Ronald Reagan, Jean-Paul Sartre and the Tennessee Valley Authority

If events proceed according to plan, I will watch this morning's sunrise from the deck of a boat crossing Fontana Lake.  I anticipate a chilly voyage, but once we embark on the trail to Hazel Creek, it shouldn't take long to warm up.  I've been assured that a much-needed rain is still one day away.   It will be a time and a place to concentrate on the present moment, but I can't go near Fontana without recollecting how it used to be.  I've always been intrigued by Fontana Village, though my first visit came long after it had morphed from a company town to a vacation resort.  When a French existentialist toured Fontana, almost 80 years ago, he saw it as a harbinger of America's future.  Maybe, in some sense, he was right...

[From December 24, 2008]

If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat.
-Jean-Paul Sartre

One such [big government program] considered above criticism, sacred as motherhood, is TVA. This program started as a flood control project; the Tennessee Valley was periodically ravaged by destructive floods. The Army Engineers set out to solve this problem. They said that it was possible that once in 500 years there could be a total capacity flood that would inundate some 600,000 acres. Well, the engineers fixed that. They made a permanent lake which inundated a million acres. This solved the problem of floods, but the annual interest on the TVA debt is five times as great as the annual flood damage they sought to correct. Of course, you will point out that TVA gets electric power from the impounded waters, and this is true, but today 85 percent of TVA's electricity is generated in coal burning steam plants. Now perhaps you'll charge that I'm overlooking the navigable waterway that was created, providing cheap barge traffic, but the bulk of the freight barged on that waterway is coal being shipped to the TVA steam plants, and the cost of maintaining that channel each year would pay for shipping all of the coal by rail, and there would be money left over.
-Ronald Reagan, 1964

When the rich wage war, it's the poor who die.
-Jean-Paul Sartre

I’ve been wanting to write about the oldest and most successful land trust in the United States, the Celo Community in Yancey County, NC. I find it ironic that Celo’s founder, Arthur Morgan, was the first chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority. But anytime the TVA is involved, you’ll find plenty of irony and paradox. The Celo story will have to wait.

During the early 1960s, Ronald Reagan adroitly exposed the contradictions of the Tennessee Valley Authority, and he paid a price it. A long time spokesman for General Electric, Reagan earned the scorn of GE (a major supplier of turbines to TVA) due to his continuing criticism of the agency as a problematic symptom of big government. In 1962, GE fired Reagan over his conservative rhetoric and that same year he officially changed his voter registration to the Republican Party.

A New Deal program created in 1933, the Tennessee Valley Authority was designed to provide flood control, electricity generation and economic development for the hard-hit Tennessee Valley region. While promising modernization and a better way of life for millions, TVA’s impact was tragic and destructive for many communities and individuals. Just ask the people who lived along the Little Tennessee River in Graham and Swain Counties. Homes, farms, schools, churches and stores were wiped out for Fontana Lake.



Jonathan Daniels, who traveled the South just before the commencement of the Fontana project, touted one side of the TVA paradox:

Nobody can see the South and its possibilities who does not see the Tennessee River and the meaning round it of the Tennessee Valley Authority. It is, as everybody knows, devoted to the use of the river, the planning of the river, the valley, and its resources for power, flood control, national defense, and soil improvement through both its technics and its phosphates. Actually, I think, its principal interest is people; and under David Lilienthal (he does not carry the full command but he has it), it is the single most stirring and hopeful agency in the South.

It is still not Eden: the river runs with its development by the signs of stupid land boom at Muscle Shoals, by tough little towns which wanted the government to give them cheap power to go with their cheap wages, by Scottsboro where the boys were tried, by Dayton, Tennessee, where the South's laws against evolution were reduced to dramatic and judicial farce. Not far east of it the worst soil erosion in the South has made a red desert of mountain tops. But along such a river a design for Southern living in terms of Southern possibility does grow. A traveler could not hope to see the signs of the present direction of the South without seeing that plan in its place.

The Great Smoky Mountains National Park, where the highest mountains, the finest remaining forests in the East are already saved for the future, lies properly on the road beyond TVA. The two contemplate both earth and men together, the dark mountain cabins by the steep cornfields, water and wash, man and mountain, a less steep pull, a more lasting America.

Even while Daniels was looking forward to the brighter tomorrows ushered in by the TVA, the government was accumulating photographs of homes and communities destined to disappear under the waters backing up behind the enormous dam.

Bushnell Hotel

The town of Judson

Churches in Judson

By 1943, the TVA had created a brand new town to accommodate the thousands of workers needed to build Fontana Dam. The following photos show pre-fabricated houses brought to Fontana from a factory in Michigan.

The dormitories and pre-fabs of Fontana Village were supplemented with a beauty parlor and a barber shop; a basketball court and a softball field; a post office, library, grocery, and soda stand; a dentist’s office and a small hospital; a movie theater; a school with a dozen teachers and 300 students; even a tiny jail. Over 90 percent of the town’s inhabitants were men.

