The announcement in November 1989 that the remote 6,300-acre Panthertown Valley tract in Jackson County had passed into the public domain was welcome news for knowledgeable outdoor enthusiasts throughout the southeastern United States. After years of private management, this truly unique region encompassing the headwaters of the Tuckaseigee River was opened for use by the general public. Those with a penchant for exploring backcountry areas have found that Panthertown is their ticket to paradise.

After being sparsely settled in the 19th century, the extensive tract passed into private hands about the turn of the century. After World War I, property rights were acquired by a lumber company that initiated operations in the 1920s. A rail spur connecting the valley with the Southern Railway system was run from three timber camps operating along the watershed. Logging operations ceased by the late 1930s, but traces of the old rail line can still be located, especially where it crossed over rock outcrops in Panthertown Creek in the uppermost portion of the watershed. In the early 1960s, the tract was purchased by a land investment corporation associated with a South Carolina-based insurance company. Through the years a few tracts on the edge of Panthertown were sold and various development possibilities considered — including a lake that would have inundated Panthertown Valley — but little development actually occurred other than minimal road improvements and ornamental tree plantings.

In January 1988, Duke Power Co. purchased the tract from the insurance company for a 230-kilovolt transmission line it wanted to run from a generating facility at Jocassee, S.C., to its proposed subsidiary, Nantahala Power and Light Company, for connection at a substation located in the Tuckaseigee River watershed. After extensive hearings on the local and state levels, Duke Power was cleared for the Nantahala Power purchase and the right to run the transmission line across the valley. The company required but 800 or so acres for the line right-of-way and sold the remainder of the tract for $7,875,000 to the North Carolina Nature Conservancy, which in turn promptly signed the deed over to the U.S. Forest Service for approximately that amount. Panthertown Valley is curently administered by the Highlands Ranger District of the Nantahala National Forest. Commercial timber production is unlikely as the tract is being managed under a Forest Service 4-C classification.

The most direct and scenic route to Panthertown Valley is to turn east at the crossroads in Cashiers onto U.S. 64 and proceed 1.8 miles before turning left onto Cedar Creek Road. At 2.1 miles, turn right onto Breedlove Road and proceed 3.3 miles to the gated trailhead. Study the map posted at the trailhead. Also consult the “Big Ridge” and “Lake Toxaway” U.S. Geological Survey quadrants, available at numerous outfitters in the Highlands/Cashiers area.

An excellent description of Panthertown Valley is provided by James H. Horton in a chapter titled “Physical and Natural Aspects” contributed to “The History of Jackson County” (1987). An article titled “Saving Panthertown Valley” by Vic Venters appeared in the May 1991 issue of “Wildlife in North Carolina.”

A short walk down the roadway and around the first bend leads to Salt Rock, one of the most delightful views in the southern highlands. From this overlook on the southwest rim of the Panthertown watershed a series of extensive rock outcrops that rise from 200 to 300 feet above the valley can be observed. (As power lines go, the one that Duke Power ran across the valley is not particularly obtrusive; you have to know just where to look to spot it, and even then the darkened steel towers blend in with the landscape as they are not silhouetted against the sky.) The broad valley floor and almost vertical rock-face terrain has led some to describe the area as “The Yosemite of the East.”

Western Carolina University biologist Dan Pittillo makes the point that Panthertown Valley resembles what the Yosemite Valley of California “might look like following several million years of erosion.” It’s a region of flat meandering tannin-darkened streams often bordered by white sand banks, extensive waterfall systems that form grottoes in which rare tropical ferns reside, large pools several hundred feet in length, high country bogs and seeps that harbor vegetation not often encountered elsewhere in the mountains, upland “hanging” valleys on the sides of the tract, and rocky outcrops where ravens nest.

Schoolhouse Falls on Greenland Creek is one of the most beautiful settings of its type in the southern mountains. Botanists who have surveyed Panthertown think that it contains “perhaps the largest collection of mountain bogs found south of West Virginia,” and the tract contains “at least 14 species of globally endangered plants.” Approximately three-quarters of a mile below Salt Rock overlook, you’ll come to a point where the road branches in three directions. The middle fork takes you down the left side of Panthertown Creek (the main headwater stream of the Tuckaseigee River) to a large pool, a bridge crossing, and access to Schoolhouse Falls. The right fork will lead you past a primitive camping site to a bridge. Turn right after crossing this bridge along a trail that will quickly bring you to a waterfall and pool area that’s a superb place for relaxing.

Editor’s note: This Back Then article first appeared in The Smoky Mountain News in May 2001.

George Ellison can be reached at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

“Ere the bat hath flown

His cloister’d flight … to black Hecate’s summons

The shard-borne beetle with his

drowsy hums

Hath rung night’s yawning peal,

there shall be done

A deed of dreadful note.”

— Shakespeare, Macbeth

There are a number of beetle species known as carrion beetles because they feed upon the carcasses of dead animals. The most interesting ones within this general type are called burying or sexton beetles because they bury their food source before devouring it. One of the ancient duties of a church sexton was the digging of graves for deceased members, hence the same sexton beetle.

Burying beetles have a keen sense of smell that enables them to locate dead animals from considerable distances. A male that discovers carrion climbs on a stone or plant and signals his mate by emitting a special odor and a harsh rasping call.

Along a pathway near my home where I grew up in Virginia, I once saw a dead bird that appeared to be slowly sinking into the earth. This seemed unlikely so I sat down so as to observe what was going on. After the bird had sunk an inch or so below ground level, two glistening black beetles about 1-1/2 inches in length with red body patches emerged from below and commenced piling the excavated soil over the bird. Before long the burial was completed and the beetles themselves disappeared underground.

That sent me to an encyclopedia. Therein I read that once the carrion is buried the female beetle lays her eggs on or near the carcass. When the hatched larvae are large enough to do so they feed on the carcass.

If the soil below a carcass that’s been located is soft, burying beetles go right ahead and conduct the burial on that site. If the ground is unduly hard or rocky, they pitch in as a team and move it to a more suitable place. The male and female laboriously roll their find by butting it over and over. Another carcass-moving technique they utilize is to turn over on their backs and apply leverage with all six of their powerful legs at once. A pair of burying beetles have been known to move a large rat several feet in order to find a suitable burial ground.

In “Macbeth,” Shakespeare associated “shard-borne beetles” (those with hard wing cases) with “night’s yawning peal” and deeds of “dreadful note” such as murder. But as gruesome as their role in the natural order of things may at first seem, the contribution burying beetles make to the recycling of energy systems is — in the long run — life giving.

Unfortunately, the populations of American burying beetles have declined to such an extent that seeing one these days is much less likely than when I was a boy.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Through the years I have attempted to describe the flora of the Smokies region for newspaper, magazine and book readers. I have learned that describing the “botanical architecture” of trees, flowers, fruits, etc., can be tricky business. Drafting a “sketch” in words that a reader can “visualize” isn’t always as easy as falling off a log. And I have also learned that when describing wildflowers the temptation is to employ too many superlatives (wonderful, exquisite, beguiling, etc.). Through the years many of my attempts have fallen flat. Here are some I think are OK. I hope they will remind you of your own encounters with plants and be a reminder to always take “a closer look.”

• What we watch for in winter are the less obvious evergreens that brighten the leaf-litter on a slushy winter day: rattlesnake plantain and cranefly orchis (orchid species that display their leaves only in winter); pipsissewa and wintergreen (two upright partially woody plants sometimes described as “sub-shrubs” because of their diminutive stature); and trailing arbutus and partridgeberry (two prostrate plants sometimes described as “creepers” because they don’t climb like true vines).

• Partridgeberry (Mitchella repens) can spread over fairly large areas, carpeting roots, small rock outcrops, and stumps. In winter the opposite dark-green oval leaves with their yellowish-green veins make a pleasant sight. In May and June four-lobed lilac-scented white flowers appear. Closer observation reveals interiors clothed with velvety white hairs. Note that the ovaries of each pair are fused. These produce a red (rarely white) berry composed of two equal parts. In winter you can readily observe two sets of sepals on the end of each berry.

• Trailing arbutus is an evergreen sub-shrub. The ovate leathery dull-green leaves are blunt-tipped, displaying distinctive wavy edges. I often find it growing alongside galax, which has a papery shiny-green round leaf. Delve under the arbutus leaves and surrounding leaf litter so as to expose the clusters of from six to ten flowers. Each will be tubular shaped and up to a half-inch long before expanding into five waxy lobes. They are white to pale pink after first blooming — but the pink intensifies with age. In order to attract insects for pollination purposes, trailing arbutus is among the most fragrant of our flowering plants. I don’t have a very keen sense of smell; nevertheless, I often detect the fragrance before I locate the plant.

• In a mischievous mood, Thoreau hailed them as “plump fellows.” But acorns are elegant, one of our most satisfying tactile and visual natural structures. They are sometimes produced in such numbers that we tend to take them for granted. I try each year to remind myself to gather a handful from each of our species. You can’t help but admire the economy of form. The rough-textured cap is an enlarged and stiffened version of the small overlapping leaves that protected the female flower before it blossomed. The smooth-textured nut is the flower’s ovary, grown large and hardened into a protective shell around the single seed within.

• Growing in the dappled shadows of rich woodland borders and openings, back cohosh seems to illuminate the forest when its long white-flowered candelabra-like stalks bloom in mid-summer. You probably know black cohosh when you see it, but you may not be aware there is a similar species here in the Smokies region. Both display leaves divided into numerous egg-shaped or oblong sharply-toothed leaflets. The flowers are mostly composed of fluffy stamens. The most common species (Cimicifuga racemosa) is the one known as black cohosh. It has ill-scented flowers that bloom from early June into August. These bear a single (female) pistil. The other species (Cimicifuga americana) is sometimes called false bugbane. Its flowers, displayed from August into September, are not ill-scented. Each bears three or more pistils.

• Bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis) is surely one of our most widely admired wildflowers. Notice how the lobes of the kidney-shaped leaf encircle the fragile stem even after the flower has blossomed. This is a structural mechanism that protects and stabilizes the stem and flower during times of high wind or even from falling branches.

The leaf also has the ability to tilt from a horizontal to a vertical position so as to most directly capture energy-giving sunlight. After the flower has withered and the canopy closes in overhead, bloodroot leaves expand and become much rounder and larger. Leaves as large as 12 inches across are sometimes encountered. This growth habit allows the plant to continue processing sunlight in an effective manner even when growing in shaded conditions. To my eyes, bloodroot plants display combinations of color and symmetry that are aesthetically pleasing. The light green leaf perfectly accentuates the pearly-white petals and golden-yellow stamens. The number of stamens (16-24) is almost always exactly twice that of the petals (8-12).

• Occuring along the banks of most streams, shrub yellowroot (Xanthorhiza simplicissima) is quite common here in the Smokies region. Look for a plant about eight to 24 inches high that resembles a minature palm tree in that all the leafy green growth is at the top of stem. The flowers emerge as graceful drooping racemes about three inches in length. Each flower consists of five purplish-brown sepals (no petals) about a half-inch in diameter. The most distinctive feature of the flower is the bright yellow dot in its center.  This is the pollen used to attract insects. Wherever you find one yellowroot plant, look around for others.  They almost always form colonies with extensive intergraded root systems. These help the plant maintain a foothold when flooded. Another flood-disaster prevention feature is a bare flexible stem that offers little resistence to raging water. And the yellowish follicles or fruits produced in summer disperse seeds that float away on inflated capsules. Scrape some bark off the stem at ground level with your fingernail and you’ll see that that genus designation is perfect (“Xanthorhiza” translates to “yellowroot”). The tissue under the bark is a bright yellow hue that rivals the color of fine butter. Cherokee women have for ages used pulp rendered from the plant to obtain the yellow dye used to tint the wooden splints they weave into traditional baskets.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

This is the peculiar story of the land transactions, disputes, and incidents that led to the establishment of Bryson City and the construction of its first jail.

This town was a village named Charleston before it became Bryson City in 1889. Before that it was a tract of land known as Big Bear’s Reserve, which was itself located in the same general area as the old Cherokee village of Tuckaleechy Town (Tuckoritchie) that had been ravaged by General Grant’s British expeditionary force in 1761.

Big Bear (Yanegwa or Yonah) was a Cherokee chief who lived in the area where Bryson Branch empties into the Tuckaseigee from the north. “Big Bear’s spring” is located at the foot of the road leading over Coalchute Hill to the old Singer Plant. “Big Bear’s ford” was used into modern times.  It’s located on the west side of the bridge. “Big Bear’s canoe landing” was in the immediate area.

According to James Mooney, “(Big Bear) was among the signers of the treaties of 1798 and 1805, and by the treaty of 1819 was confirmed a reservation of 640 acres as one of those living within the ceded territory who were ‘believed to be persons of industry and capable of managing their property with discretion,’ and who had made considerable improvements on the tracts reserved.” The mile-square tract apparently included most of the flat land on both sides of the river west of the mouth of Deep Creek; that is, the central portion of present Bryson City.

Big Bear was ceded his reserve in early 1819. Later that same year, he signed a deed for the land, giving it over to a white man named Darling Beck. That’s when the trouble started.

In a 1959 Asheville Citizen-Times article titled “Indian Twice Sold Land That Is Now Bryson City” (subsequently republished in Lillian Thomasson’s 1964 history of Swain County), Karl Fleming related, “History has it that Beck, who evidently was no darling, plied Big Bear with giggle-water and got his signature on a deed which exchanged the land for a promise of $50. Big Bear claimed he never got the money and about a year later, on November 25, 1820, he deeded his 640 acres of land to John B. Love in return for a wagon and a team of horses. Love immediately took possession of the land and Beck responded by filing in the courts a suit of ejectment. The court ruled that Beck was legal owner of the land and Love appealed to the State Supreme Court, which upheld the lower court decision in its December sitting in the year 1834.

“Not satisfied with this, Love filed suit on October 13, 1835, against the widow of Beck, who had, in the meantime expired. Love’s suit was a suit in equity, whereas Beck’s suit had been an action at law in ejectment. The distinction between actions at law and suits in equity was not abolished in North Carolina until the state adopted its present constitution in 1868.

“Love attempted to show that Beck and Big Bear had rescinded their trade and that he was the rightful owner of the mile square.  (The court ruled that Love was entitled to the property as his was the superior title.) In 1841, Love, who, it will be remembered, came into possession of the land for a wagon and a brace of mules, turned a tidy profit by selling the tract to John Shuler for $2,500.”

Portions of this land were subsequently owned by members of the Burns, Bryson, and Cline families before being deeded to form Charleston, the county seat of Swain County, in 1871. The village was not incorporated until 1887, two years before the name was changed to Bryson City in order to avoid confusion over mail that was mistakenly being sent to the larger city in South Carolina.

Tuckoritchie. Tuckaleechy Town. Big Bear’s Reserve.  Charleston. Bryson City. All the same place. For the most part it’s been a quiet place. The jail our first citizens constructed encouraged peace and tranquility. The following description was provided by Wilbur G. Zeigler and Ben S. Grossscup  in The Heart of the Alleghanies or Western North Carolina (1883).

“The old, frame court-house has its upper story used as a grand jury room, and its lower floor … holds the jail. The dark interior of the ‘cage,’ used for petty misdoers, can be seen under the front outside stairs, through a door with barred window. An apartment fitted up for the jailer is on the same floor, and, by a spiked, open slit, about six inches by two feet in dimensions, is connected with the `dungeon.’ For its peculiar purposes this dungeon is built on a most approved pattern. It is a log room within a log room, the space between the log walls filled up with rocks. It is wholly inside the frame building. Besides the opening where the jailer may occasionally peek in, is another one, similar to that described, where a few pale rays of daylight or moonlight, as the case may be, can, by struggling, filter through clapboards, two log walls, spikes, and rocks, to the gloomy interior. A pad-locked trapdoor in the floor above is the only entrance. The daily rations for ye solitary culprit, like all blessings, come from above — through the trapdoor. Here, suspected unfortunates of a desperate stripe awaiting trial, and convicted criminals, biding their day of departure for the penitentiary or gallows, are confined in dismal twilight, and in turn are raised by a summons from above, and a ladder cautiously lowered through the opening in the floor.”

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

All of the spring flowering plants are early this year by as much as two to three weeks.

Black locust is no exception. Their beautiful creamy-white pea-shaped flowers form dependent clusters so fragrant that the air is heavy with scent and the sound of nectar-seeking honeybees.

I’m fairly good at the identification of deciduous trees during the flowering and fruiting seasons, when one can observe bark, leaves, general growth habit, and flowers or fruit. I’m less adept during the winter months, when one can observe just bark, buds, and general growth habit. One tree, however, that I do recognize without difficulty is the black locust. It’s deeply furrowed and cross-checked bark, dark-brown and scaly, is a dead giveaway. A really mature black locust tree will display bark so deeply furrowed and cross-checked that it resembles an alligator’s hide.

Unlike, say, a tulip poplar, the trunk of a black locust doesn’t grow straight and true. Stand at the base of a black locust and look upward. You will observe that the trunk ascends in a sinuous, almost serpent-like fashion. And unlike, say, tulip poplar, the grain of the wood is not long and easily worked. For these reasons, black locust was never, to my knowledge, utilized in the southern mountains in the exterior construction of log cabins.

Although its precise origins are debatable, botanists conjecture that black locust probably originated in the southern Appalachians and, perhaps, the Ozarks. Today, of course, the tree is widespread in central and eastern North America and Europe.    

During the era of wooden-hulled sailing ships, treenails (wooden pins) fashioned from black locust were utilized in European shipyards for pegging the planking of hulls. Once in contact with water, the treenails swelled and held tighter than iron rivets; moreover, they did not rust when in contact with salt water. It has been estimated that between 50,000 and 100,000 black locust tree “nails” were exported annually from Philadelphia alone during the early 1800s.  

In this region, black locust was also highly prized by the Cherokees and early settlers. It was so useful, in fact, for the Cherokees in making blowgun darts, bows, “nails,” and other items they planted and cultivated the rapidly growing tree. The early settlers had numerous other uses for the rot-resistant wood, especially as base logs and interior beams for houses or outbuildings, firewood, and as durable fence posts. Among the many common names for black locust, the designation post oak is the most apt in this regard.

The best description of the essential attributes of black locust that I have encountered is provided by Donald Culross Peattie in A Natural History of Trees of Eastern and Central North America (Houghton Mifflin Co., 1950): “In the first place almost the entire woody cylinder of the trunk is heartwood, always the strongest part of a tree. It is the seventh hardest in all our sylva and, as to strength in position of a beam, locust is the strongest in North America outside the tropics. It is the stiffest of our woods, exceeding hickory by 40 percent. Of all important hardwoods, black locust shrinks least in drying, losing only 10 percent volume … It is the most durable of all our hardwoods; taking white oak as the standard of 100 percent, black locust has a durability of 250 percent. The wood takes such a high polish as to appear varnished. The fuel value of black locust is higher than any other American tree, exceeding even hickory and oak, being almost the equal, per cord at 20 percent moisture content, of a ton of anthracite coal.”

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

A mask is a mechanism employed to cover the face as a protective screen or disguise. For protection, they have been utilized for centuries by medieval horsemen, welders, fencers, hockey goalies, and so on. Their most intriguing uses, however, have been as a devices of disguise, as in a theatrical production or as part of the paraphernalia of religious and/or cultural ritual.

We don’t have to go to darkest Africa or the remote jungles of South America to find recent and extensive use of a variety of masks in this latter context. Until very recently they were an important element of Cherokee ritual.

A visit to the Qualla Arts and Crafts Mutual Inc. or other outlets in Cherokee will turn up a variety of the contemporary masks being produced by the reservation's carvers. They sometimes use skins or gourds, but for the most part masks are carved from buckeye or other suitable wood and then colored with natural dyes, paint, clay, charcoal, or shoe polish.

Often these modern masks simply depict a man with horns (the buffalo mask) or maybe a bear’s face. I am especially attracted to those haunting masks that are presented unadorned as a skull-like rendering. A favorite theme of some carvers is that of a man’s head topped by a coiled rattlesnake. And then there are those grotesque or sometimes even obscene productions known as “booger masks.”

If you take the time to look up and talk with a Cherokee mask-maker, you’ll get a friendly enough reception (especially if you’re actually shopping for a mask), but you’re not likely to get much insight into their themes. These people just don’t make their living talking. They’ll say something like, “Oh, that’s just a snake that happens to be on that man’s head”; or, “Funny thing, I started in to carving and it just turned out that way”; or, “You think it looks like a what?”

Unless you happen upon an unusually talkative mask-maker in an unguarded moment, your best sources for detailed information on the Cherokee mask tradition are the book-length study Cherokee Dance and Drama (1951) by Frank G. Speck and Leonard Broom, and the article by Raymond D. Fogelson and Amelia B. Walker titled “Self and Other in Cherokee Booger Masks” that appeared in the fall 1980 issue of the Journal of Cherokee Studies.

Cherokee Dance and Drama was written in collaboration with Cherokee mask-maker and cultural authority Will West Long. Others who contributed to the book were Long’s elder sister, Roxy, his elder half-brother Lawyer Calhoun, Deliski Climbing Bear, and Mrs. Sampson Owl. This book is the real thing.

Will West Long — the son of Sally Terrapin and John Long, a Baptist minister — was born about 1870 in the traditional Big Cove section of the Qualla Boundary.  After attending a school near High Point, he returned to Cherokee at the time the famous ethnologist James Mooney was there collecting data for his book subsequently published in 1900 as Myths of the Cherokee. Mooney hired Long as a scribe and interpreter.

Long later attended Hampton Institute and lived in New England until he was in his mid-30s. He returned once more to Cherokee shortly before his mother died in 1904, married, and spent the remainder of his life on the reservation.

His mother's interest in such matters, along with Mooney’s influence, created in Long a passion for preserving the quickly fading history and social customs of the Cherokee. He acquired manuscripts and insights from the medicine men that would otherwise have been lost. Long is rightly considered by many to be the authoritative scholar of his people’s customs during his lifetime.

In addition to his other interests, Long helped preserve the traditional dances and became one of the community’s foremost mask-makers, a craft he learned from a cousin, Charley Lossiah. Allen Long succeeded his father as the tribe’s top mask-maker during the early 20th century.

As described in the sources cited above, the Booger Dance (also called the Mask Dance) was a ritual performed after the first frost that featured masks which exaggerated human features; that is, they represented racial types: Indian man (a dark red face); Indian woman (light red face with paint on cheeks) white man (woodchuck or opossum fur as a beard); black man (charcoal colored); and so on.

What made the booger masks exceptional were the sometimes grotesque, often humorous, and usually obscene elements incorporated into them that suggested European features like bushy eyebrows, mustaches, chin whiskers, big noses, ghastly white pallor, and bald heads.

The boogers — generally depicted as older men — represented “people far away or across the water” (Europeans, blacks, northerners, southerners, alien Indians) who intrude upon the peaceful social dances of the Cherokee. Upon entering the dance house, they break wind, chase women, and generally behave as barbarians.  Asked what they want, the boogers first reply “Girls!” then announce that they want “To fight!” Instead of reciprocating, the Cherokee allow them to dance out their hostilities.

This ritual has been interpreted in several ways. It was a way to deal with “the harmful powers of alien tribes and races, who, as living beings or ghosts, may be responsible for sickness or misfortune.” It also served as “condensation of the acculturation process as seen from the Cherokee perspective: first the white man tried to steal women; second he wanted to fight; and then, finally, he was satisfied to make a fool of himself.”

It’s also clear that many of the ingeniously crafted masks used in the ceremony simply poked fun at boorish masculine traits in general, including the “excessive preoccupation with sexuality” and the desire to be “in charge.”

And so, my friend, always remember that masks are mirrors ... the next time you spot a Cherokee booger mask in a shop, at one of the craft festivals, or in a museum, pause and take a closer look ... it just might be looking back at you.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Editor’s note: This column first appeared in The Smoky Mountain News in April 2002.

Have you ever looked at a map of North Carolina and wondered how in the heck the Old North State came to be shaped like that? There’s no way to describe it except maybe as a key slot turned on its side. But that doesn’t do justice to a configuration which is almost as straight as a ruler on its northern boundary while the southern and western boundaries look like the work of a 3-year-old.  

