Our consideration of “books and all things related” continues with a look at an instance when a well-known author (and former librarian) chose to disguise his reading so as to create a literary persona.

Horace Kephart was often guarded, sometimes evasive, when giving reasons for choosing the Smokies region as a place of renewal. There was no doubt an element of chance in the decision. It’s probable, however, despite his denials of having done so, that he read travel accounts and studied government documents, many of which were available by the turn of the century.

For someone with Kephart’s areas of interest an easily located source would have been (and perhaps was) Wilbur G. Zeigler and Ben S. Grosscup’s The Heart of the Alleghanies or Western North Carolina: Comprising Its Topography, History, Resources, People, Narratives, Incidents, and Pictures of Travel, Adventures in Hunting and Fishing, and Legends of Its Wilderness (Raleigh, NC: Alfred Williams, and Cleveland, OH: W.W. Williams, 1883). Kevin E. O’Donnell and Helen Hollingsworth, authors of Seekers of Scenery: Travel Writing from Southern Appalachia (1840-1900), reproduce five magazine articles describing Western North Carolina, post-1875, including Frank O. Carpenter’s “The Great Smoky Mountains and Thunderhead Peak,” which appeared in the June 1890 issue of Appalachia magazine.

The “pub.doc” Kephart managed to unearth in “that dustiest room of a great library” — but absentmindedly fails to provide authors or title for — was Horace B. Ayers and William W. Ashe’s The Southern Appalachian Forests (Washington. DC: Department of Interior and U.S. Geological Survey, 1902), the monumental study that contains descriptions, maps and photos of the Smokies region as well as President Theodore Roosevelt’s detailed Letter of Transmittal, in which he observed: “These great mountains are old in the history of the continent which has grown up about them,” and having escaped “the ice on the north” display “that marvelous variety and richness of plant growth which have enabled our ablest business men and scientists to ask for its preservation by the Government for the advancement of science and pleasure of the people of our own and of future generations.”

Kephart had been for over a decade one of the most meticulous librarians in America. For the remainder of his life, he independently maintained the mindset and methodologies of the prototypical librarian. This trait is exemplified by the set of 27 journals — researched, categorized, alphabetized, indexed, and cross-referenced, more than once — he created so as to depict, often in great detail, almost every aspect of Appalachian culture, and more.

He wasn’t the sort who would venture into his own backyard without first taking a look at the relevant literature. By denying that he had access to written materials, the Smokies thereby became for his readers even more of a “terra incognita” — a land of “hidden possibilities” — in which, as his title for the first chapter of Our Southern Highlanders indicates, there is “Something Hidden; Go and Find It.” Via this calculated strategy, Kephart emerges as the somewhat heroic, albeit mild-mannered and curiously attentive, outsider who explores and describes the landscapes and lifestyles of a “mysterious realm.”

George Ellison 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. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

We’re still at it—considering books and related matters like shelving strategies, bookplates, home libraries, favorite books, and “How do we go about discovering the next book we’re going to read?” This could go on forever. This week, not having anything else in mind, I’ll reminisce some about the role books have played in my life. I’m not at all sure where this is headed, but I do know that it will be about some things that still mean a lot to me. We’ll start at the beginning.

I was born in Danville, Virginia, where, after my father was killed in World War II, I was raised as an only child. Mother, who never remarried, purchased a small house on North Main Street in an ideal location; that is, adjacent to our backyard was a ball field, where pickup football, baseball and other games were ongoing year-round; and beyond the ball field there were woods and a small creek that flowed several miles into a river. When I wasn’t playing ball or walking in the woods or fishing in the creek, I was reading. Reading has always been one of my greatest pleasures. At one point in my life it was, for lack of a better word, magical. We’ll get back to that.

I grew up wanting to be either: (1) a pitcher for a major league baseball team (preferably the Brooklyn Dodgers), or (2) a writer. It became apparent almost immediately, even to me, that the pitching thing wasn’t going to work out; so, I focused on my backup plan. Because of my infatuation with the reading experience, I did eventually become a writer, of sorts. And somewhat to my surprise, I also became a naturalist, of sorts—a strategy that has allowed me to spend a lot of time in the woods.

My mother’s name was Ruth. She read something to me every night. I recall that she was a good reader, not overly emphatic, and seemed to enjoy the stories—no doubt, in part, as a diversion from more pressing concerns of which I was unaware. I will always remember that she read to me every night.

Once I was reading on my own, she subscribed to a children’s book club that mailed a new book every other week addressed to me. It was addressed to me and it was my book. That’s important. I had a bookcase beside my bed in which I arranged my accumulating collection however I wanted.

By the time I was maybe nine years old, I was using the city library. It was housed, as I recall, in an ornate two-story cube of a building located, just like everything else, on the other side of town. It was reputed to have been the seat of the “Last Capitol of the Confederacy.” I never knew if that was true or not and never really cared. I was interested in the books.

On Saturdays when a game of some sort wasn’t scheduled, I’d catch a city bus first thing in the morning over to the library and spend the day reading down in the basement, where the juvenile books were shelved. There was a sign that warned young people not to enter the main library. The gray-haired librarian in charge of the basement did look like a Confederate spinster or like my idea of what one ought to look like. Her hair was pulled back in a tight ball on the back of her head and held in place with a long pin. I can’t recall her name but we got along. On the sly, she let me check out as many books as I could carry home on the bus.

There was a green cloth-covered chair in my bedroom that I always sat in when reading. If I situated myself, just so, in that chair—with a book opened on my left side and the fingertips of my right hand quietly turning the pages, something would happen. For hours it sometimes seemed, a rare emotion would envelope me, and I would be transported into the world about which I was reading.

