At home in the Smokies

by United States. National Park Service; Wilma Dykeman; James Stokely

From Pioneer to Mountaineer

While events of the early 19th century in the surrounding southland and the nation were moving inexorably toward conflict on bloody battlefields to decide issues which could not or would not be resolved in the political arena, people in the Great Smokies were pursuing their struggle to survive and adapt to their stern and splendid surroundings.

The early explorers, the long hunters, the initial homesteaders, the trailblazers and the groundbreakers—these had forever set a human seal upon the wilderness. Now it was the time of pioneer becoming mountaineer. Henceforth, as new settlers or curious travelers or specialized seekers in a dozen fields made their way into the mountains, they would find someone already there to welcome them.

That “someone” was becoming known by terms which might alternately serve as a source of description, derision, or definition. Highlander. Hillbilly. Mountaineer. The least offensive word was “highlander,” with its overtones of the misty Scottish landscape and fierce clan loyalties from which many of the Smokies’ family lines had recently descended. “Mountaineer” varied. Used to denote the proud individualism that characterized many of the stalwart men and women whose roots held deep and fast in this isolated place, “mountaineer” was a strong, acceptable name. But turned into a catchword for some picturesque, inadequate character who divided his time between the homemade dulcimer and the home-run distillery, “mountaineer” was suspect. “Hillbilly” came to verge on insult, as it conjured up cartoons of lanky, sub-human creatures who were quick to feud, slow to work, and often indifferent to the “progress” by which helpful visitors would like to transform mountain lives and attitudes.

Of course, the trouble with any single word that tried to summarize these complex and distinctive lives was its limited ability to convey more than a stereotype or a single facet. Yet the 19th and early 20th centuries saw the rise and wide adoption of such terms, with an accompanying unease—sometimes outrage—on the part of those described. This tension has persisted into the present day, for Southern Appalachian natives often have felt they have been misunderstood, or exploited, by the curious outlanders.

Cherokee veterans of Thomas’ Legion attending a Confederate reunion in the early 1900s in New Orleans include (front from left) Young Deer, unidentified man, Pheasant, Chief David Reed, (back from left) Dickey Driver, Lt. Col. W. W. Stringfield, Lt. Suatie Owl, and Jim Keg. Stringfield was a white officer in the legion which participated with varying degrees of success in several skirmishes in the Smokies and, perhaps more importantly, which helped build the Oconaluftee Turnpike across the mountains.

National Park Service

The visitors indeed were curious—curious about mountain people but also about topography, altitudes, plants, wildlife, and the rich variety of natural resources abounding throughout these hills. Naturalists and botanists followed the lead of Frenchman André Michaux and Philadelphian William Bartram, who had come collecting plants in the Southern mountains during the previous century. It was Michaux who had told mountain herb-gatherers about ginseng’s commercial value, and Bartram who had discovered and described the showy flame azalea brightening the spring woods.

Among 19th-century arrivals, S. B. Buckley wrote the earliest comprehensive botanical report of the Great Smokies. He marveled at that scenery, “surpassing anything we remember to have seen among the White Mountains of New Hampshire,” and at the variety of flora. “Here,” he wrote in the mid-1800s, “is a strange admixture of Northern and Southern species of plants, while there are quite a number which have been found in no other section of the world.” Later naturalists would share his enthusiasm and enlarge on his studies.

Journalists came. One was a reporter named Charles Lanman, secretary to Daniel Webster, who rode through the hills in 1848 and wrote a book called Letters from the Alleghany Mountains. Through his descriptive adventures readers had a glimpse into a region more remote to their experience than many foreign countries. If the Smokies were described by him as one large upthrust, perhaps that was because he saw the range through a purple haze. He wrote at one point:

“This mountain is the loftiest of a large brotherhood which lies crowded together between North Carolina and Tennessee. Its height cannot be less than five thousand feet above the level of the sea ... and all I can say of its panorama is that I can conceive of nothing more grand and imposing.”

Lanman was only the first of many writers who would come seeking high adventure and good copy, but his lack of exactitude about the physical features of the mountains was soon to be remedied by another group of visitors. Some scientists could not be content with hunters’ yarns and the poetic prose of journalists; they wanted precise facts and figures by which both native and stranger could better appreciate the landscape.

