|
|
THE railroads that have triumphantly surmounted the Blue Ridge and taken the mountains, as it were, by storm, make it easy in these days to get within reach of the formerly almost inaccessible places. Besides those that have crossed the mountains, and the short line up the French Broad Valley to the "Sapphire Country," there is the "Murphy Branch" that connects Asheville with Atlanta, Georgia, by a circuitous route down the very centre of the plateau around and over obstructing mountains.
At intervals along the Murphy Branch, villages have grown up, the largest of which, Waynesville, is beautifully placed close to the Balsam Mountains, and has long been a favorite summer resort. The next most important are Sylva and Dillsboro', lying between the Balsam and Cowee Mountains, and beyond these, Whittier and Bryson City, between the Great Smoky and Cowee Mountains.
From any of these villages one can start afoot or otherwise upon delightful trips through some of the finest scenery of the mountains, and from two o! them, Whittier and Bryson City, roads lead into the Cherokee Indian Country that lies on the lower slopes of the Great Smoky Mountain. The Indian Country affords one a plunge into the wilderness in more senses than one, for not only does one find here wild scenery, but also the original inhabitants, or at least a very orderly remnant of that mysterious and picturesque race that before the coming of the white man roamed these solitudes.
The Indians of this region were Cherokees, and there seem to have been several tribes, not always on amicable terms with one another, judging from the number of arrow-heads found in certain fields near Asheville. The country about Asheville is believed to have been a common hunting-ground without permanent settlements, which would account for the arrow-strewn battle-fields as well as for the dearth of Indian names in that section.
The white man when he came did not enter upon the scene in a way to inspire confidence in the red man, who finally tried to hold back the hand of destiny by massacring the invaders. This resulted in an armed force entering the mountains in the summer of 1779, burning the villages, killing the Indians, and destroying their growing crops.
The treatment of the Cherokees by the white man affords no better reading than the treatment of the other Indian tribes by their civilized conquerors, and finally many of the more restless spirits among the Indians went West in search of new huntinggrounds. Many, however, stayed at home and made the best of the new order of things, until the white conqueror finally decided to remove the whole Cherokee Nation to lands set aside in the Indian Territory.
Now, it is one thing to decide to move an Indian, and another thing to do it. You have first to catch your Indian, and when the hour struck for the Cherokees to go West, - nothing was said about their growing up with the country, - lo, the band had shrunk to half its size. This half was deported and men went out to hunt up the other half. Any one who thinks he can find an Indian hiding in the wilds of western North Carolina, has not seen the country. He might as well spend his time hunting for the lost ten tribes of Israel. In course of time the Indians returned to their homes and went on peacefully raising corn, grunting emphatic denials to any suggestion to go West. Finally, the large territory they now own, over one hundred thousand acres, was bought for them with their own money by one who championed their rights, so that the Indians who would not go West now occupy some of the most picturesque and beautiful as well as fertile land in the North Carolina mountains. They are known as the " Eastern band of the Cherokees," and are not " reservation Indians" in the ordinary meaning of the words, since they own their land by right of purchase and are true citizens of the Republic with all the privileges of citizenship. These Indians are as lawabiding as their white neighbors, more so, since they have never distilled unlawful "moonshine," but have only drunk it, when they could get it, until the chief of the tribe, becoming aware of the devastation being wrought among his people by the use of whiskey, did that which might have done honor to any civilized leader. Calling a council, he told the people that the only way to save their nation was to abandon the use of whiskey which he himself would do from that day, whereupon almost the whole tribe joined him, and although some fell from grace under temptation, there was a marked change for the better from that time.
The easiest way to get into the Indian Country is from Whittier over the road that goes up the Oconolufty River to Cherokee, the principal Indian settlement, and where is a government school. Another and more picturesque though longer way, a distance, if one remembers rightly, of twenty-five miles, is to go from Waynesville through the Jonathan Creek Valley and over Soco Mountain by one of the most nearly impassable roads in the mountains. But by going this way one enters the Indian country from the primeval forest, which has a certain appropriateness. Jonathan Creek Valley, deep, and so narrow that the neighbors say the cobblers there have to sew their shoes lengthwise, lies close under the north end of the high Balsam Mountain, and is one of those quaint survivals of other days that makes one feel, upon entering it, as though a door had been shut on the modern world. The road follows up through the peaceful valley, past the picturesque houses with the cornfields showing above the roofs, and the gardens full of flowers, past the high-wheeled mills, and across the charming fords banked in laurel where Jonathan Creek crosses and recrosses the road. You go on and up the mountain-side where the forest is stately, still, and ancient, and where underneath the trees, on all sides as far as one can see, a bed of dewy ferns covers the earth, the green fronds nested in shadows.
The road ascends through the ferns and you notice that Jonathan Creek has become a little rippling brook, a new-born child of the forest and the clouds. When you get to the gap of the mountains you find in the "old field" there, a large cold spring, the cradle out of which Jonathan Creek leaps to go dancing down the mountain-side, and away to the turbid plains below.
At the gap you see Soco Fall and hear it thunder down the lonely cliff. It is the wild beginning of Soco Creek that dashes down the other side of the mountain, and the road following down the gorge soon presents such an appearance that you adopt the Indian mode of progression, leaving the driver to survive or perish as fate ordains. To cross an Indian's conception of a footbridge over the torrent dashing uproariously against the boulders that strew its course is only one degree better than trying to cross the washed-out fords in a carriage. Yet nothing can dim your pleasure in the splendid freshness and mystery of the shadowy gorge where the water shouts in a thousand voices, for you are in the Indian Country where nature seems a little wilder and more secret. The writhing limbs and deep-green foliage of monster rhododendrons crowd the banks. Above them tower dark hemlocks. It is twilight in the gorge, although the sun shines brightly on the treetops.
Once in a while you get a glimpse of noiseless forms flitting through the forest. But you are not afraid, for the Indians long ago laid aside their tomahawks and arrows, along with their feathers and war-paint. They are watching us out of curiosity, and their presence adds the one needed touch to the romance of the road. As we get lower down, a lonely, neat looking house occasionally stands near the rushing river, tightly closed and looking as though uninhabited, though your driver assures you that black eyes are peering at you through the holes between the logs. But when you meet Big Witch carrying his fish spear and clad all in shop-made clothes, and two Indian women dressed in calico, each carrying what should be a pappoose, but is only a little brown baby in a pink frock just like any other baby, when this happens, your romantic fancies take flight like a flock of startled birds. At the government school, well placed on a slope near the Oconolufty River, some two hundred young Indians are learning the white man's way of life, boys and girls in about equal numbers.
The Cherokee is not a noble red man in appearance, having the flat, broad type of face with wideapart eyes, instead of the aquiline features of the wooden warrior that used to stand outside the tobacco-shops. The Indians cultivate the land, raise a few horses and cattle, make soapstone pipes to sell to tourists, and weave baskets. Their lack of progress is not due to want of natural gifts we were told at the school. They can, if they would, but they are utterly wanting in the first great incentive to work, a love of acquisition. The negro soon develops a desire to possess things, the Cherokee never. Perhaps he is the true philosopher, and seeing too far ahead asks, "What is the use?"
The Indian Country lies in a cul-de-sac between the Balsams and the Smokies, two of the grandest ranges in the Appalachians, and through it flows the Oconolufty River, swift, broad, and clear as crystal, its bed strewn with boulders, large trees guarding its banks, and rhododendrons dipping to the water. This romantic stream being too swift for a " bench " is spanned by air-line bridges, the thought of crossing which chills the blood. In its calmer reaches, one sees the long dugout canoes of the Indians tied to the trees along the bank, or perchance an Indian girl crossing the river standing securely at the bow of the craft and paddling against the current.
IS it the name, or the literary uses of the last few years, that has invested the Smoky Mountains with that feeling of mystery that seems always to hang about them? Those who have seen them rising in ghost-like beauty high against the western sky need, however, no explanation of their power over the mind. One approaches them with a peculiar feeling of anticipation, a feeling almost reverential, as though about to unveil some great mystery. One approaches them also with a little inner trepidation, they have always seemed so far away, so delicately blue and ethereal, or else as their name suggests they have been to the imagination pale emanations from a burning world, suppose that closer acquaintance with them should dispel a cherished illusion!
But have no fear. These mountains possess a double personality. The dreamlike slopes you have known and loved will remain, only there will be added to the domain of your memory another Smoky Mountain Range, the possession of which is also a rare pleasure. These new mountains, with their grand trees and wide spaces, their freshness and fragrance, their dangerous cliffs, steep slopes, and deep ravines, their rushing streams and their almost impenetrable wildness, become a refuge, - glorious heights where you wander in imagination when weary of the dust of the world.