Only half in jest, John P. Arthur in Western North Carolina - A History from 1730-1913 (Asheville, 1914) suggests that the location of still-houses producing moonshine were the primary causes of the seemingly haphazard state lines laid out by the early commissioners and surveyors:      

“It is said that the reason the Ducktown copper mines of Tennessee were lost to North Carolina was due to the fact that the commissioners of North Carolina and Tennessee ran out of spirituous liquors when they reached the high peak just north of the Hiwassee River, and instead of continuing the line in a generally southwestwardly direction, crossing the tops of the Big and Little Frog mountains, they struck due south to the Georgia line and a still-house.”

Well, losing Ducktown was perhaps no great loss. Arthur notes that the “the jagged boundary between North and South Carolina” has also been attributed “to the influence of whiskey.” (Actually this was due mainly to an agreement that the North Carolina line would be drawn north of the Catawba Indian Nation.)

I like the way in which W.L. Saunders, editor of the Colonial Records of North Carolina, phrased the matter (as quoted in Arthur): “... judging from practical results, North Carolina in her boundary surveys, and they have been many, seems to have been unusually fortunate in having men who were either abstemious or very capable in the matter of strong drink; for, so far as now appears, in no instance have we been overreached.”

The line that has always interested me the most is the fairly straight one on the northern boundary. This is because I was born in Danville, Va., just north of where the Dan River crosses the line, while my wife, Elizabeth, was born 34 days later on the other side of the line and the Dan River in Milton, N.C. Despite this proximity, we didn’t, however, meet until we were in our early 20s.  

I recently went back and reread Col. William Byrd’s accounts of how the line between Virginia and North Carolina was surveyed back in 1728. His remarks regarding the slovenliness, laziness, and generally disreputable character and ways of North Carolina is both scandalous and hilarious — and typically Virginian. Being a native Virginian, I can attest without need for rejoinder that they (we) are among the most uppity people in the world — and rightfully so. If you want some good reading, I recommend that you search out a reprint of Byrd’s accounts.  

I have never located a study that names the mountains Byrd describes. The designations suggested herein are based on this writer’s knowledge of the terrain and represent, at best, educated approximations.

Col. Byrd (William Byrd II) was one of the Virginia commissioners. Two manuscript diaries not published until long after his death have subsequently appeared in various ediitons: The History of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina and The Secret History of the Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina. The former suppressed personal details and was no doubt intended for a general audience, while the former was circulated among Byrd’s London friends amid great approval and has won an honored place in the literature of Colonial America.

The boundary line party set out on March 5, 1728, headed slowly westward from “north of Currituck river or inlet.” After six weeks the line had been run for 73 miles. Work was halted until Sept. 20. By Oct. 4 they had reached a point 50 miles west of any colonial settlements. The North Carolinians considered that to be quite far enough and departed, along with one of the Virginia commissioners. Along with the remaining commissioner, the surveyors and workers, Byrd pushed on westward.

On Oct. 10-11, they crossed the Dan River at present Milton, N.C., at a point about a mile north of where my wife was born, and then reached some high ground just southwest of present Danville, Va., about a mile east of where I was born. By this time they were approaching the inner Piedmont where the terrain changes from rolling woodlands to noticeably hilly uplands.

By late October the party had reached Peters Creek in Stokes County, where real mountains could be seen in the distance: “One of the Southern Mountains was so vastly high, it seem’d to hide its head in the Clouds, and the West End of it terminated in a horrible Precipice, that we call’ Despairing Lover’s Leap. The Next to it, towards the East, was lower, where it heav’d itself up in the form of a vast Stack of Cimnys. The Course of the Northern Mountains seem’d to tend West-South-West, and those to the Southward very near West. We cou’d descry other Mountains ahead of us, exactly in the Course of the Line, tho’ at a much greater distance. In this Point of View, the ledges on the right and Left both seem’d to close, and form a Natural Amphi-Theater.”  

The mountains to the north in Virginia were probably the low-lying Carter and Bull ranges backed up by the Pinnacles of the Dan complex on the Blue Ridge plateau. The mountains to the south were probably (east to west) Hanging Rock, Sauratown, and Pilot, which arise abruptly from the Piedmont province of North Carolina. From the hill above Peters Creek on the state line, 30 miles to the west — where the Blue Ridge escarpment is at its steepest in the area of Fisher Peak (3,609 feet elevation) — is precisely where Byrd’s imaginary “Ledges” would have appeared to converge.

Had, however, Byrd and his companions pushed on through the foothills of the Piedmont provinces of Virginia and North Carolina, they would have quickly penetrated the real mountains. In that instance, Byrd’s descriptions would be ranked today as the high-water mark in the literature of the Blue Ridge Province of North Carolina prior to the arrival of William Bartram in 1775.

Belted kingfishers are one of my favorite birds, so much so that I wrote a poem years ago about anticipating their return to our creek each spring titled “Kingfishers Return.” A pair fishes along the small creek on our property during the breeding season. In winter they move downstream to the Tuckasegee River and Lake Fontana, although the male will make infrequent appearances, probably to maintain control of his hunting territory. Each March they return for good, raising a ruckus as they fly over our cove with rattling calls that are a part of their mating ritual.

With most bird species, the male is usually the more conspicuous. The female kingfisher is an exception, however, having a chestnut breast band in addition to the gray one shared by the male. Because she broods her young deep in the ground, the female’s maternal duties don’t make her an easy target for predators. She has no real need for the sort of subdued protective coloration characteristic of female cardinals, towhees, and numerous other bird species. Her decorative breast band makes her one of the few female birds in the world with plumage more colorful than her mate.

If you have kingfishers that are active in your vicinity from March into early summer, look for their nesting dens. Situated in a steep bank, the entrance is about the size of a baseball. If it’s being used, there will be two grooves at the base of the hole where the birds’ feet drag as they plunge headfirst, in full flight, into the opening. The tunnel leading to the nesting cavity may be from three to 15 feet in length. Kingfishers have toes that are fused together, which help them excavate more efficiently. Obviously designed to prevent access by predators, these nesting dens can be located some distance from water, often in roadway cutbanks or where there has been excavation around a building site.

It’s not surprising that such a conspicuous bird would have a place in Cherokee bird lore. They composed stories that accounted for the kingfisher’s fishing tactics and incorporated the bird into their medicinal ceremonies. One can learn about the natural world by direct observation or from scientific studies. Or you can come to another sort of understanding by paying attention to the lore handed down by the Native Americans.

When James Mooney was collecting Cherokee lore here in Western North Carolina during the 1880s, he recorded two accounts of how the kingfisher (“jatla” in Cherokee) got its bill. Some of the old men told him the animals decided to give the bird a better bill because it was so poorly equipped to make its living as a water bird. “So they made him a fish-gig and fastened it on in front of his mouth.”

A second version Mooney recorded was that the bill was a gift from the benevolent Little People, the Cherokee equivalent of Irish leprechauns. They had observed a kingfisher using a spear-shaped fish as a lance to kill a blacksnake that was preying upon a bird’s nest. So they rewarded him his own spear-shaped bill.

This outsized bill accounts for the kingfisher’s success as a fisherman. One of the prettiest sights in the bird world is that of a kingfisher hovering over the riffles in a small stream before plunging headfirst underwater after its prey. Its success rate is phenomenal.

Before going fishing, the Cherokees evoked the kingfisher in magical formulas that would hopefully insure equal success.

Kingfisher’s Return

Belted kingfishers are permanent residents of the southern mountains, wintering along the larger waterways that do not often freeze over. In early spring, they reappear on smaller creeks within individual breeding territories.

Rosy maple hazes tree line.

Catkins pendant over creek.

Hepatica glows in leaf-litter.

For days now you have been

watching & waiting.

But not till you are least prepared is she suddenly there …

sculling upstream with swift strokes

rattling the morning into being

weaving her territory with sound

painting the air blue-gray and rust-brown

as her kind has for so many thousand years.

She is beyond all thinking

instinctively keen to a fuller world

than you or I could ever hope …

but if she should notice she notices

that you scribble the rocky soil ...

if she should expect, she expects failure of you

for she is the intuitive gardener of those more subtle

regions: the magic water &

the clear flowing air.

If she ever remembers she remembers

the camps laid here so long ago and

the darker people who also worried

the dirt & also shouted with joy

into the sunrise at the glory

of those flashing wings!

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

What’s in a name? Well, sometimes a lot, especially when you’re considering the names we assign plants.

The striking little early wildflower of deciduous woodlands with its yellow reflexed petals, long red stamens, and lush brown dappled green leaves goes by many common names: trout lily, fawn lily, adder’s-tongue, dogtooth-violet, and Easter yellow lily.

The derivation of these designations is clear enough. It appears at the time of year when people’s thoughts are on Easter, catching trout, and seeing newborn deer. The dappled leaves further reinforce associations with both trout and fawns. And John Burroughs — the 19th century writer-naturalist who proposed the fawn lily name (he couldn’t stand dogtooth violet) — also thought that the leaves of the plant “stand up like fawn’s ears, and this feature, with its recurved petals, gives it an alert, wide-awake look.”

The “violet” association was a carry-over from Europe, where the common trout lily (the name I like best) was thought to resemble a violet in color. The “dogtooth” connection is more interesting. That came about because the white, underground tuber (or corm) from which the leaf and flowers arise resembles “a smooth, white fang.”

My second favorite name is adder’s-tongue. Once again, as is often the case with common names, the associations are intertwined: the pointed leaf-tips are curled as they emerge from the soil; and the six long reddish stamens bear jiggling anthers that reinforce the serpent iamge.

Like many other early woodland wildflowers — toothwort, hepatica, spring beauty, bellwort, bloodroot, Mayapple, trillium, etc. — trout lily has adapted to a situation that calls for a quick emergence in early spring before the leaf canopy closes overhead and energy-giving light levels drop. Some of these species compress their blooming season into spans lasting only a few weeks at given elevations; and, for this reason, this group of wildflowers appearing in waves across the still sunlit forest floor are frequently labeled “spring ephemerals.”

Setting fruit in early spring when not that many pollinators are about is risky business, especially since mining bees and bumblebees are frequently restrained in their search for food by cold spells. For that reason, trout lily has devised a backup system.

The plant can reproduce asexually via a fleshy bud called a “dropper” that forms at the end of a fragile white stem (or stolon) attached to the base of the parent corm. This dropper stem can be from 3” to 10” in length. Digging up trout lilies with their droppers intact is a tricky affair since the stem is fragile and the dropper is sometimes deeper underground than the corm.  (But the white stems sometimes grow above-ground before penetrating the soil to set the dropper and can be located by removing leaf-litter.)

Most plants in trout lily colonies probably arise from droppers. Missouri Botanical Garden botanist Peter Bernhardt — author of the delightful book Wily Orchids & Underground Orchids: Revelations of a Botanist — calculates that as high as 90 percent of eastern trout lilies are reproduced asexually.

When you come upon a colony, notice that the plants in bloom all have two leaves. Botanists disagree as to whether the clones produced by droppers ever develop two leaves and flower, or whether only the seed-produced individuals flower.

Be that as it may, flowering individuals always have two leaves and they take a long time (up to eight years in some species) to reach reproductive maturity. The yellow petals (actually “tepals,” an undifferentiated form between a sepal and a petal) are at first partially closed. Gradually, these reflex or recurve fully exposing the interior parts of the flower.

Flowers fortunate enough to be pollinated set fruit which disperse seed at about the time the leaf canopy is closing overhead in late April and early May. Look for trout lily stalks that have collapsed, causing the fruit capsules to spill seeds in a rather neat pile on the ground. With a handlens, you can spot soft tips on them called “carbuncles.”

These “meaty” tidbits induce litter-dwelling insects like crickets and beetles to drag the seeds away and gnaw off the carbuncles. (Many violet species utilize the same technique.) The seed thus dispersed from the parent colony can perchance then form a new colony with renewed genetic vitality, especially if the flower producing the seed was cross-pollinated rather than self-pollinated.

The most common species of trout lily here in WNC appears to be “Erythronium umbilicatum,” which has petals (or tepals) lacking auricles (ear-shaped lobes) and fruit capsules (indented at the apex) appearing on the end of arching flower stalks that allow the capsule to touch the ground.

You might also encounter a second less common species, “E. americanum” (the one listed in popular field guides), in our immediate area. Its petals are eared at the base.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Lots of people write haikus or haiku-like verse. This past year we had several haiku-writing fests at our house. House rules during Lands Creek haiku fests are that each haiku must be of three lines with a 5-7-5 syllabic structure.

More wine was consumed than haikus produced. And as the evenings wore on the quality descended. But it was great fun and interesting to see how individual minds worked as they tried to turn out reasonable verse in a group setting. Han Shan would have laughed until his sides split. Some pretty good widely-published poets (I won’t name names) cranked out some miserable haiku that has been confiscated by the authorities.

Here are the Dec. 11, 2011, first- and second-place winners, which aren’t all that bad. Nothing qualified for third place.

still catching late sun

Uncle Luther Hyde’s old place

above the creek bend

cold December day

counting syllables with wine

ground hard as haiku

Kids like haiku a lot and have nimble minds, which is a plus. When our granddaughter, Daisy (11 years old), was visiting from Colorado last summer, we had a 20 or so minute haiku-writing session each evening after supper and put together a hand-bound gathering we call The Suppertime Poems. Here’s one of hers:

in the rainy mist

silent wolves moved down the ridges

always out of sight

She counted “ridges” as one syllable, which I would have, too. Here’s another one of Daisy’s:

sittin’ here waitin’

iron griddle & hot butter

cornbread on my mind

And I like this one that we wrote together. It’s a riddle (the answers to the three riddles in this column are on below in a box):

perched along the river

dark angels with outspread wings

waiting for the light

Writing haiku is therapeutic, especially when composed in a Mead composition book. I prefer the wide-ruled 100-sheet  9¾-by-7 black-and-silver model #09918 designed by Jackson Pollock …  especially those with the inside back covers featuring the multiplication tables (9-by-7 has been a lifelong difficulty) and the differences between lay and lie (another problem area) … not a journal … not a diary … no dates … no themes … mostly illegible pages decorated with mustard stains and bottle rings. Here’s the second riddle from my magic composition book:

weathered board monarch

frozen sky-tailed in the sun

dark crack slither gone

And the third riddle:

rocks without mortar

framing pathways with quiet care

1936

Answers: (1) buzzards; (2) a skink; & (3) CCC work.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

When I started writing features for a newspaper in the late 1980s, I didn’t have much of a clue as to what I was doing. I was working as a “stringer” for a regional insert called “Smoky Mountain Neighbors,” which was published in the westernmost counties of the state by the Asheville Citizen-Times. Especially difficult, for me, was interviewing. People wanted to tell me their life stories. I didn’t want to hear them. But for about 10 years I did as many as four interviews a week.

“Just the facts, lady, just the facts,” was my mantra.

My editor, Jim Crawford, was terrific when it came to working with newcomers to the profession. Some of the more crusty veterans would have had a field day with me once they found out: (1) I had a semi-academic background; (2) most of my publishing experience to that point in time had been semi-academic in style and content; and (3) I didn’t know how to use a camera, even though I had claimed to be “pretty good” in order to obtain my initial assignment. This was back in the day when most journalists, especially stringers, took their own photos. So I borrowed a camera and went to work. None of this bothered Jim; so long as I produced copy “on time” ... that is, about three minutes before deadline.

One day, after I had been submitting copy to him for almost two years, I ventured something like: “You’ve been reading my stuff for a long time now and never have said if you liked it or not.”

He peered over the rims of his glasses, rolled his eyes, and sighed, but didn’t say anything.

“Well, do you?” I persisted.

Without looking up again from proofing the copy I had just submitted, he said something like, “You’ll be the first to know when I don’t.”

When asked for advice about interviewing, he tentatively offered several suggestions based on 30 years or so experience: “Look up from time to time and make eye contact even if you’re taking notes. Be in control of the beginning, middle, and end. But your main job is to listen. We’re not interested in your story. The most significant thing you learn probably won’t be what you anticipated. People will say the damndest things.” Or something like that. Those were the most words I ever heard Jim say at one sitting. He was a fine person.

I never became a very good interviewer and currently avoid doing them like the plague. But I did learn to listen a little better, especially if I liked someone or the subject matter or where we were. To a great extent, I was always more interested in how things were said than in what was said. I’ve rummaged around in my files and found my favorite interview … one of the few I wouldn’t mind doing all over again.

I have always envied firetower wardens. To a man (and woman) they have always presented themselves as down-to-earth sorts who do not romanticize their work in the least bit. I suspect, however, that more than one is, in reality, a closet romantic. When I heard about Pearly Kirkland, I called and asked if I could interview him at his home in the Skeenah community south of Franklin. How Pearly, a Swain County native, who was 88 when I visited him, came to live down in Skeenah is interwoven with his experiences as a longtime firetower dispatcher at three high-elevation sites in Western North Carolina. On that bright autumn day, the memories slowly flooded his mind, Pearly relaxed on his front porch, talking and laughing about the old days “up on the mountain at the top of the world”:

I was born on Chambers Creek in what now is the park. My father, Albert, was from Bear Creek and my mother, Dolly, was from Bone Valley on Hazel Creek, both places being in the Smokies. I went to he Chambers Creek School, which was a church house, but I was mainly interested in the outdoors in hunting and fishing and walking around. Jack, one of my brothers, became ranger at Forney Creek and that’s how I got into the firetower business.  I’d been a logger at $1.50 a day … 75 cents of which went for board, so I agreed to go up and be lookout from the tower at High Rocks on Welch Ridge between Hazel and Forney creeks.

You can see all the south end of the North Carolina side of the Smokies from there and into the Nantahalas. I walked up to the tower from Chambers Creek and lived in the thing. What did I eat? Why I just ate rough rations – whatever was easy to fix because I had to carry the food up with me on my back on a pretty steep trail. I’d stay there the fire season until it got wet enough to come down. That’s where I picked up the habit of talking to myself. No one else up there except the bears, or I just got to talking to myself about this and that. I still talk with myself about the same things. Never have broke that habit.  You get pretty much lonely in a tower during a long dry spell of nobody to talk to. …

I was at High Rocks for about three and a half years or so, beginning in the early 1940s, as I remember. The last time I was up at the tower was when they were flooding Lake Fontana. When I came down from the tower the lake was flooded and everybody had left Chambers Creek, which was along the north shore. My wife and family had up and moved and I didn’t even know where I lived!  It took me awhile to find out they were down here in Keenah, which is where we’ve been ever since. My wife, Hattie, was a Woody from Forney Creek. She died three years ago. We raised seven children.

Then I was several years at Albert Mountain here in Macon County between Bearpen Gap and the head of Hurricane Creek. That was where I got my biggest scare. A storm came up that was awful. Lightning was everywhere and constant. It was kindly eerie. O my gosh, I’m not exaggerating, the bolts would strike the tower and balls of fire just flowed down the wires that grounded the tower. They lit up everything like pure daylight.

From Albert Mountain the forest service moved me as dispatcher over to the tower at Cowee Bald, which is located in Macon County near where it corners with Jackson and Swain in the Big Laurel country. I was ten years at Cowee, which I liked best because it was easiest to get to. Did I like it up there in those towers?  Why no, I didn’t. It was lonely with no family and nobody to talk with.

To me it was just a job. It was hard times and firetower work was a way to make some money and support your family. That’s all. No sir, I don’t recollect anything romantic about it whatsoever.

As indicated in recent Back Then columns, I've been of late walking some of the old trails along creeks in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park that were as recently as the early 1940s populated to a considerable extent. Occasionally, I'll detect an old home site by a chimney left standing. Flattened areas above creeks or old roadbeds are also likely spots for a dwelling or outbuilding of some sort.

Some of the best indicators are certain plants not native to the region that were propagated by the earliest settlers and their descendents. There are three plants that are a dead giveaway in spring. Vinca major (large-leaved) and Vinca minor (small-leaved), also called periwinkle, were planted in yards, on banks, and in cemeteries as a groundcover.

Forsythia — still called "yaller-bells" by some old-time mountain women — has prospered without human care along creek banks or other damp areas. Different species and varieties have interbred to such an extent through the years that it's virtually impossible, for me at least, to tell one from the other. This, however, doesn't bother me in the least as I can thoroughly enjoy stands of forsythia without knowing the exact species or subspecies.

Mountain folks were — and still are — inordinately fond of daffodils. Not only were they planted in gardens and around home sites, borders of them were sometimes planted along steams or woodland edges. Don't you agree with me that nothing is prettier in early spring than a stand of daffodils waving in a gentle breeze?

A daffodil is, of course, also called narcissus, jonquil, or buttercup. As with forsythia, distinguishing the species and subspecies is tricky. It seems that every plant book has a different "formula" for determining which is which. To my way of thinking, all of them can be correctly called daffodils. Those with dark, rounded leaves I designate as jonquils. Those with flattened leaves I think of as narcissi (the plural of narcissus). But if it's a great big butter-yellow daffodil with flattened leaves, I also think of that as a buttercup. If these categories don't suit you, feel free to devise your own.

The genus Narcissus — to which all of the above belong — is a member of the Amaryllis family. The word narcissus is derived from the Greek word "narke," meaning numbness or stupor. Some attribute the naming of the flower to its narcotic fragrance while others debate that it is associated with the poisonous nature of the leave's bulbs, a defense against grazing animals and underground rodents.

Those of you with children, grandchildren, or herbage-devouring pets need to be reminded of just how potent these poisons can be. According to the volume Common Poisonous Plants and Mushrooms of North America (Timber Press, 1991) by Nancy J. Turner and Adam F. Szczawinski, "The entire plant, particularly the bulbs, contain toxic alkaloids ... and a glycoside. These cause dizziness, abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting, and sometimes diarrhea. Trembling, convulsions, and death may occur if large quantities are consumed, but usually recovery occurs within a few hours."

Whenever I encounter a stand of daffodils in full bloom above a pool of water in some remote watershed, I'm reminded of Narcissus. In classical mythology he was the lad so enamored with himself that he stared at his reflection in a pool of water for so long that he forgot to eat or drink and passed away of sheer weakness. When the nymphs came to remove his body to the funeral pyre, they found no corpse. In its stead was a single narcissus in full bloom.

Most Narcissus species are natives of southern France, Spain, northern Africa and the surrounding Mediterranean areas. But various species of Narcissus have been cultivated for hundreds, even thousands, of years, so that they reached the northern European mainland and the British Isles early on. The Scotch-Irish and other nationalities that peopled the southern mountains brought these lovely flowers with them as reminders of their homelands and their relatives left so far behind. Along with periwinkle, forsythia, and numerous other plants, daffodils now serve as mute reminders of home sites occupied not so long ago.

Editor's note: This column first appeared in a February 2004 edition of The Smoky Mountain News.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart's Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney's History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

I conduct workshops on Southeastern Indian history and culture at the John C. Campbell Folk School for two full weeks a year and for various Elderhostels throughout the year. One topic that surfaces quite often is the manner in which these Indians treated enemies captured in warfare or by chance. The answer is, “It all depends.”

Not infrequently, other Indians were adopted and treated as kinsmen. Some were enslaved in the sense that he belonged to the man who captured him in war. He became part of that person’s household and performed menial duties. In The Southeastern Indians (University of Tennessee Press, 1976), University of Georgia anthropologist Charles Hudson describes captives of this sort as “a sort of living scalp;” that is, he enhanced the prestige of the captor. Still other captives were executed brutally or tortured to death.

A common method of torture was used throughout North America — the ritual burning of the captive at a stake in the middle of the village. The Natchez tribe, situated in what is now southeastern Mississippi, elevated torture to another level, as described by Dr. Hudson:

“When the Natchez decided to torture a captive to death, they first constructed a framework made of two poles about 10 feet long, set into the earth about five feet apart. A crosspiece was then tied between the poles about two feet above the ground and another crosspiece was tied about five feet above this, forming a square frame. The victim was tied to the foot of the frame and was fed his last meal. Everyone then assembled and the man who captured the victim uttered a death cry and struck him at the base of his neck with a war club, knocking him unconscious. He was then scalped and tied to the frame, with his wrists and ankles at the four corners of the frame, forming an X. His scalp was taken to relatives of slain Natchez, and they used it to ‘wipe tears from their eyes.’ (The now-conscious captive) was then tortured with torches of burning cane applied to various parts of his body, all this being done in the spirit of revenge. Throughout it the victim was expected to sing a death song. Sometimes the torture lasted for several days.”

