This special expanded third edition of Horace Kephart's classic work on the people of Southern Appalachia has been completely re-typeset and includes a new introduction by writer George Ellison. This edition also includes eight articles written by Horace Kephart and published after the previous edition on such topics as moonshiners, rifle-making, mountain culture, and the proposed Great Smoky Mountains National Park. All told, readers will find over 100 pages of new material not included in any of the book's previous editions.
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An icon of the Southern Appalachian region known for the seminal books Camping and Woodcraft and Our Southern Highlanders, Horace Kephart was instrumental in efforts to create a national park in the Smokies and to establish the Appalachian Trail through North Carolina and Tennessee. This is the behind-the-scenes story of a librarian-turned-woodsman who had a far-reaching effect on wilderness literature and outdoor pursuits throughout North America. "This long-awaited biography of Horace Kephart is so well written and informative that one reads it with the pleasure of a riveting novel and an admiration reserved for the finest scholarship. Back of Beyond is a triumph." Ron Rash, author of Serena "With affection and candor, McCue and Ellison reveal an intimate knowledge of Kephart's ancestry, education, marriage, and career, his place in American literature and history, and his part in the founding of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park." Robert Morgan, author of Boone: A Biography "This meticulously researched and carefully considered book is a great contribution to the history and culture of the Southern Appalachians." Charles Frazier, author of Cold Mountain, winner of the National Book Award for Fiction George Ellison has written extensively about Horace Kephart and was designated one of the 100 most influential people in the history of Great Smoky Mountains National Park. In 2012 he won the Wild South Roosevelt-Ashe award for "Outstanding Journalism in Conservation." Janet McCue, an independent writer and researcher, has collaborated with Ellison and others on many Kephart projects. Her writing and research reveal Kephart's multi-faceted life as student, husband, father, librarian, writer, and public figure. She is the former director of Mann Library at Cornell University. All proceeds from the sale of this book will benefit the educational, historical, and scientific programs of Great Smoky Mountains National Park.--George Ellison and Janet McCue
Best known for Our Southern Highlanders (1913) and Camping and Woodcraft (1916), Horace Kephart's keen interest in exploring and documenting the great outdoors would lead him not only to settle in Bryson City, North Carolina, but also to become the most significant writer about the Great Smoky Mountains in the early twentieth century. Edited by Mae Miller Claxton and George Frizzell, Horace Kephart: Writings extends past Kephart's two well-read works of the early 1900s and dives into his correspondence with friends across the globe, articles and columns in national magazines, unpublished manuscripts, journal entries, and fiction in order to shed some deserved light on Kephart's classic image as a storyteller and practical guide to the Smokies. The book is divided into thematic subsections that call attention to the variety in Kephart's writings, its nine chapters featuring Kephart's works on camping and woodcraft, guns, southern Appalachian culture, fiction, the Cherokee, scouting, and the park and Appalachian trail. Each chapter is accompanied by an introductory essay by a notable Appalachian scholar providing context and background to the included works. Written for scholars interested in Appalachian culture and history, followers of the modern outdoor movement, students enamored of the Great Smoky Mountains, and general readers alike, Horace Kephart: Writings gathers a plethora of little-known and rarely seen material that illustrates the diversity and richness found in Kephart's work.
When a mysterious (though familiar looking . . . ) stranger arrives on Deep Creek, he immediately encounters a vast cadre of characters that includes earnest mountaineers, a murderous land baron, a family of treacherous ne'er-do-wells, a beautiful botanist, a Cherokee Indian chief, and a witch. A search for hidden treasures leads a community to erupt into violence while the hero comes to realize that what he truly seeks may be more animal than mineral"--Publisher description.
A stingy man "won't drink branch water till there's a flood," and it is "a mighty triflin' sort o' man'd let either his dog or his woman starve." Some places are "so crowded you couldn't cuss a cat without gettin' fur in your mouth." For almost thirty years Horace Kephart collected sayings like these from his neighbors and friends in the area around Bryson City, North Carolina. Kephart, a librarian with an interest in languages and in the American Frontier, left his career and his family in midlife to settle in what was at the turn of the century the wilds of the Great Smokey Mountains. An assiduous collector and observer, he compiled twenty-six journals of notes on the folkways and speech of the Southern Appalachians at a time when the region was still largely isolated. Smokey Mountain Voices is a dictionary of Southern Appalachian speech based on Kephart's journals and publications; it is also a compendium of mountain lore. Harold Farwell and J. Karl Nicholas have compiled not only quaint and peculiar words, but jokes and comic exchanges. Many of the "ordinary" words that comprised an important part of the language of the mountaineers are preserved here thanks to Kephart's meticulous collecting. The editors have incorporated the original quotations with Kephart's definitions and explanations to create a rich source for the study of southern mountain speech. And within the echoes of these Smokey Mountain voices exists some of the joy and fullness of life that Horace Kephart shared and recorded. Smoky Mountain Voices will be of interest to dialectologists, historians of American English, students of regional literature, scholars of folk life, and laypersons interested in Southern Appalachia.
Rowlandson's famous account of her abduction by the Narragansett Indians in 1676 is accompanied by three other narratives of captivity among the Delawares, the Iroquois, and the Indians of the Allegheny.
