Our Southern Highlander, Chapter 3 (Part One)

Tonight on Southern Slumber, we continue our journey through Horace Kephart's Our Southern Highlanders. In this first portion of Chapter 3, Kephart guides us deeper into the Appalachian Mountains, sharing observations of the beauty and mystery of this land of Eden. 

Sweet dreams, and thank you for spending your evening with me here at Southern Slumber. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

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 continue our journey through the Southern Highlands with Horace Kepphart's classic work Our Southern Highlanders. Written more than a century ago, Kepphart's observations of the natural beauty of this place he called Eden will simply lull you into a world of another time and place. Consider this reading a quiet companion for your evening, a chance to settle in, let your thoughts drift as you slowly let go of the day and allow yourself to slumber. This evening we'll begin with chapter three and follow it through the first part of the narrative, saving the remainder of the chapter and chapter four for our next time together. So dim the lights, get comfortable, and allow the sounds of the Carolina Mountains to carry you away to sleep. Chapter three The Great Smoky Mountains For a long time my chief interest was not in human neighbors, but in the mountains themselves, in that mysterious beckoning hinterland which rose right back of my chimney and spread upward outward almost at three cardinal points of the compass mile after mile, hour after hour of lusty climbing, in Eden still unpeopled and unspoiled. I loved of a morning to slip on my haversack, pick up my rifle or maybe a mere staff, and stride forth alone over haphazard routes to enjoy in my own untutored way the infinite variety of form and color and shade of plant and tree and animal life in that superb wilderness that toured there far above all homes of men, and I love it still, albeit the charm of new discovery is gone from those heights and gulfs that are now so intimate and full of memories. The Carolina Mountains have a character all their own, rising abruptly from a low base and then rounding more gradually upward for two thousand to five thousand feet above their valleys. Their apparent height is more impressive than that of many a loftier summit in the west, which forms only a protuberance of an elevated plateau. Nearly all of them are clad to their tops in dense forest and thick undergrowth. Here and there is a grassy bald, a natural meadow curiously perched on the very top of a mountain. There are no bare rocky summits rising above timberline, few jutting crags, no ribs and vertebrae of the earth exposed. Seldom does one see even a naked ledge of rock. The very cliffs are sheathed with trees and shrubs, so that one treading their edges has no fear of falling into an abyss. Pinnacles or serrated ridges are rare. There are few commanding peaks. From almost any summit in Carolina, one looks out upon a sea of flowing curves and dome shaped eminences undulating, with no great disparity of height unto the horizon. Almost everywhere the contours are similar, steep sides gradually rounding to the tops, smooth surfaced to the eye because of the endless verdu. Every ridge is separated from its sisters by deep and narrow ravines. Not one of the thousand water courses shows a glint of its dashing stream, save where some far off river may reveal, through a gap in the mountain, one single shimmering curve. In all this vast prospect, the keen eye, knowing where to look, may detect an occasional farmer's clearing, but to the stranger there is only mountain and forest, mountain and forest as far as the eye can reach. Characteristic too is the dreamy blue haze like that of Indian summer intensified that ever hovers over the mountains, unless they be swathed in cloud or for a few minutes after a sharp rainstorm has cleared the atmosphere. Both the blue ridge and the smoky mountains owe their names to this tenuous mist. It softens all outlines and lends a mirage like effect of great distance to objects that are but a few miles off, while those farther removed grow more and more intangible until finally the skyline blends with the sky itself. The foreground of such a landscape in summer is warm, soft, dreamy, caressing, capitable. Beyond it are gentle and luring solitudes. The remote ranges are inexpressibly lonesome, isolated and mysterious, but everywhere the green forest mantle bespeaks of vital present. Nowhere does cold bare granite stand as the sepulchre of an immemorial past. And yet these mountains of Carolina are among the ancients of the earth. They were very old before the Alps and the Andes, the Rockies and the Himalayas were molded into their primal shapes. Upon them in after ages were born the first hardwoods of America, perhaps those of Europe too, and up popped them today to the last great hardwood forest of our country stand in primeval majesty, mutely awaiting their imminent doom. The richness of the great smoky forest has been the wonder and the admiration of everyone who has travelled it. As one climbs from the river to one of the main peaks, he passes successively through the same floral zones he would encounter in travelling from mid Georgia to southern Canada. Staring amid sycamores, elms, gums, willows, persimmons, chinkapins, he soon enters a region of beech, birch, basswood, magnolia, cucumber, butternut, holly, sour wood, box elder, ash, maple, buckeye, poplar, hemlock, and a great number of other growths along the creek and branches. On the lower slopes are many species of oaks with hickory, hemlock, pitch pine, locust, dogwood, chestnut. In this region nearly all trees attain their fullest development. On north fronts of hills the oaks reach a diameter of five to six feet. In cool, rich covers, chestnut trees grow from six to nine feet across the stump, and tulip poplars up to ten or eleven feet, their straight trunks towering like gigantic columns, with scarcely a noticeable taper, seventy or eighty feet with a nearest limb. Ascending above the zone of three thousand feet, white oak is replaced by the no less valuable mountain oak. Beech, birch, buckeye, and chestnut persist to five thousand feet.