After European contact, French, British, and Spanish captives were subject to the same possibilities. One of the more interesting “captive stories” in Cherokee history is that of a certain Antoine Bonnefoy, about whom little or nothing is known except what is revealed in the so-called “Journal of Bonnefoy.” This account was recorded in 1742 by a French Captain, Monsieur Derneville, at a French outpost where Bonnefoy found refuge after escaping from the Cherokees at Tellico on the lower Little Tennesse River in present-day Tennessee. The manuscript eventually found its way to the Archives Nationales in Paris, where it was translated by Dr. J. Franklin Jameson into English and published in 1916 in David Mereness’ collection titled Travels in the American Colonies. Jameson’s translation was subsequently annotated by Samuel Cole Williams and published again in Early Travels in the Tennessee Country: 1540-1800 (Watauga Press, 1928). The Williams edition is quoted here. Material in parentheses is added by this writer for clarity:  

“The savages directed so heavy a fire upon our boat that we were obliged to lie down flat, to escape certain death. Immediately, 20 of these savages got into their boats to hasten after the pirogue of Sieur Marin, who escaped from them. A moment afterward, these same pirogues came and surrounded us. The shore was lined with other savages, who were aiming at us. The surprise, and the death of our skipper and two of our oarsmen, having put us out of condition to defend ourselves, we surrendered .... The savages who had taken possession of us proved to be Cherakis (Cherokees), instead of Chicachas (Chickasaws) as we had thought at the time of firing ....  They passed the day in packing their (stolen) merchandise, till night, when they embarked in 22 boats, with two, three, four, or five men in each according to its size.”

The incredibly long journey from the Mississippi back up the Ohio and the Tennessee rivers to Cherokee lands in present-day eastern Tennessee was not completed until late January. The last overland leg was completed on Feb. 3, when the Cherokees warriors and their captives arrived in “Talekoa” (Tellico).

“(Having) left us nothing but breeches, (we) made the entry into their village in the order of a troop of infantry, marching four in each rank, half of them in front of us, who were placed two and two after being tied together, and having our collars dragging ....   They made us march in this order, singing, and having ... a white stick and a rattle in our hands, to the chief square of the village and march three or four times around a great tree which is in the middle of that place. Then they buried at the foot of the tree a parcel of hair from each one of us, which the savages had preserved for that purpose from the time when they cut our hair off. After this march was finished they brought us into the council-house, where we were each obliged to sing four songs. Then the savages who had adopted us came and took away our collars. I followed my adopted brother who, on entering into his cabin, washed me, then after he told me that the way was free before me, I ate with him, and there I remained two months, dressed and treated like himself ...  The 29th of April, a day on which the savages had given themselves up for a debauch, was that we chose for our escape.”

Eventually separated from his companions for good during the escape, Bonnefoy made his way overland in a harrowing journey, during which he fasted for five days and was captured yet again (apparently by Creek Indians in present-day Alabama). He eventually make his way back to French-controlled lands, apparently at present-day Mobile.  

Such were the uncertainties of life on the Southeastern Indian frontier during the 18th century.

Editor’s note: This column by George Ellison first appeared in The Smoky Mountain News in 2002.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

The tapping of pileateds ... means attachment to a nest site

and attachment of the members of a pair to each other . . .

When one pair of pileateds is especially excited about

meeting its mate, it bends its head and bill far back,

waving them back and forth in an arc of 45-degrees

as it jerks its whole body in what I call a ‘bill-waving dance.’

Thus, they keep their pair bonds strong with small ceremonies.

— Lawrence Kilham, “On Watching Birds” (1988)

Here in the Smokies region there are six woodpecker species one can anticipate encountering on a regular basis. Red-headed woodpeckers are sometimes reported, but I have only seen a few in the years that I’ve resided here. My favorite among this tribe is the pileated woodpecker. The common name can be correctly pronounced as either “pi-lee-a-tid” or “pill-ee-a-tid.” “Pileated” indicates the bird has a crest on its head. The word derives from a skullcap (a “pileaus”) worn in ancient Rome. Male and female pileateds can be easily distinguished: males sport red mustaches and full-red crests on their heads, while females display black mustaches and half-red, half-black crests.

Unlike the larger 21-inch-long ivory-billed woodpecker, the pileated proved adaptable to environmental changes wrought by man so that it has — after a period of setbacks — become a commonplace feature of both our backcountry and community woodlands. Spotting one of these 19-inch-long crow-sized birds isn’t at all uncommon. When you do flush one, it will sound loud “yucca, yucca, yucca” calls and flash its vivid white under-wing markings.

The mainstays of the big bird’s diet are ants and other wood-boring insects. Matchbook-size chips of bark and wood chiseled from a feeding tree or log are sure signs of its presence. Using its tail for support, the bird can back down a tree as easily as it can climbup a tree.

The species usually mates in February and then spends most of March digging a nest cavity. The rectangular entrance hole (other woodpeckers excavate entrance holes that are more or less round) will be located anywhere from 10 to 75 feet above ground. After the three to five eggs are laid in mid-April, incubation requires about 18 days.

Pileateds will often return to the same nest tree year after year, but a new nesting cavity is usually excavated each season. If you attempt to climb the nest tree and look through the entrance hole at the baby birds, it’s not unlikely that the parents will attack you with their formidable beaks.

A mother pileated has been photographed retrieving her eggs from a nest tree that was blown down. Shortly after the tree fell, she transferred the clutch of three to a new site.

One of the advantages of being a permanent resident rather than a migratory species is that individual birds can keep up with their mates from season to season. A lot of the ritual activity associated with pileateds, especially during the fall season, has to do with maintaining ongoing relationships. The online “Birds of North America” (available by subscription) provides additional background:

“When a mate dies, the surviving bird remains in the territory and seeks a new mate from adjacent areas. Once established, the pair defends the territory by drumming, calling, and chasing off intruders. A pair of Pileated Woodpeckers evicted young bluebirds from a nest cavity used by the woodpeckers the previous year and then enlarged the cavity and nested in it.

“Reactions to climbing snakes vary from concern to possible nest abandonment. Based on video camera data at 32 Pileated Woodpecker nests in Arkansas, black rat snakes entered 14 nest cavities. Adults ejected snakes at eight cavities, though the snake returned to 5 cavities. Nestlings fledged from only three of the 14 cavities with rat snake attacks. Adults appeared able to eject snakes that were smaller than 60 inches in length from nest cavities.”

Let’s close with this little poem by Maxwell Corydon Wheat Jr., that I happened upon on the I-net:

Pileated Woodpecker …

dressed for his coronation

in ebony cape,

ermine trim,

scarlet-crested crown.

But would royalty be caught

backing down a dead hickory.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Olive Tilford Dargan is fairly well known in literary circles as the author of  From My Highest Hill (1941), a delightful collection of autobiographical stories set in Swain County, originally published as Highland Annals in 1925. But she is also one of the finest poets the Smokies region has as yet produced.                                                                                                       

Dargan was born in Kentucky in 1869. The family moved to the Missouri Ozarks, where her parents founded a school, with Dargan serving as their assistant. While attending Radcliffe College on a scholarship, she met Pegram Dargan, a South Carolina poet then at Harvard. When she moved to Blue Ridge, Ga., to write, he followed her. They subsequently married and settled  in New York City.

While in college, she had gone on a camping trip to the mountains of Western North Carolina and had dreamed ever since of living here some day. The dream was realized in 1906 when the Dargans bought a farm at Round Hill in the Almond community above the Nantahala River in Swain County. They traveled widely but after her husband drowned off the coast of Cuba in 1915, she returned to the farm in Swain County. When the farmhouse burned in 1923, she moved to Asheville, where she wrote novels under the pseudonym of Fielding Burke. Two of them depict  mountain migrants in the Gastonia Mill strike. She died in 1968, eleven days after her 99th birthday.

Dargan published several collections of poetry, including The Cycle’s Rim (1916), sonnets dedicated to her late husband; as well as Lute and Furrow (1922) and The Spotted Hawk (1958), both of which contain verse inspired by her infatuation with the transcendental qualities she intuited in mountain landscapes.

These lines excerpted from “Sall’s Gap” describe her discovery of a springhead: a place of  renewal. The “lin” referred to is a basswoood tree with a double trunk. The “forest lillies” are turk’s-caps. Her description in the opening lines of “the sound so near” and the effect it has upon her is uncanny.

And there’s a sound so near it seems to bubble

Out of your heart and tingle through your skin.

You creep around the lin that rises double

And where a clump of forest lillies thin

Themselves to to three that rise with little trouble

To a graceful score of feet before they droop

Their spotted heads, you catch your breath and stoop;

For you have found it; found the mossy parting

Where a mountain rillet breaks into the light;

An infant on its seaward way outstarting.

In the concluding lines of “Vain Rescue” she imagines those moments just before death:   

But rising now no inner fires outflow,

No gleam around me save a pale moon’s haze.

I know a wood of beech and birch and snow

That waits my step.  And come the June-warm days,

Where two brooks wed I’ll find a lulling seat,

And stir white pebbles with my slow, bare feet.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

The names Geronimo and Gen. George Cook are interwoven in the lore of northern Mexico, southeastern Arizona, western New Mexico and the Indian territories in Oklahoma. An association with the Smokies region and the remnant Eastern Band of Cherokees in Western North Carolina is less well known. An essay I included in Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains (Charleston SC: History Press, 2005) described Geronimo’s role in that episode. This time around, I want to take a little closer look at Gen.Crook.

My renewed interest in him was rekindled by an appearance “he” (played in gruff yet regal fashion by actor Peter Coyote) makes in the HBO-DVD 36-episode docudrama titled Deadwood, which takes place in 1876 in the Black Hills of South Dakota during the gold-rush era. In a previous film incarnation, Gen. Cook was played by Gene Hackman, which gives you some idea of the real life general’s disposition. Be forewarned, if you decide to take a peek at Deadwood for the first time, it would be a serious understatement to describe the language employed throughout as “potty-mouthed.” The four-letter word for intercourse, for instance, is said to occur 2,980 times, which averages out to 1.56 utterances per minute of footage ... and other obscenities abound. Nevertheless, there are redeeming features, including some fine acting, excellent scenery, and structured language that is Shakespearian, biblical, and Wild Wild West.   

Numerous improbable episodes dot Western North Carolina’s historical landscape, none more so than when the federal government came very close to moving the Indian warrior Geronimo and other captive members of his renegade Apache band from a prison in Alabama onto Eastern Band of Cherokee lands. The story unfolds in articles that appeared in the Swain County Herald from mid-1889 through late 1890. (These bound issues were at one time in my keeping, but perhaps 20 years ago I donated them to Hunter Library at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee)

In 1889, Geronimo’s band was being held at the Mount Vernon Barracks about 40 miles north of Mobile.  Geronimo, then 60 years old, was a tribal leader … not a chief. As a young man, he had exhibited courage and skill in successive raids of vengeance upon Mexicans, who killed his mother, wife, and children in 1858. After the Civil War, an effort was made to limit the territory of the Apaches. Savage retaliatory raids by the Indians brought action by the U.S. Army under the command of General Cook. Apaches implicated in the raids were impounded on reservations, but Geronimo’s band fled to Mexico. From 1876 until 1886, he led raids against settlers in the United States, gaining recognition as “the most cunning” of all the Indian warriors faced by the American military. During the final 18 months of this campaign, the U.S. Army employed 5,000 troops and 500 Indian auxiliaries. Operating in two countries from hidden supply bases in some of the most desolate and/or rugged terrain in North America, the Apache opposition was comprised of 35 men, 8 boys, and 101 women. When the Chiricahua finally surrendered in 1886, they were promised reunion with their families on “a large, well-stocked reservation.” Instead, they — along with 17 Indian scouts who had assisted the U.S. Army in their capture — were shipped in boxcars to Florida and incarcerated. The men were sent to Fort Pickens, the women to Fort Marion.

In April 1887, President Grover Cleveland, responding to reports that malaria was rampant among the Apache prisoners in Florida, agreed to have them moved to Alabama. The Indians requested that they “be allowed a fresh start somewhere near a river and in a place where it snowed (and) where they could see long distances.” Capt. John G. Bourke of the 3rd Calvary and James C. Painter, a Congregationalist minister, were appointed by the War Department to look after Apache interests. They determined that Eastern Band lands in WNC suited Apache needs. WNC residents learned of this plan in July 1889 when the Swain County Herald reprinted an article from a newspaper in Charleston. This article reported that a tract of about 10,000 acres had been located “in Swain County, N.C., which is at present occupied by about 2,000 Cherokees. The Cherokees are willing to sell (and) Geronimo is delighted with the prospect of removal, but is disappointed at not getting back to Arizona.”

Swain County Herald editor H.A. Hodge stated that he had questioned Eastern Band agent James Blythe, who confirmed that lands in Big Cove or along the Oconaluftee or in the Cowee Mountains between Bryson City and Whittier (the 3,200-acre tract which is still a part of Indian lands) “might be sold.” In his next editorial, Hodge concluded that there “seems to be a pretty good foundation for the talk, but what do the citizens of Swain County say? We have as yet no expression from them.” Even in the remote mountains of WNC, Geronimo was not an obscure name. One response headed “Geronimo Again!” and signed “Victim” noted that “Geronimo almost drank my blood” and that in New Mexico “a monument of stones marks the place where my comrades lie buried.” His concluding sentiments indicate the fervor the matter was arousing locally: “Incumber not, I say, the fertile valley of the Tuckaseigee with Geronimo and his band of outlaws, but as military prisoners give them their dues while they live and when they are removed give them all that has been left their victims, a fit resting place for their souls and six feet of earth for their bodies, but not even that in quiet old North Carolina.” A poll made by editor Hodge of 69 “citizens of prominence” (no women, no Cherokees) tallied 37 for bringing the Apaches to WNC, 25 against, and 7 neutral.

The country was not exactly what Crook had in mind. He decided he wanted the Apaches removed to a land which more closely approximated conditions as the Chiricahuas had known them before their captivity. In September 1894, the War Department ordered their removal from Alabama to Fort Sill, Oklahoma. By orders from President Cleveland that ran counter to the terms agreed upon by the Apaches, Geronimo and 14 other male members of the Chiricahua band were placed under military confinement until his death in 1909.

Contact George Ellison at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

I am the summer …

I am the firefly and the moon …

the rain on the leaves

the swamp orchids

and the blackberries.         

— Emma Bell Miles

In chronological order, ten of the most informative and/or entertaining books (excluding fiction, poetry and plays) devoted to southern mountain life (excluding the Cherokees) published prior to 1925 are Henry E. Colton, The Scenery of the Mountains of Western North Carolina and Northwestern South Carolina (1859); Zeigler and Grosscup The Heart of the Alleghanies (1883); Charles Dudley Warner On Horseback: A Tour of Virginia, North Carolina and Tennessee (1889); Emma Bell Miles The Spirit of the Mountains (1905); Margaret Morley The Carolina Mountains (1913); Horace Kephart Our Southern Highlanders (1913); Fess Whitaker, History of Corporal Fess Whitaker (1918); John C. Campbell, The Southern Highlander and His Homeland (1921); James Watt Raine The Land of Saddlebags (1924); and Olive Tilford Dargan, Highland Annals (1925; subsequently reissued as From My Highest Hill: Carolina Mountain Folks in 1941). Aside from Kephart’s book, for which I have editorial obligations, Miles’s The Spirit of the Mountains is the one I return to most often.    

Kay Baker Gaston’s Emma Bell Miles (Signal Mountain, Tennessee: Walden Ridge Historical Association, 1985) is based on Emma’s extensive journals and letters as well as communication with her family and friends.

When Emma was born in 1879, her family resided in Rabbit Hash, Kentucky, on the Ohio River. They moved in 1890 to the Walden Ridge area of Tennessee, where it was supposed that “a milder climate would improve her health.”

Walden Ridge is a prong of the Cumberland Plateau that extends to a point just north and west of Chattanooga. Rising above the valley of the Tennessee River, the eastern rim of the ridge overlooks the town and the river, while its western rim overlooks the bucolic Sequatchie Valley. After the Civil War the scenic ridge become a vacation get-away place similar in many regards to Highlands in North Carolina and Mentone in Alabama.  

Emma explored the woods on her pony. She began to draw and paint with great aptitude, making detailed studies of wildflowers, birds, and the wild landscape. Nature and the few magazines that made their way to the ridge top were her classrooms. Her life was mostly solitary. As an adult, she recalled how utterly lonely she had been at times as a child.

In 1901 Emma married Frank Miles, the son of a local family, as distinguished from the summertime families who used Walden Ridge as a get-away. Gaston notes that while the mountain people “maintained a cordial working relationship on the surface (they) resented the patronizing attitudes of their summer employers, while the summer visitors looked down on the natives as ignorant, primitive folk.”

Their life together was a mixed bag. On the one hand their love for one another and their children was genuine. Emma taught Frank to enjoy literature and they often read to one another. But there was also a dark side to marrying Frank. He was a man with good intentions that never quite seemed to pan out. His aspirations almost never squared with reality. Their lifestyle was not only simple … it was, on too many occasions, simply squalid. Emma’s health, never solid, was in constant decline. She died on the morning of March 19, 1919, from pulmonary tuberculosis in a hastily rented house far below the ridge top that she loved so well.  

Her biographer concluded: “Through all her trials, Emma was sustained by the belief that nothing real is ever lost. To look for her, you must go to the woods, the only place she was ever truly at home. There her voice is echoed in the pure song of the woodthrush. Her spirit lingers among the delicate blossoms of mountain laurel growing thick along Marshall Creek, and in the pink perfection of a moccasin flower beside a woodland path.” She can be found everywhere in nature, in the woods all over the world:    

The Spirit of the Mountain was published by James Pott & Co. of New York in an edition of 500 copies. Few of these sold and the publisher donated the unsold copies to Emma. Copies of the first edition are now, of course, exceedingly rare; however, the book was reissued in 1975 in a facsimile edition by the University of Tennessee Press that is still in print.  

I recommend The Spirit of the Mountains to you. By way of closing here are a few lines from the conclusion to Chapter III (“Cabin Homes”) that I re-read from time to time:

“Dear common things. Memories of hours of spiritual exaltation do not cling to the heart like the mere smells of hot meadows, of rain-wet plowed land, of barn lofts and kitchen corners. No mental awakening of adolescence weaves so close a raiment for the spirit in the after-years as the musk of mother’s hair, the softness of her worn old apron and shawl. No literature can knit itself into our real being like the drowsy afternoons at home when nothing could have happened at all — the ceaseless blinking of the poplar leaves, the croon of chickens in the hot dust under the honeysuckles. For to those who are true home-lovers, home lies mostly in the kitchen and back yard. Oh, the poignant sweetness, the infinite pathos of common things.”

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

A new book has been published that will be of particular interest to area hunters, outdoorsmen, and dog lovers. It will also be of considerable value to those concerned with the region’s human history.

The Story of the Plott Hound: Strike & Stay (Charleston SC: History Press, 2007; soft cover; 189 pages; $22.99) by Bob Plott is many things. It is above all the story of the evolution of a truly great America breed of dog that commenced when two youthful brothers, Johannes and Enoch Plott, brought five of their family’s hounds with them from Germany to America in 1750 and eventually migrated to Western North Carolina, where the breed was perfected and continues to flourish.

It is also a family saga — one played out against the background of this country’s history from before the American Revolution through the settlement of the southern Appalachian frontier and on down to the present day.

Wonderfully illustrated with hundreds of vintage photographs, it is a story chock full of noble dogs and the men and women who bred, hunted, and cared for them with ingenuity, courage, and love.

And it is the story that family member Bob Plott, the great-great-great grandson of Johannes Plott, is uniquely qualified to tell. Here is the way the account opens:

Elias Isaac Plott was tired and worried. Working in the Black Forest as a gamekeeper in all seasons, for years on end, had drained his stamina and weakened his spirit. … Plott perhaps felt that he and his wife were too old to start a new life in a new world and that the boys were young enough to acclimate themselves quickly there ... Were there relatives or friends who Elias had already arranged to welcome the boys, offering safe refuge for these young strangers in a strange land? Or were they considering working as either indentured servants or craftsmen apprentices to bankroll their start in the new world? … No one knows for sure, but as a Plott who grew up hearing the family story of my great-great-great-grandfather Johannes, I always believed that it happened the following way. I think that Elias Plott was simply hoping for a better future for his sons … Since he had little or no money, I think that he gave them a generous parting gift of the only thing of real value that he had access to — his dogs. Whether or not that is true, we do know that Johannes and Enoch Plott took some of the family’s most valued possessions – five hunting dogs – with them to America in the summer of 1750. And oh, what dogs they were! Even as special as Elias Plott knew those dogs were then, neither he nor his sons could have imagined that they would ultimately, over the next two hundred years, become one of the best, if not the best, breed of big game hunting dogs the world had ever seen – the Plott bear hound.

The book’s sub-title, “Strike & Stay,” is a reference to the innate instinct of a Plott hound to hunt in a certain manner. One observer described the trait as follows: “It would strike a bear trail and stay on it. And stay and stay and stay. There was just no quit.” Another observed that, “He had to stay and fight, he had to stay with the bear at the tree. This breed of dog won’t quit … The man who isn’t game isn’t fit to have him.”

Much of the book carefully describes how, through the centuries, those very qualities were instilled into their Plott hounds in sundry ways by various legendary hunters. For those of us who aren’t particularly interested in dog breeding, the author has made past methods and ongoing controversies a readable and integrated part of the whole.

On board the ship from Europe to America (perhaps Philadelphia), one of the brothers, Enoch, became sick, died, and was buried at sea. Now alone, except for the dogs his father had given them, Johannes eventually made his way to the eastern portion of North Carolina. By the end of the eighteenth century, his descendents and their Plott-bred hounds had made their way into the mountains of North Carolina.

By 1801, “Henry Plott and his dogs were firmly established in [what is now] Haywood County [where] the beautiful surrounding area later became known as Plott Valley. The towering mountains overlooking the valley would eventually come to be called the Plott Balsams. Henry Plott later extended his holdings to about 1,700 acres in the vicinity that now includes most of the Waynesville, Pigeon and Hazelwood, North Carolina area townships. This is the area where the Plott hound would gain legendary status as one of the premier big game hunting dogs in the world.”

This is where “The Story of the Plott Hound” starts to unfold, illuminating, via the medium of one family and their dogs, facets of this region’s history and culture in a way that breaks new ground. There are, of course, the fearful hunting stories involving the dogs and the men (and sometimes the women) who followed them. But there are also the stories of families and friends and the joys and hardships they shared. And there are tales — both true and tall — involving characters like Quill Rose, Von Plott, Mark Cathey, Horace Kephart, Taylor Crockett, Alphonzo “Fonz” Cable, Mrs. Montraville Plott (who, when faced with the necessity, killed a marauding wolf with her frying pan), and countless others.            

By way of disclosure, I need to note in closing that Bob Plott is a close friend of mine and that I helped him with some preliminary editing. Furthermore, my wife, Elizabeth, prepared the illustration of a Plott hound that graces the book’s cover. Nevertheless, despite these vested interests, I can recommend “The Story of the Plott Hound: Strike & Stay” to you without reservation.

Editor’s note: This article, a review of Bob Plott’s first book, was first published in The Smoky Mountain News in 2007.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

A concept among biologists is that of “keystone species:” plants or animals with a pervasive influence on community composition and inter-reactions. In the eastern United States — especially here in the southern highlands — the beech tree is such an item. Enter a stand of beech and you immediately sense you’ve penetrated a special zone: a world of lover’s initials, dangling wind chimes, dense leaf-litter, and smooth silvery-gray or blue-gray trunks.

In Western North Carolina the beech appears as a dominant species in hardwood coves and hemlock forests up to 6,000 feet, being conspicuously absent in situations where oaks and pines prevail. At higher elevations pure stands called “beech gaps” appear in the regions just below spruce-fir forests, along ridge tops, and in gaps. In the high Smokies they can be readily observed on the main divide between Newfound Gap and Indian Gap adjacent to the Clingmans Dome road and along the Flat Creek Trail near Balsam Mountain Campground. But they are not difficult to locate throughout the region.

