Betwixt, the Ineffable
Magic of Place
T hese hills march their old, shaggy selves into the past as well as the present, sometimes loping a bit into the future. Those gentle slopes belie their deep history, and any who choose to engage in the energy of the place would do well to remember that time moves differently here. In my work in the spirit realms, I fancy it is easier in this time-muffled place, where we are often betwixt and between, neither here nor there.
This old land is filled with liminal places and gives rise to ballads and tales. In these pages we will work through our harsh and complicated history on the strings of a fiddle, in the stitches of a quilt made of scraps, and with words on paper. Each one of us as liminal as a hedgerow with complicated histories and tattered souls.
I am an urban homesteader, a gardener, a subsistence farmer, and what old-timers would have called a “good eater.” Not many processed foods but an omnivore’s full range of dietary choices. When my vegetarian and vegan friends quip about eating anything with a face, I like to remind them that I have raised chickens and I have raised broccoli. Broccoli is at least as sentient as chickens. It just isn’t mobile. That is certainly my observation of the natural world, and it invites us to consider our relationship with and within that world. The Native Americans here (the Shawnee, Creek, and Cherokee, to name a few whose names we know) knew their place in the web of all being, and that place was not superior to the biosphere that sustained them, their homeland.
The arrival of nominally Christian settlers changed the landscape, literally and figuratively. That is when Genesis reared its ugly head, with its message of domination over nature, its order to subdue nature and control it. The language of domination—along with the self-serving doctrine of Manifest Destiny—that gets lifted from the Genesis creation myth cycle has been one of the most destructive forces in the human-habitat interaction. We are to master the land, to subdue it, to bend it to our will.
It may be hard to understand the love we have for these places, even as we allow their destruction to continue. To feel the grip of the land beneath your feet, you need to cultivate a relationship to it. Forgive my chauvinism as I relate tales of this old land, and please don’t take offense. For all the land is connected just as all of everything is: the mountains are in friendship with the seas and the desert is in love with the high prairie. As with all in nature, this gives humans an opportunity to invoke the overused notion of interdependence. We read that word in all sorts of places, but I continue to see it expressed as an acknowledgment of one group’s perceived superiority in the face of the Other. Interdependence is actually about our common vulnerabilities, not one group’s ability to “save” its less fortunate, and therefore lesser, neighbors. Appalachian people used to know this and are now in the painful process of relearning it.
One of the most dynamic and destructive divides in the nation is the rural-urban one. It catches us economically, politically, and spiritually. We get locked into it in ways that make no sense at all. When we look at the perception of the Appalachian region from the outside, we see the struggle writ large, and we see how it drives concepts of compassion and mercy for people who patently don’t deserve it. The despised stereotypes are rooted in older stories of estrangement, war, and migration. European migrants arrived in the fastnesses of the southern highlands bound on finding lives of solitude and noninterference. This is reflected in the dark splendor of Protestant Christianity as it was and is practiced here. It is embedded in the music and song we relish.
Extraction
In our hearts, we always return to this land that has nurtured, sheltered, and hidden us, from which we have extracted livelihood and dubious safety. To understand us and to ponder our ties to this homeplace is to bide with the concept of extraction and all it has done to the land and the people in it.
The point is that extraction—the cultural strip-mining—removes something and often puts nothing else in the empty space. The sad history of colonialism has shown us again and again what profound effects extraction has on the land and the people on it. Blood diamonds are one example of global awareness of a particularly heinous extraction industry in Africa.
In Appalachia, I suppose you could say the curse of extraction began with the forced Indian removals, what we have come to call the Trail of Tears. The Cherokee, Muscogee/Creek, Chickasaw, Seminole, and Choctaw were driven out of their ancestral lands and force-marched to Oklahoma. The removals were done with the same level of cruelty that we have come to expect from empires. There was no pretense of equipping the people, no pretense about acknowledging their humanity. We are still unsure of the exact number of deaths, but some official reports claim ten thousand died of hunger, cold, and disease before the remaining people reached the Indian Territory in Oklahoma.5 They were extracted, removed, though some hid out in the laurel hells and caves later to reorganize as the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. Those who survived the twenty-two hundred mile trek became the Cherokee Nation at Tahlequah. Those unaffiliated and unregistered—not on the official rolls—call themselves the Free Cherokee. My friend David’s father was nearly fully Cherokee, but he and his son chose to make their way in the world without relying on government grace or tribal mercy. David married Connie, a descendant of Daniel Boone, in an interesting but hardly unusual pairing.
