Illustrating the Mountains (Part 2 of 4)

 [From December 26, 2008]

Yet the sweet converse of an innocent mind,
Those words are images of thoughts refin'd,
Is my soul's a pleasure; and sure it must be
Almost the highest bliss of human-kind,
When to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee.

-John Keats, Sonnet to Solitude



I’ve been looking for the story to be told about visual images of the Southern Appalachians in the late nineteenth century. I’m not sure I’ve found THE story, but I’ve found a starting point for it.

The story begins far from the Southern Appalachians. The scene is Asher Brown Durand’s Kindred Spirits, painted in 1849. The painting was commissioned as a tribute to the artist Thomas Cole, who had died from pneumonia in 1848. In the painting, Cole is pictured along with his friend, the poet William Cullen Bryant.

During his career, Cole's work included naturalistic American and European views, Gothic fantasies, religious allegories, and classicized pastorals. His body of writing consisted of detailed journals, poems, and an influential essay on American scenery. Asher Durand and Frederic Church were two of the artists whose careers Cole had fostered.

Among William Cullen Bryant’s many writings was perhaps the most beloved and quoted poem in nineteenth century America, Thanatopsis.

In Kindred Spirits, Bryant and Cole stand together on a rocky crag overlooking wild scenery of the Catskill Mountains in New York. In describing the scene, one reviewer said:

Not only are the two men meant to be seen as kindred spirits representing the brotherly-like love in the new nation, but the two men are meant as well to be seen as kindred spirits with the natural world spreading out around them like an amphitheater.

Kindred Spirits helped define the Hudson River School of painting. In 2005, it sold at auction for more than $35 million, a record price for an American painting.

William Cullen Bryant went on to edit a massive two-volume set, Picturesque America; or, the Land We Live In. Published in 1874, it was a groundbreaking work containing descriptions of scenic places and superb engravings based on the work of noted artists. The books created enduring and influential popular images of the some of the nation’s most famous scenic spots.

Amazon has early editions of Picturesque America, but be prepared to pay somewhere around $1,500 for it. In his preface, Bryant claimed that the scenery of Europe had become too familiar a subject for landscape painters, in contrast with the inexhaustible abundance of America:

Art sighs to carry her conquests into new realms. On our continent, and within the limits of our Republic, she finds them—primitive forests, in which the huge trunks of a past generation of trees lie mouldering in the shade of their aged descendants; mountains and valleys, gorges and rivers, and tracts of sea-coast, which the foot of the artist has never trod; and glens murmuring with water-falls which his ear has never heard. Thousands of charming nooks are waiting to yield their beauty to the pencil of the first comer.

The book includes illustrations by the English-born artist Harry Fenn, and they are among his best work.



One example is an engraving of Chimney Rock in the Hickory Nut Gorge southeast of Asheville. Shown here are the hand-colored and black-and-white versions of Fenn’s illustration.



Picturesque America shaped the mental images that readers associated with places like Hickory Nut Gorge. The illustrations also inspired subsequent artists. Frederick Ferdinand Schafer almost certainly based his Chimney Rock painting [below] on the Fenn engraving.



Their connections to the Southern Appalachians, if any, were marginal. But the careers of Cole, Durand and Bryant did have an impact on the popular perceptions of the American landscape as presented in the written word and visual art. One commentator concluded:

[They] were crucial in the formation of 19th-century American artistic taste and attitudes toward the natural world... All three viewed the unspoiled American landscape as a great moral teacher.

I was going to close with a few lines from Thanatopsis, the meditation on death that William Cullen Bryant wrote at age 19. But why edit a masterpiece? Here’s the entire poem:

Thanatopsis
William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878)

To him who in the love of Nature holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
A various language; for his gayer hours
She has a voice of gladness, and a smile
And eloquence of beauty, and she glides
Into his darker musings, with a mild
And healing sympathy, that steals away
Their sharpness, ere he is aware. When thoughts
Of the last bitter hour come like a blight
Over thy spirit, and sad images
Of the stern agony, and shroud, and pall,
And breathless darkness, and the narrow house,
Make thee to shudder and grow sick at heart;--
Go forth, under the open sky, and list
To Nature's teachings, while from all around--
Earth and her waters, and the depths of air--
Comes a still voice--Yet a few days, and thee
The all-beholding sun shall see no more
In all his course; nor yet in the cold ground,
Where thy pale form was laid with many tears,
Nor in the embrace of ocean, shall exist
Thy image. Earth, that nourish'd thee, shall claim
Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again,
And, lost each human trace, surrendering up
Thine individual being, shalt thou go
To mix for ever with the elements,
To be a brother to the insensible rock,
And to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain
Turns with his share, and treads upon. The oak
Shall send his roots abroad, and pierce thy mould.

