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WCU - Great Smoky Mountains - A Park for America

Our Southern Highlanders book review

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Our Southern Highlanders book review

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Our Southern Highlanders book review

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  • rea by Monroe Bush" >ut resources GREAT SMOK ! ;.IH3 Our Southern Highlanders, A Narrative of Adventure in the Southern Appalachians and a Study of Life among the Mountaineers, by Horace Kephart with Introduction by George Ellison. The University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville, 1976. 469 pp. Illustrated. $12.95 The Southern Appalachians, A Wilderness Quest, by Charlton Ogburn. William Morrow & Co, Inc., New York, 1975. 245 pp. Illustrated. Paper, $5.95 Horare Keph-irt liT-n i hrillnnf brave, and troubled man. The first forty years of his life were distinguished by curiosity, scholarship, and ambition—and on the opposite side of the coin, by a strange irresponsibility and growing domestic tension. He became a noted librarian and a promising historian of America's frontier culture; he is also said to have become an alcoholic who, in effect, deserted his wife and children. Charlton Ogburn, writing in The Southern Appalachians, suggests that in his early forties Kephart departed St. Louis for the wilderness of Appalachia to seek a cure for his alcoholism. I suspect, however, that while this may have been a happy result of his immersion in the forests and culture of the great Southeastern mountains, there was a deeper drive forcing him into this isolation, the same drive which initially had turned him to drink. I believe that in his magnificent book, Our Southern Highlanders, there are hints of this. Nevertheless, we will never know nor understand those inner forces which must have been frighteningly powerful to remove a man as civilized and intellectually cultivated as Kephart to permanent residence within what was surely the most primitive American society of its time. In a lengthy introduction to this new edition of Our Southern Highlanders, first published in 1913 (and out of print since 1967), George Ellison gives us a masterful biographical sketch of this man who was born with the Civil War in 1862 and died in a mountain auto accident in 1931. The tale Ellison unfolds is incredible, as is often the case with the truth, portraying a life that is far too erratic and unconventional for any convincing novel. It reminds us again how unpredictably inventive and often bizarre are the ways of a fearless man. Consequently, though Kephart's report on his Southern Highlands neighbors is rare, gripping Americana, I believe the book's most intriguing value is in its reflection of the author as an absolutely original man. Anyone seriously interested in the insights of biographical literature will not be able to set Kephart aside until the entire book is read— whether or not he gives a hoot about the Southern Highlands. This remarkable author does not, however, allow the reader to escape the beauty, the romance, and the stark brutality of both the mountains and their equally monumental citi- &?& zens. There was, and may still exist in small part, a crystal-like integrity to the lives of the mountain people which possibly no other culture in the patchwork of American history has equalled, the stout New Eng- lander being no exception. Unfortunately Kephart was not a trained anthropologist, probably not even an amateur with a conscious interest in anthropology as a discipline. He just reported it as he saw it; he told it like it was. As a result, his choice of material was not always as systematic or comprehensive as we might wish it had been. Unquestionably he had seen, experienced, and understood much more of these deceptively simple lives than he recounts, since there are great gaps in his picture of their lifestyle. However, Ogburn's The Southern Appalachians and Mike Frome's previously published, and excellent Strangers in High Places fill in important aspects that Kephart chose to ignore. But the function of these contemporary books is to elaborate upon the basic insights of Our Southern Highlanders. Others had written brief and unsatisfactory pieces before,, but Kephart was the literary pioneer who established the context for later, more thorough and objective students. His book is certainly the first to read, and with all credit to later writers, most likely the one which will endure the longest in our libraries. In a preface to the revised edition of 1922 Kephart writes very simply that "I have tried to give a true picture of life among the southern mountaineers, as I have found it during eighteen years of intimate association with them." And this is exactly what he does. Initial chapters deal with the mountains themselves, provide the setting for the human drama—and no one has ever written of the Appalachians with greater sensitivity. He tells of "the dreamy blue haze, like that of Indian summer intensified, that ever hovers over the mountains, unless they be swathed in cloud, or, for a few minutes, after a sharp rain-storm has cleared the atmosphere. Both the Blue Ridge and the Smoky Mountains owe their names to this tenuous mist. It softens all outlines, and lends a mirage-like effect of great distance to objects that are but a few miles off, while those further removed grow more and more intangible until finally the 38 AMERICAN FORESTS
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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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