This past weekend was given over to reorganizing the books in my home library. In the process, I relocated a volume of poems I had feared was long lost.

My favorite “Appalachian” poets would be Robert Morgan, Kay Stripling Byer, and James Still. Morgan and Byer are still going strong. Still passed away in 2001.

I never met James Still, but we corresponded in the 1970s with some frequency. Wilma Dykeman and her husband, James Stokely, close friends of Still’s, had suggested I might enjoy his work. They especially recommended Hounds on the Mountain, a collection of poems that had appeared in 1937 when he was generally recognized as “one of the strongest voices to emerge in Appalachian literature.”

Born in 1906 in LaFayette, Alabama, Still was librarian at the Hindman Settlement School in Kentucky during the 1930s. Following a stint in the Air Force during World War II, he became a freelance writer. In 1952, he returned to the Hindman Settlement School, again as the librarian. He stayed on for 10 years or more, but left that post to teach and write.

After I did indeed become enthusiastic about Still, who was somewhat reclusive, Wilma Dykeman said he would like to hear from me. At that time, for various reasons, Still had not, to my knowledge, published a book of any sort for almost 25 years and was pleased to be remembered. He did, of course, resurrect his career in the mid-1970s and go on to publish various poetry collections, novels, and children’s books, so that he is now sometimes referred to as the “Dean of Appalachian Literature.”

I have apparently lost our correspondence, but, sure enough, the volume that reappeared this weekend was Hounds on the Mountain, published by The Viking Press in a “first edition limited to seven hundred fifty numbered copies of which seven hundred are for sale.” My copy is hand-numbered in ink as being “435.” I had mailed it to Still, asking if he’d sign it. It came back inscribed on the front flyleaf: “For / George Ellison / Who has kept my poems / in his heart all ‘these sleeping years,’— / with greetings, and gratitude. / James Still / November 25, 1975.”

From the Mountains, From the Valley (Univ. of Kentucky Press, 2001) collects all of Still’s poems, including those that appeared in Hounds of the Mountain. I reread them this weekend with delight and remembrance of a fine poet. I recommend them to you. Here are some sample stanzas:

From Rain on the Cumberlands

Rain in the beechwood trees. Rain upon the wanderer

Whose breath lies cold upon the mountainside,

Caught up with broken horns within the nettled grass,

With hooves relinquished on the breathing stones

Eaten with rain-strokes.

From Hounds on the Mountain

Hounds on the mountain ....

Grey and swift spinning the quarry shall turn

At the cove’s ending, at the slow day’s breaking,

And lave the violent shadows with her blood.

From Graveyard

There is no town so quiet on any earth,

Nor any house so dark upon the mind.

Only the night is here, and the dead

Under the hard blind eyes of hill and tree.

Here lives sleep. Here the dead are free.

From Horseback in the Rain

To the stone, to the mud

With hoofs busy clattering

In a fog-wrinkled spreading

Of waters? Halt not. Stay not.

Ride the storm with no ending

On a road unarriving.

From Spring on Troublesome Creek

Not all of us were warm, not all of us.

We are winter-lean, our faces are sharp with cold

And there is the smell of wood smoke in our clothes;

Not all of us were warm, though we have hugged the fire

Through the long chilled nights.

From Mountain Dulcimer

The dulcimer sings from fretted throat

Of the doe’s swift poise, the fox’s fleeting step

And the music of hounds upon the outward slope

Stirring the night, drumming the ridge-strewn way.

From Child in the Hills

Where on these hills are tracks a small foot made,

Where rests the echo of his voice calling to the crows

In sprouting corn? Here are tall trees his eyes

Have measured to their tops, here lies fallow earth

Unfurrowed by terracing plows these sleeping years.

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..

You can almost smell the word “evergreen.” The word is at once one of the most aptly descriptive and highly evocative botanical terms. Simply reading or hearing it conjures up a mix of personal associations with particular landscapes.

Evergreens are with us year-round, of course, but from spring through fall they blend into a landscape comprised of a multitude of herbaceous or broad-leaved deciduous plants. Winter is the evergreen time of the year. It’s the season when the dominant colors of the landscape are the varied green hues of those trees, vines, shrubs, and ferns that do not lose their leaves or needles. For gardeners and outdoor enthusiasts alike, it’s the prime time for paying a closer attention to this particular category of plant life.

The ancient Cherokees were — by necessity and inclination — close observers of plant life. They wondered why some plants lose their leaves while others are evergreen. When anthropologist James Mooney was collecting Cherokee myths and lore during the late 1880s for his monumental Myths of the Cherokees (Bureau of American Ethnology, 1900), the medicine man Swimmer, who lived in the traditional Big Cove community, explained how it had been determined this came about:

“When the animals and plants were first made — we do not know by whom — they were told to watch and keep awake for seven nights. They tried to do this, and nearly all were awake through the first night, but the next night several dropped off to sleep, and the third night others were asleep, and then others, until, on the seventh night, of all the animals only the owl, the panther, and one or two more were awake. To these were given the power to see and to go about in the dark, and to make prey of the birds and animals which must sleep at night. Of the trees only the cedar, the pine, the spruce, the holly, and the laurel were awake to the end, and to them it was given to be always green and to be the greatest medicine, but to the others it was said: Because you have not endured to the end you shall lose your hair every winter.’”