One of these was Thomas Lanier Clingman, whose career included being a U.S. senator and a Confederate general as well as a scientist. A contemporary historian described him as being arrogant, aggressive, with “more than common ability” but limited scientific knowledge, whose chief service lay in arousing public curiosity in the mountains, mineralogy, and geography. He became involved in a scholarly feud with Dr. Elisha Mitchell, a transplanted Connecticut professor at the University of North Carolina, over which peak constituted the highest point east of the Mississippi River. While they were trying to settle the question, Mitchell was killed in an accidental fall on the slopes of the North Carolina pinnacle which later was given his name. Clingman’s name came to grace the mountain he had explored and measured: 2,025-meter (6,643-foot)-high Clingmans Dome on the crest of the Great Smokies, only 13 meters (43 feet) lower than the lofty Mt. Mitchell.

The most fascinated and impressive visitor during these years of the mid-19th century came from another mountain terrain. Arnold Guyot, remembered today by the peak at the eastern end of the Great Smokies which bears his name, was born in Switzerland in 1807. His studies in physical geography had won him distinction throughout Europe before he came to America and accepted a chair at Princeton University in 1854. Paul Fink, a historian of the Great Smoky Mountains, has said that although forerunners of Guyot glimpsed segments of the Smokies and described certain details,

“it remained for this man of foreign birth to penetrate these mountains, spend months among them, measure their heights for the first time, and have drawn under his own direction the first map we have showing the range in detail.”

Clingman secured for his friend Guyot a local guide named Robert Collins. The mountain man and the professor struggled through the roughest laurel “hells” and up the steepest slopes, measuring, calibrating, and finally naming many of the unknown heights. Guyot’s journals combined precision and poetry, and they related the awesome Smokies to the human scene in ways that had not been previously possible. From that point on, natives and visitors alike could both know and appreciate more of this green homeland. But, as Paul Fink has pointed out, “With Guyot’s labors the early explorations of the Smokies ceased.”

Why? What happened to cut off so abruptly the increasing flow of visitors to this virgin country? The happening was war.

The Great Smokies country, with its upland farms and small home crafts, was not in the mainstream of the decisive struggle between a plantation South and an industrial North. Nor was it in the mainstream of the violent action that convulsed its surrounding region. There had been slaves in some of the more prosperous mountain households, but few citizens in the Great Smokies area would have waged war either to defend or abolish the peculiar institution.

What some did resist was being conscripted by either side. “Scouting” became a well-used word defining a new experience in the Smokies. It applied to anyone hiding out in the hills to escape going into the Confederate or the Union army. Secretly supplied with food and clothes by their families and sympathetic friends, such “scouts” could hold out for years against the searches of outlander officials. Sometimes they did in fact become scouts, guiding escaped captives from Andersonville and other Confederate prisons through the mountains toward northern territory, and those fleeing from Yankee prisons toward their southern homes.

Many of the mountain people, of course, followed the example of their neighbors throughout the region and put on the formal uniform of blue or gray. There were sharp divisions within counties, towns, and families in the choice between state and nation. Perhaps no single section of the United States was as bitterly torn in its allegiance.

Tennessee and North Carolina had long held strong Union sentiments; but when Lincoln called for troops in the aftermath of the firing on Fort Sumter, the two states officially rallied to the Confederate cause. North Carolinians, who had been notably reluctant to leave the Union and who bristled at the injustices of “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight,” nonetheless sent more men to the Confederacy than any other state. Many of these were western North Carolinians, following the leadership of their own Zebulon (Zeb) Baird Vance, born in Buncombe County and occupying the governor’s chair in Raleigh during the war. Yet the fact that adjoining East Tennessee was overwhelmingly Union—and sent more men into the Federal forces than some of the New England states—affected the North Carolinians as well. With the two states’ actual secession from the Union, numerous mountain pockets in effect seceded from their states and chose to remain loyal to the Union. Thus the little rebellion inside the larger revolt compounded the agonizing conflict of war and made every cove and community and hearthside a potential battleground.

Charles S. Grossman

Mountain women and girls had to be proficient at making many things, for there weren’t many—if any—stores nearby. Over the years, Hazel Bell and many another woman spent hours and hours churning butter.

