_By James R. Randall._
The late Judge William D. Kelley was an intensely practical man, and
so not given to rhapsody, but he has left on record that Western
North Carolina was the most beautiful country upon which his feet
or eyes ever rested. He had visited many lands and gazed upon many
transcendent panoramas unrolled by the Master of the Universe. He was
a loyal and devoted son of Pennsylvania, and enthusiastically loved
and admired her noble scenery, but when he beheld the unrivalled
majesty and picturesqueness of Western North Carolina, his honest
soul expanded with the prospect, and, in a burst of genuine candor,
he declared that never before had he looked upon a region at once so
sublime and entrancing. What Judge Kelley uttered has been, by many
other enthusiasts, repeated in varying phrase and similar tenor. It
is not called the Land of the Sky because of its altitude. There are
numerous localities that surpass it in this particular, but rather,
I think, because of a peculiar phenomenon of the region, where the
azure atmosphere that we call the skies descends, or seems to do so,
actually and magically upon the tree tops and mountain sides, so that
the dazzled spectator almost instinctively puts forth his hand to grasp
the mysterious panoply. When a child of earth is thus moved, as it
were, by heaven, with the blue ether glorified by sunlight, and the
alpine groups transformed in shape by fugitive clouds, no wonder his
mind becomes blissfully inebriated, his soul uplifted, and his senses
plumed to take wing from the solid globe that imprisons his feet. The
dullest fancy cannot resist the spell.
The ardent, poetic temperament has a conditional foretaste of what
it is to escape the flesh envelope and assume spiritual alertness.
But it is not always thus that this gorgeous land presents itself. It
has moods of tremendous energy, and to make returning mildness more
alluring, as the cunning master of music intersperses rude chords in
his glorious melody, it veils the comely perfection of its face in a
storm of frowns, but only such as triumphant beauty can assume betimes.
Then the alpine cliffs are garmented with mist, while the Hyder Ali of
Cloud Land poises on the declivities, concentrated with black wrath,
before rushing down in fragmentary battalions upon the plains below.
But there is no ravage. The little hut of the inhabitant remains
unscathed, still emitting from its rough chimney a curling smoke, and
the lordly mansion, perched on some aspiring peak, stands steadfast,
while the fairy maiden shrined there playfully dabbles her white
fingers in the foam of the upper deep. From the dark canopy of the
great giant of the Smoky range leaps the live lightning, and a thunder
roll bellows or crackles or mutters in a myriad strange defiles, but
we know that behind this lowering front, hinting of God’s smile behind
the tempest, our winsome Lady of the Sky is laughing still, with the
spring in her brilliant eyes, and the wild flowers, smitten by sunshine
in her golden hair. Anon, as the seasons are made mutable, another
phase is disclosed. The air grows cold as if in the clutch of some
Siberian intruder, and feathery flakes pour down their “snow storm of
stars,” and the mighty monsters of the mountain world yield placidly
to their chill, pallid cerements, but we feel that this is one of our
enchanter’s displays of infinite variety, and that our spirits are held
in thrall for another transformation. And what a valiant exaltation
the chill breath of the ozone-ladened breeze fixes in our blood, and
what roses in our cheeks! How we dominate with resistless stride the
pedestrian paths, or how we credit the fable of the Centaur, when, in
the fervor of environment, we partake of the joy and very existence of
the nimble steed we have bestrode adventurously! In other climes and
with other surroundings we have felt languor, or dullness, or restive
incapacity, but here, with the potent inspiration of the panorama
and the atmosphere, our whole being bounds with daring briskness and
mastering activity. In the overwhelming sense of powerful forces put
in play, we do not ask if life be worth living, but thank God that we
are alive and filled with the alchemy of Sky Land. When these agencies
react and demand the unbent bow, we lounge, it may be on the porches
