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HOW THE AUTHOR FOUND THE
INSPIRATION FOR HIS CIVIL WAR-ERA
NOVEL AMONG THE SECRETS BURIED IN
THE BACKWOODS OF THE SMOKY MOUNTAINS. |
ALSO:
Mountain man "Cold Mountain" Diary By Charles Frazier
Excerpts Tour dates - - - - - - - - - -
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BY CHARLES FRAZIER | One day six or seven years ago, shortly before I began writing "Cold Mountain," I drove across a ridge and switchbacked into a valley of the Smoky Mountains. The dirt road followed a 19th century wagon route that had, in turn, taken its course from an Indian path. Before that, a buffalo trail. I parked by Caldwell Fork and walked several miles up the creek. The month was October, clear and dry. The leaves were turning and a lot of them -- especially from the poplars -- had already fallen. I was looking for a grave. Eventually I found the marker -- a flat riverstone -- on a shelf of land cut into a steep hillside. Two men occupy the same hole, civilians killed in the last days of the Civil War by Federals, Kirk's men come over the ridge raiding from Tennessee. Buried together, I guess, to save shovel work. Just a few miles away on the other side of Mount Sterling is another such grave. In it, sharing one coffin, lie a fiddler and a retarded boy killed by Teague's Confederate Home Guard. The tree the men were backed against to be shot still lived not long ago and may yet. I have not, though, found anyone who can say which, out of many candidates, it is. Witnesses reported that the fiddler played "Bonaparte's Retreat" before the triggers were pulled. I was not then thinking about writing a Civil War novel, and though I am triply qualified for acceptance into the Sons of Confederate Veterans, I remain largely uninterested in the great movements of troops, the famous personality traits of the noble generals and tragic presidents. What I am interested in are those two double graves and what they seem to represent. The people in them were caught in the crossfire of two incompatible economies. For none of those four dead could have had much to do with either of the warring sides, no strong ties to slave agriculture or industrial capitalism. They were most likely old Scots whose ancestors only a few generations back had been exiled from their country in the years after Culloden, the 18th century battle between Britain and Scotland that led to a major migration of Scots to the U.S. Fewer than 5 percent of their kind owned slaves, and most of them never worked for anyone but themselves. They were members of a small, old economy, existing in the seams between the two great incompatible powers. I don't know a term for what they were -- perhaps a rough, redneck version of Jefferson's agrarian ideal. They lived by farming a little bit of their own land, and by open-range herding of cattle and hogs, by hunting and fishing, gathering and gleaning. It was a very old way of life that had nurtured human beings for millennia, a life dependent on sparse populations and large tracts of common land. And on internal matters as well: the limitation of desire, stability, making do, a healthy suspicion of change for its own sake, extreme independence of thought and action, reluctance to acknowledge authority. Beneath it all, a hint of deep earth spirituality. In other words, they depended on just the opposite of most of the things we currently live by. I knew a few such people as a child, but they were old, and I know no one remotely like them now. And it's not just a Southern thing. There's a strong vein of this worldview in what we think of as Americana. You see bits of it in James Fenimore Cooper, a lot of it in Thoreau and Whitman and Frost. Old-time music is infused with it. Brilliant modern flashes of it in Woody Guthrie and Kerouac, though he clearly felt the end near. I knew I wanted to write about those old lifeways, but I needed some point of access. I was given such an entry not long after that day on Caldwell Fork when my father told me about an ancestor of ours, a man named Inman who left the war and walked home wounded. The man who killed the fiddler was waiting for him when he reached the mountains. The story seemed like an American odyssey and it also seemed to offer itself as a form of elegy for that lost world I had been thinking about. So I set out on Inman's trail and followed it for five years of writing.
Last year, when I was nearly finished with the book, I went looking for yet another grave. I climbed up the hill where my father says the real Inman is buried. There's nothing to tell exactly where he lies. Just a bunch of sunken oblongs with wooden markers rotted down to stubs or flat stones with unreadable scratching on them. All anonymous. If he's there he has a fine view to the forks of the Pigeon River, where once stood a Cherokee town called Kanuga, not a trace of it left but potsherds in the river sand. His long view is up toward Cold Mountain. I am in his debt and I wish him peace.
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