Everyone knows the basic definition of an evergreen as a plant that “holds green leaves, either broadleaf or needle-shaped, over winter.” But an understanding — however rudimentary — of why some plants “choose” to remain evergreen and how they go about doing so will enable us to appreciate them more fully.

All plants in upland or northern environments face the double-edged dilemma of a lack of moisture in winter and a short growing season in summer. Most opt to hunker down in cold weather and then really hustleduring the growing season to do their thing and produce seed.

Evergreens have taken the other path. Instead of shedding leaves or dying completely back in above-ground forms, evergreens have “opted” to tough it out and get a head start on the growing season. For this group of plants, photosynthesis can continue longer in the fall and begin earlier in spring; and, for them, energy that would otherwise be channeled into leaf reproduction is saved for direct reproductive efforts.

Various strategies allow evergreens to weather the drying winds and freezing temperatures of winter. The needle-like leaves of conifers expose less surface to cold drying winds. Their waxy needles, stems, and roots are filled with botanical “antifreeze” in the form of resinous chemicals. Conical shapes minimize buildups of snow or ice.

Other woodland evergreen plants have developed woody stems and thick leaves with waxy coats to cut down on evaporation. These tend to be shrubby or even ground hugging. In order to avoid having leaf cells ruptured by frost, water is channeled to spaces between the cells where expansion does less damage. And finally, the sugar content of the cells is increased to lower freezing points.

Individual evergreen species often have distinctive over-wintering devices. Everyone has observed how rhododendron leaves curl and droop in extreme cold. This posture obviously lessens exposure to wind, while the curling temporarily closes off the air-circulation pores (stomata) on the underside of the leaves. This dormant posture is also assumed during periods of drought.

Here in the Great Smokies region, a considerable body of lore has grown up around the fine art of predicting the weather. The drooping and curling of rhododendron leaves has not gone unnoticed. John Parris, a long-time columnist for the Asheville Citizen-Times now deceased, devoted an entire column titled “Tell Weather by Rhododendron’s Curl” to this topic:

“The thick, leathery leaves of the rhododendron bushes were curled tighter than a homemade twist of tobacco. As mountain weather sharps well know, it’s a sign of winter for a fact when rhododendron leaves, though evergreen, droop and roll inwards ... they make weather prognosticating as easy as falling off a log and a heap sight less certain. To the weather sharps, a rhododendron leaf reacts the same way as mercury in a store-bought thermometer. When the temperature drops, they begin to droop and curl. As the mercury falls lower, the edges begin to curl under. The colder it gets the tighter the curl becomes. When it gets down nearly to zero, the entire leaf is rolled tight and at zero it looks like a green pencil hanging on a bush. From then on as sub-zero sets in, the leaf takes on a sort of hard brittleness and a blue-greenness. To those who have devoted years of constant study to the leaf thermometers, there is a familiarity of the tightening curl that is as easy to read in terms of degrees as the markings on a store-bought thermometer. Chances are a real reader of the rhododendron thermometer won’t be off more than a degree from the mercury register of a store-bought thermometer. Of course, a body doesn’t come by such a knack overnight. Most anybody can read the simple signs. But when it comes to the fine reading, then that calls for more years than a few at studying rhododendron leaves and measuring their curl down to a hair’s-breadth with the eye. Folks who fall into this category are rare and far between these days. They are old-timers, born and raised in the mountains, folks with a pleasure for the old things which they figure still have their use.”

Aside from the conspicuous conifers and other obvious evergreen plants such as American holly, rhododendron, laurel, doghobble, and sand myrtle, there are a number of small woodland evergreens. Trailing arbutus, galax, teaberry, and the dainty little partridge-berry vine are always a delight to encounter nestled among the brown leaf-litter while out on a winter walk. They lift my spirits on a gloomy, slushy day.

My favorite evergreen sub-shrub is galax, which displays spikes composed of tiny white flowers in mid-summer. When the first heavy frosts arrive here in the mountains, the rounded dark green leaves display eye-catching bronze, wine, and crimson colors. Galax was once in peril due to over-collection by mountain families who gathered the plant for sale as a Christmas ornamental. The town of Galax in the Blue Ridge of Virginia is so-named because it was situated in an area where the plant was systematically harvested. Today galax is used mostly in the floral trade. You would be hard pressed to go into a florist’s shop where a wreath is being constructed and not observe galax being incorporated therein.

The most prominent evergreens, of course, are the various conifers. What would the winter landscapes across North America be without the varied and often intermixed green hues of pine, spruce, fir, hemlock, cedar, and cypress? When out bird watching during the winter months, my wife and I always search the conifers. Here in the Smokies region a variety of winter residents — chickadees, kinglets, nuthatches, brown creepers, titmice, crossbills, and others — are attracted to conifers for shelter, protection from predators, and food. The cones provide seeds and the scaly, plate-like bark harbors a variety of insects.

An excellent general guide to evergreen plants — including the hardy ferns and clubmosses — is Donald Stokes’ A Guide to Nature in Winter (Little, Brown & Co., 1976). This volume covers a variety of other topics like winter weeds, insects, birds and their nests, mushrooms, and tracks that will stimulate you to get out the door and poke around during the evergreen time of the year.