After the removal, the forest extraction began in earnest. The story of Appalachia is, in part, the story of extraction industries moving into the region, taking away natural resources, and leaving the land naked and broken. The woodlands were clear-cut twice, leaving small patches of so-called virgin forest in hard-to-log places. Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest on Little Santeetlah Creek has been protected since 1936.6 Almost four thousand acres of old-growth forest were protected by that designation, and the forest contains some stunning examples of woodland elders: straight-sided tulip poplars eighty feet tall, cucumber trees (Magnolia acuminata), and those strangely magical beeches that grow on the trunks of their silvered dead. To walk the figure eight trail at Joyce Kilmer is to find yourself among literal giants, beings that have reached their two- or three- or four-century span simply because the terrain was too difficult or expensive to log. There are other forests in the region as “ancient as the hills” as the poet says, but the Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest is protected and accessible for now.7
So the forests went first. As we look at the extraction industries that continue to do their damage in the greater region, it makes sense to begin with the logging that was omnipresent in the southern highlands, beginning in the eighteenth century. But the industrial exploitation got a grip in the region at the end of the nineteenth century.
Author and outdoorsman Horace Kephart was an early fan of the region, coming here to live early in the twentieth century and writing about the region and woodcraft. One of his best-known books is Our Southern Highlanders. His understanding of the devastation of extraction industries came from his experience in the region and his interviews with the people responsible. He wrote, “A northern lumberman admitted to me, with frankness unusual in his class, that ‘All we want here is to get the most we can out of the country, as quick as we can, and then get out.’ ” 8 In 1925, Kephart wrote, “Everyone who has seen the havoc and desolation the lumberman leaves in his wake knows how inexpressibly sad he is as he turns and flees from the sight of it.” 9
Coal was next, of course. The rich coal land of Kentucky, West Virginia, and other states brought good jobs, ways for men to support their families, more reliable than subsistence farming. “Jobs” is one of many battle cries of Appalachian culture. The world that grew up around coal—and to a certain extent the mill culture that followed it—was the perfect storm of ecological carelessness, human greed, and unfettered capitalism.
The coal seams were picked out and hauled away. When the profits lessened, the companies began clear-cutting the new forests in order to scrape off the thin topsoil with earth-moving machinery and then to take the coal. Mountaintop removal was the next logical step as whole mountains were blasted away, minerals extracted, and detritus dumped into the waterways, changing the shape and texture of the region. Fracking is the latest insult and the desecration of pipelines (as well as potential pipeline breaks with their subsequent terrible spills) to bring the gas from the fracking fields to the ports is palpable. Again the landscape is slashed and roadways for pipelines replace the wild variety of medicinal plants and wild foodstuff and the homes of long-time residents are flattened in the name of progress.
Next came the Civil War with its loss of life and its complicated tale of divided loyalties. Many mountain families remained staunchly loyal to the Union, in spite of their geographic placement. My Ballard family’s odd Civil War drama (as I understand one of the family myths) includes an ancestor who joined the Confederate States of America only to be disappointed in the poor quality of the food on offer. I believe he defected somewhere in Tennessee, and I have no recollection of how he was received upon his return, if he did, in fact, return.
The story of my mother’s family comes down in a little more detail. Growing up, I heard that my part of the family had come to Haywood County from South Carolina because great-great-grandpa was “shot by a Yankee.” My curiosity got the better of me and I did some digging. It was near the end of the conflict when the Union sent William Sherman and others into the heart of the Confederate States to starve the people into submission. Sherman’s Bummers were a group of largely lawless foragers, shock troops who rode through the South, often burning what they couldn’t steal. Near Travelers Rest, South Carolina, a group of them took the family’s plow horse, and my ancestor went after them, attempting to retain the use of the horse for the spring planting, swearing he’d find them and return the animal afterward. My ancestor was shot in the arm and returned home, horseless. He died three weeks later of sepsis. When my niece got sepsis last year, my mind went directly back to that long ago relation whose death drove the women of the family north into the mountains, presumably to make a new home with distant relatives there.