The French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre made a brief stop at Fontana in 1945, along with a group of other foreign journalists observing the American war effort. Sartre was amazed by the city that had sprung up overnight in the wilderness. Knoxville writer Jack Neely gave an account of Sartre’s visit:

Sartre wrote an essay called "American Cities," in which he described the transitory, distinctly un-European quality of New World communities. In his fertile mind, the prefabricated village TVA had built to house the workers at Fontana became the symbolic American city.

"The striking thing," he wrote in Le Figaro, "is the lightness, the fragility of these buildings. The village has no weight, it seems barely to rest upon the soil; it has not managed to leave a human imprint on the reddish earth and the dark forest; it is a temporary thing."

"In America, just as any citizen can theoretically become President, so each Fontana can become Detroit or Minneapolis; all that is needed is a bit of luck. . . . Detroit and Minneapolis, Knoxville and Memphis, were born temporary and have stayed that way."

Then one last metaphysical flourish: "They have never reached an internal temperature of solidification."

It’s been more than 60 years since Daniels and Sartre beheld the handiwork of the Tennessee Valley Authority. I wonder what they would say if they could come back today for a return visit. The contradictions of the TVA are as pronounced as ever, evidenced by this week’s flood of toxic coal-ash sludge at the agency's Kingston Steam Plant. It was a tragedy for Perry James and all those who lost their homes this week, reminiscent of the tragedy suffered by the residents of Bushnell, Judson, Proctor and the other communities along the Little Tennessee.

Seeing how history works, I just hope that TVA’s massive dams and towering smokestacks don’t obscure the human costs of the agency’s good intentions. I doubt Sartre had the TVA in mind when he crafted that line, "If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat." 

The paradox continues.

(Samuel M. Simpkins/The Tennessean)

# # #

Images and explanation of Kingston Coal-ash Sludge Disaster
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OkI1gIgThw



From United Mountain Defense
http://unitedmountaindefense.org/

Afternote:

I would remiss if I did not mention the 1960 motion picture "Wild River" which featured a terrific cast, including Montgomery Clift as a TVA bureaucrat. Though the trailer is a bit lurid, the film is well worth watching.

Calhoun in Cashiers - Visits to the Valley

[From October and November 2009]

 As reported here several days ago, John C. Calhoun examined the Tuckasegee Valley in 1836 as a possible route for a rail line from Charleston to Cincinnati. That trip is mentioned in an 1891 book by a Calhoun family friend, Dave U. Sloan.

Here’s a passage from Sloan's Fogy Days, and Now: Or, The World Has Changed:

Traveling through the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina, Mr. Calhoun, Col. Gadsden and my father stopped over night at a mountain cabin home. There was but one spare room, and in it a bed and a pallet. My father arranged for himself and Col. Gadsden to take the pallet and Mr. Calhoun to take the bed. About midnight the mail-rider stopped in, and seeing but one person in the bed, said: "Git furder thar, old horse, and spoon," and familiarly piled in with the Senator. In the morning the hostess came in the room and finding Mr. Calhoun there alone requested him to climb up a ladder into the loft, and hand her down a shoulder of bacon, which the Senator complied with, as gracefully as circumstances would permit.

Our party spent several days on this trip in Cashier's Valley at the home of the old man, James McKinney. Mrs. McKinney was quite a stout, red-faced, middle-aged lady, celebrated far and wide for her curiosity as well as her loquacity, as also her unsophisticated manner; entering the room where the gentlemen were talking, with her sleeves rolled up above her elbows, her arms akimbo, addressing my father, with whom she was acquainted, said: " Colonel Sloan, is this the great John C. Cal-houn that I have hearn so much talk about."

My father answered in the affirmative, saying: " Mr. Calhoun, allow me to present to you our hostess, Mrs McKinney."

Mrs. McKinney grasped the proffered hand, saying: "Do tell; why, you look jist like other folks. I reckon you've got a mighty purty wife to home haint ye?"

Mr. Calhoun answered, that he intended bringing Mrs. Calhoun on a visit to the mountains, and she would have an opportunity to judge for herself, when Mrs. McKinney broke in again," Well, I low she's got lots of purty bed quilts down thar," when old man McKinney spoke out, "Thar now, Sally, you've played h—l agin," and for one time in his life our great Statesman seemed at a loss for a reply.

Mr. Calhoun made frequent visits to these mountains with my father, examining the topography of the country in view of a railroad crossing the Blue Ridge, and could often be seen cracking rocks in search of minerals. He was first to discover the indications of gold in that section, and afterward, my father and others, worked expensive gold mines there.

Mr. Calhoun was noted for his wonderful forecast of coming events. Many are still living who remember his predictions about Marthasville, now Atlanta, the coming city of the South. Nearly fifty years ago he said it would become a great railroad distributing point and a great city. He greatly desired about that time a railroad connection between Charleston, S. C., and Knoxville, Tenn., which enterprise was finally undertaken before the war, and after an expenditure of several millions of dollars, under bad management, was abandoned for want of further means, the failure proving a great misfortune to South Carolina.

