from the falls of the Linville. Around the crackling logs (this was in
August) was a small party, such as is often collected at mountain
wayside farm-houses. Steaming their clothes with me at the broad hearth,
were two Philadelphia lawyers. A few days previous, closing their musty
tomes, filing away their legal documents, and reconciling importunate
clients with fair promises, they had locked their doors to silence, dust
and cobwebs, and started southward. In Virginia they each bought a
horse, and equipped like myself, they were doing the mountains. It was
not only their first visit to Western North Carolina, but their first
trial in that mode of traveling; and, like all innocents abroad, they
had gathered some interesting matters from personal experience. While
the good-wife rattled away at the plates on a table just cleared by us
of everything in the shape of food, in spite of the steady patter of
rain on the roof, warmed by the glowing fire, and growing enthusiastic
over mutual praise of the mountain scenery, we drifted into the
following conversation:
“That view from the Roan eclipses everything I have ever seen in the
White, Green, Catskill and Virginia mountains; but I would not ascend it
again for all the views from Maine to Florida, if I had the same
experience to pass through,” said one, whose black hair, eyes, beard and
dark complexion gave him a brigand appearance.
“No,” returned his pleasant, fair-faced companion, “You know the peril
of your being abroad nights. Some one else, less timid, might actually
shoot you.”
“Were you in danger of being shot?” I asked.
“Yes; shot for a highwayman,” answered he of the open countenance, and
then he laughed.
“How so?”
“Oh! Hal’s joking about the shooting business. I was taken for a robber;
that’s a fact; but what I mean by an unpleasant experience was our being
lost on the Roan.”
“I intend to ascend the Roan. Is the way hard to find?” I spoke to the
dark-visaged man.
“It is from the Tennessee side. We took that route, with explicit
directions how to reach the hotel on the summit. It was only fifteen
miles distant from our stopping-place, but it rained, and a dark
morning gave us a late start. From Cranberry to the foot of the Roan we
pursued a trail way, and a tangled pursuit it was. At the base of the
mountain we wound ourselves up in a net-work of log roads that, cut by
the lumbermen, branched out in every direction, crossing and recrossing
each other in the great woods. Extricating ourselves from this, we
climbed the mountain, arriving on the ridge about sunset. Just before
gaining the ridge, we met a party of four tourists on foot, whom we
saluted and left behind. A painted gate led us astray, and we followed
the ridge leading to the Little Roan. We retraced our steps in the rain
and darkness, and took shelter near the delusive gate in an empty but
comfortable cabin, erected evidently for lost wayfarers. I went out
after we had started a fire, and found the party of four men seated on a
log in the rain at some distance from the cabin. I invited them to
return with me, but they declined. I said nothing more, considering them
_non compos mentis_.”
“A singular party. Did you discover any reason for their refusal?”
“Yes,” began the one addressed as Hal, “Mat’s face, dress, and figure
frightened them; and, as they told the landlord in the morning, in spite
of their being well armed, they preferred an all night’s roost in the
rain to falling into the clutches of a highwayman.”
“Well, that’s so” said Mat, nodding his head and smiling; “However, we
were lucky in finding the cabin before they did. Had they got there
first, they would have barred the door against us, and, perhaps, warned
us away with a few pistol shots.”
Our social ring was at this point broken up by a party who seemed too
much preoccupied with themselves to join us, and so we separated for the
night. The party in question consisted of two newly married couples. The
knots had been tied in Morganton, a few days previous, and they were
then on their bridal tour. They drove up in the rain, unharnessed and
tied their horses under the dripping trees (for the stable was full),
and came in upon us.
On the next morning, under a clear sky, I wound my way on foot under the
limbs of kalmia and rhododendrons to the Linville falls. It is a wild
approach. Over the hedges tower ancient hemlocks with mossed trunks. The
blue-jay screamed through the forest, and around the boles of the trees
and along the branches, squirrels, known as mountain boomers, chased
each other, halting in their scampers to look down on the disturber of
the solitude. Once, a brilliant-breasted pheasant, roused by my
footsteps, from a bed of fern-crested rocks, sprung in air close before
me, and with a startled whirr, sailed up a shaded ravine. A sportsman,
with a shot-gun, could easily have winged the bird in its flight,
thereby securing a valuable trophy for the taxidermist. The cock
pheasant of the mountains has not a shabby feather on his body: They are
found in many sections of the mountains, but not in great numbers. The
hollow drum-like sound caused by beating their wings against their
bodies, is in most instances their death tattoo. At its sound from the
neighboring cove, the hunter takes down his rifle, creeps near the
favorite log, and generally makes a dead shot.