Yet not to thine eternal resting-place
Shalt thou retire alone, nor couldst thou wish
Couch more magnificent. Thou shalt lie down
With patriarchs of the infant world--with kings,
The powerful of the earth--the wise, the good,
Fair forms, and hoary seers of ages past,
All in one mighty sepulchre. The hills
Rock-ribb'd and ancient as the sun,--the vales
Stretching in pensive quietness between;
The venerable woods; rivers that move
In majesty, and the complaining brooks
That make the meadows green; and, pour'd round all,
Old Ocean's grey and melancholy waste,--
Are but the solemn decorations all
Of the great tomb of man. The golden sun,
The planets, all the infinite host of heaven,
Are shining on the sad abodes of death,
Through the still lapse of ages. All that tread
The globe are but a handful to the tribes
That slumber in its bosom.--Take the wings
Of morning, pierce the Barcan wilderness,
Or lose thyself in the continuous woods
Where rolls the Oregon and hears no sound
Save his own dashings--yet the dead are there:
And millions in those solitudes, since first
The flight of years began, have laid them down
In their last sleep--the dead reign there alone.
So shalt thou rest: and what if thou withdraw
In silence from the living, and no friend
Take note of thy departure? All that breathe
Will share thy destiny. The gay will laugh
When thou art gone, the solemn brood of care
Plod on, and each one as before will chase
His favourite phantom; yet all these shall leave
Their mirth and their employments, and shall come
And make their bed with thee. As the long train
Of ages glides away, the sons of men,
The youth in life's green spring, and he who goes
In the full strength of years, matron and maid,
The speechless babe, and the gray-headed man--
Shall one by one be gathered to thy side
By those who in their turn shall follow them.

So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan which moves
To that mysterious realm where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged by his dungeon; but, sustain'd and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

Whoop Up the Laggards

 [From December 21, 2007]

From The Great South, by Edward King (1875), illustrations by James Wells Champney

View on Pigeon River, near Waynesville

Our expedition grew rapidly after we left Waynesville, and our group of horsemen, followed by "the baggage train," toiling along the mountain roads, caused a genuine excitement at the farms by the way. One of our most memorable trips was that from Waynesville to Whiteside and the return.

Upon the beautiful country through which we were now wandering the Indian lavished that wealth of affection which he always feels for nature, but never for man. He gave to the hills and streams the soft poetic names of his expansive language--names which the white man has in many cases cast away, substituting the barbarous commonplaces of the rude days of early settlement.

The Cherokee names of Cowee and Cullowhee, of Watauga, of Tuckaseege, and Nantahela, have been retained; and some of the elder settlers still pronounce them with the charming Indian accent and inflection. The Cowee mountain range runs between Jackson and Macon counties, and the valley of Tuckaseege, walled in four crooked, immense stretches, includes all of Jackson county which lies north of the Blue Ridge.

The river itself, one of the most picturesque in the South, "heads" in the Blue Ridge, and swelling into volume from a hundred springs of coldest, purest, most transparent water, which send little torrents down all the deep ravines, it goes foaming and dashing over myriads of rocks, sometimes leaping from dizzy heights into narrow cañons, until it comes to, and is lost in, the Tennessee. Where the Tuckaseege forces its way through the Cullowhee mountains there is a stupendous cataract.



View near Webster, North Carolina

The little inn at Webster, the seat of justice of Jackson county, was none too large to accommodate our merry cavalcade. We came to it through the Balsam mountains from Waynesville, along a pretty road bordered with farms and giant mulberry-trees. In the valleys we saw the laurel and the dwarf rosebay, the passion flower and the Turk's-cap lily, and on the mountain sides the poplar or tulip-tree, the hickory, ash, black and white walnut, the holly, the chincapin, the alder, and the chestnut, each in profusion.