Calhoun in Cashiers - The Railroad That Never Was

From October and November 2009]

Who was this man…

…and what was he doing in Cullowhee?

Back in 1836, a major railroad line extending from Charleston, South Carolina to Cincinnati, Ohio passed right through Cashiers and Cullowhee, North Carolina.

At least it did in a plan proposed by John C. Calhoun.

The powerful politician, who resigned as Vice President of the United States to take a seat in the Senate, advocated a rail line to connect the docks and warehouses of Charleston with the farms and markets of the Ohio Valley.



One of the technical problems with such a railroad was the crossing of the formidable Blue Ridge. After examining the mountains of Western North Carolina in 1836, Calhoun believed that he had found an ideal route, and he discussed his proposal in a September 22, 1836 letter to the Pendleton Messenger newspaper.

Essentially, the rail line would have followed an old Indian trading path from Charleston toward the mountains. From the vicinity of Pickens, SC it would have proceeded along the edge of the Keowee River to the Whitewater River, and thence along the current route of NC 107 as it heads north through Cashiers and across the continental divide. From there it was to continue along the Tuckasegee River to its confluence with the Little Tennessee, and from there, northwest toward the Ohio Valley.

On his search for a gap through the Blue Ridge, Calhoun was accompanied by Colonel James “Gadsden Purchase” Gadsden, William Sloan, and James McKinney. They spent more than a week exploring the mountain region, travelling the entire length of the Tuckasegee River on their trip.

Starting their journey from South Carolina, the men reached the Whitewater River as they ascended the southeastern face of the Blue Ridge. Calhoun described Whitewater Falls and noted that the river had the potential to provide power (using a system of waterwheels and cables) to assist locomotives climbing the relatively steep grade:

At this point the White Water, one of the branches of Keowee, which rises on the summit of the mountain, (a stream about the size of the Eighteen Mile), after cutting down and turning the Chatuga mountain, leaps from the top of the Alleghany in two perpendicular falls near to each other, about 45 or 50 feet, and then continues its rapid descent to the valley below. The length of the section is bout 29 miles; and, from the best information we can obtain, the elevation to be overcome will not exceed 30 feet to the mile. The line of ascent may be conveniently lengthened or shortened to any considerable extent, to suit the grading, so as to diminish the rise probably below what I have estimated; or if it should be thought advisable to reduce it to the lowest rate, it may be effected with little expense or delay, and without a stationary engine, by using the power which the waters of the White Water afford, which is more than sufficient to elevate the heaviest train.

Calhoun described a route across the Cashiers Plateau of about 16 miles in length:

It passes through two valleys of nearly equal length and extent, divided by a low narrow ridge of about 150 feet high. The two valleys are nearly on the same level. The one on the east of the ridge is called Cashier's, and that on the west Yellow valley, from the brownish yellow which the decayed fern gives to it….

The White Water collects its waters in the eastern, and the Tuckasiege in the western valley. The sources of both are on the top of the low ridge that separates them, and but a few feet apart. The two valleys form the gap, which we named the Carolina gap to distinguish it from the Rabun or Georgia gap, which is 35 or 40 miles to the south west of it.

Calhoun suggested that a tunnel was the best way to cross the continental divide north of Cashiers:

The low ridge, or the crest of the Alleghany, as it may be called, that separates the valleys, may be easily passed at a low angle, by gradually ascending on the slopes on the south west side of Cashier's to its summit, and descending in like manner on the opposite side, or the south western slope of the Yellow valley; but it would be both shorter and cheaper in the long run, to pierce the ridge with a tunnel, which would not exceed 200 yards, and which would give a beautiful run, nearly level, for 16 miles on the summit of the Alleghany, from fall to fall.


Portrait of Calhoun as Vice President

Beginning the descent into the Cullowhee Valley, Calhoun stopped to admire the Great Falls (or High Falls) of the Tuckasegee:

The sight is beautiful. The volume of water is greater than that of the White Water. The falls consist of four perpendicular leaps in the space of about a mile. Tbe first was estimated at 50 feet, and the last at 70 or 80. — The slope of the mountain on the west side of the stream was very favorable for grading, as far down as our examination extended, and we were informed that it continued equally favorable all the way down.

The elevation of the fall may be overcome by a rise from below, certainly not greater than that to the top of the Alleghany, which I stated at 30 feet to the mile; or it may be turned, as we are informed, by passing up Shoal creek, which enters the Tuckasiege on the east side, below the falls a stream of considerable size, and which, according to our information, rises in the Alleghany near the eastern sources of the Tuckasiege, at a point where there would be no difficulty to pass from the one to the other, and, passing around the ridge that limits the Yellow valley on the east, descends with a rapid current, but without a leap, to where it joins the Tuckasiege. But, if a grading of still more gradual rise than could be effected by either of the routes should be thought advisable, here, as well as on the eastern slope of the Alleghany, there is the same cheap power to raise or let down gently the heaviest tram.

