Appalachia was “a mysterious realm,” Horace Kephart wrote to explain his decision to leave a library job in St. Louis for the wilds of western North Carolina at the start of Our Southern Highlanders (1913), his influential account of the southern mountains. “Had I been going to Teneriffe or Timbuctu, the libraries would have furnished information a-plenty; but about this housetop of eastern America they were strangely silent; it was terra incognita.” It was as temporally distant as it was geographically remote, he continued, for “in Far Appalachia, it seemed that I might realize the past in the present, seeing with my own eyes what life must have been to my pioneer ancestors of a century or two ago.”11 Kephart exaggerated, of course. Early twentieth-century Appalachia was neither the cultural frontier nor the rude wilderness of his descriptions. As part of a wave of literary “discoverers” of the region, Kephart had an interest in portraying Appalachia as wild and exotic—it made for a good travel narrative. But he correctly asserted that Americans of his day struggled to fit the southern mountains into the nation’s history, identity, and environment. Was the region a repository of white Protestant America’s “contemporary ancestors,” a sort of Elizabethan land that time forgot? Was it a landscape rich in underutilized natural resources? Was it instead a veritable wilderness of barbaric rustics? Perspectives on Appalachia were as numerous as the authors who wrote about the southern mountains.22

中文翻译：

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去山上讲

阿巴拉契亚是一个“神秘的领域”，霍勒斯·凯法特（Horace Kephart）解释说，他决定离开圣路易斯去北卡罗来纳州西部荒野的工作是在《南方高地人》（1913年）创立之初，他对南部山区颇有影响。“如果我要去特内里费或廷布克图，图书馆将提供大量的信息；但是在美国东部的这个屋顶上，他们却奇怪地沉默了。那是terra incognita。” 他继续说，这在时间上和在地理上都遥远，因为“在远阿巴拉契亚地区，我似乎可以意识到现在的过去，亲眼目睹一个世纪或一个世纪的先辈祖先应该过的生活。两年前。” 11 Kephart夸大了。二十世纪初的阿巴拉契亚既不是文化疆界，也不是他所描述的粗鲁荒野。作为该地区文学“发现者”浪潮的一部分，Kephart感兴趣的是将阿巴拉契亚描述为野生和异国情调，这使它成为了一个很好的旅行叙事。但是他正确地断言，当时的美国人努力使南部山区适应该国的历史，特征和环境。该地区是白人新教徒美国“当代祖先”的仓库，那个时候忘记了伊丽莎白时代的土地吗？这是一个自然资源利用率不足的景观吗？相反，它是野蛮的乡村居民真正的旷野吗？关于阿巴拉契亚的观点与撰写有关南部山区的作者一样多。22