An old mountaineer, famous as a narrator of bear and fish stories, was
particularly fond of telling one relating to pheasant shooting. One
autumn day, having already marked the forest locality from which the
drum of a pheasant resounded every morning, he crept near with his
rifle. The bird had just jumped in place and was drumming within his
sight. He took deliberate aim and fired. On running to the log he
discovered a red fox struggling in his death throes on the opposite side
of the log, and in his mouth a dead pheasant. Reynard, as the
mountaineer explained, marking the frequented log, had secreted himself
close beside it, and, while the mountaineer was aiming, was preparing to
seize the bird, and did so at the moment the trigger was pulled.
The heavy thunder of the falls swept through the forest, increasing as I
advanced. The path diverged at one point, and, taking the right hand
trail, by means of the roots of the laurel, I descended a cliff’s face
in cool, dismal shade. At the bottom, I came out on a black ledge of
rock, close to the river. A stupendous fall was before; stern walls of a
rocky cañon, 100 feet high, around me, and a blue sky smiling above. I
climbed a stair-way of moist rocks, and walked along the path on the
cliff’s front to a point directly before the fall’s face. The great
volume of the Linville river, formed from drainage for fifteen miles
back to the water-shed of the Blue Ridge, here at the gap between Jonas’
Ridge and the Linville mountains, has cut asunder a massive wall,
leaving high perpendicular cliffs towering over its surface, and then,
with a tremendous leap, pours its current down through space, fifty
feet, into the bottom of the cañon. It seems to burst from a dark cavern
in the mountain’s center. A pool, sixty feet across, looking like the
surface of a lake with dark waves white-capped, spreads in a circle at
the base of the cliffs. After recovering from the dizziness of its
plunge, the river, leaving the piny walls on either side, rushes along
in view for a short distance, and then disappears around the corner of a
green promontory.
If one, in retracing one’s steps, takes the left hand trail at the point
of divergence, and follows it to the edge of the cliffs, a magnificent
downward view will be obtained, both of the foot of the cataract, and
above, where its waters race in serpentine course, increased in velocity
by the plunges over smaller falls only a few yards up the gorge.
A wilder solitude, a more picturesque confusion of crags, waters,
woods, and mountain heights, can scarcely be found. But even here, man
once fitted for himself a dwelling-place; for plainly visible across the
tops of the trees, was a little cabin on a small, sloping clearing. No
smoke curled upward from its weather-worn roof; its doors had been torn
away and chimney leveled. A few cows pastured before it.
After dinner I left Franklin’s to ride over a good road up the Linville
river. The afternoon passed without any occurrences or scenes of marked
interest, and the sun was slowly sinking toward a mountain-rimmed
horizon when, making a last inquiry in regard to my route, I entered a
wilderness, unbroken by human habitation for nearly five miles. It was a
great, green-lined way. Linns, birches, and hemlocks met over-head,
rendering dark the shadows. Under this forest, grow in richest
luxuriance dark hedges of rhododendron, too dense for easy penetration,
and reaching up to the lower branches of the trees. It was late in
season for their flowers, still many of them were white and purple with
bloom. So deep and luxuriant was the foliage of the forest and its
undergrowth, and so cold the waters of the stream that crossed and
recrossed or occupied the road-bed itself, that the air was chilly at
the hour in which I rode, and must be so even at noon-day.
The shade continued to deepen, and the chilliness of the air increased;
still, in spite of the apparent great distance I had covered, no house
presented itself, and in only one place did the branches of the trees
separate themselves sufficiently to see out. Then, far beyond, I saw the
black summit of the Grandfather. That was all. The waters of the stream
are of a rich, Rhine-wine color. At one point that day, I noticed,
attached to a fence above the stream, a board bearing the words, “No
fishing allowed on this land.” This is the only posted warning against
angling that I have seen, or know of, in the mountains.
