“How many thousand-thousand of untold white ash trees are the respected companions of our doorways, kindliest trees in the clearing beyond the cabin? No one can say. But this is a tree whose grave and lofty character makes it a lifelong friend. White ash has no easy, pretty charms like dogwood and redbud; it makes no over-dramatic gestures like weeping willow and Lombardy poplar. It has never been seen through sentimental eyes, like the elm and the white birch. Strong, tall, cleanly, benignant, the ash tree with self-respecting surety waits, until you have sufficiently admired all the more obvious beauties of the forest, for you to discover at last its unadorned greatness.”

— Donald Culross Peattie, A Natural History of Trees

It’s generally overlooked, but I think ash is a pretty tree, especially when it’s fruiting. The winged seeds that appear in dense clusters on the branches below the leaves are called samaras (SAM-a-ras).

Here in Western North Carolina there are three ash species: white ash (Fraxinus americana), green ash (F. pennsylvanica), and pumpkin ash (F. profunda). White ash — and its variant forms — is by far the most common species. The undersides of the leaves are whitish.  

Like a maple seed — which is also winged — ash seeds catch the wind as they fall. The wing provides aerodynamic lift that slows the rate of fall and spins the wing around the seed’s fruiting head like a propeller. Having taken flight in a spiral descent, the seed is deposited away from the shadow of the parent tree, where it stands a better chance of flourishing on its own.

Ash trees are also famous for providing aerodynamic lift of another sort. When Babe Ruth hit his 60th home run, he did it with a bat made from white ash. Ditto Roger Maris when he hit his asterisk-marked 61st homer. Ditto Hank Aaron when he poleaxed number 755. Until the aluminum bats now favored in the college ranks are approved for use in the major leagues, white ash will remain the bat of choice.

Like hickory, ash wood is strong, but it’s lighter and provides greater shock resistance. It’s the wood of choice for use in most sporting equipment and many tools: bats, oars, paddles, rackets, bowling alleys, shovels, hoes, rakes, etc.

Some ash trees have bisexual flowers, but most are either separate male or female trees, like holly and ginko. Since some lazy folks don’t like to clean up ash seeds in the fall, male cultivars have been developed that entirely eliminate the problem (these include “Autumn Purple” and “Rosehill”).  Personally, I’d rather have a seed-littered yard with contented male and female ash trees than a pristine yard full of lonely males.

Of a summer afternoon when the wind begins moving in the trees, the whitish gray undersides of the ash leaves are slowly exposed. From a distance, they seem to be saying, “Rain is coming.” Before long the first drops begin to fall.  

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..

ELDERBERRY WINE

There’s a fly in the window

A dog in the yard

And a year since I saw you …

Feeling fine on elderberry wine.

Those were the days

We’d lay in the haze

Forget depressive times

Round a tree in the summer

A fire in the fall …

The bottle went round …

Passed on from hand to hand …

— excerpted from lyrics by Elton John

Those who’ve participated in my natural history workshops know that I’m not a very good source for information regarding either edible plants or propagation. For the most part, I obtain vegetables at the grocery store or, in season, from our gardens. Propagation I mostly leave up to my wife. But there are exceptions.

One flowering wild plant that always gets me to thinking with my stomach is common elderberry (Sambucus canadensis), which is just now coming into bloom in the lower elevations throughout Western North Carolina. You probably know it already; if not, look for white flat-topped loose clusters of flowers up to six inches or more broad that appear on a shrub 3- to 10-feet tall.

The flowering heads resemble several of the shrubs in the Viburnum genus, but elderberry has compound leaves that are divided so as to display five to eleven Leaflets. Vibrunum leaves aren’t divided.

Growing naturally or planted in full sun in moist soil (alongside seeps, ditches, or streams), the shrub makes a nice appearance. I have seen it on display in the zigs and zags of a rail fence. It catches the eye when placed in a woodland border

Various ornamental varieties have been developed in recent years. These display various leaf colors and patterns, as well as fancy names like “Aurea” and “Argentomarginata,” which features white-edged leaves. To my way of thinking, however, our plain old native homegrown elderberry species does just fine. It’s showy enough.  

In the fall, the plant bears deep purple or black fruits that sometimes weigh their branches to the ground. Many use them for making sweet breads or jam, but, in my experience, they are very irregular to taste when eaten directly off the shrub. Some fruits on a given plant can be delightfully tasty while those on an adjacent branch will be insipid.

Elderberry blossoms, however, never let you down. The entire flowering head fried up in a fritter batter makes a crunchy summertime treat that more than repays the effort of harvesting and preparation.

American Indians were (and are) the real experts on using plants as economical food sources. If a plant wasn’t worth their time, they didn’t fool with it. In Native Harvests: Recipes and Botanicals of the American Indian (Vintage Books, 1979), E. Barrie Kavasch provided the following recipe for Elder Blossom Fritters:

“Prepare a light batter, beating together 2 cups fine white cornmeal, 1 lightly beaten egg, 1 cup water, and 1 tablespoon of maple syrup. Heat 1/4 cup corn oil on a griddle and drop batter by large tablespoons onto it, immediately placing 1 elder-blossom flower-cluster in the center of each raw fritter and pressing lightly into the batter. Fry for 3 to 5 minutes, or until golden. Flip and fry for 3 minutes on the other side.  Drain on brown paper. Serve hot, sprinkled with additional loose blossoms and maple sugar. (This amount of batter is sufficient for preparing 16 flower clusters.)”

My wife, Elizabeth, makes a similar batter, substituting fine white flour for the cornmeal and beer for the water. She sometimes uses daylily or squash blossoms in place of the elderberry clusters.

I almost forgot to mention yet another positive attribute of this plant. I wonder who made the elderberry wine that inspired Elton John?

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..

Rural residents know the yellow-billed cuckoo as the “rain crow” or “storm crow” because its guttural “ka-ka-kow-kow-kowlp-kowlp-kowlp” seems to be sounded just prior to a late evening thunderstorm. (The distinctive “kowlp-kowlp-kowlp” portion of the call sounds something like a small dog barking.) The cuckoos on our property often sound a single “kowlp” note rather than the full vocalization.

Most scientific observers have dismissed the association of yellow-billed cuckoos and imminent rainfall, but the authors of Birds of the Carolinas (UNC Press, 1980) do note: “There may be some basis for this bit of folklore, because cuckoos apparently adjust the timing of their nesting effort to the temporary local abundance of suitable prey, which in many instances coincides with periods of rainfall.”

Or it might be that since they tend to call more on hot humid days, the rain crows are most often heard when rainfall would occur anyway. In this regard, ornithologist and artist George Miksch Sutton observed that the bird doesn’t call only when it’s about to rain or is raining. His theory was that when a summer storm is imminent people become apprehensive and pay closer attention to sounds; thereby, they tend to hear cuckoos calling at a certain time and associate the bird with specific weather conditions.

A second cuckoo species that nests here in the mountains, mostly in the upper elevations, is called the black-billed cuckoo because it lacks the yellow lower mandible of its cousin. I’ve never seen a black-billed cuckoo, but I have heard its rythmic “cu-cu-cu cu-cu-cu cu-cu-cu” calls on several occasions, most notably in the region of Blue Valley near Highlands, the Rainbow Springs section of the Nantahala River, and on the Balsam Mountain spur road of the Blue Ridge Parkway above Cherokee.

Both species winter in South America. They arrive in our region during the last week in April and usually depart by late October.

If you see a yellow-billed cuckoo in flight, the most distinctive feature will be a double row of large white spots beneath the tail. The reddish flash of wing against the brownish body is also diagnostic. The sight of the bird in flight or perched on a limb staring at you is one that’s worth pursuing. As Henry David Thoreau observed, “The cuckoo is a very neat, slender, and graceful bird. It belongs to the nobility of birds. It is elegant.”                  

There are certain sounds that haunt the southern highlands. Wind sighing in the spruce-fir. The ongoing ever-changing yet eternally-the-same murmurs of a creek. A little less than a century ago one could still hear from time to time the blood curdling howls and screams of timber wolves and panthers. And then there are the resonate “kowlps” of the yellow-billed cuckoo. No bird is more secretive. Seldom leaving the shrouding foliage, the cuckoo sits motionless.  When it does move, it creeps about with furtive restraint. Seeing one is possible but unlikely. For the most part, this is a bird that you hear … a “voice” in the distance. In my experience, it is a “voice” heard just before raindrops begin to patter softly on the tin roof of my house.

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..

Serpents are among the world’s most storied creatures. We are at once attracted to and repelled by them. Many view them as the “personification” of evil.

The ancient Cherokees portrayed the close relationship of good and evil in several of their myths. One of these related the legend of the Mythic Hawk, which represented the Upper World, and the Uktena, which represented the Under World. The Uktena was a monster 30-feet long and as large around as a tree trunk, with horns on its head and a diamond-like crest in its forehead. The light that blazed from this crest attracted humans to sure death like moths to a flame. On the other hand, by evoking the powers of the Upper World, the Cherokees could slay the monster and extract the crest, thereby obtaining visionary powers that enabled the tribe to balance good and evil.

The serpent that inspired the Uktena myth was, of course, the timber rattler. Our other poisonous snake here in the southern mountains is the copperhead. Cottonmouth moccasins are reported, but that species is, in fact, found no farther inland than about the fall line. Those reporting what they suppose are cottonmouths here are actually encountering northern water snakes, a species that is aggressive in and around water but not poisonous.

Insofar as poisonous snakes go, the rattler and the copperhead are sufficient. Nothing else quite focuses your attention and sets all your nerves on end as suddenly encountering a rattler. My family remembers the time when I set the world record for the standing broad jump. We were camping in the remote Rainbow Springs marsh in the Nantahala Mountains. To make a campfire so as to prepare breakfast, I pulled a limb out of some underbrush that had a timber rattler on the other end approaching 50 inches in length. To this day, I recall the serpent’s powerfully muscular near-black body, which showed just the slightest bit of yellow, and the gleaming totally fearless eyes. Coiled with tail buzzing an alarm, it was in every sense the wildest and most beautiful creature I’ve ever encountered. It was also the most ominous.

The great 20th century naturalist, Alexander Skutch, an American, lived most of his life in Costa Rica, studying birds and recording their life histories. An otherwise gentle soul, Skutch detested any human or wild animal that preyed on birds or their eggs. He made these observations in A Naturalist on a Tropical Farm (Univ. of California Press, 1980):

“Why have serpents been deified by some races and regarded as the embodiment of evil by others? … Is it because a snake has so few attributes of animality that it hardly seems to be animal, but rather a creature of unique category? … It is the only large, widespread terrestrial animal that moves without limbs. It has no evident ears and cannot close its lidless eyes. Its only sound is a hiss, and, although sometimes gregarious … it is never really social. With few exceptions, including certain pythons, it is devoid of parental solicitude, never caring for its young ... The serpent is stark predation, the predatory existence in its baldest, least mitigated form. It might be characterized as an elongated, distensible stomach, with the minimum of accessories needed to fill and propagate this maw—not even teeth that can tear its food … It reveals the depths to which evolution can sink when it takes the downward path and strips animals to the irreducible minimum able to perpetuate a predatory life in its naked horror. The contemplation of such an existence has a horrid fascination for the human mind and distresses a sensitive spirit.”

I don’t agree with either the essence of the Cherokee legend or with Skutch’s observations. Serpents are a life form that epitomizes terrestrial grace. Their body patterns — rings, stripes, hourglasses, spots, etc. — are often as intricate as fine jewelry. They represent a modality of intentness beyond ours. If a serpent strikes, he is fulfilling not a premeditated obligation but a space in his existence that you entered. He does not mind that you exist. He would not mind if you did not exist. He simply does not care one way or another. But he isn’t evil.

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..

Mention magnolias and images of plantations and mint juleps come to mind. But here in Western North Carolina we have an array of magnolia species that thrive in an upland hardwoods setting. These trees are most noticeable, of course, in spring or early summer when they produce the showy flowers that have made them famous, but they lend a graceful touch to our landscape year round.

In the southern highlands from southwestern Virginia into north Georgia there are seven species belonging to the Magnolia family. The very common tree we call “tulip popular” actually belongs to this family but is classified in a separate genus from the “magnolias” proper. Two evergreen species introduced from more southern climes that might rarely appear around old home sites in the mountains are the “sweet bay” (Magnolia virginiana) and the “southern” or “bull bay” (M. grandiflora).

A species that might rarely appear in WNC is the “big leaf” (M. macrophylla). A 1981 publication issued by the University Botanical Gardens in Asheville reported it to be “rare in the mountains, its range being sparse and spotty in range. A stand along the French Broad River near Asheville is reported.” More recent surveys locate the species in east Tennessee, north Georgia, and the piedmont region of North Carolina, but do not report it from Western North Carolina per se.

So, that leaves us with three native species that we are likely to encounter while tramping around in rich woods and coves: “cucumber tree” (M. acuminata), “umbrella magnolia” (M. tripetala), and “Fraser’s magnolia” (M. fraseri). All have deciduous leaves and bloom in April and May.

They are readily distinguished by leaf shape. Fraser’s has prominent eared lobes at the base of the leaf where it joins the stem. The other two have leaves that join at the stem without lobes. The umbrella species tapers rather sharply to the stem, while the cucumber species leaf is more oval in appearance as it joins the stem.

The cucumber tree is so-named because of the clasping greenish-yellow petals it produces that tend to blend with the leaf and stem colors. It fruits — often in exotic asymmetrical forms — in August and September.

Umbrella magnolia came by its name because of the broadly elliptical 18- to 20-inch leaves clustered near the ends of its branches. It fruits into October and is therefore the woodland species you’re most likely to observe during the fall color season.

Fraser’s magnolia is named for the Scottish plant hunter, John Fraser, who also discovered Fraser fir and purple rhododendron. It is an upland tree that rarely strays out of the highlands region and is therefore also called the “mountain magnolia.” It produces fruit from late July into early September.

Magnolia cones are attractive scarlet to rust-brown aggregates composed of numerous pod or pocket-like follicles, each containing one or two crimson seeds the color of nail polish. When the cones reach the stage whereby seeds are ejected from the fruit pockets, a curious scenario ensues.

Instead of falling immediately to the ground, these seeds remain suspended in the air attached to slender, almost invisible threads. These are called “funicular outgrowths” in botanical manuals. (“Funicular” means anything operated with strands.) Look closely at these with a pocket lens and you’ll find they are rubbery in consistency and vary in length. Indeed, as the seeds come out of the follicles they do so in a spiderman fashion, with the threads elongating according to the weight of each seed.

If you take a cone that is just beginning to exude seeds and place it upright on a sunny windowsill, this process can be speeded up and readily observed.  Some will hang on threads up to nearly three inches in length before the link is finally severed. And some seeds remain suspended for many days, if not weeks, before falling.

Why? The most obvious explanation would seem to be that this tree has adapted itself to cater to animal dispersers capable of distributing seeds at a considerable distance from the parent. Birds are the obvious choice. And they can best locate the bright red seeds dangling in the air rather than on the ground.

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..