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 professional career of biologist Millard C. (“Bill”) Davis — who was born in 1930 in Utica, N.Y., and now resides in Dunnellon, Fla. – included stints as a teacher and editor in various capacities. He has been president of the American Nature Study Society and president of the Audubon New Jersey Wildlife Society. His articles and poems have appeared in The Living Wilderness, New Jersey Outdoors, The Christian Science Monitor, Nature Magazine, Writers’ Journal and Mid-Western Review.

Some of Davis’ finest writing has been about the life and literary career of Edwin Way Teale, in my opinion the greatest American nature writer after Henry David Thoreau. He estimates that he “is now probably 80 percent done” with a biography titled Edwin Way Teale, A Musical Call to Nature.

Davis has published two books: The Near Woods (1974) and Natural Pathways of New Jersey (1997). Both are descriptions of distinctive natural areas. The latter is a county-by-county guide with capsule summaries of 100 of “the finest natural places” in that state. The former is a collection of essays that survey the vast woodlands and associated habitats and micro-habitats of eastern North America. In recent correspondence, Davis recalled some of the events behind the chapter titled “Forests of the Smokies: Northern Summits in the Deep South”:

“In 1965 I was with a group of botanists on a visit to the Smokies to view plant communities. We stayed overnight at the home of Dr. Hal DeSelm (a botanist at the University of Tennessee), who led us up even into (dense tangles of shrubs called) balds ... Eventually I wrote up the trip as “Forests of the Smokies” and sent it to Dr. DeSelm. He liked it (and the article) came out in The Living Wilderness. I placed it in The Near Woods. From this trip, I began a lifelong series of visits into the Smokies — staying overnight, sitting by campfires.”

Most describers of American landscapes plod along. Davis’ descriptions are voiced with poetic crispness and vitality: “A dark horizon seems penciled in by the deep greens of spruce and fir trees.” Words spring to life: “the ultraglassiness of rhododendron blossoms,” or that “genetic oddity, the octoploid ‘skunk’ goldenrod.”

I was so struck by this aspect of his writing that I asked Bill, who visited me briefly in Bryson City last fall, if I could include excerpts in volume two (1900-2009) of an anthology of nature writing from Western North Carolina titled High Vistas, which will be published this spring by The History Press. He agreed. Here are some samples:

“The forests of the far north begin where the first scattered trees break the low flat wilderness of tundra. From there a thin lichen-woodland of small trees and lichen-covered ground spreads southward and gradually rises into a towering escarpment, sweeping toward the sky on dark green boughs. Trees of the few species of this boreal forest, this American taiga, may become so densely interwoven to the east that forest animals are born and buried in a perpetually gloomy winter.

“If the aspect of the coniferous forest is peculiar to itself, however, some of the species are not. And a number of them survive as remnants of the ice age in forests that extend far south to the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina ....

“Mountain terrain affects the flow of the seasons as though they were strung on strings. Autumn and winter come earlier, spring and summer later, to the higher altitudes. Yet when the hour has arrived in the Smokies, spring rushes through the highest forests and grassy balds like a crackling fire ....

“On the waistline of ridge after ridge, a pink blur appears and gradually spreads across the mountain range in spring. Late one May I stood with a half-dozen friends enshrouded in a few hundred of the millions of soft blossoms that compose this hazy sash. The knees of my pants were slimy with mud, and my cheeks felt inflamed from tiny cuts. Then I bulldozed my way upward once more, emerging finally fifty yards higher up the mountain. Standing to my full height for the first time in perhaps twenty minutes, I looked down over the tangle I had escaped. For nearly 150 yards down the mountain ridge pink rhododendron flowers slid gently among each other ... To me no flower matches the ultraglassiness of the rhododendron blossoms. The pink cups allow a softer light to pass into the shadowed tangle beneath the canopy ....

“As we scrambled down the ridge flank, aiming free-hand style toward the road along the next ridge, a friend and I followed a corner of the slick. The ground fell away before us until suddenly the bushes ended at a ten-foot overhang. We dangled like parachutists over the bounding waters of a twisting mountain stream. Wading across it a few minutes later, we could see up and down stream only a few hundred feet. But we knew that upstream, several miles beyond the first crisp turn, lay the beech-filled cover of a vastly different environment. We were following one of the routes of the southern junco, which trace their migration routes up and down the mountainsides. For every four hundred feet of altitude they fly, they accomplish an equivalent of about four days’ travel northward or southward ....

“In one Lilliputian clearing the yellow bloom of boreal clintonia bobbed in the May breezes. With the sun’s rays falling directly below it, the plant might have been a lantern illuminating a leafy park. Among the plumes of shield fern we found a genetic oddity, the octoploid “skunk” goldenrod (Solidago glomerata)....

“It is the coves that give these ancient mountains their graceful slanting contours. To the observer five or more miles away, their flanks seem to flow across each other.”

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..

One of my favorite accounts of this region’s varied history is provided by John Preston Arthur, who published his 659-page volume titled Western North Carolina: A History (From 1730 to 1913) in 1914.