The origin of these “beech gaps” has been attributed to the fact that beeches have “the ability to withstand great wind damage,” to the browsing effects of cattle that “cropped them a few feet from the ground causing them to be quite thick,” and other causes such as the fact that the species — like hemlock — is quite shade tolerant while at the same time sending up shoots from older roots, which take over when the parent tree dies. It’s a complex phenomenon still being pondered by the scientific community.

The beech tree is easily identified in winter because of its tendency to retain dried leaves instead of immediately dropping them in the fall. Unlike most deciduous trees, beeches don’t fully form the corky “abscission” layer between the leaf stems and twigs that separates when activated by cold weather; so many of them hang on until pushed off by next year’s leaves.

“Why has beech developed smooth bark when all of its northern deciduous associates have developed rough back?” Tom Wessels asks in Reading the Forested Landscape (Countryman Press, 1997). And then he provides the answer:

“Deciduous trees [that evolved] in the northern forests have developed adaptations in their bark to guard against frost cracking. One of these adaptations is rough bark texture in the form of scales, ridges, or plates … American beech is a member of the Fagaceae – a family of trees that evolved in the tropics [where] trees must contend with epiphytes – plants that grow on trees … An adaptation to thwart an epiphyte’s ability to find a ‘roothold’ is smooth bark. Although beech grows into Quebec, it retains its tropical adaptation of smooth bark, compensating it with light coloration to reflect winter sunlight.”

Oak trees, which are in the same family (Fagacae), also retain leaves. But whereas oaks have thick brown leaves that rustle dully in the wind, beech leaves form thin papery — almost translucent — tan curls. When these catch a breeze it might seem as if the woods are hung with tiny wind chimes.

Even after the leaves do fall, they persist on the forest floor. This results from the fact that the carbon to nitrogen ration in the leaves is over 50 to 1. Leaves of trees like sugar maples and elms, with a ratio of about 20 to 1, decompose in about a year. Beech, pine, and oak leaves and needles require over three years.  So, when you enter the “beech community” you find it has wall-to-wall carpeting.

Such a setting invariably attracts gaffiti lovers who, alas, somehow know that beech bark is nature’s best for carving hearts and arrows, initials signifying eternal attachments, and other sublime messages.  The bark looks like skin because it’s very thin. With the living tissue so close to the surface it scars easily when the tree is carved and swells into puckered humps that accentuate bear claw marks and love-struck hieroglyphics alike.

Daniel Boone inscribed an east Tennessee beech: “D. Boone Cilled A Bar/On Tree/In Year 1760.”  The scars, if not the exact wording, were still visible in 1916 when the tree — 28 feet in girth, 70 feet tall, with an estimated age of 365 years — fell to earth.

Year round it seems we are drawn irresistibly to the complex forest communities in which the beech tree is the major player. From spring into summer, the stands become cool glades. In late fall, sunlight filters through the lingering yellow leaves and envelopes a visitor in the golden light of Indian summer. In winter, direct light reflects off the smooth ghostly-gray bark and catches the eye from afar.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Where do the poisonous snakes go in winter?

In the Smokies region we have two poisonous species: timber rattlesnakes and copperheads. Cottonmouth moccasins are often reported, but that species is found no farther inland than about the fall line, which demarcates the outer piedmont from the inner coastal plain. I suspect those reporting and killing what they think are cottonmouths are actually encountering northern watersnakes, a species that is aggressive in and around water, but not poisonous.

The northern copperhead is the most common by far of our poisonous snakes, being found in a variety of habitats from the lowest elevations to over 4,000 feet. But they’re not as frequent above 2,500 feet. Copperheads are stout-bodied, averaging about 24 to 30 inches in length. One more than four feet is rare. The national record is just over 53 inches. Immature copperheads have a bright greenish-yellow tail. Adults have brown or chestnut, hourglass-shaped crossbands over a brown, tan, or pinkish body color. The top of the head has large symmetrical coppery-red to yellowish-brown plates. Under most circumstances, this natural camouflage makes the serpent virtually invisible.

Timber rattlesnakes are not nearly so common as copperheads in settled areas. They’re found from the lowest elevations up to 6,000 feet, but are rare in the spruce-fir country. Like the copperhead, they generally prefer rocky habitats.  In summer, however, rattlers seek prey throughout the forests, meadows, and farmlands of the Blue Ridge, frequently “holing up” in old stumps. Rattlers are heavy-bodied, averaging 36 to 54 inches in length. A five-foot specimen is unusual. The national record is about 75 inches. There are two color phases: a yellow phase with wavy crossbands down the back over a body color of yellow, brown, or gray; and a black phase with a dark, olive-brown cast that conceals most if not all of the body color.

In winter, serpents in cold climates find shelter in holes or burrows or hollow logs or caves or basements and spend the winter in an inactive state similar to hibernation. As many as 100 mixed species individuals have been reported from a single site. In early spring, they emerge and begin sunning. When temperatures stay above freezing, they move into summer ranges and birthing areas as far away from the hibernaculum as five miles. As winter approaches, they return, when possible, to the previous year’s den. If a sudden cold snap catches them, they may either die or be fortunate and find a suitable secondary den. A number of species sometimes share the same den, especially black rat snakes, timber rattlesnakes and copperheads. The black rat snake is often referred to as the “pilot’s nake because it is supposed it “pilots” the way for the others to the den in winter and away from the den in spring. Baby timber rattlesnakes are often birthed at some distance from their “parental” hibernaculum, requiring fall migration to a previously unvisited  location. Studies have suggested that scent trails laid down by related species guide them “home.”

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Along with plants like red spruce, Fraser fir, yellow birch, mountain maple, mountain ash, Canada Mayflower, witch-hobble, and bluebead lily, as well as animals such as the northern flying squirrels, black-capped chickadees, winter wrens, and northern water shrews, ravens are for biologists one of the “indicator” species for the sub-alpine boreal forest that extends down the spine of the southern Blue Ridge province into southwest Virginia, east Tennessee, western North Carolina, north Georgia, and the far northwest corner of South Carolina.

Ravens resemble their cousins the crows. But they are much larger, having a wingspan that can be almost four feet. Their shaggy appearance, heavy bills, and wedge-shaped tails also distinguish them from crows. In flight they don’t “flap-flap-flap” like crows. Their wing beats are deliberately graceful. Crows “caw-caw-caw” … ravens “cronk! ... cronk! … cronk!”

Ornithologist Fred Alsop, in his Birds of the Smokies (1991),” observed that “more than any other bird I know, ravens seem to delight in their abilities of flight. I have watched them fall and tumble in the skies, stooping on one another, or on other large soaring birds, executing barrel rolls and loop-the-loops as if for the pure joy of it.  It is the living symbol of the wilderness, frequenting the craggy cliffs and the silent solitude of the spruce-fir forests.”

Alsop also noted that ravens “may occasionally be found in the lower elevations in winter.” In recent years there have been ravens in and around Bryson City in some numbers during the fall and winter months.

New England ornithologist William Brewster came south in the mid-1880s looking for ravens as part of the proof that common “northern species” are also resident during the breeding season in the higher elevations of the southern mountains.

In Our Southern Highlanders (1913), longtime Smokies resident Horace Kephart noted that, “Of animal life in the mountains I was most entertained by the raven. This extraordinary bird was the first creature Noah liberated from the ark—he must have known, even at that early period of nature study, that it was the most sagacious of all winged things. Or perhaps Noah and the raven did not get on well together and he rid himself of the pest at first opportunity. Doubtless there could have been no peace aboard a craft that harbored so inquisitive and talkative a fowl. Anyway, the wild raven has been superlatively shy of man ever since the flood. Probably there is no place south of Labrador where our raven  . . . is seen so often as in the Smokies; and yet, even here, a man may haunt the tops for weeks without sight or sound of the ebon mystery—then, for a few days, they will be common. On the southeast side of the Locust Ridge, opposite Huggins Hell, between Bone Valley and the main fork of Hazel Creek, there is a ‘Raven’s Cliff’ where they winter and breed, using the same nests year after year. Occasionally one is trapped, with bloody groundhog for bait; but I have yet to meet a man who has succeeded in shooting one. If the raven’s body be elusive his tongue assuredly is not. No other animal save man has anything like his vocal range. The raven croaks, clucks, caws, chuckles, squalls, pleads, “pooh-poohs,” grunts, barks, mimics small birds, hectors, cajoles—yes, pulls a cork, whets a scythe, files a saw—with his throat. As is well known, ravens can be taught human speech, like parrots; and I am told they show the same preference for bad words—which, I think, is quite in character with their reputation as thieves and butchers. However, I may be prejudiced, seeing that the raven’s favorite dainties for his menu are the eyes of living fawns and lambs.”

In his The Mountain at the End of the Trail: A History of Whiteside Mountain (1994), Highlands resident and environmentalist Robert (Bob) Zahner observed that he and his wife, Glenda, also considered ravens — “those noisy clowns – to be their favorite birds: “Glenda and I have several raven-watching overlooks on the mountain and at the Courthouse. We discovered many years ago that a sure way to attract a couple of ravens is to sit in a very exposed spot and begin our lunch. Soon a whiff of something enticing to eat reaches one of these birds cruising along in the neighborhood, and we hears its discordant call, or croaking (more like a hoarse goose honking), far away over the ridge before we see the raven itself. Soon its mate, and sometimes its entire family, joins it in an amazing acrobatic display one would not think possible of such huge birds… It is a family joke with us that the surest way to attract a raven is to bring along sardines for lunch, for apparently a raven can sniff out a sardine from miles away. Once as we demonstrated this phenomenon to a guest, ten seconds after the sardine can was popped open, not one raven, but a dozen appeared as if by magic cavorting in the sky above us!”

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Note: This essay was originally written for The Smoky Mountain News. It was subsequently revised and collected in Mountain Passages, which was published by the History Press (Charleston, S.C.) in 2005. This time around it has been re-revised and a weather sharp’s winter poem titled “Praise the Cold” has been appended.

Will it rain or shine? Will it be a hot? When will the first killing frost glitter on the ground? Will it be another cold winter? How many heavy snowfalls?

These days the answers are the province of trained meteorologists on the local, regional, and national level. But not so very long ago the local weather sharp was relied upon to forecast the weather — good or bad.

Here in the mountains weather sharps could be either a male or a female, but most were elderly men. They tended to be lean and spry. Hardly ever did one encounter a fat weather sharp. He or she had to be keen and alert to discern signs. Weather sharps, even those that were women, often smoked pipes. Smoking a pipe was meditative and helped one contemplate the future.

Weather sharps were usually loners. They often lived in remote cabins. They sometimes worked in fire towers. They lived close to nature. They paid attention to the plants and animals. Being a local weather sharp was just about a full time job. Here are the sorts of things that he or she knew as well as a poem one of them wrote.

Short-term forecasts

Weather sharps always watched their cats. If the cat sat with its back to a heat source, they anticipated cold weather. A cat that sat with its back to the wind also signified cold weather. If the cat frisked about the cabin, a bad storm was brewing.

Weather sharps knew for certain that it would soon rain when cows lay down in the pasture; smoke went to the ground; birds flew low; or ants covered the holes of their hills.  

Killing frost

Weather sharps listened closely to katydids. They knew that the first killing frost came exactly 90 days after the first katydids begin to sing. They carefully circled that day on calendars suspended on closet doors in their cabins.

Warm winters

Weather sharps also watched barnyard ducks whenever a pond or creek froze over in early winter. If the ice would bear the duck, the rest of the winter would be slush and muck.

Winter Snow

In the fall of the year, weather sharps were always being consulted as to how many winter snowstorms were coming. There were a number of indicators that could be relied upon. They always checked the date of the first snowfall deep enough for rabbit tracks. This clearly indicated the number of winter snowstorms of three inches or more ahead; for example, if the first snowfall came on Nov. 6, six winter storms of three inches or more would come.

Weather sharps had to be good at counting. They counted the number of foggy mornings in August. This number always equaled the number of snowfalls for the following winter. They also counted the number of days from the first snowfall until Christmas. This number always equaled the number of snowfalls to expect afterwards.

There were things about snowfalls in general that every weather sharp knew: whenever snow lies in drifts in the shade and refuses to melt, the drifts become “snow breeders” that attract more snow; whenever the sun shines while snow is falling, expect more snow very soon; and, whenever a dog howled at the moon, it always signified an early snow.

Cold Winters

Predicting whether a coming winter would be cold or not was a local weather sharp’s primary duty. His or her neighbors had to know how much wood to get up and how much food to put away. Accordingly, there were a number of signs having to do with the plants and animals that had to be consulted.  

In regard to plants, they knew that the coming winter might be especially cold when moss grew on the south side of trees; fruit trees bloomed twice; blackberry blooms, holly berries, and acorns were prolific; hickory nuts had a thick shell; or onions grew more layers than usual.

In regard to the four-legged animals and birds they knew that the coming winter might be especially cold when the hair on bears, horses, mules, cows, and dogs was thick early in season; hoot owls called late in fall; juncos (snowbirds) fed up in the trees instead of on the ground; the breastbone of a fresh-cooked wild turkey was dark purple; and squirrels grew bushier tails, built their nests low in trees, accumulated huge stores of nuts, and buried the nuts deeply in the ground.

Insects were particularly significant for weather sharps when it came to forecasting winter weather. They knew that the coming winter might be especially cold when ants built their hills high; hornets built their nests low; and the fabled wooly worms were abundant, had heavy coats, and displayed wide black bands on their backs. A really accomplished weather sharp could discern by the thickness of the black and tan bands of a wooly worm which weeks during the winter would be mild or harsh.

Weather Poetry

Weather sharps were contemplative reclusive folks. They often suffered from insomnia. Little wonder, then, that they sometimes scribbled poems like this one titled “Praise the Cold” on the back of an envelope.

Frost flowers etched silvery gray

on flat dark window panes.

Beyond the door screech owls clatter.

Mist swirls in patterns unseen.

Hoof-struck stones ring in the pasture.

Twigs slowly crosshatched in first light.

Sun gaps emerge along the high ridge.

A shadow line on the far slope

descends slowly into the cove.

Glittering fragments congeal and the

bright world arises yet again.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

When one thinks about navigation in regard to the rivers here in the Smokies region, it’s old-time ferries and modern-day canoes, kayaks, rafts, tubes, and motorboats that come to mind. But there have been other sorts of navigation involving flatboats, keelboats, mule boats, whaling boats, and even steamboats. Some incredible stories have been recorded in this regard.

The 19th century was the flatboat, keelboat, and mule boat era on the lower Little Tennessee River. It is best described by Alberta and Carson Brewer in Valley So Wild: A Folk History (Knoxville: East Tennessee Historical Society, 1975):

“The big wooden ‘arks’ plied the river carrying ladies, servants, cattle, horses, dogs, poultry and produce, while oarsmen used long ‘sweeps’ to steer clear of rocks, snags and submerged trees. Flatboats had sturdy wood bottoms designed for heavy loads, and whatever superstructure best suited the needs of passengers and cargo. Usually the owner broke them up at the end of the trip and sold the lumber. An average flatboat cost about $20 to build. It required several months to build the boat, float it to New Orleans, and sell the cargo and return.

“The Little Tennessee River was deep enough for flatboats as far as the mouth of Abrams Creek (located in the present-day Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee just southwest of Fontana Dam). Rafts could be used as far up as Tallassee, four miles farther.

Upriver traffic (beyond that point) required a different craft and technique.  Brawny boatmen walked planks along gunwales and pushed with long poles to propel the big keelboats against the current. Sometimes men walked towpaths along the bank pulling the vessel by rope, or used a method called ‘warping’ (fastening the tow rope to a tree upstream and pulling the boat toward the tree). If they were able to move the boat against the current by holding on to trees or bushes on the bank, it was called ‘bushwacking.’

“Old-timers even recalled ‘mule boats’ powered by a mule walking on top of a broad slatted wheel turned by the mule’s weight as its legs made steps that went nowhere.”    

The whaling boat story was related by John Preston Arthur in a delightful account that appeared in his Western North Carolina: A History  — 1730-1913 (Asheville, 1914) under the heading “A Thrilling Boat Ride.”

“A large whale boat had been built at Robbinsville and hauled to a place on Snowbird creek just below Ab. Moody’s, where it was put into the creek, and it was floated down that creek to Cheoah River and thence to Johnson’s post-office, where Pat Jenkins then lived. It was hauled from there by wagon to Rocky Point, where, in April, 1893, Calvin Lord, Mike Crise and Sam MeFalls, lumbermen working for the Belding Lumber Company, got into it and started down the Little Tennessee on a ‘tide’ or freshet.

“No one ever expected to see them alive again. But they survived. By catching the overhanging branches when swept toward the northern bank at the mouth of the Cheoah River, the crew managed to effect a landing, where they spent the night. They started the next morning at daylight and got to Rabbit Branch, where the men who had been sent to hunt them. They spent three days there till the tide subsided, then they went on to the Harden farm, which they reached just one week after leaving Rocky Point. No one has ever attempted this feat since, even when the water was not high. The boat was afterwards taken on to Lenoir City, Tenn.”

The story about the fabulous steamboat named “Vivian” is related in by the Brewers and by Lance Holland in Fontana: A Pocket History of Appalachia (Robbinsville: Appalachian History Series, 2001).

John, James and Charles Kitchen arrived in WNC during the early part of the 20th century and established a lumber company on the North Carolina side of the Smokies. They had acquired 20,000 or so acres of land in the Twenty Mile Creek watershed and cleared Little Tennessee River area below what is now Fontana Dam so as to establish Cheoah Lake.  After the lake was flooded in 1919, the only access to their timber holdings along Twenty Mile Creek was by foot or small boat.  

But how in the world do you get the logs out to the sawmill? No problem You simply build a steamboat; after all, the brothers did have prior maritime experience.

The “Vivian” (named after Charlie’s wife) was homemade ... a 50-foot long stern-paddlewheeler —  crafted from white oak with four four-foot sidings and powered by an upright boiler steam engine — it was the pride of  the Kitchen Lumber Company ... a sight to behold as it towed a string of large barges loaded to the gunwales with logs across the lake to the awaiting locomotive, Big Junaluska ... and  furthermore “its whistle could not  be ignored,” note the Brewers, “as it let out ear-splitting whistles to seal the transaction and set the mountains trembling for miles.”   

Stories about the Vivian proliferated in Graham County, of course; after all, a steamboat built and navigated along a man-made lake in the Great Smoky Mountains  was something worth talking about and remembering. The one I like best is told by Holland: “Joseph P. Sluder, whose mother Julie ran a logging camp boardinghouse on Twenty Mile Creek, recounted ... that Luther Anthony, Captain of the Vivian, learned to play its steam whistle to imitate the call of the whippoorwill, that was a beautiful sound — more beautiful every time we heard it.”

Editor’s note: This article first appeared in a December 2001 edition of The Smoky Mountain News.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Most of us at one time or another hanker for a place where we can get away from it all for awhile … recharge our batteries as it were. But some yearn for a place where they can hide away …begin all over again. Like Huck tells Jim at the end of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, he’s ready to “light out for the territory” … it’s time to seek a “Never Never Land” like the one Horace Kephart memorably described in the second chapter of Our Southern Highlander:

“When I went south into the mountains I was seeking a Back of Beyond. This for more reasons than one. With an inborn taste for the wild and romantic, I yearned for a strange land and a people that had the charm of originality. Again, I had a passion for early American history; and, in Far Appalachia, it seemed that I might realize the past in the present, seeing with my own eyes what life must have been to my pioneer ancestors of a century or two ago. Besides, I wanted to enjoy a free life in the open air, the thrill of exploring new ground, the joys of the chase, and the man’s game of matching my woodcraft against the forces of nature, with no help from servants or hired guides.

So, casting about for a biding place that would fill such needs, I picked out the upper settlement of Hazel Creek, far up under the lee of those Smoky Mountains that I had learned so little about. On the edge of this settlement, scant two miles from the post-office of Medlin, there was a copper mine, long disused on account of litigation, and I got permission to occupy one of its abandoned cabins.”

The phrase “Back of Beyond” is undeniably evocative. Through the years, since first encountering it, I’ve wondered about its origins and equivalents. Kephart partially divulged his sources:

“Of certain remote parts of Erin, Jane Barlow says: ‘In Bogland, if you inquire the address of such or such person, you will hear not very infrequently that he or she lives ‘off away at the Back of Beyond’ ... A traveler to the Back of Beyond may consider himself rather exceptionally fortunate, should he find that he is able to arrive at his destination by any mode of conveyance other than  ‘the two standin’ feet of him.’ Often enough the last stage of his journey proceeds down some boggy boreen, or up some craggy hill-track, inaccessible to any wheel or hoof that ever was shod.’”

Barlow, I discovered was the daughter of Rev. James William Barlow, vice provost of Trinity College, Dublin. Born in Clontarf, County Dublin, she spent most of her life living in a thatched cottage in Raheny, in the townland of Ballyhoy. She died in Bray, County Wicklow. Barlow was a poet, novelist, and writer of short stories who also wrote one play. Her work had its admirers in Britain and Irish America, rather than in nationalist Ireland.

Irish Idylls, which went into eight editions, is her most famous collection. But it’s likely that Kephart lifted the “Back of Beyond” phrase from her At the Back of Beyond, which was published in 1902.  

While tracking down Miss Barlow and her use of “Back of Beyond,” I encountered some words and phrases often used as equivalents. “Back o’ Bourke” is Australian, in reference to the remote town of Bourke in north-western New South Wales. “Timbuktu” is a town in the West African nation of situated 10 miles north of the River Niger on the southern edge of the Sahara Desert. And, my favorite, “Beyond the Black Stump” is also Australian.

Online sources indicate that the most prosaic explanation for the origin of ‘black stump’ derives from the general use of fire-blackened tree-stumps as markers when giving directions to travellers unfamiliar with the terrain. An early use of the phrase from the a Sydney journal of 31 March 1900 seems to lend support to this explanation: ‘A rigmarole of details concerning the turns and hollows, the big tree, the dog-leg fence, and the black stump.” A quote from John Wynnum’s I’m a Jack, all Right conveys this meaning: “It’s way Back o’ Bourke. Beyond the Black Stump. Not shown on the petrol station maps, even.”

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Sometimes I find myself walking without having made a conscious decision to do so. My body seems to feel the need for a stroll without having consulted my brain. My feet find their way, as if they had eyes of their own. I like such moments … when I don’t have specific objectives … when I’m not certain what I might encounter … when I’m just taking a look at things.     

Several days ago, I was out the door and several hundred yards down the trail beside the creek before I fully realized that I had ventured forth. My dogs led the way, looking back now and then to make sure I was following. The only sound was the wind in the rhododendron-laurel tangles alongside the creek. Mosses on the creek bank glowed emerald green.  

After ten minutes or so of poking along, I began to spot first one, then two, then many little evergreen plants on the forest floor. Had I been preoccupied with personal thoughts or with encountering something momentous like a wild boar or bear, I’d have no doubt overlooked these dainty plants.

Their ragged-edged waxy leaves displayed zigzagged whitish stripes. Accordingly, it’s known as striped wintergreen by some observers. But I prefer the more peculiar common name “pipsissewa,” a designation said to be of Iroquois origin (“pipsiskeweu,” which means “it breaks into small pieces” because the plant was used to treat kidney stones).

This semi-woody evergreen perennial bears the scientific name “Chimaphila maculata” (“cheima” for “winter” and “philo” for “to love”). Common throughout Western North Carolina in dry acidic woods with sandy soils, it has a reputation in both Indian and folk medicinal literature. Recent scientific investigation indicates that closely related species like prince’s pine are “loaded with biologically active compounds.”

It was formerly used as an ingredient in root beer that added a bittersweet taste. (Above all other popular commercial beverages, I dislike root beer the most). The Cherokees, among other applications, stewed pipsissewa in lard to cure ringworm, while the early white settlers utilized it as a blood purifier. Some enterprising moonshiners made “bitters” (an herbal tonic) by combining pipsissewa with white lightning, thereby creating a medicinal concoction of undoubted potency that was in considerable demand.