More than a few readers of this column collect books associated with the Smokies region. A friend who spends most of his waking hours either fishing the backcountry trout waters in the Smokies or plotting ways to do so brought what he called “an interesting item” by my office. He had obtained at local auction the first edition of a softbound, 142-page volume titled Guide to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park (Asheville: Inland Press, 1933). Having worked in the park himself some years ago, he has an ongoing interest in its history.

I’d spotted the book in various library collections through the years, but had never had an opportunity to peruse one at leisure. It makes for some interesting reading; indeed, both as a historical artifact and as an information source, it deserves to be reprinted.

According to the title page, George W. McCoy and George Masa compiled the “Guide.” McCoy was born in Dillsboro. He attended the University of North Carolina, 1919-1922, and the University of Chicago, 1926-1928, and was editor of the Asheville Citizen-Times from 1955 to 1961.

Masa was the noted Japanese photographer who helped promote the formation of a national park in the Smokies via photographs published in the national press during the 1920s and early 1930s. He was the subject of a documentary, “The Mystery of George Masa,” by Paul Bonesteel.

Masa’s photo studio was located in Asheville, where he first worked at the Grove Park Inn while teaching himself photography. But he was reputed to spend more of his time in the Smokies than in his studio. In recent years, he has been recognized as a great photographer, renowned for his patience in waiting hours, even days, for just the right light.

The Guide my friend had lucked into contains numerous photos by Masa depicting various scenic spots on both sides of the park, as well as a number of historical photographs that the compilers were able to obtain permission to reproduce.

A Masa study captioned “Sunlight on bed of giant ferns on Big Creek” is a beautiful study of light effects, while another captioned “Camping at Three Forks in the Great Smokies” depicts an idyllic tent camp in the backcountry.

The text consists of a number of motor tours and guides to hiking trails in the Smokies region. It’s full of bits of information such as the fact that, “Andrews Bald is believed to have been named for Anders Thompson, one of the first white men to hunt and camp there.” Or that the name of the vast and infamous heath thicket named Huggins’ Hell in Hazel Creek, which contains nearly 500 acres of tangled rhododendron and laurel, came about, because “Irving Huggins, who lived in the Hazel Creek section, was herding cattle on Siler’s Bald one day and wanted to reach another knob.  He thought he could cross the intervening ‘slick’ but was trapped there for a number of days before he could find his way out.”

Also included are sections devoted to hunting and fishing, plants and flowering seasons, Cherokee mythology, geology, native mountaineer and Cherokee culture and more. Keep your eyes peeled and maybe, like my friend, you’ll be fortunate enough to happen upon a copy of this little gem.

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..

Have you ever seen a mountain lion here in the Smokies region? I haven’t. In fact, the only one I’ve ever viewed outside of a zoo was somewhere near Crystal River, Fla., back in the early 1990s. It bounded out of the scrub in front of my truck and passed quickly across the highway. Even now, I can vividly recall the combined grace and power of that animal.

I frequently hear from people who have spotted a mountain lion in Western North Carolina. Or at least they think that’s what they saw. I’d guess that about 90 percent of these sightings are of something else.  But the other 10 percent seem to be pretty reliable.

It’s my supposition that any mountain lions living in this region today aren’t descendents of the genetic stock that were originally here. That is, I think they are ones that have wandered into the eastern mountains from Florida or the western states; or, more likely, that they are ones that were trapped elsewhere and deliberately released. Whatever the source, I’m reasonably certain that we have mountain lions in the Smokies region.

The Family Felidae contains a number of species, including jaguars, ocelots, mountain lions, bobcats, lynxes, and domestic cats. Bobcats are very common in the Smokies region, but they are very secretive and are seldom seen.

Mountain lions were common enough well into the 19th century throughout North Carolina. According to Donald W. Linzey’s notes in Mammals of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park (1995), the last mountain lion killed in the Great Smokies was back in the early winter of 1920: “Tom Sparks was said to have been attacked by a panther while herding sheep on Spence Field. He managed to inflict a deep wound in its left shoulder. Several months late, W. Orr killed a panther near what is now Fontana Village and found that its left shoulder blade was cut in two. This was generally believed to be the same cat Mr. Sparks had wounded.

Nevertheless, according to Linzey, there were 12 reported sightings between 1908 and 1965 and 31 sightings for the years 1966-1976. He doesn’t provide figures since that date, but my recent discussions with park service biologists would lead me to believe that sightings have increased in the Smokies in recent years, particularly in the Clingmans Dome area. Also, several National Park Service rangers have told me that they have spotted mountain lions while patrolling the Blue Ridge Parkway.  Even if only 10 percent of these reports are valid, that still allows for a relatively significant mountain lion population in the Smokes region.

Editor’s note: A longer version of this column by George Ellison first appeared in The Smoky Mountain News in May 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..

As part of this coming weekend’s third annual Horace Kephart Day, a group of 20 or so participants will visit Kephart’s cabin site on Hazel Creek, where he resided from 1904-1907. In that regard, I thought it would be appropriate to revisit a Back Then column written in 2004, when his Our Southern Highlanders (1913) was being read throughout Western North Carolina as part of the “Together We Read” program.

Located two miles from Medlin, a tiny settlement situated where the Sugar Fork enters Hazel Creek about 10 miles from its confluence with the Little Tennessee River (now inundated, in part, by Lake Fontana), this remote cabin on the Little Fork became the vantage point from which Kephart studied the land and its people. It was a two-room structure, half of logs and half of rough planking, perhaps with two levels constructed at different times. He refurbished the dwelling, adding his few belongings once they were hauled up in a wagon.

One of the most revealing sources in regard to Kephart’s three years at the cabin is an interview conducted by F.A. Behymer published in the St. Louis Post Dispatch (12/12/26) under the heading “Horace Kephart, Driven from Library by Broken Health, Reborn in Woods.” Behymer, who apparently knew Kephart from his days as a librarian in St. Louis, visited Kephart in his office just off the town square in Bryson City.

“‘Seldom during those three years as a forest exile,’ Kephart said, ‘did I feel lonesome in the daytime; but when supper would be over and black night closed in on my hermitage, and the owls began calling all the blue devils of the woods, one needed some indoor occupation to keep him in good cheer.’

“It was the old life calling, the life of books that he had left,” Behymer noted. “For such a man there could be a beginning again but the old life could not be entirely disowned …. Out of the thousands of books that he had intimately known [as a librarian] there were only a few he could carry with him into the solitudes. He selected them with care, 20 of them. Here is the list in the order in which they stood on a shelf on his soap-box cupboard:

an English dictionary; Roget’s Thesaurus; his sister’s Bible; Shakespeare; Burns’ Poems; Dante (in Italian); Goethe’s Faust; Poe’s Tales;  Stevenson’s Kidnapped, David Balfour and The Merry Men; Fisher’s Universal History; Nessmuk’s [i.e., George Washington Sears] Woodcraft; Frazer’s Minerals; Jordan’s Vertebrate Animals; Wright’s Birdcraft; Matthews’ American Wild Flowers; Keeler’s Our Native Trees; and Lounsberry’s Southern Wild Flowers and Trees. The old man had become a new man, but the new man was a man of books … and when the owls began calling, it was in his books that he found comfort. He took up writing, as it was inevitable that he would, setting down by night his experiences of the day.”

Kephart became preoccupied with the simple and direct challenge of living efficiently in this new environment.  Despite his extensive experiences in the outdoors dating back to childhood, he found that he now “had to make shift in a different way, and fashion many appliances from the materials found on the spot. The forest itself was not only my hunting-ground but my workshop and my garden ...  I gathered, cooked, and ate (with certain qualms, be it confessed, but never with serious mishap) a great variety of wild plants that country folk in general do not know to be edible. I learned better ways of dressing and keeping game and fish, and worked out odd makeshifts in cooking with rude utensils, or with none at all. I tested the fuel values and other qualities of many kinds of wood and bark, made leather and rawhide from game that fell to my rifle, and became more or less adept in other backwood handicrafts, seeking not novelties but practical results.”

These “practical results” he published in the popular outdoor magazines of the day. By 1906, he had compiled enough material to put together the first edition of The Book of Camping and Woodcraft, a storehouse of practical advice, lore, anecdote, and adventure that in expanded editions re-titled Camping and Woodcraft became the standard work in its field, supremely applicable as is no other book in regard to basic techniques and philosophy.

After leaving Hazel Creek in 1907, Kephart considered returning there when he came back to the Smokies in 1910. Because the Ritter Lumber Company had begun extensive operations up the entire watershed the previous year, he decided to locate in Bryson City instead.  

But those three years in the cabin on the Little Fork stimulated Kephart’s imagination and writing. It was the place where he sorted out his life and laid the foundation for what became a substantial literary and environmental legacy. When he observed toward the end of his life that, “I owe my life to these mountains,” he no doubt had the Little Fork of the Sugar Fork of Hazel Creek years in mind.

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 past Friday (April 15) I attended the dedication ceremony for the new Oconaluftee Visitor Center on the North Carolina side of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park near Cherokee. I wouldn’t normally enjoy a program made up of eight or so speeches, but as this one proceeded I found myself smiling.

I was pleased that the North Carolina side of GSMNP finally has a real visitor center. I was pleased that the directors, board members, and general membership of the Great Smoky Mountains Association and Friends of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park received due recognition in regard to raising private funding that totaled $3 million. And I was pleased that it was such a nice friendly-looking building — the sort of public facility you’d enjoy visiting with your mother or your children or by yourself.

I tried after the dedication to tour the exhibit area. But I couldn’t get into it ... too many people I knew … too many distractions. So I left and came back Sunday afternoon. I don’t know anything about the nitty-gritty of designing buildings or planning exhibits. I do love museums of almost any sort, ranging from the grand old Smithsonian in the nation’s capital to the delightful county museum housed in a basement in Murphy. I’ve probably been through the nearby Museum of the Cherokee Indian at least 20 times, with groups or on my own. Here then are some random impressions of the new OVC.

Many traditional museum exhibits are driven by printed sources; that is, the designers read the significant books about a given event or place and use that information to present (in enclosed wall or glass-topped table displays) a chronological account based on — and quoting extensively from — those sources.

The new OVC exhibits are refreshingly free of that semi-academic approach. The only authors allowed even a sentence or two are Francis Asbury, Horace Kephart, Paul Fink and John Parris. (James Mooney, author of the monumental Myths of the Cherokees published in 1900, probably did deserve a word.) Instead, the new OVC exhibit is thematic — depicting via “Mountain Voices” how lands within and related to the park have been used through time by various peoples in various ways — as they sought to establish homelands suitable to their needs. As such, it necessarily tells the story of the ongoing relationship between the Cherokees, the white settlers, and their respective descendents.

Displays are devoted to Cherokee lore, Trail of Tears, Civil War, logging, moonshine, household and farm implements, family relationships, trails and roads, mills, CCC camps, natural history and more. The sounds of voices and music are literally in the air, not as white noise but as an integral part of the presentation. It is, in fact, more of an active “presentation” than static “display.”  

The planners clearly strived for diversity in regard to presentation. Layers of often-interactive information are presented via video, print, artwork, maps, photos and voice recordings. Some exhibits, for instance, are designed as hands-on oversized notebooks, while others roll or spin with illustrated sequences. There are free-standing information boards and several video screens along with traditional enclosed wall displays. I can’t pretend to have absorbed a very high percentage of the overall content. After about an hour of looking my brain was saturated.   

The primary exhibit area consists of a round kiosk inside a large room. Foot traffic flows clockwise and counterclockwise around the outside and within the kiosk. There is a chronological component, but the individual visitor isn’t locked into a predetermined route. I liked that aspect. I like to ramble around, and I noticed that not a few of my fellow visitors had chosen to wander with me backwards in time from 2011 AD to circa 1000 AD.

Many reading this will remember the oversized (perhaps 4-by-10 feet) raised relief map of the GSMNP that resided on a table in the old OVC. It looked like it had been constructed with mud overlaid with dull green enamel paint. That monstrosity has been replaced in the new OVC by a terrific raised relief map that depicts the topography of the park and adjacent areas in considerable detail.

Aside from perhaps adding a quote from Mooney, I have one other suggestion. Whenever I conduct natural history workshops for the Smoky Mountain Field School, participants are always curious about where the GSMNP is situated in regard to the Appalachians as a whole. It might be useful if a free-standing information exhibit placed near the new map delineated the geographic location of GSMNP as one of the numerous mountain ranges on the western front of the Southern Blue Ridge Province in the Southern Appalachians.  

The only notes I made consist of a list of distinctive first names belonging to various individuals quoted or cited in the exhibit: Pettybone, Runaway, Fonzie, Milas, Dulcie, Aden and others. Runaway’s last name was Swimmer. Did he runaway from home or from being transported to Oklahoma?

As I was leaving the exhibit area, I spotted a quote by someone named Winifred. Bending over for a closer look, I saw that it had been spoken by my now deceased friend Winifred Cagle, who grew up on Toms Branch, a tributary of Deep Creek north of Bryson City within what became GSMNP. When I knew him, Winifred lived just outside the park on East Deep Creek. He was very proud of his old home place in the Smokies. And he was a great supporter, in his quiet manner, of the park.

The quote, which I didn’t have to write down, concerns a special salve his mother made that was so good it would cure leprosy, if need be. “It would, in fact,” Winifred advised me on several occasions when we were visiting his old homesite, “cure most anything but a broken heart.”

Winifred spoke in a high-pitched lyrical voice, almost  a stammer, that was memorable. Mark Cathey, the renowned fly fisherman who also grew up on Deep Creek, reportedly spoke the same way. I can hear Winifred now. He would be tickled pink to know his mother’s salve has been memorialized in the new visitor center.

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..

Flowing water was the primary agent that sculpted the mountains as we know them today. Long before the first Europeans arrived, the ancient Cherokees had developed ceremonials focused on the spiritual power of running water. One of the prized sites for such purification ceremonies was a waterfall. It was there that they could hear a river — which they identified as “the Long Man” — speaking to them in the clear voice of the raging current.  

Waterfalls still speak to us today. Along with scenic vistas and fall colors, they are one of the most sought-after natural attractions in the southern mountains. They are dynamic places that seem to encourage contemplation. Whenever I’m conducting a natural history workshop that encounters a waterfall, I ask participants to contemplate why they are so appealing. Invariably, such qualities as constant motion, soothing sound, spiritual tranquility, natural beauty and harmony of sight and sound are mentioned.

I suspect there are at least 25 waterfall guidebooks for this general region: Western North Carolina, East Tennessee, northwestern South Carolina, and north Georgia. Most waterfalls of any significance have been described in some fashion. Do we need another one? The answer is “Yes, we do, if it’s a good one like Jim Parham’s recently published Waterfall Hikes of North Georgia (Milestone Press; 828.488.6601; www.milestonepress.com).

Parham’s book isn’t just good. In regard to basic content — driving and hiking directions, general and specific maps, elevation profiles and trailhead GPS coordinates, and waterfall photos — it’s really good. And in regard to trail-waterfall descriptions, it’s excellent. The prose is crisp and lively. Parham has an eye for details and a gift for describing what he sees in a concise manner. He also has a nice sense of the tensions that exist where the natural world and recent human activities intersect along old rail beds, at former CCC camps, and similar locations.       