It lingers with some families, even up here in the mountains where we were sometimes unsure of where our allegiance should fall. I remember walking with a friend from Texas (by way of Maine) near the Battery in Charleston. She passed yet another street plaque and, in a frustrated voice, she demanded to know why the South couldn’t let it go. After all, the war was long over and the South, she said, her voice rising in pitch, had lost. I smiled at her and squeezed her arm, then quietly told her about the plow horse and the drawn-out painful death. She got thoughtful. When did your people come to America? I asked. The 1930s, she replied. They fled Nazi Germany. I nodded. For many families in the South, the story is one of death, of deprivation, and sometimes of renewal. We carry our family tales—whether they are entirely true or not—like heavy strongboxes, easily opened. If there could have been a truth and reconciliation commission here, like the ones in South Africa following apartheid, it might have been different. If Reconstruction had been handled better, it might have been different. But the South was never fully reintegrated into the Union, and that plagues the republic down to this very day.
The next extraction in my part of the mountains was the industrialized timber industry. Most of the southern forests were clear-cut at this time. The glory of those forests was the American chestnut tree—Castanea dentata. It was an extraordinary tree, enormous and fast growing, reaching almost one hundred feet high and ten feet in diameter. A blight arrived in the United States on imported chestnut trees at the beginning of the twentieth century, and by the Roaring Twenties, it had killed upward of three billion trees. Castanea dentata is rarely seen as an adult specimen in its former range, though the American Chestnut Foundation is working earnestly to develop a successful hybrid and is having slow and steady success with its quest.
It towered above most of the hardwoods, and its girth made it a prize for furniture and home building. I can’t overemphasize the importance of this tree to the ecosystems of the ancient forests. They were logged indiscriminately before the destructive blight did its damage. Logging provided lucrative but dangerous jobs for lightly educated mountain men. Camps were set up throughout the region and the men sent money home to their families, what money they didn’t owe to the company store, as well as money spent on alcohol and the inevitable sex workers who attached themselves to the camps.
My neighbor Beecher was pretty old when we moved in beside the house where he lived with his wife Pearl in the 1980s. He worked in the logging camps of Haywood County when he was a young man and loved to tell us stories about it. He was a friendly character and shockingly brave. We watched him rig a scaffolding on his roof so he could replace his shingles. He was in his eighties then and did the job alone, not asking for or accepting help. It was the kind of self-sufficiency that used to be common in the area but has fallen out of favor in these urban-focused times.
One of my prized possessions is a short stack of chestnut planks given to me by my grandmother. They are wormy chestnut and painted green. Wormy chestnut is the descriptive name for lumber sawn from chestnut trees that died from the blight and continued to stand, and feeding insects give it its distinctive wormy appearance. These inherited planks served as bookshelves at my grandmother’s earlier house, and she had them stored in her garage until she decided what she wanted done with them. They are stored on my porch and will soon resume their shelf duties. I will hold them dear, as a remnant of a time that is long past and a tree we may never see thriving here again.
As we continued to cut down these great trees, to destroy the ecosystem built around them, the southern forests were hit by a series of devastating plant diseases. The chestnut blight was not the first, but its effect was profound. It is with us still, this fungus. Its name is Cryphonectria parasitica. It has never, not down to the present day, been eradicated, nor has a cure been found for it. There are still chestnut trees in the southern highlands, but they barely reach a breedable age before the fungus strikes. They continue on for a few years but they rarely thrive, never again to become the giants of former days. We kept cutting and killing these trees, harvesting in an unstoppable cycle, a cycle that continued until nature found a way to stop it. When I am feeling fanciful, I consider the notion that we kept removing them subconsciously proving that they were unneeded and unwanted. And so they went, leaving our forests bereft, an allegory of our sad extractive history.
Soil, Forest, Mast, Magic
With so much taken away from so small a place, one might think that the spirit of the place might feel diminished, less than it had once been. The height of the mountains belies the power here. The old rivers—the New River, the French Broad, the Nolichucky (lovingly called the Chuck)—are not so broad or fast as the Ohio or the Mississippi. It is tempting to dismiss them as small and unimportant, but you’d be mistaken. During the regular heavy downpours of this temperate rain forest, the waters often rise up into the floodplains where the careless or unaware have built homes and businesses then settle back into their modest beds.
