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The Art of Getting Lost

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The Art of Getting Lost

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The Art of Getting Lost

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The Art of Getting Lost

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The Art of Getting Lost

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The Art of Getting Lost

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The Art of Getting Lost

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The Art of Getting Lost

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The Art of Getting Lost

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  • HUNTER LIBRARY, WESTERN CAROLINA UNIVERSITY MiiNaS,f::i- I \~B~*p UuX-J^-» The Art of Getting Lost by Stephen Goodwin At the age of forty-two Horace xV. Kephart bailed out. He closed his eyes, yelled Geronimo, and free- fell into the Great Smokies. The father of six children, a respected librarian who had already served for thirteen years as the head of the prestigious Saint Louis Mercantile Library, a scholar whose whopping ambition was to complete Teddy Roosevelt's saga of the winning of the West by writing the history of trans-Mississippi exploration and settlement, Kephart decided to give it all up and get good and lost. In 1904, when he set up housekeeping in an isolated log cabin on a fork of Hazel Creek, the Smokies were Back of Beyond. The forests of the southern Appalachians were still wild and virgin, and the mountaineers—who have now been photographed, interviewed, and lionized as if Appalachia were a branch of show business—were still regarded as "fierce and uncouth races of men." These mountains, the spine of eastern America, covering an area somewhat larger than England and Scotland, were a geographical and human wilderness. Kephart, who arrived so drunk that he couldn't even hold onto the reins of the mule that carried him up Hazel Creek, quickly sobered up. In the next ten years he was to write two books that have be- 106 / SEPTEMBER 1980 come authentic classics: Camping and Woodcraft, for half a century the bible of outdoorsmen, and Our Southern Highlanders, still one of the finest regional studies in print. But in 1904 Kephart seemed to be falling toward obscurity or worse. He'd just given up what the world calls success, though he'd worked hard to obtain it; his biography up to that year is one of enterprise, responsibility, and accomplishment. Of Swiss stock, he was the son of the energetic and versatile Isaiah Kephart, a farmer, school administrator, soldier, actuary, professor, minister, and editor. Young Horace, his BA behind him at the age of seventeen, went to Boston University for a year of postgraduate work, where he so valued the privilege of being able to study what he pleased in the Boston Public Library that he decided to become a librarian himself. After working as a cataloguer at Cornell University, he went to Italy to catalogue the private collection of a wealthy bibliophile, Willard Fiske. In 1886 he returned, married, and took a position as assistant librarian at Yale University. Four years later, before he was thirty, Kephart became the chief of the Saint Louis Mercantile Library, the oldest library west of the Mississippi and at the time the most extensive collection of scholarly books in the Mississippi Valley. While at Yale, Kephart had set out with his usual diligence and determination to make a dent as a scholar. To Fiske he wrote that he found the atmosphere of the university congenial and stimulating. He made a careful translation of Dante'sLa vita nuova and began a study of the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic, but his literary interests were already being supplanted by a taste for American history, especially the history of the frontier. When the job in Saint Louis was offered to him at the same time as a job at Princeton University, Kephart decided that it was time to go west. Saint Louis, the jumping-off place for the wagon trains, was where the history he wanted to write had begun. At the Mercantile Library he built a first- rate collection of western Americana. Kephart—the visible Kephart anyway—was not merely upwardly mobile, his head was bumping the ceiling. He was running a major library, and he was making a name for himself as an authority on the history of the West. Even in the matter of recreation Kephart was an over- achiever; he wrote up his pastimes, camping and firearms, for the outdoor magazines. His frequent expeditions to the Ozarks seem to have
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Object’s are ‘parent’ level descriptions to ‘children’ items, (e.g. a book with pages).

  • This 11-page article titled, “The Art of Getting Lost,” is about the life and work of Horace Kephart. It was written by Stephen Goodwin in 1980 for the magazine Country Journal. The article features photographs contributed by Western Carolina University’s Hunter Library and includes an excerpt from Kephart’s book “Camping and Woodcraft.” Horace Kephart (1862-1931) was a noted naturalist, woodsman, journalist, and author and promoter of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

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Great Smoky Mountains - A Park for America

This digital collection was created to contribute to the public's understanding of the forces and ideas that led to the establishment of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 1934. The most vi...

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