Parham grew up in Rome, Ga., and graduated from Berry College. He has hiked, paddled, and biked all over the world. He became a guidebook author in 1992. That year the first of his six-volume Off The Beaten Track mountain bike guide series was published by Milestone Press, which he and his wife, Mary Ellen Hammond, own and operate in Swain County.

When asked, Parham advised me that “his favorite hike” is the Raven Cliffs Trail. That section in his book consists of five pages, which contain a general destination map; a specific trail map; a chart (distance, elevation changes, hiking times, etc.); eight photos of falls encountered along three creeks; and a trail-waterfall description from which the following is excerpted:

“Raven Cliffs Falls is at the head of a waterfall-rich drainage area comprising Dodd Creek, Davis Creek, Bear Den Creek, and Little Low Gap Branch. These all flow down out of the Raven Cliffs and Mark Trail Wilderness Areas to form Dukes Creek. On Dodd Creek alone there are at least six waterfalls within a little over three miles. There are three more on Davis Creek, and Dukes Creek has a few as well. It’s a great place to go for a day hike. With numerous campsites along the trail and elsewhere in the area, it can also make a nice overnight excursion ... Once you see it, there’s no mistaking Raven Cliffs Falls. Dropping 170 feet over, under, and through a breach in the rock face, it’s one of a kind. The most easily seen part is also the most dramatic. Far back in a six-foot wide crack, the water makes a 40-foot freefall plunge into a dark green pool. This magical grotto is guarded above and below by rocks and water … Farther up and about halfway to the cliffs is the second falls. Here the river plunges 15 feet, creating a horsetail, then slips another 15 feet down a long slide. You don’t have to hike too much farther to reach the third falls, and at this point many people think they’ve reached Raven Cliffs Falls. It’s an easy mistake to make, since you’re now in an area of cliffs, high above a 30-foot waterfall that careens and then heads steeply up the hill beside it to a cleft in the cliff where the most dramatic part of the waterfall may be seen. The top is still a long way up, hidden between more rock clefts. You can see where people have scaled their way up trying to reach the top of the falls via a series of sketchy-looking, handover-hand, pull-yourself-up trails. Don’t be tempted to try it. The view of the falls really does not get any better than the one from the base of the cleft. Enjoy it, then head back the way you came.”

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..

As I begin writing this it’s midnight, April 4-5, 2011. When insomnia strikes I always look for something to read. At times I just rummage around in various books rereading and studying familiar passages. Some were encountered in recent years — others have been with me for the better part of a lifetime. Having nothing better to do, I’ll share several  them with you.

Long ago a very good teacher remarked: “You can tell a book by its opening lines.” The novelist-philosopher Walker Percy remarked in an interview that the opening of A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960), the post-apocalyptic science fiction novel by American writer Warren M. Miller, made the hair stand up on the back of his neck in anticipation.

My favorite story opens: “Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns / driven time and again off course … / Launch out on his story …  / start from where you will — sing for our time too.”

James Joyce, of course, had The Odyssey in mind when he wrote the opening lines of Ulysses (1922): “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned: ‘Introibo ad altare Dei.’”  

Thomas Hardy opens The Return of the Native (1878) with foreboding words: “A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment … The distant rims of the world and of the firmament seemed to be a division in time no less than a division in matter … The place became full of a watchful intentness now; for when other things sank brooding to sleep the heath appeared slowly to awake and listen.”  

And then, of course, the greatest opening in American literature is but three words: “Call me Ishmael.” Five hundred and twenty-six pages later, Herman Melville brings Moby Dick (1851) to closure: “A sky-hawk … folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her”      

James Joyce was also good at closure. His long story “The Dead” (from Dubliners, 1914) concludes with sentences that are almost magical: “It had begun to snow again ... falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills [and] upon every part of the lonely churchyard … It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones … He heard the snow faintly falling through the universe … upon all the living and the dead.”

Similar but more ornate sentiments are found in Sir Thomas Browne’s Urn-Burial (1658): “Oblivion is not to be hired: the greater part must be content to be as though they had not been, to be found in the register of God, not in the record of man … And since death must be [the deliverance] of life, and even pagans could doubt whether thus to live were to die … therefore it cannot be long before we lie down in darkness.”

On a lighter note, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings opens The Yearling (1938) in this manner: “A column of smoke rose thin and straight from the cabin chimney. The smoke was blue where it left the red of the clay. It trailed into the blue of the April sky and was no longer blue but gray. The boy Jody watched it speculating. The fire on the kitchen hearth was dying down. His mother was hanging up pots and pans after the noon dinner … The day was Friday. If she scrubbed the floor she would not miss him until he reached the Glen [where] a spring as clear as well water bubbled up from nowhere in the sand … It excited Jody to watch the beginnings of the ocean. There were other beginnings, true, but this one was his own. He liked to think that no one came here but himself and the wild animals and the thirsty birds.”

Thoreau’s journal entries can be stimulating in small doses, but they are often too acerbic for my taste. More to my liking are those informed by quiet observation by writers like Edwin Way Teal. The following entry appeared in his Circle of the Seasons (1953): “William T. Davis once showed me some of the unpublished things he had written. I remember two eloquent sentences that express the whole outlook of his life: `There is no need of a faraway fairyland for the earth is a mystery before us. The cow paths lead to mysterious fields.’”

Gilbert White was the first great British naturalist. Although he and William T. Davis were separated in time and space, they were on the same wavelength. In The Natural History of Selborne (1789), White published a letter written on October 8, 1768, in which he expressed his conviction (which I share) that: “It is, I find, in zoology as it is in botany: all nature is so full, that that district produces the greatest variety which is the most examined.” In other words, White and Davis, like the Chinese sages, were admonishing us to “Study the familiar.”    

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..

Systems of mature trees and shrubs are covered with blemishes that signal age: cankers, seams, burls, butt scars, sterile conks, and protrusions in the form of bracket fungi.

Cankers are diseases in which lesions caused by a wide range of fungi and bacteria appear on the trunk and branches. When the infected tissue dies, the lesions then crack and split open, exposing underlying tissue to further infection. Some cankers grow on a perennial basis, forming concentric rings in trunk bark with each cycle. Because these patterns resemble targets they are referred to as “target cankers.” Other cankers – like the one now killing off the butternut tree – eat through the bark exposing darkened elliptical patches of the outer cambium.

Seams are long vertical or spiral cracks on tree trunks. They vary in size from a few feet to the entire length of the trunk. These are usually caused by wind, lightening, or frost and occur in all species; however, they are observed most frequently on beech because of the smooth, thin, susceptible bark. Sometimes the seam will fold inward, forming a smoothly turned pattern like a carefully tucked blanket. At other times, it will remain opened like a knife wound.

Burls are round to semi-round or elongate swellings of the trunk. They range in size from a few inches to several feet in length. Some are of unknown origin, but most are caused by either insect or fungi infestations. Fantastically shaped burls on birch trees in the higher elevations of the mountains lend an eerie touch to that often fog-shrouded landscape.

For awhile during World War II – when the European wood traditionally used to make briar pipes was not available – burls on the roots of laurel and rhododendron in boggy places in the southern Appalachians were “grubbed up” as a substitute. The center of the industry in Western North Carolina was around Hendersonville and Brevard, as well as Sparta. Another spot was the White Oak Stamp in Clay Country. An old road near Chunky Gal Mountain is still known as “the old burl road.”

Butt scars are triangular-shaped openings at the base of trees commonly caused by fire or logging injuries. Sycamores are often inflicted with butt scars, resulting in large openings that livestock and even humans have been reputed to take refuge in during hard times or while building cabins. The largest butt scar opening I have seen is one at the base of a tree on Bryson City Island Park, which is situated in the middle of the Tuckaseigee River within the Bryson City town limits. Two people can sit inside with relative ease.

Bracket fungi grow on tree trunks year around but become especially apparent during the winter months. Some are shaped like a horse’s hoof, others like a turkey’s tail. Some are as large as dinner platters, others as small as your fingernail. Also known as pore fungi, bracket fungi belong to a mushroom family (Polyporaceae) whose members grow attached to decomposing logs and tree trunks. Brackets are quite woody and hardened as compared with most soft-bodied mushrooms. Because of this woody nature they tend to last much longer than other mushrooms, providing the opportunity to observe them from year to year.

My favorites among the bracket fungi are the artist’s conks. These cracked, furrowed, knobby growths are really hard. Larger specimens have been made into stools. In Mushrooms Demystified (1986), author David Arora calculates that a large artist’s conk (he found one monster weighing in at 26 pounds) “liberates 30-billion spores a day, 6 months a year – or over 5,000,000,000,000 (5-trillion!) spores annually.” Since the snowy-white pore surface on the underside of the bracket bruises easily and stains permanently brown when scratched, they have been used to leave messages in the woods or as a means for making sketches, hence the common name.

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 George Ellison column first appeared in The Smoky Mountain News in March 2005.

“Then Jonah prayed unto the Lord his God out of the Fish’s belly …. The waters compassed me about, even to the soul: the depth closed me round about, the weeds were wrapped about my head …. But I will sacrifice unto thee with that voice of salvation; I will pay that that I have vowed. Salvation is the Lord … and the Lord spake unto the fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land.

— Jonah 2:1-10

When a fisherman in the Smokies region receives a sudden strike from a huge fish that breaks his line or maybe even drags his tackle away before he can react, he usually supposes it was a muskellunge, a ferocious species of pike that reaches a length of 60 inches and a weight of nearly 70 pounds. But maybe all strikes of this sort can’t be attributed to muskies.

There is, after all, another great fish almost as large as a whale that would smash any tackle to smithereens. This would be the Dakwa, a monstrous critter in Cherokee lore so large that it was equated with the whale. Indeed, according to ethnologist James Mooney’s Myths of the Cherokee (1900), when the Bible was translated into Cherokee in the 18th century — using the syllabary invented by Sequoya — the word “Dakwa” was employed as the equivalent of “whale.” As we shall see, the primary Cherokee story having to do with the great fish clearly echoes the biblical story of Jonah and the whale.

But how in the world would the Cherokees know anything about whales? No problem. They were great adventurers. Their trade routes and excursions of warfare took them far and wide throughout eastern North America. At any given time when a Cherokee party was on the Atlantic coast, whales — or at least their carcasses washed ashore — could have been observed.

Mooney points out, for instance, that James Lawson, in his A New Voyage to Carolina (1700), noted that whales “were ‘very numerous’ on the coast of North Carolina, being frequently stranded along the shore, so that settlers derived considerable profit from the oil and bladder.”

Mooney also points out that, “in almost every age and country we find a myth of a great fish swallowing a man, who afterwards finds his way out alive.” It’s my notion that after the Cherokees were introduced to Christianity in the 18th century, they adapted an earlier legend depicting a great fish to a version closer to the story related in the Bible. There are several Dakwa stories in Cherokee lore. Here is the one known as “The Hunter and the Dakwa” as collected by Mooney from the storytellers Swimmer and Tagwaddihi on the Qualla Boundary (present-day Cherokee) during the late 1880s:

“In the old days there was a great fish called the Dakwa …. This fish was so large that it could easily swallow a man. One day several hunters were travelling in a canoe …. when the Dakwa suddenly rose up under the canoe and threw them all into the air. As the men came down, the fish swallowed one with a single snap of its jaws, and dived with him to the bottom of the river. This man was one of the bravest hunters in the tribe, and as soon as he discovered where he was he began thinking of some way to overcome the Dakwa and escape from its stomach. Except for a few scratches and bruises, the hunter had not been hurt, but it was so hot and airless inside the big fish that he feared he would soon smother. As he groped around in the darkness, his hands found some mussel shells which the Dakwa had swallowed. These shells had very sharp edges. Using one of them as a knife, the hunter began cutting away at the fish’s stomach. Soon the Dakwa grew uneasy at the scraping inside his stomach and came up to the surface of the river for air. The man kept on cutting with the shell until the fish was in such pain that it swam wildly back and forth across the river, thrashing the water into foam with its tail. At last the hunter cut through the Dakwa’s side. Water flowed in, almost drowning the man, but the big fish was so weary by this time that it came to a stop. The hunter looked out of the hole and saw that the Dakwa was now resting in shallow water near the riverbank. Reaching up, the man pulled himself through the hole in the fish, moving very carefully so as not to disturb the Dakwa. He then waded ashore and returned to his village, where his friends were mourning his death because they were sure he had been eaten by the great fish. Now they named him a hero and held a celebration in his honour. Although the brave hunter escaped with his life, the juices in the stomach of the Dakwa had scalded all the hair from his head, and he was bald forever after.”

The obvious difference between the story of the Cherokee hunter and that of Jonah is that the latter was dependent upon a higher power for his salvation whereas the hunter was dependent upon his own devices.

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..

During the course of a recent interview for a literary magazine, I was asked: While in grad school at the University of South Carolina, you began an association with James Dickey. What was it like to hang out with one of the leading poets of the day?”

Dickey was, in fact, a major American poet of the 20th century. And he was, of course, the author of the novel Deliverance (1970), which was, in turn, made into a movie filmed in north Georgia, Western North Carolina, and northwest South Carolina.

For many, Deliverance (both the book and the film) endures as a notorious item in regard to its sensationalized depiction of the region’s culture.

The James Dickey part of the interview has been relegated to the cutting room floor, as it were. But I suppose it won’t hurt to get my impressions (as a minor footnote) on record, especially those regarding archery, since bow hunting has such a significant role in Deliverance. I knew Dickey in the pre-Deliverance era … before things apparently got out of hand in his personal life to a significant degree. The dialogue in the interview is an approximation of what was said forty-some years ago.        

•••

“Hanging out” is a good way to describe our “association.” It certainly wasn’t literary. I’ve never written anything or had much to say about James Dickey. We met I’m pretty sure in the fall of 1968. The English Department had moved into a new building … but they didn’t have enough professors to occupy two floors so they assigned exceptionally nice offices to the grad assistants to keep another department from occupying them. Not long after I moved in, I heard a loud voice in the corner office next to mine say something like, “If you don’t pay me a thousand dollars I’m not coming.” After a pause, the voice said something like, “One thousand … plus expenses … take it or leave it.” I glanced into the office and saw a good-sized fellow in his mid-40s standing up holding a telephone. It was James Dickey negotiating an appearance fee. I was impressed by the amount he was demanding ... a thousand dollars was a lot of money in the late 1960s.   

Not long thereafter we crossed paths and started talking. He introduced himself. I knew who James Dickey was, of course. I had read Buckdancer’s Choice (which had won the National Book Award) but didn’t mention it.

Dickey said something like, “Jim Meriwether says you played football at North Carolina. You don’t look like a football player. Were you any good?” James B. Meriwether, the Faulkner scholar, had been at UNC in the early 1960s. I had more or less followed him to USC.

I said something like, “I was OK until I got hurt.”  

He said something like, “I got hurt, too.” I think he played football at Clemson but we never talked much, if any, about football. I don’t know if Dickey ever boxed or not … to me, he had the look of a prize fighter in his facial features, rounded shoulders, and shambling gait.      

I do know for certain that he was a skilled archer. He asked me the first day we talked if I had ever shot with a bow at an outdoor range. When I said I hadn’t, he offered to loan me some equipment and give me “a few lessons” … by which he meant he was going to get me up and running and then beat the crap out of me.

A new archery course had been established a few miles outside Columbia in the piney woods. It was something like a golf course with targets of different sizes laid out at different distances that required different trajectories. Dickey had a low key way of explaining and demonstrating bracing a bow; posture; notching, drawing, sighting, and loosing arrows; and so on. He said the “loosing” or instinctive moment of release is “the mystic part” … which I found to be true.

I quickly discovered that one of the reasons for having a companion when shooting arrows is to have help finding the ones that miss the target and the bale of hay on which it is mounted. More time is spent hunting arrows than shooting them. The more eyes the better. Losing arrows is frustrating and expensive. Dickey demonstrated how to straighten aluminum arrows in a vice grip or with a special hand tool or “if need be” with your thumbs; how to cut new arrow shafts from a lengthy section of tubing; and how to point, noch, and fletch the shaft. In retrospect, he clearly liked teaching archery as much as he did doing it ... maybe more.

I got hooked and he helped me upgrade my equipment … even giving me some of his used stuff. Meanwhile he was trouncing me every time we shot a round. In those days I was as competitive as Dickey … so I started going out by myself or with my wife, Elizabeth, practicing. She became a good shot and I started just about holding my own with Dickey.      

He looked at me one day and said, “You’ve been practicing. That’s cheating.”

I didn’t say anything. But the next time we went to the range I noticed right away that his skills had increased exponentially. Every shot was on target.

About half way through the round, I said, “You’ve been practicing.”

He grinned and said something like, “Shut up and shoot.”

Dickey liked practical jokes, and he liked challenging people to see how they reacted. It was a macho thing … but he was genuinely interested in how different people responded. One day when we were walking through some scrub palmetto he froze and exclaimed, “Rattlesnake! … right there beside your foot.”

When he realized that I wasn’t amused, he apologized. Well, he didn’t exactly apologize for having done it … he just said he wouldn’t do it again.

Deliverance was published in 1970 … so he must have been working on it at that time … but he never mentioned the novel. The only literary discussion we ever had that I can remember now was about Richard Jeffries. Our discussion … if you can call it that … took place in about 60 seconds at a picnic table on the way back to Columbia from the archery range.

Jeffries was the British naturalist who wrote an autobiography titled The Story of My Heart published in 1883. Dickey really liked the book. I thought it was overly romanticized and, in places, downright trite. Somewhat miffed, he asked which of the British naturalists I preferred. When I said “W.H. Hudson,” he replied, “Hudson doesn’t count. He was a South American,” which was, of course, quibbling since the major part of Hudson’s life had been spent in England writing about the English countryside.

We bought snacks and something to drink at a roadside bait shop that offered seemingly endless varieties of everything from peanut butter crackers to bubblegum to rods and reels. This stimulated most of our discussions at the picnic table, which were centered around intricate mock-plans to “retreat” from “the halls of academe” and open a bait shop on Lake Murray. This was tomfoolery, of course, but we enjoyed horsing around. We were, in that regard, on the same wavelength.   

Most of the James Dickey discussions I’ve overheard through the years have been disparaging in one way or another. When I knew him in the late 1960s he was fun to be with. He had a boyish smile and liked to laugh. He wasn’t an academic or literary snob. He was a pretty good listener. He was a talented bow-and-arrow coach … but not a very good loser.

And he was always a terrific poet. These lines are excerpted from James Dickey’s The Heaven of Animals (1961):

Having no souls, they have come 

Anyway, beyond their knowing ...  

Their instincts wholly bloom  

And they rise.

The soft eyes open ...

And those that are hunted  

Know this as their life,

Their reward: to walk

Under such trees in full knowledge  

Of what is in glory above them,  

And to feel no fear …

They fall, they are torn,  

They rise, they walk 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..

Hiking a designated trail involves prescribed origins and destinations, whether it be a four-mile jaunt from Clingman’s Dome to Siler’s Bald in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park or a 2,000-mile trek from north Georgia to Maine along the Appalachian Trail. The designation “trail” implies official recognition by mapmakers, hiking clubs, periodic maintenance, and state or federal authorities monitoring its use.  

Trails are usually marked with guideposts and described in hiking guides. They involve advance planning, the accumulation of materials, and the toting of a load, whether it be a 60-pound backpack or a six-pound daypack.  They mean driving some distance to a trailhead and departing with some objective in mind.

Mountain pathways, on the other hand, are the reverse side of the coin.  They usually don’t have names and few are delineated in books. Rangers don’t patrol them asking where you’re going or if you have a permit. If they have destinations, they lead down to creeks or over the near ridge to an old homesite.

Many don’t lead anywhere. There’re just sort of there for no particular reason except enough people like a place well enough to go walking there from time to time. They’re maintained anonymously by succeeding generations. As such, they’re quiet links with our past and the people who have been walking these hills for many thousands of years.

The best are those just beyond your front door. You can walk them almost without forethought. All you need to carry is yourself. Without a particular destination or objective, you tend naturally to slow down and pay attention. My favorites are those that wind alongside the creek below our house. I’ve walked them day and night for going on 35 years. My feet quite literally “know” the way.

A mountain path has a life of its own. Darting here and there, it discovers the perfect route to a high gap. Have you ever marveled at the way paths merge and then diverge effortlessly? Or the way your feet find their way effortlessly over the softly worn ground? You can feel a good path in your bones. Each has a life of its own. Here’s a poem in which I try to say some of these things:

Don’t Walk Fast

At first just listen – after awhile

sound will distill in your body.

Slowly refocus mind and ear.

Attend the silences between

foot swings and boot falls.

Those spaces pulse making sound

complete and movement whole.

There’s the music – call it that.

It was not here before you came.

Won’t be here when you’re gone.

Do not avoid steeper slopes.

Against grade intervals widen.

In them you will feel the lovely

up-curving pathway arc in a manner

that is unrealizable coming down.

— By George Ellison from “Permanent Camp,” a collection of narratives and poems to be published in 2011.

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 spent some time last week reading about the 18th-century Indian wars in Western North Carolina. These were the Cherokee battles with the British along the Little Tennessee and Tuckaseigee rivers in 1760 and 1761, as well as the Rutherford expedition in 1776. In doing so, by chance, I took a look at James Adair’s account of his life among the southeastern Indians. I hadn’t looked at Adair for some time and had forgotten (or perhaps never read) his description of Indian warfare.  

Adair (1709-c.1787) was born in County Antrim, Ireland. He moved to South Carolina in 1735 and immediately began trading with the Overhill Cherokees, whose towns were beyond the Great Smoky Mountains along the lower Little Tennessee River in present east Tennessee. By the early 1840s, he was trading with the Catawbas in the Piedmont region of North and South Carolina. From there, he moved west to present north Mississippi to trade with the Chickasaws. During the 1760s, Adair wrote a history of the Indians among whom he had lived. He voyaged to England in 1775 to get his book published. It appeared that year with the marvelously descriptive title page:

The HISTORY of the AMERICAN INDIANS, Particularly Those Nations Adjoining to the Mississippi, East and West Florida, Georgia, South and North Carolina. Containing an Account of Their Origin, Language, Manners, Religious and Civil Customs, Laws, Form of Government, Punishments, Conduct in War and Domestic Life, Their Habits, Diet, Agriculture, Manufactures, Diseases and Method of Cure, and Other Particulars … With a New Map of the Country Referred to in the History. By James Adair, Esquire, a Trader with the Indians, and Resident in Their Country for Forty Years. London: Printed for Edward and Charles Dilly, in the Poultry. MDCCLXXV.

According to recent scholarship, Adair’s book is not always reliable as a history of his own time. But his first-hand descriptions of southeastern Indian cultures are still accepted, despite the author’s obsessive arguments that the lost tribes of Israel were ancestors of American Indians. Here are some of his descriptions regarding Indian warfare that caught my eye.

• They are all equal – the only precedence any gain is by superior virtue, oratory, or prowess; and they esteem themselves bound to live and die in defence of their country. A warrior will accept of no hire for performing virtuous and heroic actions; they have exquisite pleasure in pursuing their own natural dictates.

• As soon as they enter the woods, all are silent; and, every day they observe a profound silence in their march, that their ears may be quick to inform them of danger: their small black eyes are almost as sharp also as those of the eagle, or the lynx; and with their feet they resemble the wild cat, or the cunning panther, crawling up to its prey. Thus they proceed, while things promise them good success; but, if their dreams portend any ill, they always obey the supposed divine intimation and return home, without incurring the least censure.

• If a small company be out at war, they in the day time crawl through thickets and swamps in the manner of wolves – now and then they climb trees, and run to the top of hills, to discover the smoke of fire, or hear the report of guns: and when they cross through the open woods, one of them stands behind a tree, till the rest advance about a hundred yards, looking out sharply on all quarters. In this manner, they will proceed, and on tiptoe, peeping every where around; they love to walk on trees which have been blown down, and take an oblique course, till they inswamp themselves again, in order to conceal their tracks, and avoid a pursuit … Every one at the signal of the shrill-sounding war-cry, instantly covers himself behind a tree, or in some cavity of the ground where it admits of the best safety. The leader, on each side, immediately blows the small whistle he carries for the occasion, in imitation of the ancient trumpet, as the last signal of engagement. Now hot work begins – The guns are firing; the chewed bullets flying; the strong hiccory bows a twanging; the dangerous barbed arrows whizzing as they fly; the sure-shafted javelin striking death wherever it reaches; and the well-aimed tomohawk killing, or disabling its enemy. Nothing scarcely can be heard for the shrill echoing noise of the war and death-whoop, every one furiously pursues his adversary from tree to tree, striving to incircle him for his prey; and the greedy jaws of pale death are open on all sides, to swallow them up. One dying foe is intangled in the hateful and faltering arms of another: and each party desperately attempts both to save their dead and wounded from being scalped, and to gain the scalps of their opponents. On this the battle commences anew — but rash attempts fail, as their wary spirits always forbid them from entering into a general close engagement. Now they retreat: then they draw up into various figures, still having their dead and wounded under their eye. Now they are flat on the ground loading their pieces – then they are up firing behind trees, and immediately spring off in an oblique course to recruit — and thus they act till winged victory declares itself.

• On returning to the place of battle … their first aim however is to take off the scalp, when they perceive the enemy hath a proper situation, and strength to make a dangerous resistance ... This honourable service is thus performed — they seize the head of the disabled, or dead person, and placing one of their feet on the neck; they with one hand twisted in the hair, extend it as far as they can – with the other hand, the barbarous artists speedily draw their long sharp-pointed scalping knife out of a sheath from their breast, give a slash round the top of the skull, and with a few dexterous scoops, soon strip it off. They are so expeditious as to take off a scalp in two minutes. When they have performed this part of their martial virtue, as soon as time permits, they tie with bark or deer’s sinews, their speaking trophies of blood in a small hoop, to preserve it from putrefaction, and paint the interior part of the scalp, and the hoop, all round with red, their flourishing emblematical colour of blood.

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 is the second of a two-part series regarding the Cherokee Ghost Dance.)

A recent column focused on a so-called Ghost Dance movement that took place among the Cherokees in 1811-13. That, of course, was almost 80 years before the infamous era in the American West that culminated in the Indian massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. The western Indians initially believed the dance would unite them with friends and relatives in the ghost world. As the movement spread from tribe to tribe, however, the dancers began to imagine that the dance would make them invincible.

The unity and fervor that the Ghost Dance movement inspired, however, only brought fear and hysteria to white settlers and contributed to the events ending in the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. When the smoke cleared and the gunfire ceased, more than 300 Sioux, some wearing ghost shirts, lay dead.

In the previous column I relied upon an essay titled “The Cherokee Ghost Dance Movement of 1811-1813” by William G. McLoughlin in the book The Cherokee Ghost Dance: Essays on the Southeastern Indians, 1789-1861 (Mercer University Press, 1984). McLoughlin’s essay is presented as an overview of the extant 19th century accounts of the movement. He treated the various episodes as part of an interrelated related “Ghost Dance” movement:

“In the troubled years 1811-1812 … a prophet named Charlie [i.e., Tsali, but not the individual involved in the Removal events of 1838] appeared among the Cherokee and described a dream or vision in which the Great Spirit … said he was angry with the Cherokees because they had departed from the customs and religious practices of their ancestors and were adopting the ways of the white man … Though Charlie met some opposition, he found many ready to accept his revelations, and he went on to say that it had been revealed to him that on a specific date, three months hence, a terrific wind and hailstorm would take place that would annihilate al the white men, all the cattle, and all the works of the white man … After the storm, these true believers would be able to return to their towns where they would find all of the deer, elk, buffalo, and the other game that had disappeared. Then they would live again as their ancestors did in the golden era before the white man came.”

There was no storm or eclipse. The Ghost Dance fervor withered and died without a return to a golden era.

Michelene E. Pesantubbee is a professor of American Indian studies at the University of Iowa who specializes in Native American religious traditions.  In “When the Earth Shakes: The Cherokee Prophecies of 1811-1812” American Indian Quarterly (1993), Pesanttubbee took a closer look at the evidence and concluded that there was no “Ghost Dance” movement per se among the Cherokees. Unlike McLaughlin, she also felt that the Cherokee incidents were, in part, fueled by rumors about the Shawnee movement led by Tecumseh. Even so, her descriptions of various incidents provide evidence of stress-related symptoms … dreams, visions, phophecies, and apopalyptic forecasts … in Cherokee society 35 years before forced removal took place:

[According to Charlie’s vision] the Cherokee were adopting the customs of the white people. They had mills, clothes, feather beds, and tables-worse still they had books and domestic cats! This was not good-therefore the buffalo and other game were disappearing. The Great Spirit was angry, and had withdrawn his protection. The nation must return to the customs of their fathers ... They must discard all the fashions of the whites, abandon the use of any communication with each other except by word of mouth, and give up their mills, their houses, and all the arts learned from the white people. He promised, that if they believed and obeyed, then would game again abound, the white man would disappear, and God would love his people. He urged them to paint themselves, to hold feasts, and to dance ...

[In] the next record of a prophecy …Big Bear, a Cherokee man, informed the missionaries of a vision another Cherokee man experienced in December 1811. According to Big Bear, this man and his sick children were in their house when: A tall man, clothed entirely in the foliage of trees, with a wreath of the same foliage on his head … said to him ... “I am not able to tell you now whether God will soon destroy the earth or not. God is not pleased that the Indians have sold so much land to the white people. Tugalo [along the GA-SC border], which is now possessed by white people, is the first place that God created. There in a hill he placed the first fire, for all fire comes from God. Now the white people have built a house on that hill. They should abandon the place; on that hill there should be grass growing, only then will there be peace.”         

The third pattern of prophecies was apocalyptic. It began in 1812 after the appearance of a comet and a series of earthquakes. The Moravian records contain three entries describing apocalyptic predictions. On February 23, 1812, the missionaries wrote that David McNair, an intermarried white, told them about the stories he had heard. Later in the entry, the missionaries wrote about an incident in which the residents of one town fled into the hills to hide from a storm of hailstones, the size of half bushels, that were to fall on a certain day. That day passed without incident and the people returned to their homes. A March 1 account came from Laughing Molly, an elderly Cherokee woman, who heard that a sorcerer predicted that in three months the moon would become dark and afterwards hailstones as large as hominy blocks would fall, all the cattle would die, and the earth would come to an end.

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: The second installment in George Ellison’s research into the Ghost Dance has been delayed due to the inability to reach certain sources. Look for the article in next week’s Smoky Mountain News.

This article first appeared in SMN in February 2003.

Surprisingly, a recent column about wood-burning cookstoves attracted as much attention as anything I’ve written for years. Folks who live in the Smoky Mountain News distribution area and can pick up the print edition were the most numerous e-mail correspondents, of course. But a lot of people outside of the region must read the publication online as well because at least 10 people living in different parts of the country contacted me to reminisce about their woodstove experiences.

None of the people here or abroad had anything but pleasant memories. None seemed to recall the days when the chimney smoked or there was no dry wood ... or no wood at all. They remembered grandma baking bread or a Thanksgiving turkey baking in the oven or canning vegetables in the fall. Several reported they are still using wood-burning cookstoves, at least on a part-time basis, but for most they are a part of the nostalgic past. Best of all, two people said they liked my “Woodstove” poem.  

So coming up with the topic for this week’s column was a no-brainer. As with cookstoves, Elizabeth and I have been lighting our home with oil lamps for 30 years. Are there people out there who are nostalgic about oil lamps? I’m betting on it.          

The story of how we first started using woodstoves and oil lamps is both complicated and boring, so I’ll spare you the details. Using them isn’t a big deal. Lots of folks living in the Smokies region today grew up that way. And most folks today would much rather use electric or gas burners and switch on the electric lights. But in many ways that count our lives have been enhanced by doing the opposite.    

I don’t know when the first oil lamps arrived here in the mountains. It must have been well before cast-iron wood-burning cookstoves arrived. And before lamps, of course, there was firelight and candle light.

About 20 years ago I purchased in a used bookshop a little 45-page pamphlet by Cecil A. Matthews titled “Discovering Oil Lamps.” It was published in 1972 in England. A note about the author advises that Mr. Meadows “was apprenticed to the ironmongery trade in the late 1920s when there was still a small demand for oil lamps in rural East Anglia ... He has built up a considerable collection of his own ... and gives talks and lectures on the subject.” I never imagined that anyone gave lectures on oil lamps. I hope Mr. Matthews was paid handsomely for his lamp lectures.

Most of “Discovering Oil Lamps” is devoted to illustrations and descriptions of lamp types and paraphernalia. Most are various types of table lamps, including lamps mounted on arm extensions for reading. The floor lamps are very elegant. Harp lamps hang from the ceiling on short metal supports, whereas suspension lamps hang on extended chains.  Bracket lamps are mounted on walls, some with swinging arms. One of the piano lamps is mounted on a gooseneck arm so that light could be reflected onto sheet music. Then there are various hand lamps used in the same manner as flashlights.  

Mr. Marshall also provides a brief history of oil lamps. (There is also an online history titled “Oil Lamps in Antiquity” that can be consulted at www.aworldmall.com/candles/history.html.) In brief, he notes that simple lamps were made by primitive man from a stone with a small depression on one side in which fuel rendered from animal fat was deposited along with a floating wick of bark or fiber. There were also lamps made from shells that used fish oil as fuel. Ancient Chinese lamps consisted of an open saucer, sometimes mounted on feet, with floating wicks. Light was provided in the Pacific region by coconuts with floating wicks. Even the early Greek, Egyptian, Roman and lamps were bowl shaped with floating wicks of some type.  

Indeed, a flat wick lamp that could be adjusted wasn’t invented until 1783.  Shortly thereafter the first glass chimney was produced. Paraffin (kerosene) had already been distilled from petroleum earlier in that century. Presto ... all of the ingredients were available for producing the common oil lamp. Incandescent and pressure lamps came later, of course, but Elizabeth and I consider them to be aberrations that make noise and cast an eerie light,

We much prefer the old-fashioned oil lamp consisting of a glass container, a wick that can be adjusted, and a glass chimney. Of these we have 10 or 12 that are fully assembled and in use. Most are of the table variety and are fashioned from clear or opaque glass. One of the table lamps I bought for Elizabeth as a gift some years ago is made from darkened glass with a white rose design.

Four of the smaller glass lamps are round at the base and fit into brackets that hang on walls. We do not fool with hanging lamps made from metals as they are likely to leak with use and become dangerous.              

Cleaning chimneys and trimming wicks isn’t a big chore, but it has to be done from time to time. We usually get around to it when we notice we can’t see well enough to read at night.

We have found that the tinted kerosene mandated by the state several years ago is hopeless. We could barely light and keep our lamps going with that crud. We always go to one of the local stations selling K-1 fuel oil.

I but have one hard and fast rule regarding oil lamps. It’s called The Ellison Rule For Lamp Placement & Adjustment. Always position a lamp so that the wick adjustment mechanism is on the right side if you’re right-handed or on the left side if you’re left-handed. Doesn’t that make perfect sense? You just reach out and adjust the wick without having to first rearrange the lamp. Both Elizabeth and I are right-handed. It follows that all of the lamps in our home should be placed with adjustment mechanisms on the right side, doesn’t it? Does Elizabeth follow this rule? No. She almost invariably places them reversed so as to bother me.  

Lamplight is a softly luminescent light. Our combined kitchen and sitting area comes to life once the lamps are lit. Many evenings at dusk I cross the bridge in front of our house and walk down into the pasture. Looking back across the creek, I can see blue woodsmoke spiraling upward from the chimney and the windows of our home glowing with lamplight.

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 is part one of a two-part series regarding the Cherokee Ghost Dance. Part two will present Michelene Ethe Pesantubbee’s conclusions and perspectives on the movement.)

The belief in the coming of a messiah, or deliverer, who shall restore his people to a condition of primitive simplicity and happiness, is probably as universal as the human race, and takes on special emphasis among peoples that have been long subjected to alien domination. In some cases the idea seems to have originated from a myth, but in general it play safely be assumed that it springs from a natural human longing.

— Handbook of American Indians (1906)

Few know there was a Ghost Dance movement among the Cherokees almost 80 years before the infamous epoch in the American west that culminated in the Indian massacre at Wounded Knee.

Flash back to January 1889 … a Paiute Indian named Wavoka (aka Jack Wilson), while suffering from high fever, had a vision during a total eclipse of the sun. This revelation became the genesis of the religious movement known as the Ghost Dance. At first the Indians believed the dance would simply unite them with friends and relatives in the ghost world. As the movement spread from tribe to tribe, however, the dancers began to imagine that the dance would make them invincible.

It consisted of slow shuffling movements following the course of the sun. It would be performed for four or five days and was accompanied by singing and chanting. It would, they imagined, cause the world to open up and swallow all other people, while the Indians and their friends would remain on this land, which would return to its beautiful and natural state. In addition, a ghost shirt made of buckskin cloth was said to render the wearer immune to bullets.

The unity and fervor that the Ghost Dance movement inspired, however, only fear and hysteria among white settlers and contributed to the events ending in the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. When the smoke cleared and the gunfire ceased, more than 300 Sioux, some wearing ghost shirts, lay dead.

Flash back another 78 years. The story of the much earlier Cherokee version of the Ghost Dance is related in an essay titled “The Cherokee Ghost Dance Movement of 1811-1813” by William G. McLoughlin in the book The Cherokee Ghost Dance: Essays on the Southeastern Indians, 1789-1861 (Mercer University Press, 1984).  McLoughlin’s essay is presented as an overview of the extant 19th century accounts of the movement: as told by two Cherokees, Major Ridge and James Wafford; as published in the “Cherokee (Oklahoma) Advocate” in 1844; as recorded in the official mission diaries, 1811-1812, of the Moravians; and as observed by two U.S. Indian agents.

It was James Mooney, author of Myths of the Cherokees (1900), who first characterized the events as a Ghost Dance movement. Mooney, who lived among the Cherokees during the late 1880s, was also the author of The Ghost-Dance Religion and Wounded Knee, the definitive study of the western events.

McLoughlin summarizes the eastern Ghost Dance events as follows, with this writer’s additions in brackets:

“In the troubled years 1811-1812 . . . a prophet named Charlie [i.e., Tsali, but not the individual involved in the Removal events of 1838] appeared among the Cherokee and described a dream or vision in which the Great Spirit spoke to him. [Some accounts speak of there being several prophets rather than just one.] The Great Spirit said he was angry with the Cherokees because they had departed from the customs and religious practices of their ancestors and were adopting the ways of the white man. To regain the favor of the Great Spirit and overcome their troubles, the Cherokees were told by their prophet to give up everything they had acquired from the whites (clothing, cattle, plows, spinning wheels, featherbeds, fiddles, cats, books) and return to the old ways: they must dance their old dances…. The prophet also said that those who did not heed this message would be punished and some would die. [`Now I have told you the will of the Great Spirit, and you must pass on it,’ he is reported to have said in one account, `But if you don’t believe my words, look up into the sky.’] Though Charlie met some opposition, he found many ready to accept his revelations, and he went on to say that it had been revealed to him that on a specific date, three months hence, a terrific wind and hailstorm would take place that would annihilate al the white men, all the cattle, and all the works of the white man. [Some accounts predicted a three-day eclipse rather than a hailstorm.] The hailstones would be ‘as large as hominy blocks’ and would crush all those who did not retreat to a special, charmed spot high in the Great Smoky Mountains where they would be safe. [The charmed spot was perhaps Clingmans Dome, the highest peak in the Smokies, which the Cherokees know as Yonah.] After the storm, these true believers would be able to return to their towns where they would find all of the deer, elk, buffalo, and the other game that had disappeared. Then they would live again as their ancestors did in the golden era before the white man came.”

There was no storm or eclipse. The Ghost Dance fervor withered and died without a return to a golden era. In the end, as was inevitable, superior numbers won out. Four thousand Cherokees died during the 1838 forced removal. But for a while the Cherokees danced and returned to the old ways in an attempt to stem the tide.

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..

If you don’t like dogs, come back next week. Dogs have been an integral part of my life since I was a boy. My first dog -– part something, part something else –- was named Rascal. He was my boyhood buddy. I was a sophomore in college when Rascal had to be put to sleep after a long and happy life. I still remember that day.

Other dogs have followed: cocker spaniels; a long line of beagles, several named Toby; and more recently German shorthaired pointers. German shorthairs are the best breed of dog in the world. They can be somewhat uppity when need be, but for the most part they are companionable, curious, bright-eyed, humorous, and generally reliable dogs.     

Our current shorthairs are Uly (a brown-ticked dog named for the Greek wanderer, not the Civil War general); Salley (a brown-ticked patrician sort of dog); Hera (a whitish black-ticked dog named for the Greek trouble-maker); Woodrow (a black-and-white spotted dog named after Capt. Woodrow Call, a character in Lonesome Dove); and Zeke (named after Ezekiel in the Bible).  

Born in a kennel in northwest Georgia, Zeke is going on 16 now. He doesn’t care much for any of the other dogs. His friend Maggie (a dark brown naturally regal dog) died several years ago and is buried across the creek. Zeke hasn’t gotten over her departure and apparently doesn’t plan on getting over it.

Maggie and Zeke were our constant companions for years, spending the day with us at work in town. When we went bird watching along the Texas, Gulf and Atlantic coasts, they traveled along in the back of the truck, their heads stuck through the camper top window into the cab. As a last resort, I would sometimes turn them loose when a particular bird wouldn’t come out of the brush. That tactic generally produced almost instant results. Zeke was stronger but Maggie was always in charge. I haven’t hunted for years; so, I threw red rubber balls for them to chase. They caught the balls on the bounce or tracked them down in the woods or plunged into the creek after them.             

Frumpy-looking with brown and white cow-like markings — front legs splayed clumsily and slow afoot — Zeke doesn’t look the part, but in his prime he was a natural born hunting and fighting dog. There were several bear squabbles I know about. Two of them he picked and didn’t quit but dragged himself home on his shield … as it were… head bashed lop-sided, ear torn, ribs busted in so bad all he could do was lie down and think things over.

Add in years of ongoing skirmishes. The battle with the weasel in the creek ford was hilarious … from my perspective. Every time Zeke’d shake him off the critter would come back and grab him by the nose. Went on that way back and forth for maybe five minutes. I called it a draw but (truth be told) the weasel looked better off at the end. Bobcats … coyotes … mink … wild hogs …coons … copperheads … feral cats … other critters … maybe even a big cat  … Zeke was born convinced that the universe is full of troubles it is his assigned task to combat.

He’s been a good friend. Born into a world of smells and subtle frequencies, Zeke has studied expressions and listened closely to intonations so as to comprehend human intentions in an uncanny manner. These days he’s mellowed. He enjoys eating snow cream my wife concocts from fresh snow, vanilla extract, sugar, and canned milk. And has taken to writing sonnets. The one he’s working on these days is titled: “Gone to Hell in a Handbasket: A Country Music Sonnet in Blank Verse (14 Lines, 140 Syllables with Rhymes).” The first draft has been completed. It goes like this:

Winter was dryly bitter & bone cold.

‘Cept when I went out in the yard to pee

I’d sit in the house by the fireside bright

and work on my next sonnet about me.

My ex-girlfriend Polly wasn’t so bad

but her babies had grown up to be hounds.

Long after I asked them nicely to “Shut Up!”

they still moped around singing Merle Haggard:

‘If we can just make it thru De-cem-ber

ev-ry-thing is go-in’ to be o-kay.’

Well spring’s dun sprung and noth-in is o-kay.

Polly left town with the beagle next door.

If en-ee-one asks ‘bout me you just say:

‘Ole Zeke’s gone to hell in a handbasket.’

After reading it, I told Zeke “I don’t know what to say.”

“Then don’t say anything,” he said.

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..

Are there boardinghouses still operating here in the Smokies region? There are, of course, hotels, inns, bed-and-breakfasts, and motels galore. But I’m wondering about the true, old-fashioned boardinghouse, which flourished throughout the region until the middle of the 20th century.  

Unlike any of the establishments mentioned above, a real boardinghouse had several distinctive features. It would often come into existence as an expansion of the proprietor’s original home site; or, it was sometimes established in a renovated commercial structure of some sort.  

Rooms would sometimes be let out for overnight guests. For the most part, however, a boardinghouse catered to those staying for at least a week. And it wasn’t unusual for them to stay either for an entire season or even on a permanent basis. Working-class guests were as common as vacationers. Long-term boarders were often adopted into the proprietor’s extended family. Concern for his or her general welfare became a part of the socio-economic relationship.

