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.]
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.
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.
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):
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.
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.
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
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. .
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
[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!
[Back in December of 2010, I looked back on my first-time visits to various waterfalls over the preceding months. Good times indeed!]
Leisure is a form of silence, not noiselessness. It is the silence of contemplation such as occurs when we let our minds rest on a rosebud, a child at play, a Divine mystery, or a waterfall. -Fulton Sheen One can never visit enough waterfalls. And when I look back on the falls I discovered for the first time this year, I just regret that I didn't get around to more.
May 2 Chau-Ram Falls This one is on Ramsey Creek just before it joins the Chauga River in Oconee County, South Carolina (at Chau-Ram Park on US 76). This was the day I went out hunting for Yellow Lady Slippers in the wild and it wound up being one of the best days of the whole year. Now I want to explore more of the Chauga, a lovely river flowing through what could be my favorite county on the planet.
September 18 Sols Creek Falls This photo doesn't do justice to the 120-foot waterfall, reached after two-and-a-half miles of paddling across Bear Lake, which was remarkably quiet for a Saturday morning. As I came to shore below the falls, two otter-like critters came scampering over the rocks and into the water. I've come to the conclusion that they were weasels. It was a nice surprise. If anyone asks, I didn't really see this waterfall (ostensibly on private property), I didn't really take this picture. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
September 19 Ledbetter Creek Pick up the recently-published map of the Bartram Trail in North Carolina, and you'll see this little waterfall on the cover. The hike to this lovely spot begins next to the Nantahala River, not far from the place where William Bartram and Attakullakulla crossed paths in May 1775. If I can ever commandeer a time machine, that meeting is high on the list of events I would like to witness. In 1730, Attakullakulla was one of several Cherokee men who visited London. I'd like to imagine that Attakullakulla regaled Bartram with stories of attending a play at the Globe Theatre decades earlier. The trail to Cheoah Bald crosses Ledbetter Creek before a long, steep climb up the mountain. Just to look at the map, you don't get a sense of what a demanding hike it is (at least for the first couple of miles). Having scaled the toughest part of the trail, I regretted the necessity of turning back before reaching Bartram Falls and Cheoah Bald. It was mighty pretty up there. Maybe next year...
September 23 Warden's Falls All things being equal, I favor accessing Panthertown Valley from the east. But from Cullowhee, it is a considerably longer drive. And really, any way into Panthertown is the right way. The monarch butterflies were making their annual migration on the day I found Warden's Falls. They were pausing at Duke's powerline right-of-way that runs through the valley.
October 3 Greenland Creek Falls I wanted to revisit this one (another Panthertown waterfall) at a later date to capture a bit more autumn color, but it will have to wait until next year.
October 14 Skinny Dip Falls As many times as I have passed the Looking Glass Rock Overlook on the Blue Ridge Parkway in the past 30 years, it was only this fall that I followed the short trail (across the BRP) to Skinny Dip Falls, a nice spot on the Mountains-to-Sea Trail.
October 24 Chasteen Creek Cascade This is a view looking downstream from the top of Chasteen Creek Cascades in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The trail begins at the Smokemont Campground and is as nice a walk as you'll find anywhere.
So we saunter toward the Holy Land; till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, so warm and serene and golden as on a bank-side in Autumn. -From Walking, by Henry David Thoreau .
I was received with a great deal of courtesy by the mistress of the house whose husband was away. This woman was young, beautiful, but very devout, and continually reflecting on the different ways of thought among the Methodists, Anabaptists and Quakers. Conversations on these subjects went from seven until ten-thirty; I then became bored with it in spite of the kindness and charm of this woman, and I went to bed. -Andre Michaux, December 1, 1788
The more I delve into Andre Michaux’s December 1788 expedition to the Southern mountains, the more contradictions I find. This trip has earned a place in the history of botanical explorations because Michaux collected specimens of Shortia galacifolia at the head of the Keowee River, and it took a century for subsequent researchers to locate the source of those plants. But the Oconee Bell was not the object of Michaux’s field trip. He was intent on finding Magnolia cordata, a rare tree mentioned by William Bartram on his 1775 trip through the mountains.
If diverse flora was one appeal of the region, Michaux also found a great diversity of people living on this frontier. By all descriptions, the Frenchman was a good conversationalist and well-mannered, but his diary reflects annoyances along the way. On December 1, he arrived near the head of the Savannah River (at the confluence of the Keowee and Tugaloo Rivers) where he stayed at the home of home of a Mr. Freeman (as described above).