Webster is a little street of wooden houses, which seem mutely protesting against being pushed off into a ravine. For miles around the country is grand and imposing. A short time before our arrival the residents of the county had been edified by the execution of the only highwayman who has appeared in Western North Carolina for many years. The hanging occurred in front of the jail in the village street, and thousands flocked to see it from all the section round about.

Sunset came with a great seal of glory. Before the dawn we were once more in the saddle, en route for the Cowee range. Just below Webster we crossed the Tuckaseege river at a point where once there was a famous Indian battle, and wound up the zigzag paths to the very top of Cowee, now and then getting a glimpse of the noble Balsam left behind.

Now we could look up at one of the "old balds," as the bare peaks' tops are called. (The Indian thought the bare spots were where the feet of the Evil One had pressed as he strode from mountain to mountain.)

Now we stopped under a sycamore, while a barefooted girl brought a pitcher of buttermilk from the neighboring house; now a group of negro children, seeing a band of eight horsemen approaching, made all speed for the house, evidently thinking us Ku-Klux or "Red Strings" resuscitated; and now a smart shower would beat about our heads, and die away in tearful whisperings among the broad leaves. The mile-stones by the roadside were notched to indicate the distance; and from hour to hour, in the mountain passes, stops were made to whoop up the laggards.


The Devil's Couthouse, Whiteside Mountain

Illustrating the Mountains (Part 1 of 4)

 [From December 16, 2008]

For many years, I’ve been interested in how these mountains have been depicted, visually, for outside consumption.

The airbrushed images in brochures and websites promoting gated golf-course communities are just a recent example of a long tradition. A century ago, railroad companies published gorgeous pamphlets encouraging travel and tourism in the mountains. In between, we’ve seen everything from linen-style penny postcard views to stereoscopic Viewmaster reels of the Blue Ridge Parkway, Cherokee and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

I’m especially curious about the illustrations in nineteenth century works on the Southern Appalachians, works published before photography was widely used in such books and articles. For millions of people, these were the first images of the southern mountains they had ever seen.



Some of my favorite illustrations from that era appeared in an 1880 Harper’s Magazine article written by Rebecca Harding Davis, and I’ve included just three of them in this post. The drawing at top shows the Tuckasegee (Tuckaseege) River near Qualla. The next drawing is of three Cherokees. And at bottom is the Waynesville prison.

In Davis’ story, the travelling companions had visited some of the more remote portions of the mountains before returning to Waynesville:

They returned to Webster, and from there to Haywood County. A day or two later, when they were snugly ensconced again with good Mrs. Bright in their favorite village of Waynesville, the Judge caught sight of a prisoner whom an armed man was escorting into the lonely little jail, which stood in a field overgrown with golden-rod at the end of the hamlet….



More images to be posted soon; meanwhile I'm seeking details on the artists who created these illustrations for Harper’s.

[Note - Here we are in 2024 and I'm still not sure who created the illustrations for the Davis article.  However, subsequent articles will delve into the life stories of several artists who visited these mountains in the 19th century.]

The Promise of Spring

All this week, and especially today, Winter has made itself known here in the Cowees. So I began to comb through my old photos for something warm and colorful to post here.  I came across the following and it touches on topics that I ponder often, and more than ever.  My affinity with the plant world, for which I am so grateful, grows deeper and deeper with each new season.

[From February 22, 2010]

Biophilia

Humanity is exalted not because we are so far above other living creatures, but because knowing them well elevates the very concept of life.
-Edward O. Wilson, Biophilia



By the end of next month, I’ll be out in the woods slithering around on my belly to take pictures of early spring wildflowers.

I’m looking forward to seeing my friends again. Throughout this cold winter, though, I’ve seen them in my mind’s eye. Just beneath the surface of the frozen ground, they’ve been there all along. Even on the bleakest days, the bright colors of spring are near.

