“Shaconage—Place of the Blue Smoke—the Cherokees called it, the long range of forested pinnacles and plunging valleys crowning the boundary between North Carolina and Tennessee. Eden was the description bestowed by early botanists on this virgin wilderness. But thickets of intertwined laurel and tough rhododendron were known to hunters and settlers as hells.”
Very few writers have captured the essence of the Great Smoky Mountains as accurately as these words written by Wilma Dykeman in her book Explorations, published in 1984.
Wilma Dykeman Stokely’s writing career as a journalist, novelist and state historian, spanned more than 40 years and included such wonderful works as The Tall Woman, At Home in the Smokies, and Neither Black nor White.
Dykeman was a Berea College trustee for 30 years, the Tennessee State Historian for 20 years and a Knoxville News-Sentinel columnist for 40 years.
She helped establish the Tennessee Committee for the Humanities, taught writing to National Park Service staff, established the James R. Stokely Institute for the Liberal Arts at the University of Tennessee, taught Appalachian Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Tennessee and was an active member of the Southern Regional Council.
Dykeman’s career as a Tennessee historian was launched in 1955 with the release of The French Broad, part of the Rivers of America series. In 1981, Dykeman was appointed by Governor Lamar Alexander as the official Tennessee state historian.
But perhaps even more notable than her passionate descriptions of life, both fictional and non-fictional, was her love for nature, Appalachia and preservation of the world as we know it. That love led her to become one of the leading environmentalists of our time.
Appalachian-born, Dykeman was a working advocate for civil rights, human freedom and human dignity. Her beliefs included a deep reverence for, and affirmation of, life and the environment.
During the 1980s, Wilma worked closely with Asheville-based RiverLink, https://riverlink.org/, and its Executive Director, Karen Cragnolin. Today, the central greenway in Buncombe County, along the east bank of the French Broad River in Asheville’s River Arts District, is named the Wilma Dykeman Greenway. https://www.ashevillenc.gov/department/transportation/greenways/
During the 1990s, Wilma testified in a class action lawsuit brought by citizens of Cocke County, Tennessee, against Champion Paper and Fibre Company in Canton, North Carolina, for polluting a major tributary of the French Broad River called the Pigeon River. Due in large part to her dramatic testimony, Champion settled the lawsuit for millions of dollars.
Much of Dykeman’s writing, as written in a foreword by Robert Morgan for Family of Earth, has detail that is intimate, sensuous and sometimes cinematic. There is a special sense of thresholds connecting the past and the traditional with the modern present.
Family of Earth tells the reader that Dykeman’s path from a girl raised in nature to a groundbreaking environmentalist was not a straightforward one. Although Dykeman was such an eloquent, multi-published writer and advocate for securing our natural future, she once spoke of her life as unimportant. Little did she know at the time the important things she would be remembered for; especially as it concerned the French Broad River. A true lover of nature, Dykeman argued that environmental sensitivity can encourage broad-based economic development.
The French Broad has been called the classic example of an Appalachian Mountain River. https://riverlink.org/french-broad-river/. Dykeman chronicled the French Broad as a river, a watershed, and a way of life where yesterday and tomorrow meet in odd and fascinating harmony. She said that the French Broad is a region with all the richness and paradox of life. Water, forests, plants, animals, people: thronging here in rare and wonderful variety.
After reading The French Broad, Carl Sandburg wrote to Dykeman, “Your blood and brain absorbed that tributary completely in both fact and imagination.”
These are excerpts pertaining to the French Broad from a few of Dykeman’s books:
“A river is not only a highway in itself, but frequently it also provides, like the ancient buffalo trails and Indian traces, the route of least resistance, and marks the way for thoroughfares to follow.”
“Providing corn for the swarms of hogs, mules and turkeys that came up the river each year became more and more of an enterprise. So large a demand brought about the clearing of many mountain acres ill-suited to growing corn. With no system of crop rotation, little money to invest in fertilizers, and the dwindling of the corn yield after the first couple of harvests, much of this land so quickly and indiscriminately cleared was left to wash away in the quick-melting snows of winter and the sudden beating rains of summer.
The French Broad still runs red with its second and third topsoil. Only in recent years have people begun to understand that this water reddened from the butchered earth is draining away life-blood as precious as was once the blood of the livestock which tramped along this route on their great half-remembered drives.”