Originally published by The Edward Buncombe Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution of Asheville, the volume was reissued in 1996 by The Overmountain Press, by Kessinger Publishing (quick print), and by The University of Michigan Library (quick print) in 2009. (Note that “quick print” editions are generally inferior in regard to print quality and binding but are, perhaps, better than nothing.) And the text is also available online via any search engine.

I like Arthur’s book because it is generally accurate and is written with a distinctive personal style; furthermore, it not only covers the big picture (Cherokee history and culture, early white settlers, timbering, railroads, mining, etc.) but gives equal attention to important matters like “Manners and Customs,” “Humorous and Romantic” incidents, and “Physical Pecularities.”

The dust-wrapper for The Overmountain Press reissue provides information regarding Arthur’s life culled from a “biography” by O. Lester Brown published in the Watauga Democrat (Boone, North Carolina) in March 1976. Arthur was born in 1851 in Columbia, South Carolina, and died in Boone in 1916. He received a law degree from the University of South Carolina in 1872 and practiced in that state and New York City until 1887, when he moved to Asheville, where he also practiced law in addition to serving as manager and superintendent of the Street Railway Company. About 1912 Arthur moved to Boone, where he lived in the Blair Hotel for the rest of his life. He wrote a history of Watauga County then published his history of WNC shortly before his death.

According to the dust-wrapper account, Arthur’s last years were not all that sunny. He earned little from his historical writings, which probably wasn’t a surprise. But he also had few legal cases come his way, so that “his financial condition was acute.” He was reduced to working “for fifty cents a day, digging potatoes and gathering apples, and even applied for a job as a helper at a livery stable. Broken-spirited, he soon took to his bed and died ‘homeless, penniless and heartbroken.’”

Local and regional historians don’t generally live high on the hog, but Arthur’s last years were especially grim. Nevertheless, his work displays an interior outlook that belies the apparent bleakness of his everyday life. “Western North Carolina” is chock full of humor and delight in the everyday events and episodes of mountain life. It’s my hope that O. Lester Brown misread his subject somewhat, not fully realizing that old JPA was having a grand time while scribbling away in his hotel room. By way of support for that position, here are some mostly random excerpts:

JPA on mountain women: “But it was the women who were the true heroines of this section. The hardships and constant toil to which they were generally subjected were blighting and exacting in the extreme. If their lord and master could find time to hunt and fish, go to the Big Musters, spend Saturdays loafing or drinking in the settlement — or about the country ‘stores,’ as the shops were and still are called, their wives could scarcely, if ever, find a moment they could call their own. Long before the ‘palid dawn’ came sifting in through chink and window they were up and about. As there were no matches in those days, the housewife ‘unkivered’ — the coals which had been smothered in ashes the night before to be kept ‘alive’ till morning, and with ‘kindling’ in one hand and a live coal held on the tines of a steel fork or between iron tongs in the other, she blew and blew and blew till the splinters caught fire. Then the fire was started and the water brought from the spring, poured into the ‘kittle,’ and while it was heating the chickens were fed, the cows milked, the children dressed, the bread made, the bacon fried and then coffee was made and breakfast was ready. That over and the dishes washed and put away, the spinning wheel, the loom or the reel were the next to have attention, meanwhile keeping a sharp look out for the children, hawks, keeping the chickens out of the garden, sweeping the floor, making the beds, churning, sewing, darning, washing, ironing, taking up the ashes, and making lye, watching for the bees to swarm, keeping the cat out of the milk pans, dosing the sick children, tying up the hurt fingers and toes, kissing the sore places well again, making soap, robbing the bee hives, stringing beans, for winter use, working the garden, planting and tending a few hardy flowers in the front yard, such as princess feather, pansies, sweet-Williams, dahlias, morning glories; getting dinner, darning patching, mending, milking again, reading the Bible, prayers, and so on from morning till night, and then all over again the next day. It could never have been said of them that they had ‘but fed on roses and lain in the lilies of life.’”

JPA on mountain dialect and language: “Writers who think they know, have said that our people have been sequestered in these mountains so long that they speak the language of Shakespeare and of Chaucer. It is certain that we sometimes say ‘hit’ for it and ‘taken’ for took; that we also say ‘plague’ for tease, and when we are willing, we say we are ‘consentable’ .... We also say ‘haint’ for ‘am not,’ ‘are not,’ and ‘have not,’ and we invite you to ‘light’ if you are riding or driving. We ‘pack’ our loads in ‘pokes,’ and ‘reckon we can’t’ if invited ‘to go a piece’ with a passerby, when both he and we know perfectly well that we can if we will. Chaucer and Shakespeare may have used these expressions we do not know .... We may “mend,” not improve; and who shall say that our “mend” is not a simpler, sweeter and more significant word than “improve”? But we do mispronounce many words, among which is ‘gardeen’ for guardian, ‘colume’ for column, and ‘pint’ for point. The late Sam Lovin of Graham was told that it was improper to say Rocky ‘Pint,’ as its true name is ‘Point.’ When next he went to Asheville he asked for a ‘point’ of whiskey ... ‘mashed, mummicked and hawged up,’ means worlds to most of us. Finally, most of us are of the opinion of the late Andrew Jackson who thought that one who could spell a word in only way was a ‘mighty po’ excuse for a full grown man.’”