of the grand hotel, with eyes restful upon Pisgah and the enormous
petrifaction of the rat that never budges from its lair. Perchance,
with appetite made robust and undeniable, we attack the toothsome
repast provided, but ever and anon we glance through the big windows
at the splendid pictures beyond, as if we were afraid that some stray
expression of the amphitheatre would escape us unaware. We stroll,
happy and satisfied, to the piazza, and loll in an easy chair, puffing
at pipe or cigar, but never ceasing to confront admiringly the scenes
that intoxicated us from the first. The sun has driven its fiery,
glowing chariot beyond the vast barrier of loam and basalt, but left
a sparkling, glowing, radiant wake behind. The clouds are blushing
like traditional brides, and the sorcerer of the sky has grouped them
among shining lakes and islands and the watching perspective that
this inimitable artist alone can fashion and dissolve. You presently
understand how the poet merely revealed what he had seen when Night
dropped her crimson mantle and pinned it with a star. And it was no
exaggeration when the grim Carlyle bade us witness how Bootes drags his
reluctant dogs in a leash of sidereal fire, or how mailed Orion flames
his plumes ’mid bright-battalioned planets. As the mystic dusk robes
the familiar scenery with a pall, we hear the insect world, if it be
the proper season, conversing in a thousand tongues, startled anon by
the shrill cry of a night bird, and possibly we wonder if the momentary
shadow on the orb of the moon was the vagrant pinion of Minerva’s
bird, or the flashing stroke of the eagle, put to flight from his
eyry slumber. Then the vision fades, and some drowsy sprite, circling
in the atmosphere, infects us with somnolency. We cannot resist it,
unless perchance strong coffee or some such insidious decoction has
violated, for a time, the blessed ministering of sleep that men, who
have betrayed or lost it, would give millions to enjoy. We move to our
apartment in amiable indolence, and hardly has our head touched the
inviting pillow when we reach that condition wherein, as Lew Wallace
says, even the wicked cease to sin. And if we have scientifically and
rationally allowed the wholesome air to enter a little at the top and
a little at the bottom of our window, what slumber we enjoy, unless we
have deliberately assailed and violated every law conducive to repose!
We know that while we rest no noxious thing can enter our lungs, but
the pure, sweet, invigorating wind from the heights is visiting our
whole system and repairing what other atmospheres may have put in
peril. What a blessing, after such refreshment, to rise in the earlier
morning and prayerfully go to the window for another glance at the
wonderland that has made us a willing prisoner to its enticements! We
salute the mountains as loyal friends, and they, after a vogue of their
own, appear to reciprocate our salute. They, too, appear renovated
with the dews of night, and their variegated vestments glitter with
adornment. The fascinating curves of the French Broad river cleave
the landscape, and the swift, clear tide laves the feet of the giant
peaks, whose fertile valleys, smiling it may be with agricultural
abundance, betoken that this is a fertile as well as a grand and
attractive region. How that fine farm called Tahkeostee projects itself
like an immense backbone upon the undulating piedmont, and how you
scheme about the happiness of a proprietor who holds the title to such
a domain! But you need a nearer view, and, as all manner of vehicles
or horses are at disposal, you take an excursion there, crossing the
railway track and handsome bridge to emerge upon a firm country road.
You look back, and the prospect is brave with splendid hotels, villas
of all manner of architecture, and the city of Asheville, which,
because chiefly of the tourist travel, is rapidly taking rank with the
first cities of the State, by manufacturing, by drainage and by the
discovery that all of the pure air on earth cannot make amends for
water contamination. And so, with generous, innocent fountain sources
everywhere at the bidding of man, Asheville and all Western Carolina
have nothing to crave for in the way of physical health and happiness.
[Illustration: VIEWS NEAR ASHEVILLE.]
