Qualla Town, North Carolina, May, 1848.

In coming from Franklin to this place, a distance of thirty miles, I travelled over a wild, mountainous, and thinly settled country, where I was pained to witness the evil effects of intemperance, and made happy by following the windings of a beautiful river. Having been overtaken by a thunder-storm, I found shelter in a rude and comfortless cabin, which was occupied by a man and his wife and eight children. Every member of the family was barefooted, and one or two of the children almost destitute of clothing; not one of the children, though one or two of them were full-grown girls, could read a single word; the mother was sickly and haggard in her appearance, and one of the little boys told me that he had not eaten a hearty meal for ten days. I subsequently learned that the head of this household was a miserable drunkard.

The river to which I alluded is the Tuck-a-se-ja, which empties into the Tennessee. It is a very rapid stream, and washes the base of many mountains, which are as wild as they were a century ago. Whenever there occurs any interval land, the soil is very rich, and such spots are usually occupied. The mountains are all covered with forest, where wild game is found in abundance. The fact is, the people of this whole region devote more of their time to hunting than they do to agriculture, which fact accounts for their proverbial poverty. You can hardly pass a single cabin without being howled at by half a dozen hounds, and I have now become so well educated in guessing the wealth of a mountaineer, that I can fix his condition by ascertaining the number of his dogs. A rich man seldom has more than one dog, while a very poor man will keep from ten to a dozen. And this remark with regard to dogs, strange as it may seem, is equally applicable to the children of the mountaineers. The poorest man, without any exception, whom I have seen in this region, lives in a log cabin with two rooms, and is the father of nineteen children, and the keeper of six hounds.

On my arrival in this place, which is the home of a large number of Cherokee Indians, (of whom I shall have much to say in future letters,) I became the guest of Mr. William H. Thomas, who is the “guide, counsellor, and friend” of the Indians, as well as their business agent. While conversing with this gentleman, he excited my curiosity with regard to a certain mountain in his vicinity, and, having settled it in his own mind that I should spend a week or two with him and his Indians, proposed (first excusing himself on account of a business engagement) that I should visit the mountain in company with a gentleman in his employ as surveyor. The proposed arrangement was carried out, and thus was it that I visited Smoky Mountain.

This mountain is the loftiest of a large brotherhood which lie crowded together upon the dividing line between North Carolina and Tennessee. Its height cannot be less than five thousand feet above the level of the sea, for the road leading from its base to its summit is seven and a half miles long. The general character of the mountain is similar to that already given of other Southern mountains, and all that I can say of its panorama is, that I can conceive of nothing more grand and imposing. It gives birth to a pair of glorious streams, the Pigeon river of Tennessee, and the Ocono lufty of North Carolina, and derives its name from the circumstance that its summit is always enveloped, on account of its height, in a blue or smoky atmosphere.

But the chief attraction of Smoky Mountain is a singular cliff known throughout this region as the Alum Cave. In reaching this spot, which is on the Tennessee side, you have to leave your horses on the top of the mountain, and perform a pedestrian pilgrimage of about six miles up and down, very far up and ever so far down, and over every thing in the way of rocks and ruined vegetation which Nature could possibly devise, until you come to a mountain side, which is only two miles from your starting place at the peak. Roaring along at the base of the mountainside alluded to is a small stream, from the margin of which you have to climb a precipice, in a zigzag way, which is at least two thousand feet high, when you find yourself on a level spot of pulverized stone, with a rocky roof extending over your head a distance of fifty or sixty feet. The length of this hollow in the mountain, or “cave,” as it is called, is near four hundred feet, and from the brow of the butting precipice to the level below the distance is perhaps one hundred and fifty feet. The top of the cliff is covered with a variety of rare and curious plants, and directly over its centre trickles a little stream of water, which forms a tiny pool, like a fountain in front of a spacious piazza. The principal ingredients of the rock composing this whitish cliff are alum, epsom salts, saltpetre, magnesia, and copperas, and the water which oozes therefrom is distinguished for its strong medicinal qualities. This strange and almost inaccessible, but unquestionably very valuable cave, belongs to a company of neighboring Carolinians, who have already made some money out of the alum, but have not yet accomplished much in the way of purifying and exporting the various products in which it abounds.

The scenery upon which this cave looks down, however, interested me quite as much as the cave itself. From the most comprehensive point of view two mountains descend abruptly into a kind of amphitheatre, where the one on the right terminates in a very narrow and ragged ridge, which is without a particle of vegetation, while far beyond, directly in front of the cave, rises a lofty and pointed mountain, backed by some three or four of inferior magnitude. The ridge which I have mentioned is itself very high, but yet the cave looks down upon it, and it is so fantastic in its appearance that from different points of view you may discover holes leading like windows entirely through it, while from other places you might fancy that you looked upon a ruined castle, a decayed battlement, or the shattered tower of an old cathedral. To gaze upon this prospect at the sunset hour, when the mountains were tinged with a rosy hue, and the immense hollow before me was filled with a purple atmosphere, and I could see the rocky ledge basking in the sunlight like a huge monster on the placid bosom of a lake, was to me one of the most remarkable and impressive scenes that I ever witnessed; and then remember, too, that I looked upon this wonderful prospect from a framework of solid rock, composed of the stooping cliff. It was a glorious picture, indeed, and would have amply repaid one for a pilgrimage from the remotest corner of the earth.

The ordinary time required to visit the Alum Cave is two days; but, owing to bad weather, my friend and myself occupied the most of four days in performing the same trip. To give a minute account of all that we met with would occupy too much time, and I will therefore only record in this place the incidents which made the deepest impression on my own mind.

Our first night from home we spent in the cabin of a man who treated us with the utmost kindness, and would not receive a penny for his pains. So much for mountain hospitality. And now, to prove that our friend was an intelligent man, it may be mentioned that he is an adept in the following professions and trades, viz. those of medicine, the law, the blacksmith, the carpenter, the hunter, the shoemaker, the watchmaker, the farmer, and he also seemed to possess an inkling of some half dozen sciences. Now, I do not exactly mean to assert that the gentleman is a master practitioner in all these departments of human learning and industry; but if you were to judge of his ability by his use of technical words, you would not for a moment imagine he could have a competitor. But so it is in this wild region, one man has to perform the intellectual labor of a whole district; and, what is really a hard case, the knowledge which is thus brought to so good a market is nearly always the fruit of a chance education, and not of a systematic one.

Among those who spent the night with us under the roof of the above accomplished man, was one of the idle vagabonds of the country. This individual, it appears, had met with a singular accident on the day previous, and amused us by relating it. I regret that I cannot remember all the singular epithets that he employed, but I will do my best to report him faithfully: