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Last of the Eastern Wilderness: An Article on the Proposed Great Smoky National Park

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  • wcu_great_smoky_mtns-11062.jp2
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  • Some time, if I get the chance, I shall dig into the old records and the old maps in the Library of Congress to find out how far back the poetic title of the Groat Smokies goes. Any visitor in the Smokies oan see for himself what suggested the syia- bolisnu Nearly always there hovers over the high tops and around them, a tenuous mist, a dreamy blue haze, like that of Indian Summer, or deeper. Often it grows so dense as almost to shut out the distant view, as smoke docs that has spread from a far-off forest fire. Then it is a "great smoke" that oovers all the outlying world} the rim of the earth is but a few miles awayi beyond is mystery, enchantment• Mysterious, indeed, this Smoky Mountain region has been ever since the first white explorer, DeSoto, heard of it, nearly four oenturios ago* At intervals of many years a few adventurous botanists and geologists have roamed through its great forest—Bartram, Michaux, Gray, Buckley, Mitchell, Guyot, and others—but their reports reached none but soientifio circles* lh«B Miss Murfreo published a novel entitled "The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains" it was commonly supposed that she had invented the striking name. The wildest and most picturesque highland east of the Rockies remained virtually unknown until about ten years ago. Even to-day there are gulfs in the Smokies that no man is known to have penetrated] and seven of the capital peaks, all of them higher than any point in the Bluo Ridge, remain to this day unnamedt In fact, so little is known of the Smokies that newspapers generally misplace them by calling them a part of the Blue Ridge. A recent textbook of advanced geography, prescribed for use in the high schools of North
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