There is a wonderful and comparatively unknown world of myth waiting to be mined along the highways and by-ways of these mountains. To discover this bonanza of fancy, you must seek out the old ones and listen with the attentiveness and faith of a child to the things they have to tell.
When they set to talking, the jingle of the mythmaker’s coinage in their heads, they give new and wondrous meaning to this valley, or yonder mountains, or that river bend, or the great mass of stones jutting there toward the sky.
As the nuggets of myth and fancy crop up, take a map of the Carolina highlands and mark the spot where each find was made. For this is to be your guide into a land where the mythmaker left his mark. You will want to go up this road and down that one, stopping here to listen for strange voices and pausing there to look for strange creatures.
And right here is good as place as any to begin the pilgrimage into the mountain myth world – here in the narrow-walled valley of the Nantahala, which the Cherokees called the Valley of the Noonday Sun.
Up there where the overhanging cliff is the highest is the haunt of the great snake Uwtsunta, the bouncer, named by the Cherokee because it moved by jerks like a measuring worm, with only one part of its body on the ground at a time. Uwtsunta generally stayed on the east side where the sun came first in the morning and used to cross by reaching over the highest point of the cliff until it could get a grip on the other side, when it pull over the rest of its body. The snake was so immense that when it was stretched thus across its shadow darkened the whole valley below, and only when the sun was straight overhead did any light filter into the valley.
Now travel into the Great Smokies. There fast under Clingman’s Dome lies the mystic Lake of Miracles, a body of water visible only to those with second sight. Wounded animals, particularly bear, could be healed by bathing it.
At the head of Cheowa River on the Macon-Graham border is Swim Bald mountain where a monster horney once had its nest. When it wasn’t flying above the treetops it was sunning itself on the bald. It was so fierce it drove away anyone who came near the mountain.
At Whiteside Mountain in Jackson County near Cashiers is where Utlunta or Spear-finger, whose food was human livers attempted to build a great rock bridge through the air to Hiawassee near Murphy – a distance of a hundred miles – but lightning destroyed the span before it was completed. Pieces of the bridge can still be seen.
Near East Laport is Jutaculla Rock, which bears the handprint of the giant Jutaculla who could drink a stream dry at a gulp and who used lightning as arrows for his bow.
There are two bald spots on a mountain at the head of Little Snowbird Creek near Robbinsville where a mysterious being, having the form of a giant, with head blazing like the sun, once landed. When it flew away the herbage was burned away where he had landed, thus the bald spots.
Above Bryson City on the Tuckaseegee River is a deep hole where a family of water bears lived. And there are two red dogs, the Cherokee used to say, who lived under the water just above the village of Cherokee.
Gregory Bald in northern Graham County was known to the Cherokee as “Rabbit Place”. Here the rabbits had their townhouse and here lived under their chief, the Great Rabbit. In olden times people could see him. He was as large as a deer, and all the little rabbits were subject to him.
Throughout the mountains, according to the old Cherokee storytellers, there is a race of spirits called Yunwi Tsunsdi or Little People, who live in rock caves. They are little fellows, hardly reaching up to a man’s knee but well-shaped and handsome, with long hair falling almost to the ground. They are great workers and fond of music.
At Franklin is the famous Nikwasi mound, which is peopled by the Nunnehi or the Immortals.
Tsulkalu, the slant-eyed giant, had his home on the Pigeon River near Waynesville.
These are only a few of the places where the myth world of the mountains comes alive. There are many, many more. And as you talk to the old, you will learn of them and put them on your map.