When I had read pretty much everything down in the basement worth reading, the Confederate spinster obtained a special dispensation from the head librarian that allowed me to come upstairs and read—so long as I didn’t venture into a certain room, where I supposed the dirty books were shelved. In the far corner of the main reading room there was a plush chair in which I always sat, just so, while reading. It was also magical, especially when there was a steady rain falling on the roof of The Last Capitol of the Confederacy.

At Chapel Hill I majored in English because I still loved reading more than anything else, a whole lot more than, say, chemistry, math, economics, German, and other unlikely opportunities. Back then—this was in the early 60s—the Bull’s Head Book Store was located in the basement of Wilson Library. If a book was worth reading, they had it; and you didn’t have to buy it—there were chairs in which you could sit and read anything for free. Anything. Even the dirty books by writers with names like Henry Miller and Jack Kerouac and D.H. Lawrence. And once again there was a chair involved. It was a soft black leather or imitation-leather chair tucked in behind a partition. While sitting in it, just so, I could still enter the dream world of each book as I read it . . . they were books with beautiful names . . . The Old Man and the Boy . . . Specimen Days . . . Go Down, Moses . . . My Antonia . . . Far Away and Long Ago . . . The Odyssey . . . Ulysses . . . Urn Burial . . .Lie Down in Darkness . . . Give Your Heart to the Hawks . . . Tender is the Night . . . names that stick with you for a lifetime, long after you have forgotten the plot and most of the characters.

But that was the end of the magic. I grew older, assumed responsibilities as best as I knew how, and lost the capacity to be fully transported by what I was reading. A person I talked with about this experience suggested that things changed for me with “a loss of innocence.” Maybe so . . . a more realistic explanation would be that my way of processing information changed. The stories and images that books relate — fiction and non-fiction, alike — had once flowed into my system unimpeded with galvanizing impact.

George Ellison 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. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at,.

We’re been considering books and related matters like shelving, bookplates, home libraries, favorite books, and (last week’s topic) — “How do we go about discovering the next book we’re going to read?”

This week we’re going to do something worthwhile by introducing you to the new Friends of the Marianna Black Library Book Store. It’s located on Everett Street in Bryson City, just south of the town square, on the right, before you get to the bridge, right next to Calby’s Antiques. If you’re old enough to recall where Bennett’s Drugstore was situated, that’s the place.

The word “unique” is almost always misused, but the new bookstore probably qualifies. Is there another one anywhere that features a marbled-topped counter from Italy and five stools with spinning seats that graced one of the most famous soda fountains in North Carolina? People traveled to Bryson City just to order a peanut butter milkshake at Bennett’s and sit in one of the old-time booths while drinking it.

For 10 long years, the library bookstore was a 14-by-20-foot shed perched next to the main library that featured a jumble of “unalphabatized” books. Revenues generated for the library via book sales were minimal. Calling it inadequate would have been praise.

Within the last six months, that situation has been altered. The change was initiated when Friends president Gail Findlay, who was director of the Fontana Regional Library system before “retiring,” decided to look for a new location that was large enough, relatively inexpensive, well-situated within walking distance of the main library and downtown areas, and could be leased for at least two years.

Findlay looked closely at four or five locations that didn’t pan out. She mentioned her project to Peggy Duncan, an artist who leased the old Bennett’s soda fountain and luncheonette room as gallery space. Duncan no longer wanted to maintain a downtown gallery — but she did want to retain rights to the wall space as a place to display her work.

Findlay and Duncan went next door to Calby’s and talked things over with Ivan Gibby, present owner of the soda fountain room. While growing up, Gibby had known Doc Bennett and his daughters, and maintains fond recollections of a pharmacy and soda fountain operation that once served as the social and political center of Swain County. They had no difficulty with working out a three-way lease suitable to all. And that’s the story of how the new Friends of the Marianna Black Library came to be.

I can report that when you come to Bryson City to check out the stock, you will find it meets the requirements established by author Larry McMurtry, who owns a bookstore himself, that all books be neatly shelved, arranged alphabetically, make a nice appearance, and be interesting to peruse, whether or not you buy anything. Chances are you will find something to read.

I knew the Bennetts, too. Years ago, I wrote a feature article about Doc Bennett, his daughter, Mary Alice, and the day she closed the drugstore’s doors after almost a century of service. Mary Alice was a great reader who always stocked regional books. She would be pleased with the recent turn of events. For the record, here are some excerpts from that article:

Sorry folks, no more ice cream cones, milkshakes, or sundaes at the marble-topped counters and tables. No more old-fashioned hospitality at the drug counter. No more advice on what to do for a foundered horse or poison ivy. Bennett’s Drug Store — a landmark in Western North Carolina for nearly a century — recently closed its doors for the last time when pharmacist Mary Alice (Bennett) Greyer decided to retire.

The closing marks the end of a single family’s century-long medical service in a rural mountain county, and brings back memories of a remarkable man whose influence extended far beyond his profession as a pharmacist.

Bennett’s Drug Store was founded in 1905 by Greyer’s father, Kelly Bennett (1890-1974), whose father, Dr. A.M. Bennett, was registered as a pharmacist by the state of North Carolina in 1888. Kelly was registered in 1912. His daughter, Mary Alice, was registered in 1936, being the first woman pharmacist in North Carolina. Accordingly, three generations of the Bennett family served Swain County as pharmacists for more than 100 years, with 86 of those years being in the same location.

For his part in promoting the movement that culminated in the establishment of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Kelly became known as “The Apostle of the Smokies.” Shortly after his death, a peak just south of Bryson City in the park was named Mount Bennett. If something took place in Swain County during Doc Kelly’s lifetime, there was more than an even chance he either started it or had a hand in supporting or opposing it. A billboard sign in Bryson City that read “Ask Bennett, He Knows” was more often right than wrong. The closing of Bennett’s Drug Store marks the end of an era.”

