in ‘‘a comfortable place’’ notwithstanding the exhaustion required to get
there—resembles Henry David Thoreau’s reaction to reaching the diffi-
cult summit of Mount Ktaadn, in northern Maine, two years later. Namely,
a beauty so dangerous as to be sublime—an ‘‘Earth,’’ as Henry famously
wrote, ‘‘made out of Chaos and Old Night.’’ Thoreau relished the wild re-
lease from reason, but Mitchell suppressed chaos, preferring the illusion
of civilization and its engineered development. In his first published re-
ports on the Blacks, Mitchell had welcomed the prospect that tourism
would likely change the mountains and local people for the better. Indeed,
as Timothy Silver, intimate biographer of the range, concludes, ‘‘Mitchell
never wavered from his progressive plans for the region.’’
Mitchell’s earliest news of the Blacks induced visits from other scien-
tists, professional and ‘‘gentlemen,’’ the latter including Thomas Lanier
Clingman, the former student, now a Whig politician, who during the s
declared that his former mentor had identified the wrong peak. The public
dispute contributed to an already growing volume of visitors, not least the
hugely popular writer David Hunter Strother (Porte Crayon), whose carica-
ture appeared inHarper’s New Monthly Magazinein November . By that
time summer and fall tourism was a substantial business in the Blacks,
and a corps of local men, most famous of all Big Tom Wilson (who hosted
Porte Crayon), had developed thriving guide and hostel businesses. A well-
maintained horse trail permitted tourists to visit Mount Mitchell’s peak and
return to quarters in one day.
Wilson’s hostel and the horse trail were but the beginning of what Silver
ominously terms ‘‘Modernity.’’ The Civil War halted cattle and hog drives
and temporarily all but halted agriculture in the valleys, and tourists were
no more. By , though, Morganton, the mountain town just to the south
of the Blacks, had regular train service. This accommodated a newly emer-
gent social phenomenon: a craving among urbanites for ‘‘wilderness’’ ex-
periences. The Appalachian Mountain Club—hiking and climbing scien-
tists and professors—was founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in ,
and in a few years many members made their way south. Mount Mitchell
disappointed them, lacking as it did the cragginess of New England peaks.
But birders, also now organized and traveling, delighted in Mount Mitchell
and the Blacks. (Many were collectors who shot birds and carted them to
taxidermists for preservation-in-death.) Most visitors met and admired Big
Tom Wilson, by now an aging Confederate veteran but still physically im-
posing and garrulous. Wilson himself was probably the best of the Blacks’