So We Rode Away, In The Blazing Heat, No Poetry Exuding From The
Professor, Eight Miles To Banner's Elk, Crossing A Mountain And
Passing Under Hanging Rock, A Conspicuous Feature In The Landscape,
And The Only Outcropping Of Rock We Had Seen:
The face of a ledge,
rounded up into the sky, with a green hood on it.
From the summit we
had the first extensive prospect during our journey. The road can be
described as awful, - steep, stony, the horses unable to make two
miles an hour on it. Now and then we encountered a rude log cabin
without barns or outhouses, and a little patch of feeble corn. The
women who regarded the passers from their cabin doors were frowzy and
looked tired. What with the heat and the road and this discouraged
appearance of humanity, we reached the residence of Dugger, at
Banner's Elk, to which we had been directed, nearly exhausted. It is
no use to represent this as a dash across country on impatient
steeds. It was not so. The love of truth is stronger than the
desire of display. And for this reason it is impossible to say that
Mr. Dugger, who is an excellent man, lives in a clean and attractive
house, or that he offers much that the pampered child of civilization
can eat. But we shall not forget the two eggs, fresh from the hens,
whose temperature must have been above the normal, nor the
spring-house in the glen, where we found a refuge from the flies and
the heat. The higher we go, the hotter it is. Banner's Elk boasts an
elevation of thirty-five to thirty-seven hundred feet.
We were not sorry, towards sunset, to descend along the Elk River
towards Cranberry Forge. The Elk is a lovely stream, and, though not
very clear, has a reputation for trout; but all this region was under
operation of a three-years game law, to give the trout a chance to
multiply, and we had no opportunity to test the value of its
reputation. Yet a boy whom we encountered had a good string of
quarter-pound trout, which he had taken out with a hook and a feather
rudely tied on it, to resemble a fly. The road, though not to be
commended, was much better than that of the morning, the forests grew
charming in the cool of the evening, the whippoorwill sang, and as
night fell the wanderers, in want of nearly everything that makes
life desirable, stopped at the Iron Company's hotel, under the
impression that it was the only comfortable hotel in North Carolina.
II
Cranberry Forge is the first wedge of civilization fairly driven into
the northwest mountains of North Carolina. A narrow-gauge railway,
starting from Johnson City, follows up the narrow gorge of the Doe
River, and pushes into the heart of the iron mines at Cranberry,
where there is a blast furnace; and where a big company store, rows
of tenement houses, heaps of slag and refuse ore, interlacing tracks,
raw embankments, denuded hillsides, and a blackened landscape, are
the signs of a great devastating American enterprise.
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