The Sugarlands valley, at the Tennessee foot of Newfound Gap Road, once had a reputation that North Carolinians liked to tease it about. In 1919, writer Horace Kephart walked into these coves beside a federal revenue officer who had spent three days carving and painting a wooden rattlesnake. Boone tells what they were hunting, and what happened when the valley learned who Kephart was.
Don't let the quiet in this valley fool you. They call it the Sugarlands, and folks on the Carolina side had their own name for it. Blockaders' Glory. Moonshiners' paradise. Horace Kephart wrote that down, and said sinless North Carolina liked to look down on sinful Tennessee. Kephart was a writer, and his book was Our Southern Highlanders. From down in here he said the Chimneys stuck up like tusks, off a ridge so narrow a man could sit astride it. In nineteen nineteen a federal revenue officer named Thomason came to see him, posing as a tourist. This Thomason had spent three days on a sourwood club, carving a rattlesnake onto it and painting it lifelike, to put the fear in moonshiners, and he came to be known as the Snake-Stick Man. So the writer went man-hunting. Nobody swore him in. He got handed a forty-five automatic and a pair of handcuffs. They set out from Smokemont, a brand-new sawmill village Kephart called the head of navigation for Ford cars. After that it was shoe leather, up over the crest at Indian Gap and down what was left of a Civil War military road. They were after three fugitives, a father and two sons. One of the boys had jumped bond, and their Cherokee guide had put it up. The Sugarlands met them cold. Then Kephart mentioned a famous moonshiner, and it came out that his host had read a borrowed copy of Our Southern Highlanders. I wrote it, Kephart told him. And the fellow dragged him off to the kitchen, hollering, Mary, Mary, here's the man who wrote that book! So much for the Snake-Stick Man. Three days of carving and paint to scare these hills, and what opened a door in the Sugarlands was a book. The tip was false, too. Those three were never there at all. Kephart swore there wasn't a line of fiction in that book. He owned up to one thing, though. The names he gave the people of the Sugarlands, he made up, every one. I've come to think that was all he had to give them back. Whoever she really was, she'll be Mary for good, wiping her hands on her apron in that kitchen, sizing up the famous stranger her husband won't turn loose of, a man with a pair of handcuffs on him that nobody swore him in to use.
Photo: Photographer unknown; from Horace Kephart, Our Southern Highlanders (Outing Publishing, 1913) · Public domain