What the land has meant to the people

Geography matters.

From grunts to generals, soldiers understand the enormous role terrain plays in warfare. An intimate familiarity with terrain—the high ground, a ford in a river, a trail through a marsh or dense forest, the location of a wadi in the desert—can spell the difference between victory and disaster. Highway engineers similarly are aware of landscape’s tremendous effect on plans and aspirations. 

Most of us, however, fail to credit geography’s impact on a culture and its peoples. As we zip around our mountain highways, shop at malls carved from hills, and rumble across rivers by means of stout bridges, we give little thought, most of the time, to the degree in which these mountains have shaped the lives of all who ever have lived here, including ourselves. 

Ethnicity provides one of many examples of this formation. One finds a much larger African-American population in North Carolina’s eastern flat lands than in Western North Carolina. This imbalance occurred for at least two reasons: the mountain slopes and climate were not suitable for plantation farming—such farms relied on slave labor—and in later times, the Piedmont region, years ahead of the mountain culture in industrial development, drew black workers from South Carolina. The Cherokee, unlike tribes European settlers obliterated on the coast and flat lands, benefited from the mountains’ peaks and valleys, nooks and crannies. From accents to music, from folk arts to small independent farms, Western North Carolina’s culture is a result of geography.

Nearly all books written about Western North Carolina acknowledge, consciously or unconsciously, terrain’s influence. Take William R. Trotter’s “Bushwhackers: The Civil War in the North Carolina Mountains” (John F. Blair, Publisher, 338 pages, $18.95). Bushwhackers is part of a trilogy along with Silk Flags and Cold Steel and Ironclads and Columbiads, these being histories respectively of the Civil War in the Piedmont and on the Coast. Why does the Piedmont rate “Silk Flags” while the mountains earn the onerous “Bushwhackers?” Basic answer: terrain. The mountains were settled last in the state’s history; inhabitants, many of them Scots-Irish living in isolation, saw no point in succession, and skirmishes and feuds were therefore the order of the day among Union and Confederate sympathizers.

“Appalachian Travels: The Diary of Olive Dame Campbell” (University Press of Kentucky, 294 pages, $40) tells of the John C. Campbell Folk School founder and her husband when they first explored the Southern Appalachian Mountains in the early part of the twentieth century. Campbell notes the local people’s poverty and the ingenuity, the mountains’ beauty, and industry and tourism’s gradual incursions into the area—she describes places she and her husband slept each night, ranging from a cabin where the inhabitants hacked and coughed from some disease of the lung to a grand summer hotel in Linville with golf links. Campbell constantly attests to the terrain’s importance on their travels, writing of steep grades, good and bad roads, and the variety of vehicles—trains, motor cars, wagons—by which they made their journey.

In “Literary Trails of the North Carolina Mountains: A Guidebook” (The University of North Carolina Press, 426 pages, $22), Georgann Eubanks takes readers on 18 self-guided literary tours of Western North Carolina. In addition to the notes on more than 170 authors—writers like Horace Kephart, Gail Godwin, and Thomas Wolfe—Eubanks also visits various museums, restaurants, and bookshops, any establishment, in fact, having to do with literature. Public libraries, theaters, certain coffee shops, even a general store or two that carries books, cemeteries like Riverside in Asheville where both Thomas Wolfe and O’Henry are buried, the home towns of writers dead and alive: readers will find all of these in Literary Trails. Needless to say, writers mentioned all exhibit geography’s, the mountains’ influence in their work. Even F. Scott Fitzgerald was a frequent visitor to Asheville while his wife, Zelda, was at Highlands Hospital. The mountain climate gave rise to sanitariums for people suffering respiratory diseases or, as was the case with Zelda, mental and emotional problems. 

These books, like so many others Appalachian writers have produced, are reminders of the mountains’ impact on our lives and our culture. In our pride, we may think that we have fitted the mountains to serve us. It would behoove us to remember that the contrary is true. It is the mountains that have formed us.