Dr. Johnson and Horace Kephart Among The Highlanders

Natural Tunnel State Park, Virginia Frank Curtis Dr. Johnson and Horace Kephart Among The Highlanders by Parks Lanier, Jr. From August to November 1773, Dr. Samuel Johnson and James Boswell made their celebrated tour of Scotland to see "wild objects, —mountains, — waterfalls, —peculiar manners; in short, things which [Dr. Johnson] had not seen before."1 Together they went north from London with the expectation of entering a world vastly different from their own. As Boswell, who was a native of that world, probably knew, they were destined to be disappointed, at least on the score of discovering outrageously "peculiar" manners among the people. Dramatic changes in his own lifetime had extinguished most of the "old ways." Where they were to be glimpsed, Dr. Johnson was as much a curiosity to the natives as their way of life was to him. Boswell they knew was one of them, but Johnson was "the stranger, the outlander—a person to be studied with suspicion for his accent, his habits, his beliefs"2 even as he studied theirs. 68 In 1904, Horace Kephart left Ohio for the mountains of Southern Appalachia , attracted to them by many of the same expectations which lured Dr. Johnson to the Highlands of Scotland. "With an inborn taste for the wild and romantic," says Kephart, "I yearned for a strange land and people that had the charm of originality...In Far Appalachia, it seemed I might realize the past in the present..."3 Like Boswell andJohnson, Kephart was fascinated with the notion that he could catch a glimpse of time turned back. It was possible , he felt, to be simultaneously in the twentieth and eighteenth centuries, to step back to the time of Boswell and Johnson by traveling in the southern highlands. "The mountain folk live in the eighteenth century," he says. "And so in order to be fair and just with these, our backward kinsmen, we must, for the time, decivilize ourselves to the extent of going back and getting an eighteenth century point of view." (Kephart, p. 18) Elsewhere he adds, "[The Highlanders] are closely analogous to what we read of lower-class English and Scottish life in Covenanter and Jacobite times." (Kephart, p. 285) By comparing what Boswell andJohnson discovered during theirjourney, with what Kephart discovered during his sojourn in Appalachia, one might be persuaded that Kephart was right. This is possible, of course, because it is likely that the Highlanders among whom Kephart lived were descendants of the Highlanders among whom Boswell and Johnson travelled." One of the major concerns of Boswell and Johnson during their trek through the Hebrides was the departure of so very many Scots for America. Following the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745, the English had enacted cruel laws which destroyed clan allegiances in order to encourage a more national outlook.5 Highlanders were deprived of their weapons and their national garb was outlawed. With the dissolution of a way of life which can only be called "feudal," Highland chiefs became "rapacious landlords, and many disgruntled Highlanders began their emigration to America."6 After travelling through Scotland for about a month, Boswell records, "My fellow traveller and I were now full of the old Highland spirit, and were dissatisfied at hearing of racked rents and emigration; and finding a chief not surrounded by his clan. Dr. Johnson said, 'Sir, the Highland chiefs should not be allowed to go farther south than Aberdeen. A strong-minded man...may be improved by an English education; but in general, they will be tamed into insignificance .' " (Boswell, p. 208) Like Johnson, Kephart delighted in finding Highlanders who had not been "tamed into insignificance." "Our typical mountaineer," he writes, "is lank, he is always unkempt, he is fond of toting a gun on his shoulder." (Kephart, p. 12) Johnson would have recognized his own Highlanders in such sketches as Kephart's description of "a bare-headed, bare-footed woman, coarse featured 69 but of superb physique—one of those mountain giantesses who think nothing of shouldering a two-bushel sack of corn and carrying it a mile or two without letting it down." (Kephart, p. 112) Later he makes a more general observation , "The women...