Last year, I began to get serious about learning the wildflowers. I regret waiting so long. It could be a lifelong quest, no matter how long your life, and I’ve learned just enough to recognize how little I know. It’s one thing to identify individual specimens in bloom, but quite another to understand them in a fuller context.

Over the winter, I’ve considered how to botanize this year - by finding a different frame through which to view the world. I got some help with this by attending a native plant symposium over the weekend, hosted by the North Carolina Native Plant Society, Asheville Chapter. By the end of the day, I had some ideas for new perspectives on the upcoming woodland rambles. 

For now, from the symposium…

Tom Baugh, a biologist and former poetry editor of Rapid River magazine, began the day with a discussion of life on earth and our human connection to other life. Baugh shared the quote from E. O. Wilson that I used at the beginning of this post.

E. O. Wilson, a Harvard University entomologist, coined the term "biophilia" referring to our innate affinity with nature. Wilson’s hypothesis is that humans evolved as creatures deeply enmeshed with the intricacies of nature, and that we still have this affinity with nature ingrained in our genotype.

His book, Biophilia, The Human Bond with Other Species, includes essays on his own journey of understanding:

I have argued in this book that we are human in good part because of the particular way we affiliate with other organisms. They are the matrix in which the human mind originated and is permanently rooted, and they offer the challenge and freedom innately sought. To the extent that each person can feel like a naturalist, the old excitement of the untrammeled world will be regained. I offer this as a formula of reenchantment to invigorate poetry and myth: mysterious and little known organisms live within walking distance of where you sit. Splendor awaits in minute proportions.

Among those inspired by Wilson’s eloquent argument is social ecologist Stephen Kellert who has applied biophilia to the design of buildings and communities, as described in the book Biophilic Design: The Theory, Science and Practice of Bringing Buildings to Life:

This book offers a paradigm shift in how we design and build our buildings and our communities, one that recognizes that the positive experience of natural systems and processes in our buildings and constructed landscapes is critical to human health, performance, and well-being. Biophilic design is about humanity's place in nature and the natural world's place in human society, where mutuality, respect, and enriching relationships can and should exist at all levels and should emerge as the norm rather than the exception.

Wilson and Kellert co-edited The Biophilia Hypothesis, a collection of invited papers supporting & refuting the biophilia hypothesis

Here are a few thoughts from E. O. Wilson:

The great philosophical divide in moral reasoning about the remainder of life is whether or not other species have an innate right to exist.

Biodiversity is the most information-rich part of the known universe. More organisation and complexity exists in a handful of soil than on the surfaces of all the other planets combined.

Biodiversity of a country is part of its national inheritance - the product of the deep history of the territory extending long back before the coming of man.

Humanity needs a vision of an expanding and unending future. This spiritual craving cannot be satisfied by the colonisation of space. The other planets are inhospitable and immensely expensive to reach. The nearest stars are so far away that voyagers would need thousands of years just to report back. The true frontier for humanity is life on earth, its exploration and the transport of knowledge about it into science, art and practical affairs. Again, the qualities of life that validate the proposition are: 90% or more of species of plants, animals and micro organisms, lack even so much as a scientific name; each of the species is immensely old by human standards and has been wonderfully moulded to its environment. Life around us exceeds in complexity and beauty anything else humanity is ever likely to encounter.

The manifold ways by which human beings are tied to the remainder of life are very poorly understood, crying for new scientific enquiry and a boldness of aesthetic interpretation.

---

Wildflower photos from Spring 2009 include (from top):

Geranium maculatum

Trillium erectum

Sanguinaria canadensis

Erythronium americanum

Kodachrome Revisited - Part Two

 [From January 4, 2011]

The Two Leopolds

When Leopold and Leopold met, they were teenagers who enjoyed taking pictures with their Brownie cameras. 

The friends, Leopold Godowsky, Jr. (1900 - 1983) and Leopold Mannes (1899 - 1964), went on to become highly-accomplished professional musicians, but are best known for their collaborative effort to invent and improve the color film, Kodachrome. 

Along the way, their colleagues came up with nicknames for the two Leopolds: “God and Man.”


