The Race for the Roof of the East

Two men wanted the roof of the East, and only one of them could have it. Somewhere up on the crest to the west sits the highest ground in Tennessee, a big rounded dome, and for a hundred and sixty-five years it wore one of those men's names. Elisha Mitchell was a professor at the University of North Carolina. Thomas Clingman had been his student, and grew up to be a congressman and a senator, and not a man you'd pick to argue with. He once fought a duel with a congressman from Alabama. Both men fired. Both men missed. They settled it with apologies. In the eighteen fifties those two got into a running fight over the highest peak in the Black Mountains. In eighteen fifty-five Clingman came right out and said the old professor had measured the wrong peak. Then he came to favor this big dome on the Smoky crest. As for which mountain stood tallest, Mitchell didn't live to see that answered. The dome had other suitors. In eighteen fifty-eight, a naturalist named Buckley wrote it up as Mount Buckley, after himself, and his name slid off to a lesser peak next door. Clingman had a path cut six miles up the mountain, so a Swiss geographer named Arnold Guyot could get his horse and his instruments to the top. The man who guided them was Robert Collins, from down in the Oconaluftee valley. Guyot had a thick Swiss accent and Collins talked pure mountain, and the two of them could barely make out each other's English. In eighteen fifty-nine, Guyot named the summit for his patron. Clingman's Dome. And he measured it, and found it a few feet short of the Black Mountain. Today's surveys put this dome at six thousand, six hundred and forty-three feet, and the peak Mitchell had championed, Mount Mitchell now, at six thousand, six hundred and eighty-four. Clingman cut the path, got his name on the mountain, and by today's reckoning lost the race by forty-one feet. I'd give a good deal to have seen his face when the news came. Thing is, that dome already had a name, a Cherokee name, and it had carried that name all those years while these gentlemen argued over who ought to get it. Kuwohi. Today the mountain wears it again, and Clingman's name has come off the top, same as Buckley's. I think about that climb more than I ought to, a horse picking its way up six miles of fresh-cut path, a Swiss geographer fussing over his instruments, a mountain man out front who can barely make out what he says, all of them sweating uphill to name a mountain that was Kuwohi the whole time.