I didn’t have any white lightning with me (and don’t care for it either), but there was plenty of pipsissewa; so, while Uly and Woodrow looked on with puzzled interest, I tried my first dose ever of “pipsiskewe” by nibbling some of the leaves. After due deliberation, I can report that pipsissewa leaves don’t taste good and they don’t taste bad.

Whistling up the dogs, I started back home. The wind had died down. I could hear water moving over and among the silent stones. Whether it was the walk or the pipsissewa or listening to the creek or some combination thereof, I felt a bit sprightlier. It was good to be out and about.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

I have perused Kephart’s Camping and Woodcraft many times, but somehow or other had consistently overlooked his entry on lungwort bread (vol. 1, pp. 324-325):

On the bark of maples, and sometimes of beeches and birches, in the northern woods, there grows a green, broad-leaved lichen variously known as lungwort, liverwort, lung-lichen, and lung-moss, which is an excellent substitute for yeast. This is an altogether different growth from the plants commonly called lungwort and liverwort — I believe its scientific name is ‘Sticta pulmonacea.’ This lichen as partly made up of fungus, which does the business of raising dough. Gather a little of it and steep it over night in lukewarm water, set near the embers, but not near enough to get overheated. In the morning, pour off the infusion and mix it with enough flour to make a batter, beating it up with a spoon. Place this “sponge” in a warm can or pail, cover with a cloth, and set it near the fire to work. By evening it will have risen. Leaven your dough with this (saving some of the sponge for a future baking). Let the bread rise before the fire that night, and by morning it will be ready to bake. It takes but little of the original sponge to leaven a large mass of dough (but see that it never freezes), and it can be kept good for months.”

Last week, my wife harvested a patch of lungwort from the trunk of a white oak tree on the ridge above our place. The resulting bread had a pleasant tea-like aroma and flavor that I liked a lot. So, I requested more for the holiday.

Lungwort, presently classified as ‘Lobaria pulmonaria,’ is actually more prevalent on oak. It resembles liverwort but grows in drier conditions. It is bright green under moist conditions but becomes brownish and papery when dry. The leaf-like growth is leathery and lobed. There are patterned ridges and depressions (pits) on the upper surface. The lower surface often displays a fine layers of hairs. The pits and ribs of the upper surface become the lumps and ribs of the under surface.

Various online sources indicate that lungwort was used in beer manufacture as a substitute for hops by monasteries in Europe and Siberia. It was reputed to be both darkly bitter and highly intoxicating. The plant yielded a permanent black dye when mixed with indigo. Because the pitted and sectioned leaf patterns resembled the surface of human lungs, the plant was used in the treatment of pulmonary diseases, wheezings and shortness of breath.  

Now that Kephart’s recipe has whetted my culinary interest in lungwort, it has also refocused my attention on the plant itself. Look for it the next time you’re walking a  woodland trail. The leafy green outreaching lobes form rosettes that glow emerald-like in the gray light of early winter.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

The second volume of an anthology of nature writing from Western North Carolina and the Great Smokies that I edited will be published in a couple of weeks by The History Press in Charleston, S.C. The first volume (1674-1900) offers selections from 21 authors, including Bartram, Michaux, Elisha Mitchell, William Brewster, Arnold Guyot, and Christian Reid. The second volume (1900-2009) offers selections from another 21 authors, including James Mooney, Horace Kephart, Margaret Morley, Arthur Stupka, Roger Tory Peterson, Edwin Way Teale, D.C. Peattie, Edward Abbey, Harry Middleton, William A. (Bill) Hart, Scott Weidensaul, Bob Zahner, Doug Elliott, John Lane, and Thomas Crowe.

Each selection is prefaced by a biographical note. I necessarily wrote the notes for deceased authors. But I enlisted input in that regard from the living authors. They discovered that writing a self-portrait is rather more difficult than might be supposed. But in several instances, these mini-bios were exceptionally well-crafted and informative.   

One such was composed by Jim Casada, the nationally known outdoor writer from Bryson City, as a head note for four excerpts from his Fly Fishing in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park: An Insider’s Guide to a Pursuit of Passion (2009). Those who know Casada’s work or encounter it in the future will, I suspect, enjoy this self-portrait as well as one of the excerpts (“Flies”) included in anthology:

I am a son of the Smokies, born and raised in Bryson City, N.C., and the region remains the home of my heart and the primary inspiration for my literary endeavors. From my earliest memories connection to the natural world was an integral part of my being. My father was a keen outdoorsman whose boyhood was spent high up on Juneywhank Branch, now in the national park, and his father was a flowing fount of down-to-earth wisdom concerning nature’s ways. Both were wonderful mentors who oversaw an idyllic boyhood spiced by hunting, fishing, subsistence farming, and constant awareness of the cycle of the seasons.

They lovingly laid the foundations of knowledge and linkage to the land which run as a bright thread through the fabric of my literary endeavors, but it took the inspiration of a mother who instilled a lasting love for reading, along with a trio of teachers, to plant the seed which eventually sprouted into life as a writer. Two of these individuals, Thad DeHart and John Wikle, taught at Swain County High School, while the third, Inez Morton, was an English professor at King College. All offered encouragement and guidance, but my academic pursuits took me along a different path with a B.A. in history at King and the M.A. and Ph. D. degrees in the same field at Virginia Tech and Vanderbilt, followed by 25 years as a history professor at Winthrop University.

Long before I took early retirement to write full time, however, my focus had switched from academic works (I wrote four scholarly books) to the outdoors. Realization gradually dawned that a life devoted to writing on fishing, hunting, natural history and cooking nature’s wild bounty was what held my heart, and the day I became a fulltime writer and “recovering” professor was a glorious one indeed. For the last 15 years writing has been my life. Over that period I have written more than a dozen books and edited or otherwise contributed to many more, served as series editor for the University of Tennessee Press Outdoor Tennessee Series and the Firearms Classics Series from Palladium Press, produced weekly newspaper columns, and averaged upwards of a hundred feature articles a year for regional and national magazines.   

Much of my focus has been on the Smokies, and the book from which these selections are taken, Fly Fishing in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park:  An Insider’s Guide to a Pursuit of Passion, is one I consider my book of a lifetime. It combines my love of fly fishing with detailed looks at natural history, human history and mountain folkways.

Flies

Fetching frauds crafted from fur and feather, thread and clue, flies are designed to catch trout, and those who tie them deserve recognition as creative souls of the first rank.

As I have already suggested, mine was an incredibly rich boyhood. I was blessed by growing up in a world well populated with devoted anglers and surrounded by the deep-rooted traditions of mountain fly fishing. Some of the fly-fishing heroes of my marvelously misspent youth served as informal mentors, and tales associated with the sport’s regional history were almost daily fare.

Today ours seems a world obsessed with a fast-paced lifestyle that too often leaves little time for tradition, storytelling and respect for the past. Yet those of us who cherish the feel of the long rod or savor the music of whistling line and singing reel should pay careful heed to the lure and lore of fly-fishing history in the Smokies … The sport is one productive of endearing individuals and enduring traditions…

Bryson City’s Frank Young is a splendid example. Young returned home from service in the Korean War with a deep-rooted determination to sample and savor the streams of his highland homeland as fully as possible. For decades he did just this, fishing an average of 250 days a year. Young became an accomplished fly-tier, with one of his more notable achievements in this regard involving the substitution of the fur from ‘possum bellies for calf’s tail in tying hair-wing patterns such as the Royal Wulff. As Young laughingly said, “It doesn’t cost anything to get ‘possum fur, and anyone who can’t find it just doesn’t understand road kills.”

A religious, contemplative man, Young appreciated the world of the trout with something approaching reverence. Over the years, anytime he caught a trophy trout or enjoyed a meaningful experience, he picked up a stone from the stream and put it in his creel. Upon returning home he placed these stones in a frame. When it was full, the addition of some concrete made it one more building block for walls that would eventually line his home. “It’s mighty comforting,” he reflected, “to be by surrounded memories.”

It is also comforting to know that the legacy of individuals like Young, and countless others, has found contemporary adherents. This linkage across generations is a meaningful one, a poignant reminder of the legacy of pioneering mountain fly fishermen.  While the paraphernalia of the sport has changed immensely, the lure of clean waters, wild fish and solitude are timeless. So are the characteristics of hardy highland folks — thrift, independence, practicality, ingenuity and an innovative approach to making do with whatever happens to be available — as they apply to fishing in waters coursing through the deep hollows and steep coves of the Appalachians.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

“Sang” redux.

Several weeks ago I wrote about ginseng. I have, in fact, been writing about ginseng for years. There seems to be a never-ending general interest in the plant. Its only rival would be ramps. Come spring, I will no doubt be writing about ramps.

Unsurprisingly, there was a good response to the latest “sang” column, which touched on the estimated payment for a dried pound ($500) this year; the concept known as the Doctrine of Signatures; Cherokee lore; and two “mystery plants” called “sang master” and “sang granny,” which some plant hunters use as “indicator species” to locate ginseng.

I hazarded a guess that “yellow mandarin” (Disporum lingunosa) might be “sang master.” I didn’t have an inkling as to what “sang granny” might be. But I’ve been doing some research (i.e., lying in bed reading) and now have an opinion.  

My horizontal research consisted of reading Doug Elliott’s Swarm Tree: Of Honeybees, Honeymoons, and the Tree of Life (History Press, 2009). Elliott is a naturalist, herbalist, lecturer, writer, adventure trip leader, folklorist and prize-winning harmonica player who resides in Rutherford County. He is a world authority on “possumology,” with a long-standing interest in ginseng. In Swarm Tree, he relates the following sang-possum related tale.   

“If you want to go ‘seng hunting, you come up this fall, and we’ll run yo’ little legs off!”

That sounded like both a challenge and an invitation to go on a ginseng hunt. The offer came from Ted and Leonard Hicks when I was visiting their family homestead high on Beech Mountain in Western North Carolina. I had come there, like so many others, to listen to their dad tell stories. Their father, [the late] Ray Hicks, was a national treasure, known for his incredible repertoire of old-time Appalachian stories … So one morning in early October, when I knew most of the ginseng berries would be ripe and the leaves would be turning that distinctive shade of yellow, I showed up at the Hicks homestead. There I met Leonard at the top of the driveway, where he informed me that both he and Ted had gotten jobs and they had to go to work that morning.

Since I was there already, I went down to the house to say hello to Ray and Rosa. I knocked on the door and heard Ray say, “Come in.”

I could tell that he sort of recognized me from previous visits, but it seemed like he was having trouble placing me. His wife, Rosa, hollering in from the kitchen, reminded him I was the “possum man” and that I had been there a few times over the years.

I don’t know how it is where you live, but among these folks mentioning ‘possums is a great icebreaker. And indeed Ray warmed quickly to the subject. He started talking … and he pretty much kept on talking till later that afternoon when I stood up and said I had to leave ... As for his account of the mating habits and sexual practices, there has been little scientific documentation confirming what he described, but what a tale! I just listened and took it all in.

We talked about ginseng and about how ginseng hunting gets in your blood. He was saying that when you’re walking through the woods, you can tell the places where ginseng is likely to grow — in the richer coves often near chestnut stumps, grapevines or black walnut trees.

“Thar’s a little fearn …” Ray was saying, speaking in his rich Appalachian dialect, full of archaic expressions and word twists. At first I didn’t understand what he was trying to tell me about. Then I realized he was talking about a fern, pronouncing the word like “fee’-ern.”

“Thar’s a little fearn I look for,” he went on to say. “If’n you find that fearn, you’ll find ‘seng (if somebody ain’t got there first and dug it). See, this here fearn, ‘hit’s all hooked up with ginseng. Thar’s a fungus hooked up thar ‘tween their roots.”

I realized he was talking about rattlesnake or grape fern (Botrychium sp.). This little fern grows in the same rich hollows as ginseng, and many mountain folks call it “‘seng sign” or “‘seng pointer” because it’s commonly known to grow in association with ginseng.

When I got home, I looked up the word “fern” in my dictionary, and it said that our word “fern” comes from the Anglo-Saxon “fearn.” So here was this backwoods mountaineer, a vestige of another era, living without a phone or indoor plumbing, speaking an ancient, archaic dialect. Yet he was discussing subterranean microscopic mycorrhizal associations between plants — something that is only just beginning to be understood by modern scientists …

I stopped one more time as I passed through the national forest, remembering that I had started the day with the intention to hunt ginseng. There were still a few hours of daylight left. I headed off into the woods. I worked my way up a creek, traveling across a rich, north-facing slope. I started to see grape ferns, those “fearns” that Ray had told me about, and before long, the distinctive yellowing leaves of ginseng caught my eye. There were about forty plants in this area. Because ginseng has a high price on its head and is being over-harvested in many areas, I was particularly judicious about my gathering from this patch.

So, I am now guessing  that “sang granny” — the second “mystery plant” used locally as an indicator species for ginseng — is “rattlesnake grape fern.”

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

A mask is a mechanism employed to cover the face as a protective screen or disguise. For protection, they have been utilized for centuries by medieval horsemen, welders, fencers, hockey goalies, and so on. Their most intriguing uses, however, have been as a devices of disguise, as in a theatrical production or as part of the paraphernalia of religious and/or cultural ritual.

We don’t have to go to darkest Africa or the remote jungles of South America to find recent and extensive use of a variety of masks in this latter context. Until very recently they were an important element of Cherokee ritual.

A visit to the Qualla Arts and Crafts Mutual Inc. or other outlets in Cherokee will turn up a variety of the contemporary masks being produced by the reservation’s carvers. They sometimes use skins or gourds, but for the most part masks are carved from buckeye or other suitable wood and then colored with natural dyes, paint, clay, charcoal, or shoe polish.

Often these modern masks simply depict a man with horns (the buffalo mask) or maybe a bear’s face. I am especially attracted to those haunting masks that are presented unadorned as a skull-like rendering. A favorite theme of some carvers is that of a man’s head topped by a coiled rattlesnake. And then there are those grotesque or sometimes even obscene productions known as “booger masks.”

If you take the time to look up and talk with a Cherokee mask-maker, you’ll get a friendly enough reception (especially if you’re actually shopping for a mask), but you’re not likely to get much insight into their themes. These people just don’t make their living talking. They’ll say something like, “Oh, that’s just a snake that happens to be on that man’s head”; or, “Funny thing, I started in to carving and it just turned out that way”; or, “You think it looks like a what?”

Unless you happen upon an unusually talkative mask-maker in an unguarded moment, your best sources for detailed information on the Cherokee mask tradition are the book-length study Cherokee Dance and Drama (1951) by Frank G. Speck and Leonard Broom, and the article by Raymond D. Fogelson and Amelia B. Walker titled “Self and Other in Cherokee Booger Masks” that appeared in the fall 1980 issue of the Journal of Cherokee Studies.

Cherokee Dance and Drama was written in collaboration with Cherokee mask-maker and cultural authority Will West Long. Others who contributed to the book were Long’s elder sister, Roxy, his elder half-brother Lawyer Calhoun, Deliski Climbing Bear, and Mrs. Sampson Owl. This book is the real thing.

Will West Long — the son of Sally Terrapin and John Long, a Baptist minister — was born about 1870 in the traditional Big Cove section of the Qualla Boundary. After attending a school near High Point, he returned to Cherokee at the time the famous ethnologist James Mooney was there collecting data for his book subsequently published in 1900 as Myths of the Cherokee. Mooney hired Long as a scribe and interpreter.

Long later attended Hampton Institute and lived in New England until he was in his mid-30s. He returned once more to Cherokee shortly before his mother died in 1904, married, and spent the remainder of his life on the reservation.

His mother’s interest in such matters, along with Mooney’s influence, created in Long a passion for preserving the quickly fading history and social customs of the Cherokee. He acquired manuscripts and insights from the medicine men that would otherwise have been lost. Long is rightly considered by many to be the authoritative scholar of his people’s customs during his lifetime.

In addition to his other interests, Long helped preserve the traditional dances and became one of the community’s foremost mask-makers, a craft he learned from a cousin, Charley Lossiah. Allen Long succeeded his father as the tribe’s top mask-maker during the early 20th century.

As described in the sources cited above, the Booger Dance (also called the Mask Dance) was a ritual performed after the first frost that featured masks which exaggerated human features; that is, they represented racial types: Indian man (a dark red face); Indian woman (light red face with paint on cheeks) white man (woodchuck or opossum fur as a beard); black man (charcoal colored); and so on.

What made the booger masks exceptional were the sometimes grotesque, often humorous, and usually obscene elements incorporated into them that suggested European features like bushy eyebrows, mustaches, chin whiskers, big noses, ghastly white pallor, and bald heads.

The boogers — generally depicted as older men — represented “people far away or across the water” (Europeans, blacks, northerners, southerners, alien Indians) who intrude upon the peaceful social dances of the Cherokee. Upon entering the dance house, they break wind, chase women, and generally behave as barbarians.  Asked what they want, the boogers first reply “Girls!” then announce that they want “To fight!” Instead of reciprocating, the Cherokee allow them to dance out their hostilities.

This ritual has been interpreted in several ways. It was a way to deal with “the harmful powers of alien tribes and races, who, as living beings or ghosts, may be responsible for sickness or misfortune.” It also served as “condensation of the acculturation process as seen from the Cherokee perspective: first the white man tried to steal women; second he wanted to fight; and then, finally, he was satisfied to make a fool of himself.”

It’s also clear that many of the ingeniously crafted masks used in the ceremony simply poked fun at boorish masculine traits in general, including the “excessive preoccupation with sexuality” and the desire to be “in charge.”

And so, my friend, always remember that masks are mirrors ... the next time you spot a Cherokee booger mask in a shop, at one of the craft festivals, or in a museum, pause and take a closer look ... it just might be looking back at you.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

You don’t have to live in a cabin to get cabin fever. You can come down with a bad case of cabin fever — which I think of as  “the doldrums” — even if you live in a snazzy mansion. Indeed, I often come down with them right here in my office, on the town square in Bryson City.

The term ”the doldrums” is perfectly descriptive of that listless state of mind and body into which one can seemingly falls at any moment for no specific reason; indeed, if you’ve got a specific cause for your spiritual malaise, you’re “depressed,” which isn’t the same thing.

My dictionary defines the doldrums (a term that is correctly plural in form and usually preceded by “the”) as a period of inactivity with the following symptoms: listlessness, low spirits, gloomy feelings, and being generally “down in the dumps.”

The Oxford English Dictionary quotes a 19th century gentleman named C. Keene as having observed that “The great thing is to avoid ‘the Doldrums.’” Well, that’s seemingly sound advice, but the difficult thing about them is that — like a bothersome guest — they’re usually upon you before you know they’re coming.  I’d amend Mr. Keene’s observation to “The great thing is to know how to rid yourself of the doldrums.”

The OED quotes yet another 19th century gentleman as having found that “A glass of brandy and water is a panacea for the doldrums.” That’s a time-honored prescription, but if you reach for the juice too often when you get the blahs you’re going to have real problems.

The only surefire remedy for the doldrums is a good stroll ... not “a hike” — a bothersome term that implies planning and the toting of heavy loads for some distance. No agenda. No destination. Don’t hurry. Don’t carry anything. Go alone. A stroll can be executed at any distance more than 440-yards and less than a mile. Break a sweat and you’re disqualified. When in doubt, slow down. Pretty soon the doldrums will get bored and go find someone who’s sitting down at a desk.

The view from my office window is limited to the front of the fire department across the street, the tree line of a ridge back of town, and a thin slice of sky to the south. This morning, I’ve already checked the email, voice mail and snail mail. But I can’t seem to settle down to the task at hand, which is writing this column. Deadline looming. I feel fidgety and a little irritated. I’ve got the doldrums. What I need is a little stroll before settling down.

When we go out with a set objective — to observe birds or flowers or fall colors or deer sign, whatever — that objective limits our range of comprehension. While looking at the purple-crested “zoombee” up in a hemlock, we fail to spot the polka-dotted elephant in the underbrush.

Sometimes it’s worthwhile just to get out and see what pops up. Now, at times, no matter how adroitly you stroll along, nothing happens. That’s life; indeed, there are strolling purists who maintain that the ultimate strolls are those in which absolutely “nothing” happens. But generally, something pops up. Let’s see.

October skies. The morning sun catches the gold enamel on the old courthouse clock tower just so. Generally, it’s best to stroll on flat ground, but my feet carry me up the hill behind town to a patch of scrub pine that has overgrown a barren site where some excavation work took place years ago. Under these pines in fall, amanita mushrooms flourish. Their varied hues — ranging from lemon to pink to orange to lime — are gaudy, probably a warning of sorts of the deadly toxins contained therein. Exotic and menacing, they are beautiful in the same way that a thick-bodied black-and-yellow timber rattler is truly beautiful. Amanita’s and rattlers both favor dry, barren, exposed habitats ... and both give warnings to intruders: one with color, the other with sound.

Back down by the Tuckaseigee River, the town’s main bridge attracts a variety of strollers and walkers. The walkers hustle on across, headed for the shops or the railroad depot. The strollers are moving at a pace that allows them to peer over the rail into the river below.

The Tuckasegee is emerald green. A multi-colored tapestry of fall leaves floats on the surface.  Some have become slightly waterlogged and swirl downstream just below the surface.  Others gather in piles on the bottom. A school of brightly-hued bream floats in the quiet pool just upstream from the bridge, making rings where they break the surface to feed.

Joint-weed, virgin’s-bower, Virginia creeper, poison ivy, and other plants cover the hog-wire fence beside the building supply store along the north side of the river. There are morning glories in four shades — blue, purple, red, white — are color forms of the same species. We call them “common” morning glory, but there’s nothing common about them.

My favorite grass is foxtail grass. The curve of their bristly fruiting cluster (the fox’s tail) is accentuated in fall as the weight of the forming seeds causes them to arc. When backlit by sunlight, they shimmer like ornaments. I suppose some gardeners consider foxtail grass to be a weed, but that — as with most things — is all in the eye of the beholder.

The 150-foot swinging bridge leading from the north bank of the river over to Bryson City Island Park — located several hundred yards upstream from the town square — is just about impossible to avoid when you’re out strolling around. You don’t have to think about the bridge to wind up on it ... your feet just naturally take you there.

A footpath winds around the western tip of the island that ought to be marked: “Stroller’s Only — No Walking, No Jogging, No Biking.” On the inland side of the island, the river is a narrow channel that once served as the “boom” area for a timber operation that floated logs down Deep Creek out of the high Smokies. Overhung with giant oaks and tulip poplars, it’s now a peaceful spot.

On the river side of the island, the water crashes through a cascade called “Devil’s Dip.” Kayakers like to fool around here, but today none are present. Instead, a group of 25 or so cedar waxwings are putting on an aerial show as they hawk insects in the bright sunlight out over the water. I’ve read about waxwings feeding in this fashion but have never actually observed them doing so.

The loose family group of young and mature birds has chosen a sycamore as their perch tree. I can see their heads moving as they follow the flight of whatever insect is hatching out. From time to time, one or more of the birds leaves the tree to feed.

They don’t just fly out and grab an insect. That’d be too easy. Waxwings do everything with style.They climb steeply and descend in leisurely, sweeping arcs upstream as if riding a roller coaster, catching a chosen morsel at the peak of each arc.  

Back in the office again ... strolling concluded for the day ... doldrums at bay ... time to crank it up. Out over the fire station, beyond the far ridge, my thin slice of sky is October blue.

Editor’s note: This column first appeared in The Smoky Mountain News in October 2002.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Roland M. Harper was born in Maine but spent practically his entire professional life in the South, where his work embraced studies in plant geography, forestry, systematics, human demography, and economic botany. Harper’s extensive field work resulted in the discovery of more than two dozen new species of flowering plants. His published works exceeded 500 in number.

Just over a century ago, Harper visited Haywood County and adjacent areas in Western North Carolina quantifying and classifying habitats, one of the first systematic physiographic-botanical undertakings of that sort in the southern Appalachians. In March 1910, his notes were published in the journal Torreya under the title “Summer Notes on the Vegetation of Haywood County, North Carolina.” Excerpted below are some of Harper’s general observations regarding topography and vegetation. Those interested in detailed plant lists for various habitats and other particulars can access the original document at: www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/40594925.

