His Friends Called Him Champ

 [From December 26, 2007]

        The Judge shows the Artist's Sketch-Book

…he with camp stool and dripping umbrella slung on his shoulders, with broad slouch hat crushed down over his eyes, and a variegated panorama of the road along which he had passed painted by the weather upon his back--the artist, whose hands were filled with the mystic tin box; behold him! the envied cynosure of boyish eyes.
- Edward King, describing the artist James Wells Champney, who accompanied King on an expedition through the Southern Appalachians in 1873.

Artists have been looking at these mountains for a long, long time...

A thousand years ago they created the petroglyphs on Judaculla Rock.



A couple of centuries ago, naturalists like William Bartram sketched the plant life and other sights they encountered in these hills.



In the 1850s, William Frerichs explored the Blue Ridge and the Smokies to get inspiration for his majestic oil paintings "Tamahaka Falls" in Cherokee County, NC. 



After the end of the Civil War, magazine publishers had an insatiable appetite for travel stories describing the people and scenery of the Southern Appalachians. 

More than one scholar has opined on how these articles shaped and reinforced stereotypes about mountain people. But I’ve not seen much written about the artists who supplied the illustrations that accompanied the travel stories of the late nineteenth century.

Take for instance, James Wells Champney (1843-1903). He accompanied the writer Edward King on travels throughout the South and made more than 500 sketches during their journeys.  The two traveled more than 25,000 miles together.

James Wells "Champ" Champney has been described as:

a prolific artist whose work was of high quality and broad scope. He was very successful as a oil painter of genre scenes, and later was perhaps the foremost pastelist of his day. A lecturer, illustrator, watercolorist and photographer, he was also one of the first Americans to grasp and utilize the spirit of impressionism.

Born in Boston, the artist studied drawing at Lowell Institute and took courses in anatomy from Oliver Wendell Holmes. Champney had already visited Europe for further studies and exhibited at the Paris Salon before he was commissioned by Scribner’s to illustrate the Edward King articles. 

Afterwards, he returned to Europe and provided figure drawings of American life for the French magazine, D’Illustration. By 1876, he settled in Deerfield, Massachusetts where he taught art at Smith College.



J. Wells Champney married Elizabeth Williams (1850-1922) in May 1873, just prior to his visit to Western North Carolina. Elizabeth Champney herself began to publish short sketches, poems, books on art, and romantic travel stories, some of which were illustrated by her husband.



After Mr. Champney opened a studio in New York City in 1879, the couple divided their time between Deerfield and New York, and made frequent visits to Europe. Further, we read:

He was an early and avid amateur photographer, and also used the camera as an aid to his work. He was fond of books and the theatre, was a member of a dozen clubs and artists’ societies, and with Mrs. Champney entertained generously at their Fifth Avenue home and at Deerfield. "When they arrived, and Mr. Champney was seen on the street, the old town always seemed to come alive," wrote one villager.



Champney was in great demand as a lecturer, as suggested in December 18, 1894. New York Times article:

The members of Sorosis had a pleasant gathering in the parlors of Sherry’s yesterday afternoon, when J. Wells Champney told them many interesting things about pastels… The bright and luminous tints of the pastel, Mr. Champney said, are due to the fact that ‘the integrity of the molecule is intact,’ and that there is not ‘gumming together,’ as with paints… He humorously recommended the pastel as a valuable health thermometer, to be kept by every family, for if the pastel showed signs of succumbing to its one great enemy – dampness – the welfare of the household should be looked after.

An 1899 story described Champney’s presentation at the Carlisle Indian School:

On Tuesday evening, J. Wells Champney, the famous pastel artist of New York City, delivered a lecture before the Literary Societies and a large audience from town in Assembly Hall. The lecture was replete with wit and interesting anecdote. From the beginning lines of a straight-edged pig the artist with chalk and crayon led up to the graceful curves of a child's face, and on to the picturesque in landscape, giving scientific reasons for changes of lines, in a most attractive manner which could never tire the listener.



On May 1, 1903, Champney fell to his death. Champney had gone to the Camera Club of New York to make some photographic prints. As Champney got on the elevator, a piece of walnut furniture was too large to be carried in the car, so the operator had placed it on top, where it shifted and jammed the elevator between floors.

The headline of the New York Times article stated "His Death Was Due to His Hurry and Disregard of Warning." As reported by the Times:

Against the protests of the elevator boy, he attempted to swing himself to the floor below. He lost his hold on the car floor and fell down the shaft….

Mrs. Champney was notified by the police of her bereavement, and showed great fortitude after learning of her husband’s death. "We were very happy together," she said. "He was one of the most beautiful characters in the world and was always lovable. His life was just like his work."