And no matter which army the men marched with, their characteristics remained surprisingly intact. The historian of one North Carolina Confederate regiment described some of the soldiers from Haywood County:

“These mountain men had always been accustomed to independence of thought and freedom of action, and having elected for their company officers their neighbors and companions, they had no idea of surrendering more of their personal liberty than should be necessary to make them effective soldiers. Obedient while on duty and independent while off duty, this spirit to a marked degree they retained to the close of the war.”

The experience of Radford Gatlin concentrated in a single episode both the sharp divisions and the ironies of war in the mountains. Gatlinburg, now a commercial and flourishing tourist mecca at the edge of the park, bears the name of a man who was driven out of that town because of his unpopular stand during the war. The sturdily built, enterprising, and somewhat arrogant Gatlin was not a man to conceal his beliefs. With his wife and a slave woman he had come from North Carolina by way of Jefferson County, Tennessee, to the community known as White Oak Flats and had established a successful general store and a less successful church: the New Hampshire Baptist Gatlinites. When Dick Reagan was appointed postmaster for a new postal service to be established in White Oak Flats in 1860, the office was located amidst the axes, guns, coffee, sugar, and bells of Gatlin’s store, and Reagan renamed the post office, and therefore the town, after his good friend the storekeeper.

But when war came and Radford Gatlin not only supported the Confederacy but made heated speeches in its favor, the strongly Unionist villagers turned against him. After being beaten by a band of masked men, Gatlin abandoned his claim to thousands of hectares that now lie within the park and departed forever from the place that was to perpetuate his name if not his memory.

The war’s severest hardships followed in the wake of the outliers, or the bushwhackers. These scavengers favored no cause. As the war dragged on, they ambushed and raided, stealing meat from the smokehouse, corn from the crib, and farm animals from barn and pasture. Scarcity and want became commonplace throughout the mountains. In North Carolina’s Madison County, a group of citizens broke into a warehouse and laid claim to a valuable commodity, salt. Economic want enflamed political emotions. In Tennessee’s Sevier County, controversial “Parson” Brownlow, Methodist circuit-rider turned newspaper editor turned politician, sought refuge in the shadow of the Smokies with Unionist sympathizers when Knoxville came under Confederate control.

A well-known army unit operated in the Smokies: Col. William Thomas’ Confederate 69th-N.C., known as Thomas’ Legion of Indians and Highlanders. “Little Will,” as he was affectionately called, had become the effective spokesman in Washington and at the state level for the eastern remnant of the Cherokee. When the Civil War came and he chose to stay with the South, the Cherokees chose to stay with him. For a while, they secured mineral supplies for the Confederacy, including alum and saltpeter for gunpowder. The Legion guarded Alum Cave in the Smokies. Under Thomas’ direction, his unit also worked on the Oconaluftee Turnpike.

Page 80: Aunt Celia Ownby cards, or straightens, wool fibers that have already been washed.

Edouard E. Exline

Page 81: Hettie, Martha, and Louisa Walker run cotton through a gin built by their father, John. He made the rollers out of hickory and the rest out of oak. Three people were required to operate the gin: one to feed the cotton into it and one on each end to turn each of the rollers. The ginned cotton fell into a white oak basket, also made by John Walker.

Charles S. Grossman

Wash day was a laborious one of lifting large buckets of water and stirring steaming kettles of dirty clothes.

Maurice Sullivan

Over another fire, Mrs. Kate Duckett and daughter Tennie of Coopers Creek make hard soap. Mrs. Duckett stirs the lard with a wooden paddle as Tennie fans the fire with a hawk wing before dipping into the kettle with a gourd scoop. It was a five-hour process.

In December 1863, after Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside had secured Knoxville for the Union, Col. William J. Palmer and the 15th Pennsylvania Cavalry attacked Thomas’ camp near Gatlinburg. After a short battle, Thomas and his troops retreated across the mountains into North Carolina. One month later, Confederate Gen. Robert P. Vance decided to remedy the situation in the mountains. With 375 cavalry, 100 infantry, and artillery, he marched from Asheville, joined Thomas and 150 Indian troops in Quallatown, and crossed the Smokies during a bitterly cold spell. While Thomas remained in Gatlinburg, Vance proceeded toward Newport, camped on Cosby Creek deep in the Smokies, and was surprised there by none other than Colonel Palmer and his 15th-Pa. In the resulting rout, General Vance was captured along with about everything else: men, horses, medical supplies, food, ammunition. In February, Thomas and his Legion were engaged once more, in the Great Smoky Mountains near the mouth of Deep Creek. The result was another defeat, this time by the 14th Illinois Cavalry under Maj. Francis Davidson.

