chapter One: Our Southern Highlanders

Welcome to Southern Slumber, bedtime stories for sleep. 

In this episode, we drift into the the lives and landscapes of the Southern Highlands of North Carolina and Tennessee. 

Let your breathing slow as the story unfolds, and allow yourself to rest. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Southern Slumber, Bedtime Stories for Sleep. I'm glad you're here tonight. I'm Holly, and each week we visit a corner of the American South where the air is warm, the aroma of gardenias linger from the garden, and everything moves in slow motion. You can simply drift in and out, letting the sound of my voice carry you. If sleep comes, you can let it. I'll be right here as you rest. So close your eyes if you haven't already. Take a slow breath in and let it fall away. Tonight we drift into the Southern Highlands of Tennessee and North Carolina. There's a classic book called Our Southern Highlanders, a narrative of adventure in the Southern Appalachians and a study of life among the mountaineers. It's written by Horace Kepphart and was first published in 1913 and revised in 1922. It's a classic book that discovers the lives and landscapes of the mountaineers in the southern highlands of the United States. Kepphart was a travel writer and librarian from Pennsylvania. He had an insatiable curiosity about large areas of wilderness and the people who lived there. He seemed to lose interest in his job and home life in the early 1900s, started imbibing more than he should. He separated from his wife and suffered a nervous breakdown. While recovering, he searched on a map for wilderness area. I guess his pointer finger landed on the southern United States because he determined to travel to the Great Smoky Mountains between Tennessee and North Carolina. In 1904, he moved to North Carolina to venture into the wilderness along with his recorder and camera. He spent about a month in a cabin near Dillsboro, North Carolina. Dillsboro is in Jackson County. It's a beautiful historic town in western North Carolina, right near the Blue Ridge Parkway in the Great Smoky Mountains. Hephart was then able to arrange to stay at a cabin in the Hazel Creek area in the southwest corner of the Great Smokies Range. Hazel Creek Valley today is a remote area, isolated since the 1940s, with the building of the Fontana Dam. It's pristine and secluded with some of the best fly fishing and variety of trout in the country. To reach Hazel Creek Valley today, you have to get there either by ferry boat or hiking 10 miles from Fontana Dam or a 16 mile, more strenuous hike from Cades Cove. In these chapters, you'll hear about the town of Proctor. It was once a massive lumber town with more than 1,000 residents. It is now a ghost town submerged by the Fontana Lake, but remnants of the town still exist, the Calhoun House, cemeteries and foundations. You'll also hear tales of Bushnell and Judson, towns in Swain County, still part of western North Carolina. These two towns were also submerged in the nineteen forties to create Fontana Lake. Its ruins have settled beneath the lake within the Great Smoky Mountains. After Kephart left the cabin in Dillsborough, he arranged to stay at another cabin in nineteen oh four. He was very ill from tuberculosis and possible alcohol withdrawal. He was met at Bushnell by legendary bear hunter Granville Calhoun. The two made a sixteen mile mule back trek to Calhoun's house in the hamlet of Medlin near the middle of the Hazel Creek Valley. After recovering, Kepphart moved to his new cabin north of Medlin, where he lived until nineteen oh seven. He then spent several years traveling around the southern Appalachians before permanently settling in Bryson City. This book he wrote clearly out of love for the area provides one of the earliest realistic portrayals of life in the rural Appalachian Mountains and culture. It's truly poetic and honest. Chapter one is a bit lengthy, so if I can't finish it tonight, I'll conclude it in the next episode. I sure hope this will interest you up to a point of gradually drifting off to sleep. The content is slower and sometimes not really high adventure. I'm hoping it will help you sleep and have sweet dreams.

SPEAKER_02 5:33

So here we go. Something hidden go and find it.

SPEAKER_00 5:46

In one of Poe's minor tales, written in eighteen forty five, there is a vague allusion to wild mountains in western Virginia, quote tenanted by fierce and uncouth races of men. This so far as I know, was the first reference in literature to our southern mountaineers, and it stood as their only characterization until Miss Murfrey, Charles Eggbert Craddock, began her stories of the Cumberland Hills. Time and retouching have done little to soften our Highlander's portrait. Among reading people generally, South as well as north, to name him is to conjure up a tall, slouching figure and homespun, who carries a rifle as habitually as he does his hat, and who may tilt its muzzle toward a stranger before addressing him, the form of salutation being stop there. What's Ewain's name? Where's Ewain's going? Let us admit that there's just enough truth in that caricature to give it a point that will stick.