Wooed by the spirit of adventure, you spur your horse higher and
higher up the ascent, and find that some rich man has fixed his abode
in more or less of grandeur atop the alpine plateau, and you look
down upon humbler mountains and far away into the vista, where the
locomotive is pushing its path from Henderson, or it may be Hickory
Gap. Descending the road you follow along the bright, rippling stream,
passing habitations of various kinds, now rude or humble, and now
comfortable or charming. At last you reach a spot that the poet Moore
would have raved about in undying song, for it is worthy of any singer,
who, however tuneful, might well despair of bringing justice to the
realm of so much beauty. The dwelling there is not a palace, but
evidently the abode of taste and wealth. The garden is what you have
dreamed about, when young and addicted to Lalla Rookh. What a wealth
of flowers and how artistically displayed! The air is perfumed all
about this fairy kingdom and you instinctively look askance for the
apparition of Prince Charming, or the Fair One with the Golden Locks.
The Prince I have not seen, but the Fair One was visible and, with her
guidance, I am permitted, in a luxurious nook, to scan the surrounding
glories. There is no other just such site for perfect habitation, for
it is at the meeting of the waters, which glisten far below. Here the
impetuous French Broad rushes to the embrace of the gentle Swannanoa,
and here their mingled tides laughingly and pellucidly hasten to kiss
the awaiting and absorbing sea. The mountains are marshalled on dress
parade in one mighty ring around this centre of loveliness, and the
dream you have fallen voluntarily into is only dissolved, and not
unpleasantly, by the matter-of-fact tracks of steel that glisten at the
base of the hill, and the snorting or clanging or whistling engine that
plunges, with its train, toward the station, which is now, by local
significance, well known as the place where our modern Kubla Khan, Mr.
George Vanderbilt, must alight to visit the matchless pleasure dome
he has decreed on the heights beyond the summer lodge of the Fair One
with the Golden Locks, where, in imagination, we are now spectator.
It is needless to repeat how much Mr. Vanderbilt has spent or will
continue to spend upon what fame heralds as the most complete and
magnificent estate owned by any private gentlemen, and one that few
royal personages could obtain. Without summing up the oft-repeated and
dry statistics of the dimension of his residence, out-houses, stables,
barns and acres, it is enough to understand that, after the method of
another marvelous man who has metamorphosed St. Augustine, unstinted
opulence and modern art have met for material transformation. No
amount of money could reproduce the natural splendor of the location,
but science and skill and Aladdin’s lamp, which is ready money and a
superabundance of it, can rear castles and improve grounds in a way to
be worthy of such scenes of Arcadian majesty and beauty all around.
It speaks well for the rich young man, who is highly educated, most
accomplished, and a lover of literature in all of its development,
while kind and gentle and benignant, that he should have determined
upon this place of all the places in the world to rear his incomparable
home and be a veritable monarch of much that he surveyed, though not
all. And yet, having once had vision of this alluring sphere, it would
be indeed a source of astonishment if it failed to exercise upon him
the sorcery I so feebly portray. The fancy takes flight and pictures
to itself what may be the result of such a scheme. Will he, when
the palace is completed and everything exhausted to fashion it as
he aspired, be any more content than he was before? Will he abandon
the mighty Babylon of the East and abide at his gorgeous Southern
hermitage, with its imperial setting? Will he simply flit there, from
time to time, and, at other seasons, leave his domain, like a haunted
palace, a stupendous show-place or proverbial folly? Will he settle
there, and perchance wed the Fair One with the Golden Locks, becoming
racy of the soil of the Old North State, dispensing joy, hospitality,
munificence and rational bounty? Will he, having more than emulated the
author of Vathek in construction, live, like Beckford, to behold the
ruin of his aspiration? But what is the use of tossing these gilded
juggler balls in the air of imagination, and making inquiries of that
future which does not belong to any mortal? Suffice it practically,
that young Mr. Vanderbilt has appreciated the South, yielded homage to
her natural magnetism, and made his deeds speak louder than words of
praise. Let us take for granted that he will never weary of his designs
and that Providence has in store for him and his surroundings special
and exceptional benedictions.
