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National Geographic : 1936 Aug
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THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE Photograph by John D. Topping DEFT FINGERS WEAVE BASKETS FROM RIVER REEDS, CANES, AND WHITE OAK SPLINTS Thirty-two hundred Cherokees live on the 63,000-acre Qualla Indian Reservation on the south ern slopes of the Great Smokies, adjoining the Park. The men cling to native games and the women carry their papooses astride their backs in true Indian fashion (pages 264 and 266). I suggested that he might be like the Smoky mountaineer who moved when a family settled within ten miles of his cabin because the newcomers were too close. He chuckled, as if in agreement. "GOOD OLD MOUNTAIN RIFLES" One morning I visited a summer colonist at Gatlinburg whose hobby was collecting mountain rifles. He was enthusiastically fondling a newly purchased five-foot flint lock when a freckled, red-haired mountain boy approached the cottage and handed him a penciled invitation to a "shoot." The host promised "plenty of mountain music and watermelon." I was invited, too. I saw mountain boys who had not reached their teens hitting the bull's-eye with hog rifles longer than they were tall, rifles whose leaden bullets were larger than peas (page 265). And mountain men who had passed their threescore and ten seldom missed a target. I was convinced that had the National Park Service not spread its protective net over the mountains, the few remaining wild animals would soon have fallen before the mountaineers' deadly aim. Between shots, mountain music filled the valley. Some of the ballads I had heard; others originally were brought from the Old World by early pioneers and have been handed down to the present generation. "Lord Thomas and Fair Elender," a folk song of England, traced back to the time of Chaucer, is a favorite. In the mountain cabin or at a "music makin' " in a Great Smoky village you may hear: "O mother, O mother, come rede me a riddle, Come riddle it both in one. Whether I shall marry fair Elender, Or bring the brown girl home. "The brown girl, she has house and lands, Fair Elender, she has none; Therefore, dear child, under my consent, Go bring the brown girl home. "He dressed himself in scarlet red; His waiters all in green; And in every town that he rode through They took him to be a king." 250
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