SPEAKER_00 10:54

Then where the beaches dwindle until adult trees are only knee high, there begins a subarctic zone of black spruce, balsam, striped maple, aspen and the Peruvian or red cherry. I have named only a few of the prevailing growths.

SPEAKER_01 11:21

Nowhere else in the temperament zone is there such a variety of timber as in Western Carolina in the Tennessee front of the Unica system. About a hundred and twenty species of native trees grow in the smoky forest itself. When Asa Gray visited the North Carolina Mountains, he identified in a thirty mile trip a greater variety of indigenous trees than could be observed in crossing Europe from England to Turkey, or in a trip from Boston to the Rocky Mountain Plateau. As John Meir has said, our forest, however slighted by man, must have been a great delight to God, for they were the best he ever planted. The undergrowth is of almost tropical luxuriance and variety. Botanists say that this is the richest collecting ground in the United States. Whether one be seeking ferns or fungi or orchids, each hour will bring him some new delight. In summer the upper mountains are one vast flower garden. The white and pink of rhododendron, the blaze of azalea, conspicuous above all else, in settings of every imaginable shade of green. It was the botanist who discovered this Eden. Far back in the eighteenth century when this was still Cherokee country, inhabited by no whites, but a few Indian traders, William Bartram of Philadelphia came plant hunting into the mountains of Western Carolina and spread their fame to the world. One of his choicest finds was the fiery azalea, of which he recorded the epithet fiery I annex to this most celebrated species of azalea, as being expressive of the appearance of its flowers, which are in the general color of the finest red, lead orange and bright gold, as well as yellow and cream color. These various splendid colors are not only in separate plants, but frequently all the varieties and shades are seen in separate branches on the same plant, and the clusters of blossoms cover the shrubs in such incredible profusion on the hillsides that suddenly opening to view from dark shades, we are alarmed with apprehension of the woods being set on fire. This is certainly the most gay and brilliant flowering shrub yet. And we of a late later age, seeing the same wild gardens still unspoiled, can appreciate the almost religious fervor of those early botanists, as of Michot, for example, who in seventeen ninety four ascended the peak of the Grandfather Mountain. He broke out in song, he was just so excited. Of course Michot was wildly mistaken in thinking Grandfather the highest mountain in all North America. It is far from being even the highest of the Appalachians. Yet we are scarcely know today to a downright certainty which peak is supreme among our southern highlands. The honor is conceded to Mount Mitchell in the Black Mountains, northeast of Asheville. Still, the heights of the Carolina peaks have been taken with one exception so far as I know, only by barometric measurements, and these, even when official, may vary as much as a hundred feet for the same mountain. Since the highest ten or a dozen of our Carolina peaks differ in altitude only one or two hundred feet, their actual rank has not yet been determined. For a long time there was controversy as to whether Mount Mitchell or Klingman Dome was the crowning summit of Eastern America. The Coast Survey gave the height of Mount Mitchell as 6,688 feet. Later figures of the US Geological Survey are sixty seven hundred and six thousand seven hundred and twelve feet. In any case, the Great Smoky Mountains are the master chain of the Appalachian system, the greatest mass of highland east of the Rockies. This segment of the Unicas form the boundary between North Carolina and Tennessee from the Big Pigeon River to the McDaniel Ball. Although some parts of the Smokies are very rugged, with sharp changes of elevation, yet the range as a whole has no one dominating peak. Mount Guillot, Mount Lecant, and Klingman Dome all are over six thousand six hundred feet and under six thousand seven hundred, according to the most trustworthy measurements. Many miles of the divide rise six thousand feet above sea level with only small undulations like ocean swells. The most rugged and difficult part of the Smokies and of the United States east of Colorado is in the Sawtooth Mountains between Collins and Gio at the headwaters of the Ocona Lufty River. I know but few men who have ever followed this part of the divide. Although during the present year trails have been cut from Klingman to Collins or near it, and possibly others beyond to the northeastward. In August and September nineteen hundred, mister James H. Ferris and his wife, naturalist from Jolette, Illinois, explored the smokies to the Lufty Gap northeast of Klingman, collecting