In the Tennessee Mountains

In the Tennessee Mountains

In the Tennessee Mountains* by Charles Egbert Craddock (the pen name of Mary Noailles Murfree) is a collection of short stories set among the isolated mountain communities of the Cumberland highlands of East Tennessee. Published in 1884, the collection draws on Murfree's firsthand observations of the region's people, landscape, and customs, rendering them with close attention to dialect, natural description, and the moral life of a remote and largely forgotten population. The collection opens with "The Harnt That Walks Chilhowee," in which a young man suspected of wrongdoing is haunted by local superstition, and the story explores the uneasy relationship between guilt, community judgment, and the supernatural beliefs of mountain folk. Throughout the collection, Murfree returns repeatedly to the tension between the isolated world of the mountains and the broader civilization beyond them. "The Star in the Valley" tells of a refined city sportsman, Reginald Chevis, who hunts in the mountains and becomes aesthetically fascinated by the family of a drunken blacksmith named Jerry Shaw, particularly by his pale, ethereal daughter Celia. Chevis admires her from a romantic distance, seeing her as a picturesque element of the landscape rather than as a full human being. He remains oblivious to her feelings for him. When she overhears her father and his companions planning a murderous raid on a neighboring family, she walks fifteen miles through a blizzard at night to warn the intended victims. This act of extraordinary moral courage goes largely unappreciated by those around her, and she dies of the exposure she suffered. Chevis only learns of her heroism and death later, through a casual report from his former mountain guide. The story is a quiet indictment of the cultivated man's failure to perceive genuine nobility in those he condescends to admire. "Electioneerin' on Big Injun Mounting" follows Rufus Chadd, a lawyer born in mountain poverty who has become the aggressive and feared attorney for the State. He returns to his home region to campaign for reelection, having made enemies among the mountain people by prosecuting their kin with relentless efficiency. He is attacked and badly wounded by a drunken constituent named Isaac Boker. Believing himself to be dying, Chadd surprises everyone by asking that Boker not be prosecuted. This act of unexpected clemency transforms the political situation entirely, and the mountain community, which had turned against him, rallies to reelect him by a large majority. The story examines the paradox of a man hardened by his work into pitilessness who nevertheless finds, at the moment of crisis, a capacity for mercy. "The 'Harnt' That Walks Chilhowee," "Drifting Down Lost Creek," and other stories in the collection share certain persistent themes: the fierce independence and pride of the mountain people, the harshness and beauty of their natural surroundings, the weight of poverty and ignorance, and the occasional emergence of remarkable courage or selflessness from unlikely quarters. "Drifting Down Lost Creek" is among the most fully developed of these narratives. Cynthia Ware loves Evander Price, a talented young blacksmith who is unjustly convicted of receiving stolen goods, having falsely confessed to a more serious charge in order to protect his mentally disabled brother. Cynthia, alone and without resources, undertakes a long and difficult campaign to secure his pardon, petitioning jurors on foot, recovering a lost legal document from a negligent lawyer, and finally pressing the petition into the governor's hands during a political appearance. The pardon is granted, but Evander, liberated and absorbed in his work at an iron foundry, has largely forgotten both the mountains and Cynthia. He returns years later as a prosperous married man, briefly and carelessly, and departs forever. Cynthia endures her disappointment without bitterness, finding a quiet usefulness in the lives of those around her. Murfree's prose is notable for its elaborate landscape description, which is never merely decorative but serves to establish the psychological and moral atmosphere of each narrative. The mountains function as both setting and presence, indifferent to human suffering yet capable of lending it grandeur. The dialect she renders, though occasionally dense for modern readers, is handled with consistency and serves to define character and community. The collection as a whole is a sustained work of regional realism that treats its subjects with sympathy but without sentimentality, and it established Murfree as one of the foremost practitioners of American local color fiction in the nineteenth century.

By Mary Noailles Murfree · First published 1884 · Genre: Regional Fiction, Short Story Collection, Literary Realism · 11 chapters · 86,315 words

First lines

High above Lost Creek Valley towers a wilderness of pine. So dense is this growth that it masks the mountain whence it springs. Even when the Cumberland spurs, to the east, are gaunt and bare in the wintry wind, their deciduous forests denuded, their crags unveiled and grimly beetling, Pine Mountain remains a sombre, changeless mystery; its clifty heights are hidden, its chasms and abysses lurk unseen. Whether the skies are blue, or gray, the dark, austere line of its summit limits the horizon. It stands against the west like a barrier. It seemed to Cynthia Ware that nothing which went beyond this barrier ever came back again. One by one the days passed over it, and in splendid apotheosis, in purple and crimson and gold, they were received into the heavens, and returned no more. She beheld love go hence, and many a hope. Even Lost Creek itself, meandering for miles between the ranges, suddenly sinks into the earth, tunnels an unknown channel beneath the mountain, and is never seen again. She often watched the floating leaves, a nettle here and there, the broken wing of a moth, and wondered whither these trifles were borne, on the elegiac current. She came to fancy that her life was like them, worthless in itself and without a mission; drifting down Lost Creek, to vanish vaguely in the mountains.

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In the Tennessee Mountains is listed on Textopian as a novella by Mary Noailles Murfree, dated 1884 CE.

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Appalachian literature · regionalism · local color · Southern fiction · Tennessee setting · mountain communities · rural life · nineteenth-century literature · American fiction · folk culture · dialect writing · social realism

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More by Mary Noailles Murfree