Is It
"Low" To Dwell Upon These Things Of The Senses, When One Is On A Tour
In Search Of The Picturesque?
Let the reader ride from Abingdon
through a wilderness of cornpone and rusty bacon, and then judge.
There were, to be sure, novels lying about, and newspapers, and
fragments of information to be picked up about a world into which the
travelers seemed to emerge.
They, at least, were satisfied, and went
off to their rooms with the restful feeling that they had arrived
somewhere and no unquiet spirit at morn would say "to horse." To
sleep, perchance to dream of Tatem and his household cemetery; and
the Professor was heard muttering in his chamber,
"Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed,
The dear repose for limbs with travel tired;
But then begins a journey in my head,
To work my mind, when body's work's expir'd."
The morning was warm (the elevation of the hotel must be between
twenty-five hundred and three thousand feet), rainy, mildly rainy;
and the travelers had nothing better to do than lounge upon the
veranda, read feeble ten-cent fictions, and admire the stems of the
white birches, glistening in the moisture, and the rhododendron
- trees, twenty feet high, which were shaking off their last pink
blossoms, and look down into the valley of the Doe. It is not an
exciting landscape, nothing bold or specially wild in it, but restful
with the monotony of some of the wooded Pennsylvania hills.
Sunday came up smiling, a lovely day, but offering no church
privileges, for the ordinance of preaching is only occasional in this
region. The ladies of the hotel have, however, gathered in the
valley a Sunday-school of fifty children from the mountain cabins. A
couple of rainy days, with the thermometer rising to 80 deg.,
combined with natural laziness to detain the travelers in this
cottage of ease. They enjoyed this the more because it was on their
consciences that they should visit Linville Falls, some twenty-five
miles eastward, long held up before them as the most magnificent
feature of this region, and on no account to be omitted. Hence,
naturally, a strong desire to omit it. The Professor takes bold
ground against these abnormal freaks of nature, and it was nothing to
him that the public would demand that we should see Linville Falls.
In the first place, we could find no one who had ever seen them, and
we spent two days in catechizing natives and strangers. The nearest
we came to information was from a workman at the furnace, who was
born and raised within three miles of the Falls. He had heard of
people going there. He had never seen them himself. It was a good
twenty-five miles there, over the worst road in the State we'd think
it thirty before we got there. Fifty miles of such travel to see a
little water run down-hill! The travelers reflected. Every country
has a local waterfall of which it boasts; they had seen a great many.
One more would add little to the experience of life. The vagueness
of information, to be sure, lured the travelers to undertake the
journey; but the temptation was resisted - something ought to be left
for the next explorer - and so Linville remains a thing of the
imagination.
Towards evening, July 29, between showers, the Professor and the
Friend rode along the narrow-gauge road, down Johnson's Creek, to
Roan Station, the point of departure for ascending Roan Mountain. It
was a ride of an hour and a half over a fair road, fringed with
rhododendrons, nearly blossomless; but at a point on the stream this
sturdy shrub had formed a long bower where under a table might have
been set for a temperance picnic, completely overgrown with wild
grape, and still gay with bloom. The habitations on the way are
mostly board shanties and mean frame cabins, but the railway is
introducing ambitious architecture here and there in the form of
ornamental filigree work on flimsy houses; ornamentation is apt to
precede comfort in our civilization.
Roan Station is on the Doe River (which flows down from Roan
Mountain), and is marked at 1265 feet above the sea. The visitor
will find here a good hotel, with open wood fires (not ungrateful in
a July evening), and obliging people. This railway from Johnson
City, hanging on the edge of the precipices that wall the gorge of
the Doe, is counted in this region by the inhabitants one of the
engineering wonders of the world. The tourist is urged by all means
to see both it and Linville Falls.
The tourist on horseback, in search of exercise and recreation, is
not probably expected to take stock of moral conditions. But this
Mitchell County, although it was a Union county during the war and is
Republican in politics (the Southern reader will perhaps prefer
another adverb to "although"), has had the worst possible reputation.
The mountains were hiding-places of illicit distilleries; the woods
were full of grog-shanties, where the inflaming fluid was sold as
"native brandy," quarrels and neighborhood difficulties were
frequent, and the knife and pistol were used on the slightest
provocation. Fights arose about boundaries and the title to mica
mines, and with the revenue officers; and force was the arbiter of
all disputes. Within the year four murders were committed in the
sparsely settled county. Travel on any of the roads was unsafe. The
tone of morals was what might be expected with such lawlessness. A
lady who came up on the road on the 4th of July, when an excursion
party of country people took possession of the cars, witnessed a
scene and heard language past belief. Men, women, and children drank
from whisky bottles that continually circulated, and a wild orgy
resulted. Profanity, indecent talk on topics that even the license
of the sixteenth century would not have tolerated, and freedom of
manners that even Teniers would have shrunk from putting on canvas,
made the journey horrible.
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