Adjacent to Mr. Vanderbilt’s principality are the grounds of the
Kenilworth Inn, which would have delighted Amy Robsart and disarmed
her enemies. Never did British beauty of any country preceding this
command, even at the hands of royalty, so many comforts as the
Kenilworth lavishly displays for the delectation of the most exacting
creature. When this is said, what need of multiplying words or
measuring with yard-sticks the magnificence of the various compartments
of the house or its broad baronial park? Unless you are impervious to
all enticement, you will be impelled to see these marvels through your
own eyes and then compare your impressions with mine.
Perhaps you who visit Western North Carolina find instinct within you
some of the fiery blood of Orion or Nimrod or Buffalo Bill, and wish
to exercise it in the slaughter of beasts and birds. Well, with your
improved weapon, with all modern lethal devices, in dear old clothes
that are already creased in the seams and baggy at the knees, you
may, with the rugged father of Esmeralda, or one of her tough, nimble
brothers, follow the black bear to his cave or track partridges,
grouse or squirrels to their leafy haunts, and make them acquainted
with death or anguish. You may, even without having conned the pages
of Isaak Walton, be impassioned for snaring diplomatic and pugnacious
trout, with an insect engendered by the artificer or with the native
minnow; and, if so, your selection of streams will be easy and your
game-bag should be bulging with trophies when you homeward wend your
way, with appetite of a ploughman for the fare of a French chef who has
been beguiled by Col. Coxe as the presiding genius of his kitchen and
larder. And the Colonel will, after supper, make merry with you, as
becomes an elegant gentleman, who has carried his accomplishments all
over the world, and who laughingly declares that he is “the only man
extant who was killed on both sides during the war.” He had possessions
at the North and South, and his respective substitutes were among the
unreturning brave. So, by proxy, he was slain twice, and yet is still
alive to the gratification of a host of friends and admirers. You will
be sure to get an invitation from him to drive, with a jocund company
of both sexes, in his tally-ho-coach, which is as well appointed as
any in the land, and it is a memorable thing to see him handle the
ribbons over four thoroughbreds that were nurtured on bluest and most
succulent of Kentucky grass. A drive with Colonel Coxe and such ladies
and gentlemen as he groups around him is an experience that you will
fondle, some day, when business or a kindred commonplace tie fetters
you to a dull or smoky town. You will then comprehend that poor girl, a
rustic heroine and living martyr, when she could forgive the miserable
man who had repaid her with ingratitude and desertion, but could not
divine how, though he left her, he could leave “The Mountings.”
[Illustration: MOUNT MITCHELL--6700 FEET ABOVE THE SEA.]
In a rollicking mood you may venture to pay a pop-call on Bill Nye,
who, though he pokes perfunctory, periodical fun at the Sky Land,
clings to it, when he can, like a fellow does to his skin, and, in
serious interludes, loves even its occasionally disreputable roads,
which are, at any rate, picturesque and informal. He may escort you
to a friend’s place of concealment, the den of “the chemist,” the
alchemist of moonshine whiskey, warranted, no doubt, to kill at three
hundred yards. I have always pitied these proscribed brethren, the
victims of our internal, or what no less a person than Thomas Jefferson
is credited with denominating “infernal” law. The moonshiner naturally
has as much right to boil his fruit or grain into spirits as the farmer
has to put hominy hot in the caldron, but the law places a negative
upon his claim, and fosters and pampers the trusts that so much trouble
the Democratic conscience, but are ingeniously utilized to pay pensions
or run the government. So the mountain chemist is given to hiding and,
at times, when hunted too persistently, to shooting his pursuers. This
is all wrong, because unlawful, but it is hard to instruct the grey
matter of his brain on such subjects. It is grewsome to see these
lank, leathery, unkempt, semi-barbarous brethren brought into court
with manacles on their limbs and summarily consigned to doleful exile
in distant dungeons. You will, when you see them and their wives and
their progeny, wonder how such a country can produce such specimens
of humanity, but it is easily understood when explanation is at hand.
