Horace Kephart roamed the Smoky Mountains in all seasons, but he held springtime here in high esteem.
“I doubt if anywhere in the world there is a more luxuriant bloom of of laurel and rhododendron than where I live in the Great Smoky Mountains,” he noted in 1916 in Camping and Woodcraft, a backwoods primer that has gone through some 70 printings.
Kephart kept a tiny cabin for a time on the Little Fork of the Sugar Fork of Hazel Creek, deep in the southwestern corner of today’s national park. A quirky backwoodsman, who at one time had been a librarian in St. Louis, Kephart gained widespread acclaim for the lessons he learned in the Smokies. Today, amazon.com says his two-volume Camping and Woodcraft book “ranks sixth among the ten best-selling sporting books of all time.”
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Comments
Sounds like you had a great visit down here, Kurt. Nice article.
Regarding Kephart, however, you won't get much warm fuzzy from true Smokies sons and daughters about him. He is seen as a carpetbagging degenerate who abandoned his large family to pursue and indulge his alcoholism in the hills aforementioned. Old Horace took advantage of Southern Hospitality on many occasions only to turn around and make fun of their "simplistic" lifestyle and capitalize in his books on their backs.
Kurt--I am a native of the Smokies and one of those Kephart described as "branch-water people." I am also someone who has done a great deal of study on and writing about Horace Kephart, I would like to add a few thoughts to your well-written piece on a part of the world I cherish and to the review of Camping and Woodcraft.
First, Kephart is by no means universally liked, much less revered, by folks with roots running deep in the Smokies. All you have to do is look at this list of descriptors he used to describe the "Southern Highlanders" to understand why:In a single chapter in that book, "The People of the Hills," he uses the following words to describe mountaineers: feral, primitive, crafty, strange, intgermarried, slab-sided, stoop-shouldered, sinister, vindictive, sulolen, hateful, suspicious, listless, shiftless, defective, inbred, half-wits, indifferent, unsanitary, gross, and touchy. I would simply suggest that anyone facing that assembly of pejoratives is likely to experience more than a mere touch ot tetchiness. Certainly I do.
In his book Random Thoughts and Musings of a Mountaineer, Judge Felix Alley, a widely respected, well-educated, and indeed beloved man of the mountains, wrote of Our Southern Highlanders: "If Mr. Kephart and Miss Morley (Margaret Morley, author of The Carolina Mountains) had closed their books when they finished what they had to say about the mountains and the mountain region,k and had said nothing about the people who dwell therein, their books would have been acclaimed masterpieces, and we should have owed them a debt of gratitude so great that it never could be repaid. Instead they extend the false impression created by other libelous writers, so that even today multitudes of people . . . look upon our mountaineers as freaks and curiosities." He was squarely on target.
As for the Bernstein review of Camping and Woodcraft, I would agree that appreciable portions of the book are of enduring value. So much is that the case that I successfully nominated him, many years ago, for the inaugural class of the American Camping Hall of Fame. However, there are portions of the book which are highly problematic. His coverage of what he styled "route sketching," for example, is so inaccurate as to in effect provide a tailor-made recipe for getting lost. Similarly, in this book there arises a problem with his inaccuracy when it came to the correct spelling of place names that was magnified many times over (and continues to be an issue to this day) in his work on the Nomenclature Committee which renamed many places in what would become the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
Finally, the statement that Libby Kephart Hargrave (not Hargrove, as Bernstein spells it) "has been very instrumental in keeping alive an accurate version of Kephart" is, to put matters bluntly, pure balderdash. Although one can readily understand the filial passion underlying Hargrave's endeavors, the cumulative result of them is often an extended exercise in hagiography.
Jim Casada