Locate a copy of Arthur’s history of WNC and see for yourself. You’ll perhaps sense, as do I, that JPA’s last years probably weren’t irremediably wretched. After all, anyone who maintains a passionate interest in the history, lore, and humor of his or her chosen region won’t ever be totally impoverished.

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 New Year has arrived and the great horned owls have commenced their annual “singing” along the dark ridges. These birds don’t sing, of course, in the manner of true songbirds like warblers and orioles — but the quick cadence of four or five hoots (“hoo, hoo-oo, hoo, hoo”) given by the male, or the lower-pitched six to eight hoots (“hoo, hoo-hoo-hoo, hoo-oo, hoo-oo”) of the female serve the same purpose.

For most living things, winter in these mountains is a time of simple survival. But if you walk the ridges just after dusk, there’s a chance you’ll hear the territorial and mating calls of the so-called “hoot owl,” which, as part of its survival strategy, breeds and lays eggs in the depth of winter.

Aptly known as “The Tiger of the Night,” a great horned owl can stand more than two feet tall with a wingspan of four and a half feet. Its eyes are 35 times more sensitive than those of a human being. The feathered tufts (“horns”) on its head look like ears but aren’t. The real ears are slits hidden among the feathers on the side of the owl’s head. Placed asymmetrically, these admit slightly different frequencies to each of the eardrums so that the bird can differentiate and pinpoint the origin of faint sounds. Specialized wing feathers, downy-fringed like a butterfly’s, enable this predator to move silently in flight. No sound of rushing wings warns the victim of the devastating strike that will be delivered by talons so powerful they can rip through a fencing mask.

The ancient Cherokees were astute observers of the natural world within which they existed. The mountain landscape and all of its plants and animals were a part of their spiritual cosmos. Their system divided the world into three levels: the Upper World of light, goodness, and the everlasting hereafter; the Under World of darkness, evil, and eternal death; and the mundane Middle World within which humans reside. By balancing these realms the Cherokees sought to bring peace and harmony into their daily lives.

There is a great deal of serpent imagery in Cherokee lore, especially that having to do with the Uktena, a giant, mythic snake that haunted their imaginations. But the main portion of their animal imagery was devoted to birds. They were our first ornithologists. For them, as for us, birds were magical. They are beautiful. They often sing. And they can do something that humans can only dream about ... they can fly.

Most Cherokee bird lore is concerned with species they saw all the time: cardinals, chickadees, tufted titmice, etc. Their bird stories are usually rather lighthearted; at times, however, they associated birds with the negative aspects of the Under World. The most logical candidates for this distinction were the owls, those woeful denizens of darkness, especially the great horned owl, which they knew as “tsgili.”

Anthropologist James Mooney, who lived with the Cherokees on the Qualla Boundary (present day Cherokee) during the late 1880s, observed that, “Owls and other night-crying birds are believed to be the embodied ghosts or disguised witches, and their cry is dreaded as a sound of evil omen.” Of the three owls named in Cherokee lore, the great-horned was by far the most dreaded; so much so, that the designation “tsgili” was expanded in meaning so as to also signify “witch.” The great-horned owls and the Cherokee witches were the masters of the night.

I have always been struck by the sacred formulas (chants or incantations) that the Cherokee medicine men used to create good luck in hunting or warfare, in healing, or in affairs of the heart. The evil medicine men or “witches” employed the formulas to accomplish their own nefarious ends. These have been categorized as those used “To Lower One’s Soul.” Alan Kilpatrick, a member of the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma, noted in The Night Has a Naked Soul (Syracuse University Press, 1997) that the sacred formulas which fall into this category “represent instruments whose express purpose is to destroy human life. Because of their grave and irreversible consequences, life-threatening spells . . . were traditionally the last incantations to be taught an apprentice.”

Here is a formula of this type that I rendered from one of Kilpatrick’s rough paraphrases. No reader will be surprised to see which bird is invoked:

To My Enemy

Your name is night.

I am the black owl

that hunts the darkness

for your heart and soul.

Your name is the night.

I am the black owl

hunting your soul.

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..

This marks my tenth year of writing a weekly Back Then column for The Smoky Mountain News. In all that time I have belabored neither editors nor readers with my poetry. Brace yourselves. The time has come. It is winter and it is cold and this is when I read and write poems. Herewith are several winter poems, dating back to 1977. Some day, if I get around to it, they might appear with others in a collection of personal essays and poems as well as line drawings by my wife titled “Permanent Camp.” These will depict random aspects of life in a somewhat remote cove situated a few miles west of Bryson City.

Han Shan

That old reprobate told his friends:

“Don’t come in winter!”

But he’d grin his toothless grin

and clap his hands and dance in the snow

way up there in the swirling mists

when anyone came to see him.

Well, we like friends, too.

And we’ll drink your wine with glee.

But what we will look for here in the lamplight

is the sparkle in your eyes.

Season of Light

Windowpanes gleam in winter.

Dark branches and twigs stand uplifted

crosshatched against the blue sky.

Snow-covered mountains emerge from the

swirling mists and move closer,

seemingly within reach.

