OCHLAWAHA VALLEY, FROM DUN CRAGIN.
AFTER THE ANTLERS.
Rise! Sleep no more! ’Tis a noble morn;
The dews hang thick on the fringed thorn,
And the frost shrinks back, like a beaten hound,
Under the steaming, steaming ground.
Behold where the billowy clouds flow by,
And leave us alone in the clear gray sky!
Our horses are ready and steady.—So, ho!
I’m gone, like the dart from the Tartar’s bow.
Hark! Hark! Who calleth the maiden Morn
From her sleep in the woods and the stubble corn?
The horn,—the horn!
The merry sweet ring of the hunter’s horn.
—Barry Cornwall.
The Smoky chain, whose summit bears the long boundary line of North Carolina and Tennessee, attains its culmination between the deep, picturesque gaps of the French Broad and Little Tennessee, and is known as the Great Smoky mountains. For the distance of sixty-five miles it forms a mighty barrier, affording, with the exception of the Big Pigeon, no passage-way for mountain waters, and broken, except toward its southern end, by no gaps less than 5,000 feet in altitude. Nineteen peaks of over 6,000 feet in altitude, and 14 more within 400 feet of these figures, connected by massive ridges and interspersed by peaks but little lower than those just mentioned, make a marked cluster of massive mountains.
Clingman’s dome, 6,660 feet high, the most elevated summit in the range, is 372 feet higher than Mount Washington of the White Mountains, and only 47 feet lower than the loftiest peak of the Appalachian system. From its dome-shaped summit, in close communion with the clouds, and encircled by a dense grove of balsams, high above the line of scrubby oak and beech, and higher still above the majestic forests of cherry, locust, chestnut and the walnut, which clothe its lower slopes, the observer, as from the basket of a balloon, looks down upon a varied world spread wide and rolling beneath his feet. To the north lies that level and fertile portion of East Tennessee, watered by the French Broad and the Holston. Villages dot the plains; and, afar, the crests of the Cumberland mountains and their spurs form with the transparent sky a purple horizon. On the other hand, the lofty heights of the Bald, Black, Blue Ridge, Balsam, Cowee and Nantihala ranges, with lapping ends and straggling summits, make a distant, circling, boundary line to a central ocean of rolling mountains. Directly south, one obtains a wide-spread prospect of the most wild and picturesque portion of the eastern United States—that land embraced by the counties of Swain and Macon—the once romantic habitation and hunting ground of the Cherokee Nation. Here lies the fertile valley of the upper Little Tennessee, and its picturesque but almost uninhabited lower reaches; the emerald green Ocona Lufta with its rich lands; the Indian reservation on the banks of the Soco; the beautiful Tuckasege, and the narrow and wildly romantic vale down which courses the Nantihala.