Someone needs to find that sign and hang it over the marble counter in the old soda fountain room that, almost overnight, has been transformed into a library bookstore.

George Ellison 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. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Of late, we’ve been considering books. The feedback (mostly email) from readers to recent columns regarding books in general, book shelving strategies, bookplates, home libraries, favorite books, and so on, has been instructive. Before we move on to this week’s assignment (“How do we go about discovering the next book we’re going to read?”) here’s some of what my bookish correspondents are up to.

As previously mentioned, I heard from a woman who doesn’t require a book shelving strategy because she doesn’t shelve her books, having “given up on that foolishness more than 20 years ago.” Her home in Atlanta is apparently awash in a sea of 2,500 or so volumes, amongst which she and her three cats make their way. Her multiple copies of Gone With the Wind, she advised me most recently, are “very carefully stacked.”

A woman in Lake Junaluska wrote a lovely note about bookplates that I haven’t responded to as yet. But I will.

A well-organized gentleman dispatched (by snail mail) a list (three handwritten, single-spaced yellow pages) that warmed my heart. Therein, he enumerated the subject matter in each of his nine (A-I) bookcases situated, respectively: (1) in the “Living Room,” four bookcases, seven subject areas (novels, books about Indians, music, etc.), 11 sub-categories (edible/medicinal plants, Smoky Mountains, William Bartram, etc.), and two sub-sub-categories; (2) in the “Kitchen,” one bookcase, one subject area (American History) and five subcategories (French and Indian War, War of 1812, etc.); (3) in the “Hallway,” one bookcase, one subject area (music) and five sub-categories (opera, biographies of musicians, etc); (4) in the “Bed Room,” two bookcases and random shelves, with miscellaneous subject areas (sports, mysteries, poetry, transcendentalism, etc.); and (5) in the “Bathroom,” one bookcase, four subject areas (natural history, trail guides, animals, and books about the Appalachian Trail). All’s right with this world when a man’s books are well-organized.

Last week, I picked The Odyssey as the book I’d want if I could have but one book in my home library. Some picks by readers: the Bible (by a landslide), anything by Jane Austen, Walden, a one-volume edition of Shakespeare’s complete works, The Divine Comedy, Don Quixote, Chaucer, and Gene Stratton Porter’s A Girl of the Limberlost.

Now we get to “How do we go about discovering the next book we’re going to read?” — a serious question. When things are going well, it seems there’s no end to the books in hand or on your reading list. But in the blink of an eye, you can go into a slump. You’re not reading well (it’s a skill that fades with disuse) and you don’t know where your next book is coming from. What to do?

Book reviews. At times, when I can keep up with them, I subscribe to as many book review publications on the national and regional levels as I can afford (not more than five). Aside from whatever leads I might pick up, I enjoy reading reviews in and of themselves. They are an art form of sorts, at which the British excel. In this country, Larry McMurtry is skilled at informal overviews and book talk; James Wood, a reviewer for the New Yorker who was raised in England, is more formal, more of a traditional critic. And it must be noted that, when he’s on his game, Gary Carden is as good a book reviewer as there is on any level.

Blurbs. I read them carefully. If the recently-deceased detective fiction author Robert Parker (creator of Spenser and Hawk) wrote a blurb praising another mystery author’s prose style, you could bank on it. James Dickey, you couldn’t trust. If asked, he would have written a blurb praising a chainsaw manual.

Writing blurbs is also an art form of sorts. They are difficult because so much has to be packed into so little space. I can’t write them. Several months ago, Renea Winchester — a Swain County native who lives in Atlanta — asked me to read the typescript of her new book, In the Garden with Billy: Lessons About Life, Love, and Tomatoes, and write a blurb. It’s a terrific book. The best thing I’ve read in quite a while. I got carried away. Renea was understandably bewildered – but still gracious – when she received, as an email attachment, a 1,000-word blurb. What she’s doing with it, I’m afraid to ask.

Word of mouth. The best bet. I won’t have any interest in your politics or problems, but if our paths should ever cross, it won’t be long before I ask, “By the way, what are you reading?” I will listen carefully to what you say and, if something you mention sounds likely, I’ll make a note.

George Ellison 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. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

The feedback (mostly email) from readers to recent columns regarding books in general, book shelving strategies, and bookplates has been both surprising and interesting. It encourages me to proceed in that vein. Down the line, we might consider public libraries and the wonderful freedoms they represent, but for the time being let’s consider private holdings — that is, the sort of personal libraries you and I have.

You can’t have a library without a book. But just one book will do it. Hopefully, it’s the right book, suitable to your unique needs. If you were forced to reduce your library to just one book, what would it be?

After some deliberation, my pick is The Odyssey. Homer’s epic has always fascinated me. It has most everything a reader could desire: adventure after adventure, seascapes and landscapes, monsters galore, bad hosts and good hosts, seductive sirens and a beguiling temptress, a descent into Hell, a whirlpool and a shipwreck, a return home (to Ithaca) where the hero’s patient wife (Penelope) weaves by day and unweaves at night so as to befuddle her many arrogant suitors, a faithful dog (Argos), and a thoroughly satisfying closing in which father (Odysseus) and son (Telemachus) pile up dead suitor upon dead suitor like bloody cordwood. There have been numerous translations: the one by T.E. Lawrence (himself a near-mythic figure) has special overtones; a more recent translation by Robert Fagles is one of the best.

Also on my one-book library nomination list: Michel de Montaigne’s Complete Essays, J. Frank Dobie’s The Ben Lilly Legend, Horace Kephart’s Camping and Woodcraft, J. Evett Haley’s Charles Goodnight: Cowman and Plainsman, E.C. “Teddy Blue” Abbott’s We Pointed Them North: Recollections of a Cowpuncher, Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove and Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, Edwin Way Teale’s North with Spring, Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days, W.H. Hudson’s Far Away and Long Ago, Richard Jefferies’ The Story of My Heart, James Joyce’s Ulysses, Thomas Hardy’s Complete Poems, Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selborne, Louise Dickinson Rich’s We Took to the Woods, William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses, George Crabbe’s Complete Poems, W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Jupiter, E.O. Wilson’s Naturalist, William T. Davis’s Days Afield, Merrill Gilfillan’s Magpie Rising, James Thurber’s The Years with Ross, Llewelyn Powys’ Earth Memories, Virginia Woolf’s Complete Essays, and various others that reflect my eclectic and sometimes peculiar tastes when it comes to reading matter. Few will have even heard of George Crabbe, that poet of the East Anglican mudflats and ungainly flora, whose aim was to avoid in his verses, whenever possible, the poetic. But Homer’s Odyssey won, going away — his only near competition being Montaigne.

Some of the most satisfactory libraries are those housed on a single shelf in a remote cabin — or a portable one consisting of not more than 25 books carefully arranged in a wooden or cardboard box. When Kephart ventured up to his cabin on the Little Fork of the Sugar Fork of Hazel Creek in the fall of 1904, he bought with him that sort of library.

“‘Seldom during those three years as a forest exile,’ Kephart told a reporter in 1927, ‘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,” the reporter 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.”

Then there is the home library — the sort most of us have, ranging from an hundred or so books to several thousand. If you have more than 5,000 books in your library, you may require counseling. If you have more than 10,000, it’s probably too late.

For the devoted, the home library requires an infallible shelving strategy, periodic rearranging, weeding and dusting, carefully chosen additions, and reading. Whether housed in a separate room, on a wall in the den, in the corner of a spare room, or (like mine) in bookcases and on shelves scattered throughout the house, the home library is, for many, a living entity.

Montaigne (1533-1592) was the first essayist in Western literature. The first and the best-able practitioners of the art like Bacon, Hazlitt, Emerson, and Woolf agree that he has never been surpassed. His subject matter was himself. In three volumes, he evaluated and quantified himself with calm objectivity, describing without cant what it’s like to be alive, what it means to be human.

After his best friend Ramond Sebond died, Montaigne’s library became his best friend, a place of refuge. At his chateau in the French countryside, one of the three-story towers was converted into private quarters: chapel, bedroom, and library. Of the forms of association Montaigne preferred — these included intelligent men and beautiful women — he ranked the 1,000 or so books shelved on the top floor of his tower first. In Of the Three Kinds of Association he wrote:

“In my library, I spend most of the days of my life, and most of the hours of the day there ... The shape of my library is round, the only flat side being the part needed for my table and chair; and curving round me it presents at a glance all my books, arranged in five rows of shelves on all sides. It offers rich and free views in thee directions, and sixteen paces of free space in diameter ... There is my throne. I try to make my authority over it absolute, and to withdraw this one corner from all society, conjugal, filial, and civil ... Sorry the man, to my mind, who has not in his own home a place to be all by himself ... I find it measurably more endurable to be always alone than never to be able to be alone. In my youth I studied for ostentation; later, a little to gain wisdom; now, for recreation; never for gain. As for the vain and spendthrift fancy I had for that sort of furniture [used] for the purpose of lining and decorating walls, I have given it up long ago.”

George Ellison 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. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Several weeks ago, I devoted a column to the complicated science of book shelving. Not a few readers responded — often with descriptions of their systems, which they deemed infallible.

Shelving by fiction and non-fiction and leaving it at that seems sort of lazy to me, hardly worth the effort. Nevertheless, that method had several adherents, none of whom gave a hoot when I suggested they might be lazy if not slovenly shelvers. They were happy and didn’t care what I thought.

One lady proudly claimed to have “thousands of books scattered around the house, none of them shelved.” When I replied (in an email) that I hoped she was kidding, she wrote back to say she wasn’t kidding and offered to send a picture of her “book jungle” that I declined.

Most respondents shelved by subject categories of some sort: boats, animals, countries, etc. — and then arranged their books alphabetically within each category. No one else also broke them down chronologically, as I do; that is, I first shelve by general categories, say, natural history. Those books are then divided into British and American. Books up until 1900 are arranged chronologically (Thoreau would come before John Burroughs), but post-1900 books are alphabetical (Annie Dillard comes before Gretel Ehrlich). I don’t know how or why this system of mine originated, but it is infallible.

It should be noted before we move on that almost everyone, as a last resort, approved of the Dusty Miller school of book shelving. Dusty Miller was the much admired London bookseller I described in the column who, when asked how he arranged his books, replied that, “When I buy a short fat book I try to find a short fat hole.” For the lady who doesn’t shelve anything, this wasn’t an issue.

The response to the shelving column surprised me. In Western North Carolina, the love of and care for books seems to be alive and well. Or maybe the point is that readers of The Smoky Mountain News tend to be bookish. And the corollary to that would be that bookish people seem to seek out The Smoky Mountain News in both print and online editions. Why not? It’s a weekly regional newsmagazine situated off-the-beaten track in the southern mountains that features two wonderful written book reviewers, another general column (this one) that discusses older books with frequency, and a natural history columnist who is as likely to focus on a book almost as frequently as he does pileated woodpeckers.

Without this sort of feedback, I probably wouldn’t be inclined to write about bookplates. But there appears to be an audience out there that wouldn’t mind considering bookplates. Here goes.