Forgotten patterns and textures emerge.

Now is the time for seeing.

Do Not Neglect the Winter Months

Solitude is surer then.

The body of the land is laid bare.

Gray boulders await with somber intensity.

Each trail has an entity best realized in winter.

Sitting here at the kitchen table writing this for you

I think of Deeplow Gap . . . a notch in Thomas Divide.

Not far. I go there often, walking or in my fancy.

Oh, I could tell you all about it, how I see it.

But for you it will be different.

Essence arises from the manner of coming and going.

Go light. Don’t walk fast. Savor the cold.

Even in Winter

Stones in the creekbed

will speak to you quite clearly

in praise of water.

Sleepless

The creek is frozen.

All this clothing and still I shiver.

The goat rattles loose boarding behind the shack.

A decayed tree on the ridge gives way under ice.

Peering into the mirror by lamplight

I see the mole splotch spreading on my right cheek

and the gray hairs spurting from my nostrils.

There is no occasion for talk.

Woodstove

At 10 below there is a silence that is not solitude.

Frost flowers etch darkened window glass.

The woodstove leaks the light of a million poems.

But you are beyond all words

transported by the cold.

And what a fine thing

to kneel and blow the coals

just to see the embers glow,

when suddenly the kettle boils.

January 1977

After the long cold siege it warmed today.

Sun in a haze. The surface of the ice slurred

at noon but solidified by 3:00. I spent my day

in the yard, gathering scattered piles

of horseshit into one large pile. At first

I tried shoveling, but the frozen balls rolled

frustratingly away, here and there.

So I scooped them up with my bare hands.

They looked like ... like frozen horseshit.

And that’s the way I feel.

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..

For my wife, Elizabeth, and me, winter doesn’t arrive until the first of each year. From now until spring is our finest season. She doesn’t have to keep her gallery-studio on the town square in Bryson City open all the time. And I don’t have to travel conducting workshops. We spend more time at our place west of town. Keeping the wood fires burning. Catching up with reading. Enjoying the way the pathway winds slowly downstream along the creek. Suddenly noticing a high ridge shimmering with light.

After summer’s haze and the muted tones of autumn, we’re confronted not with the gloom we tend to anticipate, but with a clarity that sharpens the senses. Some part of the effect, of course, is that there is less moisture in the air in winter. We do in reality see more clearly — so much so, that objects appear to be nearer. Have you ever noticed how much closer the mountains seem in winter? You could almost reach out and touch them. Come spring, they will recede.

In the same manner and perhaps due to the same causes, sounds become more clearly defined in winter. What are the characteristic sounds of this season? Paradoxically, they are the ones heard from a distance that seem to be nearby.

From a ridge overlooking our cove, there is a spot where I can sit in the pale early-morning sunlight beneath a rock ledge that provides shelter from the wind. If I shut my eyes, a rooster’s call or the roar of a distant chainsaw or a truck engine starting up seem to be occurring just yards away. Voices carry in the crisp air: snatches of distant conversations can be deciphered. From high overhead the strident cry of a red-tailed hawk pierces the air.

Perhaps the most characteristic sounds of winter are those created by the wind: the rustling movements of air passing through a field ... the monotonous scraping of tree limbs against one another. Or at times, you can hear a patch of icy woodlands roaring in the wind. The poet Robert Burns observed in one of his letters: “There is scarcely any earthly object gives me more — I do not know if I should call it pleasure — something which exalts me — something which enraptures me — than to walk in the sheltered side of a wood in a cloudy winter day, and hear the stormy wind howling among the trees, and raving over the plain. It is my best season of devotion.”

After a lifetime of working with paint, Elizabeth has a keen sense of the colors viewed in a natural landscape. For her, there is almost no pure white light — not even in winter.

“Look,” she will say, “at the lavender shadows on that far mountainside. And see how the clouds are reflecting the setting sun down into the valley.”

Scaled down to essentials, our earthly haven becomes more distinct, more exhilarating. It’s a time for seeing things as they are, for paying closer attention to the world about us while we can.

Happy New Year.

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..

Each season has characteristic features that signal its arrival. Winter is no exception. Two of my winter favorites: mistletoe and sycamore.

Coon Cove — the name assigned to our valley on a late 19th century deed — is surrounded on three sides by steep ridges, the crests of which mark the boundary with the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. By the time my wife and I get home during the winter months, the evening sun is setting behind the southwestern rim of the cove. This illuminates a stand of white oaks situated along the highest ridge. Globular clusters of mistletoe decorate the bare branches, glowing with pristine intensity. It’s not difficult at that moment to comprehend why mistletoe has for so long been a green emblem of renewal.

Numerous bird species — notably cedar waxwings and bluebirds — are inordinately fond of the translucent white mistletoe berries that mature in November and December. Mistletoe seeds are coated with a sticky substance (viscin) that cause them to stick to the beaks and claws of foraging birds. Birds are tidy critters. When they pause to clean themselves on tree limbs, they unwittingly distribute mistletoe seeds from treetop to treetop throughout the woodlands. These germinate and penetrate their hosts via short root-like structures (haustorium).