So here’s to Champ, and his summer in the mountains 134 years ago, when he looked around Waynesville and Webster, Cullasaja Falls and Whiteside Mountain, and drew the world he saw.
---
Illustrations (From top)
1. From The Great South, "The Judge", a member of the travel party, shows Champney’s sketch book to a group of mountain folks, illustration by James Wells Champney.
2. Judaculla Rock by firelight
3. Morning Glory, by William Bartram
4. Falls of Tamahaka, oil on canvas, William Frerichs
5. James Wells Champney and daughter, Maria, ca. 1874
6. Elizabeth Champney
7. Feeding Chickens, oil on canvas, James Wells Champney
8. The Poppy Garden, James Wells Champney
9. Mount Pisgah from The Great South, illustration by James Wells Champney



239 of Champney’s sketches from The Great South trip are housed at the Lilly Library Manuscript Collection, Indiana University.

Finally, a passage from The Great South, in which Edward King describes their mode of travel:

It is sometimes said that Western North Carolina is shaped like a bow, of which the Blue Ridge would form the arc, and the Smoky mountains the string. Within this semicircle our little party, now and then increased by the advent of citizens of the various counties, who came to journey with us from point to point, traveled about 600 miles on horse-back, now sleeping at night in the lowly cabins, and sharing the rough fare of the mountaineers, now entering the towns and finding the mansions of the wealthier classes freely opened to us. Up at dawn, and away over hill and dale; now clambering miles among the forests to look at some new mine; now spurring our horses to reach shelter long after night had shrouded the roadways, we met with unvarying courtesy and unbounded welcome.

Addendum

If I ever write a book entitled "The Most Interesting People I Never Met," James Wells Champney will definitely merit a chapter.

His superb artistry is evident in several more of my favorite illustrations from The Great South, (and especially his depiction of Dry Falls, on the Cullasaja River):

Illustrating the Mountains (Part 4 of 4)

 [From March 3, 2009]

It overlooks a country of peaks and projections, of frightful precipices, often of naked rock, but generally fringed with delicate foliage; a country dotted with fertile clearings set down in the midst of forests; of valleys inaccessible save by narrow passes; of curious caves and tangled trails; of buttes and knobs, reached only by dangerous passes, where one finds the bluff's base thousands of feet down in some nook, and as he looks up sees the wall towering far above him.
-Edward King, 1875



I opened up the Heart of the Alleghenies and saw this mountain with the curious name, "UNAKA-KANOOS."

The authors (Zeigler and Grosscup) of the 1883 book on Western North Carolina explained:

… we came out before the massive front of a peculiar mountain. Whiteside, or in literal translation of the Cherokee title, Unaka-kanoos, White-mountain, is the largest exposure of perpendicular, bare rock east of the Rockies. It is connected, without deeply-marked intervening gaps, with its neighboring peaks of the Blue Ridge; but from some points of observation it appears isolated—a majestic, solitary, dome-shaped monument, differing from all other mountains of the Alleghanies in its aspect and form.




I don't know much about the artists who created these illustrations of Whiteside Mountain. James Wells Champney did much of the art for The Great South (1875), where the pictures of Devil’s Courthouse and the edge of the abyss appeared. The page with two views of the mountain was from the Harper’s article, By-paths in the Mountains, by Rebecca Harding Davis (1880).





In The Great South, Edward King shares a story told while he was atop Whiteside Mountain:

"One day," said the Surveyor, seating himself with admirable carelessness on the dreadful slope of a rock overhanging the awful depths, "I was taking some levels below, and at last thought I would climb Whiteside. While I was coming up a storm passed over the mountains, and when I reached the top everything was hidden in such a dense mist, fog, or cloud, that one could hardly see his hand before his face. I strolled on until I reached a spot which I thought I recognized, and sat down, stretching my feet carelessly.

"Luckily enough, I didn't move; I was mighty still, for I was tired, and the fog was solemn-like; but pretty soon it blew away right smart, and dog my skin if I wasn't perched on the very outer edge of this line of rock, and about two inches between me and twelve hundred feet of sheer fall.

"I saw the trees in Cashier's valley, and the clearings, and then the sky, for I didn't look twice at the fall below me; but I flattened myself against the rock, and turned over; and I never want to come up here in a fog again."

Imagine a waterfall 2,000 feet high suddenly turned to stone, and you have the general effect of the Whiteside precipice as seen in the single, terrified, reluctant glance which you give from the top. There is the curve and the grand, dizzy bend downward; were it not for occasional clumps of foliage down the sides, the resemblance would be absolute.

The mountain itself lies rooted in the western slope of the Blue Ridge. [Silas] McDowell has compared it to the carcass of some great monster, upon whose head you climb, and along whose mammoth spine you wander, giddy with terror each time you gaze over the skeleton sides.