SPEAKER_01 7:05

Our typical mountaineer is Lank. Not only is he lank, he is also unkent.

SPEAKER_00 7:45

He is fond of touting a gun on his shoulder, and his curiosity about a stranger's name and business is promptly, though politely outspoken. For the rest, he is a man of mystery. The great world outside his mountains knows almost as little about him as he does of it. And that is little indeed. News in order to reach him must be of such widespread interest as fairly to fall from heaven. Correspondingly, scarce any incidents of mountain life will leak out unless they be of sensational nature, such as the shooting of a revenue officer in Carolina, the massacre of a Virginia court, or the outbreak of another feud and bloody credit. And so from the grim sameness of such reports, the world infers that battle, murder, and sudden death are commonplaces in Appalachia. To be sure, in Miss Murfrey's novels, as in those of John Fox Jr. and of Alice McGowan, we do not meet characters more genial than feudist and illicit distillers. Nonetheless, when we have closed the book, who is it that stands out clearest as type and pattern of the mountaineer? Is it not he of the long rifle and preemptory challenge? And whether this be because he gets most of the limelight or because we have a furtive liking for that sort of thing on paper, or whether the armed outlaw be indeed a genuine protagonist. In any case, the Appalachian people remain in public estimation today, as Poe judged them, an uncouth and fierce race of men inhabiting a wild mountain region little known. The Southern Highlands themselves are a mysterious realm. When I prepared eight years ago for my first sojourn in the Great Smoky Mountains, which form the master chain of the Appalachian system, I could find in no library a guide to that region, the most diligent research failed to discover so much as a magazine article written within this generation that described the land and its people. Nay, there was not even a novel or a story that showed intimate local knowledge. Had I been going to Taneriff or Timbuktu, the libraries would have furnished information aplenty. But about this housetop of Eastern America, they were strangely silent. It was terra incognita. On the map I could see that the southern Appalachians cover an area much larger than New England, and that there are nearer the center of our population than any other mountains that deserve the name. Why then so little known? Quaintly there came to mind those lines familiar to my boyhood get you up this way southward and go up into the mountains and see the land, what it is, and the people that dwelleth therein, whether they be strong or weak, few or many, and what the land is that they dwell in, whether it be good or bad, and what cities that be that they dwell in, whether in tents or in strongholds, and what the land is, whether it be fat or lean, whether there be wood therein or not. In the dustiest room of a great library, where public documents are stored, I unearthed a government report on forestry that gave at last a clear idea of the lay of the land. And here was news. We are wont to think of the south as a low country with sultry climate, yet its mountain chains stretch in uninterruptedly southwestern Virginia to Alabama, six hundred and fifty miles in an airline. They spread over parts of the eight contiguous states and cover an area somewhat larger than England and Scotland, or about the same as that of the Alps. In short, the greatest mountain system of eastern America is masked in our southland. In its upper zone one sleeps under blankets the year round. In all the regions north of Virginia and east of the Black Hills of Dakota, there is but one summit, Mount Washington in New Hampshire, that reaches six thousand feet above sea level, and there are only a dozen others that exceed five thousand feet. By contrast, south of the Potomac, there are forty six peaks and forty-one miles of dividing ridges that rise above six thousand feet, besides two hundred and eighty-eight mountains and some 300 miles of divide that stand more than 5,000 feet above the sea. In North Carolina alone, the mountains cover 6,000 square miles, with an average elevation of 2,700 feet, and with 21 peaks that overtop Mount Washington. I repeated to myself, why then so little known? The Alps and the Rockies, the Pyramid, and the Hearts are more familiar to the American people in print and picture, if by not if not by actual visit, than are the Black, the Balsam, and the Great Smoky Mountains. It is true that summer tourists flock to Asheville and Toxaway, Linville and the Highlands, passing their time at modern hotels and motoring along a few roads, but what they do see of the billowy wilderness that conceals most of the native homes glimpses from afar. What do they learn of the real mountaineer? Hearsay. For mark you, nine tenths of Appalachian population are a sequestered folk. The typical the average mountain man prefers his native hills and his primitive ancient ways. We read more and talk more about the Filipinos, see more of the Chinese and the Syrians than of these three million next door Americans who are of colonial ancestry and mostly of British stock. New York, we say, is a cosmopolitan city, more Irish in Dublin, more German Germans than in Munich, more Italians than in Rome, more Jews than in Jerusalem. But how many New Yorkers ever saw a southern mountaineer? I am sure that a party of hillsmen fresh from the back settlements of the Eunicus, if dropped on the street of any large city in the Union and left to their own guidance, would stir up more comment and probably more trouble than would a similar body of whites from any other quarter of the earth. And yet this same odd people is more purely bred from old American stock than any other element of our population that occupies by itself so great a territory. The mountaineers of the South are marked apart from all other folks by dialect, by customs, by character, by self-conscious isolation. So true is this that they call all outsiders foreigners. It matters not whether you descent be from whether your descent be from Puritan or Cavalier, whether you came from Boston or Chicago, Savannah or New Orleans, in the mountains you're a foreigner. A traveler, puzzled and scandalized at this, asked a native of Cumberlands what he would call a Dutchman or a Dago. The fellow studied a bit and then replied them's the outlandish.