Late nineteenth century anthropologist James Mooney recorded that the Cherokees noted that mistletoe “never grows alone but is found always with its roots fixed in the bark of some supporting tree or shrub from which it draws its sustenance.” And so they “called it by the name ‘uda’li,’ which signifies ‘it is married.’”

When the last leaves drop from the trees, it’s past time to get serious about winter and hope you’ve got enough firewood in place. One type of wood, however, that won’t do much in the way of providing heat is sycamore. The stuff is just about impossible to split. Axes bounce off. That’s because the grain of sycamore wood is peculiar. Indeed, everything about the woody structure of the tree is peculiar.

Wood grain is determined by the alignment of the xylem cells within a given tree species. These cells form the woody tissue that conduct water and nutrients and help support the tree. In woods that split easily, the xylem cells lie in a parallel plane. That’s why it’s such a pleasure to pile up kindling from, say, tulip poplar.

Some trees are difficult to split because their cell structures are slightly irregular or even spiraled. But sycamore takes the cake — its cells alternately spiral right-handed and then left-handed in successive years, resulting in an interlocked arrangement that has been accurately described as “an ax-wielder’s nightmare.”

The outer covering of the tree is as peculiar as its inner grain. Go to the base of most any large sycamore specimen and you’ll find bark plates that have scaled off the upper trunk and limbs. The technical term for this is “exfoliation.” Apparently the outer bark isn’t able to stretch as the tree grows and is cast off. It has been theorized, but not proven, that sycamore can gather additional light-giving energy by doing so. At any rate, serpent-like, the species sheds its “skin,” exposing whitish inner bark that catches the slanting evening light and gleams like a beacon, signaling winter.

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 economic destiny of a given region is ultimately determined by its geology, flora and climate. That’s certainly been the instance here in the Smokies region, where logging and mining have been supplanted as the major industries by recreation and ecotourism. A casebook example of this transition exists in the southwestern tip of North Carolina. A key figure in this story was Arthur Keith, an early twentieth century geologist who has been largely (if not totally) neglected by regional historians.

The Murphy Marble Belt is an elongated, lens-shaped mass of marble and related sedimentary materials up to three miles wide that extends in a crescent from northwestern Georgia into Cherokee and Swain counties. This lens also contains talc, limestone, soapstone, and calcareous soils. The first two materials are still mined at the Nantahala Talc and Limestone Co. in the Nantahala Gorge. But it was marble that was once the linchpin of the area’s mining interests.

Some extraction of marble took place in Swain and Cherokee counties during the 19th century. But it wasn’t until the arrival of the railroad from Asheville in the 1890s that moving the excavated blocks became economically feasible on a large scale.

Then, in the latter half of the 20th century, the marble industry declined and ultimately ceased to exist in southwestern North Carolina. It was apparently more feasible in economic terms to extract and transport marble mined in the Georgia end of the belt. At about the time the marble industry was phasing out in the early 1970s, the whitewater industry arrived on the scene. And it, too, was based on geology.

In 1904, Arthur Keith of the U.S. Geological Survey observed the abnormal, almost right-angled bend to the east that the Nantahala River makes as it enters the lower portion of the Nantahala Gorge (where the power plant and raft put-in areas are presently situated). Keith theorized that the river originally ran northward from the Georgia line directly through a water gap (just east of present Topton) into the Tulula Creek watershed in present Graham County, and on into the Little Tennessee below where Fontana Dam was built.

The situation represents a textbook instance of “stream piracy,” whereby a small creek eating back westward through the soft, limestone strata of the Murphy Marble Belt in the lower gorge captured the original Nantahala, causing it to change course and flow back to the east, thereby creating the dramatic Nantahala Gorge as we know it today. In other words, a geologic event that took place millions of years ago culminated in a regional economy that went from dependency on hard marble blocks to soft rubber rafts in less than a single generation.

Near the big bend in the Nantahala River there is a state historical marker honoring botanist William Bartram’s excursion into the region in the mid-1770s. A marker commemorating Arthur Keith’s work there in the early twentieth century would not be inappropriate. The National Academy of Sciences published Chester R. Longwell’s memoir titled Arthur Keith (1864-1944) in 1956:

“The name of Arthur Keith is inseparably connected with Appalachian geology. During most of his mature life, over a period of nearly 50 years, his chief efforts were devoted to field study, mapping, and written description of selected areas distributed from the Carolinas to Maine. Sixteen folios of the United States Geological Survey, most of them under his name alone, a few prepared jointly with other workers, are in themselves a monument to his skill and industry ... He entered Harvard in 1881 and received his bachelor’s degree in 1885 ... At Harvard he rowed in the varsity crew, was a letter man in football, and became heavyweight wrestling champion. These athletic activities hardened and trained his naturally rugged physique, and helped prepare him for the strenuous field work in which he was engaged well beyond his seventieth year. Like many others in his generation at Harvard, Keith sat under Nathaniel Southgate Shaler and was fascinated by that master’s eloquence in presenting the fundamentals of geology ... In June, 1887, he became assistant in a field party of the United States Geological Survey, and spent the summer mapping in the mountains of eastern Tennessee. That experience determined the pattern of his later life. He went to Washington at the end of the field season, and became a regular member of the Federal Survey, which was still in the first decade of its vigorous early growth. The Geological Society of America was founded a year after Keith went to Washington, and he was elected to membership in 1889 ... For several decades Keith’s geologic folios in the Southern Appalachians were accepted as models, and three contiguous sheets — the Mount Mitchell, Roan Mountain, and Bristol quadrangles — were widely used as the most satisfactory geologic cross section of the Appalachian belt. His maps published between 1891 and 1907 represent detailed study and description of nearly 15,000 square miles, largely in areas with intricate bedrock structure. For nearly 20 years Keith spent his summers contentedly in strenuous field work, his winters in writing; and his high productivity continued unbroken. But at last he consented to take part in administration, and in 1906 he became chief of the Section of Areal Geology for the entire country. This assignment soon became too demanding for one man, and in 1913 a division was made into Eastern and Western Areas, with Keith in charge of the former ... He served as President of the Geological Society of Washington; as Councilor, Vice-President, and President (1927) of the Geological Society of America; as Chairman (1928-31) of the Division of Geology and Geography, National Research Council; as Council Member and Treasurer (1932-40) of the National Academy of Sciences.”