In my spiritual tradition, we talk about a “veil” between the worlds of matter and spirit. We know the power of liminal spaces, of being neither here nor there but betwixt the two. When you are betwixt, you have a foot in both worlds and can move from one to the other. The betwixt place is tempting because it is terribly interesting and terribly powerful and we don’t exactly know the rules there. It is the magic of liminality, of the hedge, of the place that is neither the one thing nor the other.
In walking that wobbly line between magic and the everyday, I realized there isn’t a firm boundary between the two places. I’ve begun asking festivalgoers to stop referring to their daily lives as “mundane” or “mundania” in order re-enchant their everyday lives and the world around them. I gently remind them that people have been practicing all this witchery for generations and practicing it where they live, not saving it up for a special weekend with coreligionists. The work that puts beans on your table may be bank teller, but there’s no reason why that can’t be infused with magic and intention. In fact, I refer to any act of folk magic as work or a job of work. I don’t know if that is traditional or if I read it somewhere, but the fact of the matter is I’ve called it that for so long that it has stuck like a burr. I have a little black case that my daughter gave me, and when I pack it for an energy clearing or to do a bit of ghost-busting, I pat its nubby surface and mutter, “Time for a little job of work.” Our small acts of re-enchantment may improve our attitude, our practice, and the lives of the people (and other beings) we encounter every day. It isn’t necessary to wear special jewelry or a particular outfit in order to do this work that is so wrapped up in our natural world.
In pondering the concept of this spirit of place—of all things and beings ensouled, each of us rambling betwixt the worlds of matter and spirit—I sat in my yard and looked around. Everything in my view had a soul, to my way of thinking, and was sentient in its own way. My eye caught a few things that felt like they were leaning in, to tell me more, or maybe to listen in.
There is magic inherent in soil, forest, and mast. My thoughts went from one to another and I found myself straightening my back and listening intently, as though feeling my way to some place I didn’t quite know.
Soil
There is a little planting bed beside the front steps near the gate. It gets no sun at all during most of the day but gets blasted all summer long with the baking afternoon sun. In the spring it holds hyacinths, tulips, and grape hyacinths, but it’s usually a sorry naked place in the summer and fall. A couple of weeks ago my husband, the champion composter, added in some homemade soil and moved a couple of runaways into that bed. The runaways included a scented flowering tobacco that was growing in a crack in the concrete walk and another mystery plant he’d been given by one of his gardening buddies. I added a black-eyed Susan I saved from a house in our neighborhood that is due for demolition. We’ve been religious about watering the planting bed, and every time I do, I breathe in the fragrance of that young soil.
Soil is tiny bits of stone, with rotted leaves and sticks tossed in, carcasses of insects and small mammals, with enough water and heat to make it friable. It passes through the gut of innumerable earthworms and those castings also become soil. Even a poor soil consists of this extraordinary alchemical potion, made up of so many tangible pieces of the organic world.
Soil comes in many densities and combinations of materials. Much of the southern highlands of Appalachia are covered with a thin layer of soil, which is true of many forested mountain areas. This layer is easily destroyed through clear-cutting and other careless logging, which causes that skinny layer to flow down the sides of the hills, often clogging streams and branches below.
The most prized soil is called “bottom land” and is found in the floodplains of creeks and rivers. This soil is deep and rich, as it benefits from the occasional flooding of the river. It also has the distinct advantage of being flat and more easily tilled, planted, and tended. With the advent of toxic farm runoff and chemicals freely dumped in local waterways, this soil (like all soils) should be tested, not only for nutrients or deficiencies but also for heavy metals and other toxic residue.
Much of the soil here contains a generous amount of clay, which helps retain moisture in times of drought but is heavy going for the roots of tender plants. The opposite may also be found: sandy soil that doesn’t hold water but is easy for plant roots to move through. Most serious gardeners will find a balance of moisture retention and friability through building up their soil by adding composted plant material.
Forest
The wretched and destructive squirrels demand my attention, racing up and down the big maples. I observe them and remember the trees in the woods across the river. I was raised in the woods and used to know my way through those trees, walking easily and confidently. When I was growing up, the times seemed safer than now, and I would leave my house on a sunny morning and return hours later, having wandered far and seen much. My daughter was raised years later in an urban setting but she still holds some woodland skills and some common sense. I am unreasonably proud of that.