Family style meals were the mainstay of a boardinghouse. Sometimes all three meals were served each day. Serving times for each meal were posted and the proprietor expected boarders to be on time. Most guests honored this system as a matter of courtesy. They also realized that those arriving late had less — or sometimes very little — to eat.

Some of the rooms had bath facilities. These cost more. Most guests shared a bath, which always seemed to be located “Just down there at the end of the hall.” A guest taking too much time or using up all of the hot water would hear about it from his fellow guests. If the habit persisted, the proprietor would weigh in.

There was always a common sitting, reading, and TV room used primarily during the winter or just before meals were served. When the weather was fine, there was also a front porch with rocking chairs.  

In my experience, the last true boardinghouse in this region was the Swain Hotel located on Everett Street in Bryson City. From 1967 until 1996, it was owned and operated by Mildred and V.L. Cope. Swain County native Luke Hyde, an attorney, purchased and renovated the establishment, opening in 1997 as the Historic Calhoun Country Inn. Family style meals are still served, but the current operation is not a true boardinghouse in most regards. Although many of the guests return from season to season, none are of the long-term or permanent variety.  Most are vacationers.

“Until 1966, the business was known as the Calhoun Hotel,” said Hyde. “It was operated by Granville Calhoun and his family. My mother, Alice Hyde, worked at the Calhoun Hotel for 30 years. That’s why I converted to the old name.

“As far as I know the Swain Hotel as operated by the Copes was the last true boardinghouse west of Morganton. I stayed in a lot of places when I was looking for a suitable location of my own, and it was the only one I encountered.

“I remember when mother was working at the Calhoun Hotel that the Simonds family would come and stay for the summer. He operated a real estate business and had a sign right there in the front yard. She operated a clothing store.”

I stayed in the Swain Hotel on two occasions in the early 1970s shortly before deciding to move to Bryson City. For some reason, memories of those visits — once by myself and once with my wife and three children — remain vivid.               

Mrs. Cope, who orchestrated the meals, had jet-black hair, powder-white skin, and was something of a character. Her specialties were fried eggs and biscuits and gravy for breakfast; sliced cured ham, mashed potatoes, and apple sauce for dinner; and pork tenderloin or chops, baked sweet potatoes, and blackberry pie for supper. Fried chicken was reserved for Sunday dinners. Mr. Cope was one-armed but could perform any maintenance task with great dexterity.   

All of our fellow guests were exceedingly cordial but not intrusive. Most were working-class and dressed accordingly for meals. One elderly couple dressed up for meals. They were permanent residents. He was the only man in the dining room with a coat and tie. Everyone got along. Everyone was exceedingly courteous about passing food and not taking too much.  Personal matters, politics, and religion were not discussed. Weather was the primary topic at each meal, but hunting and fishing were well within bounds. Children were made over. The black-and-white TV in the sitting room was always turned off right after the evening news.  All in all, the boardinghouse provided the context for a functional and agreeable lifestyle.

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: George Ellison is snowed in without an Internet connection. This column first appeared in The Smoky Mountain News in January 2003.

Tuckaseigee, Oconaluftee, Heintooga, Wayah, Cullasaja, Hiwassee, Coweeta, Stecoah, Steestachee, Skeenah, Nantahala, Aquone, Katuwah, and on and on. Our place names here in the Smokies region are graced throughout with evidence of the Cherokee culture that prevailed for over 700 years. Wouldn’t it be nice if Clingmans Dome was correctly designated as Mount Yonah (high place of the bears)?

Still, we’re fortunate that all of the original place names weren’t obliterated. The same can be said for the Native American words that persist in what we now know as the American language. They add a poetic, almost musical touch to our everyday lives that would otherwise be sorely missed.

It’s interesting to keep track of the ways we find books that we enjoy via reviews, blurbs, word of mouth, etc. Before Christmas my friend Lee Knight, the folklorist and musician, came by for a visit and presented me with a little book titled Tracks That Speak: The Legacy of Native American Words in North American Culture (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002) by Charles L. Cutler.

“There,” he said, “You’ll be able to get several columns out of that one.”

Lee knows me pretty well, so I just nodded agreement. And he was, of course, quite right. It’s my kind of book and touched upon the sort of material that I like to share via this column. I’m going to provide some of Cutler’s research to whet your appetite. Many will then no doubt want to obtain their own copies.

The author’s wife, Katherine, indicates that her husband passed away before the book’s publication. An Internet search indicates that he wrote various titles related to American history and Native American language. Tracks That Talk bears evidence to the obvious fact that he knew what he was writing about and enjoyed doing so.

The book is divided into various sections having to do with topics like shelter, clothing, plants, animals, and artifacts. Other sections are dedicated to miscellaneous words and, lastly, words having to do with “Spirit.”

In his introduction Cutler tells us that “This bountiful harvest of words springs from the more than one thousand native languages currently and formerly spoken in the Western Hemisphere ... many as different from one another as English is from Japanese. At the dawn of European settlement, probably sixty separate [word] families graced North America alone. Sadly only about half of the continent’s original stock of indigenous languages that existed [then] are still alive today, many of them spoken by no more than a handful of elderly tribes people ... This book examines the most prominent of English words that were borrowed from North American Indian languages and explains their background and the significance of the things they refer to, both in Native American and in general American cultural practices, each with its own tradition, extending into and influencing the present. When we follow their trail, we are reminded of words a storyteller of the Slavery tribe in Canada once used to describe the wolverine: ‘His tracks go on and on.’”

Here are some very brief excerpts from various entries within Tracks That Speak. These are misleading in that entries for individual words often go on for a page or more, creating mini-essays.

MOCCASIN: “The first appearance of the word in English occurs in 1609 [as] ‘mekezin’ ... A Crow warrior flaunted wolf tails at the heels of his moccasins after he accomplished that most daring of plains Indian feats — scoring a ‘coup,’ or touching and enemy’s body without injuring him.”

SUCCOTASH: “Combining the two main vegetables [corn and beans] was natural, since they were grown together (often with squash). According to the Iroquois, the spirits of the two ‘sisters’ wanted to remain together even when cooked and served.”

POKEWEED: “Settlers learned [from Indians] that pokeweed yielded still another bonus [other than as a cooked green] — a long-lasting red or purple ink [made by] boiling together pokeberries, vinegar, and sugar ... The great Sequoya would use pokeberry juice and a quill pen to transcribe the Cherokee language for the first time ... In the twentieth century rural people sometimes used the concoction for special writing purposes.”  

PERSIMMON: “The Indians customarily dried persimmons on mats spread over frames. This led to the Algonquian term ‘pasemenan,’ meaning ‘fruit dried artificially.’”

TERRAPIN: Indians respected the turtle as deliberate, calm, steadfast, and long-lived. Many revered it. A widespread belief in the Northeast ... was that Earth is Turtle Island — an island resting on the back of a giant turtle.”

CHIPMONK: “The outsized power of the small chipmonk is described in Iroquois legend. In early days, an animal council debated whether Earth should always remain in day or in night. Bear argued for perpetual night, but Chipmonk kept chattering for alternate night and day until dawn broke and resolved the argument. Bear angrily raked Chipmonk’s back with his claws, leaving indelible stripes on the animal ... [The Cherokee disagreed] saying that the animals once held a council in which it was proposed that each wish a disease on men for hunting them. Chipmonk refused to join in because it wasn’t among the hunted. The other animals attacked the little SQUAW: “some Indians claimed that ‘squaw’ arose from a Mohawk word meaning vagina. The word was worse than demeaning, they said — it was obscene. But Ives Goddard, the authority on American languages at the Smithsonian Institution, explains that this interpretation is not correct: ‘It is certain as any historical fact can be that the word squaw that the English settlers in Massachusetts used for Indian woman in the early 1600s was adopted by them from the word ‘squa’ that their Massachusett-speaking neighbors used in their own language to mean ‘female, younger woman’ and not from Mohawk.’”

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..

Winter is the season for thinking about pines. For the ancient Orientals, pines signified dignity and vitality, especially in old age. In art, a wand tipped with a pine cone was often carried by the god or his supplicants.

At the great spring festival in Rome, on the twenty-second day of March, a pine tree was cut and brought into the sanctuary by a guild of tree bearers, where it was treated as a divinity. The trunk was swathed like a corpse.  

Learning to distinguish the pine species of the southern mountains is a do-able project. There are just five native species, and they are easy to distinguish.

• White pine (Pinus strobus) is a common species from low to middle elevations with 5 needles per bundle.

• Shortleaf pine (P. echinata) is an occasional species from low to middle elevations with 2 to 3 dark blue-green, slender, flexible needles per bundle.

• “Pitch pine” (P. rigida), which is a common species in middle elevations with 3 yellowish-green needles per bundle that are less slender and flexible than those of shortleaf pine. (Look for bristly needle-cluster outgrowths along the main trunk.)

• Virginia or scrub pine (P. virginiana) is a common species from low to middle elevations with 2 needles per bundle and a “scrubby” appearance due to the fact that many side branches persist for years after dying.

• Table-mountain pine (P. pungens) is an occasional species at middle elevations with 2 rigid, twisted needles per bundle and cones that are persistent with a stout, hooked spine at the top of each scale.

The white pine has needles with white accents in their polished surfaces and white lines of stomata (breathing holes) on their undersides. An annual growth of limbs presents a “wagon spoke” appearance near the trunk.

The best kindling is fat pine, which is created when resin has collected in the stumps and butt cuts of pine trees. The resinous stubs of old pine limbs are the second best kindling. Pitch pine is so-named because of its high resin content.

Short-leaf pine is sometimes called “southern yellow pine.”

Virginia or scrub pine is common in old fields as pioneer plants that form thickets.    

And that brings us to my favorite pine. Have you ever been walking one of the wind-swept, sun-bitten, high-elevation rock outcrops in the Smokies region when you suddenly encountered a grove of strange, almost stunted looking pines with outlandish cones? As described by Donald C. Peattie in A Natural History of Trees (1950), each such pine will bear “huge cones that encircle the limbs in dense clusters, each knob of the cone armed with a horrendous hooked prickle, as if to guard the harsh fruit.” You will have happened upon Table Mountain pine (Pinus pungens).

It is the only pine species that is essentially restricted (i.e., endemic) to the southern Appalachians.

Some sources state that the species is known as Table Mountain pine because it thrives on gravelly tablelands, ridges and slopes. Others assert that the name arose because the species was first collected around 1794 near Table Rock Mountain in Burke County, North Carolina.

It is also known as bur or prickly pine (because of the cones), mountain pine, hickory pine (because of limbs that are, as Peattie phrases it, “elastic but unbreakable by human muscle”), and squirrel pine (because the seeds are favored by red squirrels, locally known as “boomers”).

Table Mountain pine flourish where there is site disturbance, light, and heat. In closed stands on western and northern exposures, the cones are distinctly serotinous; that is, they require heat from a fire before opening to release seed. On southerly and easterly exposures, however, many cones open soon after maturing. A large number of closed cones remain on the trees from five to 25 years, with the retained seeds remaining viable for 10 or more years.

It is a wonderful tree that, in my opinion, should be the arboreal emblem of the southern 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..

Editor’s note: This George Ellison column was first published in December 2004.

Most everyone agrees that marriage is a noble institution. But even in the best of situations it can be, at times, a demanding proposition. Some folks seem to be especially star-crossed when it comes to matrimony. Have you ever noticed that extraordinary marital situations seem to run in certain families? Don’t ask me why.

Behold, for instance, the example of the Calloway sisters, who resided in the North Carolina mountains during the early 19th century. Fanny and Betsy Calloway were the daughters of Ben Calloway, one of the first settlers on the Watauga River in the northwestern corner of the state. Both sisters were celebrated for their grace and beauty. Both, alas, had complicated spousal issues.  

Fanny married John Holtsclaw, a Baptist preacher. They had seven children. Around 1825 Holtsclaw encountered Delilah Baird, the 18-year-old daughter of Col. Bedent Baird of Valle Crucis. Delilah was willing to elope with Holtsclaw so long as they went somewhere far away like, say, Kentucky.

“Why certainly, Delilah, we shall go to Kentucky,” Holtsclaw said, or something like that. He then proceeded to take her via horseback on such a roundabout and circuitous journey through the mountains in the immediate vicinity that the poor girl thought she had arrived in Kentucky. In reality, she was on the Big Bottoms of the Elk River, a mile from Banner Elk and only several miles from her childhood home.

Holtsclaw owned land along the river bottom and, with foresight, had already constructed their “love nest.” This was a camp, consisting of a bark structure built against the trunk of a large fallen tree. “For a long time this was their home. Their bed consisted of a heap of dry leaves and grass upon the ground; their stove was a crude furnace outside the door. Chairs? They were large stones. When Delilah wished to primp, her mirror was the placid waters of Elk River. Or so the story goes. We know that something like this took place, but just where fact leaves off and fable begins is difficult to discern.    

It was here that Delilah’s first child, Alf Baird, was born. Alf is said to have been the first white child born in what is today Banner Elk. Later on the family moved into a rude cabin lower down the river, “where they settled in apparent harmony.”

Delilah liked to dig ‘sang in the fall of the year. One day when she had wandered far afield hunting roots she heard a cowbell jingle, the first cowbell she had ever heard in Kentucky. As she listened, it sounded more and more like the bell on “Old Jers,” her father’s cow far away in North Carolina. Several days later she returned and followed the cow down a hollow and across a ridge, where, lo and behold, she found herself in her father’s backyard at Valle Crucis!

(Despite now being aware of her long deception, Delilah not only renewed her ties with her own family but continued to live with Holtsclaw, not in “Kentucky,” but just over the ridge. In time he built her a fine white house overlooking the Big Bottoms of the Elk.  

Fanny (Calloway) Holtsclaw, whose place Delilah had usurped, one day came to their door, asking to be allowed to spin, weave, wash, hoe or do anything that would provide John Holtsclaw’s children with bread. No one knows how Delilah reacted. Holtsclaw’s response was to deed all 480 acres of his Elk River land to Delilah and her descendants.  

But what goes around comes around. Among Fanny’s children was a girl named Raney. One of her sons, James Whitehead, bought up all of the acreage Holtsclaw had deeded to Delilah.

Now we return to Betsy Calloway, Fanny’s sister. She was living at home in 1819 when a handsome fiddler and hunter named James Aldridge arrived in the community. (That he was fiddler should have been a warning sign to the girl, but she was young and didn’t know about wayfaring fiddlers.) He was attractive and appeared to be single. Soon, of course, they married and settled in a large cabin.

Everything went fine for about 15 years. They had seven children. Then a fur trader named Price happened into the region. Price instantly recognized Aldridge as “Fiddling Jimmy.” And he knew Mrs. Aldridge number 1, who, with their five children, was still living on the Big Sandy River on what was then the Kentucky-Virginia border (now West Virginia). When he went north again, he promptly shared news of his discovery with the original Mrs. Aldridge.