Edward King imagined the future of the Cashiers Valley and Whiteside Mountain:

The wealthy citizens of South Carolina have long known of the charms of this section, and many of them annually visit it. In a few years its wildness will be tamed; a summer hotel will doubtless stand on the site of "Wright's" farm-house, and the lovely forests will be penetrated by carriage roads; steps will be cut along the ribs of Whiteside; and a shelter will be erected on the very summit. A storm on the vast rock, with the lightning playing hide and seek in the crevices of the precipice, is an experience which gives one an enlarged idea of the powers of Heaven.




For good measure I’ve included a few postcards showing how the portrayal of the Unaka-kanoos has changed over time. The first color postcard of Whiteside (with the river in the foreground) was published before 1908.

Illustrating the Mountains (Part 3 of 4)

 [From January 13, 2009]

Toccoa Falls, Georgia was a favorite subject for writers and illustrators employed by the popular magazines of the nineteenth century and I've turned up a surprising number of engravings published during that era.






One descriptive passage on Toccoa Falls and nearby Table Rock in South Carolina appeared as early as 1816 and was reprinted in many other books during the following decades:

It is very surprising that two of the greatest natural curiosities in the world, are within the United States, and yet scarcely known to the best informed of our geographers and naturalists. The one is a beautiful water-fall, in Franklin county, Georgia; the other, a stupendous precipice in Pendleton district, South Carolina; they are both faintly mentioned in the late edition of Morse's geography, but not as they merit. The Tuccoa fall is much higher than the falls of Niagara. The column of water is propelled beautifully over a perpendicular rock, and when the stream is full, it passes down the steep without being broken. All the prismatic effect seen at Niagara, illustrates the spray of Tuccoa.

The Table mountain in Pendleton district, South Carolina, is an awful precipice of 900 feet. Many persons reside within five, seven, or ten miles of this grand spectacle, who have never had the curiosity to visit it. It is now however occasionally visited by curious travellers and sometimes by men of science. Very few persons who have once passed a glimpse into-the almost boundless abyss, can again exercise sufficient fortitude, to approach the margin of the chasm.





Almost everyone, on looking over, involuntarily falls to the ground senseless, nerveless, and helpless; and would inevitably be precipitated, and dashed to atoms, were it not for the measures of caution and security, that have always been deemed indispensable to a safe indulgence of the curiosity of the visitor or spectator. Every one on proceeding to the spot, whence it is usual to gaze over the wonderful deep, has in his imagination a limitation, graduated by a reference to distances with which his eye has been familiar.

But in a moment, eternity, as it were, is presented to his astounded senses; and he is instantly overwhelmed. His whole system is no longer subject to his volition or his reason, and he falls like a mass of lead, obedient only to the common laws of mere matter. He then revives, and in a wild delirium surveys a scene, which for a while he is unable to define by description or limitation.

How strange is it that the Tuccoa falls and Table Mountain, are not more familiar to Americans! Either of them would distinguish any state or empire in Europe

I haven't been to Table Rock, but however entertaining the scenery itself might be...watching those who are watching the scenery would be even more entertaining...people involuntarily falling to the ground in a state of wild delirium!




In the era before landscape photography gained prominence, these engravings of Toccoa Falls and Table Rock were among the first views of the Southern Appalachians for many outsiders. Writers were eager to craft their own word pictures in the florid style of the period. In her Journal of a Tour in the United States, Canada and Mexico, Winefred, Lady Howard of Glossop, recounted a four-mile carriage ride from Toccoa to the falls on the bitterly cold afternoon of December 29, 1894:

I got out to walk, or rather scramble, along a path over great boulders covered with green-gold lichens and moss, the ground one sheet of snow-ice, shadowed by solemn ilexes and pines, skirting the river, till I reached a quite open space with semicircular background of vertical cliffs, 185 feet high, pine-crowned, glistening with huge, pendent, fantastic icicles—the Falls in the centre gracefully floating rather than falling in loveliest fairy-like clouds and wreaths of misty foam down the shining ice-wall on to a dazzling snow-heap of frosted silver: then winding their way into deep emerald- green whirling pools hemmed round by green-gold velvety rocks ice-bound—the whole glittering magical scene lighted into a glory of radiance by the scarlet and gold of sunset!

The cold was intense, and at last, rapidly turning into a pillar of ice, I tore myself away, and we drove back to the Hotel Simpson, where I spent a very pleasant evening in the warm little cosy parlour with my kind and agreeable hosts…





I’ll close with some verse composed by Stephen Greenleaf Bulfinch (1809-1870) and published in 1834.

LINES
WRITTEN AT TOCCOA FALLS, GEORGIA.