“It was my privilege in July and August, 1908, to spend a few weeks at the Biltmore Forest School, in the mountains of North Carolina, by invitation of the Director, Dr. C. A. Schenck. This school is located during the summer months in the ‘Pink Beds,’ a beautiful valley in the northern corner of Transylvania County, with its floor elevated about 3,200 to 3,300 feet above the sea. The Pisgah Ridge, with its crest varying in altitude from about 4,500 to 6,000 feet, forms the northwestern boundary of this valley and the southeastern boundary of Haywood County. The Pink Beds valley seems to be unique in several respects, and considerably more field work would be necessary before one could do justice to its very interesting vegetation and ecological problems. But the mountains of Haywood County seem to be thoroughly typical of western North Carolina, and much of what follows will doubtless apply almost as well to any other county in the neighborhood. While sojourning with Dr. Schenck I ascended to the crest of the Pisgah Ridge several times, and walked once over to Waynesville (the county-seat of Haywood County, distant 16 miles from the Pink Beds “as the crow flies” and nearly half as far again by the roads) and back. On the way over to Waynesville I followed the East Fork of Pigeon River most of the way, leaving it at its confluence with the West Fork and going thence nearly due west the remaining seven or eight miles. On the way back I went up the West Fork a few miles, then turned eastward and went over the summit of Cold Mountain, a sharp peak between the two forks, whose altitude is given on the topographic maps of the United States Geological Survey as between 6,000 and 6,100 feet. From Waynesville I also walked the railroad to Balsam, about eight miles southwestward and just over the line in Jackson County. This is about 3,300 feet above sea level, and is said to be the highest railroad station east of the Rocky Mountains. Although a great deal of botanical work has been done in these far-famed North Carolina mountains ever since they were visited by Bartram and Michaux in the latter part of the 18th century, it has been mostly mere collecting, and the publications resulting from it, with very few exceptions, have been either works relating to trees only, notes on selected species, or narratives dealing with the flora or scenery rather than with the vegetation. So perhaps an attempt to classify the habitats of a small but typical portion of the mountain region, and arrange the species in each according to structure, relative abundance, etc., will not involve too much duplication of previous publications. Although the time I spent in Haywood County was very short, and I collected no specimens (so that some of my identifications are incomplete or uncertain), some of the generalizations which follow may be just as true as if they were based on a broader foundation, and some comparisons with other regions may be of interest. As is well known to geographers, the mountains of North Carolina are as near normal as any in North America, having been brought to their present form almost entirely by erosion … The following descriptions of vegetation are intended to apply only to areas more than 2,700 feet above sea-level. Below this rather arbitrary limit in Haywood County the country is scarcely mountainous, consisting mostly of broad valleys and low hills with fertile red soil, very largely under cultivation, and the vegetation does not differ greatly from that of the Piedmont region of the Carolinas and Georgia. Above the altitude just mentioned the principal habitats in this county seem to be (1) mountain summits above 5,500 feet, (2) slopes and lower summits below 5,500 feet, (3) wet ravines or mountain rivulets, (4) rich ravines or steep coves, (5) river banks and bottoms, (6) gravelly and muddy river beds, (7) wet meadows, and (8) artificial or unnatural habitats … The trees here [in the higher elevations], as in many other exposed places in different parts of the world, are very stunted, none over ten feet tall and they are mostly so scattered as to afford little shade …The balsam, Abies Fraseri, seemed to be confined to north slopes too. It was not common on Cold Mountain, but considerable quantities of it were plainly visible on another peak of about the same height a few miles to the southward; and the Balsam Mountains are said to be covered with it, whence their name. The herbs were scarcely stunted at all, doubtless because the larger ones are not evergreen, and thus escape the chilling blasts of winter. On the very highest point was a specimen of Lilium superbum [turk’s-cap lily] about four feet tall, rearing its flowers above all other vegetation on the mountain ... On the mountain slopes and lesser summits, from about 3,300 to 5,000 feet above sea-level, the flora is considerably richer, chiefly because this habitat is the most widespread and variable one in the region under consideration … The wet rocky ravines at the heads of streams have a characteristic and interesting but not very rich flora. This habitat seems to be much better developed in the Pink Beds than in the parts of Haywood County that I visited … About half of these are typical southern Appalachian species. The remainder range farther north. Some small ravines or steep coves are so filled with deep rich humus or colluvial soil that no water appears above ground in them in ordinary weather. Such places have a decidedly climax vegetation … Half the trees have wind-borne seeds, but among the herbs a large proportion have berries or burs, adapted to be carried off by animals, as is the case in many climax forests … Near Davis Gap (sometimes called Pigeon Gap), about three miles east of Waynesville, and near Balsam Gap, about seven miles southwest, are the only wet meadows which I made note of in the region under consideration.”

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

The war in the Smokies proved to be … a curious conjunction of terrain, history, politics, and culture ... a tragic division of loyalties … a brutal partisan conflict

where men left homes and wives and children and trekked north in cold and rain … where still others served in nearly forgotten units to protect border and home.

— Noel C. Fisher, The Civil War in the Smokies

One of the remarkable “nearly forgotten” events that took place in the Smokies region during the Civil War occurred at Indian Gap, situated at 5,317 feet between Clingmans Dome and Newfound Gap along the high divide between North Carolina and Tennessee. On Jan. 12, 1865, a Confederate battery of artillery and about 650 men under the command of General Robert B. Vance crossed the Great Smoky Mountains at Indian Gap in an attempt to secure provisions, screen the main approaches to North Carolina, and guard the left flank of Longstreet’s main Confederate force at Greeneville, Tenn.

The primary military objectives failed for the most part, but the crossing itself — accomplished under the most severe conditions — deserves to be remembered for a number of reasons. Described as one of the more “heroic episodes” to take place during the Civil War in the southern mountains, the crossing has been likened to “Hannibal crossing the Alps in miniature.” It involved the Thomas Legion, one of the most colorful forces in the Confederacy, which consisted of a unit put together by Will Thomas made up of both mountaineers and Cherokees. The Indian component of the Legion was initially comprised of 130 Cherokees. Used primarily as scouts, their role in the war involved alleged “atrocities” of scalping made by the northern press. And the crossing took place over the old Oconaluftee Turnpike, sections of which can still be located.

The road was commissioned by the N.C. General Assembly more than three decades prior to the war. Tom Robbins (a now-retired park historian stationed at the Oconaluftee Visitor Center for years) has a long-standing interest in the history of the road. In “Summit Magazine” (Summer 1986), Robbins provided an account of the road’s early history:

“The valley was Cherokee land for hundreds of years before it was given up in a treaty in the 1790’s. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the first permanent white settlers were occupying land along the banks of the Oconaluftee River. Like many areas throughout the mountains, as the population of the valley grew, so did the need for roads to provide a better means of trade and communication.

“In 1831, the N.C. General Assembly authorized the formation of the Oconaluftee Turnpike Co. to build a road through the valley to the top of the Smoky Mountains. Road commissioners were selected from the local community and authorized to sell stock and collect tolls.

“Construction of the road was difficult and time-consuming. Cliffs and the river had to be avoided, thus lengthening the route. Blasting involved hand-drilling holes in rocks and packing the holes with black powder. Large rocks were sometimes split by burning logs on them, then pouring cold water on the hot rocks.

“The road, completed in 1839, followed an older Indian trail along much of its route. It crossed the Smokies at a point called Indian Gap. Initially, the principal traffic on the turnpike was livestock being driven to market. But not long after the road’s completion several men living in the valley formed the Epson Salts Manufacturing Co. in an attempt to tap the mineral resources [at Alum Cave] on the southwestern side of Mount LeConte in Tennessee.”

Robins believes the turnpike gate was probably situated beside the Oconaluftee River about where the present boundary is situated between the national park and Cherokee lands. He has walked the old road up the north bank of the river from the visitor center to the Smokemont Campground area and on to the Kephart Prong trailhead, where it “sort of gets lost” in the old roadways cut there during the CCC days of the 1930s.

Two of the most visible and accessible sections of the Oconaluftee Turnpike are to be found alongside U.S. 441: (1) at the Kephart Prong trailhead cross the footbridge, proceed 100 yards along the main trail, then follow a side trail (to the right) where the old trace is obvious as it is worn up to five feet deep; and (2) at the Oconaluftee Overlook (just below Newfound Gap), where a clearly defined section winds up from the overlook area toward the Clingmans Dome road along the main ridge.

Accounts differ as to just when Thomas started improving the road. The version published in 1914 by John Preston Arthur in Western North Carolina: A History from 1730-1913 is perhaps the most accurate. Arthur states that Thomas obtained “an order from General Kirby Smith in the spring of 1862 to raise a battalion of sappers and miners ... and put them to making roads, notably a road from Sevier County, Tennessee, to Jackson County, N.C. This road followed the old Indian trail over the Collins Gap [another name for Indian Gap], down the Ocona Lufty river to near what is now Whittier, N.C. [ten miles east of Bryson City].”

In January 1864, the 58-year-old Will Thomas and 125 of the Cherokees joined about 100 infantry, 375 cavalry, and one section of artillery Vance had marched from Asheville to acquire provisions and take up positions in Tennessee. By all accounts the winter of 1864 was unusually cold with considerable snow in the higher elevations. According to William R. Trotter’s Bushwackers! The Civil War in North Carolina (vol. 2, 1988):

“The Indian Gap road that … had been hacked through the mountains toward Sevierville was passable as far as the crest of the Smokies, but beyond that the route was little more than a mule-path: steep, rocky, and too narrow even for an ox cart. But what oxen could not do, men could. At the crest, Vance’s men dismantled their artillery. Teams of men carried the wheels, axles, rigging, and ammunition. The gun barrels themselves were harnessed to ropes and rolled, pushed, or dragged down the far side, gun metal screeching on naked rock. The march was characterized not only by Homeric physical exertion, but also by vile weather; Vance and his men did all this into the teeth of savagely cold winds that scoured the mountain tops like a sand-blaster ....”

After reassembling their equipment at the base of the Smokies, Vance’s men had initial success on Jan. 13 with the capture of a Union caravan of about 30 wagons. But shortly thereafter, flushed and cocky by his “little victory,” Vance was smashed at Schultz’s Mill on Cosby Creek by Col. William Palmer’s 15th Pennsylvania Calvary.”

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

It’s that time of the year, and the hills are alive not with music but “sang” hunters. As of now a dried pound of “green gold” is bringing about $500 and might rise before the ginseng season closes for good. Here are some random thoughts and observations regarding “sang” that might be of interest.

What’s in a name? When it comes to plant names, there’s quite a bit. A special allure of the plant world is the various common names one encounters. You’ll never meet a botanist, naturalist, nurseryman, herbalist, or florist who doesn’t delight in the colorful lingo used in their workaday world.

The Doctrine of Signatures was a governing principle in ancient herbal medicine and in assigning many of the names we use today. Up until the end of the 19th century, before plants could be scientifically tested to ascertain their active ingredients, each culture on earth independently evolved its own version of this principle. In Europe and subsequently in the Americas, the concept was called the Doctrine of Signatures. It was based upon the simple notion that the almighty spirit of whichever culture you happened to be a part of had marked everything with a sign. This sign was a taken as a clear indicator of the plant’s use as intended by that almighty spirit. Put in its simplest terms, the doctrine states that by careful observation of each plant one can learn the uses of that plant from some aspect of its form.

For instance, there is a very early spring-blooming plant sometimes called hepatica that is also known as liver-leaf because of its darkish brown older leaves that have a rounded liver-like appearance. The Cherokees — who had a wonderful knowledge of this region’s plant life passed down from shaman to shaman — thereby concluded that it was signed to cure liver ailments. Modern testing does not indicate active ingredients in the plant that would be useful for liver ailments; but occasionally, the herbalists in any given culture would stumble upon a plant that did have the active ingredients appropriate for the remedy indicated by the Doctrine of Signatures.

The most famous plant in the Smokies region is ginseng.  (Ramps would hold second place, with shortia, or oconee bells, coming in third.) The common name used in America is based on the Mandarin Chinese “jen shen,” which means “man like” because the lower rootstock is forked so that it resembles the trunk and legs of a human being. According to their version of the Doctrine of Signatures the plant was obviously signed for use as an all-purpose pick-me-up as well as an aphrodisiac. The Cherokees looked at the very similar North American species and made the same determination. Their priests addressed it as “Yunwi Usdi” (Little Man).

I don’t know if the “Little Man” works in these regards or not. I don’t know if the energy drinks so popular now like Red Bull work or not. But there are millions of people out there who do believe in them. Maybe it’s the “believing” that works.

I’m interested in plant hunting strategies … the way knowledgeable people locate various plants in the wild. Sometimes, of course, they just stumble and bumble upon them. Sometimes they visualize a particular species ahead of time and then locate it in the wild as if by magic. Sometimes they keep an eye out for “indicator” species; that is, they have one or more plants they associate with the “target” plant that help them “zero” in on that plant. For instance, many mushroom hunters look under white pines for morels in the spring and for other mushroom species in the fall.

Bob, who lives in the Alarka community just west of Bryson City, knows as much about woodcraft, hunting, and fishing as anyone would ever want to know. Plant lore is an Alarka specialty. It has been passed down for generations.

I heard through a mutual friend that one of Bob’s prime “indicator” species for “sang” is a plant he called “sang master.” I had never heard of anything by that name, so I went into search mode in reference books and on the internet. Nothing doing. I went back to our mutual friend, who described the mystery plant as about waist high with a several forked stems that bore orange fruit.

OK, that narrowed it down. Osage orange has orange fruit, but it’s not native to this region and is but rarely encountered east of the Mississippi. But yellow mandarin (Disporum lingunosa), also called merrybells because of its yellow bell-like flowers does bear orange berries.

Bob showed up in my yard this morning. I asked him to look at a line drawing of yellow mandarin in a guidebook. He squinted at the image for awhile and said, “I believe that’s it.”

I am satisfied that yellow mandarin was the culprit. It grows in the rich woodlands of the sort associated with ginseng. It’d make a fine “indicator” species. Case closed.

Not so fast. As we parted ways, Bob said, “‘Sang granny’ is a good one. You find ‘sang’ where you find that plant, too.”

I don’t have a clue as to what “sang granny” might be. Bob said he’d bring me some to identify the next time he goes ‘sang’ hunting.

“‘Sang’ master” . . . “yellow mandarin” . . . “‘sang’ granny” . . . wonderful names.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

(Note: Since its publication several years ago, this column about Evan O. Hall has sparked a number of comments. Something about Hall’s indefatigable and self-reliant cleverness reminded people of someone they, too, had known in days gone by.)

Back in the late 18th century and throughout the 19th century, America specialized as a nation in producing a special breed of citizen popularly categorized as an “original genius”; that is, they were folks self-reliant, indefatigable, and exceedingly clever when it came to improvising and making do with little or nothing. Some of these “original geniuses” had experienced formal education, many hadn’t. Most were “local characters” of one sort or another. Many were irascible and difficult to get along with, others were mild mannered.

With the spread of wealth and material goods, much of the country stopped producing their quota of “original geniuses” early in the 20th century. But the more remote areas such as the far western states and Alaska continued to do so for most of that century and even up until the present day. Because it was pretty much off the beaten track prior to World War II, the Smokies regions also continued to turn out “original geniuses” on a regular basis.  

One such was Evan O. Hall, who resided with his family on Goldmine Branch in the present-day Great Smoky Mountains National Park. If from Bryson City you drive north on the infamous Road to Nowhere (i.e., Lakeshore Drive), park at the gated trailhead and walk down the Goldmine Loop Trail just opposite the parking area (not through the tunnel). After several miles you’ll come to the point where Goldmine Branch and Tunnel Branch empty into Lake Fontana.  It was in this general area that Hall lived and flourished.

Images of Evan O. Hall, his wife, Ivalee Cole Hall, and their numerous children are fortunately preserved in Duane Oliver’s Along the River: People and Places - A Collection of Photographs of People and Places Once Found Along the Little Tennessee River, An Area Now part of the Fontana Lake Basin & Southern Edge of the Great Smokies Park (1998). Since not all of these are indexed, here’s a listing of the picture numbers for the Hall family that I was able to locate: 152, 229, 293, 929, 953 (the photo reproduced with this column), 1134, 1313, and 1452.

Rollins E. Justice contributed a memoir titled “Rev. Evan O. Hall” to the “Swain County Heritage” volume published in 1988.  His opening paragraph reads: “Reader’s Digest used to have a regular monthly feature story, ‘My Most Memorable Character.’ Had I offered a story, and I often thought of it, it would have been about the one person outside my family who had the most influence on my life. My first teacher, Rev. Evan O. Hall, inspired ambition in learning, working, and right living.”  

The following brief synopsis of Hall’s character and activities is derived from this memoir as well as from information contained in Michal Strutin’s History Hikes in the Smokies (2003).

Evan O. Hall, the son of a Baptist minister, was born in Bryson City in 1888. By 1916 or so, he was living on Goldmine Branch with his wife, Ivalee Cole Hall (a former student he had married in 1913), and their family, which eventually numbered five daughters (Bertha, Zena, Gladys, Bonnie, and Minnie) and four sons (Greeley, Brownlow, Luther, and Stanley).

As a Baptist minister and school teacher, Hall was indefatigable, walking 10 mile round trips each day regardless of the weather on mountain trails and across swinging bridges to reach his destinations. Justice notes that Hall’s religion was “the confident, happy kind,” while as a teacher he “instilled respect for our country, its heroes, and ethical living [so that by] example and instruction he built honesty, ambition, and willingness to work into his students.”

Hall taught shape-note singing, ground cornmeal for his neighbors, sawed lumber for them at his handmade sawmill, cut tombstones for the community in his blacksmith shop (where he also shoed horses and mules), and made them coffins when they died. He was, in short, as Strutin rightly notes, “a community treasure.”

Picture #929 in Along the River is captioned: “Greely O. Hall at E.O. Hall’s Water-Powered Light Plant on Gold Mine Branch with First Radio on the Branch, a Mid-West Radio.”

Evan O. Hall had initially constructed a gristmill on Goldmine Branch, using wood from his own land to construct the housing, shafts, axel, and overshot waterwheel. The only items he didn’t construct were the millstones, which he purchased and set in place. Utilizing the power of this waterwheel (or perhaps another that he constructed) and his native ingenuity, he proceeded to wire and light his home with electricity, the first such in the area. In the evening hours, the entire Hall family no doubt enjoyed gathering around their newly-purchased, waterwheel-powered Mid-West radio.

Evan O. Hall — an “original genius” if there ever was one — and his entire family left their Goldmine Branch residence when Lake Fontana was flooded in the 1940s and moved to Haywood County. He died in 1969.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

This is about frogs. Of late, I’ve been thinking about them … especially the frog that snores. As I recently discovered, there is a fairly common species here in the Smokies region that emits snore-like vocalizations. More about that in a moment.

My grandmother was a short gap-toothed woman with a loud laugh who most always got her way. She was a very good with a .22 rifle. Her hunting was restricted to three animals: in the fall she shot squirrels; during the summer she shot frogs; and year-round she shot rats. The squirrels and frogs were shot through the head so as not to damage the flesh. She skinned them herself. The edible portions of the squirrels were pan fried and served with thickening gravy.

I was about eight when I first went frog-hunting with grandmother near my father’s homeplace at Abingdon in the mountains of southwestern Virginia. She didn’t like to walk … so she hunted squirrels from a stump only a few paces from her car and shot frogs through the driver’s window.

It wasn’t hard to find a frog pond. You could hear them booming from the main road. Once situated just so, she’d cut off the motor and lights and wait for the frogs to reappear. As soon as they were booming again, she’d flip on the headlights and flood the pond with light so that the dark water sparkled with transfixed frog eyes. She’d pick them off one by one until there were no more eyes showing. My job was to retrieve the frogs in a sack, after which we’d move on to the next pond until grandmother felt we had enough or got tired. Once home, she’d cut off the hind legs and deftly peel the skin off the soft flesh using a paring knife and pliers. These were soaked in salt water, dried, battered, and deep fried until crispy brown.If you’ve never eaten frog legs, there’s no way you can understand how good they taste when prepared fresh out of a swamp, creek or pond. Better than catfish. Better than deep-fried chicken. Better than most anything.

As a teenager, I waded with an uncle or by myself in the swamps of piedmont Virginia gigging frogs. Then later, I gigged them from boats wherever we happened to be living in the South. My wife, seven months pregnant with our first child, paddled the boat one time on a lake near Chapel Hill while I speared frogs from the bow. That was her first time hunting frogs and she wasn’t too sure about the undertaking until she tasted the results later that night.

My last frogging expedition was on a farm pond in Mississippi in the summer of 1972. Since then, I’ve simply taken an interest in their range and peculiarities. There are but four species that are commonly encountered here in Western North Carolina — bull frogs, northern green frogs, pickerel frogs, and wood frogs — so identification isn’t a problem. Wood frogs, which are about 2- to 3-inches long and sport distinctive dark patches around their eyes, usually inhabit moist woodlands. The call is a duck-like squawk or grunt. Bull frogs can be up to 8-inches long. They are dark olive and exhibit a fold of skin on each side of their heads extending in an arc from behind the eye down to their front armpit. Breeding males have yellow lips. Their vibrant “jug-o-rum” mating signals are what we think of when we think of frogs calling. Northern green frogs resemble bull frogs but are smaller. Their backs are mottled with brownish-green patterns. The vocalization has been likened to a “banjo-like ‘clung.’” They are perhaps the most common frog species in the region. Pickerel frogs are about the same size as northern green frogs. They display rows of squarish brown spots down their backs and favor areas near creeks or wetlands.

For several years I had been hearing a snoring noise outside our bedroom window after midnight. Coons don’t snore. Possums don’t snore. Fox don’t snore. Coyotes don’t snore. Bobcats don’t snore. Horses don’t snore. Chickens don’t snore. To my knowledge, none of the animals that inhabited our property snore. Then, by chance, I read the pickeral frog entry in Reptiles and Amphibians of the Smokies (2001): “The voice is a low-pitched snore lasting 1-2 seconds.”

I have learned that pickeral frogs snore for two reasons: to attract a mate; and to warn intruders (other male pickeral frogs) away. These attraction and warning snores can be heard at:

http://animaldiversity.ummz.umich.edu/site/topics/frogCalls.html.                

So now, when I lie awake at night listening to snoring outside my window, I know exactly what it is and think about my grandmother shooting frogs through her car window 60 years ago.      

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Earlier this week about nine in the morning, I was standing on the Everett Street bridge in the heart of downtown Bryson City. Looking down I saw two otters in the dark-tinted currents of Tuckasegee. I retrieved my binoculars from my car and watched them cavort in the water and on the bank near the county administration building. I watched until they disappeared downstream.

I had been rivited once again by otters. The river had been “alive” while they were passing through. To say that they are beautiful creatures is inadequate. They are beyond beautiful. They are what beautiful aspires to be.  

I was reminded of the times back in the late 1980s when I had the opportunity to observe and write about the initial otter releases in the Great Smokies. Then, in late January of 1991, I was able to observe and write about the first controlled release of otter in the mountains of North Carolina west of the continental divide. Here’s some of what I wrote at that time:

“Monday morning,­­­ North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission furbearing specialist Mike Carraway set free eight river otters on the east bank of the Little Tennessee River in Swain County. According to Carraway, otters disappeared from WNC as pioneers settled the region and began hunting the animals for their luxurious brown pelts.  That practice combined with habitat destruction led to the elimination of the otter in the mountains by the mid-1930s, when the last otter sighting was made in the Catalooche section of the Great Smokies.

“But otters did survive in the remote swamps of eastern North Carolina, and that population has served as the source of the NCWRC’s restoration program in WNC.  Within the last year, 22 otters have been trapped down east and released in the Catawba River beween Lake James and Morganton east of the continental divide.

“Monday’s release in the Little Tennssee involved seven males and one female. Carraway — who was assisted by wildlife officers Dave Allen of Andrews and John Rogers of Franklin — hopes to return next week and release additional females in the same area several miles north of the line dividing Swain and Macon counties.  He’s hopeful the otters will pair off and reestablish a thriving population along the river and its tributaries.