Calhoun saw little to interfere with construction of the line from Cullowhee to the Little Tennessee River:

The next and last section extends from the termination of the last to the mouth of Tuckasiege.— It is difficult to imagine a pass through a mountain region finer than this section. The river is remarkably straight, and free from all sudden turns. The road would pass along its east side two-thirds or more of the way, on level ground, requiring but little expense in grading. A large portion of the residue, where the hills come in, would be on favorable slopes free from rocks. In the whole length, there were not two hundred yards of rocky cliff to encounter; and, through the whole length, no walling in the river. We did not extend our examination farther, as the survey of captain Bache, under the orders of the war department, gives ample information in relation to the Tuckasiege to the head of steamboat navigation on that river. It is sufficient to say that there is no serious difficulty below.

For those who might have wondered why such a desirable route for the Charleston to Cincinnati Line had never been suggested, Calhoun had these words:

It may be asked how it can be explained that a route, which, on the examination I have given it, appears to possess so many advantages, has attracted, heretofore, so little attention. The only reason that I can assign is, that the gap leads to a portion of North Carolina little known, and which has but lately been acquired from the Indians, and between the two established routes by Asheville and Rabun, through one or the other of which most persons going to the west pass. But it was not so obscure as not to be known by the neighborhood, and to attract the attention of those whose duty it was to explore the mountains, in order to find the best pass over it. General Hayne, whose devotion to the great undertaking is so well known, undertook to examine the gap, but unfortunately his guide was not sufficiently well acquainted with the section of the mountains, to which so many ridges converge, and which on that account is so intricate, as to conduct him through the proper route.




Two decades later, the proposal to run the railroad through the gap at Cashiers had been forgotten. Instead, work had commenced on the Blue Ridge Railroad taking a more westward course through Rabun Gap. The Stumphouse Tunnel, north of Walhalla, SC was started, but never finished. Huge stone towers, intended to support a railroad trestle, still stand along Dicks Creek near the Chattooga River in Rabun County, GA. Financial problems, and the Civil War, doomed the project.

And the great corridor of commerce – the railroad that almost passed through Cashiers and Cullowhee – was never completed.

.

Dillsboro's Very Own Mastodon

Long, long ago mastodons frequented the banks of the Tuckasegee River.  Or so suggests one old newspaper clipping.  But this discussion requires some background before we investigate the evidence found in Dillsboro, North Carolina.

Mastodons and other megafauna

First off, mastodons and mammoths were two distinct creatures.  Mammoths originated in Africa and migrated through Eurasia and North America.  The woolly mammoth, which went extinct about 10,000 years ago, was closely related to the elephant.

Mastodons lived in Central and North America before their extinction, also about 10,000 years ago.  Compared to mammoths, they were slightly smaller, with shorter legs and flatter heads.  They were anywhere from seven to fourteen feet tall and covered in long, shaggy hair.  Both animals were herbivores.

During the Pleistocene Era, 12,000 years ago, humans and megafauna (including mastodons) quite possibly encountered one another on the Great Smoky Mountains.  Though glaciers did not reach this far south, the climate was much colder than today.  The highest peaks must have been tundra-like environments with permafrost and few trees.  The fossil record reveals many large mammals inhabiting the park region prior to the Quaternary Extinction: Jefferson’s ground sloth, Harlan’s ground sloth, tapir, horse, half-ass, long-nosed peccary, flat-headed peccary, stout-legged llama, helmeted musk-ox, bison, white-tailed deer, caribou, elk, giant beaver, black bear, Florida spectacled bear, giant short-faced bear, cougar, jaguar, saber-toothed cat, scimitar-toothed cat, coyote, dire wolf and mastodon.

Spear-points found in this area indicate that migratory hunters came to this area in search of mastodons and other large prey.  A paleontological site near Nashville, Tennessee has provided abundant information about mastodon-hunting in the Southeast.  The Coats-Hines-Litchy site has yielded portions of four mastodon skeletons, one of which was directly associated with Paleoindian stone tools such as blades and scrapers, signs of a successful hunt on one day 10,000 to 14,000 years ago.

Ominous events at the Cowee Tunnel

This brings us back to Dillsboro and the year 1882.  Construction of the Western North Carolina Railroad was underway and the “Cowee Tunnel” adjacent to the Tuckasegee River was posing many challenges for the convict laborers digging their way through the mountains.

An ominous note from “Sojourner” appeared in the September 18, 1882 issue of the Asheville Weekly Citizen:

I did not intend to convey the impression in my last letter that the entire Cowee tunnel had fallen in.  The workmen on the west end of the tunnel came to dirt, and it has fallen in several times. Mr. Dick Wilson says they are having much trouble in bracing it up, the dirt falls in so fast.  Many thousand yards of rock and dirt have been taken out, and some think the trees from the top will come through soon.  It is a serious drawback in the work on the tunnel, and there is some talk of having to make it a cut, but that seems impracticable.   If the dirt can be removed, and the hole walled in safely, the work will proceed on the tunnel as usual. 