In that region are reared the best of cattle, sheep, poultry and
fruits, but the moonshiner disdains them. He prefers, or habit and
poverty compel him to prefer, soggy, hot biscuit, excessive coffee,
cadaverous, greasy bacon, assassinated in a frying pan. He drinks too
much of his own fiery decoction and too little of the salubrious water
that leaps, gushes and sparkles on every hand. If one could capture
young moonshiner girls and boys, feed them on civilized diet, girdle
them with proper comfort, garment them decently, treat them amiably
and educate them wholesomely, the transformation would be thorough,
startling and supreme. It would be an object lesson conveying its own
moral, and this would be the evolution of many Esmeraldas off the mimic
stage, and many a sturdy, comely, valiant, intellectual man, who might
succeed in the Senate such typical Carolinians as Vance and Ransom.
Speaking of Vance, if you loitered in Sky Land, in midsummer, you
might make your way to Gombroon, his highland roost, and be sure of an
old-fashioned welcome. No man has a heartier nature and no man is more
of an adorer, so to speak, of Western North Carolina. He would tell
you characteristic anecdotes of his wonderful career and hold you, as
the ancient mariner did the wedding guests, with wit and wisdom, such
as Master Coleridge never “dreamt of in his philosophy.” So you would
understand from him what potent possibilities this clime possesses, and
how from the very elements there is distilled a subtle essence that
holds in solution the formation of noble men and beautiful women.
If, for instance, you had an agreeable, harmonious company of friends
and acquaintances at Battery Park Hotel, and longed for an ideal trip,
not too long, and which would entertainingly add to your stock of
enchantment, I doubt not that Mr. McKissick, who is young and genial
and intelligent, as becomes a cavalier South Carolinian and manager of
a great caravanserai, would suggest a trip to the Hot Springs, which,
by rail, is not many miles away. If you could prevail upon McKissick
to join your party, it would be an accentuated treat, for he has been
an ardent, expert, accomplished newspaper man, and is bubbling over
with high health and fresh humor. This maroon is altogether delicious.
From the car window you get rapid but incessantly changing views of the
French Broad, which, crossed and recrossed and paralleled, is never
out of sight. It is mild and clear flowing; it is turbulent, swift
and vocal; it is free from impediment; it is vexed with rapids and
frustrated with boulders as if a battle of Titans had been contested
to stormy demolition; it is always charming. The time consumed in the
passage has never for an instant tormented you, and even the most
voluble talker is content to let his tongue “keep Sunday”--as an old
darkey said--in the presence of this water course which descends in
glory through the mountain defiles. These mountains enclose you, but
they are not like their Swiss family bare and bleak and tawny, but
lush with emerald foliage or cultivated to their very brows. The
Mountain Park Hotel at Hot Springs, like all first-class establishments
hereabout, is equipped sumptuously. It has miles of piazzas. It nestles
in a happy valley. The river runs hard by, and, at this point, is
narrow but energetic. It is a cold stream, but here, a few feet from
the surface, hot fountains are latent, and any positive disturbance
of the earth-crust is followed by vaporous exhalations. The baths are
seductive, the more so, perhaps, because you are immersed in dazzling
marble tanks and the liquid purrs you like velvet in motion. You can
drink vast quantities of this fluid for it has amazing lightness and
makes a delicate stomach feel “like a gentleman.” Wondrous tales are
told of its curative faculties, and I take for granted that a rheumatic
or dyspeptic man or woman soon gets ashamed, in such ablution and
bibulation, of racking muscles and azure imps. By what volcanic agency
this phenomenon occurs we can only conjecture. The probability is that
the central fires are nearer than usual to the surface, or that the
boiling waters that can ordinarily be reached by hard, pertinacious
mining toil, thousands of feet deep, find here some propulsion and
channel of their own and need only a touch to make them disclose their
virtues. If they do not “create a spirit under the ribs of death,”
they spur on an appetite that may have lost all zest, and when a man is
impatient for his meals and partakes of them with satisfaction, disease
has small hold upon him.
[Illustration: THE SWANNANOA.]
One of the weird sights of this region is a mountain fire. On a dark
night such conflagrations are, of course, more spectacular, and when
belts of flame cover large areas and are detached fiercely from one
another, the resemblance to Kilauea, the burning lake of the Sandwich
Island, is startling. In these days of Hawaiian perturbation and
discussion one could easily imagine that he was in the Eden Isle of the
Pacific ocean, and might look for dusky maidens darting by on horseback
with red hybiscus flowers blushing in their lustrous black hair.
This enchanted region is reached by the Richmond & Danville railroad,
whose lines furnish approach also to many other places in the alpine
location of South Carolina and Georgia that merit equal attention
with these scenes so imperfectly described or sketched from memory.
Cæsar’s Head, near Greenville, is a genuine curiosity, and even the
old European or Rocky Mountain traveller admits that the prospect from
this precipitous elevation is awesome and inspirational. At the old
town of Clarksville, in North Georgia, the scenery is transcendent.
Once you have seen Mount Yonah you will never forget it, and when will
ever fade from your recollection the prodigious carving, by witchery in
distant perspective, of the Cherokee chief stretched gigantically upon
his sky-line bier? From the porches of Roseneath villa you best discern
this strange conformation. There he extends, in tremendous dimensions,
graven on the horizon, a distinct and spectral Indian shape, with
drooping plumes. The people thereabout know him familiarly as
Skiahjagustah. You may, in quest of gold, for the region is full of it,
seek to penetrate this mysterious personage, but he will vanish as you
approach him, transformed to common rock and tree and shrub, and yet
reappear by enchantment when you go back to Roseneath and summon him
from beyond the Soquee river. Here asthma has no clutch and rheumatism
ceases to torment. A German workman came here crippled from New Jersey,
and presently grew perfectly well in this climate. He is busily at work
in wood and iron in a shop of his own, and happy in possession of a
little farm, which has a famous vineyard like unto those which gem the
banks of the Rhine or Moselle.
Just beyond Clarksville is one of the most beautiful valleys in all
this world--the Vale of Nacoochee--with Yonah dominating the fertile
plain, and the upper Chattahoochee river purling around it. Here the
mound builders of the continent had cherished habitation, and here
they left monumental signs of their existence. Here the Cherokee
loved to dwell, and just on the banks of the river and circumjacent
to the mound, where clover and corn attain exceptional proportions,
is a cemetery fat with Indian death. From Clarksville to Toccoa and
Tallulah Falls is a mere jaunt of an hour or so. But why attempt to
portray the graceful cascade and the terrible torrent? Ben Perley
Poore, who had roamed in many lands and had adoration of all sights
of nature of a high and exceptional kind, once told me that after all
of his wanderings the scenes that lingered longest and fondest in his
memory were those around Clarksville and Tallulah. Oh, you must see for
yourself the unrivalled Georgia waterfall, with its tremendous chasm
and precipitous descent, not in one roar of waters, but by successive
leaps and bounds and plunges, alternately divided in swirling pools
before dashing headlong down to the palpitating plain. Each fall is
distinct in itself and of varied fury, as you will perceive either
from the brink of the abyss or in touch with the vital torrent. This,
too, is the Sky Land--glorious land--and here, in the coming time, as
elsewhere in the alpine region of the South, many thousands will come
ecstatically. St. Augustine waited long for a Flagler and Asheville
for a Coxe, but they came in the ripeness of time and amazingly well
did they perform the work appointed for them. If some men like these
should, in their opulence, propose to magnify Clarksville, Nacoochee
and Tallulah, what new splendors will come to the Land of the Sky, and
what blessings will be lavished upon thousands of human beings who only
need to know the South to love it, and who are beckoned back to health
and strength and happiness where
“Far, vague and dim,
The mountains swim.”