“Both the Catawba and Little Tennessee rivers offer prime otter habitat: long stretches of slow-moving, moderately deep water with pools, waterfalls, riffles, and rapids. Carraway noted that studies of otter scat indicate the playful mammals feed upon slower moving rough fish like suckers and stonerollers rather than expending energy chasing trout, and that the reintroduction program has the full support of various wildlife organizations like Trout Unlimited.

“This NCWRC otter project and the ongoing river otter reintroductions taking place since 1986 on the Tennessee side of Great Smoky Mountains National Park provide wildlife officials with a justification for hoping that these playful and engaging animals will soon become a permanent fixture once again in the southern highlands.”

The red wolf introduction that was going on about the same time in the Smokies failed for environmental and strategic reasons. (They shouldn’t have been “reintroduced” in the southern mountains since they were never really here in the first place.) The river otter program has been a success because it was well-planned and environmentally sound.

Otters are long, streamlined animals that may live up to 15 years.  An average of two to four young are born in the spring of the year, with a family group sometimes staying together for over a year.  They live in cavities among the roots of trees or rocks, thickets of vegetation, or in burrows made by other animals.

Otters are the barn swallows of the aquatic world. What a swallow can do in the air an otter can — in its own way — duplicate in water. Our greatest living Irish poet, Seamus Heaney, had these impressions:

The Otter

When you plunged

The light of Tuscany wavered

And swung through the pool

From top to bottom.

I loved your wet head and smashing crawl,

Your fine swimmer’s back and shoulders

Surfacing and surfacing again

This year and every year since.

I sat dry-throated on the warm stones.

You were beyond me.

The mellowed clarities, the grape-deep air

Thinned and disappointed ...

Turning to swim on your back,

Each silent, thigh-shaking kick

Re-tilting the light,

Heaving the cool at your neck.

And suddenly you’re out,

Back again, intent as ever,

Heavy and frisky in your freshened pelt,

Printing the stones.   

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Usually I locate rare plants by visualizing them and visiting likely habitats. It’s as if I can will them into existence. But this time was different. It was just suddenly there. By chance, while looking for another plant, I literally stumbled into a stand of monkshood (Aconitum uncinatum) alongside a seepage area on Chunky Gal Mountain in Clay County. It was the perhaps the fifth time I have encountered the plant in the Smokies region in the past 40 or so years.

Monkshood displays one of the most striking flowers in North America. They appear in late summer or fall on a smooth stem about three to five feet in length that reclines on foliage of other plants. Like other members of the Buttercup Family (wild geranium, delphenium, etc) the leaves are deeply cleft into three or five lobes.

Arising from the leaf axils the translucent bluish-purple flowers seem to glow with an inner light in the shaded moist habitats it favors. The common name is derived from the uppermost sepal, which is shaped like a helmet or hood. The closely related and very rare plant called wolfsbane (A. reclinatum), which I have never encountered, is described as having whitish or yellowish flowers.

Monkshood is beautiful. It is also deadly poisonous. According to Nancy J. Turner and Adam F. Szczawinski’s Common Poisonous Plants and Mushrooms of North America (1991), the potent alkoloids it harbors are acontine and aconine. When ingested for whatever misguided reason, symptoms include tingling and burning of the face and throat, severe vomiting, headache, cold feeling, slow heart rate, paralysis, and delirium … followed by either recovery or death.

This notion was reinforced at a dinner party in 1856 in the Scottish village of Dingwall when two priests were served a sauce into which monkshead root (mistaken for horseradish) had been grated. Fans of the Harry Potter series will perhaps recall that Professor Snape brews monkshood to assist Remus Lupin in his transformation to a werewolf.        

Several species of Aconitum have been used as arrow poisons. In Japan it was used to hunt bear. And in China it was used in warfare.

It is well documented that the Cherokees used various plant extracts (buckeye and devil’s shoestring, a vetch) to dope fish. But there is seemingly no evidence that the Cherokees used any sort of poison on their arrows when hunting wild game or in warfare.

However, if such use is ever documented, it’s likely that monkshood will be implicated.   

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

The Eastern Screech Owl has the broadest ecological niche of any owl in its range. It occurs east of the Rocky Mountains, where it is a permanent resident of both rural and urban habitats from south of the Canadian boreal forest to near the Tropic of Cancer in Mexico. This species nests in tree cavities in wooded environments below about 1,500 meters, regardless of habitat, occupying lowland forests to mountainside woodlands, both deciduous and evergreen ... It is often the most common or only avian predator in wooded suburban and urban habitats.

— Birds of America Online (subscription site sponsored by the Ornithology Lab at Cornell and the American Ornithologists’ Union)

These little owls, which are seven to 10 inches in length, become particularly active here in the Smokies region from mid-August through October. My wife and I have been hearing them in recent weeks during the daylight hours, as well as throughout the night.

Eastern screech owls are not aptly named. Their primary call is actually a quavering descending trill reminiscent of a horse’s whinny, not a screech. Its vocal repertoire also includes various barks, hoots, rasps, and chuckles.

The Cherokees knew this bird as “wahuhi,” an onomatopoetic term that captures the essence of its eerie sound. All owls, being nocturnal predators, were ascribed mysterious supernatural powers by the Cherokees, who considered them to be evil portents, often an embodiment of a human ghost or one of the various disguises assumed by witches.

No other North American owl has such distinctive plumage differences. The screech owl has two color-morphs, rufous and gray. Individual owls can’t change colors but localized populations will tend to be one or the other. In this area the reddish phase outnumbers the gray by approximately four to one. That ratio is reversed in the piedmont and coastal plain. Ornithologists suppose these color phases help the birds blend in more effectively in their respective forest environments. Five subspecies are recognized by ornithologists according to body size and vocalizations.   

Learn to imitate their tremulous call and they’ll often answer you right back. I have lured them to within 15 yards or so of our porch, probably to see who the fool was making such a racket. It’s not difficult to locate and observe them with a flashlight.

A screech owl will capture and devour most anything that comes along: earthworms, young rabbits, moles, rats, mice, songbirds, and so on. A full-sized domestic chicken is the largest food item currently on record. Small items are eaten when caught, while larger ones are cached away (usually in tree cavaties) for subsequent consumption.   

Screech owls often nest in tree cavities. You can also purchase or construct boxes that they will readily move into so that you can observe them on a regular basis. A friend of mine who lives in suburban Atlanta, Ga., purchased a screech owl box and placed it in a tree about 30 yards from his back porch.

He was able to observe the box quite closely through a spotting scope. To his surprise and pleasure, within a few days a screech owl had moved into the box.

If you do locate a screech owl nest in the wild or establish one, be careful about approaching too closely.  They become “feathered wildcats” when defending these sites. Aroused adults make raking strikes with their talons at intruders who come near nestlings and fledglings. Domestic cats, dogs, squirrels, snakes, and any other animals, including humans, are subject to attack.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

I started to write this column about Duane Oliver before I discovered that he has just published what he tells me is his “last cookbook.” We’ll see. This one is titled The North Shore Cookbook. It is a follow-up to Cooking on Hazel Creek and Cooking and Living Along the River. All are about cooking on the “north shore” of Lake Fontana in the present day Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

Duane grew up on Hazel Creek, the largest watershed on the North Carolina side of the Smokies. After retiring as a professor of art history at Western Carolina University, he followed his mother’s suggestion to write about family and regional history. Many of the recipes in this new book date from the early 1900s or are “later variations” of those cooked along the Tuckasegee and Little Tennessee rivers before they were dammed to form the lake. If something can be boiled, baked, fried, stewed, simmered, sliced, diced, cubed, or whatever, there’s a good chance there’s a recipe for it in The North Shore Cookbook. For good measure, there are also mini-treatises on rolled oats and the Quaker Mill Company; self-rising flour; raising hogs; chickens that hid their nests in the woods; and similar topics. The spiral-bound 272-page text is available at local bookstores or can be ordered directly from Duane Oliver, 558 Westwood Circle, Waynesville, N.C., 28786. Call him at 828.456.8289 to iron out the details.

We now return to the point of the original column, which was that Duane is undervalued as a writer. His magnum opus, Hazel Creek From Then Till Now, is always cited as a source for regional topics. Therein, he covers every aspect of domestic life from building a cabin to springhouses, corn cribs, barns, fences, spinning wheels, cupboards, and so on.

But the quality of Duane’s writing is never mentioned when Western North Carolina writers like Mooney, Kephart, Wolfe, Ehle, Morgan, Frazier, Rash, Byer, Crowe, et al, are being considered. Duane can really write. This was brought home to me yet again by a memoir I recently chanced upon that he wrote about country stores for the Spring 1996 issue of the “Fontana North Shore Historical Association Bulletin.” Therein Duane captures the essence of those things that trigger memories of days gone by. Some excerpts:

My childhood memory of stores at Judson, Fontana and Proctor is that they were good places to buy a ‘dope’ … usually an icy cold Orange Crush … Those old general stores had a certain distinct smell, not the antiseptic, air-conditioned smell of today’s stores. Your nostrils were assailed with the pungent smell of onions, the dusty smell of potatoes that still had a little dirt clinging to them, the cool, spicy smell of apples from far-off places packed in bushel baskets with narrow strips of blue tissue paper, the acrid smell of kegs of nails, the sharp smell of unwrapped bars of soap guaranteed to produce the whitest sheets ever hung on a clothes line, the warm summery smell of towsacks full of cottonseed hulls, and best of all to a child the sweet smell around the drink box where emptied bottles stood in cases waiting for the Nehi truck from Bryson City to take them away and chase off the hungry yellow jackets that always buzzed around the bottles ...

In the middle of the floor was a big pot-bellied stove with a long stovepipe going up into the darkness through the roof … On cold days the stove roared contentedly as it was fed coal or wood, and ‘tramped snow’ with a funny chuffing sound when a snowstorm was coming. It was especially comforting to scrooch up to the stove and warm frozen backsides or put your shoes against it until you smelled rubber starting to melt ...

Candy, a child’s delight, could be bought in bars for a nickel … horehound drops, orange wax candy glistening with sugar, peanut-shaped mallows, gumdrops, and long black licorice sticks whose taste was exotic and not especially good, but a stick lasted for a long time for it didn’t melt in your mouth … candy cigarettes whose ends were red and we held them nonchalantly as if they were real until they melted and we ate them.

These stores not only sold dopes, candy, cloth, thread, needles, shoes, overalls, work shirts, shotgun shells, soap, farm supplies, soda crackers, matches, kerosene (coal oil), pencils, ink (when did you lat see a bottle of it?), dishes, canned goods, and lard, but flour in cotton sacks that when they were washed could be made into all sorts of things … dresses (if you could get two with the same flour pattern), blouses, shirts, bloomers, as well as aprons and curtains …

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

About a year and a half ago I wrote a column titled “Mountain Topography and Language Lend Themselves to Colorful Names” that sparked a number of e-mails and letters. Obviously there are other folks out there who enjoy thinking about “the lay of the land.” After all, there’s no other place in the world that surpasses the actual topography of the southern mountains. And there’s no place where the people of a region have utilized a more delightful language to describe their homeland.”

Here then are some additional examples. I’ve restricted myself to the Smokies region west of Asheville. Unless otherwise noted, my general sources are William S. Powell’s The North Carolina Gazetteer: A Dictionary of Tar Heel Place Names (UNC Press, 1968) and Allen R. Coggins’ Place Names of the Smokies (Great Smoky Mountains Natural History Association, 1999). I have sometimes added additional commentary:

• ADVALOREM BRANCH in Swain County within Great Smoky Mountains National Park. An advalorem tax is one based on a percentage of assessed value.  Land taxes have never been popular in Swain County or in general, but maybe someone just liked the sound of the word.

• AKWETIYI (or AGWEDIYI) is a Cherokee word for a site in the Tuckaseigee River at the mouth of Dick’s Creek in Jackson County. It means something like “the place of the lizard monster” as it was believed that a dangerous creature resided therein.

• ANGELICO GAP and ANGELICO MOUNTAIN are Cherokee designations for places in Cherokee County. Angelico is the Cherokee designation for an herbaceous plant used as a cooked green.

• AQUONE is a community in Macon County on the upper Nantahala River. The word is believed to be a corruption of ““egwanulti” (by the river).

• BEAR BRANCH or BEAR CREEK have a combined 36 entries statewide in Powell’s Gazetteer.

• BEAVER CREEK or BEAVERDAM have a combined 45 entries statewide in Powell’s Gazetteer.

• BELL CONEY MOUNTAIN is situated on the eastern side of Lizzy Mountain in Jackson County (see the Big Ridge topo). I’ve never been to Bell Coney and don’t know how it came by that name.  Anyone out there know?

• BIG BUTT is situated in Macon County between Mooney Gap and Bearpen Gap. In geographic parlance, “butt” refers to an abrupt, broken off end of a ridge or mountain.

• BIG FAT GAP is situated in northwestern Graham County at the head of Bear Creek. What does the word “fat” signify in this sort of geographic context? I should know, but don’t.

• BIG HOGBACK CREEK is situated in Jackson County. I assume this creek is associated with HOG BACK MOUNTAIN, so-named because the mountain features jagged rocks along its spine.

• BONE VALLEY CREEK is situated in Swain County in the GSMNP. In 1888 cattle were trapped along this tributary of Hazel Creek in a horrendous blizzard. Named for the bleached bones of these animals that lay in the valley for years.

• BOOGERMAN TRAIL is situated in Haywood County in Cataloochee Valley within the GSMNP. Named for Robert Palmer, whose nickname was “Boogerman.” As he grew older, Palmer became increasingly reclusive and sported a brushy beard that tended to frighten young folks.

• CATALOOCHE is thought to a corruption of the Cherokee word “Gadalutsi,” which is variously translated as “fringe standing erect” or “wave upon wave” in reference to the trees along the valley’s ridge crests.

• CATSTAIRS is a steep trail situated in Macon County along Overflow Creek in Blue Valley. Wildcats supposedly established the route to go from one mountain to another. Or maybe it was so narrow and difficult that it only seemed suitable for wildcats?

• CHATTOOGA RIDGE and CHATTOOGA RIVER in Jackson County are place names derived from the Cherokee word “chatawga”

• COWEE or COWEETA are places names for an old village, a modern community, a creek, a mountain bald, gaps, and a hydrologic station in Macon County. The words mean “place of the Deer Clan.”

• DEVIL’S TATTER PATCH, situated in Swain County within the GSMNP, is one of the numerous place names that invoke the devil in Western North Carolina. He is associated with DEVIL’S NEST (a peak), DEVIL’S PRONG (a creek fork), DEVIL’S SHOALS FORD (a crossing), DEVIL’S GARDEN (steep eroded land), DEVIL’S DEN (rugged terrain), DEVIL’S COURTHOUSE (high outcrop), and numerous other sites local inhabitants deemed fit for the devil himself.   

• EAST LAPORTE is a community in Jackson County east of Cullowhee alongside the Tuckaseigee River. It is named for the site of an 18th century French trading post that the French considered to be the east gate (“la port”) to the Cherokee country.

• GABBY BRANCH is situated in Cherokee County. What a wonderful name for a mountain stream! Instead of merely babbling away, this one seemed to be “talking incessantly.”

An Indian named Running Deer hunted deer in the area with his dog, Wolf. Late one winter day, he wounded a deer with an arrow, and Wolf set out after the wounded animal, which headed into the main stream with the dog close behind.

“A moment later Running Deer spotted Wolf, who was dangling from a mass of jammed logs, debris, and fox grape vines in the middle of the stream. His entanglement was so severe he was in imminent danger of drowning. Running Deer shouted encouragement to Wolf as he plunged into the icy flooded water, fought his way to the dog, and released him. The two then swam to the bank and resumed the chase of the wounded buck, which was soon captured in a clump of laurel bushes.”

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Spring is the appointed time for the various wildflower pilgrimages and outings that attract thousands of visitors to the mountains of Western North Carolina each year. In April and May, it’s a piece of cake to locate spring beauty, hepatica, trailing arbutus, painted trillium, trout lily and all of the other showy wildflowers that appear in profusion before the leaf canopy fully closes in overhead.

Springtime wildflowering is easy pickings. No bugs. No sweltering heat. No beggar’s-lice. No sudden afternoon thunderstorms that leave you drenched and far from home.

As you read this column, however, it’s mid-August and all of the negative factors cited above are out in full force. Yet, the dog days represent one of the very best times to get out and botanize. Sweat may run off your brow into your eyes while you’re trying to key out an unknown species, but — if you persist — you’ll encounter many of the more spectacular wildflowers our region has to offer.

Most summertime wildflowers are located along open roadsides, woodland borders, and in upland pastures or meadows. The edges of creeks, rivers, lakes, and ponds are productive. Whenever I’m driving along and encounter an exposed rockface with water seepage, I hardly ever fail to pull over and take a look.

Wet rockfaces are especially promising when there are moss mats that provide a footing for plants like round-leaved sundew, a carnivorous plant that captures small insects with its glistening, sticky leaves. Sundews exude enzymes that dissolve the insect.  The insect’s proteins are then converted into nitrogen so the plant can inhabit its acidic, nitrogen-deficient habitat.

In damp pastures and meadows, Joe Pye weed and New York ironweed are making their appearance. The former is recognized by almost everyone, but do you know ironweed? It grows from three- to seven-feet tall, with a leaf-spread of about three feet. It’s easy to spot from your car. Whereas Joe-Pye-weed produces soft rounded plumes of lavender-pink flowerheads, ironweed presents a rugged, flat-topped appearance with numerous flowerets of a vivid deep purple (sometimes blue) hue gathered into a head about a foot wide.

My favorite late summer wildflower is cardinal flower. Look for it along stream banks or back in the shade of moist woodland borders. About two- to four-feet high, the plant displays spikes of scarlet flowers above toothed leaves that alternate along the main stem. The one-inch long flowers are so vivid they seem to glow as they beckon hummingbirds and other pollinators.

You never know what you’ll encounter if you get out and poke around.  Several years ago, I stopped alongside U.S. 64 in Macon County with a natural history workshop from the John C. Campbell Folk School to take a look at a wetland area situated below the road embankment. We talked about wetland types (marshes, swamps, and bogs) for awhile until a belted kingfisher diverted our attention with rattling calls as it circled back and forth. Had we not been looking out over the wetland through binoculars at the kingfisher, we wouldn’t have spotted one of the more dense stands of spiked blazing star that I’ve ever encountered.

Spiked blazing star grows up to five-feet high with lovely spires of lavender-purple flowers. In its natural setting — as viewed from a distance through binoculars — the graceful plants moved slightly in the wind against a background of rushes and alder, creating an August wildflower setting that was memorable.      

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Lots of folks like to study those molded relief maps of the region, the ones that show the upraised contours of the mountain ranges. Some have even pieced together the maps for the Southern Blue Ridge Province from Southwestern Virginia to North Georgia as wall hangings, making it possible to contemplate in miniature the glorious terrain we call home.

It’s pleasurable to sit in an easy chair on a rainy day and ponder the way the ridges join or meditate over how they might have looked before eons of erosion wore them down into their present configuration. Even more rewarding is a venture to a local vista for a panoramic look-see at the real thing.

In one sense, of course, high vistas are places that enable us to rise above our everyday humdrum existence and take in grand scenery, even when we don’t know exactly what we’re looking at. As one writer aptly phrased it, “There’s wonder and delight up there ... elbow room for the soul ... all you have to do is suspend judgment and analysis long enough simply to be there, on the mountain, experiencing it.”

Well, no one would want to fail to take in the beauty or be exhilarated, but we also shouldn’t forget that Blue Ridge vistas are windows that allow us to see and comprehend more truly. A little “analysis” from time to time won’t hurt.

On a clear day, you can observe the bare bones of the land and come to a fuller understanding of the exact lay of the land. The thoughtful choice of a series of strategic vistas in your particular section of the Blue Ridge will enable you to observe just where the major ranges abut and how the peaks, spurs, gaps, upland valleys, streams, rock cliffs, gorges, grassy balds and other topographical features fall into place. You will come away with a more precise notion of your place in the world.

Because we’ve lived in the Tuckasegee River valley on the southern edge of the Smokies for the last 40 or so years, my wife and I have concentrated our attention on the interior portion of the Southern Blue Ridge Province from the Great Smokies on the west and north, to the Nantahalas in the south, and the Balsams in the east. One of our greatest satisfactions while driving or walking is being able to look up and recognize specific peaks and ranges by name, to know how they interconnect and relate to the remote cove we live in. They have become old friends. Each new lookout visited, each new mountain range recognized by its distinctive shape adds acreage to our spiritual landscape.

Among our favorite vistas are Wayah Bald (5,342 feet) in the Nantahalas, Waterrock Knob (6,292 feet) in the Plott Balsams along the Blue Ridge Parkway, and Clingman’s Dome (6,643 feet) on the high divide of the Smokies along the N.C.-Tenn. state lines. All three can be reached directly by vehicle within a single day. When it’s clear, one can easily see the 30 or so miles from each of these vantage points to the other two corners in what is a vast triangle. This triangulation technique allows an observer to view a given terrain from various directions and fit together landscape in an efficient manner.

Waterrock Knob is a fun place to visit because it attracts such a mix of visitors: drive-by tourists looking for the next overlook; thoughtful tourists savoring a special spot; plant enthusiasts seeking out species restricted to the northern hardwood and spruce-fir forests (yellow birch, spreading wood fern, mountain ash, etc.); birders looking for high-elevation species (ravens, golden-crowned kinglets, winter wrens, etc.); frisbee-catching college students; sunset and sunrise watchers; hikers, walkers, and strollers; and so on. I like remote, difficult-to-access spots, but I also like places where a diverse gathering of people are having fun. I like to watch them go about their chosen activities.

Just last week, I found out about the upcoming “Blue Ridge Parkway: Celebrating Heritage and Communities” event that will take place this coming Saturday at Waterrock Knob. Nevertheless, I wanted to support the event if possible. So I contacted BRP ranger Pam Mann and offered to do a nature walk and talk of about 45 minutes duration starting at 3 p.m. I’ll talk some about the geologic-geographic setting. I’ll have with me a handout for the field guides I use for general natural history as well as for trees, shrubs, vines, ferns, grasses and wildflowers in Western North Carolina. (And I’ll also bring copies of the actual books and source materials). Then we’ll go walking (slowly) and see what we may see. I hope that you will join me in support of one of our great national treasures.        

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

(Editor’s note: This column first appeared in The Smoky Mountain News in July 2005.)

Are you by chance looking for a high-elevation day-hike that embodies quite a bit of the region’s human history? If so, try the moderate to steep portion of the Appalachian Trail that leads from the Newfound Gap parking area in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park to Charlies Bunion.

Murlless and Stallings in Hiker’s Guide to the Smokies (1973) designated Charlies Bunion to be “probably the most spectacular view in the park. Almost sheer cliffs drop more than 1,000 ft. into Greenbriar section.” Located on the Tennessee-North Carolina border 4.0 miles north of Newfound Gap, this bare rock outcrop is situated at 5,375 feet. The narrow, cliff-hugging trail affords breathtaking views not only down into the abyss but far westward out beyond Mt. Le Conte into Tennessee. It’s not the Grand Canyon by any means, but the site can give you a touch of vertigo in a heartbeat.

The rocky outcrops of Charlie’s Bunion (formerly called Fodderstack) were created in the mid-1920s when a fire swept over the crest. The exposed humus was washed completely away shortly thereafter in a deluge. The curious place name dates to 1929 when Swain County native Charlie Conner was hiking with outdoorsman Horace Kephart, photographer George Masa, and others along the high divide. When they paused for a rest on the rocks, Conner took his boots and socks off, exposing a bunion or two that rivaled the surrounding stones. Eying Conner’s feet, Kephart remarked, “Charlie, I’m going to get this place put on a government map for you.” And he did.

As exciting as the views from Charlie’s Bunion are, the walk from Newfound Gap up over Mt. Kephart and down around Masa Knob is equally interesting. It’s a stroll through the early history of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

Newfound Gap (5,040 feet)is situated 16 miles from the Oconaluftee Visitor Center on the North Carolina side of the GSMNP. The site came by its name when it was discovered (perhaps as early as the 1850s) by surveyors to be a lower pass through the high Smokies than Indian Gap two miles to the west. In 1928, when funds to acquire national park lands were proving hard to come by, John D. Rockefeller donated over $5 million as a memorial to his mother.  In 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945) dedicated the GSMNP — which had been officially founded in 1934 — in ceremonies at the gap.