rare species of snails and ferns. No doubt misses Ferris is the only white woman who ever went beyond Klingman or even ascended the dome itself. She stayed at the Lufty Gap while her husband and a Carolina mountaineer of my acquaintance struggled through to Gio and returned. Of this trip, mister Ferris sent me the following account. We brought another axe of a moonshiner and with a week's provisions on our back one of the guides and I took the consolidated American black bear and ruffled grouse line for Mount Gio twenty miles farther by map measurements. The bears were in full possession of the property and we could get no information in the settlements, as the settlers do not travel this line. They did not know the names of the peaks other than as top of the Great Smokies knew nothing of the character of the country, except that it was rough. The Tennesseans seem afraid of the mountains, and the Cherokees of North Carolina side equally so. For two miles from camp all traces of men, except surveyors, had disappeared. In the first two days we routed eight bears out of their nest and mud wallows, and they seemed to stay routed, for upon our return we found the blackberry crop unharvested, and had a bag of pudding duff or what you call it. The surveyor had run part of a line this year, which helped us greatly and the bears had made well beaten trails part of the way. In places they had musked up the ground as much as a barnyard. We tried to follow the boundary line between the two states, which is exactly upon the top of the Smokies, but often missed it. A government surveyor many years ago made two hacks upon the trees, but sometimes the linemen neglected to use their axes for half a mile or so. It took us three and a half days to go and two and a half to return, and we arose with the morning star and worked hard all day. The last day and a half going there was nothing to guide us but the old hacks. Equipped with government maps, a good compass, and a little conceit, I thought I could follow the boundary line. In fact, at one time we intended to go through without a guide. A trail that runs through blackberry bushes two miles out of three is hard to follow. And there was a huckleberry bush reaching to our waist, growing thickly upon the ground at Tomato vines curled hard and stubborn, and laurel much like a field of lilac bushes, crooked and strong as iron. In one place we walked fully a quarter of a mile over the tops of laurel bushes, and these were ten or twelve feet in height, but blown over one way by the wind. Much of the trail was along rocky edges, sometimes but six inches or so wide, but almost straight down on both sides for hundreds of feet. One night, delayed by lack of water, we did not camp till dark, and finding a smooth spot lay down with a small log on each side to hold us from rolling out the bed. When daylight came, we found that we had rolled over the logs. My partner would have dropped five hundred feet into Tennessee, and I would have dropped as far into North Carolina unless some friendly treetop had caught us. Sometimes the mountain forked and those ridges concealed by the balsams would not be seen. Then there were round knobs, and who can tell where the highest ridge lies on a round mountain or a ball? My woolen shirt was torn off to the shoulders, and my partner who had started out with corduroys, stayed in the brush until I got him a pair of overalls from camp. Even to the west of Klingman, a stranger is likely to find some desperately rough travel if he should stray from the trail that follows the divide. It is easy going for anyone in fair weather, but when cloud settles on the mountain, as it often does without warning, it may be so thick that one cannot see a tree ten feet away. Under such circumstances I have myself floundered from daylight till dark through heartbreaking laurel thickets, and without a bite to eat, not knowing whether I was going except that it was toward the little Tennessee River. In nineteen oh six I spent the summer in a herder's hut on top of the divide, just west of the locust ridge, miscalled chestnut ridge on the map, about six miles east of Thunderhead. This time I had a partner, and we had a glorious three months of it, nearly a mile above sea level, and only half a day's climb from the nearest settlement. One day I was alone. Andy having gone down to Medlin for the mail. It had rained a good deal. In fact, there was a shower nearly every day throughout the summer, the only semblance of a dry season in the smokies being the autumn and early winter. The nights were cold enough for fires and blankets, even in our well chinked cabin. Well, I had finished my lonesome dinner and was washing up when I saw a man approaching. This was an event, for we seldom saw other men than our two selves. He was a lame man, wearing an iron extension on one foot, and he hobbled with a