For the Smoky Mountains are at once the most ethereal and the most substantial of created things; ethereal when you see them exquisitely blue or pearly white phantoms in the containing heavens, tremendous realities when you are among their wild cliffs and inclosed by their primeval forests.
Unlike the Blue Ridge, the Smoky Mountains do not hold out inviting levels for man's occupation, They sweep in steep slopes up from both sides to a narrow summit, in places a mere knife-edge ridge, and their flanks are set with precipices, ravines, and deep moist coves out of which rise large forest trees. They are yet the home of the wild animals that have been driven from most other parts of the mountains, and their rhododendron and laurel labyrinths are so dense and so extensive that to get lost in them may mean destruction. Their feet lie in the pleasant valleys, their heads in the clouds. For a distance of over fifty miles the Tennessee and North Carolina state line runs along the crest of the Great Smoky Mountains without crossing a gap below five thousand feet high, while it surmounts Clingman Dome, Mount Guyot, and other summits at an elevation above six thousand feet. Below, these mountain: are covered with the finest hardwood trees left in the United States; above, they are wrapped in spruce and balsam fir, a dark unbroken forest of which covers all but the very tops. For like the summits of all the highest mountains, these too are bare, no matter how small the opening may be, the mounttain top is free.
But while there are no large settlements and few signs of the devastation that follows the coming of man, the long line of the Great Smoky Mountains is not uninhabited. The valleys that run up into the mountains hold little nests of houses, and here and there, far up on the mountain-side, in a cove or on a, fertile "bench," one may find a clearing with its lonely cabin and its cornfield, to be reached only b. a trail through the forest.
The Great Smokies yet remain, as a whole, the most inaccessible part of the mountain region. No road crosses them, few paths penetrate into their fastnesses. To go to any of the high peaks is an arduous climb requiring a guide. And yet it is not difficult to ascend into their forests far enough to get a sense of the glory of the heights.
Being at Cherokee, in the Indian country, instead of following the road down the Oconolufty River to the railroad, it is far wiser to go up it and thereby get into the very heart of the Smokies. As you ascend the narrowing valley, you have a feeling of exhilaration, an increasing sense of splendid freedom, with which the increasing altitude may have something to do. The many streams, that cone hurrying down from their birth chambers in the clouds, cross the road to enter the river. Hence there are fords, beautiful shady places under the trees and the vine-draped bushes. And then the way becomes so narrow that there is not room for both road and river, and the two, for some distance, become one, the river by this time having grown shallow enough to make such a liberty possible. This often happens in the mountains, and a stranger, seeing you slowly vanishing up a river with no apparent exit, might conclude that you had lost, not only your way but your senses. And you do feel a little as though you had taken leave of the ordinary ways of life and entered into a sort of enchanted world as you splash along through a tunnel roofed by tree-tops and paved with flashing water, the leafy walls embroidered with the strong, dark lines and white flower clusters of the Rhododendron maximum.
These roadways in the rivers, these entrancing halls paved with silver, and walled with chrysoprase, topaz, and emerald, are among the most cherished memories of the mountains. There is such a road -let us see - in the " Plumtree Country," where, in the springtime, the silver-floored tunnel is roofed with the delicate colors of coming leaves, and out of which you pass into a world radiant with plum blossoms, and where the road, no longer paved with silver, is bright red and overhung with blossoming trees. Clouds of airy white flowers float above you and about you, pouring intoxicating fragrance into the air you breathe, - and what is more inebriating than the breath of the wild plum! Later in the season bright red plums replace the flowers, giving forth a spicy and joyous odor that tempts you to taste again and again the sparkling juices. The road is fairly covered with the bounty of the tree. The path you travel is red with plums.
One remembers another union of road and river near the headwaters of the Linville, and alongside which a footpath has been cut in the laurel. There used to be a short one near Traumfest, where the overarching bushes were twined with the clematis that bears large pink, urn-shaped flowers, and but enough, one could recall a bookful about the fords and riverbed roads of the mountains.
When you get to where the shining Oconoluf ty forks, you take the left-hand " prong" and go on until the next fork when you turn to the right, the stream becoming ever wilder and narrower and, if possible, more sparkling. The farther you go the more difficult the road becomes. There are few people living as far as this, for you have gone beyond the Indian boundary and are close to the uninhabited mountain. Yet here one's artist friend got one of her loveliest pictures composed of a long, gray old house, pale-blue cabbages, bright flowers, and mountains so divinely blue as to make the senses swim.
