The Changing Blue Ridge Mountains: Essays on Journeys Past and Present

By Brent Martin

Explore this section of the Appalachians in these essays examining its history, its wilderness, and what change means for its future.

In the eighteenth century, naturalist and artist William Bartram traveled in the Blue Ridge Mountains and spent time documenting both plant life and the customs of the Middle Town Cherokees. Since that time, men and women like Bartram have journeyed through Western North Carolina’s wildest and most remote places and written about their experiences. The essays in this volume compare the present day to those historical journeys and explore the idea of wilderness and what change means for the future of the people and the species who live in the mountains. Join local writer and guide Brent Martin on a journey through this incredible landscape.

“With unflinching candor, Brent Martin celebrates the heartbreaking beauty of Appalachia. He wrings out every sensory and emotional detail in these passionate, probing essays that explore the wild within. These aren’t lyrical paeans to nature; they are gritty, gutsy journeys into the rugged, remote landscapes of the human heart. Immersed in mountain tradition, culture, and community, he wanders deep and alone into the wild to find what remains. Martin’s powerful, masterful writing shines with real, hard-earned hope.” —Will Harlan, author of the New York Times bestseller Untamed: The Wildest Woman in America 

“If you love the Southern Appalachians and Wendell Berry and Annie Dillard and Gary Snyder, read this beautifully written and deeply thought-provoking book.” —Charles Frazier, author of the New York Times bestseller Cold Mountain

“A thoughtful and thought-provoking collection of essays from one of Appalachia’s staunchest proponents of wilderness and one of its most devoted writers. Brent Martin is a preeminent naturalist and a scholar of the history of his place. This book is deeply personal, highly instructive, far-reaching.” —Janisse Ray, author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

“A loving a troubling portrait of the southern Appalachians—the rich history and complexity of ecosystems alongside the damage we’ve wrought on them.” —Catherine Reid, author of Falling into Place: An Intimate Geography of Home

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 17, 2019
• ISBN: 9781439667149

Book preview

IT’S A GOOD COUNTRY; HOLD ON TO IT

It is another dark and freezing winter night here in the old Doc Clark home on West Branch, and after several days of rain, I can hear the stream’s bold and lonely babble through our bedroom window. It is the season when we are prone to question our decisions and our ability to persevere. The landscape, empty of vegetation, reveals itself in stark shadows and light. I have been reading William Bartram’s Travels again tonight, focusing on his eighteenth-century description of this area and situating our late nineteenth-century home into that landscape.

Bartram passed through our valley less than a mile from our front door, describing Cherokee plantations of corn and beans as he went. Pottery shards and arrowheads found in my garden confirm their presence, and I have often wondered if Doc didn’t situate his home on what once had been a Cherokee dwelling. Now I lie in bed and imagine this mountain hollow as it might have appeared 20,000 years ago—an ice age boreal forest of spruce fir, an ecotone resembling something closer to Canada today. I think back further to the geological uplift that formed these mountains over 300 million years ago, enormous mountains many thousands of feet higher than they are now, slowly eroding at a pace we are not capable of conceptualizing, our house now sitting where there was once deep soil and stone. Slow, grinding evolution, pathless and without people for millions and millions of years. I feel that alone.

The author’s home on a snowy winter day. Photo by Angela Faye Martin.

Humans have only inhabited Cowee valley for the last ten thousand years or so. The first early nomadic bands that arrived here might have arrived in the hundreds, but we will never know. They likely prospered, and there is evidence of settled agriculture that dates back four thousand years to support this. The Native American mound building culture that developed sometime around the ninth century AD was largely wiped out by diseases introduced by Spanish explorers in the sixteenth century. The Cherokees who followed them created a vibrant town in Cowee that did well until the French and Indian War of the 1760s. There was another wave of destruction of Cowee during the American Revolution, but the Cherokees hung on here until their Jacksonian-era removal in 1838. American settlers hungry for land followed, and then the Civil War, followed by industrialist timber interests, world wars and their attendant worker Diasporas and now this.

