Editor’s Note: 2004 marks the 100th anniversary of Horace Kephart’s arrival in the Smokies region. A series of Back Then columns initiated last week will deal with various aspects of his life and career.

WNC reader series tackles Kephart classic

Last week’s column detailed Kephart’s flight in mid-summer of 1904 into the Western North Carolina mountains, where by November of that year he had secured the use of a cabin at an abandoned copper mine on the Little Fork of the Sugar Fork of Hazel Creek in the Great Smokies. This week we’ll take a closer look at those seminal years from 1904-1907 when he lived on the Little Fork. It was the touchstone period of Kephart’s life, providing direct experiences that fostered the writing of Our Southern Highlanders and his considerable role in the movement that culminated in the founding of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 1934.


Located two miles from Medlin, a tiny settlement situated where the Sugar Fork enters Hazel Creek about 10 miles up Hazel Creek from its confluence with the Little Tennessee River (now inundated by Lake Fontana), this remote cabin on the Little Fork became the vantage point from which Kephart studied the land and its people. It was a two-room structure, half of logs and half of rough planking, probably with two levels that were constructed at different times. He refurbished the dwelling, adding his few belongings once they were hauled up in a wagon.

One of the most revealing sources in regard to Kephart’s three years at the cabin is an interview conducted in 1926 by F.A. Behymer published in the “St. Louis Post-Dispatch” (12/12/26) under the heading “Horace Kephart, Driven from Library by Broken Health, Reborn in Woods.” Behymer, who probably knew Kephart from days together in St. Louis, visited Kephart in his office just off the town square in Bryson City.

“Seldom during those three years as a forest exile,” Kephart said, “did I feel lonesome in the daytime; but when supper would be over and black night closed in on my hermitage, and the owls began calling all the blue devils of the woods, one needed some indoor occupation to keep him in good cheer.”

“It was the old life calling, the life of books that he had left,” Behymer noted. “For such a man there could be a beginning again but the old life could not be entirely disowned .... Out of the thousands of books that he had intimately known [as a librarian] there were only a few he could carry with him into the solitudes. He selected them with care, twenty of them. Here is the list in the order in which they stood on a shelf on his soap-box cupboard: an English dictionary; “Roget’s Thesaurus”; his sister’s “Bible”; Shakespeare; Burns’ Poems; Dante (in Italian); Goethe’s Faust; Poe’s Tales; Stevenson’s Kidnapped, David Balfour and The Merry Men; Fisher’s Universal History; Nessmuk’s [i.e., George Washington Sears] Woodcraft; Frazer’s Minerals; Jordan’s Vertebrate Animals; Wright’s Birdcraft; Matthews’ American Wild Flowers; Keeler’s Our Native Trees; and Lounsberry’s Southern Wild Flowers and Trees. The old man had become a new man, but the new man was a man of books ... and when the owls began calling, it was in his books that he found comfort. He took up writing, as it was inevitable that he would, setting down by night his experiences of the day.”

Kephart became preoccupied with the simple and direct challenge of living efficiently in this new environment. Despite his extensive experiences in the outdoors dating back to childhood, he found that he now “had to make shift in a different way, and fashion many appliances from the materials found on the spot. The forest itself was not only my hunting-ground but my workshop and my garden ... I gathered, cooked, and ate (with certain qualms, be it confessed, but never with serious mishap) a great variety of wild plants that country folk in general do not know to be edible. I learned better ways of dressing and keeping game and fish, and worked out odd makeshifts in cooking with rude utensils, or with none at all. I tested the fuel values and other qualities of many kinds of wood and bark, made leather and rawhide from game that fell to my rifle, and became more or less adept in other backwood handicrafts, seeking not novelties but practical results.”

These “practical results” he published in the popular outdoor magazines of the day. By 1906, he had gathered enough material to compile the first edition of Camping and Woodcraft, a storehouse of practical advice, lore, anecdote, and adventure that became the standard work in its field. Supremely applicable as is no other book in regard to basic techniques and philosophy, it’s still in print via a University of Tennessee facsimile edition published in 1988.

After leaving Hazel Creek in 1907, Kephart apparently considered residing there again when he returned to the Smokies in 1910. Because the Ritter Lumber Company had begun extensive operations up the entire watershed the previous year, he decided instead to locate in Bryson City. But those three years in the cabin on the Little Fork had stimulated Kephart’s imagination and writing. It was the place where he sorted out his life (as best he could) and laid the foundation for what became a substantial literary and environmental legacy. When Kephart observed toward the end of his life that “I owe my life to these mountains,” he no doubt had the Little Fork of the Sugar Fork of Hazel Creek years in mind.

Since 1972 I’ve been to the cabin site many times, and I will be leading a “Together We Read” sponsored outing there this coming fall. Each time I’m there, I go and sit on the hillside above the spot where the cabin was situated. I listen to the wind in the tulip poplars and the tinkling of the creek. Even today the setting is not so very different from that day in November of 1904 — almost a century ago — when Horace Kephart moved into his remote hiding place and began to explore “that mysterious beckoning hinterland which rose rightback of my chimney and spread upward, outward, almost to the three cardinal points of the compass, mile after mile, hour after hour of lusty climbing — an Eden still unpopulated and unspoiled.”

(Next week, we’ll take a closer look at how Kephart gathered and ordered the materials that became Our Southern Highlanders.)

George Ellison is a writer who lives in Bryson City. He wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C. 28713, or at ellisongeorge@cs.com.