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.”