For years, I’ve admired them and thought about coming up with one for our books that would be appropriate. I like the way a nice bookplate dresses up a nice book. I don’t have a rare or fancy collection of books by any means, but I do have many books that would look good with a bookplate, as does my wife, Elizabeth, who has a nice collection of art and papermaking books. I keep using the word “nice” so as to emphasize that we’re not talking about rare first editions or leather-bound books. We’re just talking about “nice” books — not tattered hardbacks or cheap paperbacks (although some quality soft cover books are “nice”) — of the sort everyone reading this has in their home.

Another reason for thinking about a bookplate is that I have signed most of our books on the front flyleaf. Some signatures are pleasant looking, even elegant. My signature is downright ugly. It used to be as big as a barn door. These days, as I get older, it’s becoming microscopic. Either way, it’s not a pretty thing to encounter. A bookplate would cover up most of my signatures.

Through the years, I’ve picked up several books with chapters on the history of bookplates. There’s no need to go into that sort of detail here. Some excerpted background I summoned up in about five seconds by entering “bookplates” in the Google search engine will suffice:

“A bookplate, also known as ex-Libris [Latin,’ from the books of’], is usually a small print or decorative label pasted into a book, often on the inside front cover, to indicate its owner. Simple typographical bookplates are termed ‘booklabels.’ Bookplates typically bear a name, motto, coat of arms, or any motif that relates to the owner of the book. The earliest known marks of ownership of books or documents date from the reign of Amenophis III in Egypt (1391-1353) ... The earliest known examples of printed bookplates are German, and date from the 15th century ... Although the majority of the older plates were armorial, there were always pictorial examples as well [including] landscape-plates by wood engravers of the Bewick school ... In 1901-1903 the British Museum published the catalog of the 35,000 bookplates collected by Sir Augustus Wollaston Franks (1826-97).”

I included the reference to “landscape-plates” because that’s what Elizabeth and I finally came up with, using one of her idealized renderings in watercolor of the cove where we live. The same image appeared on the cover of one of our books, Mountain Passages (2005). So, the bookplates that arrived last week have personal significance, for us — all the more so, because our friend, Asheville artist Ann Smith, designed the 1,300 plates that arrived last week from a printer she works with. Ann describes them as “four-color with bleeds, peel and stick plates — uncoated (matte) finish — 3 x 4 inches.”

They’re better than nice. If you’ve ever thought about a bookplate to dress up your nicer books, I can affirm that you would in all likelihood enjoy doing so.

Considering the rate at which I am presently proceeding, I should be finished with the mounting process of these 1,300 plates in about 2015 or so.

George Ellison 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. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

My weekly deadline is looming. I’m not sure how this is going to turn out. But I’ve been thinking about it, and I’m fairly sure it’s going to be a rambling essay about Horace Kephart, author of Our Southern Highlanders, Camping and Woodcraft, and Smoky Mountain Magic. The first two titles were published by the Outing Publishing Company, upon which he exerted considerable influence for a number of years, as we shall see.

Partly, if all goes well, this is going to be about Kephart’s lifelong rather carefully-cultivated self-image as “an earnest and sometimes lonely, yet self-sufficient figure, like ‘dear old Robinson Crusoe;” and partly, about a thankless sort of literary endeavor at which he was better than competent — editing.

I sometimes think of Horace Kephart as “Robinson Kephart.” Hearing that, he would no doubt laugh and nod in agreement. After all, in the “North Carolina Library Bulletin” for June 1922, he published an autobiographical essay (reprinted as a pamphlet in 1922 by the “Bryson City Times”) titled “Horace Kephart by Himself,” in which he recalled his youthful years in rural Iowa in this maner:

“It was before the day of fences ... The elk and buffalo had left, but their bleached antlers and skulls were strewn everywhere over the prairie ... I had no playmates . . my mother taught me to read . . she gave me my first book, dear old ‘Robinson Crusoe’ ... I used to take ‘Robinson’ out to the old boat among the trees ... I made wooden guns, pistols, hatchet, and a thing I called a cutlass ... A fur cap was easily contrived, shaped like the one Crusoe wears in the pictures in my book ... The old boat was my wrecked ship, to which I made frequent trips, swimming out in my imagination, returning on an imaginary raft laden with imaginary seaman’s chests, bottles of rack and cordials, kits of tools, barrels of powder and bags of shot ... [My copy of DeFoe’s book has] ‘been saved through the vicissitudes of a somewhat venturesome life and lies before me now, coverless and stained with age ...’”

(What is apparently Kephart’s “coverless and stained” copy of the novel that reads like reality apparently re-emerged in the Kephart family archives last year.)

Kephart sometimes recalled his early years on Hazel Creek (1904-1907) in the pre-park Smokies in a manner that evoked affinities with the real Robinson Crusoe. Explaining why he wrote at night, he told a newspaper reporter from St. Louis: “Seldom during those three years as a forest exile 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 ... in good cheer.”

A neglected aspect of Kephart’s literary career consists of the series of 11 books he edited for Outing Publishing Company in their Outdoor Adventure Library, starting about 1914. Nine are complete or abridged volumes with historical-biographical-critical introductions.

The titles are indicative of the content: J.D. Borthwick, The Gold Fields: A First-Hand Picture of Life in California Mining Camps in the Early Fifties; Earl of Dunraven [Windham Thomas Wyndham-Quin Dunraven], Hunting in Yellowstone: on the Trail of Wapiti with Texas Jack in the Land of Geysers; Roualeyn Gordon-Cumming, The Lion Hunter: In the Days when all South Africa was Virgin Hunting Field; Augustus C. Hobart-Hampton, Hobart Pasha: Blockade-Running Slave-Hunting, and War and Sport in Turkey; Dr. Elisha Kent Kane, Adrift in the Artic Ice Pack: From the History of the First U.S. Grinnell Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin; Major John Wesley Powell, First Through the Grand Canyon: Being the Record of the Pioneer Exploration of the Colorado River in 1869-1870; and three volumes by George F.A. Ruxton, In the Old West; Adventures in Mexico; and Wild Life in the Rocky Mountains.

