Since the point of this blog is Horace Kephart, that old librarian, naturalist, and writer about the outdoors, here’s a bit about Himself.
Horace Kephart (1862-1931), called by a critic of his time “The Dean of American Campers,” was one of the best-loved writers of that exuberant era of American outdoor writing between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the Great Depression. Besides Kephart, those writers include, among others,George Washington Sears (writing as Nessmuk), Daniel Carter Beard, Ernest Seton-Thompson, Stewart Edward White, Albert Bigelow Paine, Warren Miller, William Long, and Theodore Roosevelt.
Kephart’s first book, The Book of Camping and Woodcraft, published by Outing Publishing Company in 1906, has apparently never been out of print and is, according to Jim Casada, one of the ten best-selling sporting books of all time. Casada is a modern outdoor writer and one of Kephart’s two major biographers. The other is North Carolina writer and naturalist George Ellison.
What has long been forgotten about Kephart is that he was a busy young librarian during the final decade of the 19th Century, and a rising star in his profession. A series of personal emotional disasters brought that career to an end, but he recovered to live a second career during the last half of his life as a well-known and much loved outdoor writer and conservationist.
Kephart was born in Pennsylvania, of pioneer Swiss stock. The Civil War was raging. His father Isaiah served as a chaplain with the 21st Pennsylvania Cavalry. Like many veterans, after that war he wanted to get away, to start a new life. In those days, that meant going West, and West he went in 1867 with his wife Mary, and young Horace. They settled in Iowa, where, Kephart wrote, “It was before the day of fences, and for a year or so there was little to be seen from our front door but a sea of grass waving to the horizon.”
Horace was an only child, and a lonely one, but he was lucky. He had an attentive mother who encouraged his imagination: “My mother taught me to read. When I was seven, and could read almost anything, she gave me my first book, dear old Robinson Crusoe. ” In view of his later life, Crusoe may have molded the man.
Kephart’s family returned to Pennsylvania in 1876, and he graduated from Lebanon Valley College in 1879. He spent twenty years in the library profession, beginning at Cornell University, then at Rutgers and Yale University libraries, in Europe, and culminating as director of the St. Louis Mercantile Library from 1890 to 1903. Kephart published regularly in Library Journal on a variety of topics of interest to librarians of the day, including ink and paper, glue, bookbinding, library ethics, and cataloging and classification of library materials. At St. Louis he not only built an extraordinary collection of Western Americana literature but he also “re-engineered” the library—developing the staff and services to meet the changing needs of its patrons, and adopting new library technologies such as the Library of Congress printed catalog card subscription service.
An 1890 article called “Being a Librarian,” which Kephart published in Library Journal and in Harper’s Weekly, has been turned into a one-act play for voices by the author of this blog. Permission to stage the play is available upon application to the Center. The script is available at http://www.faculty.uaf.edu/ffdjs1
He was also publishing articles in the outdoor magazines about military history, woodcraft, shooting, camping, spelunking, and other outdoor topics.
An engaging account of life in St. Louis can be found in a typescript at the St. Louis Mercantile Library by Kephart’s eldest son Leonard. titled “An Experienced Generation.” Leonard described family life as warm and comfortable, with Father coming home each evening, researching his articles, and puttering about in his study. But increasing emotional problems, perhaps exacerbated by alcohol and the demands of family life, led to a “nervous breakdown” and the disintegration of his professional and family life in 1904. His wife Laura (born Laura Mack) and their six children left St. Louis to return to New York State, and they did not live together as a family again, at least not for any significant period of time.
Following his breakdown Kephart retreated to the wilderness of the Great Smoky Mountains. He was 41 years old. There he set up a backwoods camp and began supporting himself by writing books and hundreds of articles for popular sporting magazines such as Arms and the Man, American Rifleman, Forest and Stream, Field and Stream, Sports Afield, Recreation, Outing, and Shooting and Fishing.