Godowsky and Mannes, ca. 1940

The inventors shared a love of music and played violin and piano together. Godowski studied violin at UCLA, where he also studied physics and chemistry. He performed as a soloist and first violinist with the San Francisco and Los Angeles Symphonies, and despite his eventual success as an inventor, music remained his great passion, especially chamber music performed with the most illustrious musicians of his day: Heifetz, Primrose, Feuermann, and Piatigorsky.

Mannes studied music at Julliard and Harvard and earned a Guggenheim fellowship for composition.

According to the Inventors Hall of Fame:

In 1916 the pair started experimenting with the complex, awkward methods of producing color images by taking multiple black-and-white exposures through filters of various colors. For years they worked in their families' kitchens and bathrooms, often in total darkness and measured the developing times of film by whistling the last movement of Brahms' 1st Symphony at a metronomic pace of two beats per second.

By 1924, they secured financial backing* to build a dedicated laboratory and were taking out patents on their work.

Kodachrome, as conceived and realized by Godowsky and Mannes, is quite unique in one regard. In other color films, color dyes are a part of the film as it is leaves the factory. With Kodachrome, the dyes aren’t incorporated into the film until it is developed. This allows the multiple layers of emulsion making Kodachrome to be much thinner, which makes for less diffusion of light when the film is exposed while taking a picture.

To be more specific, Kodachrome film was coated with three layers of ordinary black-and-white silver halide gelatin emulsion. Each layer was sensitive to only one-third of the spectrum of colors: red, green or blue. During processing of the film, the complimentary colors cyan, magenta or yellow dye images were generated in the respective layers of emulsion as the black-and-white silver images were developed. Then the silver images were chemically removed, leaving only the three layers of dye images suspended in gelatin.



One way to identify a developed Kodachrome is to examine the emulsion side (reverse of the shiny side) of film. Because of the process unique to Kodachrome the images will stand out in relief, compared to other color films. For this and other reasons, successful digital scanning of Kodachrome film is more challenging. Often, the scanned Kodachrome image will take on a bluish cast.

Photographers recognized several desirable characteristics of Kodachrome including greater contrast, blacker blacks, more saturated reds, and pleasing skin tones. Also, for archival purposes, Kodachrome had a much longer lifespan than other color films which would deteriorate in quality relatively quickly.

Both men were active in music, both during and after their time devoted to the invention of Kodachrome. In 1930, Leopold Godowsky married the younger sister of George Gershwin, Frances Gershwin, who was a sculptor and painter. But Godowsky stuck with the film research in the 1950s as he improved the process for Kodak from his own lab in Westport, Connecticut.

Leopold Godowsky and Frances Gershwin

Leopold Mannes continued his work in music as a pianist and composer of musical scores, in addition to serving as president of Mannes College of Music, founded by his parents.

For Additional Reading

Gene Gable wrote a very personal tribute to Kodachrome in 2005 and does an excellent job of describing the technical aspects as well: http://www.creativepro.com/article/heavy-metal-madness-im-looking-through-you-where-did-you-go

Eric Schulmiller tells the story of the two Leopolds inventing Kodachrome and even works in a lesson in Jewish theology: http://www.forward.com/articles/134366/

This complex process of adding vibrant color to a black-and-white world is similar to the Jewish notion of keva and kavanah.  The sages divided ritual practice into two distinct categories. The elements that were unchanging and static, such as the words of prayer recited daily, were termed keva — Hebrew for “fixed in place.” This was the black-and-white reality that formed the foundation for our world and our place in it. But then there is kavanah — the fluid, dynamic way in which we constantly color our practice with life’s ever-changing perspective. As any good musician will tell you, written music will get you only so far. Until the notes are infused with the kavanah that each artist brings to every performance, they are simply monochromatic dots on a page.

"Man and God" ca. 1935

Herb Geddul, writing in Jewish World Review, explains how the inventors secured funding for their first dedicated lab:

While on his way to perform in Europe in late 1922, Mannes made the chance acquaintance of a senior partner in the investment firm of Kuhn, Loeb and Co. and enthralled him with his enthusiastic prospects for color photography. Some months later, much to the surprise of Mannes and Godowsky, Kuhn-Loeb sent one of their junior associates, Lewis L. Strauss (30 years later to become chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission) to the Mannes apartment to view the progress on their color process. A Charlie Chaplin-like scenario ensued during which Mannes and Godowsky took turns playing Beethoven sonatas to their guest while they dashed back and forth to their darkroom/kitchen to develop their photographs. The process took an extraordinarily long time because of the cold temperature in the apartment. The final results were impressive enough, however, for Kuhn-Loeb to invest $20,000 in the process -- one of the most profitable investments the company ever made.