SPEAKER_02 17:10

Foreigner, outlander, it is all one. We're different.

SPEAKER_00 17:16

We're quir, as they say, to the mountaineer. He knows he is an American, but his conception of the meets and bounds of America is vague to the vanishing point. As for countries oversea, well, when a celebrated Nebraskan returned from his trip around the globe, one of my backwoods neighbors proudly informed me, I see they gave Brian a lot of receptions when he came back from the other world. No one can understand the attitude of our highlanders toward the rest of the earth until he realizes their amazing isolation from all that lies beyond the blue, hazy skyline of their mountains. Conceive a shipload of immigrants cast away on some unknown island, far from the regular track of vessels, and left there for five or six generations, unaided and untroubled by the growth of civilization. Among the descendants of such a company we would expect to find customs and ideas unaltered from time of their forefathers, and that is just what we do find today among our castaways in the Sea of Mountains. Time has lingered in Appalachia. The mountain folk still live in the eighteenth century. The progress of mankind from that age to this is no heritage of theirs. Our backwoodsmen of the Blue Ridge and the Unicas, of their connecting chains and of the outlying Cumberlands are still thinking essentially the same thoughts, still living in much the same fashion as did their ancestors in the days of Daniel Boone.

SPEAKER_02 19:17

Nor is this their fault.

SPEAKER_00 19:20

They are a people of keen intelligence and strong initiative when they can see anything to win. But as President Frost says, they have been beleaguered by nature. They are belated, ghettoed in the midst of a civilization that is as aloof from them as if existed only on another planet. And so, in order to be fair and just with these, our backward kinsmen, we must, for the time, decibilize ourselves to the extent of going back and getting an eighteenth century point of view. But first, how comes it that the mountain folk have been so long detached from the life and movement of their times? Why are they so foreign to present to present day Americanism that they innocently call all the rest of us foreigners? The answer lies on the map. They are creators of an environment, immeshed in a labyrinth that has deflected and repelled the march of our nation for 300 years. In 1728, when Colonel William Byrd of Westover was running the boundary line between Virginia and North Carolina, he finally was repulsed by parallel chains of savage, unpeopled mountains that rose tier beyond tier to the westward, everywhere densely forested and matted into jungle by laurel and other undergrowth. In his journal, writing in the quaint old fashioned way, he said, Our country has now been inhabited more than 130 years by the English, and still we hardly know anything of the Appalachian Mountains that are nowhere above 250 miles from the sea, whereas the French, who are later latecomers, have rang from Quebec, southward as far as the mouth of the Mississippi in the Bay of Mexico, and to the west almost as far as California, which is either way above two thousand miles. For the fierce and uncouth races of men that Poe faintly heard of remained practically unsubstantiated. Undiscovered until they startled the nation on the scene of our Civil War by sending 180,000 of their riflemen into the Union Army. If a corps of surveyors today should be engaged to run a line due west from eastern Virginia to the bluegrass of Kentucky, they would have an arduous task. Let us suppose that they start from near Richmond and proceed along the line of thirty seven degrees thirty seven and fifty. The Blue Ridge is not especially difficult. Only eight transverse ridges to climb up and down in fourteen miles, and none of them more than two thousand feet high from bottom to top. Then thirteen miles across the lower end of the valley, a curious formation begins. As a foretaste in the three and a half three and a half miles crossing little house and big house mountains, one ascends twenty two hundred feet, descends fourteen hundred, climbs again sixteen hundred, and goes down two thousand feet on the far side. Beyond lie steep and narrow ridges athwart the way, paralleling each other like waves at sea. Ten distinct mountain chains are scaled and descended in the next forty miles. There are a few leads rising gradually to their crest. Each and every one of these ridges is a Chinese wall magnified to altitudes from a thousand to two thousand feet and covered with thickets. The hollows between them are merely deep trails. In the next thirty miles we come upon novel topography. Instead of wave following wave in orderly procession, we find here a choppy sea of small mountains with hollows running toward all points of compass.

