A sardonic humor, sometimes smudged with “that touch of grossness in our English race,” characterizes many of the backwoods place-names. In the mountains of Old Virginia we have Dry Tripe settlement and Jerk ’em Tight. In West Virginia are Take In Creek, Get In Run, Seldom Seen Hollow, Odd, Buster Knob, Shabby Room, and Stretch Yer Neck. North Carolina has its Shoo Bird Mountain, Big Bugaboo Creek, Weary Hut, Frog Level, Shake a Rag, and the Chunky Gal. In eastern Tennessee are No Time settlement and No Business Knob, with creeks known as Big Soak, Suee, Go Forth, and How Come You. Georgia has produced Scataway, Too Nigh, Long Nose, Dug Down, Silly Cook, Turkey Trot, Broke Jug Creek, and Tear Breeches Ridge.
Allowing some license for the mountaineer’s irreverence, his whimsical fancies, and his scorn of sentimentalism, it must be said that his descriptive terms are usually apposite and sometimes felicitous. Often he is poetically imaginative, occasionally romantic, and generally picturesque. Roan Mountain, Grandfather, the Lone Bald, Craggy Dome, the Black Brothers, Hairy Bear, the Balsam Cone, Sunset Mountain, the Little Snowbird, are names that linger lovingly in one’s memory.
The writer recalls with pleasure not only the features but the mere titles of that superb landscape that he shared with the wild creatures and a few woodsmen when living far up on the divide of the Great Smoky Mountains. Immediately below his cabin were the Defeat and Desolation branches of Bone Valley, with Hazel Creek meandering to the Little Tennessee. Cheoah, Tululah, Santeetlah, the Tuckaseegee, and the Nantahala (Valley of the Noonday Sun) flowed through gorges overlooked by the Wauchecha, the Yalaka and the Cowee ranges, Tellico, Wahyah, the Standing Indian and the Tusquitee.[10] Sonorous names, these, which our pioneers had the good sense to adopt from the aborigines.
To the east were Cold Spring Knob, the Miry Ridge, Siler’s Bald, Clingman’s Dome, and the great peaks at the head of Okona Lufty. On the west rose Brier Knob, Laurel Top, Thunderhead, Blockhouse, the Fodder-stack, and various “balds” of the Unakas guarding Hiwassee. To the northward were Cade’s Cove and the vale of Tuckaleechee, with Chilhowee in the near distance, and the Appalachian Valley stretching beyond our ramparts to where the far Cumberlands marked an ever-blue horizon.
What matter that the plenteous roughs about us were branded with rude or opprobrious names? Rip Shin Thicket, Dog-hobble Ridge, the Rough Arm, Bear-wallow, Woolly Ridge, Roaring Fork, Huggins’s Hell, the Devil’s Racepath, his Den, his Courthouse, and other playgrounds of Old Nick—they, too, were well and fitly named.
CHAPTER XIV
THE LAW OF THE WILDERNESS
It is only a town-dreamed allegory that represents Nature as a fond mother suckling her young upon her breast. Those who have lived literally close to wild Nature know her for a tyrant, void of pity and of mercy, from whom nothing can be wrung without toil and the risk of death.