The ”big” story coming less than six weeks later, was reported in North Carolina newspapers and reprinted in papers across the country:

The skeleton of a full grown mastodon has been found in the Cowee tunnel on the Ducktown branch of the Western North Carolina railroad.  When the monster was discovered the convicts fled in terror, and it was by hard work that they could be induced to return to their picks.  It was found six feet below the surface of the earth.  It was in a perfect state of preservation, and crumbled to dust as soon as exposed to the air.  The mastodon is the Russian term of fossil elephant, and is extensively found in Russia and all over Europe.  It became extinct, according to geology, near 10,000 years ago, died on the Pleistocene beds.  In 1799, one was found in the icy districts of Russia, the hide of which was in a fair state of preservation, and was of such weight that it took ten men to support it a distance of 150 feet.  The one found in the Cowee tunnel was stretched out a distance of forty feet – supposed to have been devoured by carniverous animals, and the bones disengaged from their original position.  The largest mastodons range from fourteen to twenty-four feet in length, and from nine to twelve feet in height.  - The Greensboro Patriot, Oct. 27, 1882  

Questioning the newspaper account

The temptation is to dismiss the story as fake news, something too preposterous to be believed. 

Maybe so. 

On the other hand, as the earlier story reported, the tunnel was not cut through solid rock.  Is it plausible that an unfortunate mastodon, grazing alongside the Tuckasegee River on a chilly day 12,000 years ago, was in the wrong place at the wrong time and was buried by a landslide? 

Perhaps.

Steam locomotive emerging from Cowee Tunnel, ca. 1892

But isn’t it almost too convenient that the bones of the Dillsboro mastodon practically vanished into thin air before the discovery could be verified?  It turns out that long-buried bones can crumble fairly quickly when exposed to the air.  That issue was broached in a 2017 newspaper report of mastodon bones unearthed at a Michigan construction site:

Eagle Creek Homes, the developer behind the Railview Ridge housing project, reached out to University of Michigan Museum of Paleontology Director Dan Fisher. Fisher has 40 years of experience investigating claims of prehistoric remains found in the region….

Most remains of mastodons and mammoths found in Michigan, Fisher said, are somewhere in the range of 11,000 to 15,000 years old.

"That was at a time that humans had found their way to North America," Fisher said. "These were some of the animals that they were sometimes lucky enough to bring down or otherwise get access to. So people butchered them, ate them and stored their meat."

As glaciers moved through Michigan several thousand years ago, they created lakes, ponds and swamps that became surrounded by vegetation attractive to the American mastodon and Jefferson woolly mammoth. Fossils of both are prevalent in the southern two-thirds of the state.

The age of the bones means they are often very fragile, and can sometimes disintegrate when exposed from the sediment that has been preserving them all that time.

"They dry, shrink, crack and sometimes they literally fall to pieces," Fisher said.

Those words from Dan Fisher go a long way toward erasing my doubts about the veracity of the Dillsboro mastodon story. 

But not completely. 

Overshadowed by tragedy

If workers actually found a mastodon skeleton in Dillsboro, why haven’t I heard about it until now?

One reason could be that the event was overshadowed by a tragedy that occurred two months later, on December 30, 1882.  As convict laborers were crossing the river to start another day’s work on the Cowee Tunnel, their barge capsized.  Nineteen men, shackled together, drowned in the Tuckasegee.

Is it any wonder that some crumbling bones of an ancient animal were soon forgotten?   On January 3, 1883, the News and Observer in Raleigh reported on the accident:

"A few days since we published an account of the trip of Governor Jarvis to the Western North Carolina Railroad, and gave an account of the operations at the Cowee tunnel, which is near the bank of Tuckaseegee River, in Jackson county. On that section of the road are employed about 200 convicts. Yesterday Lieutenant-Governor James L. Robinson, who came down from his home in Macon county, brought the news of a horrible disaster at the crossing of the Tuckaseegee River, the news of which he received from Mr. W.B. Troy, the officer in charge of convicts on the Western North Carolina Railroad.

" It appears that the camp of the convicts, that is, the stockade in which they are quartered, is on the bank of the Tuckaseegee river, opposite the Cowee tunnel. The river is at that particular point deep, with a current somewhat sluggish as compared with parts immediately above and below, where it breaks into rapids and rushes with the swiftness peculiar to those mountain torrents. The means of ferriage across the stream has been a large barge or flat boat, capable of containing fifty convicts, a rope stretched across being grasped by the hands and the boat then pulled over.

On Saturday, while thirty convicts were being thus transferred, they became alarmed on seeing some water and ice in the boat, and despite the fact that there was no danger, rushed panic-stricken to one end of the boat, which was at once capsized and all the men thrown into the cold river, there deep, though not more than fifty yards wide. A white guard who was on the boat went down with the rest.