She soon appeared on the North Carolina scene. Details of what transpired between the two Mrs. Aldridges are scant. It is recorded, however, that “Fiddling Jimmy” came by the local millhouse the day his first wife appeared and told the boys: “Well, the cat is out of the bag.” Of Mrs. Aldridge number 2, he said: “She is sulky, but since I’m treating both women exactly alike [there’s] no doubt she will get over it.”

At some point after Mrs. Aldridge number 1 returned to the Big Sandy, several of her children by “Fiddling Jimmy” appeared on the scene in the Banner Elk area further complicating matters. When relations between Mrs. Aldridge number 2 and “Fiddling Jimmy” cooled, he headed up to the Big Sandy to try and patch things up with Mrs. Aldridge number 1. This didn’t work out either. When Mrs. Aldridge number 2 came north to check one last time on “Fiddling Jimmy” (her first “real” visit to Kentucky), she found him living with a young girl in a hut.

Back home on the Elk River, Betsy managed to raise her own children and, occasionally, the children from her husband’s first marriage. It is recorded: “She died in 1900 a well-respected woman.”    

(Note: The primary sources for this account are John P. Arthur, A History of Watauga County (1915); Horton Cooper, The History of Avery County, North Carolina (1967); Carolyn Sakwoski, Touring the Western North Carolina Backroads (1990); and an anonymous, online article published by the Watauga News at www.mountaintimes.com/summer/lore_calloway.php3.)

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..

Each of us inhabits several landscapes. On the one hand, there is our everyday exterior topographic landscape. We call it reality. On the other there is our interior landscape … the world of imagination, dreams and nightmares. Whether we are aware of it or not, a significant portion of our life is spent balancing and reconciling the exterior and the interior.

The spiritual ideal of the ancient Cherokees was balance in all matters large and small … the Upper World of light, peace, and everlasting life (represented by Sanuwa, the mythic hawk modeled, perhaps, on the perigrine falcon) was balanced by the Under World of darkness, strife, and eternal death (represented by Uktena, the giant serpent modeled on the rattlesnake) ... men balanced women … plants balanced animals … summer balanced winter … each item or category had its counterweight. The totality of this belief system is now sometimes referred to as the Harmony Ethic.

The interior landscapes reflected in the Cherokee myths are inhabited by anomalous creatures. They were distorted images of the exterior world that helped define “reality”—or maybe it was the other way round. Be that as it may, they were an interesting assembly of strange and wonderful critters. Here is one of them: Dakwa.

When a fisherman in the Smokies region receives a sudden strike from a huge fish that breaks his line or drags his tackle away before he can react, he usually supposes it was a muskellunge, a ferocious species of pike that reaches a length of 60 inches and a weight of nearly 70 pounds.

But all strikes of this sort can’t be attributed to muskies. There is, after all, another great fish almost as large as a whale. This would be the Dakwa, a fish so large it was equated with the whale. Indeed, according to ethnologist James Mooney’s Myths of the Cherokee (1900), when the Bible was translated into Cherokee in the 18th century, the word “Dakwa” was employed as the equivalent of “whale.”

Mooney also points out that, “In almost every age and country we find a myth of a great fish swallowing a man, who afterwards finds his way out alive.” It may be that after the Cherokees were introduced to Christianity in the 18th century they adapted an earlier legend depicting a great fish to a version closer to the story related in the Bible:

Then Jonah prayed unto the Lord his God out of the Fish’s

belly … The waters compassed me about, even to the soul:

the depth closed me round about, the weeds were wrapped about

about my head … But I will sacrifice unto thee with that

voice of salvation; I will pay that that I have vowed. Salvation

is the Lord … and the Lord spake unto the fish, and it

vomited out Jonah upon the dry land.

— “Jonah” 2:1-10

There are several Dakwa stories in Cherokee lore. Here is the one known as “The Hunter and the Dakwa” as collected by Mooney from the storytellers Swimmer and Tagwaddihi in the Big Cove of the Qualla Boundary (present-day Cherokee) during the late 1880s:

“In the old days there was a great fish called the Dakwa … This fish was so large that it could easily swallow a man. One day several hunters were traveling in a canoe … when the Dakwa suddenly rose up under the canoe and threw them all into the air. As the men came down, the fish swallowed one with a single snap of its jaws, and dived with him to the bottom of the river. This man was one of the bravest hunters in the tribe, and as soon as he discovered where he was he began thinking of some way to overcome the Dakwa and escape from its stomach. Except for a few scratches and bruises, the hunter had not been hurt, but it was so hot and airless inside the big fish that he feared he would soon smother. As he groped around in the darkness, his hands found some mussel shells which the Dakwa had swallowed. These shells had very sharp edges. Using one of them as a knife, the hunter began cutting away at the fish’s stomach. Soon the Dakwa grew uneasy at the scraping inside his stomach and came up to the surface of the river for air. The man kept on cutting with the shell until the fish was in such pain that it swam wildly back and forth across the river, thrashing the water into foam with its tail. At last the hunter cut through the Dakwa’s side. Water flowed in, almost drowning the man, but the big fish was so weary by this time that it came to a stop. The hunter looked out of the hole and saw that the Dakwa was now resting in shallow water near the riverbank. Reaching up, the man pulled himself through the hole in the fish, moving very carefully so as not to disturb the Dakwa. He then waded ashore and returned to his village, where his friends were mourning his death because they were sure he had been eaten by the great fish. Now they named him a hero and held a celebration in his honour. Although the brave hunter escaped with his life, the juices in the stomach of the Dakwa had scalded all the hair from his head, and he was bald forever after.”

The obvious difference between the story of the Cherokee hunter and that of Jonah is that the latter was dependent upon a higher power for his salvation whereas the hunter was dependent upon his own devices. Before someone calls to advise me that there are no whales in WNC, I’ll note that the Cherokees had trade relations with coastal tribes. They would have heard all about whales. And it’s probable that they saw them from time to time. I do wonder why the storytellers gave the hunter a baldhead.

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: George Ellison, like many in the mountains, was snowed in and unable to get an internet connection. This column was first published in The Smoky Mountain News in 2005

I’m sure you’ve noticed it’s the little things that, in the long run, mean the most in life? That’s a time-worn cliché if there ever was one. But as of now, I prefer to believe that it’s true.

And furthermore, I’m of the opinion that the little things are more important during the winter months. Here in the mountains, winter slows life down almost to a standstill, especially if you live in the country. In the country in winter, one tends to pay closer attention to the everyday world.

One of my best times for paying attention is in the morning just after I’ve cajoled myself out of bed and before I crank up the truck, scrape the frost off the windows, and drive the three miles to my office in Bryson City. After dressing, I pour myself a cup of grapefruit juice and, sometimes, a half of a cup of coffee. Then I position myself in front of the wood burning stove in the living room, with my backside situated as close as is feasible to the stove. From that secure position, I have a clear view out the front windows and across the creek to a far pasture. My wife, Elizabeth, almost always joins me. We usually don’t bother to talk much.

Sometimes her horse, Sochan, will be standing in the pasture. Preferring to walk all of my life, I have no inclination to ride a horse. But I like watching them. As someone once remarked, “A pretty horse completes a landscape,” or something like that.

Most of the time, however, Sochan is waiting up at the barn for his food and can’t be seen. My eyes then wander to the jagged ridgeline above the cove southeast of our home. Beyond that ridgeline in winter are the lower reaches of the Tuckasegee River, several miles below town. In summer, the river valley fills with bluish-green water and transforms itself into Lake Fontana.

From the ridgeline, my eyes wander downward to a bend in the creek just below the house. I’ve been watching that bend for over 30 years now and will never tire of doing so. A hardening in the ridge at that point, perhaps hornblende gneiss, diverted the water abruptly into a dogleg left, as a golfer might describe it. The water cuts under a small rock overhang, purling and glinting in the winter light. That bend is, for me, a magical sort of place. It was there when the first Indians walked this creek thousands of years ago.

My eyes follow the creek below the bend to the dark, almost black, vase-shaped outlines of several large slippery elms situated on the far bank. All elms are darkish looking from a distance. But slippery elms are a lot larger than winged elms. And they’re usually more vase-shaped than American elms. They display a gracious symmetry that’s always a pleasure to study. The splayed limbs look as if they’d collapse under a heavy snowfall, but they don’t. The Cherokees and the early settlers peeled the bark from slippery elms in long strips, shaved off the outer layers, and converted the mucilaginous inner bark into poultices that were applied to old sores, burns, and wounds. Watching the elms, I like to think about such long-ago things.

Below the elms at the far end of the pasture, is a footbridge, level and true. It gives Elizabeth and I not a little satisfaction to come back up the trail on the west side of the creek and be able to cross into the pasture on the far side, wander around, and view our home from that perspective. A creek without a footbridge is incomplete.

Come Christmas morning, Elizabeth and I won’t exchange gifts, just hugs and a kiss. From the windows we’ll be able to see the looming ridgeline, a sharp bend in the creek, the dark outlines of elms, a footbridge in the distance, and maybe a horse.

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 am fascinated by those images from the natural world that remain with us for a lifetime — almost as vivid as when first exposed — while most simply fade away. I have sometimes tried to capture in prose or verse or scribbled notes in a journal those moments when such images are created

•••

I was driving alone south of Asheville on the Blue Ridge Parkway. A light early morning mist was swirling in my truck’s headlights. As if from out of nowhere, a fox suddenly appeared, moving across the roadway, nimble feet in a dainty trot. On the roadside embankment, it paused, lifted a front paw, and turned to peer at the oncoming vehicle. The animal’s eyes looked into mine without fear. It was simply curious. With heightened awareness, I could see drops of moisture clinging to the hairs that outlined the creature’s silhouette. Then, with a single catlike bound, it disappeared in a graceful flow of movement. That clear image of a fox in the rain remains with me.

•••

The most distinctive feature of the rattlesnake is, of course, its rattle. Poisonous snakes prefer not to waste energy or venom except in pursuing food. The rattle serves to warn off creatures that might disturb or harm the serpent. Some authorities think the evolution of the rattle occurred by natural selection years ago when the rattlesnake’s ancestors were in danger of being trampled by vast herds of grazing animals. Whatever its origin, the rattle is an effective instrument. It’s a sound that galvanizes the senses. The tail vibrates with an uncanny almost-musical warning … you freeze in mid-step, holding your breath but unaware that you’re doing so … the hair on the back of your neck stands on end … the moment remains imprinted in your memory bank.

•••

August 1982 … Forney Creek-Welch Ridge-High Rocks … rain finally stops … dry T-shirt … a hog bolts out of the underbrush like a goat, head up … lunch where a giant chestnut fell long ago … decaying, blue-gray like a ghost … steep from main ridge to High Rocks … stone steps carved from granite splotched with patches of lichen … rhododendron boughs arched overhead … glistening black muck underfoot … the lush moss glows emerald green in this dim underworld … step after step & finally the top … tower & cabin … we can see almost forever … ridge upon ridge in every direction … no need to talk.

•••

Suddenly sunlight pierced the mist

magnetizing the moist leaf canopy

& filling the glade below Hawk Knob

with blue shadows and bright patches of light.

Down in the tangle at the lower edge of the

spring-fed now radiant glade there was

the faint glow of just one pendant lily.

•••

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 kingfishers have for so many thousand years.

•••

In the plain light of that long cold winter I saw things more clearly than ever before … it was a revelation … I could see the edges and shapes of things: twigs and branches, stakes and posts, rusty wire and rotting string, thin blue shadows on snow, brown paths curving beside lichen encrusted stone walls … that strange winter provided time to pay attention.

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 write this from my “office” (a spare room) at home. Looking out the window, I can see the creek that passes through our place. As a general rule, I spend more time watching the creek flow by my window than I do writing.    

We have lived beside this particular creek for 34 years. During the last 10 years, it has been mentioned with some frequency in this column. I often hear from readers who also feel attached to the creeks they live beside or seek out. This is for them … and any others who might feel the same way.

In a collection of essays titled Mountain Passages (2005) I observed: “Creeks are as central to life here in Western North Carolina as the mountains themselves. You can’t have mountains like the ones found here without the seeps, springs, branches, creeks and rivers that form them. Flowing water was the primary agent that sculpted the landscapes as we know them today. The word creek, in addition to being defined as ‘a small stream, often a shallow or intermittent tributary to a river,’ means ‘any turn or winding.’ The word may derive from the Old Norse kriki, meaning ‘a bend or nook’ … Mountain pathways almost inevitably wind down to and alongside creeks. They are irresistible. Each bend and nook has its own voice: the unique set of sounds that arises from the confluence of water running at a given rate over a particular configuration of logs and stones. We are attracted when moody or meditative to certain creeks where these sounds become voices that speak to us quite clearly.”

The creek I watch is named Lands Creek. Some say Land(s) was the last name (with or without the “s”) of the original settler … others that it was a general designation scribbled in the soiled notebook of the first surveyor who ventured up the creek after the Cherokees were forcibly removed.  

Be that as it may, Lands Creek rises far upstream within what is now national park from a hubcap-sized swatch of pebbly dark-stained seepage tucked in just below a grove of pitch pine and boulders. You can sit back out of the wind in that grove and consider the rhythmic repetition of nearby clearly-defined ridgelines as they fade westward into the distance toward Tennessee.

Have you ever noticed how paired ridges meander downward in measured patterns that mirrow one another across shared creek beds?  

Once out of the park the creek slows to a near stop as it filters though the system of reservoirs and dams that until the mid-nineties provided Bryson City with drinking water and then flows through the upper Lands Creek community into lower Lands Creek via a culvert under the so-called “Road to Nowhere” just east of  the park boundary.    

Here it is freed again to braid its way through remembered channels beneath overhanging rhododendron and laurel into sunlit openings. After surging over fallen hemlocks and boulders it suddenly flattens into a silver ribbon and flows past my window before darting under Shorty’s Foot-log.

I smile whenever I think about Shorty’s Footlog because: (1) Shorty isn’t short; and (2) to his way of thinking anything he constructs that reconnects the far sides of a branch … creek … river … bay … ocean … whatever it might be that ordinary people walk on to get from one side to the other without getting wet is a “foot-log” because that’s what it always has been “Up on ‘Larkie.” And it always be — even if someone says it’s the Brooklyn Bridge — because Shorty doesn’t give a damn and is easily aggravated. So henceforth the four-foot wide, thirty-five foot long, pressure-treated structure he calculated to reunite our pasture and yard for only $806.11 will be known as Shorty’s Foot-log.

The creek passes one last time into the park and down to a small waterfall without a name. Here you might sit and watch the water as it pours over the wafer-thin lip of rock … forming and reforming in falling patterns of white lace that dissolve in the dark pool below—and descends into what is the desolate landscape of the lower Tuckasegee in winter or placid Lake Fontana in summer.

Before the rivers of eastern America were impounded the waters that pass by my window flowed unimpeded nearly 2000 miles from Sharp Top in the Smokies down Lands Creek to the Tuckasegee … Little Tennessee . . . Tennessee . . . Ohio . . . Mississippi . . . and the Gulf of Mexico.

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..

Ho down down … Ho down dee

Red bird dancin in custody

Way down in New Orleans.

