Looking for a book to take to the mountains that’ll make you to kick back the rocker and put your feet on the porch rail?
Look no farther than Our Southern Highlanders by Horace Kephart, originally published in 1913 and continually in print. And since the Appalachian Trail has been in the news of late, Kephart’s writings did much to promote the creation of that wilderness pathway.
Kephart, a child of the Iowa frontier, made his way East for collegiate work at Boston University and then Cornell. After a stint in the 1880s cataloguing Willard Fisk’s enormous collection of Italian manuscripts at the Villa Forini in Florence, Italy, this young bibliophile returned and married his fiancé, Laura Mack of Ithaca. He became a research librarian at Yale and then directed the St. Louis Mercantile Library Association. The “Merc” was the oldest, and for years, the most prestigious library west of the Mississippi.
This bow-tied academician logged 12-hour days putting together the greatest collection of the history of the American West. From the native American culture to the Spanish and French incursion, Kephart was the expert.
Then one day in the spring of 1904, Kephart walked out and left no word of explanation and no forwarding address. His wife and six children had no idea where he was. A few weeks went by and a letter came asking that Kephart’s typewriter and a few of his books be crated up and freighted C.O.D. to the Asheville Post Office. Horace let all know that he was headed for the “back of beyond.”
That “back of beyond” one day, thanks in part to him, would be known as the Appalachian Trail.
Kephart went into the Appalachian wilderness for a few weeks to find himself, much as Henry David Thoreau did at Walden Pond, but, unlike Thoreau who lived isolated for two years, Kephart was one with the Appalachian wilds for the rest of his life.
“Kep,” as he was known to his mountain cronies, had been quite an outdoorsman in his early years on the Iowa plains. That was before he made a name for himself as one of the country’s top archivists. One more credential and Kephart would have been a candidate for Librarian of Congress. But the call of the wild, and maybe the call of hundred-proof, moonshine whiskey lured this scholarly man from his family and vocation.
The old southern expression, “He’ll take a drink,” certainly held true with Horace. His battle with alcoholism evidently led to the break up of his marriage, the estrangement from his children, and the loss of his academic position.
However, the new life that Kep forged for himself in the Appalachian mountains brought him a spate of fame as one of America’s greatest shooting sportsmen. Kephart’s most enduring legacy is his book Our Southern Highlanders, which captures the clannish lifestyle of the Scots-Irish who made this remote wilderness their province for 200 years.
This librarian-turned-woodsman lived alone in lean-to shelters for nine years encompassing the Theodore Roosevelt administration. The enthusiasm that T.R. had for all things Americana, and for wilderness adventures especially, rubbed off on Kephart. Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Interior, Gifford Pinchot, was the recipient of a number of Kephart entreaties advocating the creation of a national park in the Great Smoky Mountains.
Even though he lived rough in the dense western North Carolina mountains, Kephart always had his typewriter and folding desk handy so that he could write stories about his wilderness adventures. The magazine All Outdoors was the top sportsman’s periodical, and Kep’s regular columns earned him a modest living. By this time his family had long since given up on him and had gone back to New York.
Just how Kephart got hooked-up with the federal revenue agents and their whiskey-still-busting campaign is unclear, but by 1910 he took lodging at Cooper Boarding House in Bryson City, North Carolina - the Moonshine Capitol of the South. Bryson City had a county courthouse, a boarding house, a drugstore and a hardware store.
Prohibition was a godsend from Washington for these crusty mountaineers. It brought more business than they could handle.
At Cooper’s Boarding House strangers would show up for a week or two just to “have a good drunk” before returning to their “dry” counties.
Of course, the revenue agents stayed at Cooper’s also, and that made for intrigue.
Only Kephart can tell these tales in the brogues of the east Tennessean and west North Carolinian.
One evening at the boarding house Kep was waiting in the parlor for the dinner bell to ring and he noticed a stranger reading Don Quixote in Spanish. The stranger was a giant of a man who claimed to be a rancher from Oklahoma “visiting for some air” in the NC mountains. This rancher always packed a couple of concealed handguns and was very quick on the draw. Horace had the man pegged as a fellow with a serious alcohol problem.
In dramatic fashion all suspense was lifted when the rancher announced that he was a United States Marshall on assignment in Bryson City to arrest moonshiners doing business on the Cherokee reservation. Kep was deputized along with a few others and off the posse went on a manhunt in the roughest terrain east of the Mississippi.
For anyone brought up on tv programs such as “The Beverly Hillbillies” and “The Dukes of Hazzard,” discard right now that idea of hillbilly life. As Kephart describes it, these insular and wily folks are peaceable until someone trifles with their corn liquor, their dogs, or their women.
Not only does Horace write of the lifestyle of east-ern Appalachia in the way that Francis Parkman writes of the American West, that he “clothes the bones with flesh and blood.” The stories he tells of hunting black bears, wild boars, and Carolina panthers take us back to the era of Crockett and Boone.
And that is what Kephart told his wife in the letter — that he wanted to “go somewhere that he could realize the past in the present.”
For 95 years Kephart’s book has been the best mountain read of the summer!

(Dr. Thomas B. Horton is a history teacher at Porter-Gaud School. He lives in the Old Village of Mount Pleasant. Visit his Web site at www.historyslostmoments.com).