A terrible scene followed, as the men struggled to get out, each man looking only after his personal safety. Many of the convicts swam ashore, or after being washed down a short distance reached the bank ere they came to the swift water. Twelve thus saved themselves, but eighteen clasped each other so closely that they became a struggling mass and were all drowned. The guard was taken from the water to all appearance dead, and it was only by dint of great and long continued efforts that his life was saved.

" The gang of convicts at this particular place, or rather section of the road was in charge of Mr. J.M. McMurray. Yesterday afternoon Capt. E.R. Stamps, chairman of the board of Penitentiary directors, left for the scene to make investigation of the disaster, which as, he state to a reporter, fairly appalled him. It was one of those accidents which seem to be unavoidable, and due to the sudden panic which seized the convicts in the boat, which it is said was in no danger of sinking, the water having fallen in it from the rains. Some of the drowned men were found some distance below, locked together in a last and fatal embrace. Many who could swim were hampered by others, who clutched them in a death grip.

"This is the greatest disaster that has happened on the road. A portion of the Cowee tunnel was of so treacherous a character that it caved in on a number of convicts, and they narrowly escaped death. The utmost precautions were used to prevent a repetition of the occurrence, an immense “cut” being made and arched over. The dirt was replaced, and all made secure. The tunnel is eighteen miles from the Balsam mountains, and thirty-four miles from Pigeon River, and is on what is known as the Ducktown branch of the Western North Carolina Railroad.

- News and Observer (Raleigh, N.C.), January 3, 1883

Butterflies of the Mountains

 [From November 3,  2008]

With the turning of the seasons, I suppose we've seen the last of the butterflies until next spring. From what I observed this year, and from what others mentioned to me, butterflies were unusually abundant. Here are a few of my favorite shots from the past couple of years.

The butterfly is a flying flower,

The flower a tethered butterfly.

~Ponce Denis Écouchard Lebrun

Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.

~Nathaniel Hawthorne

I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.

~Chuang Tzu

This great purple butterfly,

In the prison of my hands,

Has a learning in his eye

Not a poor fool understands.

~William Butler Yeats, "Another Song of a Fool"

We must remain as close to the flowers, the grass, and the butterflies as the child is who is not yet so much taller than they are. We adults, on the other hand, have outgrown them and have to lower ourselves to stoop down to them. It seems to me that the grass hates us when we confess our love for it. Whoever would partake of all good things must understand how to be small at times.

~Friedrich Nietzsche

The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.

~Rabindranath Tagore

"A Way I Know"

 

Cullasaja River, October 2015

From The French Broad Hustler, April 23, 1908

The Cullasaja
(By Charlotte Young)

I wish you knew a way I know
   Along the Cullasaja.
There, everything to quietness
   And happy thoughts persuade you.

The river sings its own wild song
   Around the rocky turnings,
There honey-suckles light the banks
   With red and yellow burnings.

Along the cliffs the ferns uncurl,
   And trails the pink arbutus,
And here the wood thrush lilts a song
   As sweet as any flute is.

I wish you knew a way I know
   By dreaming flowers and river,
The little cares that hurt you so
   Would float away forever.

--Charlotte Young  [1878-1985]

Buried Alive in WNC

 [From November 8, 2017]

This evening, I was watching a documentary on Edgar Allen Poe (1809-1849) when something caught my attention.  The narrator mentioned Poe’s 1844 story “The Premature Burial,” which was based on a phenomenon often reported in the nineteenth century – the burial of those who were not yet dead.

Flashing across the screen was the image of an old newspaper article, dateline “Asheville, NC.”  Thank goodness for DVR! 

After collecting a few details, I found the article, published February 21, 1885 in the New York Times under the headline “What His Friends Discovered When the Coffin Was Opened”

ASHEVILLE, N.C., Feb. 20 –A gentleman from Flat Creek Township in this (Buncombe) County, furnishes the information that about the 20th of last month a young man by the name of Jenkins, who had been sick with fever for several weeks, was thought to have died. He became speechless, his flesh was cold and clammy, and he could not be aroused, and there appeared to be no action of the pulse and heart. 

He was thought to be dead and was prepared for burial, and was noticed at the time that there was no stiffness in any of the limbs. He was buried after his supposed death, and when put in the coffin it was remarked that he was as limber as a live man. There was much talk in the neighborhood about the case and the opinion was frequently expressed that Jenkins had been buried alive. 

Nothing was done about the matter until the 10th inst., when the coffin was taken up for the purpose of removal and internment in the family burying ground in Henderson County. The coffin being wood, it was suggested that it be opened in order to see if the body was in such condition that it could be hauled 20 miles without being put in a metallic casket. 

The coffin was opened, and to the great astonishment and horror of his relatives the body was lying face downward, and the hair had been pulled from the head in great quantities, and there were scratches of the finger nails on the inside of the lid and sides of the coffin. These facts caused great excitement and all acquainted personally with the facts believe Jenkins was in a trance, or that animation was apparently suspended, and that he was not really dead when buried and that he returned to consciousness only to find himself buried and beyond help. 

