“... the forest primeval, where roamed some sparse herds of cattle, razorback hogs and the wild beasts. Speckled trout were in all the streams. Bears sometimes raided the fields and wildcats were a common nuisance. Our settlement was a mere slash in the vast woodland that encompassed it.”
But it was also, for Horace Kephart, a new and invigorating home. He loved it. He thrived in it. At first he concentrated his senses on the natural beauty around him, on the purple rhododendron, the flame azalea, the fringed orchis, the crystal clear streams. Yet as the months passed, he found that he could not overlook the people.
The mountain people were as solidly a part of the Smokies as the boulders themselves. These residents of branch and cove, of Medlin and Proctor and all the other tiny settlements tucked high along the slanting creekbeds of the Great Smoky Mountains, these distinctive “back of beyond” hillside farmers and work-worn wives and wary moonshine distillers lodged in Kephart’s consciousness and imagination with rock-like strength and endurance.
Initially silent and suspicious of this stranger in their midst, families gradually came to accept him. They approved of his quietness and his even-handed ways, even confiding in him with a simple eloquence. One foot-weary distiller, after leading Kephart over kilometers of rugged terrain, concluded: “Everywhere you go, it’s climb, scramble, clamber down, and climb again. You cain’t go nowheres in this country without climbin’ both ways.” The head of a large family embracing children who spilled forth from every corner of the cabin confessed: “We’re so poor, if free silver was shipped in by the carload we couldn’t pay the freight.”
Kephart came to respect and to wonder at these neighbors who combined a lack of formal education with a fullness of informal ability. Like him, many of their personal characters blended a weakness for liquor with a strong sense of individual etiquette. He heard, for example, the story of an overnight visitor who laid his loaded gun under his pillow; when he awoke the next morning, the pistol was where he had left it, but the cartridges stood in a row on a nearby table.
He met one George Brooks of Medlin: farmer, teamster, storekeeper, veterinarian, magistrate, dentist. While Brooks did own a set of toothpullers and wielded them mercilessly, some individuals practiced the painful art of tooth-jumping to achieve the same result. Uncle Neddy Carter even tried to jump one of his own teeth; he cut around the gum, wedged a nail in, and made ready to strike the nail with a hammer, but he missed the nail and mashed his nose instead.
None of these fascinating tales escaped the attention of Horace Kephart. As he regained his health, the sustained energy of his probing mind also returned. Keeping a detailed journal of his experiences, he drove himself as he had done in the past. He developed almost an obsession to record all that he learned, to know this place and people completely, to stop time for an interval and capture this mountain way of life in his mind and memory. For three years he lived by the side of Hazel Creek. Though he later moved down to Bryson City during the winters, he spent most of his summers 13 kilometers (8 miles) up Deep Creek at an old cabin that marked the original Bryson Place.
Kephart distilled much of what he learned into a series of books. The Book of Camping and Woodcraft appeared in 1906 as one of the first detailed guidebooks to woodsmanship, first aid, and the art we now call “backpacking,” all based on his personal experience and knowledge. There is even a chapter on tanning pelts. But the most authoritative book concerned the people themselves. Our Southern Highlanders, published in 1913 and revised nine years later, faithfully retraces Kephart’s life among the Appalachian mountain folk after he “left the tame West and came into this wild East.” And paramount among the wilds of the East was the alluring saga of the moonshiner.
Laura Thornborough