SPEAKER_02 24:17

Instead of Chinese walls, we now have Chinese puzzles.

SPEAKER_00 24:25

The innate perversity of such configuration grows more and more exacerbating as we toil westward. In the two hundred miles from the Greenbrier to the Kentucky River, the ridges are all but unscalable, and the streams sprangle in every direction like branches of mountain laurel. The only roads follow the beds of torturous and rock strewn water courses, which may be nearly dry when you start out in the morning, but within an hour may be raging torrents. There are no bridges. One may forward a dozen times in a mile. A spring tide will stop all travel, even from neighbor to neighbor for a day or two at a time. Buggies and carriages are unheard of. In many districts the only means of transportation is with saddlebags on horseback or with the toe sack afoot. If the pedestrian tries a shortcut, he will learn what the natives mean when they say going up, you can might nigh stand up straight and bite the ground. Going down, a man wants hobnails in the seat of his pants. James Lane Allen was not writing fiction when he said of the far famed wilderness road into Kentucky, despite all that has been done to civilize it since Boone traced its course in 1790, this honored historic thoroughfare remains today as it was in the beginning, with all its sloughs and sands, its muds and holes and jutting ledges of rock and loose boulders and twists and turns and general total depravity. One such road was enough. They are said to have been notorious for profanity, those who came into Kentucky from this side, naturally. Many were infidels. There are roads that make a man lose faith. It is known that the more pious companies of them, as they traveled along, would now and then give up despair, sit down, raise a hymn, and have prayers before they could go further. Perhaps one of the provocations to homicide among the mountain people should be reckoned this road. I have seen two of the mildest of men after riding over it for a few hours lose their temper and begin to fight. Fight their horses, fight the flies, fight the cobwebs on their noses. Such difficulties in inner communication are enough to explain the isolation of the mountaineers. In the more remote regions, this loneliness reaches a degree almost unbelievable. Miss Ellen Simple, in a fine monograph published in the Geographical Journal of London in nineteen oh one, gave as examples These Kentucky mountaineers are not only cut off from the outside world, but they are separated from each other. Each is confined to his own locality and finds his little world within a radius of a few miles from his cabin. There are many men in these mountains who have never seen a town or even the poor village that constitutes their county seat. The women are almost as rooted as the trees. We met one woman who during the twelve years of her married life had lived only ten miles across the mountain from her own home, but had never in this time been back home to visit her father and mother. Another back in Perry County told me she had never been farther from home than Hazard, the county seat, which is only six miles distant. Another had never been to the post office, four miles away, and another had never seen the Ford of the Rock Castle River, only two miles from her home, and marked, moreover, by the country store of the district. When I first went into the Smokies, I stopped one night in a single room log cabin, and soon had the good people absorbed in my tales of travel beyond the sea. Finally, housewife said to me with pathetic resignation. Bushnell's the furthest ever I've been. Bushnell at the time was a hamlet of thirty people, only seven miles from where we sat. When I lived alone on the little fork of Sugar Fork of Hazel Creek, there were women in the neighborhood, young and old, who had never seen a railroad, and men who had never boarded a train, although the Murphy branch ran within sixteen miles of our post office. The first time that a party of these people went to the railroad, they were uneasy and suspicious. Nearing the way station, a girl in advance came upon the first negro she'd ever seen in her life, and she ran screaming. My God almighty, ma'am, that's the boogeyman I dunno see them. But before discussing the mountain people and their problems, let us take an imaginary balloon voyage over their vast domain. South of the potomac, the Blue Ridge is a narrow rampart rising abruptly from the east, one or two thousand feet above its base, and descending sharply to the Shenandoah Valley on the west. Across the valley begins the Alleghenies. These mountains from the Potomac through to the northern Tennessee border consist of a multitude of narrow ridges with steep encartment on both sides, running southwesterly in parallel chains, and each chain separated from its neighbors by deep slender dales. Whether one goes westward from the valley, he will encounter tier after tier these ridges as I've already described. As a rule, the links in each chain can be passed by following small gaps, but often one must make very wide detours. For example, Pine Mountain, every link has its own distinct name, is practically impassable for nearly 150 miles, except for two water gaps and five difficult crossings. Although it averages only a mile thick, the people on its north side generally know less about those on the south than a main Yankee does about Pennsylvania Dutchmen. The Alleghenies together have a width of from 40 to 60 miles. Westward of them for a couple of hundred miles are the labyrinth of West Virginia and eastern Kentucky. In southwestern Virginia, the Blue Ridge and the Alleghenies coalesce, but soon spread apart again, the Blue Ridge returning its name as well as its general character, although much loftier and more massive than in the north. The southeast front of the Blue Ridge is a steep escarpment, rising abruptly from the Piedmont Plateau of Carolina. Not one river cuts through the ridge, notwithstanding that the mountains to the westward are higher and much more massive. It is the watershed of this whole mountain region. The streams rising on its northwestern front flow down into central plateaus and thence cut their way through the Unicas in deep and precipitous gorges, draining finally into the Gulf of Mexico through the Tennessee, Ohio, and Mississippi rivers. The northwestern range, which corresponds to the Alleghenies of Virginia, now assume a character entirely different from them. Instead of parallel chains of low ridges, we have here on the border of North Carolina and Tennessee a single chain that dwarfs all others in the Appalachian system. It is cut into segments by the rivers Grinchbroad, the Pigeon Little Tennessee that drain the interior plateaus, and each segment has a distinct name of its own Iron, Northern Unica, Bald, Great Smoky, Southern Unica, or Unicoy Mountains. The Carolina Mountaineers still call this system collectively the Alleghenies, but the U.S. Geological Survey has given it a more distinctive name, the Unicas. While the Blue Ridge has only seven peaks that rise above 5,000 feet, the Unicas have 125 summits exceeding 5,000 and ten that are over 6,000 feet. Connecting the Unica chain with the Blue Ridge on several transverse ranges, the Stone, Beech, Roan, Yellow Black, Newfin, Pisca, Balsam, Howie, Nantahala, and a few minor mountains, which as a whole are much higher than the Blue Ridge, 156 summits rising over 5,000 feet and 36 over 6,000 feet above sea level. In northern Georgia, the Unicas and the Blue Ridge gradually fade away into staggering ridges and foothills, which extend into small parts of South Carolina and Alabama. The Cumberland Plateau is not attached to either of these mountain systems, but is rather a prolongation of the roughs of eastern Kentucky. It is separated from the Unicas by the broad valley of the Tennessee River. The plateau rises very abruptly from the surrounding plains. It consists mainly of tabland gashed by streams that have cut their way down in deep narrow gulches with precipitous sides. Most of the literature about our southern mountaineers refers only to the inhabitants of the comparatively meager hills of eastern Kentucky or to the Cumberlands of Tennessee. Little has been written about the real mountaineers of southwestern Virginia, western North Carolina, and the extreme north of Georgia. The great mountain masses still await their analyst, their artist, and in some places, even their explorer. That ends chapter one, and thank you for joining me tonight.

SPEAKER_01 36:56

And sweet dreams.