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: