Book Reviews

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Smoky Mountain Magic
Horace Kephart
©2009
ISBN: 978-0-937207-64-2
Great Smoky Mountain Association
Gatlinburg, TN
www.smokiesinformation.org
205 pages, $12.95

Smoky Mountain Adventure

Horace Kephart’s writings have inspired great interest in woodcraft and camping. His book of that title has remained in print for over one-hundred years. Millions revere him for championing the formation of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. His Our Southern Highlanders still reigns as the premier work about the people of the Smoky Mountains.

Less well known is a work of fiction that Kephart wrote depicting life in the Smoky Mountains. Kephart spent eighteen years gathering notes, composing and revising his novel; then in 1928 submitted it for publication. It was sent back. Two years later, Kephart was killed in an auto accident, and his novel lay ignored. Regard for Kephart, however, continued to grow. Now, eighty-one years after its completion, Smoky Mountain Magic has finally come to print.

In the novel, John Cabarrus returns to Kittuwa (present-day Bryson City, NC) in the Smoky Mountains after an absence of fifteen years. He sets up camp in the wilderness and begins panning the brooks and streams for minerals, arousing some suspicion from people who live in the area. He meets Marian Wentworth and rescues her horse whose foot got caught in a crevice in the ground.

Marian gradually pieces together what others have told her about a young boy whose family had come to grief fifteen years earlier. As her encounters with Cabarrus increase, she realizes that he is that boy. Cabarrus is now twenty-eight. Marian and Cabarrus become friends. Someone in Kittuwa had defrauded the Cabarrus family a long time ago and caused the young Cabarrus to flee when he was thirteen.

Kephart develops his storyline in an interesting way and crafts an adventuresome story. There’s a wrong that had been done to innocent and helpless people and a desire of Cabarrus to rectify the wrong without himself doing wrong. There’s a budding romance between Cabarrus and Marian. And there is much local color about the inhabitants of Kittuwa and the surrounding mountains and vivid descriptions of the pristine forest on the mountains.

Kephart does a fine job of capturing the mannerisms and speech patterns of the folks living in the mountains and of some Cherokee Indians who took refuge in the mountains to escape the forced relocation of the tribe to the Western Frontier. Kephart has his characters discuss some Cherokee creation legends and some of their myths about sacred talismans. Kephart has Cabarrus compare the Cherokee lore with similar legends and myths held by the Caucasian population in the hills. The only flaw I noticed is when Kephart has Cabarrus compare John Wesley’s teachings to similar superstition where, I think, it is obvious that Kephart did not fully understand Wesley.

Kephart develops a good plot explaining the dilemma Cabarrus is in and how Cabarrus works his way out of it. The novel ends with Cabarrus and Marian very much attracted to each other and with Cabarrus’ future looking good as a result of his hard work and good common sense. If anyone is tired of the wanton sexuality in today’s novels, you won’t see any of that here.

The rear cover shows a photograph of Kephart sitting against a tree on a mountain later named after him, his forearms resting on his knees; his rifle placed along side of him. It is a nice image of the man who loved these mountains and who worked so hard to have these mountains preserved for future generations. I can almost see Kephart’s spirit, still at ease, after all these years, surrounded by this forest he loved so much with its gurgling brooks and inquisitive titmice and chipmunks and where he once chanced upon relics of Stone Age man. I can almost visualize him becoming aware of the real spirit in the forest, the one who created the forest, the one who claims us all as his own.

You will enjoy Smoky Mountain Magic. It is well worth the reading.


Maurice A. Williams

http://www.geocities.ws/mauricewms2003

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