At 1.7 miles, the AT leads to a gap and an intersection with Sweat Heifer Creek Trail. According to Allen R. Coggins in Place Names of the Smokies (1999), this name “goes back to a time when cattle (including young, virgin female cows called heifers) were driven up the strenuous pathway along this stream to summer pasture.”  One supposes that this sort of rugged terrain made the virgin heifers sweat.

At 2.7 miles, the AT reaches the intersection with the Boulevard Trail, which leads 5.3 miles to Mt. Le Conte, named for John Le Conte, a scientist, not for his older brother, Joseph Le Conte, as is often supposed.  

About 100 yards from the AT, a spur trail off the Boulevard Trail leads 0.8 miles to Mt. Kephart (6,217 feet) and the Jump-Off (6,100 feet), which also has truly spectacular views. The mountain is named for Bryson City writer Horace Kephart (1862-1931), author of the classics Camping and Woodcraft (1906) and Our Southern Highlanders (1913). Kephart was a force in the movement that helped establish the GSMNP and was nominated to have a mountain named after him in the late 1920s while still living.  

This story is told in full for the first time in a Web site titled “Horace Kephart: Revealing an Enigma” www.library.wcu.edu/digitalcoll/kephart/), which was completed about six years ago by the Special Collections division of Hunter Library at Western Carolina University. Using a variety of media, the library has built an in-depth archive around the life and times of Kephart that presents photos, artifacts, documents, writing, maps, and links to other sources of information.

In the section of this Web site devoted to the naming of Mt. Kephart, it’s noted that, “The life of Horace Kephart ended unexpectedly in a 1931 automobile accident. While the National Park he campaigned to create was not yet a reality, it was already clear that despite the obstacles to its founding, the park would come to the mountains he had grown to love. Of the many individuals involved in creating the park, Kephart was already recognized as a leader in the movement during his later years …The North Carolina Literary and Historical Commission urged that a mountain in the coming park be named after Kephart. In 1928 [a peak] in the proposed park was officially named [for him], an honor rarely given to living individuals.

At 2.9 miles along the AT you will reach Icewater Spring and shelter (5,900 feet) after swinging around the North Carolina side of Mt. Kephart. From Icewater Springs, the trail drops down through slate outcrops and across Masa Knob.

George Masa (1881-1933) was the well-known Japanese photographer whose Japanese name was Masahara Iisuka. Masa had a commercial studio in Asheville, but he spent as much time in the Smokies with his dearest friend (who he called “Kep”) as he could. His magnificent photographs of the Smokies often illustrated the articles Kephart wrote in support of the park movement. Masa was so distraught when Kephart was killed in the automobile accident that he petitioned the government with a barrage of letters requesting that he be buried with “Kep” at a site in the Smokies. This was not to be. Masa is buried in Asheville.

But it is absolutely appropriate that their names be linked in this way via natural monuments in the high Smokies along that portion of the AT leading from Newfound Gap to Charlies Bunion.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

A portion of this Back Then column appeared in SMN in August 2004 as “A Box to Call Your Own.” It has been rewritten and expanded. The notes regarding ancient (pre-Cherokee) burial practices can be found online: www.handsontheland.org/HistoryExploration/cultural_comparison/archives.cfm?cl=death&site=&period=0)  

When I was a boy growing up in Virginia, there was a very old man in our neighborhood who was was eccentric; or, at least, his neighbors judged him to be so because he was reputed to have built his own coffin in the work shed behind his house.  

His immediate neighbors boasted that they had watched him doing so through the hedges. This made an impression on me. I used to wonder what it would be like to sleep in an open coffin that you had yourself constructed.  

Great Britain, for whatever reason, has for centuries specialized in eccentrics of all varieties. Naturally enough, that island nation has produced numerous coffin-building tales. Jemmy Hirst of Rawcliffe was one of Yorkshire’s most eccentric characters during the early 18th century. For one thing, he rode a bull rather than a horse when foxhunting. For another, he made a vehicle equipped with sails and a carriage of wicker-work that housed his bed and was drawn by Andalusian mules.

Jemmy, of course, constructed his own coffin. It had windows and shelves. When he died in 1829, aged 91, 12 pounds from his estate was set aside to pay a dozen old maids to follow his coffin to the burying ground. Two musicians were also engaged, a fiddler and a piper, who, as a final salute, played Jemmy’s favorite tune “O’er the Hills and Far Away,” which I also like and have placed on my tentative song list.

This country has turned out its fair share of “original characters” — as eccentrics were known in the 19th century. One day a man named Warren Snow, who Moffit didn’t care for, entered his place of business.  Seeing the coffin hanging over the checkout counter, Snow dared to inquire as why it had been made so far in advance of his likely death. Moffit looked up and replied: “I want everything dry and light so I can go over Hell just a-flying, so I won’t have to stop down and see you.” All of us could do worse than be “light and dry” so we can “go over hell just a-flying” when the time comes.

Closer to home, Sylva native John Parris noted in These Storied Mountains (1972) that “Many a mountain man has made his own coffin. But old man Eddie Conner is the only man I ever heard of who planted the tree that provided the lumber for the one they laid him away in.”

In May 1885, Conner had as a young man planted a walnut sprout at his sister’s home place in the Smokemont area of what is now the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. In 1918 he suffered  “a slight stroke of paralysis” and decided it was high time to get “busy making my preparations for the last go-round.” By this date, the walnut sprout had grown into a tree that measured two feet and seven inches in diameter.

With the help of two Cherokee Indian men, Conner felled the tree and they drug it to a nearby rail line, where it was loaded up and freighted “to the big band sawmill at Ravensford where the lumber was cut for my casket.” A carpenter by the name of Jim Ayers assisted Conner in the construction of his casket.  

This wasn’t your ordinary run of the mill casket. It featured “a heavy walnut panel on the lid to make a round or oval-shaped top.” It was “trimmed in three-inch cherry molding, cut in mitered squares like picture frames, leaving a two-inch black walnut margin clear around the top, the sides and the ends.”  The brown and red colors highlighted the casket’s appearance so much that, in Conner’s eyes, it “truly gives a beautiful combination beyond compare.” And to top it all off, the lid was constructed from “two pieces, joined together with hinges near the bulk of the breast, with a face glass reaching almost back to the joint hinges, well counter-sunk, to prevent the heavy lid from smashing it.”

When it was done, Conner gave his creation a test drive, as it were, by putting in his pillow and laying down in it “to see how good it fit.”

The coffin was then stored away in the attic of Coot Hyatt’s home above Bryson City. Upon passing away in 1951 at the age of 87 — 33 years after finishing it — Eddie Conner was laid to rest in his masterpiece.

During the prehistoric Archaic Period, 10,000 to 3,000 Years Before Present, people usually buried their dead in shallow graves in a flexed or semi-flexed position. These were sometimes lined with stone. In regions where bedded limestone occurred stone box graves were constructed for both elite and commoner. Burial items for a 16-20 year old high-status female in the summit of a mound included a short neck painted water bottle, marine shell beads, and turtle shell rattles on each ankle. Accompanying a child in a separate burial “were two marine shell ear pins and copper beads” as well as “preserved fragments of cordage and red and yellow textile.”

A person I know claims there are “no dogs in heaven.” We used to argue about this over the Internet. To my way of thinking, heaven wouldn’t be heaven without dogs. The early Indians and then the Cherokees apparently felt the same way as a favorite dog was sometimes buried with his master so they could make the journey into The Darkening Land together.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

When walking a trail in the Smokies (or Nantahalas or Great Balsams or wherever) here in the southern Blue Ridge, I sometimes pause to observe the landscapes and flora and imagine that I’m in the mountains of northern Japan or eastern China. Botanists are familiar with a concept sometimes known as “The Asian Connection.” In Hollows, Peepers, and Highlanders: An Appalachian Ecology (1994), George Constantz devotes an entire chapter to this topic.  

“Here’s a claim that might surprise you,” Constantz noted. “The forests of eastern Asia and southern Appalachia are so similar that if you were swept from one to the other you would be hard pressed to tell them apart.”

He went on to explain that, “At the genus and species levels this similarity involves more than 50 genera of Appalachian plants that are restricted to eastern North America and eastern Asia and, except in fossil form, are absent in between.”  

The ginseng trade was, of course, established due to this connection, with the North American species being closely related to the various Asian species and supposed to have similar medicinal virtues. And, as Constantz also pointed out, “More than two-thirds of the total orchid genera of temperate North America are related to orchid species in eastern Asia,”   

In The Woods of Time (1957), Rutherford Platt listed other plants that have exact or very closely related genera and species, one residing in eastern Asia and the other in the Appalachians: oak, elm, basswood, beech, hickory, maple, birch, hemlock, persimmon, yellowwood, sassafras, tulip poplar, sumac, bittersweet, columbine, hepatica, Dutchman’s-breeches, dwarf ginseng, skunk cabbage, wild geranium, May apple, partridgeberry, sassafras, silverbell, witch hazel, stewartia, and Hercules-club.  

In A Natural History of Ferns (2004), Robbin Moran noted that, “These two regions share more genera and species than any other two regions on earth.” Of the 120 or so species found on the Japanese island of Hokkaido, 47 of them are found in eastern North America, including maidenhair fern, slivery glade fern, interrupted fern, and marsh fern.     

Why do we have an Asian connection? Here’s the short answer, as I have pieced it together from various sources. When the giant super continent of Pangea was being formed between 300 and 250 million years ago, numerous plant communities were contiguous across a circumpolar landmass that included Asia, Europe, and North America. When Pangea split up some millions of years later, the vestiges of this plant community died out in Europe, western Asia, and western North America, leaving the Asian and Appalachian communities intact but widely separated.   

In turn, these remnant communities survived various climate changes. The most dramatic of these, by far, occurred during the Ice Ages. (The last truly cold interval, the Wisconsin epoch, reached its apogee about 18,000 years ago.) The southern Asian mountains and the southern Appalachians escaped being glaciated because both terrains have north-south conformities that impeded the oncoming ice sheets.

I do not know how far south glaciation extended in Asia, but in the Appalachians there was no true glaciation any farther south than northeastern Pennsylvania, although it was, of course, very cold here in the Blue Ridge and adjacent upland terrains. On the other hand, in the Mississippi River valley, where there were no uplands capable of resisting glaciation, the ice sheets extended much farther south to the outskirts of present day Cincinnati.

Platt explained that this trans-world plant connection wasn’t revealed until after trade was opened with Japan in the mid-19th century and plant hunters like E.H. Wilson of the Arnold Arboretum began to return to America with extensive collections that matched our southern Appalachian flora.

By this time, the European-born glaciologist Louis Agassiz had journeyed to American and announced “the sensational discovery of the Big Ice visit to the United States.” Asa Gray, this country’s first great botanist, “put together the Big Ice story and the discovery of the same flora, separated by half the world, and announced in a sensational address, in 1858, that the Big Ice had arranged the world that way.”

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Identifying ferns is an entirely different process than, say, identifying wildflowers or trees. They don't display flowers, showy fruits, or bark patterns. What they do display are myriad leaf (frond) forms and highly distinctive, if minute, spore cases. Once you learn how to hone in on these features, you're on your way to identifying the 70 or so native species in Western North Carolina.

Perhaps a third of these are so unique in appearance there’s nothing else you can confuse them with. For instance, along the trail that leads down the creek from our house I’ve located, to date, 17 species: Christmas fern, ebony spleenwort, marginal wood fern, rock-cap fern, hay-scented fern, sensitive fern, cinnamon fern, maidenhair fern, New York fern, lady fern, broad beech fern, bracken, rattlesnake grape fern, blunt-lobed grape fern, rusty woodsia, fragile fern, and silvery glade fern. All but the last four are easily recognizable after initial identification.

Perhaps another third of our 70 native species are so rare or inaccessible (sometimes only behind waterfalls) that the average fern seeker probably won’t encounter them. Now comes the fun part. The remaining 20 to 25 species are similar enough in general appearance that their sori (clusters of spore cases usually located on the underside of their fronds) require examination under magnification. A 10-power lens will do just fine. The arrangement, shape, or other features of these clusters will be diagnostic as to species.     

In the workshops I conduct, we first review the fern life cycle and then the language utilized in field guides for fern parts. Afterwards, we visit sites where participants can work on their identification skills, using a non-technical field guide. By the end of the day, everyone is up and running in regard to ferns.

Occasionally, a natural history book will come along that breaks new ground.

Timothy P. Spira’s Wildflowers & Plant Communities: A Naturalist’s Guide to the Carolinas, Virginia, Tennessee, & Georgia (Chapel Hill: UNC Press) introduces readers to the diverse plant communities one can seek out and explore in a systematic fashion. But the concept has never been systematically delineated in a non-technical format for the non-professional plant enthusiast. In a section headed “Plant Community Profiles,” Spira describes in some detail communities found at various elevations in the mountain and adjacent piedmont regions: spruce-fir forests, grassy and heath balds, high-elevation rock outcrops, red oak forests, northern hardwood forests, rich and acidic cove forests, spray cliffs, rocky stream sides, mountain bogs, river bluff and alluvial forests, forest edges, and others.

For example, the high-elevation rock outcrop community is described in pages 119-123 as to distinguishing features, vegetation, seasonal aspects, distribution, dynamics, and conservation aspects. Sources are cited for Suggested Reading about the community. Forty or so Characteristic Plants (trees, shrubs, vines, wildflowers, grasses, sedges, spikemosses, ferns, and lichens) are listed in a table. Six rare species one might encounter in this specific community are enumerated: spreading avens, mountain golden heather, granite dome St. John’s wort, Blue Ridge ragwort, pinkshell azalea, and three-tooth cinquefoil. A set photographs illustrates most of the plants associated with each community. two-hundred and fifty pages are devoted to Species Profiles of each of the hundreds of plants associated with the various communities. Throughout this section, the entries are packed with tidbits of information about plants, including ferns, I had never before encountered.

• I knew hayscented fern as a common species resembling lady fern that often forms dense stands. From Spiria, I learned that “Established plants spread rapidly into open areas as buds at the base of leaves develop into long, creeping, underground stems … Apparently, a dense organic mat of roots, rhizomes, and dead fronds, coupled with a dense canopy of living fronds, inhibits seed germination and seedling establishment of other plants. Chemicals such as coumarin that leach from the fronds or rhizomes of hayscented fern also have an inhibitory effect on seeds and seedlings.”

• Christmas fern fronds, which are evergreen, reorientate themselves to a prostrate position in winter so as to conserve energy during cold months. The warmer ground increases leaf temperatures, promoting photosynthetic activity during relatively mild days.

• Cinnamon ferns are called “living fossils” because the forms we see today are much the same as they were more than 200 million years ago. Individual clumps can be quite old as the fibrous rootstock can persist for years.

• Most plants die after losing more than 15 percent of their water content. Resurrection fern, which curls up during dry weather, can lose up to 97 percent of its water without irreversible harm.       

Most of us don't find it absolutely essential to know the name of every plant and animal we encounter, but it is a quiet joy to know the more common ones on a first-name basis. This has been especially true for me in regard to ferns. They are, after all, our most graceful plant — things of beauty, providing forms that delight the eye and add harmony to our woodland and garden settings.

NOTE: George Ellison will teach a “Native Fern Identification” workshop for the North Carolina Arboretum from 9:30 a.m. until 4:30 p.m. on Saturday, Aug. 11. After an introductory morning session, participants will car pool to habitats along the Blue Ridge Parkway where various species can be found. Walks will be short and easy. Materials required are bag lunch, rain gear, hand lens (any household magnifier will do), and the 2001 second edition of "Fern Finder" (Nature Study Guild Publishers) by Anne and Barbara Hallowell. Copies of Fern Finder will be available for purchase at the North Carolina Arboretum. Each workshop will be limited to 15 participants. For additional information call 828.665.2492.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

The elevations of the southern Blue Ridge province above 4,000 feet can be thought of as a peninsula of northern terrain extending into the southeastern United States, where typical flora and fauna of northeastern and southeastern North America intermingle. Through a combination of processes, the province has evolved into the mature upland landscape we know today. It has become especially diverse in two regards: plant life and distinctive natural areas.

According to B. Eugene Wofford’s Guide to the Vascular Plants of the Blue Ridge (1989), the province presently features upwards of 1,500 vascular plants: trees, shrubs, vines, herbs, sedges, grasses, ferns, horsetails, quillworts, and club-mosses. Many are considered to be showy plants when in flower. There are 130 species of trees, whereas in all of Europe there are only 75 or so species. The primitive non-vascular plants include countless moss and lichen species. And the province is one of the epicenters in the temperate world for mushrooms.   

Before the introduction about 1910 of a non-native fungus that decimated the American chestnut trees, the prototypical forest here was “chestnut-heath;” that is, chestnut was the dominant canopy tree, with an understory mainly made up of shrubs such as rosebay rhododendron, mountain laurel, and other members of the heath family. Before the arrival of the fungus, 30 percent or more of the deciduous forests in the province were made up of chestnut. Almost all of the trees seen in the province now are root sprouts that persist despite the fact that their main trunks have died back to ground level. Within a few years, almost all of these sprouts succumb to the fungus before they can flower and fruit. Today, the prototypical forest of the province is “oak-heath.”

The Blue Ridge is a mosaic of varied habitats, large and small: grassy and heath balds, marshes and bogs, periglacial boulderfields, beech gaps, seepage slopes and cliffs, oak orchards or wind forests, and more. The forest types of the present-day southern Blue Ridge include the spruce-fir or Canadian zone above 5,500 feet. It shares characteristics with evergreen forests in eastern Canada and features the most boreal-like climate in the southeastern United States. The conifers that predominate are red spruce and Fraser fir. The latter is being infested and killed by the balsam wooly adelgid, an introduced aphid pest.

Between 4,000 and 6,000 feet, the northern hardwood zone shares characteristics with the “north woods” of New England. But note that Michael P. Schafale and Alan S. Weakley in their Classification of the Natural Communities of North Carolina (1990) made the point that there are clear differences between the two zones:

The name ‘northern hardwood forest,’ traditionally given to these communities, implies a similarity to hardwood forests of the northern Appalachians. Many tree, herb, and shrub species are shared; however our Northern Hardwood Forest has evolved under different climatic regimes, with a different [geographic] history, and has many plant and animal species endemic to the southern Appalachians. It is clearly not the same natural community type as the forests of the northern United States.  

Yellow birch and American beech are indicator species for this southern version of the northern hardwood forest, which also features hobblebush, yellow buckeye, and mountain maple.

In Great Smoky Mountains National Park: A Natural History Guide (1993), Rose Houk described the forest that sometimes appears below the northern hardwood forest in this manner:

In a place outstanding for diversity of forest types, one type, unique to the southern Appalachians, stand out as the richest of the richest. It is the cove hardwood forest, the forest primeval, one of the most diverse plant communities in the world. The word cove, when used with hardwood forest, refers generally to a sheltered valley, sometimes flat and sometimes steep, below 4,500 feet elevation. Cove soils are rich and deep.      

The largest and most famous of the cove hardwood forests is Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest near Robbinsville, North Carolina, just south of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Located on U.S. Forest Service lands, the 3,840-acre tract is an amazing site. In A Directory of North Carolina’s Natural Areas (1987), Charles E. Roe provided this description:

Massive Canadian hemlocks dominate the forest along the stream flats … but farther upstream give way to mixed hardwoods … Hemlocks measure up to 70 inches in diameter, tulip poplars 76 inches, and oaks 72 inches. Rhododendrons prevail in the forest understory on the flats and ravine bottoms as well as on the ridge top heath balds or ‘slicks.’ Green carpets of mosses and liverworts cover boulders, old logs, banks and tree bases in the damp, shaded environments … This classic primeval forest is an exceptional research and recreational source.

Below 3,000 feet, various pine, oak, and hickory species predominate. This type of “pine-oak-hickory” habitat — often made up of Virginia pine, pitch pine, or Table Mountain pine, red oak, chestnut oak, and pignut hickory — can also appear in higher elevations along exposed slopes and ridges that are relatively dry.

Along streams in the lowest elevations and on moist mountainsides up to 4,000 feet, eastern hemlocks form forests called “hemlock ravines.” Rosebay rhododendron and other shrubs sometimes form a dense under story. The eastern hemlock along with the endemic Carolina hemlock are both being infested and killed by the hemlock wooly adelgid, another introduced aphid pest.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

I’ve always been interested in the processes by which we discover things. Being a naturalist, I’m most interested in the processes by which entities like birds, plants, special places, etc., are located.

I’m a firm believer that preparation generally pays off. That is, if you study up on something — say a bird — and anticipate where you might locate it, your chances are considerably enhanced that you will encounter it. Last year, for instance, I spotted my first-ever Swainson’s warbler in this manner.

Wanting very much to see one, I read the literature regarding the bird’s range distribution. The nearest place where they have commonly been encountered in North America during the breeding season is the headwaters region of the Chattooga River. That was handy enough. Before driving down the Bull Pen Road southeast of Highlands, I studied the bird’s image in several field guides and listened to its call notes and song on tapes.

My first stop was at a pullover above the old Iron Bridge that overlooked a rhododendron thicket, their preferred habitat in the Southern Applachians. After about 45 seconds, I heard a bird singing. Could it be? Yep, it could. I trained my binoculars on the singing bird and there was a Swainson’s warbler, considered by many to one of the most elusive and reclusive birds.

I also think one can almost “will” things into existence. That is, if you want to find something badly enough, you probably can. I have located many very rare plants by putting on my blinders and looking for and thinking about nothing else. Sometimes it takes months, but I’ve never come up empty-handed. If it’s out there, I believe you can locate it if you really and truly want to do so.

And then there is what I think of as my “blunder method.” That is, you simply go out and see what you happen to stumble upon my pure blind luck. Sort of like the proverbial blind pig that stumbles upon an ear of corn now and again. I employed this method last week while camping at the Evins State Park just off the western edge of the Cumberland Plateau northwest of Smithville, Tenn.

On Thursday morning I picked a trail and went out with no particular objective in mind except to observe the extensive stands of Goldie’s and glade ferns reputed to be distributed along the first half mile or so of the trail. After passing through the ferns, I followed the trail down a steep ravine to Center Hill Lake.  

It started to get hot and buggy. I was thirsty and hadn’t brought any water. This is the point at which one either returns to the campsite or pushes on to see just what can be blundered upon. I pushed on and somehow got off the established trail. Not wanting to backtrack, I decided to hump it up the ridge in the general direction of where I’d parked my truck. The ridge slope was really steep; so much so, that I had to stop and rest every few minutes.  

“Well now,” I thought to myself, “this is going to be really good. No telling what I’ll find having gotten lost and ending up climbing the side of a mountain.”

Sure enough, just as I reached a road near my truck, I saw chestnut husks littering the ground. Looking up, there in full bloom was an American chestnut tree. I examined the leaves to make sure it wasn’t one of the disease-resistant foreign species that might have become naturalized at the park. Nope, it was the genuine article.

I have seen American chestnut trees flowering and fruiting at several places here in Smokies region, most notably near Wayah Bald above Franklin. But all of those were small and obviously already blighted by the fungus first introduced to America about 1910 in New York City.

This tree showed absolutely no signs of blight. The bark was firm without any of the fissures that indicate infestation. The leaves were bright and glossy. And it was covered with snowy-cream, spike-like flowers.

Later on, I roughly measured the tree. At breast height, it was nearly 60 inches in circumference and about 18 inches in diameter. I’d estimate it stood over 50 feet in height, and it displayed a nice wide canopy spread in spite of being crowed by several adjacent trees. What a sight!   

Carl Halfacre, the manager of Evins State Park, was just as excited as I was to learn about such a tree on the park’s grounds. Along with cerulean warblers recently discovered breeding there, this wonderful tree will no doubt become one of the park’s claims to fame. Many people would travel a goodly distance just to see a healthy American chestnut in full flower.

I did, however, fail to mention to Ranger Halfacre that I’d been employing my “blunder method” of exploration to make the discovery.

Editor’s note: This Back Then column by George Ellison was first published in July 2003.

George Ellison wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..