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Horace Kephart and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park

  • wcu_great_smoky_mtns-11214.jp2
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  • Mountains on lengthy, solitary camping trips. In 1903 he suffered a nervous breakdown, and his doctor advised a change of scenery. With the agreement of his family he decided to take up a whole new life in which he could recuperate his health and satisfy his taste for the wild and romantic. "I wanted to enjoy a free life in the open air", he wrote, "the thrill of exploring new ground, the joys of the chase, and the man's game of matching my woodcraft against the forces of nature."2 He found the frontier he was looking for in the Great Smoky Mountains of Western North Carolina. When I prepared, in 1904, for my-first sojourn in the Great Smoky Mountains, which form the master chain of the Appalachian system, I could find in no library a guide to that region. The most diligent research failed to discover so much as a magazine article, written within this generation, that described the land and its people. Nay, there was not even a novel or a story that showed intimate local knowledge. Had I been going to Teneriffe or Timbuctu, the libraries would have furnished information a- plenty; but about this housetop of eastern America they were strangely silent; it was "terra incognita".3 "Knowing nobody who had ever been here", Kephart wrote later in his brief autobiography, "I -took a topographic map and picked out on it, by. means of the contour lines and the blank spaces showing no settlement, what seemed to be the wildest part of this region; and there I went."4 For nearly three years he lived alone at an abandoned miner's cabin on the Little Fork of Sugar Fork of Hazel Creek, a remote spot deep in the Smokies west of Bryson City. There ne regained his health. He spent his time in the mountains and among the people, gathering information for his extensive files and writing for outdoor magazines. He soon gained the trust of the natives whom he often served as doctor (unlicensed), postmaster (unauthorized), and correspondent for the illiterate. In 1SC6 he published his first book, Camping end Woodcraft, composed largely of articles he had written for Field and Stream magazine. In a brief
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