In that twilight hour the stream seemed to sing a doleful refrain over
the smooth boulders and gnarled ivy roots. An owl hooted from its hidden
perch in a mossed pine; and a scared rabbit, interrupted in its evening
meal on an apple dropped by some lonely wayfarer, fled across the road,
and disappeared in the gloom of the thickets. A more dismal woodland for
a twilight ride could not well be imagined in the possibilities of
nature. It would naturally be more dismal to the unfamiliar traveler,
tired with a long day’s ride, and despairing of reaching a farm-house
before the approach of a cloudy night.
Suddenly the forest on one side opened, and a clearing of dead, girdled
trees, with brush fires blazing here and there among the white, standing
trunks, lay before me. Further on was a meadow and a small house, from
whose chimney a wreath of smoke was ascending straight to the zenith.
Over the house and farm loomed the rock-crowned summit of the Peak of
the Blue Ridge. An unshapely ledge cropped from the mountain’s top.
I was now on the summit of one of the gaps of the Blue Ridge, at an
elevation of 4,100 feet. On one side down a gradual descent through the
wilderness described, flow the waters of the Linville on the way to the
Atlantic; on the other, close on the dividing line, wells up the spring
forming the Watauga, whose waters mingle with the Mississippi. A short
mile below this point, down the Watauga side, is Calloway’s, at the foot
of the Grandfather, as the sign-board directly before the gate will tell
the man who stops to read it. In the dusk, I dismounted here, tossed my
horse’s bridle to a barefooted boy, and then lugged my saddle-bags to
the porch before the unpainted front of a new addition on an old house.
I was well received and seated.
Beside the road, before the house, was presented that evening a scene
that merits description. It was the camp of a family who, having
abandoned one home, was seeking another. An open fire blazed on the
ground. Its light shone on a white covered, rickety wagon, at whose rear
end were feeding, out of a box strapped there, a mule and a horse. The
mule was all ears; the horse all ribs, backbone, and neck, plainly
appearing through a drum-tight hide. Around the fire was a squalid group
consisting of a man, woman, and four small boys. The man and boys were
barefooted, and wore nothing but hats, breeches, and shirts. The woman
had on a tattered gown, and had her pinched features concealed within a
dark bonnet. At that moment they were drinking coffee in turns from a
single tin cup, and eating corn bread. The pinched features, straggling
hair, and sallow, almost beardless face of the man, made his a visage of
stolid apathy. At intervals, a gust, sweeping down the narrow valley,
would lay low the flames and whirl the smoke in a circle, enveloping the
group, and awakening a loud coughing from the woman. My supper was not
ready until after I had seen the last one of the family crawl after the
others into the wagon for the night.
The next morning I went out to talk with them as they ate breakfast.
“Where are you from?” I asked.
“Tenesy,” answered the man, giving the accent on the first syllable, a
pronunciation peculiar to the uneducated natives.
“How do you come to be here?”
“Movin’. Got ejected in Tenesy, an’ we’re now huntin’ a new place.”
“Where?”
“Dunno. We reckon on squattin’ somewhar in the Blue Ridge.”
“Will you buy or rent the property?”
“Buy?” answered he, with an expression of astonishment on his face;
“What do you reckon I’d buy with, stranger? I ain’t got a copper, an’
thet mule, hoss, wagin, an’ hay an’ corn in hit, an’ them harnesses,
could’nt be swapped fer much land, I reckon. All I’ve got? Yes, ’cept
the ole woman an’ them boys. I’ll jist put up a cabin somewhars in the
woods, plant a crap, an’ stick thar till they done driv me out.”
After this reply, he leaned forward and poured out another cup of coffee
for himself and family, as I slowly turned and walked away. No more
poverty-stricken families can be found than some of these occasionally
seen moving through the mountains. This one had property in a team and
wagon, but I have met them traveling on foot and carrying their sole
possessions.
A family of the latter description I came across near the Ocona Lufta in
Swain county. It was a warm May day, and the road was dry and dusty. I
was on foot with a companion from the Richland valley. On descending a
short hill to a small stream gliding out from under a clump of wayside
willows, we met the party. There were eight of them, as destitute,
ragged, forlorn, and withal as healthy a family as I ever saw. The
father and husband was fully 70 years of age. His long gray hair,
although unkempt; his wrinkled face, and mild blue eyes, had something
in all to arouse reverence and pity in the most thoughtless of mankind.
He was dressed in an unbleached muslin shirt, much the worse for wear; a
pair of pantaloons so completely covered with patches that it would have
taken an artisan tailor to distinguish the original ground-work; a pair
of cloth suspenders, and a battered hat. He was bare-footed, and carried
on his shoulders half a bushel of corn. The wife and mother was much
younger. Her face was stolid enough to be utterly indifferent to their
condition. She had on the least possible quantity of clothes to cover
her form, and a calico bonnet on her head. Under her arm was a bundle of
spring onions, probably gathered from some convenient yard near which
they had encamped in true gypsy fashion. The eldest daughter, a grown
woman, was no better attired than her Mother. She had in her possession
a roll of tattered blankets. The five remaining, frowzy children,
barefooted and ragged like their sire, had in their respective keepings,
a coffee-pot, two or three gourds and an iron kettle. This was the whole
family with a full inventory of their worldly possessions. They said
that they were moving back to Tennessee; that they had been burnt out;
that the head of the family could not earn more than 20 cents per day;
that it was “split the Smoky mountings or bust.” We were under the
impression that the 20 cents per day included the board for the family.
We gave them some small change and tobacco and then separated.
The Grandfather mountain, in the extreme southern corner of Watauga
county, is the highest point of the Blue Ridge. The elevation is 5,897
feet, and being 35 miles in an air-line distant from the loftier summits
of the Black mountains, and fifteen miles from the Roan, over-topping as
it does all the nearer peaks by an altitude of nearly 1,000 feet, it
commands an almost limitless view of mountain country. It merits the
name of Grandfather, for its rocks are of the Archæan age, and the
oldest out-croppings on the globe. Two other reasons for its name are
ascribed; one from the profile of a man’s face seen from the Watauga
river; the other from the resemblance of the rhododendrons, when clad in
ice and snow, to the white, flowing beard of a patriarch.
Differing from all the mountains of the South, dense labyrinths of
rhododendrons and pines begin at its base. The traveler enters their
shadows by the road-side, and for two and a half miles, the distance
from Calloway’s to the summit, they are continually with him. Although
the first two miles are often accomplished on horseback, it is too steep
for easy riding. The path winds like the trail of a serpent, brushing by
the bases of low, vine-draped cliffs, around yellow hemlocks, and
disappearing in the rocky channel of a torrent, or into hedges of
rhododendrons.
On the morning that I made the ascent, I was impressed with the
noticeable absence of birds. Not a note from a feathered songster
resounded through the forest. No life was visible or audible, except
occasionally on the cliffs, quick-eyed lizards, of the color of the
rocks, appeared and then disappeared in the mossed crevices of the
stone.
One-half mile from the summit, under a tall, dark cliff whose cold face
seems never to have been kissed by sunlight, bubbles a large spring. Its
water is of a temperature less than eight degrees above the freezing
point. This, as far as is known, is the coldest spring south of New York
state. Here the steepest part of the ascent begins. At intervals old
logs are piled across the narrow trail, and in places rocks have set
themselves on edge. Grasses grow rankly with weeds and ferns. These,
covered with the moisture of the clouds that had dropped with the night
about the forehead of the Grandfather, and only lifted with daylight,
wet the person pushing through them as thoroughly as if he had fallen in
the torrent.
The summit of the mountain is a narrow, ragged ridge, covered with
balsams. If these trees were cleared from the central pinnacle, a
sweeping view toward every point of the compass could be obtained,
without change of position. As it is, they obstruct the vision, and to
see out on every side it is necessary to move to three points, all close
together, known as the Watauga, Caldwell, and Burke views.