Thomas and his Legion did not win mighty military victories for the Confederacy; Governor Vance even accused Thomas’ command of being “a favorite resort for deserters.” But it appears that this strange little mountain force did act as a deterrent against wholesale raids in the Smokies by Federal sympathizers, and to some extent, raids by marauding bushwhackers. As for “Little Will” himself, mental disorder in later years brought him his own personal civil war and its losing battles. He died in a North Carolina hospital.

An equally well-known force in the Great Smokies during the war was a band of Union raiders led by Col. George W. Kirk. One contemporary called him “Kirk of Laurel,” referring to a remote watershed in Madison County where the colonel often camped. Kirk’s most effective march into the Smokies came near the close of the war, in the early spring of 1865. With 400 cavalry and 200 infantry he entered the mountains through East Tennessee’s Cocke County, via Mt. Sterling, and marched into Cataloochee. Turning aside a Confederate company there, he went on to Waynesville, then proceeded to Soco Valley and back across the Smokies.

Kirk raided, released Federal prisoners, skirmished with home guards, and scattered general fear throughout the mountains. In fact, his main achievement for his cause lay in diverting Confederate troops and keeping them scattered on the home front rather than mobilized on the battlefields where they were desperately needed. Try as they might, the Confederates could not find enough of the “silver-greys” or the “seed-corn”—as those too old and too young for regular service were called—to totally protect their homeland from Kirk’s men, or from renegade bushwhackers who had no cause but plunder and pillage.

Joseph S. Hall

Mrs. Clem Enloe of Tight Run Branch was 84 years old when Joseph S. Hall photographed her in 1937. “I was told that if I took her a box of snuff, she would let me take her picture.” That’s the snuff in her blouse. She didn’t give in so easily on everything. She refused to observe the park’s fishing regulations and fished every season of the year. She was filling a can with worms when Hall approached. “See that,” she said pointing to the can, “I use them for fishing and I’m the only one in this park who’s allowed to.”

As the Civil War drew toward its final convulsion, the mountain area engaged in a more familiar struggle for survival. Food was scarce, soda and salt almost non-existent. Women leached lye from wood ashes and made soda. There was no substitute for salt; when available, it cost a precious dollar a pound. Bitter enmities divided families, communities, and counties. Life had never been easy in the mountains; now it was rigorously difficult. And the people in this land of “make do or do without” learned new ways to make do. Continuing old habits and traditions up their isolated coves and along their steep hillsides, they created a life that was distinctive, rugged, and adapted to its natural surroundings.

One historian, John Preston Arthur, has described the mountain woman’s day as follows:

“Long before the pallid dawn came sifting in through chink and window they were up and about. As there were no matches in those days, the housewife ‘unkivered’ the coals which had been smothered in ashes the night before to be kept ‘alive’ till morning, and with ‘kindling’ in one hand and a live coal held on the tines of a steel fork or between iron tongs in the other, she blew and blew and blew till the splinters caught fire. Then the fire was started and the water brought from the spring, poured into the ‘kittle,’ and while it was heating the chickens were fed, and cows milked, the children dressed, the bread made, the bacon fried and then coffee was made and breakfast was ready. That over and the dishes washed and put away, the spinning wheel, the loom or the reel were the next to have attention, meanwhile keeping a sharp lookout for the children, hawks, keeping the chickens out of the garden, sweeping the floor, making the beds, churning, sewing, darning, washing, ironing, taking up the ashes, and making lye, watching for the bees to swarm, keeping the cat out the milk pans, dosing the sick children, tying up the hurt fingers and toes, kissing the sore place well again, making soap, robbing the bee hives, stringing beans for winter use, working the garden, planting and tending a few hardy flowers in the front yard, such as princess feather, pansies, sweet-Williams, dahlias, morning glories; getting dinner, darning, patching, mending, milking again, reading the Bible, prayers, and so on from morning till night; and then all over again the next day.”