In the course of this new career he became one of the best-known of his generation among those who read about camping, shooting, and the outdoors, and who shared his conviction, popular then as now, in the spiritual renewal offered by wilderness.
The Book of Camping and Woodcraft has a dizzying history of editions and printings. It was a standard of its day in outdoor literature, and is considered a classic of the genre: practical, well-written, expert, and penned with more than a hint of wry humor. Kephart was an avid proponent of “going light,” and included in his book tables of weights of food and equipment–to the ounce. He was one of those light-weight equipment gurus whose line extends from the long-distance canoeist J. MacGregor and explorer Dr. Frederick Cook, whose wife sewed him a gossamer-weight silk tent for his 1906 trip to Mt. McKinley, to Colin Fletcher’s Complete Walker and other contemporary writers.
In 1913 Kephart published Our Southern Highlanders, which also remains in print and which was among the first popular ethnographic studies of the people of the Southern Appalachians. At the time of its publication it was called “The finest regional study yet written by an American.”
Camping and Woodcraft found a ready audience in the U.S. and Britain, in an era when outdoor recreation was of intense interest, and Kephart, like his mentor and earlier outdoor writer Nessmuk (George Washington Sears, 1821-1890 ) was an advocate of going to the woods for spiritual refreshment from the rigors of civilized life. “To many a city man,” he wrote as the first sentence of Camping and Woodcraft, “there comes a time when the great town wearies him. He hates its sights and smells and clangor. Every duty is a task and every caller is a bore. There come visions of green fields and far-rolling hills, of tall forests and cool, swift-flowing streams.” Kephart dedicated his Camping and Woodcraft “To the shade of Nessmuk in the happy hunting ground.”
He also wrote books on camp cookery and sporting firearms for Outing Publishing Company, and edited that company’s Outing Adventure Library. These can be found at your library or through interlibrary loan, and in the used-book market at http://www.abebooks.com/ . The titles themselves are a chronicle of the the era’s popular taste for exploration and adventuring:
The Cherokee of the Smoky Mountains: A little band that has stood against the white tide for three hundred years
Castaways and Crusoes: Tales of survivors of shipwrecks…
Captives among the Indians
First through the Grand Canyon: Being the record of the pioneer expedition of the Colorado River in 1869-70
Hunting in the Yellowstone, or on the trail of the wapiti with Texas Jack in the land of the gysers
Adrift in the Arctic ice pack, from the history of the first U.S. Grinnell expedition in search of Sir John Franklin…
In the Old West as it was in the days of Kit Carson and the “Mountain Men”
The Gold Hunters: a first-hand picture of life in the California Mining Camps in the early ’50s
Watching the devastating effects of wholesale logging on the people and landscape of his beloved Smoky Mountains, Kephart became an ardent conservationist. In the last decade of his life, he worked tirelessly to bring Great Smoky Mountains National Park into being. He lived long enough to anticipate the establishment of the park in 1934. Several weeks before his death in 1931 in a car accident near Bryson City, North Carolina, the United States Geographic Board named one of the highest peaks in the Smokies “Mount Kephart.” It is one of the two first peaks named after a living person by the U.S. government. The memorial plaque at his last campsite in Great Smoky Mountains National Park was erected by the Horace Kephart Troop, Boy Scouts of America.
In-depth biographical material can be found in George Ellison’s introduction to the University of Tennessee Press edition of Our Southern Highlanders and Jim Casada’s introduction to Camping and Woodcraft, also from University of Tennessee Press.
Kephart’s archives, including his notebooks, correspondence, typescripts, artifacts, and realia, are collected at Hunter Library Special Collections and at the Mountain Heritage Center at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, NC. A rich source of material, especially relating to Kephart’s career as a librarian, is archived at the St. Louis Mercantile Library. A fabulous online collection of photographs and other materials at Western Carolina University, called Horace Kephart: Revealing an Enigma, is available at http://www.wcu.edu/library/digitalcoll/kephart/index.htm.