Let the reader imagine himself stationed at one of these views. Mantling
the steep declivities are the wildernesses of black balsams. A cool
breeze swings and beats their branches together. The sun rides in an
atmosphere so clear that there seems no limit to vision. A precipice
breaks away from your feet, but you do not notice where it ends; for at
the attempted downward look, the mountains below, like the billows of a
stormy ocean stilled in their rolling by some mighty hand, crowd upon
the vision. They have all the colors of the ocean, wave beyond wave,
surge beyond surge, till they blend in with the sky, or hide their most
distant outlines in the cumuli bounding the horizon. You fancy hearing
the sound of breakers, and look directly below as though seeking for the
reason of no roar arising from the waves lying at the base of the
headland. Then the dream of the sea vanishes. There lie the forests,
dwarfed but real, dark green, covering the unsightly rocks and ending at
brown clearings, in whose centers appear farm-houses, the almost
invisible fences running wild over the hills, the yellow road revealed
at intervals, and the silver threads of streams.
It was on a beautiful Sunday morning that I left Calloway’s and rode
down the western slope of the Blue Ridge. A quiet, seemingly more
hallowed than that of other days, was brooding over the valley through
which, beside the Watauga, the road descended. The fields and meadows
were vacant; and the mountaineers, observant of the Sabbath, were all
within their homely dwellings, or assembled at the meeting-house of the
neighborhood. This place of prayer is a plain, unpainted, frame
building, enclosed by a rail fence, beside the road. Just before
reaching it your horse must splash through a roaring, crystal ford of
the Watauga. When I passed it that morning, services had already begun,
and the sounds of a hymn, sung by all the congregation, in strong,
melodious chorus, came wafted through the trees. A long line of saddled
horses and mules were ranged along the fence, or tied to the
rhododendron hedges on the opposite side of the road. The house seemed
packed; for many of the men were standing bare-headed in the sunlight
before the crowded door, and a number of young folks were gathered in
groups about the yard, the latter more intent on their own conversation
than on what was doing indoors. Some of them nodded to me as I passed.
This manner of the mountaineers saluting every one, friend or stranger,
is a pleasant one, and prevents, in the traveler, all feelings of
loneliness arising from his being in a strange country.
At one point on the road, the further rocky end of the Grandfather
mountain presents the distinct features of a face. You can see it
looking out from its head-dress of firs, like a demi-god, holding
eternal watch over the myriad mountains and valleys.
The vicinity of Blowing Rock is a summer resort. It is a lofty plateau
of the Blue Ridge, covered with dense forests, level farms, and crossed
by smooth highways. Good country accommodations are offered here for the
tourist. From the edge of the mountain wall, which overhangs Caldwell
county, two points--Blowing Rock and Fairview--afford admirable stands,
for overlooking the piedmont country. The views are similar in
character. From Fairview the valley of the John’s river, embosomed in
green mountains, lies in the low foreground; while rolling back, spread
ranges, picturesque in outline and purple coloring. In the morning or
evening, when the sunlight is thrown aslant across them, bathing the
fronting slopes in fire, and leaving, under the opposite brows, gloomy
shadows, so long drawn out that many of the valleys are as dark as they
are silent, the scene is such that one can never tire of viewing it, or
ever lose the impressions that even one sight of it will awaken.
A ride of eight miles from the center of the plateau resort, will bring
the traveler to Boone, the county seat of Watauga. Along the way several
sweeping landscape prospects are afforded. In one of the dense woods I
passed men engaged in clearing a laurel thicket. The soil where the
laurel springs being generally rich, it requires, after its clearing,
nothing but a slight plowing, and enough corn for planting, to have the
[Illustration: WATAUGA FALLS.]
expanse, which, during the last season, was blooming with white and
purple rhododendron flowers, transformed into a green and tasseled
corn-field.
Boone, the most elevated county seat east of the Rocky mountains, is
3,222 feet above the sea. Its population numbers about 200, and lives
along a street rising and falling with the hills. Due to the fact of no
majestic mountains arising round it, there is, in its surroundings, less
of the attractive features that distinguish the most of the mountain
county seats. Near the stream which flows on one side of the town,
Daniel Boone, the famous hunter, is said to have encamped while on a
hunting tour. It is from this tradition of the camp that the village
took its name.