The body was then taken to Henderson County and reinterred. The relatives are distressed beyond measure at what they term criminal carelessness in not being absolutely sure Jenkins was dead before he was buried.

Apples

 [From April 13, 2008]

"...We fall asleep in a room fragrant with the scent of apples and pears, and when I wake up during the night I think for a moment that I am a boy again. For then my father not only had an orchard of his own, but purchased the fruit of other orchards....Every bedroom had heaps of apples on the floor, as well as those adorning the window-sill. At bedtime my brother and I had to pick our way between the piles of Tom Putts, Beauty of Baths, Orange Pippins, Bramleys, and the rest, all of which we could then identify by taste in the dark..."

- Ralph Whitlock, A Little Heap of Apples Under the Stairs, Letters from an English Village, Bradford on Avon




Francis Orray Ticknor (1822-1874) was a country doctor in Columbus, Ga., who wrote poetry and submitted horticultural articles to southern agricultural journals. This Ticknor poem is from April 1, 1859:

NANTAHALEE

A famous Apple

You’ve heard, I think, of the beautiful maid
Who fled from Love’s caresses,
Till her beautiful toes were turned to roots,
And both her shoulders to beautiful shoots,
And her beautiful cheeks to beautiful fruits,
And to blossoming sprays her tresses!

I’ve seen her, man! She’s living yet
Up in a Cherokee valley!
She’s an apple tree! and her name might be,
In the softly musical Cherokee,
A long-drawn "Nantahalee!"
‘Tis as sweet a word as you’ll read or write;
Not quite as fair as the thing, yet quite
Sufficient to start an old anchorite
Out of the ashes to bless and bite
The beautiful "Nantahalee!"

Tsatugi Afternoon

 [From October 24, 2008]

Call me greedy, but I’m getting to the point where I don’t want to talk about my favorite places in the mountains. Some things are best kept secret, lest throngs of visitors descend upon them. But at the risk of contributing to that traffic in some tiny way, I can’t resist talking about the Chattooga River.

I’ve not had a particularly successful season of fall photography. When the pictures turn out "blah" I can always resort to my standard, "The light just wasn’t quite right that day." That’s a lot easier than acknowledging my creative and technical deficiencies. So, on this rainy October afternoon, I decided to go for as close to a sure thing as I know: the Bullpen bridge across the Chattooga River. I arrived there under my favorite lighting conditions, a steady drizzle, and commenced to shooting. (Apologies to my poor mistreated Nikon.)

The Chattooga is gorgeous any time of year. The Chattooga has a spirit to it that I won’t even attempt to describe. And the recorded history of the Chattooga is endlessly fascinating.

Intending to pluck out some tidbit of Chattooga lore to accompany these photos, I turned to James Mooney and what I have touted (ad nauseum) as the most indispensable book ever written about the place we inhabit, his Myths of the Cherokee.

Once again, Mooney came through, with his reference to Tsatugi as the name commonly written Chattooga or Chatuga. Mooney offered possible Cherokee derivations:

From words signifying respectively "he drank by sips," from gatugia…or "he has crossed the stream and come out on upon the other side," from gatugi.


But according to Mooney, Tsatugi was a name of foreign origin, specifically from the Creeks who laid claim to at least a portion of the Chattooga River during the first half of the eighteenth century. More often than not, the Cherokees contested the claims of the Creeks in North Georgia and Western North Carolina:

The ordinary condition between the two tribes was one of hostility, with occasional intervals of good will.


Mooney listed several place names reflecting the former presence of Creeks, among them Coweeta, Tomatola, Coosa, and Chattooga. All this time I had never thought that Chattooga, or those other names, might be anything other than Cherokee.

So much for today’s toponymy lesson. While perusing this topic, I discovered another bit of Chattooga trivia. In June 2002, some Atlantans travelling the Chattooga made a remarkable discovery. An odd-shaped log protruding from the riverbank was, in fact, a 32-foot long dugout canoe constructed in the Cherokee style, but with metal tools. Carbon dating of the yellow pine canoe suggests it was crafted around 1760. The ancient canoe is on display at the Oconee Heritage Center in Walhalla, South Carolina. Now that I’ve learned about the old canoe, it’s gone straight to the top of my list of things to see in Walhalla.

The Ghosts of Straight Fork

[From October 19, 2009] 

Straight Fork, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, October 2009

Among the many eye-witness accounts of the giants of the Appalachian forest, this one, written by Henry Seidel Canby and published in Harper's in 1916, is one of my favorites:

We rode up Straight Fork through a sun-spangled grove of chestnuts, then left the trail to Cataloochee, splashed noisily across green water, burst horse and man through a screen of rhododendron, and entered the dark forest. It was an open forest beneath its high roof. The eye went freely once we were past the door of rhododendron, and at first, in intervals of guiding our scrambling horses, we looked vainly for the poplars. Hemlock shafts, oak bolls aplenty; and then on the upper slope I saw the first, a smooth tower, its head lost above the leafage, and beyond another, and below in the hemlocks a group of four, like cathedral piers beyond the pillars of a nave.