Hail, loveliest, purest scene!
How brightly mingling with the clear, blue sky,
Thy glancing wave arrests the upward eye,
Through thy grove's leafy screen.

Through thy transparent veil,
And wide around thee, Nature's grandest forms,
Rocks, built for ages to abide the storms,
Frown on the subject dale.

Fed by thy rapid stream,
In every crevice of that savage pile,
The living herbs in quiet beauty smile,
Lit by the sunny gleam.

And over all, that gush
Of rain-drops, sparkling to the noonday sun!
While ages round thee on their course have run,
Ceaseless thy waters rush.

I would not that the bow
With gorgeous hues should light thy virgin stream;
Better thy white and sun-lit foam should gleam
Thus, like unsullied snow.

Yes! thou hast seen the woods
Around, for centuries rise, decay, and die,
While thou hast poured thy endless current by,
To join the eternal floods.

The ages pass away,
Successive nations rise, and are forgot,
But on thy brilliant course thou pausest not,
'Mid thine unchanging spray.

When I have sunk to rest—
Thus wilt thou pass in calm sublimity,
Then be thy power to others, as to me,
On the deep soul impressed.

Here does a spirit dwell
Of gratitude, and contemplation high;
Holding deep union with eternity.-^
0 loveliest scene, farewell!

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.]

James R. Gilmore's "Mountain-White Heroine"

 After decades perusing nineteenth century documents pertaining to the Southern Appalachians, it is easy for me to assume that I've already found all the "Really Good Stuff."  Of course that's not the case, though the rare gems I still unearth from time to time have been well hidden.

The work of James Roberts Gilmore is a good example.

A prolific and popular author during and after the Civil War, Gilmore deserves to be better known than he is today.  His 1889 novel, Mountain-White Heroine, is a Civil War story set in Western North Carolina.  His introduction to the novel is a commentary on the threats posed by lax immigration laws and the diffusion of socialist thought in America.  In contrast, Gilmore saw the embodiment of desperately needed "American values" in the mountaineers of Southern Appalachia.

Although his political commentary at the front of Mountain-White Heroine is a somewhat surprising curiosity, I wasn't expecting anything special from the novel that followed.  I've read, or tried to read, other 19th century regional fiction.  Some of it is worth the effort, but much of it is deeply flawed.  Besides if Gilmore was any good, why had I never heard of him?

The Author

Born in Boston, James Roberts Gilmore (1823 - 1903) began his career in New York as a businessman involved in the cotton and shipping industries.  During the 1850s, his work took him to the South where he became acquainted with whites and blacks. During the Civil War and the decades that followed, he devoted more of his time to writing, often publishing his work under the pseudonym, Edmund Kirke.  He was a novelist, historian, poet and lecturer, spending time in the South to collect material for his books.  He took particular interest in John Sevier and other pioneers of trans-Appalachian settlement and stayed in East Tennessee and Western North Carolina while conducting research for his historical book series.

The Novel

As a Civil War story, as a suspenseful tale well-told, Mountain-White Heroine rises well above my low expectations. It warrants a space on the same shelf as similar works by modern writers like Charles Frazier and Robert Morgan.  The novel recounts the hardships endured by Union loyalists in Madison County, NC.  Sons and husbands who refuse to fight for the Confederacy suffer the most dire of consequences. Several historic figures appear in the novel:  Robert Vance (briefly), Daniel Ellis (a Union officer who wrote a popular memoir about his war-time exploits in the mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina), and Union Colonel George Kirk. More often than not in other novels and histories, Kirk and his "Raiders" are portrayed as cruel bushwhackers, terrorizing North Carolina mountaineers regardless of their allegiances in the war.  Gilmore, though, presents a different perspective on Kirk's Raiders, casting them in an unusually positive light.

Several things ring true in Mountain-White Heroine: Gilmore was intimately familiar with the geographical setting for the story, primarily in Madison County, although action ranged as far as Charleston (Bryson City), Soco, Waynesville and Morganton.  Gilmore also had a sense of the social strata of mountain communities.  His descriptions of some mountain people as ignorant and slovenly verge on stereotype.  On the other hand, he devotes as much or more space to mountaineers who are resolute, principled and brave.  Gilmore introduces us to the best and the worst of society.

The novel opens in April 1861 with the arrival of the circus:

...the monster placard announced that the dancing dogs, the monkey that plays the tambourine, and the half-nude goddess who rides four steeds at once, bare-backed, and at full gallop, would soon be on exhibition in the widely-known village of Asheville. The circus stole into town over night, and when the half-asleep dwellers in the place heard its measured tramp on the highway, they knew that a long procession of Mountain-Whites would follow in the morning. And it did. One unbroken stream of both sexes, and all ages, on foot, on horse-back, mule-back, and "critter back," and in every kind of nondescript vehicle, poured into the town, over all its principal thoroughfares, from early dawn till high-noon...

