rows and inevitabilities in such a fashion. Musical behavior—not to men-
tion geological morphology and wonderful biological diversity—invite dis-
crete and emphatic attention to the mountains.
tThe Black Mountains of western North Carolina, above Asheville, are
a useful localized case of upland experience. The range was effectively
doomed as wildlands and commons because among the Blacks is the high-
est peak in eastern America, Mount Mitchell. As recently as , when I
was a teenaged soldier stationed in Massachusetts, some New Englanders
were still asserting that the highest peak in the East was Mount Adams or
Mount Washington. By coincidence, was the centennial of the death of
Professor Elisha Mitchell, who had measured the highest pinnacles in the
Blacks more than twenty years before his demise, who endured a long and
bitter controversy with a former student over just which of the peaks was
highest, and who, climbing alone and at night (and in his sixties), fell from
the very mountain that would bear his name and, a few years later, would
bear his grave. Mitchell was born in Connecticut in and well edu-
cated in chemistry and mathematics at Yale. The University of North Caro-
lina recruited him for its science faculty in . There Mitchell promptly
made himself into an excellent field botanist and geologist. He was hero-
ically disciplined and felt called to explore Carolina, which still seemed to
him a vast wilderness. Late in the s the state legislature commissioned
Mitchell to conduct a geologic survey. The labor took Mitchell across the
state, east to west, measuring and prospecting. Legislators hoped that he
would discover valuable minerals, identify rich new farmland and timber
sources, and indicate the best routes for future roads that would speed eco-
nomic development—that is, to find means somehow to reverse the flow of
out-migration and increase public revenues. This political context—under-
stood and agreeable to Mitchell, himself capitalist-minded—enveloped all
his visits to the Blacks, his designation of the tallest of them, and even his
death and burial.^20
Returning to the Blacks for more hiking, climbing, and measuring in
, Mitchell experienced a Romantic moment. He and his two local
guides traveled all a July day on foot, beyond trails, at one point crawling on
hands and knees through a thicket of rhododendron. At this point, Mitchell
noted later, he ‘‘could not help thinking...what a comfortable place [this]
would be to die in.’’ A bit later, as they reached the summit already named
for him in one popular atlas, a rumbling thunderstorm approached sud-
denly, and the men scrambled back down. The revelation of his mortality—