Where There Are Mountains: An Environmental History of the Southern Appalachians, and: The Great Smokies: From Natural Habitat to National Park, and: The Wild East: A Biography of the Great Smoky Mountains (review)

Where There Are Mountains. An Environmental History of the Southern Appalachians. By Donald Edward Davis. University of Georgia Press, 2000. 352 pp. Cloth $40.00

The Great Smokies. From Natural Habitat to National Park . By Daniel S. Pierce. University of Tennessee Press, 2000. 296 pp. Paper $18.95

The Wild East. A Biography of the Great Smoky Mountains . By Margaret Lynn Brown. University Press of Florida, 2000. 504 pp. Cloth $49.95, paper $24.95

The first European tourist to write about his summer vacation in the southern mountains was the Philadelphia Quaker, William Bartram. His Travels (now published in a lovely Library of America edition) tells how he spent most of 1775 riding and tramping from Charleston to Cherokee and back, watching his feet most of the way. He catalogued the plants he didn't step on, the friendly people he met (he liked everybody, and everything--he devotes a couple of pages to the excellent character of the rattlesnake), and the liquor he didn't drink. He has inspired visitors and writers ever since. If the university presses don't watch it, the Appalachian balds are going to start getting bigger from the harvesting of trees to print these new histories of the mountains.

Donald Edward Davis's Where There are Mountains: An Environmental History of the Southern Appalachians is the most scholarly of the bunch, and he is the most like Bartram in his willingness to consider everything as relevant. Davis covers the mountains from Mississippian times ("Mississippian" referring to the people who were here when DeSoto came in 1540) through the period of industrial railroad logging (beginning in the 1880s), and ends with the sudden death of the chestnut trees in the 1930s. Along the way he documents the horrifying results of DeSoto's contact with the Mississippians (for every twenty native Americans in the southern states at the arrival of DeSoto, one survived the Spanish epidemic diseases), speculates about the travels of the sweet potato (the Spanish brought it from the West Indies and maybe the English traded it inland, but by the mid-1770s the Cherokees were "living on them"), and notes the preference of hogs for peaches and chestnuts (mountain hogs brought the best prices because they gorged on fallen chestnuts). "Ecology" must mean everything; Davis doesn't find a thing he doesn't fit into his story.

Perhaps his most instructive tale recounts the era of "industrial railroad logging," the period from 1880 to 1920. During these four decades, the railroad and timber companies joined forces to put narrow-gauge rail lines deep into the old-growth forest of the southern mountains and to haul out everything they could get their hands on. The trees were astonishing: yellow poplars twelve feet in diameter; white and red oaks more than six feet in diameter, yielding 15,000 board feet of timber each. Davis concludes that "[d]uring the four-hundred-year history of land use that this book chronicles, the single greatest human activity to affect environmental and cultural change in the southern Appalachians is industrial
logging."

"Industrial logging" was logging without mercy. Steep slopes were worked by dragging the cut trees across the hillside, flattening everything in the way. Bark and branches were cut and piled willy-nilly, where they often fueled wildfires that further denuded the slopes. The abundant rainfall washed the bare dirt into the creeks, where mud dammed and debris piled until it rotted. The increased runoff of rainwater resulted in increased flooding of the mountain rivers--and it was, largely, the increased flooding that finally brought government action. A 1901 government report about flooding squarely blamed the timber-cutting practices, but nothing was ever done about the practices themselves. Instead, in 1911 the federal government began to purchase cut-over, eroded acreage...