Gilmore devotes several pages to colorful descriptions of the people travelling to the big show:

The most of the people in this procession had dull, expressionless faces, and only a casual glance was needed to show that they were below the average of our rural population in civilization, and intelligence. A considerable portion had the appearance of well-to-do farmers, the remainder are known, far and wide, as "poor whites;" though they are not poor in the sense of being homeless, and destitute of the necessaries of life. However, their homes are often little better than hovels, and their food is usually a ration of salt pork, hominy, and "corn-dodger," which fails to develop in them a very high order of manhood. But the hovels are their own, and so are the small patches of cleared ground which they cultivate in the rudest and most primitive manner.

During the circus, news of the recent attack on Fort Sumter in Charleston begins to circulate through the crowd:

It is probable that not an individual in the assemblage had any adequate conception of the national bearing of the event, or of its vital relation to his own future; and yet, a feeling of dread and uncertainty, a vague sense of a grave crisis having come into their lives, pervaded the entire gathering, and sent each one back to his home pondering the tidings with more than his accustomed thoughtfulness. By none was the political bearing of this event more fully appreciated than by three youths, aged respectively, fifteen, seventeen, and nineteen years, who occupied one of the upper seats of the immense tent at the beginning of the itinerant performance. They were of a better class than a larger portion of the motley audience. Their clothing was of homespun, like that of the others, but it was neat, cleanly, and well-fitting, and sat upon them with the easy grace which betokens good breeding.

Apollonians and Dionysians

A reference to "good breeding" might chafe the sensitivities of the 21st century reader, but so be it. Gilmore's distinctions bring to mind an interview with Charlotte Young (1879-1985) a poet and educator who taught in remote mountains schools in the early twentieth century.  She had her own way of depicting the range of virtue and vice that she observed among mountain folk:

According to Greek belief, there two groups in the world. Apollo stood for reaching for Divinity for music and poetry. The followers of Bacchus emphasized the physical side of like, and were called Dionsyians. In Western North Carolina you see that as it was then in Greece and Rome, and everywhere, for that matter. You can see it all over the world now; all civilization, or lack of civilization. It was a fight between those two forces. In North Carolina the force for seeking the Divine is rather strong.  Some are followers of Bacchus and some are followers of Apollo, reaching for the Divine in art, in music, in beauty, as Apollo stood for all the finer things of life, as we say. So Bacchus stood only for his wine and women and eat, drink and be merry.  In North Carolina, I don't know if it's more so than in other places, but those who are with the group that reach for Divinity are very strong in it; and just as strong are those who like to shake their feet and dance and drink and run with the Bacchus crowd. I find that in my teaching, and I suppose it's more or less that way everywhere.

The three brothers in Gilmore's novel have never been so far from their home across the Ivy River in Madison County.  Growing weary of the circus, they leave early to share the news of Fort Sumter with their widowed mother, Mrs. Nancy Hawkins, a saintly woman and the central character of Mountain-White Heroine, a Charlotte Young Apollonian if there ever was one.

Mrs. Hawkins and Sukey

Mrs. Hawkins' relationship with a mountain "wild-woman" named Sukey is remarkably similar to the Ada and Ruby friendship in Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain.  For anyone steeped in 19th century mountain narratives, Frazier's "borrowings" from that pool of literature are obvious.  Frazier acknowledges as much in an afterword to his novel, listing a dozen books that he found particularly helpful.  Nothing by James R. Gilmore is listed.  So, the parallels between Nancy-Sukey and Ada-Ruby could be sheer coincidence...or not:

...house-keeping was not Sukey's "gift."  She preferred to roam the woods, rifle or shot-gun in hand, in pursuit of the deer or wild rabbit. With these she kept their larder well stocked, and sometimes she brought down game that would have been regarded as a trophy by a male sportsman — on two or three occasions, a bear, and once a panther, which had stretched itself along the limb of a tree, and was about to spring down upon her.  

Sukey faces ongoing difficulties with her neer-do-well common law husband, the "Parson:"

"He's just loike what they say uv his farder and gran'ther — lazy as one, an' as big a thief as t'other. Why, he steals game thet I gits by all-day hunting; and swops hit off for bacon. He'd ruther pay twenty cents a pound for greasy swine-flesh, nor eat my best venison for nothin'. An' the swine ar' got inter his blood — made him just loike the porkers, an' thet's the trouble with all the folks round yere. They'se lived on swine so long that they'se got to be swine tharselves."