Consider the magic inherent in the forests of the world, magic that comes down to us through folk and fairy tales. There is always more to the forest than meets the eye. From the canopy above to the mycelium layer in the soil, there are so many things unseen, so many possibilities for magic and danger.
I returned to the woods after a long absence—an absence in which I left rural life, launched a career in the arts, married, and had a child. In all that time, I busied myself with new ways (and flush toilets!) and hardly missed the world I called home for so many formative years.
Then a friend invited me for a walk in a wooded park nearby. He pointed out the plants he knew so well and we marveled over the young trees, including a scraggly American chestnut. The area had been clear-cut and then used as a dump by the county. It had been left to lie for many years and the city traded something for it in order to create a city park in that neighborhood. The fast-growing but short-lived trees—the pines—zoomed up, providing some cover for all the rest. But first came the briars, poison ivy, and Virginia creeper because humans had done so much damage and these plants are always the first responders in passive restoration. Consider the natural magic of this protective covering and how we as humans utilize prickles and energetic poison to cover and protect ourselves and others when the need arises.
Mast
In old Appalachia, the people predicted the severity of the upcoming winter with beans and mast. Mast is the output of wild trees—acorns and nuts, mostly. A heavy mast year indicates a winter of colder than usual temperatures, snow, and ice. It foretells a winter in which the wild things will need extra feeding supplies. We know from history that this mast also served to feed the people who lived here long ago, as well as the new crop of primitive skills aficionados.
What We Are
A friend asked if I’d ever seen the 2010 movie Winter’s Bone. Indeed, yes. In fact when people outside the region ask me what life is like here—to be of here with these gnarly roots—I usually ask the same question. Appalachia has been so mythologized over the years that we lie somewhere between quaint throwbacks to Elizabethan England and the urbanoia of Deliverance. But the reality of Appalachian people, as you have come to discover, is that we are not a monolith, and for some of us the truth of our real lives is nearer Winter’s Bone than either of the other extremes. Neither Andy of Mayberry nor Jed Clampett—and yet all of these too. The ideas compacted into the hillbilly stereotypes need some freedom, as well as an open mind, to receive the unpacking of them and to allow real lives to show their true selves.
Winter’s Bone clearly holds up three aspects of Appalachian culture that are important for outsiders to know and indwellers to acknowledge—family, making do, and fatalism. We’ll unpack each one and weave them as we can into our understanding of the region and its inhabitants. Then we’ll move on to the spirit folk who also lay claim to the region.
When the Border Reivers were removed into Ulster in the seventeenth century, they were justly notorious for several things. Due to generations of living in a war zone between two powerful nations, they rode throughout the borderlands on swift, silent ponies, stealing sheep, cattle, and most anything that wasn’t nailed down. They lived, so we understand, as their Gael ancestors had lived. They were Scottish and English, with bits and bobs from different Continental sources, making this group one of the most genetically diverse in western Europe.
These unusual circumstances made the borderers suspicious of any authority, secular or religious. Trust was placed in the head of the family and then the chieftain of their particular clan. Their general mistrust of law and their prevalence in the southern highlands helps open a piece of the pervasive stereotype—the adherence to the family view and loyalty to the extended family. We are often said to be suspicious of strangers. Even if we do offer hospitality, there’s rarely an extension of recognizable trust. When I was growing up, the sheriff’s department (the law or the law-dogs) was rarely brought in, even for outrageous offences. Some reasons include the need to refrain from airing the family’s dirty laundry in public because it is shameful, and the trope of not bringing outsiders in, not even potentially neutral ones, because they might discover things best left undiscovered. I track this to the Border Reivers so long ago, scraping out a living in a place with little safety and no peace.
The question of trust—and even the ability to trust—looms large in Appalachia. Understandable given the way some people have been cheated out of home or livelihood here, generation after generation. This continues today as representatives of fracking interests misrepresent their intentions to landowners throughout the area, or so I am told.