cane. He looked played out and gone. I met him outside. He smiled as though I looked good to him and asked with some eagerness, can I buy something to eat here? No, I answered, You can't buy anything here. Oh how his face fell. But I'll give you the best we have, and you're welcome. Then you should have seen that smile. He seemed to have just enough strength left to drag himself into the hut. I asked no questions, though, wondering what a cripple, evidently a gentleman, though in rather bad repair, was doing on top of the smoky mountains. It was plain that he had spent more than one night shelterless in the cold rain and that he was quite famished. While I was baking the biscuit and cooking some meat, he told his story. This is the short of it. I am a Canadian, McGill University man, electrician. My company sent me to Cincinnati. I got a vacation of a couple of weeks and thought I'd take a pedestrian tour. I can walk better than you'd think, and he tapped the short leg. I liked his grit. The Canadian continued. I knew no place to go, so I took a map and looked for what might be interesting country, not too far from Cincinnati. I picked out these mountains, got a couple of government topographical sheets and thinking they would serve like European ordinance maps. I had no fear of going astray. It was my plan to walk through to the Balsam Mountains, and so on to the Big Pigeon River. I went to Maryville, Tennessee, and there I was told that I would find a cabin every five or six miles along the summit from Thunderhead to Balsams. I broke in abruptly. Whoever told you that was either an imposter or an ignoramus. There are only four of these shacks on the whole smoky range, two of them the Russell Cabin and the Spencer Place, and you have already passed without knowing it. This is called the Hall Cabin. None of these three are occupied save for a week or so in the fall when the cattle are being rounded up, or by chance, as my partner and I happen to be here now. Beyond this, there is just one shack at Siler's Meadow. It is down below the summit, hidden in timber, and you would never have seen it. Even if you had, you would have found it as bare as a last year's mouse's nest, for nobody ever goes there except a few bear hunters. From there onward for forty miles is an uninhabited wilderness so rough that you could not make seven miles a day in it to save your life, even if you knew the course. And there's no trail at all. The government maps are good and reliable to show the approaches to this wild country, but where you need them most they are good for nothing. The Canadian said, Then if I had missed your cabin, I would have starved to death, for I depended on finding a house to the eastward and would have followed the trail till I dropped. I have been out in the laurel thickets now three days and two nights, so nothing could have induced me to leave this trail once I found it, or until I could see out to a house on one side of or other of the mountain. I said you would see no house on either side from here to beyond Gio, about forty miles. Had you no rations at all? The Canadian responded. I travelled light, except to find entertainment among the natives. Here is what I have left. He showed me a crumpled buckwheat flapjack, a pinch of tea, and a couple of ounces of brandy. The Canadian said I was saving them for the last extremity. Have had nothing to eat since yesterday morning. Drink the brandy, please. It came from Montreal. I told him no, my boy, that liquor goes down your own throat only. You're the chap that needs it. This coffee will boil now in a minute. I won't give you all the food you want, for it wouldn't be prudent, but by and by you shall have a belly full. Then as well as he could, he sketched the route he had followed, where the trail from Tennessee crosses from Thunderhead to Hall Gap. He had swerved off from the divide, and he discovered his error somewhere in the neighborhood blockhouse. There, instead of retracing his steps, he sought a shortcut by plunging down to the headwaters of Hall Creek, thus worming deeper and deeper into the devil's nest. One more day would have finished him when I told him that the trip from Klingman to Guillot would be hard work for a party of experienced mountaineers, and that it would probably take them a week, during which time they would have to pack all supplies on their own on their own backs. He agreed that his best course would be down into Carolina and out to the railroad. As we come to the end of our reading tonight, I hope you are asleep. Or if not, my wish for you is that you're so close to letting yourself allowing yourself to fall away into sleep land. Thank you for spending part of your evening with me here at Southern Slumber, where the air is warm, the mountains rest beneath the silver stars, and everything moves just a little slower.

SPEAKER_00 33:20

Good night for now.