Word Pictures

Yes, some of the dialect might be an issue for today's reader, but isn't as extreme or pervasive as that found in other Appalachian literature from the same time period, Mary Noailles Murfree (aka Charles Egbert Craddock) being a prime example.  Gilmore is also more moderate than Murfree with another common device from that time, florid descriptions of mountain scenery.  I happen to enjoy over-the-top word pictures like those painted by Murfree, including this one from The Frontiersmen:

The mockingbirds were singing in the woods outside. The sun was in the trees. The leafage had progressed beyond the bourgeoning period and the branches flung broad green splendors of verdure to the breeze. The Great Smoky Mountains were hardly less blue than the sky as the distant summits deployed against the fair horizon; only the nearest, close at hand, were sombre, and showed dark luxuriant foliage and massive craggy steeps, and their austere, silent, magnificent domes looked over the scene with solemn uplifting meanings.

It is worth remembering that most readers in the mid to late 19th century had no access to full-color, high resolution images of the Smokies.  Perhaps they had seen a few black-and-white lithographs in popular magazines, but they relied on their own imaginations to form a mental image of the mountains.  Compared to other writers of his time, Gilmore exercises restraint with his depictions of the landscape, and this passage is about as extravagant as it gets:

...the horsemen set off at a brisk gallop down the road to Waynesville, until they came opposite the point where the Oconolufta joins the Tuckasege. There in Indian file, each horseman treading as nearly as possible in the tracks of the one preceding him — they forded the Tuckasege, and striking a north-east course entered, at the distance of a few miles, the wooded ravine bordered by steep mountain ranges, a mile or more in height, through which flows the picturesque Oconolufta.  They were now in a magnificent region of mighty woods, majestic mountains, and noisy cascades, which leap over precipitous cliffs, and rush in sheeted foam down steep declivities. Here and there a grassy cove indents the side of the ravine, or a quiet, tree-sprinkled valley, where the mountains had receded farther from the river, and left some luxuriant nook to be one day the abode of man. As yet, however, no human habitation can be found in all the forest-covered region, and a stillness unbroken save by the noisy rush of the river, the startled cry of some bird, or the occasional bleat of a deer, or growl of a bear, reigns over all the leafy solitude.  

I'll reveal nothing more about the plot of Gilmore's novel.  Despite, or perhaps because of, the literary license he takes with historic facts, he gives us an engaging and valuable perspective on a tragic episode of Appalachian life.  The author's obscurity, 130 years after his hey-day, is revealed by googling "James Roberts Gilmore."  After reading his novel about the people of Madison County, I would say he deserves to be rediscovered.

Cumberland Chronicler and Presidential Confidante

Among his other books was the historic work, Advance Guard of Western Civilization, focused on James Robertson and the pioneer settlers of Middle Tennessee's Cumberland Region. However, Gilmore's contemporaries were underwhelmed by the depth of his scholarship.  With a lengthy footnote in the The Winning of the West, Theodore Roosevelt skewered Gilmore for shoddy research about John Sevier.  Even so, and even if Gilmore's version of history might have its shortcomings, Advance Guard is an entertaining read. Until finding Gilmore's book, I knew nothing about Spanish intrique among the trans-Appalachian pioneers in the 1780s, and I was unaware of James Wilkinson, a man who challenges Benedict Arnold for the title of "America's Worst Traitor...Ever."

With a little digging, one can find some unusual items from and about James R. Gilmore.  It would seem that President Abraham Lincoln sought his advice, if we are to believe the dialogues in Gilmore's Personal Recollections Of Abraham Lincoln And The Civil War.

Indeed, the New York Times reported on Gilmore's July 1864 mission to Richmond where he intended to convince Rebel leader Jefferson Davis to surrender.  Had Gilmore's mission been a success, no doubt his name would be better known today.

Of Heavens Above and Stories

 [A mysterious petroglyph near Cullowhee, North Carolina has inspired many theories about its origin.  Some say that carvings on the soapstone boulder represent a sky map. That is how I depicted it in a painting which included a man and his son gazing at the spectacle in the night sky.  A writer in Pakistan saw my painting and crafted his own response.]

Back in 2014, I put my own interpretation of Judaculla Rock on canvas and shared the result online.  Who would have guessed that the image would reach a blogger in Pakistan who reflected on that star-map view. Zeeshan Ahmed posted this on September 26, 2015:

As I looked at the celestial objects, up-close, I wondered. I wondered of all the ages, and the people, who had seen it before. I thought of the prehistoric times, when the heavens were brightly lit, and had no artificial, manufactured light to pollute them. I thought of the people who looked above and wondered. They imagined all these fantastic stories, and attempted to give a meaning to everything they saw above. They saw the whole sky as a canvas on which there were these lights, and strange mists. They moved, every night, until the sun came up. The giant, yellow ball of light, hid everything else, until it disappeared and gave way to the celestial painting again.