Making do with what you have is the motto of people living in multigenerational poverty and isolation. What it means in practical terms is hard work. Plowing, planting, tending, harvesting, preserving. Subsistence farming means growing and preserving enough food for your entire family with little or no access to stores. Children got new shoes when the burley came in and was sold. In these mountains, many families depended on their tobacco allotment as a cash crop to buy the things that couldn’t be grown and made and to pay the taxes on the land. Allotments are a state-imposed control over the supplies of a particular product, aimed to keep the market moderately supplied in order to keep the prices high. Those supports were removed less than a decade ago, as American demand for tobacco decreased. Most of the big farms still growing are located in the central and eastern part of North Carolina, and there are other cash crops now. The notion that a family could survive without ready cash until it was time to pay the landlord or the taxes goes back to European peasantry. Here in the southern Appalachians, you ate what you grew, hunted, caught, or picked free off the land. Today we talk about “value-added” products, which is a fancy way of saying you picked and dried three herbs, combined them to create incense and put them in a jar with a label. Everything that could be used was used. Anything that could be eaten was eaten. It used to be said that every part of a slaughtered hog was used in some way, except for the tail and the squeal.
The strange magic of these strange places has a deep appeal now, as modern practitioners look for magic that is authentic, as well as magic that works. Often the seeds of that magic lie in the land under our feet and the rivers that flow through the land. The savvy practitioner will look to the land for strength as well as inspiration. To find the essence of your magical practice in the heart of nature is also an act of spiritual reclamation.
Some Witchery: Acquiring Good Luck
If you study magic workings through history, you may find, as I have, a curious thing: the idea of being lucky or of having good (or bad) luck used to be more prevalent than it seems to be in more recent writings and discussions. Charms and talismans to either improve one’s luck or draw good luck to you used to be very popular. There are probably valid reasons why we don’t consider the amount or quality of our personal luck as much as we used to.
In my work, I find that a return to the idea of improved luck is helpful for many of my friends and clients as they navigate through challenging times. I haven’t encountered traditional Appalachian workings to improve your luck, though good luck has always been valued in the regional culture. There are many ways to ward off bad luck, like inscribing an X in the air when a black cat crosses your path. My family, being contrary, considered a black cat crossing to be a positive thing, but my grandmother was uneasy if a white cat did the same.
I created this job of work to improve your luck. It is cobbled together from traditional materials wielded in traditional ways. But it is an invention of my own and not something I learned from a neighbor or family member.
We begin by embracing the idea that our natural state is lucky. That may require a change in your mindset and that may not be an easy thing if you’ve gone through your life this far thinking that luck never goes your way. Phrases like “just my luck” or “that figures” muttered after an unfortunate event imply that your expectation is that things won’t go your way because you aren’t a lucky so-and-so. Try replacing those with “lucky me” when something goes well and that will go a long way toward tweaking your attitude in the direction of a new outlook.
Begin by sweeping your home space from the front door to the back, leaving both doors open. Encourage air and new energy to flow through the area, blowing away bunged-up energy and old air. There are a few things to pull together: a pinch of dirt from your yard (or from a potted plant, if you don’t have a yard), another pinch each of sour grass and catnip (fresh or dried), and some ground nutmeg. You’ll also need some red thread and plain brown paper. Cut out a square of the paper, three inches by three inches or slightly larger. Embroidery floss is a good choice for thread. Use a felt-tipped pen to put a fat black dot in the middle of the paper and add the ingredients to the square. Stir them together with the first finger of your soft (nondominant) hand. Add something shiny to the mix—a sliver of mirror, a bit of foil, a chip of mica, or a little silver bead. Take that same finger and tap the top three times, thinking to yourself how lucky you are going to be from here on out.
Now fold that paper over on itself tight, so nothing falls out. Tie it up tight with the red string into a small package, a sachet. Tap it one more time, same as before, thinking the same things. Place that little sachet to your forehead, to your eyes, to your mouth, to your belly, and finally over your heart. Carry the sachet with you for at least seven days and nights, in your purse or your pocket. Lay it under a full moon as you can to keep it charged. Let your self-talk change to this: “My natural state is very lucky.”
5. Gregory Smithers, Native Southerners: Indigenous History from Origins to Removal (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019).
6. “Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest,” USDA Forest Service, accessed August 4, 2020, www.fs.usda.gov/recarea/nfsnc/recarea/?recid=48920.
7. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Kubla Khan,” Poetry Foundation, 1816, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43991/kubla-khan.
8. Horace Kephart, Our Southern Highlanders: A Narrative of Adventure in the Southern Appalachians and a Study of Life among Mountaineers (New York: Outing Publishing, 1913), 357.
9. Horace Kephart, “The Smoky Mountain National Park,” The High School Journal 8, no. 6/7 (1925): 64.