Our Southern Highlanders
[1][2] Hazel Creek originates on the slopes of Silers Bald in the Great Smoky Mountains and drops 4,000 feet (1,200 m) over its 18-mile (29 km) route to the Little Tennessee River, draining much of the southwestern part of the range along the way.
[3] In 1904, the nearest railroad depot was 16 miles (26 km) away at Bushnell, a small town at the confluence of the Tuckasegee River and the Little Tennessee (now submerged by Fontana Lake).
Although a successful librarian, Kephart eventually became disenchanted with his homelife and job in the early 1900s, started drinking more often, and began spending more and more time in the nearby Ozark wilderness.
While recuperating at his father's home in Dayton, Ohio, Kephart used a map to seek out the nearest substantial wilderness area, which he determined to be the Great Smoky Mountains, a rugged range straddling the border between Tennessee and North Carolina.
[8] After a short stay in Dillsboro, Kephart secured usage of a cabin at an abandoned copper mine in the Hazel Creek Valley in the southwest corner of the Great Smokies range.
In 1921, MacMillan acquired the book's publishing rights, and released a revised edition the following year complete with several new chapters ("The Snake-Stick Man," "A Raid into the Sugarlands," and "The Killing of Hol Rose"), several new photographs, and a subtitle.
Criticism of Our Southern Highlanders typically revolves around Kephart's focus on backwoods outlaws or people living in extreme poverty while paying scant attention to the region's middle class landowners and town dwellers, many of whom would not have been too far out of place in mainstream America.
[2] Other critics take issue with Kephart's notion that radical isolation in Southern Appalachia had created a race of "contemporary ancestors"— relics of the nation's pioneer period who were largely untouched by modernity— a belief popularized by Berea College president William Goodell Frost in the late 1890s.
While he left Hazel Creek in 1907 to tour the Southern Appalachian region, he eventually returned to nearby Bryson City in 1910, where he lived for the rest of his life.