Not all of them wondered about the heavens, I believe. Like today, there were these people, storytellers, if you will, who wanted to come up with the reason why the ceiling was the way it was, and why it was there. And why this ceiling anyway, which is such a wonderful sight, and not mere emptiness? Oh, imagine if there was nothing above, and just plain darkness. Of course, if that had been the case, we wouldn’t have come up with all these glorious myths, the kind we know of today. There would have been some other kind. These storytellers, I tell you, always find a way to come up with truly amazing tales.

So, if a storyteller belonging to those early days, were here, what would he say? Of course, he would be really surprised at the current state of the world, and its inhabitants. But I will try to keep him far away from the modern world, and ask him questions. I will ask him what he saw in the night sky and what fascinated him. Perhaps, he will tell me that the shimmering dots had their own tales. How some were grouped together, and some were far away. How that misty, hazy pathway above was a gateway to some other world. Then, he might get excited and tell me about these streaks of light which appear, and then vanish. He would perhaps tell me that these were little wanderers who jumped from here and there. They travelled quickly and left behind this wonderful trail of light. At that moment, I will think of these ‘streaks of light’ and think of him, and other such storytellers. Who keep jumping between stories, and worlds, and always have a lot to share with rest of the people. Oh, how fascinating indeed!  

"reckon up all the names of these wild apples"

 [From October 18, 2008]

So as I say poetry is essentially the discovery, the love, the passion for the name of anything. – Gertrude Stein



The odd perversity of human nature. How else can you explain it? The fruit associated with our expulsion from Paradise is the fruit we hold in highest regard.

The forbidden fruit,
The golden apples,
The apple of discord,
Adam’s Apple,
William Tell’s apple,
Isaac Newton’s apple,
Johnny Appleseed’s apple,
Apple of my eye,
Apple a day,
Baseball hot dogs apple pie and Chevrolet,
An apple for the teacher,
The Big Apple
And one bad apple.
How ‘bout them apples?

On a brisk October afternoon in the 1850s Silas McDowell wandered the Cullasaja Valley searching for wild apples. On that same afternoon, hundreds of miles to the north, Henry David Thoreau set out from Concord searching for wild apples. Silas left us the Nickajack, the Alarkee, the Equinetely, the Cullawhee, the Junaluskee, the Watauga, the Tillequah and the Chestooah. Henry left us a treatise on Wild Apples in which he contemplated the naming of them.



Oh, the delights of pomaceous nomenclature! When enthobotanist Gary Nabhan visited Highlands recently, he spoke of the many varieties of apples originating from the Southern Appalachians:

I think the names of these apples are interesting because some of the varieties go by multiple names. The Nickajack apple that was first promoted in Franklin was also known as Carolina Spice, Spotted Buck, Colonel Summerhour and World’s Wonder. What a great name for an apple – World’s Wonder. You have things like Hubberson’s Nonesuch and Seek-No-Further. Just park yourself under that tree and wait for them to fall into your lap! That’s about the highest compliment you can give another species. Seek No Further!




When apple breeders breed apples they must eventually name those apples. That was the challenge facing some Minnesota apple breeders after they crossed a Gala with a Braeburn:

We put a very scientific 'keep an eye on this one' note on the Sugar Shack tree. Of course, we hadn't named it yet, and we are the type of people who would name an apple 'Keep An Eye On This One,' but we later thought 'Sugar Shack' was a better name. The guys who named the apple variety 'Westfield Seek-no-further' in Connecticut 'way back in the mid-1700's didn't do too bad with a novel name, though. Antique apple collectors are still growing the variety, and the intriguing name certainly has something to do with that. We could name an apple 'Minnesota Never-stop-growing-this-one' and then hang around a few hundred years and see if it worked. It's worth a shot.



Some UK orchardists consider how the naming of apples has become yet another corporate enterprise in this fallen world:

Part of the appeal of the old heritage apple varieties is their good honest names. In the "good old days" apples were named without fuss. A common strategy was the name of the person who discovered them - Pott’s Seedling, Cox’s Orange Pippin, Kidd’s Orange Red, Granny Smith, Chivers Delight and so on. If that didn’t have quite the right ring to it, the name of the local village might suffice: Ribston Pippin, Barnack Beauty, Allington Pippin, Braeburn. Another popular strategy was to borrow the name of a famous person such as Lord Lambourne, Freyberg, Bismarck for example. If you were stuck (or not very inventive) you just went for something really simple like Red Delicious or Golden Delicious. In the 21st century however the important job of naming (or branding) new apple varieties is no longer left to the happy grower, but has been taken over by marketing departments, who see apples as just another consumer item, and might as well be naming a new car as a new apple. Thus we have Kanzi, a brand new 21st century apple, which means "hidden treasure" in Swahili - of course.