Several of his editions of these classics have remained in print because of the quality of Kephart’s introductions, in which he obviously invested considerable research and effort. Here is a paragraph from the introduction to Borthwick’s The Gold Fields:

“The popular notion of a miner is that of a rude and reckless fellow who works one day with a tin pan and gets drunk the next. There were, indeed, many of this ilk in the gold-diggings; but in the main, the miners of ‘49 were a picked and superior class of men. It was not as if a bonanza had been struck within easy reach of the riffraff of the nations. California, by the shortest route, was two thousand miles from any well-populated part of America, five thousand from a European port. The journey thither was expensive, and most of the men who undertook it were such as had accumulated, by their own industry, a good ‘stake’ at home. They were adventurers, to be sure; but what is an adventurer? One who hazards a chance, especially a chance of danger. That is the spirit which starts almost any enterprise that demands courage, determination and self-reliance ... Most of them were charged with spontaneous and persistent energy. Immediately, as by an electric shock, the California of dreaming friars and lazy vaqueros was tossed aside and an amazing industry whirred into action.”

Two of the volumes consist of narratives Kephart excerpted from numerous sources and pieced together with prefatory notes: Captives Among the Indians: First-Hand Naratives of Indian Wars, Customs, Tortures, and Habits of Life During Colonial Times; and Castaways and Crusoes: Tales of Survivors of Shipwreck in New Zealand, Patagonia, Tobago, Cuba, Magdalen Islands, South Seas, and the Crozets.

The title Castways and Crusoes caught my eye. Sure enough, as his first entry, Kephart placed a tale titled “A South Sea Crusoe” that Charles Dickens originally published in the 1860s in “All the Year Round,” one of the magazines he edited. In his note, Kephart informs the reader that this is “the narrative of an English missionary who was cast away on an uninhabited islet off the north coast of New Zealand, with no equipment but his pocket-knife, a pair of blankets, a few pieces of broken glass, a ruined boat and its tattered sails. The man was without food, tools, tackle, weapon, or even the means of making a fire. He was no expert in seamanship or in woodcraft. Yet he managed to subsist in this desolate place for nearly six months, without so much as a captured animal to divert his mind from the awful lonesomeness.” The clergyman added that he had “no books to while away the long tedious hours, no means whereon to fix even an account of my sufferings and fate; though perchance they might one day be read in my bones whitening on the beach.” Just the sort of reading matter Dickens and Kephart would enjoy.

I almost forgot to note that the Outing Publishing Company offered in their 1916-1917 catalog a four-volume “Robinson Crusoe Library,” comprised of Kephart’s Camping and Woodcraft (volumes I and II), his Camp Cookery, and — just in case something went awry — Charles Moody’s Backwoods Surgery and Medicine. Potential buyers were advised that, “It has been used and approved by mining engineers, travelers and sportsmen from Alaska to Hayti. Four volumes in a box. Pocket size 41/2x7 inches. Bound in flexible leather. $6.00 net. Postage 30c.”

George Ellison 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. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

It’s Saturday night as I write this .... going on toward midnight. I read the thermometer mounted outside the kitchen through the windowpane with a flashlight. 30-degrees. Not bad. A light frost is forming on the grass in the pasture.

I recall, somewhat vaguely, that Coleridge in a poem titled “Frost at Midnight” alludes to the “secret ministry” of frost. After looking the poem up in an anthology, I’m still not sure exactly what he means by “secret ministry.” I can relate to the sentiments expressed a few lines later, when Coleridge notes his pleasure that all others in his “cottage” are fast asleep, leaving him to “that solitude which suits musings.”

I like being up alone late at night, too, especially in winter. What to do? Plenty. There’s always sports talk on XM radio, so long as I don’t turn the volume up and incur my wife’s wrath. But sports talk, alas, has gone to the dogs since the glory days when you could tune into the Bob Bell and Bill King duo out of Nashville, the irascible Pete Franklin from Cleveland, Larry Munson out of Atlanta, and “Buddy D” (Dilberto) down in New Orleans. Only Bill King is still alive. Those guys were informative and they were entertaining. Buddy D repeatedly vowed to dance down Bourbon Street wearing a dress if the Saints went to the Super Bowl. Too bad he didn’t hang in there a few more years.

Sports talk guys these days, all too often, seem to think they’re sociologists or political savants. The ESPN folks refer to their office building as a “campus.” There’s not much genuine interest out there in who’s on third.

My workspace here at home is in “the spare room,” where most of my favorite books are shelved. Late at night is when I reread them; that is, I usually read just a chapter or several pages — enough to become reacquainted and refresh my memory.

I will brag, however, about having read J. Frank Dobie’s The Legend of Ben Lilly in its entirety at least once every year since 1967. Ben Lilly, as you may not know, was the legendary bear and lion hunter from Mississippi who, in his latter days, frequented the Silver City area of New Mexico, where there is a monument honoring him that I have visited.

Theodore Roosevelt hunted with “Mr. Lilly” in the Louisiana swamps in 1907 and described him in a letter to Ethel, his daughter, as “a remarkable character” and “religious fanatic,” who had slept one night “in a crooked tree, like a wild turkey.” According to Teddy, “Mr. Lilly” had a “a mild, gentle face, blue eyes, and full beard” and was “as hardy as a bear or elk, literally caring nothing for fatigue and exposure, which we couldn’t stand at all.”