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0398/geduld1.html

Kodachrome Revisited - Part One

 [From January 1, 2011]

Kodachrome - An Appreciation

An old, largely forgotten, friend is no longer with us. The end finally came for Kodachrome (1935-2010) on December 31. With a dwindling supply of processing chemicals left, the last lab that could develop the film called it quits.

For many of us of a certain age, Kodachrome was the color slide film of choice. Most of the pictures I shot in Kodachrome are long gone. Lacking any convenient means of converting my slides to digital, I won’t even try to dig through the ones that are left today.

For iconic Kodachrome images, Steve McCurry’s 1985 National Geographic cover photo of an Afghan girl, Sharbat Gula, is near the top of the list.

"Kodachrome was my mainstay film, this was the main film I used for 30 year," McCurry said. "I have about 800,000 Kodachrome transparencies in my archive, maybe more, and this was probably the greatest film ever made." Tributes to Kodachrome and other comments from McCurry himself are at: http://1000words.kodak.com/post/?id=2388083

Browsing online for Kodachrome memories, I found a review posted several years ago on the Daily Kos, http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/12/7/04913/9030 The writer mentions some of the most memorable Kodachrome images I’ve ever seen and quite a few are included along with the review. Most of us think of the documentary photography of the Great Depression in shades of gray, as in this famous picture from Dorothea Lange:

But some of the Farm Security Administration photographers were experimenting with the new film called Kodachrome:

After a lifetime of seeing that era in black-and-white I still remember the first time I picked up the book that collected the Kodachromes, the subject of the Daily Kos review: Bound for Glory: America in Color 1939-43

Another tribute to the film is the Kodachrome Project:
http://www.kodachromeproject.com/pages/contents.html



Besides the inherent qualities of Kodachrome itself, the film is an emblem for other changes in our culture. As I look around at people living their lives through cell phones and other ubiquitous gadgets, I’m aware that many of these folks have known nothing but a digital world. On the other hand, I’m a member of that dwindling herd whose lives stretched back into the analog era. Before computers allowed us, enticed us, coerced us, forced us, to do things the way we do them now, the world was a very different place. Daily life was conducted in a very different fashion. We took for granted how time and space stretched out in a languid manner, a pace that would be intolerable to most people weaned on the instantaneous responses facilitated by digital technologies – technologies that compress time and space in ways we could have barely imagined fifty years ago.

I’ve looked at life from both sides now, analog and digital, and I’m not saying one is better or worse. But they sure are different. Kodachrome is one beautiful and evocative manifestation of those differences.

Until I heard a BBC story on Kodachrome, I had not really considered some of the unique technical characteristics of the film. For now, this bit of trivia: a 35mm Kodachrome image contains the equivalent of a whopping 20 megapixels of data. 

And, when I learned that Kodachrome was invented by a pair of professional musicians (no, not Simon and Garfunkel) I decided that this story will need to be continued on another day.
.

The Great Haywood Artifact Scam

[From August 26, 2008]

 

Just south of Canton, NC, past the homeplace pictured here, the land at the confluence of Garden Creek and the Pigeon River has been inhabited for thousands of years.

The Garden Creek archaeological site consists of three mounds and two villages on a twelve-acre tract. At Garden Creek, Mann S. Valentine and his sons conducted one of the first archeological digs in North Carolina. They arrived in Haywood County in 1879 to obtain artifacts for their museum in Richmond, Virginia and employed ginseng hunters, who were most familiar with the mountain recesses, to scout for stone tools, pottery and other traces of ancient civilizations.

Soon, A. J. Osborne became the local agent for the Valentines, obtaining and forwarding artifacts taken from Garden Creek and surrounding areas in Haywood County. One of the first significant finds was a stone cup, followed by birds, animals and men, carved in stone. Learning that the Valentines paid top dollar for such relics, farmers on the East Fork of the Pigeon got busy digging for antiquities.