Ho down down … Ho down dee

A jailer stoned & barred the door:

“Red bird soon be dark & dead.”

Ho down down … Ho down dee

Red bird dancin in custody

Sang his song & flew away.

—modern rendering of The Red Bird Song

What if suddenly there were no songbirds? Hell, I’m told, is like that: hoot owls and buzzards … maybe a night heron or two … the occasional stork … no songbirds down there … a world without bird song would be “dark & dead.”

I wouldn’t want to do without any of the common songbirds that grace our landscape. But if I had to choose the one species I’d keep above all others, I suppose it would have to be the redbird. It is the emblematic songbird of the eastern temperate zone in which I’ve resided all of my life. Indeed, it’s the designated bird for my native state, Virginia, as well as for my adopted home state, North Carolina.

For the most part, we tend to take many astonishing things in our everyday world for granted. What if you had seen but one redbird in your lifetime? That would be a red- letter day in your life for sure. From time to time, we have to pinch ourselves and pay attention to the commonplace.

I sometimes have Elderhostelers in natural history workshops from the far western states that are accomplished birders. Many times … when I’ve asked those folks which bird they’d like to see that they’ve never seen before … they have responded, “I’ve never seen a northern cardinal, even though my mother read me stories about them when I was a child.” What great satisfaction to take them out, look around, and say, “Look over there in that bush … there’s a redbird.”       

Redbirds aren’t great vocalists in the pure musical sense. But their vocalizations are quite varied. Singing is almost exclusively done by male birds … the female cardinal, who also sings, is one of the few exceptions We usually think of them as saying something like “pretty-pretty-pretty” or “right-cheer, right-cheer, right-cheer.” But they must have at least 15 to 20 other vocalizations

My wife and I have observed that redbirds are almost always the first bird species to sing in the morning during the breeding season. And they are always the very last bird to visit our feeders during the winter months. I recently read an account in a birding journal attributing this habit to the fact that their eyes are larger than those of any other songbird species; that is, their eyes are more sensitive to the light.

Whether or not this is the case, these “early to rise and late to bed” tactics are in keeping with the redbird’s personality. They like to be in charge of all the other songbirds in their area. So, they wake them up in the morning and see them to bed at night. Somebody has to be in charge, and it might as well be the incandescent redbird.

The early Cherokees, who were unsurpassed observers of bird life, gave the redbird the onomatopoetic name “to-juh-wa.”

In Myths of the Cherokees (1900), James Mooney records two cardinal stories. The first, “How the Redbird Got His Color,” is simple. A raccoon had tricked a wolf and plastered his eyes with dung so that he couldn’t open them. In return for some red paint “the brown bird” agreed to peck the dung away from the eyes of the wolf, who then showed the bird a rock with veins of bright red pigment.

“The little bird painted himself with it, and has ever since been a redbird.”

From a number of informants in Western North Carolina and Oklahoma, Mooney stitched together one of his most interesting renderings of Cherokee spiritual lore.

The earth became dark after the sun’s daughter was slain. The benevolent Little Men told the Cherokees they must go to “Tsusginai” … to “the Ghost country in ‘Usunhiyi,’ the Darkening land in the west” (also known as Night Land) and bring back the daughter in a box in order to restore light in their homeland.

(In “The Swimmer Manuscript” published in 1932 we are told: In the Night Land the ghost people live exactly according to the native pattern; they live in settlements, have chiefs and councils, clans and families … everybody who dies goes and joins the relatives who have preceded him; they go hunting and fishing, have ball games and dances, etc.)

“The Little Men told them that they must take a box with them, and when they got to ‘Tsusginai’ they would find all the ghosts at a dance. They must stand outside the circle, and when the young woman passed in the dance they must strike her with sourwood rods and she would fall to the ground. They must then put her into the box and bring her back to her mother, but they must be very sure not to open the box, even a little way, until they were home again.”

This they did. On the way home, however, they heard the young woman wailing. She told them that she had no air and was dying. They tried to withstand these pleas, but finally succumbed and lifted the lid of the box “just a little to give her air.”  

“There was a fluttering sound inside and something flew past them into the thicket …”  

In Living Stories of the Cherokee (1998) contemporary Cherokee storyteller Freeman Owl concludes the story in this manner:

They looked over to the bush,

and there was

a beautiful redbird.

And as she sang,

the Sun smiled …

Then they knew that the redbird

was the daughter of the Sun …

It is a story about darkness and light and bird song.

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..

Horace Kephart (1862-1931) was the author of Our Southern Highlanders, Camp Cookery, Sporting Firearms, Camping and Woodcraft, Smoky Mountain Magic, and other books. He also played a well-documented role in the founding of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Most residents in and frequent visitors to the Smokies region know the basic story.

During 1903-1904, in a situation acerbated by alcoholism, he lost his position as a prestigious librarian in St. Louis and his wife and six children returned to her family in Ithaca, N.Y. He came to Western North Carolina seeking a “Back of Beyond” in which to heal himself, which he found from 1904-1907 in a cabin on the Little Fork of the Sugar Fork of Hazel Creek in the Smokies. From 1910 until 1931, when he died in an automobile wreck, he resided in Bryson City.

Those are the barest rudiments of the Horace Kephart story. This is the story of the little-known role his father, Isaiah L. Kephart, played in his son’s transition from St. Louis to the Smokies. It’s a role that can’t be overestimated.

Born on a farm in 1832 in Clearfield County, Penn. (west of State College and northwest of Harrisburg), Isaiah worked as a lumberman, teamster, raftsman, and river pilot before being licensed to preach in 1859 by the Allegheny Conference of the United Brethren in Christ. He was ordained in 1863. During the final year and a half of the Civil War, he served as chaplain for the 21st Pennsylvania Cavalry, which lost 417 men killed or wounded and more than 200 captured. He participated in 19 engagements under fire, including the Second Battle of Cold Harbor and the Battle of Petersburg. Thereafter, he taught at colleges in Iowa, California, and Illinois. Although some sensed during the early portions of his career that Isaiah’s interests were perhaps too broad, that he was at times dilettantish, he was by this time firmly entrenched in Dayton as editor of the Religious Telescope and widely respected, even revered, in the family, church, and educational circles within which he moved.

The journey from St. Louis to Dayton required perhaps eight hours. Sitting with one another in a coach, the Kepharts would have experienced tense moments. Aside from their differences in regard to religious issues and Isaiah’s disgust with tobacco, the major source of tension between father and son would have been the use of alcohol. Isaiah had for years been a leader of the temperance movement in Ohio.

Nevertheless, Isaiah and Horace enjoyed one another’s company, especially when they could get together “for a tramp in the woods.” And they maintained mutual interests that allowed them to work through or set aside tensions as they arose. These interests were intertwined, involving matters of family history and lore that included a passionate nostalgia for almost anything having to do with the pioneer lifestyle — as evidenced in a poem Isaiah wrote dated ”September 1899”:

WHEN I WAS A BOY

Ah! oft in my thoughts do I wander

Away to the dear forest, home,

Far off in the pine-covered mountains,

Where the cabin stood silent and lone;

And I think, with a heartache pathetic,

Of the home circle, rustic and fair,

That there, ‘mid the wildest surroundings,

Dwelt cozy, contented, and poor.

‘T was a paradise, now as I see it ….

So in thought I go back to that cabin,

That clearing, that forest, that farm

Where father and mother and children

Dwelt contented—oblivious of harm.

And as memory retouches the picture,

And contrasts it with life of to-day—

With the hurry, the rush, and the clatter.

On the road thus far down life’s way.

My heart often yearns for the quiet.

The peace, the contentment, the joy

Of the life that I lived in that cabin

Back yonder when I was a boy.

Isaiah’s poem is chock full of sentiments regarding the degrading influence of urban “uproar” and “The peace, the contentment, the joy / Of life that I lived in that cabin / Back yonder.” Few readers of Our Southern Highlanders will have overlooked the connection between Isaiah’s dreamed of cabin “Back Yonder” in the Alleghenies and his son’s cabin-to-be in the heart of the Smokies.

In Isaiah Kephart’s biography published in 1909, a photo captioned “Elder Kephart’s home in Dayton, 916 N. Main Street” provides an image of a large double-storied frame house with an L-shaped front porch. The residence of Horace’s father and mother looks quiet and inviting, a better place than most from which to plot a new start. While trying to sort things out — to see what he might make of a life now in such disarray — Kephart had already decided upon a literary career of some sort. With his father’s counsel, he intuited that living in a setting similar to the one experienced by Isaiah and their pioneer ancestors (while writing about such a place and its people, if he could find it) might become part of a healing process. As if to get their bearings, father and son journeyed to the “Old Goss” cemetery “on the hill one mile east of Osceola Springs, Pennsylvania,” where many of Horace’s ancestors on his mother’s side are buried. (These descriptions are based on a series of “snapshots” Horace made with penciled inscriptions on their backs.) Horace carefully photographed the site and recorded the inscriptions on each headstone. Of note is the fact, not previously known, that Isaiah had accompanied his son on this venture. The inscription on the back of “the old Center school-house” snapshot indicates that the building’s logs “were hewed by Rev. Henry Kephart [Isaiah’s father] in 1847, 8 or 9, and in which in the winter of 1855-56 one Bishop, two preachers, two physicians, one lawyer, one editor, and eleven Union Soldiers of the Civil War (then in their boyhood) all attended school. The Snap-shot was taken  ...  by Horace Kephart, son of editor I.L. Kephart (who stands in the fore-ground) and grand-son of the said Rev. Henry Kephart.”

This mid-July 1904 outing to ancestral sites in central Pennsylvania took place not more than two weeks before Horace left Dayton headed south, looking for a place in the Smokies where life was still being conducted, he supposed, as it had been in the Alleghenies. By November, three months after establishing a base camp 45 miles west of Asheville, he had relocated to a cabin deep in the Smokies, where to a certain extent he could “realize the past in the present.” The following July, the 72-year-old Isaiah arrived on the scene — making what amounted to an inspection tour on horseback of the pioneer facilities in the Hazel Creek area and along the high state line between North Carolina and Tennessee, which Horace documented with photographs.

It appears that Isaiah not only played a more active role in his son’s overall plans than previously supposed, but that he was, in fact, a co-conspirator in the search for a “Back of Beyond.”

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..

Buffalo Branch ... Buffalo Creek ... Buffalo Cove ... all are common place names that indicate the prior residence of that mammal here in Western North Carolina.

Whenever I conduct workshops on the region’s natural history or Cherokee lore, the buffalo topic always comes up. I used to think that the species that was formerly here was the wood bison (Bison bison athabascae), one of the two bison subspecies recognized in North America. After looking into the matter more closely, however, I now know better. More about that after we take a look at the historical record.

The buffalo was certainly here long before the Cherokees emerged as a distinctive culture about a thousand years ago. They knew the great beast as “yansa,” and utilized it for clothing and food. According to Arlene Fradkin’s Cherokee Folk Zoology (N.Y.: Garland, 1990), the horns were made into surgical instruments for curing swellings from boils and toothaches as well as for war trumpets. Buffalo hoofs were sometimes worn on warriors’ feet during war expeditions so as to deceive the enemy. To this day the buffalo dance is still a favorite among the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.

John Henry Preston in Western North Carolina: A History (Asheville: Daughters of the American Revolution, 1914) notes that some of Hernando de Soto’s men exploring this area in 1540 were presented with a dressed buffalo skin by the Cherokees. This, Arthur speculates, was perhaps the first such skin “ever obtained by white men.” The Spaniards described it as “an ox hide as thin as a calf’s skin, and the hair like a soft wool between the coarse and fine wool of sheep.”

The first recorded British observation of a buffalo in eastern North America was documented by William T. Hornaday in The Extermination of the American Bison (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1889):

“The earliest discovery of the bison in Eastern North America ... was made somewhere near Washington, District of Columbia, in 1612, by an English navigator named Samuell Argoll, and narrated in a letter published as follows in ‘Purchas: His Pilgrimes’ (1625): ‘And then marching into the Countrie, I found great store of Cattle as big as Kine, of which the Indians that were my guides killed a couple, which we found to be very good and wholesome meate, and are very easie to be killed, in regard they are heavy, slow, and not so wild as other beasts of the wildernesse.’”

While helping to run the dividing line between North Carolina and Virginia in 1729, Col. William Byrd of Virginia recorded several buffalo sightings in the Piedmont sections of those states. According to Hornaday, Byrd noted that a bull “was found all alone, tho Buffaloes Seldom are,” and “the meat is spoken of as ‘a Rarity.’”

Most authorities feel that buffaloes had been extirpated from the mountains of Western North Carolina by 1865 or so. The last reference I have been able to locate comes from a diary kept by Bishop Augustus Gottlieb Spangenberg in which he portrayed in detail his exploration of the Blue Ridge in 1752-53 on behalf of the Moravian Church.  

In 1752, Bishop Spangenberg traveled westward from the coast. By Nov. 24, they had reached the mountains east of present-day Asheville. He recorded that this was a land where timber wolves still howled at night and panthers were a menace. The land was also “frequented by buffalo, whose tracks are everywhere, and can often be followed with profit. Frequently, however, a man cannot travel them, for they go through thick and thin, through morass and deep water, and up and down banks so steep that a man could fall down but neither ride nor walk!”  

Before many more years had passed, the buffalo was a thing of the past in the Blue Ridge. But what kind of buffalo was it? I had always read and been told it was the wood bison, but that’s not possible. Let’s look at the taxonomic background.

The online edition of the Encyclopedia Britticana indicates that a bison is “either of two species of ox-like grazing mammals that constitute the genus Bison of the family Bovidae. The American bison (Bison bison), commonly known as the buffalo, or plains buffalo, is native to North America, while the European bison (B. bonasus), or wisent, is native to Europe ... Some authorities distinguish two subspecies of American bison, the plains bison (Bison bison bison) and the woodland bison (Bison bison athabascae).

Various Internet sites describe the wood bison as having been a resident of boreal forests in western Canada. Today, there are small remnant herds of wood bison in that region. Whereas plains bison have a full beard and neck mane, wood bison have a thin pointy beard and a rudimentary neck mane. There are differences in weights as well, with the wood bison being considerably larger. Canadian research teams recorded just one instance of a plains bison bull weighing more than 2,000 pounds, while over one-third of the wood bison bulls exceeded this weight.

OK, we’ve ruled out the wood bison as a candidate for historical residence here in the Blue Ridge. That leaves us with the plains bison ... but what kind? The authors of Mammals of the Carolinas, Virginia and Maryland (UNC Press, 1985) observe that “Very little is known about the biology of the eastern bison, but it was presumably similar to the plains-dwelling bison of the west.”

Roger A. Caras in North American Mammals (N.Y.: Galahad, 1967) mentions in passing two sub-types of the plains bison: a “pale mountain bison of Colorado” and an “eastern bison of Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.”  

The bison found here in the east were usually described as being smaller and better adapted to woodlands than the western form. I’m now of the opinion that our Blue Ridge bison was Caras’ ‘eastern bison,” and that it was an ecological (not a genetic) variant of the plains bison.

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..