The road outside is glazing over with ice. Tomorrow, it will be covered with snow. We will likely be here for a few days before venturing out. We will be without power soon, but we are prepared. There is firewood stacked on the porch for the wood stove, batteries for the CD player, propane for our camp stove and plenty of candles. It will be silent, and we will write. And I don’t really mind the not venturing out. I will be forced to be bored, and I can use it. If there is one thing we twenty-first-century Americans could use a good dose of, it is some forced and productive boredom.

A hundred years ago, the road outside stopped at our house. There was nothing above us but the towering Cowee range, likely stripped of timber at that time, with cattle grazing and corn growing on the rugged hillsides. Today, it goes for another mile before turning back at the edge of the national forest and heading down the mountainside opposite us. Empty second homes dot its path in winter, many of them likely in bank ownership after the last real estate collapse. One of the Clark daughters who is in her nineties stops by every once in a while with her daughter, who always drives up out front, rolls down the window and yells, Mama says she wanted to go home. Upon her first visit here, the elderly woman stood outside the car, looked up at the mountains above us, swept her hands about and said, My daddy sold all that land to the government for a dollar an acre.

Yes, he did, and the government agency, the U.S. Forest Service, eventually purchased almost half the county. This, in turn, led to the area becoming a major recreation and second-home destination, with almost half the county’s property tax bills now being sent out of state. Cowee, once the vibrant diplomatic capital of the Middle Town Cherokees, followed by agricultural American Cowee, is now a mishmash of retired Floridians, second-home owners, locals and those who have moved here for quality of life reasons—a broad spectrum of back-to-the-landers, post-suburban dropouts, survivalists, fundamentalists and New Age eschatologists.

IT IS AN EXCEPTIONALLY warm July morning, soon to be very hot, and I am standing on top of the Cowee mound, the once ceremonial center and diplomatic capital of the Middle Town Cherokees. In my hand is the Harper’s edition of William Bartram’s Travels, hefty and covered in sweat after the march here from the end of the gravel road by the Little Tennessee River. There are perhaps twenty-five people around me, and they are waiting for me to read Bartram’s description of the mound and the council house that once stood here. I am amazed that so many people turn out on a weekday in this remote location to hear and talk about one of America’s first and most well-known naturalists. Bartram passed through here in May 1775 on his journey to the Cherokee Overhill Towns near present-day Loudon, Tennessee, but he stopped in Cowee for an extended visit, exploring the area while waiting on a guide.

This is the heart of the southern Blue Ridge; look in any direction from here and there are mountains. To the west, the Nantahala range runs roughly north, paralleling the river and eventually reaching a dead end at the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. To the east, the Cowee range looms closer, with Cowee Bald, a sacred mountain to the Cherokees, standing out starkly among the ridgeline’s many peaks. Studded with radio and cell towers, it is not hard to locate. To the north, the Unaka range of the Great Smokies is a distant hazy blue, barely discernible. It is apparent to all here why Bartram described Cowee as one of the most charming mountain landscapes perhaps anywhere to be seen. This event has been advertised as an outing to learn more about Bartram and his time in the Little Tennessee Valley, and since this rural area has a large retirement and second-home population, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised at such a large weekday turnout. If you have lived here long, you have likely heard his name.

Cowee mound, the once diplomatic center of the Middle Town Cherokees. Photo by Ralph Preston.

Bartram’s path to Cowee in 1775 began in Charleston, South Carolina, from which he traveled up through Keowee, the principal town of the Lower Town Cherokees in northwest South Carolina, and across to the headwaters of the Little Tennessee near present-day Mountain City, Georgia. From there, he turned north and followed the river as it wound through a landscape largely empty of humans, passing through the empty Cherokee village of Nikwasee, a spiritual center yet to recover from the damage inflicted upon it during the French and Indian War. Today, the mound is a tiny green island surrounded by the town of Franklin, where such reverential honorifics as Indian Mound Realty, Hot Spot Convenience Store and Black Dog Guns spill forth from the mound’s tenuous base.