Having explored mounds in the Ohio River Valley, Valentine began to notice the "absolute unique character of the finds," and acknowledged that carvings of a camel and a rhinoceros could give rise to questions of authenticity. But he insisted that he had taken every imaginable precaution to guard against fraud.

Other archaeologists who examined the carvings reported:

The human figures are nearly all of a uniform type – round, regular, though somewhat flat features, totally distinct from the ordinary American Indian, with a mild, placid expression, almost suggesting that of the Chukchis of north-east Siberia, but more intelligent.

Valentine took the artifacts and photographs to London in 1883 to obtain an opinion from the Royal Anthropological Institute. One of the reviewers concluded that the objects had been manufactured with metal tools and saw no reason to regard any of them as ancient.

Despite the doubts about their origin, the Haywood County artifacts were gaining international attention for their unusual design and clues they might yield regarding the Mound Builders. Meanwhile, Cyrus Thomas was exploring mounds throughout the country for the Smithsonian Institution. After investigating Valentine's artifacts, Thomas exposed them as fraudulent in an 1894 report:

…these articles were made from the soapstone found in that region by some persons who had learned to give them the appearance of age. This is done by placing them, after being carved, in running water which is tinctured with iron, as most of the streams in that region are.

The Smithsonian report even included illustrations of bogus articles carved by the modern counterfeiters in Haywood County- who proudly demonstrated their ability to create "ancient" relics. The embarrassment to the Valentines was so great, they abandoned the plan to devote their Richmond museum to archaeology and instead shifted the emphasis to the fine arts.

In the end, the archaeologists didn’t resolve the mysteries of the Mound Builders…but they learned how a few Haywood mountaineers wielding sharp pocketknives could pull one over on the experts.

Waterfall Renewal

This past autumn, a frequent lament was that the waterfalls in this region had "dried up" due to a long spell without rain.  Looking back through my notes, I see that we endured a similar drought in the autumn of 2007.

[From January 7, 2008]

As the drought worsened in 2007, waterfalls almost dried up. Over the past month, though, the rain renewed the waterfalls to a surprising degree. The first photo of Cullasaja Falls was taken October 22, 2007...the second photo of the identical scene was taken January 6, 2008.

Feathered Friends

After all these years, I'm still not a proficient birder. And that is just one of the many things I hope to improve upon in 2024.

[From January 7, 2011]

At the end of the nineteenth century, ornithologists studied birds in the way they had studied them since the time of John J. Audubon: they took their shotguns and slaughtered them.

In his history of American birding, Of a Feather, Scott Weidensaul uses the term “Shotgun Ornithology” to refer to the firmly held belief of that time: “the path to ornithological wisdom issued from the muzzle of a shotgun.” The idea was to collect all the skins you could, fifty or a hundred of any given species. For Audubon himself, the shotgun was as indispensable as the paint brush.

I find it a tad ironic that the Audubon Society is named after such a gunslinger. But fortunately, times change. On Christmas Day 1900, Frank Chapman took a different approach. He began a tradition of counting the birds instead of hunting them. His idea caught on and, now, birders throughout the western hemisphere get out on Christmas (or sometime thereabouts) to watch and listen and count. I wonder if any other organized volunteer effort has collected as much scientific data as has the Christmas Bird Count, just completing its 111th cycle.

The Audubon Society has a wealth of information on how the CBC has helped birds and our understanding of their lives: http://birds.audubon.org/how-christmas-bird-count-helps-birds

Now, I’m not a bird expert. Far from it. I did go out with the birders a few times, because I was curious to observe them observing the birds, to see how it might be possible to encounter 40 or 50 different species of birds in one morning. Perhaps I encounter that many different species of birds when I go out, but I’m lucky to identify a small fraction of them. Before the last big snow, I put out the feeder again, stocked with black oil sunflower seeds. As in previous years, at least 90% of the visitors are chickadees, titmice and nuthatches.