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..

Five skunk species are residents in the United States: hooded, hog-nosed, western spotted, eastern spotted, and striped. Only the last two reside in the Smokies region.

The striped skunk — which is black with two white stripes running up its back to form a cap on top of its head — is the one that usually comes to mind when someone starts telling skunk tales in this neck of the woods.

The spotted skunk is, in my experience, more common in the higher elevations. Sometimes referred to as a civet, it is black with a white spot on its forehead and under each ear. There are also four broken white stripes along its neck, back, and sides, as well as a white-tipped tail.

Now we get to the interesting part. When provoked, a striped skunk simply raises its tail daintily like a plume and assumes a U-shaped posture that allows its hip muscles to squeeze the odiferous fluids indiscriminately out of its anal glands.

The spotted skunk has perfected that basic strategy. When frightened or angered, it will often do a “handstand” on it front feet. This posture allows the critter to look between its legs and see where to aim the spray.

Many readers of this column will have encountered skunks in the shelters along the Appalachian Trail, especially those situated in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Long before the park was established in 1934, writer and outdoorsman Horace Kephart underwent a typical skunk “invasion.” It took place in the Hall Cabin, a hut situated smack-dab on the state line between Tennessee and North Carolina. Kephart subsequently described the incident in his book Camping and Woodcraft — first published in a single volume in 1906 but later expanded to two volumes in 1916.

He somehow identified his visitor as a female but failed to note whether it was spotted or striped. I suspect it was the latter. Be forewarned that this skunk story has a sad ending.

“Another notoriously fearless pest is the skunk. It will turn tail quickly enough, but nothing on earth will make it run. If a skunk takes it into his head to raid your camp he will step right in without any precautions whatever. Then he will nose through all of your possessions, walk over you — if you be in his way — and forty men cannot intimidate him.

Once, when I was spending the summer in a herders’ hut, on a summit of the Smoky Mountains, a skunk burrowed under the cabin wall and came up through the earthen floor. It was about midnight. My two companions slept in a pole bunk against the wall, and I had an army cot in the middle of the room. It was cold enough for an all-night fire on the hearth.

I awoke with the uneasy feeling that some intruder was moving about in the darkness. There was no noise, and my first thought was of rattlesnakes, which were numerous in that region. I sat up and lit the lantern, which hung over my head. One glance was enough.

“Boys,” I warned in a stage whisper, “for the love of God, don’t breathe; there’s a skunk at the foot of my bed!”

The animal was not in the least disconcerted by the light, but proceeded leisurely to inspect the premises. It went under my cot and nosed around there for five mortal minutes, while I lay rigid as a corpse.

Then Doc sneezed. I heard Andy groan from under his blanket: “You damn fool: now we’ll get it!”

But we didn’t. Madame Polecat waddled to their bunk, and I had a vision of two fellows sweating blood.

Then she moved over to the grub chest, found some excelsior lying beside it, and deliberately went to work on making a nest. An hour passed. I simply had to take a smoke. My tobacco was on a shelf right over the skunk. I risked all, arose very quietly, reached over the beast, got my tobacco, and retired like a ghost to the other end of the cabin to warm myself at the fire.

We were prisoners; for the only door was a clapboard affair on wooden hinges that shrieked like a dry axle. The visitor, having made its bed, did not yet feel like turning in, but decided to find out what sort of a bare-legged, white-faced critter I was, anyhow.

It came straight over to the fireplace and sniffed my toes. The other boys offered all sorts of advice, and I talked brimstone back at them — we had found that pussy didn’t care a hang for human speech so long as it was gently modulated.

That was a most amiable female of her species. True, she investigated all our property that was within reach, but she respected it, and finally she cuddled up in the excelsior, quite satisfied with her new home.

To cut an awfully long story short, the polecat held us spellbound until daybreak. Then she crawled out through her burrow, and we instantly fled through our shrieky door. Doc had a shotgun in his hand and murder in his heart. Not being well posted on skunk reflexes, he stepped up within ten feet and blew the animal’s head clean off by a simultaneous discharge of both barrels.

Did that headless skunk retaliate? It did, brethren, it did!”

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..