“Mr. Lilly” was a champion jumper, who could stand flat-footed in a barrel and jump out in a single bound. Holding a brick in each hand, he once made three consecutive jumps that measured 36 feet, an American record for jumping with bricks. While riding his horse, he would grab an overhanging limb and cavort to other limbs, chattering like a squirrel. I am fairly certain that I am the only person in the world who has read The Legend of Ben Lilly 43 times.

When not tuned into sports talk or reading about “Mr. Lilly,” I sit and listen to the creek that flows by our house. For going on 25 years now, we’ve resided beside Lands Creek, which rises in the Smokies above town and flows perhaps 10 miles into what is the Tuckasegee River part of the year and Lake Fontana the other part. The creek is a living entity, a part of the family — the last thing we hear at night and the first thing we hear in the morning. In the darkness, it purls over and around the smooth stones, murmuring and babbling, speaking quite clearly of its long journey home ... Tuckasegee ... Little T ... Tennessee ... Ohio ... Mississippi ... and on down to the Gulf of Mexico.

Past midnight, now — the frost in the pasture has thickened into a dull-white crust. Everything is very still ... almost perfect.

George Ellison 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. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Some readers might recall that three weeks ago — in a column about relocating my long lost inscribed copy of James Still’s “Hounds on the Mountain” — I mentioned in passing that the book had reappeared as I was in the process of reorganizing my home library while snowbound. I was iced into the cove the following weekend; so, having nothing better to do, I proceeded with the project and finally finished up this past weekend, sort of.

By this time next year, I will have despaired of the present arrangement and have to start all over again. Un-shelving and reorganizing and re-shelving books is a tricky business, with multiple options that can be endlessly fascinating, frustrating and time consuming. I like it. It’s an innocent species of self-therapy.

One of, my favorite authors is Larry McMurtry. I have a shelf of almost all of his books. He presently operates Booked Up — a vast bookstore of rare and used books comprised of nearly 400,000 volumes housed (according to subject matter) in four or five separate buildings in his hometown of Archer City, Texas, which is located in the middle of nowhere many miles south of Wichita Falls. Getting there isn’t easy or scenic, unless you’re partial to scrub and mesquite, but more than worth the effort.

In addition to well-known novels like Lonesome Dove, McMurtry has written two memoirs about book selling, collecting, reading, and related matters: Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen (1999) and Books (2008). Having grown up on a hardscrabble farm outside Archer City, McMurtry thinks of his bookselling and book collecting as “book herding” — as opposed to the actual “cow herding” his father practiced.

(As an almost totally unrelated aside, I will note that Larry McMurtry is the father of accomplished country musician James McMurtry, who co-wrote with Townes Van Zandt the immortal “It’s Snowin’ Over Raton.” That would be the memorably rugged Raton Pass between New Mexico and Colorado, where my wife and I have also been snowbound on several occasions.)

Back to the point. In his Walter Benjamin memoir, McMurtry contemplated the mysteries of book shelving:

“Both in my library at home and in my bookshops I have a hard time hewing to any strict philosophy of shelving. Shelving by chronology (Susan Sontag’s method) doesn’t always work for me. The modest Everyman edition of “The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle” refuses to sit comfortably next to Leonard Baskin’s tall “Beowulf,” and exactly the same problem — incompatibility of size — crops up if one shelves alphabetically. Susan Sontag, on a visit when all of my books were in the old ranch house, found that she couldn’t live even one night with the sloppiness of my shelving. She imposed a hasty chronologizing which held for some years and still holds, in the main.

“Susan’s principles notwithstanding, I make free with chronologies when the books seem to demand it. My Sterne looks happier beside my DeFoe than he looks next to his near contemporary Smollett, so ‘Tristram Shandy’ sits next to ‘Moll Flanders’ rather than ‘Peregrine Pickle.’

“Despite a nearly infinite range of possibilities in the matter of book arrangement, I’ve noticed that most people who really love books find ways of shelving them which respect the books but clearly reflect their own personalities.”

Nevertheless, after several lengthy descriptions of various arrangements he had encountered through the years in distinguished personal libraries, McMurtry allowed in closing that: “I have long been a disciple of the Dusty Miller school of book shelving. Dusty Miller was a much admired London bookseller, who when asked how he arranged his books, replied that if he bought a short fat book he tried to find a short fat hole.”

My “home library” consists, in reality, of various stacked shelves and bookcases scattered at nine strategic locations throughout the house, including the bedroom and the kitchen. I don’t know how many books there are in the house, and I don’t want to know. I would estimate, conservatively, that there are several tons worth. The house shifts, as if situated on a fault line, each time I relocate a bookcase.

My wife fears it’s only a matter of time before a bookcase makes an appearance in the bathroom. That would, in fact, pose an interesting bibliographic proposition. What sort of books should be shelved in one’s bathroom?

My present system has been scientifically formulated. Authors are sorted and shelved according to subject categories. All of a given author’s titles have to go in one place — they can’t be divided up. This can be difficult. Does, for instance, Lawrence Durrell belong with the British travels writers or the British novelists? (As I am not an admirer of Durrell’s novels, he is currently placed among the travel writers, a genre in which he excels.) Pre-1900 books are arranged chronologically. More recently published titles are arranged alphabetically. Never stack books on top of books that have already been properly shelved. Try to avoid shelving books at floor level.

No, I haven’t read all of the books in my home library or the ones in my office in town, which also require reorganization. Why would anyone want to have read all of the books they possess? I feel good knowing they’re there waiting for me to get around to them at the appropriate time.

No, I don’t regret buying a single book I’ve ever purchased. I do regret each and every one that I’ve ever disposed of. And I hold bitter grudges against all those who have never returned books that I loaned them.