Emergencies of health and sickness affected the daily routines. “Doctor-medicine” might have its place, but home remedies were considered most reliable—and available. A doctor with his saddlebag of pills and tonics might be a day’s ride or more away from the patient. But nature’s medicine chest lay almost at the doorstep. Plants in swamp and meadow, leaves and bark and roots of the forest: all healed many ailments. From ancient Cherokee wisdom and through their own observations and testing, mountain people learned the uses of boneset, black cohosh, wild cherry, mullein, catnip, balm of gilead, Solomons-seal, sassafras, and dozens of other herbs and plants.

While they found one school and laboratory in the woods and hills around them, the people of the Great Smoky Mountains also worked to provide themselves with more orthodox classrooms. Continuing customs that had begun before the War, the residents of many little communities “made-up” a school. This meant that they banded together, and each contributed to a small fund to pay a teacher’s salary for the year. The “year” was usually three months. John Preston Arthur left a vivid memoir of his experience in one of these so-called “old-field” schools, which were located on land no longer under cultivation:

Edouard E. Exline

The one-room log schoolhouse at Little Greenbrier, like the somewhat larger Granny’s College at Big Greenbrier, provided the basics in reading, writing, and arithmetic.

Edouard E. Exline

And judging by the smiles of Margaret Tallent and Conley Russell, the place was lots of fun.

Edouard E. Exline

Herman Matthews conducts a class in the school’s last year of operation, 1935. He was the only teacher who had completed college.

“In lieu of kindergarten, graded and normal schools was the Old-Field school, of which there were generally only one or two in a county, and they were in session only when it was not ‘croptime.’ They were attended by little and big, old and young, sometimes by as many as a hundred, and all jammed into one room—a log cabin with a fireplace at each end—puncheon floor, slab benches, and no windows, except an opening made in the wall by cutting out a section of one of the logs, here and there. The pedagogue in charge (and no matter how large the school there was but one) prided himself upon his knowledge of and efficiency in teaching the three R’s—readin’, ’ritin’ and ’rithmetic—and upon his ability to use effectively the rod, of which a good supply was always kept in stock. He must know, too, how to make a quill pen from the wing-feather of a goose or a turkey, steel and gold pens not having come into general use. The ink used was made from ‘ink-balls’—sometimes from poke-berries—and was kept in little slim vials partly filled with cotton. These vials, not having base enough to stand alone, were suspended on nails near the writer. The schools were paid from a public fund, the teacher boarding with the scholars.”

During the latter 1800s, free schools began to replace subscription schools. But the quality and methods of education did not appear to change drastically. Across the Smokies, in East Tennessee’s Big Greenbrier Cove, Granny’s College provided the rudiments of public education for many students and was an example of similar schools in the Great Smokies region. Lillie Whaley Ownby remembered the house which was turned into a school:

“Granny College was built before the Civil War by Humphry John Ownby. This house was two big log houses, joined together by a huge rock chimney and a porch across both rooms on both sides of the house. The houses were built of big poplar logs. The rooms were 18×20 feet and both rooms had two doors and two windows. The floor was rough, hewn logs. There was a huge fireplace in it. The living room had a partition just behind the doors and a cellar about 8×10 feet.”

After Mrs. Ownby’s father had acquired the old log building, he went to Sevierville, the county seat, and proposed to the school superintendent that he would furnish this house if the county would supply a teacher for Big Greenbrier children. This was agreeable, and Granny’s College, as it was locally known, came into being.

“The men made benches, long enough for three or four to sit on. The back was nailed up on some blocks and the children used the wall for a back rest. There was no place for books except on the benches or floor. Dad furnished wood for the fire. The boys carried it in and kept the fire going. Everyone helped in keeping the house clean and keeping water in the house.”

Church as well as school was a personalized part of family and community life in a way not known in more formal, urban situations. Each fulfilled not only its own specific function, spiritual or intellectual, but also satisfied social needs. The doctrine was strictly fundamentalist; the dominant denominations were Baptist and Methodist, although the Presbyterian influence was also present, especially in the schools that were founded with both money and teachers drawn from other regions of the country.

