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Updated: June 17, 2025
The language of the people of the Great Smokies and the Blue Ridge mountains is filled with a quaintness of expression. Many of their words and phrases that attract through their oddity were at one time in popular use and grammatically correct. These people are clinging to the dialect of their fathers who were Anglo-Saxons.
Where else can we hear to-day a phrase that passed out of standard English when "villainous saltpetre" supplanted the long-bow? It means to bury an arrow up to the feather, as when the old chronicler Harrison says, "An other arrow should haue beene fethered in his bowels." "Till the skyline blends with the sky itself." Great Smokies. N. C. from Mt.
Once in a blue moon a lynx is killed in the highest zone of the Smokies, up among the balsams and spruces, where both the flora and fauna, as well as the climate, resemble those of the Canadian woods. Our native hunters never heard the word lynx, but call the animal a "catamount."
More than that, what did I need of an outing? All the latter half of my life has been an outing, and an "inning" seemed more in order. Then, after fourscore years, the desire for change, for new scenes and new people, is at low ebb. The old and familiar draw more strongly. Yet I was fairly enlisted and bound to see the Old Smokies.
'That was the healthiest way, he reckoned, 'just to toughen yourself and not wear no coat. No matter how cold it was, he 'didn't wear no coat." One of my own neighbors in the Smokies never owned a coat until after his marriage, when a friend of mine gave him one.
In the mountains, where their numbers were considerable, they were the victims of a relentless guerilla warfare, as the same class was upon the other slope of the Great Smokies in East Tennessee. Out of these classes came the elements of new struggles for political power.
Curiously enough, our mountaineer knows little or nothing about the goat an animal perfectly adapted to the free range of the Smokies. I am convinced that goats would be more profitable to the small farmers of the wild mountains than cattle. Goats do not graze, but browse upon the shrubbery, of which there is a vast superfluity in all the Southern mountains.
In the Smokies the Eastern Band of Cherokees still holds its ancient capital on the Okona Lufty River, and the whites mingle freely with these redskins, bearing them no such despite as they do negroes, but eating at the same table and admitting Indians to the white compartment of a Jim Crow car.
Deep shadows clung to the walls and benches, charitably concealing much dirt and disorder left by previous occupants, much litter of our own contributing. At last we were on a saddle of the divide, a mile above sea-level, in a hut built years ago for temporary lodgment of cattle-men herding on the grassy "balds" of the Smokies.
Even as he shuddered, sickened at the terrible, though necessary deed, the deed which alone could save him from swift death, an overwhelming air-wave from the terrible explosion struck his speeding machine, the machine captured in the Great Smokies from the Air Trust itself. It heeled over like an unballasted yacht under the lash of a hurricane.
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