On the morning of New Year's Day, while I was still half-asleep, I stepped onto the deck and glanced at the feeder. Normally, birds will scatter as soon as I open the door, but this individual stayed on the perch and gave me a look as if to say, “What the heck do you want?”



“I want to take your picture,” was the thought that came to mind. And the bird stayed there while I went to retrieve a camera. It stayed there when I came back outside, and I managed a so-so shot (above). I really didn’t know what kind of bird I had just seen, but as it returned that morning, I took careful note of its markings. Later, looking it up in my bird book, I figured out that it was a Downy Woodpecker. I might have guessed it was some type of woodpecker, except it had no red markings at all. However, that identifies it as a female Downy.

Anyhow, local birders have been out conducting the Christmas Bird Count in our neck of the woods. One group scoured the Highlands area on December 17, 2010 and tallied 37 species, with the Carolina Chickadee and the Dark-eyed (Slate-colored) Junco being the most numerous. Here’s their list:

Mallard
Bufflehead
Hooded Merganser
Wild Turkey
Mourning Dove
Belted Kingfisher
Red-bellied Woodpecker
Downy Woodpecker
Pileated Woodpecker
Eastern Phoebe
Blue Jay
American Crow
Common Raven
Carolina Chickadee
Tufted Titmouse
Red-breasted Nuthatch
White-breasted Nuthatch
Carolina Wren
Winter Wren
Golden-crowned Kinglet
Eastern Bluebird
Hermit Thrush
American Robin
Northern Mockingbird
Brown Thrasher
Cedar Waxwing
Eastern Towhee
Chipping Sparrow
Song Sparrow
Swamp Sparrow
White-throated Sparrow
Dark-eyed (Slate-colored) Junco
Northern Cardinal
Purple Finch
House Finch
Pine Siskin
American Goldfinch

There was also a Balsam area CBC on January 1, 2011. The inhospitable weather made for a relatively low count, by Balsam standards, but it was a larger group and their territory included the bird haven of Lake Junaluska. Their species count was 65, with the most numerous birds being American Coots and European Starlings:

Canada Goose
Gadwall
Mallard
Blue-winged Teal
Canvasback
Ring-necked Duck
Lesser Scaup
Bufflehead
Hooded Merganser
Ruddy Duck
Ruffed Grouse
Wild Turkey
Pied-billed Grebe
Horned Grebe
Great Blue Heron (Blue form)
Cooper's Hawk
Red-tailed Hawk
American Kestrel
American Coot
Killdeer
Bonaparte's Gull
Ring-billed Gull
Rock Pigeon
Eurasian Collared-Dove
Mourning Dove
Eastern Screech-Owl
Great Horned Owl
Belted Kingfisher
Red-bellied Woodpecker
Yellow-bellied Sapsucker
Downy Woodpecker
Hairy Woodpecker
Northern (Yellow-shafted) Flicker
Pileated Woodpecker
Eastern Phoebe
Blue Jay
American Crow
Carolina Chickadee
Tufted Titmouse
White-breasted Nuthatch
Brown Creeper
Carolina Wren
Winter Wren
Golden-crowned Kinglet
Ruby-crowned Kinglet
Eastern Bluebird
Hermit Thrush
American Robin
Northern Mockingbird
Brown Thrasher
European Starling
Cedar Waxwing
Yellow-rumped (Myrtle) Warbler
Eastern Towhee
Field Sparrow
Fox Sparrow
Song Sparrow
Swamp Sparrow
White-throated Sparrow
White-crowned Sparrow
Dark-eyed (Slate-colored) Junco
Northern Cardinal
Eastern Meadowlark
Brown-headed Cowbird
Purple Finch
House Finch
Pine Siskin
American Goldfinch
House Sparrow

For detailed tables on these and other bird counts: http://cbc.audubon.org/cbccurrent/current_table.html

And, finally, some assorted insights on woodpeckers:

When a dead tree falls, the woodpeckers share in its death.
-Malayan proverb

Even the woodpecker owes his success to the fact that he uses his head and keeps pecking away until he finishes the job he starts.
-Coleman Cox

My father told me all about the birds and the bees, the liar - I went steady with a woodpecker till I was twenty-one.
-Bob Hope

Lawyers and woodpeckers have long bills.
-Anon.
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