Each summer, Methodist camp meetings brought families together under the long brush arbors for weeks of sociable conversation and soulful conversion. The visiting ministers’ feast of oratory was matched only by the feast of victuals prepared by housewives over the campfires as they cooked and exchanged family news, quilt patterns, recipes, and “cuttings” from favorite flowers and shrubs.

Baptists were the most numerous denomination. They divided themselves into many categories, among others the Primitives, the Freewills, the Missionaries, and one small group called the Two-Seed-in-the-Spirit. Their rules were strict: no violins in church, no dancing anywhere. To be “churched,” or turned out of the congregation, was heavy punishment—and not infrequent.

One aspect of church that incorporated an important feature of mountain life was its singing. In ancient Ireland and Wales songsters had been accompanied on the harp. Settlers had brought the Old Harp song book of early hymns and anthems with them from the British Isles, and on down the valleys and across the mountains into these remote byways. The notes of this music were not round but shaped, and shape, rather than placement on a staff, indicated the note. This method simplified reading the music; and as the unaccompanied, usually untrained, singers took their pitch from a leader, they proceeded in beautiful harmony, usually in a minor key.

The mournful sound of minor chords was also familiar in the ballads common throughout the hills. Death and unrequited love were their recurring themes, whether they reached back to England and the Scottish borders, as in “Lord Thomas and Fair Elender,” or recounted some local contemporary affair. Beside their blazing hearths during long, lonely winter evenings, or at jolly gatherings or through lazy summer Saturday afternoons, mountain people remembered the past and recorded the present as they sang, altering and adding to the ballads which had been taught to them and which in turn would be handed on to another generation.

Pages 88-89: Butchering was a chore shared by nearly everyone in a family. Here, the Ogles—Earl, Horace, Collie, and Willard—butcher a hog as they get ready for a long winter.

National Park Service

Edouard E. Exline

Three children look on as he works at his shaving horse on a stave. His coopering equipment includes a draw knife, crow cutter, jointing plane, stave gauge, and barrel adze.

Edouard E. Exline

At his blacksmith shop Messer shapes a small metal piece, one of many he turned out just to keep his farm running.

Edouard E. Exline

Here is Messer the tanner, scrubbing the pelt side of a hide with a scythe blade after taking it out of the vat and removing the spent bark with a long-handled strainer.

And among those visitors who would begin to search the mountains during the approaching 20th century, the folk song collectors and the ballad seekers could find here a repository of rare, pure music—much of it now forgotten even in its own homeland. The visitors would find a way of life that might seem static but which was, indeed, changing. For the early pioneers had yielded to the authentic mountaineer. His log cabin was being replaced by sash-sawn lumber in a frame house. Extensive apple orchards and corn crops yielded the basic ingredients not only for fruit and bread but for the luxuries of a brandy and whisky known also as moonshine, white lightning, Old Tanglefoot.

Edouard E. Exline

In the mountains you had to work hard at being self-sufficient. And some men did better than others. One such man was Milas Messer of Cove Creek. Setting barrel staves to the hoop takes a bit of coordination, but Messer makes it look easy.

Hunting and fishing, which had been necessities for the first settlers, eventually turned into sport as well. Buffalo, elk, wolves, beavers, passenger pigeons, and a variety of other game disappeared early and forever, leaving only the memory of their presence in names like Buffalo Creek, Elk Mountain, Wolf Creek, Beaverdam Valley, Pigeon River. But deer, black bear, fox, raccoon and other animals remained to challenge the mountain man and his dogs. The relationship between a hunter and his hounds was something special. A dog shot or stolen could be cause for a lifelong feud. Names of individual dogs—Old Blue, Tige, Big Red—were cherished by their owners, as were certain breeds. The Plott dogs, named after the bear hunters who bred them in Haywood County’s Balsam range, were famous for their tenacity and strength in hunting bear.

One of the sharpest condemnations that could be laid on a mountain man concerned the hunting dogs. An early resident of Roaring Fork above Gatlinburg was a “hard, cruel man,” despised by his neighbors and in turn despising them. He had frightened children and cut a fellow “till he like to bled to death.” Finally—and most devastatingly—it was agreed that “he was the type of fellow that would pizen your dog.”