When you reach "Jim Mac's place," you stop, for this is the end of what has ceased to deserve the name of road. There is nothing beyond but the steeply rising mountain with its primeval forest, where the red deer and the brown bear yet roam, and the panther and the wildcat make their home. Big trout lie hid in the bright waters of Laurel Fork that comes leaping down icy cold from its embowering springs three thousand feet above your head. At Jim Mac's one hears thrilling tales of fisherman's luck and hunter's adventures, while one young man reluctantly admits that he never did bear-hunt, but has only squirrel-hunted.
And from Jim Mac's you go to the very top of the mountain, there where you step on the Tennessee line without knowing it. Not to one of those grand fir-clad summits that few people reach, but to a gap at an elevation of some fifty-five hundred feet lying on the ridge of the Smokies somewhere between Clingman's Dome and Mount Guyot, two of the great mountains of the range, Clingman having contended long and ardently with Mount Mitchell for the honor of being the highest mountain in the East.
We follow an obscure trail that our guide says in wartime was a sort of road across the mountains, and that it passed near an alum mine where during those troublous times the women got something to set the dyes of their homespun clothes. The horses we ride were born and bred in the mountains, the only kind of horse one ought to ride here, for he knows the ways of the woods and will go over a log or under it, climb, one is tempted to say, anything but a tree, take the situation philosophically if he falls down or you fall off, get up himself, or, if he cannot, wait patiently for help, and when it comes he will assist rather than hinder by his efforts. This horse that never gets nervous or frightened is intelligent and companionable to a high degree, the mountain horses often seeming to share the kindly nature of the people with whom they are intimately associated in all kinds of work, from ploughing a furrow or working a sorghum press to hauling logs over almost impassable roads or bearing their owners over almost impassable trails.
The way up the mountain is now enchanting in its perfection of wildness. Oaks tower above you as you go, and tall locusts shade you, a giant chestnut here, a lordly cherry there, a stately ash, a royal tulip tree, mammoth hemlocks, standing where they please, all remind you that this is a primeval forest, planted by nature and by her husbanded through the millenniums. Here, too, along the cliffs and the streams, the rose-bay, splendid in the literal meaning of the word, adds to the shining of its polished leaves that of regal flower masses, for up here it is yet in bloom, although the time is August. These noble rhododendrons, that blossom with a freedom and a loveliness of color that belong with these vast skydomed spaces, sometimes are not purple at all, but a clear bright rose-color seldom seen at lower levels.
In the forest where the rocks are hidden from view under a thick carpet of moss, your horse wades kneedeep in luscious ferns, or his hoofs sink out of sight in tender oxalis leaves whose crowding flowers embroider a rosy and white design over the green floor. You pass into a parklike grove of great beech trees, still and sweet. You see a large turkey on the topmost limb of a dead tree suddenly expand his wing and float away with incredible speed and lightness. A domestic turkey walking on the ground gives no hint of the almost ethereal lightness with which the wild bird projects himself into and through the air.
As your body rises your spirits also mount. All the turmoil of mistaken humanity is down below those billowing forests that sweep into bottomless blue abysses of which you catch glimpses from some cliffside. The clean, cool air is filled with tree odors, about you the wild denizens of these untroubled heights are roaming and, it may be, unseen, are watching you and wondering. A crackle of twigs a light crashing noise in the laurel - what is it?
The shadows among the trees are intensely blue, overhead white clouds sail in the boundless heavens, down the mossy cliffs streams leap like naiads newly escaped from some cavern of eternity. Where the view opens, fir-clad summits roll away like high green seas, to be transformed in the distance into that spirit-like semblance of mountains that seem to belong, not on earth, but to the realm of the sky.
In a high-lying primeval forest one is often stirred by what might be called primeval feelings. Out of the solitudes come revelations. You look at a tree, grand, alone, touching as it were both earth and heaven, and it awakens in you strong emotion. What is this tree that thus can move you? As you stand questioning, a light flashes through your consciousness. The forest has answered.
From this gap one gets no extensive outlook; we cannot see Clingman Dome, that lacks only about fifty feet of being as high as Mount Mitchell, nor Mount Guyot, nor any other of the high peaks of the Smokies; nevertheless we feel that we know the mountains, lacking only the supreme pleasure of traversing those balsam groves that cover the peaks. A new Smoky Mountain, strong and glorious, projects itself into the imagination alongside the wraithlike shapes of those other Smoky Mountains one has so long known and loved. And over these splendid slopes, one sees in imagination the protecting arm of the new national park reach out, as it soon will, to save them forever from the power of the destroyer.