His description of the great Vale of Cowee is replete with the language of someone at once in love with the natural beauty of the world yet struggling with its harshness and the plight of its inhabitants—not to mention his own internal drama. The passages are filled with luminous descriptions of the plant world, Cherokee customs and characteristics, the violent and destructive forces of Appalachian weather and what my friend Brad Sanders has referred to in his Guide to William Bartram’s Travels as the Southern Paradise Lost. I have always considered Travels a bittersweet and melancholic interpretation of the eighteenth-century southern landscape, a landscape on the great verge of something, and a reading never leaves me without feeling a bit wistful, even nostalgic for what is likely an over-romanticized past.

I think of Bartram as America’s first hippie and one of the only eighteenth-century Americans who still has groupies. The Seminoles named him Puc Puggy, or, in English, the Flower Seeker. He was a Quaker pacifist at odds with his father, longing for his respect. There are annual conferences, biographies, anthologies, epic poems and trail societies that exalt his legacy. I’ve dressed as Bartram and taken groups down the Little Tennessee River in canoes to hear about him and to experience this view from the mound. I’ve looked for his original route up the Cowee mountains with historical map expert Lamar Marshall, read my own poems about him out loud, read his Travels to groups while dressed as I thought he might have dressed and spent one long winter slowly reading Philip Lee Williams’s four-hundred-page epic poem The Flower Seeker, each line going down in me like a sip of old smoky bourbon. It might best be described as an affliction.

The Nantahala Mountains, described by Bartram as the Jore mountains. Photo by Ralph Preston.

Bartram’s language for this landscape is rich with the adjectives of respect and awe, and I find myself going back to passages of his in order to ground myself here in a way that makes me view my homeplace geography with hope. His visit to Cowee on the eve of the American Revolution was over a decade after the French and Indian War, and the landscape had been stripped of the Cherokees’ original glory and magnificence. Like most Anglo explorers and military adventurists of his day, he found the place intimidating, though his is the only account that expresses such intimidation simultaneously with rapture and awe. His description of the view west from the Nantahala Mountains is a powerful expression of this: I began to ascend the Jore Mountains, which I at length accomplished, and rested on the most elevated peak, from whence I beheld with rapture and astonishment, a sublimely awful scene of power and magnificence, a world of mountains piled upon mountains.

Not long after his descent into the Nantahala River drainage, Bartram retreated from his original plan to reach the Cherokee Overhill Towns and returned to Cowee. It wasn’t just the lonely and intimidating landscape before him; he had encountered on his path Atakullahkullah, the well-known and respected Cherokee chief, who gave him a friendly warning of colonial troubles in the Overhill Towns.

I believe he also heard a lonesome note within these mountains and hollows, including one that exudes that certain melancholy that Emily Dickinson tapped into with her certain slant of light. I have experienced this in the mountains of Appalachia my entire life. I think that the spirit world here runs deep, an expression of the hundreds of millions of years of the birth, death and decay of an unparalleled world of plant and animal life. Walk the rich coves of Appalachia on an early spring morning and you will not deny the power of this dark and evocative bouquet. Thomas P. Slaughter, in The Natures of John and William Bartram, has written about Bartram’s suffering of melancholia. Among the letters that Slaughter uses to support this is one of southern planter Henry Laurens, whose description of Bartram’s condition upon his visit to Bartram’s backwoods struggling Florida farm suggests suicidal tendencies. Laurens’s letter to William’s father states matter-of-factly that William simply wasn’t fit for the world in which other men lived.

Bartram did compare himself to Nebuchadnezzar while traveling in the Nantahala Mountains, expelled from the society of men and constrained to roam in the mountains and wilderness, there to herd and feed with the wild beasts of the forest. He describes his journey into the mountains of Cowee as a lonesome pilgrimage and speaks of the dreary mountains. More than once, he describes the landscape sinking his spirits. I ask Brad Sanders what he thinks about Slaughters’s assertion, as well as my own feelings about the Appalachians having their own unnerving certain slant of light.

To the first question, Brad tells me:

I am not so sure that Bartram was melancholy, but maybe just introverted and introspective. His bête noire was that he had to live and work in a society that required him to behave differently, mainly work for a living at a career that he did not like just so he could have money. He was by no means a recluse, because everybody he met found him to be charming