For the last word on this subject, I’ll yield to Henry David Thoreau for a passage from Wild Apples:

The Naming of Them

[73] It would be a pleasant pastime to find suitable names for the hundred varieties which go to a single heap at the cider-mill. Would it not tax a man's invention,--no one to be named after a man, and all in the lingua vernacula? Who shall stand godfather at the christening of the wild apples? It would exhaust the Latin and Greek languages, if they were used, and make the lingua vernacula flag. We should have to call in the sunrise and the sunset, the rainbow and the autumn woods and the wild flowers, and the woodpecker and the purple finch and the squirrel and the jay and the butterfly, the November traveller and the truant boy, to our aid.

[74] In 1836 there were in the garden of the London Horticultural Society more than fourteen hundred distinct sorts. But here are species which they have not in their catalogue, not to mention the varieties which our Crab might yield to cultivation.

[75] Let us enumerate a few of these. I find myself compelled, after all, to give the Latin names of some for the benefit of those who live where English is not spoken,--for they are likely to have a world-wide reputation.

[76] There is, first of all, the Wood-Apple (Malus sylvatica); the Blue-Jay Apple; the Apple which grows in Dells in the Woods, (sylvestrivallis), also in Hollows in Pastures (campestrivallis); the Apple that grows in an old Cellar-Hole (Malus cellaris); the Meadow-Apple; the Partridge-Apple; the Truant's Apple, (Cessatoris), which no boy will ever go by without knocking off some, however late it may be; the Saunterer's Apple,--you must lose yourself before you can find the way to that; the Beauty of the Air (Decus Aëris); December-Eating; the Frozen-Thawed, (gelato-soluta,) good only in that state; the Concord Apple, possibly the same with the Musketaquidensis; the Assabet Apple; the Brindled Apple; Wine of New England; the Chickaree Apple; the Green Apple (Malus viridis);--this has many synonyms; in an imperfect state, it is the Cholera morbifera aut dysenterifera, puerulis dilectissima;--the Apple which Atalanta stopped to pick up; the Hedge-Apple (Malus Sepium); the Slug-Apple (limacea); the Railroad-Apple, which perhaps came from a core thrown out of the cars; the Apple whose Fruit we tasted in our Youth; our Particular Apple, not to be found in any catalogue,--Pedestrium Solatium; also the Apple where hangs the Forgotten Scythe; Iduna's Apples, and the Apples which Loki found in the Wood; and a great many more I have on my list, too numerous to mention,--all of them good. As Bodæus exclaims, referring to the cultivated kinds, and adapting Virgil to his case, so I, adapting Bodæus,--

"Not if I had a hundred tongues, a hundred mouths,
An iron voice, could I describe all the forms
And reckon up all the names of these wild apples."

An 1879 Visit to Cherokee

Illustration from Heart of the Alleghanies

Writer Wilbur Gleason Zeigler (1857-1923) traveled west of the Balsams on May 10, 1879 and observed the area near Cherokee:

A great part of this hilly land away from the river is now under cultivation. Dismal young forests of field pine show that it had once been cleared, worked until worn out, and then left for nature to again train into its primitive wilderness. It reminded me of the dreary pine woods of the State next south of this. Nothing could look more lonesome than, surrounded by these pine fields, old, empty farm houses, one or two of which we passed, with dingy, weather-beaten sides, moss grown roofs, crumbling chimneys, gaping, sashless windows and doorless entrances. Not a domestic creature could be seen around them, and even the birds seemed to sing mournfully in the still flourishing orchards.

Zeigler later wrote about the conditions he had seen:

The question naturally comes up: why are these so many of these ugly blots, marked by scrubby pines, upon the face of an otherwise fair landscape? The answer is, indifferent farming, resulting, in a great many cases, from the ownership of too much land. There was no object in saving manures and ploughing deep, when the next tract lay in virgin soil, awaiting the axe, plough, and hoe.

Zeigler’s entry for May 10 also included this:

We were in Swain county. Fine farms of rich black soil lay on either side between the river and the environing mountains, which grew higher, steeper, wilder and closer together as we advanced. The farm houses were large, looked old fashioned in their simple style of architecture, ancient with the gray, unpainted exteriors, but homelike and cheerful, surrounded by their large, blossoming apple orchards.

(W. G. Zeigler, "On Foot Across the Mountains," May 10, 1879, Asheville Citizen, May 22, 1879)

Note - Zeigler, an Ohio lawyer, explored the mountains with fellow lawyer Ben S. Grosscup and they authored a splendid book, The Heart of the Alleghanies; or, Western North Carolina, published in 1883.