Livestock raising was important throughout the Great Smoky Mountains. Stock laws had not yet been passed, and rail fences were built to keep cattle, horses, hogs, or sheep out of gardens, fields, and yards rather than in pastures, pens, and feedlots. Animals roamed the fields and woods. Hogs fattened themselves on the mast of nuts and roots from the great chestnut, oak, and hickory forests; cattle grazed on the grassy balds in summertime. By mid-May, farmers in the coves and valleys had driven their cattle into the high places of the Smokies. Once every three weeks or so thereafter, they returned to salt and “gentle” them, thus keeping them familiar with their owners. In October, before the first snowfall, the cattle were rounded up. If the season had been good, livestock drives to near or distant markets began.

Charles S. Grossman

Salt licks are among the few remaining pieces of evidence of the great herding activity that once flourished in the Smokies. Notches were cut into logs or chiseled into rocks so the salt wouldn’t be wasted as it would be if placed on the ground. The salt was good for the cattle, and the regularity of the procedure helped to keep them from becoming completely wild.

During both the roundup and the drive, livestock marks played a critical role of identification. These were devised by each farmer—and acknowledged by his neighbors—as the “brand” signifying ownership. These might be various “crops,” “knicks,” and “notches:” an “underbit” (a crop out of the under part of the ear), or a “topbit” or a “swallow-fork” cut in the skin below the neck, or a combination of them all. If several kinds of animals were included on a livestock drive, there was a settled rule of procedure. Cattle led the way, followed by sheep, then hogs, and finally turkeys, which were usually the first to start peering toward the sky and searching for the night’s resting place.

All of these plodding, grunting, gobbling creatures were kept in order with the help of one or two good dogs. If a hunter’s dogs were valuable, a livestock drover’s dogs were invaluable. “Head’em,” the drover called, and his dogs brought recalcitrant animals into line, nipping the slow to hurry and curious to remain orderly.

During a long day’s drive to the county seat, or a several weeks’ journey to the lowlands of the Carolinas or Georgia, men and beasts surged forward in a turmoil of shouting and noise, dust and mud, autumn’s lingering heat and sudden chills. But on these journeys, the men left their small mountain enclaves for a brief glimpse of the larger world. They returned home not only with bolts of cloth and winter supplies of salt and coffee, but also with news and fresh experiences.

And accounts of these experiences were related in a language that was part of the mountaineer’s unique heritage. That language revealed a great deal about the people; it was strong and flexible, old yet capable of change, sometimes judged “ungrammatical” but often touched with poetry. In a later century, students and collectors would come here seeking the Elizabethan words, the rhythmic cadences of this speech. It harkened back to a distant homeland.

The mountain person’s “afeard” for afraid, or “poke” for paper bag, were familiar to Shakespeare. In Chaucer could be found the mountaineer’s use of “holpt” for helped, and such plurals as “nestes” and “waspes.” Webster confirmed that “hit” was Saxon for it, and the primary meaning of “plague” was anything troublesome or vexatious (the mountain man might well say someone was plaguing him). The habit of turning a noun into a verb often added strength to an otherwise dull sentence: “My farm will grow enough corn to bread us through the winter,” or, when speaking of the heavy shoes that were brogans, “Those hunters just brogued it through the rough places.”

The daily poetry and humor of the mountain language was caught in the names of places—Pretty Hollow Gap, Charlie’s Bunion, Fittified Spring, Miry Ridge, Bone Valley—and in descriptive words like “hells” and “slicks” for the tangled laurel and rhododendron thickets. It was present in the familiar names of plants: “hearts-a-bustin’-with-love,” “dog-hobble,” “farewell summer.” And the patterns of their quilts, pieced with artistic patience and skill, bore names such as “tree of life,” “Bonaparte’s March,” and “double wedding ring.”

Thus, the mountain people adapted their language, as they had their lives, to the needs and beauty of this land they called home. And contrary to what might seem the case, these later residents were a more nearly distinctive group than that which had first come. The pioneers had been a fairly heterogeneous group, but as the years passed, those with itching feet and yearning minds moved on to other frontiers. Restless children wandered west in search of instant gold and eternal youth. In time, those remaining behind became a more and more cohesive group, sharing a particular challenge, history, folklore, economy, dream. Their lives were gradually improving. They had earned the privilege and joy of calling this their homeland.