Detour Via Cleveland's Ferry
Rather than proceeding straight up the Keowee, Michaux headed northwest along the Tugaloo. He traveled about twenty miles on December 2 and spent the night at the home of Larkin Cleveland. On December 3, he crossed the river to breakfast at the home of John Cleveland:
I crossed the Tugaloo River at the only place used for fording. It was so dangerous that two of our horses narrowly escaped drowning.
Larkin and John had fought beside their brother, Colonel Benjamin Cleveland, who was a hero at the Battle of Kings Mountain in 1780. Cleveland counties in North Carolina and Georgia, and the town of Cleveland, Tennessee were all named for the Colonel. After the Revolution, the three Cleveland brothers brought their families to the Tugaloo just east of Toccoa, Georgia.
Returning to Keowee River
Leaving the Tugaloo, Michaux went east, spending the night of December 3 sleeping on the ground at Seneca. That night he wrote that his twenty mile trip had been:
…through country completely covered with forests, like all southern provinces, but it was very hilly…
Michaux spent a couple of days botanizing on the Keowee. On December 6, he proceeded upriver to some unnamed Indian village, where he spent the night with a hospitable native family.
On December 7, after securing a Cherokee guide to accompany him, Michaux continued about fourteen miles up the river, camping on the shores of the river at the foot of the mountains.
Magnolias and Wet Dogs
The next day, Michaux drew closer to the head of the Keowee and found the way becoming more and more difficult. About two miles before the head of the river, Michaux recognized the Magnolia cordata he had been seeking, collected specimens of “a new plant with denticulated leaves” (later identified as Shortia) and also found a place to stay for the night:
In this area there was a small hut inhabited by a family of Cherokee Indians. We stopped there to camp… The weather changed and it rained the whole night. Although we took shelter under a large white pine our clothing and blankets were drenched and soaked. Around the middle of the night I went into the hut of the Indians which could barely hold the family of eight persons, men and women. There were further six large dogs which added to the dirtiness of this housing and to the inconvenience. The fire was in the middle, without an opening on top of the hut to let the smoke escape; however, there were enough openings all over the roofing of this house to let the rain in. One Indian offered me his bed which consisted of a bear skin and took my place by the fire. But finally I was so annoyed by the dogs, which fought all the time for a place by the fire; that I returned to rny camp, especially since the rain had ceased.
On December 9, Michaux wanted to investigate the more precipitous of the two headwater streams to reach the highest mountains:
We had to cross precipices and creeks covered with fallen trees where ten times our horses plunged down and came close to perishing. We climbed up to a waterfall where the thunder of the falling water resembled distant shots of musketeers. The Indians said that at night fires could be seen at this place. I wanted to camp there, but the unexpected snow and the wind were so cold that we looked for an area lower on the mountain that was less exposed to the cold and that had more grass for our horses. The night was terribly cold. There was only pinewood to keep up the fire which burned poorly due to several snowfalls. Our snow-covered blankets became stiff with ice shortly after having been warmed.
Despite the cold temperatures. Michaux collected plants all of December 10 and for part of December 11:
I noticed a chain of high mountains stretching from west to east and where the frost showed little in places exposed to the sun. I gathered a ground juniper (Juniperus repens) that I had not yet noticed in the middle parts of the United States… On these mountains I saw several trees of the northern regions such as river birch (Betula nigra), alternate-leaved dogwood, white pine, hemlock spruce, etc. We crossed an area of about three miles through rosebay rhododendron (Rhododendron maximum).
Botanizing in December
By the evening of the 11th, Michaux had returned to the head of the Keowee. On December 12, he was retracing his steps as he continued downriver:
We kept close to the river and saw several flocks of wild turkeys. Our Indian guide fired at them, but the rifle failed several times since we had not been able to protect it from the rain in the preceding days. Thus our supper consisted of a few chestnuts that our Indian guide had gotten from another of his nation. We made eighteen miles. The weather was very clear. The freeze set in early in the evening, and, after having asked my Indian to tell me the names of several plants in his language, I wrote my journal by the light of the moon.
On December 13th I attempted to shoot a wild turkey at daybreak; there were plenty in this area but I was unsuccessful and we broke camp without breakfast. We were famished and changed our direction towards a camp of Indian hunters, and, although the hills became less steep, it was one o'clock in the afternoon before we arrived there after a journey of six hours estimated at only fifteen miles.
They cooked bear meat for us, cut into small pieces and fried in bear grease. Although it was smothered in grease, we had an excellent dinner, and, although I ate a lot of the fattest part of the meat, I did not become indisposed. The bear grease is tasteless and resembles a good olive oil. It doesn't even have a smell. When some food is roasted with it, it does not congeal until it freezes. After dinner, we made sixteen miles and arrived at Seneca in the evening.