I have a horrible memory, getting worse. To this day, however, I can visualize exactly where certain books I desired but couldn’t afford were shelved as long ago as 1965 in remote bookstores scattered throughout the South in places like Nashville, Birmingham, Tupelo, Abbeville, Hodges, Madeira Island, Buxton, and so on. Book collection and reading and shelving and rearranging have been a most enjoyable part of my life. I can trace this inclination with certainty to when I was very young and mother purchased books and read them to me and then let me shelve them in a small green bookcase beside my bed.

George Ellison 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. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

I enjoy using variants on the phrase “lay of the land.” One can “get the lay of the land” in a number of ways. If your hiking partner says that he or she is “going on ahead to get the lay of the land,” that’s one thing; on the other hand, if he or she is your business partner and flies to Dallas to “get the lay of the land” in a business deal, that’s something else. All of us all go through life evaluating “the lay of the land” in order to make it from day to day.

Here in the mountains the phrase is best applied to topography. There’s no other place in the world that surpasses the actual topography of the southern mountains. And there’s no place where the people of the region use a more delightful language in describing the topography of their homeland.

In Smoky Mountain Folks and Their Lore (1960), the well-known folklorist Joseph S. Hall enumerated some of the stories and phrases he had collected in the Smokies during the late 1930s. Some of the language had to do with “getting the lay of the land.”

Hall learned that a “bald” was “a treeless mountain top characteristic of the Smokies, as in Bearwallow Bald.” Botanists recognize a second species of “bald” they call a “heath bald”(i.e., a treeless tangle of rhododendron and other shrubs in the heath family). Hall found that they were known locally by such names as “laurel bed, lettuce bed, rough, slick, wooly (as in wooly head, wooly ridge, wooly top), and laurel hell.” A “bench” is “a level area, sometimes cultivated, on the side of a mountain,” while a “butt” is “the abrupt end of a mountain ridge, as in Mollies Butt, at the end of Mollies Ridge.” A “knob” is “a mountain top,” while a “lead” is “a long ridge, usually extending from a higher ridge, as in Twenty Mile Lead.” I would add that a “spur” is “a lateral branch leading from a ridge or high top that usually terminates abruptly.

Furthermore, a “sag” or “swag” is a low lying area along a ridge that’s not quite low enough to qualify as a “gap.” A “cove” is “a widening out of a mountain valley, or a meadow land between mountains, as in Cades Cove, Emerts Cove.” Coves are closely related to “hollows” (properly pronounced “hollers”) that are small valleys, “as in Pretty Hollow.” I would add that a “bottom” is flat land, usually along a stream. Hall recorded that a “deadening” is “an area where the trees have been killed by girdling (in order to clear the land for farming). Thereby, “bottoms” would often be “deadened” so as to create a “deadening.” Conversely, a “scald” is “a bare hillside” created deliberately or unintentionally by fire, which becomes a “yellow patch” when it has “grown up with thick brush.”

I am fascinated by the terms associated with water. First, there are “seeps” and “springs” or “springheads.” (If a spring is referred to as being “fitified,” this means that it is intermittent or “spasmodic” and thereby unreliable.) Reliable “springs” become “brooks” and then “creeks” and finally “streams” or “rivers.” “Shoals” are shallow, rocky places along waterways that can be treacherous. When a “branch” passes through “a marshy place” or small ravine, it becomes a “run.”

In a little volume by Allen R. Coggins titled Place Names of the Smokies (1999), we discover that the topographic aspects of the mountain landscape have been immortalized in a manner that is at once descriptive, humorous and poetic. Advalorem Branch in Swain County refers to “a tax based on a percentage of assessed value,” and Arbutus Branch in Cades Cove has that trailing wildflower growing in abundance along its banks. Ballhoot Scar Overlook at Smokemont is a place where logs were rolled (“ballhooted”) down the slope creating bare areas (“scars”), and you already know why an area near Gatlinburg is named “Bill Deadening Branch.”

“Blowdow” at Thunderhead Mountain along the state line in the high Smokies is named for an area where a wide swath of tulip trees and other trees were blown down by a storm in 1875. And there are branches, creeks, mountains and ridges known by the designation “Hurricane,” tornadoes or other heavy wind storms ravaged those areas. “Crooked Arm” is a mountain spur in Cades Cove shaped like an elbow that is drained by “Crooked Arm Branch,” which features “Crooked Arm Falls.”

Another place I’d like to visit is on Mt. LeConte. You already know what a “fittified spring” is. The one by that name on Mt. LeConte is said to have been originally created by an earthquake in 1916. It ran like clockwork with a “seven minute on, seven minute off flow pattern” until 1936 when a dynamite blast set off by a CCC trail construction crew disrupted that pattern. Thereafter, it was “fittified.” I’ve been to Miry Ridge at Silers Bald along the state line. As Coggins says, it is “knee-deep in places” with “black muck.” And I’ve been to “Mule Gap” in the same area, where Tom Siler operated a mule lot. Would you seek out Snake Den Mountain at Luftee Knob where, according to local lore, there is a den (nest) of rattlesnakes? I’d enjoy a visit to the “Dry Sluice” on Mt. Guyot. Coggins describes this as being “named for a small hollow or valley called a sluice, which has a spring-fed stream that sinks beneath the surface for several hundred yards before resurfacing. Hence the upper part of the sluice is generally dry.” But the origins of place names can be tricky. Coggins adds that “This name may also be linked to the early logging industry, when logs were sluiced (moved down the mountain) from timber cutting operations.” One could ramble on and on in this regard. Maybe some day soon I’ll run into you up at the Devil’s Courthouse or Hornet Tree Top or Holy Butt or down along the Boogerman Trail or Dog Hobble Branch, “getting the lay of the land.” Let’s just say, “Howdy,” and keep on moving.

George Ellison 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. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..