“Tired and eager, the people found their place, each his own cove or mountain slope or river field, and faced their first tremendous task; that of destroying the most precious resource on the continent. With all the vigor and recklessness of necessity which had been behind their forward push to this very place, they attacked the forests of primeval pine and poplar, walnut and oak, chestnut and maple. With ax and fire they laid the giants low. The bitterest irony of all the years of settlement is in this process by which a people so frugal they utilized every element of nature, animal, vegetable and mineral, to its least portion, made every scrap count, scraped and pinched and survived only by the closest economy, would waste with prodigal abandon, the vast harvest of centuries as if it were not only useless but actually an enemy. Their complete self-dependence lent an immediacy to pioneer lives that closed out all foresight into the long future and made unimaginable the possibility of a day when these vast stands of acres would have disappeared. It is at once a tribute and a heartbreak that so few, with such crude implements, could have wrought so large a destruction in such a shortness of time.”
“To the Cherokee who roamed this country and had the legendary village of Kanasta on the French Broad, who hunted these forests and fished these waters, a river was part of their religion and livelihood, their commerce, their myth, and their recreation.”
The French Broad has seen its share of marches and encounters that came to pass during wars. The history of the French Broad is rich with heroes and villains, settlers and tramplers.
Many came with intentions of giving back to the land that provided for them, while others came only to rob, use and move on. Those who stayed arrived on foot carrying all they owned on their backs. Most were poor by man’s standards, but were made rich by the land in ways that far exceeded monetary gain. Even so, they soon began to destroy that which they loved.
An ornithologist studying the forest litter of these Appalachians that encompass the French Broad made people aware of the multiplicity of miniscule hidden lives to which the forest owes its porousness, the water owes its storage powers and the river owes part of its existence.
As we began this writing with a Dykeman quote, so we shall end with one that depicts Dykeman’s intense feelings about this area.
“Which is the time to know the river? April along the French Broad is a swirl of sudden water beneath the bending buds of Spicewood bushes, a burst of spring and a breath of sweetness between the snows of winter and the summer’s sun. August is a film of dust on purple asters along the country roads of the lower river, and a green stillness of heavy shade splattered with sunlight beside the upper river. October is a flame, a Renaissance richness of red and amber, the ripeness of harvest in husk and bin. It is the golden span between the dry rattle of September’s end and November’s beginning. In this mountain country, November is the month for classic beauty. Lines are clear and simple. Colors are subdued earth shades. Only those who know well and deeply these hills and rivers and their valleys can find them beautiful in this starkness. November strips the trees and leaves their branches in etched design against the sky, strips the hills and reveals their contours ― every winding path and rocky ridge and scooped-out gully finally reveals the river. No longer laced overhead with green limbs or half hidden under banks of fern, the streams and springs and rivulets, as well as the river they feed, emerge in each sharp twist, each lazy pool, and become dark liquid lines threading the mountains and valleys. It is a fit time to trace its course. It is a fit time to meet the country and its people. Now there is nothing hidden by summer’s rich growth, which is past, or winter’s soft snow, which will come.”
Dykeman’s work to keep the French Broad environmentally sound for the future generations remains endless, long after she has passed. Her love of nature was imparted to her descendants.
“She showed us her love of all plants and animals, including insects, elephants, wild galax and garden-grown irises,” said son, Jim Stokely. “Her often-stated belief was that everything is connected, and that human beings are only a small part of nature.”
Stokely said that if you define the Smokies technically as the bounds of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, she personally interacted with many residents from the Cosby, Big Creek, Cataloochee and Gatlinburg sections of the park. If you define the Smokies as the broader mountain region, she was one of the natives and lived her entire life interacting with the people.
The Wilma Dykeman Legacy is currently launching an initiative to learn about what environmental justice means to the public. To participate and to find out more about the amazing legacy left by Dykeman, go to: https://www.wilmadykemanlegacy.org/.
Dykeman said that the earth is with us always and we are one family upon it. In her words, “Who is there among us who can say he has lived upon this earth, in his own time, and never once been blinded by the clear beauty in that splinter of immortal splendor which is man and plant and animal, and life in all its forms? Certainly not I.”
All quotes and photos used with permission from Jim Stokely.