We rode to the first in view. Twenty-one feet in circumference, it rose massively for seventy feet perhaps without a branch; how much above one could not tell in that forest. For as in the redwood groves of California, so here, the eye can seldom take in a whole tree when in its forest setting, the camera never. Indeed, the habit of the great poplar is curiously like that of the giant sequoia. Like the sequoia it rises above lesser neighbors, and flings from the capital of its great trunk a crown of heavy limbs that turn and lift nobly above the forest roof. From an opposing hillside you can pick out these crowns of light-green foliage above the oaks and chestnuts, just as across a Sierra canon one sees the sequoias lift above spruce and fir. Only these two trees, in my experience, have this regal habit. And if the sequoia is vaster, it is less graceful.

Deciduous Cascades, or the Falls of Fall

 [From October 1, 2009]

It is often forgotten that [dictionaries] are artificial repositories, put together well after the languages they define. The roots of language are irrational and of a magical nature.
-Jorge Luis Borges, Prologue to "El otro, el mismo."

Names, once they are in common use, quickly become mere sounds, their etymology being buried, like so many of the earth's marvels, beneath the dust of habit.
-Salman Rushdie


Thurston Hatcher Falls

Pardon my imprecision. I should have known the difference between waterfalls and cascades. A cascade of water doesn’t leave the surface of the rock, while a waterfall does. At least, that's how I heard it explained this week.

CASCADE. A lovely word. With a slightly better grasp of its meaning I began to consider its origin. Perhaps it was a compound of two roots, cas + cade, and if so, what did they mean?

But I was wrong. The English word cascade dates back to 1641, from the Italian word cascata, which was derived from the Latin verb cadere, “to fall.”

I found this information at the Online Etymology Dictionary.
http://www.etymonline.com/abbr.php

Digging a little deeper at that site, I learned that our word fall came from the Old English feallan. As a name for the season, it is short for fall of the leaf (1545).

Fall, in the sense of a waterfall or cascade, dates from 1579. Most of the figurative senses of fall developed in the Middle English: to fall asleep (1393), to fall in love (1530), to be reduced, such as a fall in temperature (1658).

Deciduous plants are the botanical show-offs of fall and the word deciduous is closely related to cascade.

Deciduous, as a reference to trees, dates from 1778. The word came from the Latin decidere “to fall off” which was a compound of de- “down” and cadere “to fall.” And so, when we speak of deciduous trees and cascading water, both words can be traced back to that same Latin root, cadere.


Flat Creek (Heintooga)

Such are the crooked paths on which my curiosity sends me. While using this website, I became curious about who created it, and was delighted to learn the story of Douglas Harper:

I began this project after I looked one day for a free dictionary of word origins online and found that there was none. You could subscribe to the Oxford English Dictionary for $550 a year. There were free dictionaries with definitions, some lists of slang words and their sources, and some sites that listed a few dozen of the strangest etymologies of English words. But there was no comprehensive public list of the words we use every day -- words like the and day -- that told what they used to be before we got them.

For some reason no university has seen fit to shackle its graduate students to the cyber-mill, grinding out an online etymology dictionary. So I decided to do it for them. I also did this to increase my understanding of the language, and its ancestors and relatives. As a writer and editor with an amateur's passion for linguistics, I took this as a joy ride more than drudgery. And I know so much more useless trivia than I did when I started (applaud is related to explode; three people can have a dialogue; and if anyone calls you feisty, slug him).

Etymologies are not definitions; they're explanations of what our words meant 600 or 2,000 years ago. Think of it like looking at pictures of your friends' parents when they were your age. People will continue to use words as they will, finding new or wider meanings for old words and coining new ones to fit new situations. In fact, this list is a testimony to that process.


Chattooga at Bullpen

I suspect there’s a name for the subgenre of autobiography devoted to the author’s background of books and reading, but I don’t know what it is. I do know that Douglas Harper shares a terrific example of that form:

http://www.etymonline.com/columns/bio.htm

For a reader who loves words and loves reading the words of a writer who loves words, Harper’s Online Etymology Dictionary warrants a leisurely visit.

Colors of October

 [From October 10, 2009]

Autumn is a second spring when every leaf's a flower.
- Albert Camus


Near Beech Gap, October 2009

All those golden autumn days the sky was full of wings. Wings beating low over the blue water of Silver Lake, wings beating high in the blue air far above it . . . bearing them all away to the green fields in the South.
- Laura Ingalls Wilder

Change is a measure of time and, in the autumn, time seems speeded up. What was is not and never again will be; what is is change.
- Edwin Way Teale

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.
- George Eliot


Looking Glass Rock, October 2009

October. This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August, and February.
- Mark Twain

Youth is like spring, an over-praised season more remarkable for biting winds than genial breezes. Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.
- Samuel Butler

"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."