A Geographic Debate
What Andre Michaux actually meant by “the head of the Keowee” has been a subject of disagreement for many years. In 1886, seeking the same patch of Shortia that Michaux had described, Charles Sargent attempted to retrace the 1788 journey. Sargent had his own theory about “tete de Kiwi”:
It has been suggested that the spot described by Michaux as the "Tete de Kiwi" might have been the junction of two rapid mountain torrents, the White Water and the Devil's Fork... It is more probable however, that the spot described as the head of the Keowee is the junction of the Toxaway and Horse Pasture Rivers, several miles above the mouth of the White Water and close to the North Carolina boundary… They are swift rivers flowing through beds cut deep in the rock, broken by innumerable rapids, and full of logs and boulders; in each about six miles from its mouth is a noble fall, or rather a series of cascades of great height and beauty. It was near one of these falls probably that Michaux wished to camp on the evening of the 9th of December, and the evidence favors the belief that it was the falls of the Toxaway.
Sargent believed that Michaux found the old Indian trail that continued up the Toxaway and crossed the Blue Ridge Divide between Hogback and Tigertail (now Panthertail) Mountains. This would have brought Michaux to the Tuckasegee headwaters that flow through Panthertown Valley. According to Sargent, the distant chain of high mountains that Michaux observed on December 11, 1788 would have been the Balsams.
Subsequent investigators have challenged Charles Sargent’s conclusions. In 1983, Robert Zahner and Steven Jones published the results of their attempt to follow Michaux’s path. They assert that the “head of the Keowee” mentioned by Michaux was actually the confluence of the Whitewater and the Toxaway, rather the confluence of the Toxaway and Horsepasture as claimed by Sargent. Instead of going up the Toxaway, Michaux went up the Whitewater to reach the “high mountains” (Chimney Top, Terrapin and Sassafras) where he botanized on December 10 and 11. Zahner and Jones explain that the spot where Michaux collected Shortia, two miles downriver from the head of the Keowee, was very near where Jocassee Dam stands today. This was also the location of an old Cherokee village called “Toxaway” destroyed by Colonel Archibald Montgomery in 1760.
Loyalists and Tories
I would like to see more evidence before casting my vote for one theory over another. Some of that evidence, though, is lost beneath the waters of Lake Jocassee. What remains indisputable is Andre Michaux’s ability to meet the challenges of exploring the backcountry. While returning to Charleston after his December 1788 trip through the mountains, Michaux encountered difficulties of a different kind. His biographers, Henry and Elizabeth Savage, describe the events of December 21:
After fording twenty large streams in bitter cold weather, he sought shelter and warmth in the home of an American loyalist with no love for Frenchmen. “This American tory said to me on my arrival that he would kill me if I spent the night at his house,” recounted the botanist, “and I told him I was not afraid of that because I was not fat enough nor my purse either! He wanted to badger me about my country but I was a match for him and he had to be content with making me pay dearly for my lodging.”
POSTSCRIPT
The illustrations, above, are of the main object of Michaux’s trip, the plant he identified in his journal as Magnolia cordata. He brought back specimens that were introduced into cultivation, but it would be another 150 years before the tree was once again found in the wild.
The “cucumber tree” or “cucumber magnolia,” notable for its rich yellow blossoms is now considered a variant of the Magnolia acuminata species (Magnolia acuminata var. subcordata).
I’m afraid things are not quite that simple, though. Michaux’s magnolia has persisted as a subject of debate and speculation for botanists up to the present time, and for a thorough examination of this subject, we would involve William Bartram, John Fraser, Magnolia auriculata, M. macrophylla, M. fraseri, Mountain Magnolia, Frasers Magnolia and much more. This is not something I will attempt to sort out, but I'll recommend a couple of articles for any intrepid botanical sleuth who wants some context:
And Charlie Williams published “André Michaux and the Discovery of Magnolia macrophylla in North Carolina” in Castanea, (Southern Appalachian Botanical Society), Vol. 64, No. 1 (March 1999), pp. 1-13. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4034119
With apologies to Monsieur Michaux, I will call on his old friend Puc Puggy (aka William bartram) to wax rhapsodic over a tree that he saw near Mobile in the summer of 1775:
…how gaily flutter the radiated wings of the Magnolia auriculata, each branch supporting an expanded umbrella, superbly crested with a silver plume, fragrant blossom, or crimson studded strobile and fruits.
Finally (and this is not too much of a stretch) J J Cale sings about those whippoorwills that Bartram heard in the Keowee Valley where Michaux found that special magnolia.
