In the autumn of 1876, the United States Geological Survey was in the business of mapping the unmapped.
It was a young agency established formally only 6 years prior in 1870, and it carried the particular ambition of institutions that believe they are doing work that has never been done before and may never need to be done again.
The American continent in 1876 still contained significant territories that existed on no reliable map.
The Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee were among them. The survey party assigned to the eastern Tennessee range in the fall of that year was led by a man named Edward Marsh.
He was 38 years old, a geologist by training and a surveyor by vocation with 11 years of field work behind him in ranges from the Appalachian to the Rockies.
He was considered by his supervisors in Washington one of the most capable and methodical men on the AY’s roster.
He had never lost a party. He had never returned from a survey with incomplete data.
He had in 11 years of work in difficult terrain under difficult conditions earned a reputation that the agency relied on when it needed to assign a man to a territory where failure was not an acceptable outcome.
The Great Smoky assignment was not considered unusually dangerous. Difficult certainly. The terrain was steep, the weather in October unpredictable, the existing maps unreliable to the point of being worse than no maps at all.
But Marsh had worked in worse terrain with less preparation. He assembled his party with his customary care, 10 men in addition to himself, each chosen for a specific function.
Two assistant surveyors, both experienced, a cgrapher, two geologists, one of whom specialized in the limestone formations that were known to characterize parts of the range.
A botonist, included because the agency had a secondary interest in documenting the flora of unmapped regions.
Two camp hands, capable men who had worked previous surveys, and two guides, local men from a community at the base of the mountains, hired for their knowledge of the terrain.
The two guides names appear in the expedition’s official preparation documents, but not in any subsequent record.
They are listed as R. Hulcom and T. Vance. Nothing else about them is recorded.
Marsh filed his expedition plan with the agency on September 28th, 1876. The plan outlined a 3-week survey of the upper ranges with a return date of October 22nd.
The party departed from a staging point outside Knoxville on October 1st, moving southeast toward the mountains.
They were well equipped. Surveying instruments, geological tools, a full medical kit, 30 days of provisions, more than the plan required because Marsh was a careful man and careful men over plan.
They were last seen as a group by a farming family named Cutler, whose property sat at the edge of the mountain road and who watched the 11 men pass on the morning of October 3rd, heading up into the range.
The Cutlers later told investigators that the party had seemed in good spirits. The equipment looked professional.
The guides walked ahead on the trail and seemed to know where they were going.
The Cutler family saw none of them again. On October 23rd, one day after the official return date, the AY’s regional office in Knoxville sent a messenger to the staging point to check on the party’s status.
The staging point was empty. No party had returned. No word had been sent. The agency waited four more days, attributing the delay to weather, which had been poor through the third week of October.
On October 27th, with no word and no sign of the party, the regional director authorized a rescue operation.
Finding 19 men to go into the Great Smoky Mountains in late October of 1876 on short notice in weather that had already turned cold required effort.
The regional director drew on a combination of agency employees, contracted mountaineers, and volunteers from the Knoxville area.
The rescue party that assembled at the staging point on October 29th was a varied group.
Some of them experienced, some of them considerably less so, united primarily by the urgency of the task and in the case of the volunteers, by the particular pull that missing person situations exert on communities small enough for everyone to know someone connected to the case.
The rescue party was 19 men. Their leader was a man named Calvin Prior, 44 years old, a former army surveyor who had resigned his commission in 1869 and settled in Knoxville, where he occasionally contracted with the Geological Survey for fieldwork.
He was not Marsh’s equal as a geologist, but he was arguably Marsha’s superior as a man who operated in dangerous terrain.
He had a quality that the soldiers who had served under him described as an accurate understanding of when a situation had become untenable.
He knew when to push and he knew when to stop. In 20 years of mountain work, he had never led a party into a situation he could not lead them out of.
That record ended on November 3rd, 1876 when four men walked out of the Great Smoky Mountains, and Calvian Prior was not among them.
The four men who returned were a Knoxville volunteer named Daniel Foss, 27 years old, a carpenter by trade, an agency employee named George Whitmore, 31, who had served as one of the rescue party’s equipment handlers, a contracted mountaineer named Seth Arlo, whose age is not recorded in the surviving documents, described only as experienced and local, and a man identified in The agency records only as W.
Calhoun, no first name given, no occupation, no age. The record notes beside his name.
Volunteer, affiliation unknown. These four men came out of the mountains on the morning of November 3rd, 5 days after the rescue party had entered.
They came out at a point that was not where they had gone in. A different trail lower on the range, several miles from the staging point.
A farmer found them on his road at dawn. He described them later as walking in a single file, evenly spaced without speaking, looking straight ahead.
He called out to them. Three of them did not respond at all. The fourth, he thought it was the youngest one, turned his head briefly in the farmer’s direction.
The farmer said the man’s face was the face of someone who did not recognize where he was.
Not confused, he said. Further gone than confused. He brought them to his house. He fed them.
They ate without speaking and without apparent awareness of what they were eating. He sent his son for the county sheriff.
The sheriff came. He asked them questions. None of the four answered any question about what had happened in the mountains.
None of them answered any question about the other 15 men of the rescue party.
None of them answered any question about the original survey party of 11. In 4 hours of questioning by the sheriff and subsequently by two agency representatives who had written out from Knoxville, not one of the four men spoke a single word.
They were not physically injured. The agency physician who examined them found no wounds, no frostbite beyond minor surface damage to the extremities, no signs of starvation.
They had been 5 days in the mountains, but their condition suggested they had eaten during that time, or at least had not been without food, long enough to show the signs of serious deprivation.
Their clothing was intact. Their boots were worn but not destroyed. The physician noted one thing in his examination report that he flagged with particular emphasis.
He wrote, “The pupils of all four men are dilated beyond any condition explicable by the available light.
The dilation is uniform and does not respond normally to changes in illumination. I have observed this condition once previously in a patient who had suffered a significant psychological trauma of a nature I will not specify here.
I did not expect to observe it in four men simultaneously. The physician’s report was filed with the agency.
The agency classified it within 3 weeks of its filing. The four men were transported to Knoxville.
They were housed separately at the agency’s direction in private rooms at a boarding house that the agency contracted for the purpose.
They were provided with food, clothing, and medical attention. They were visited daily by agency personnel and by the physician.
None of them spoke for 11 days. On the 12th day, one of them, the carpenter, Daniel Foss, spoke.
He said four words to the agency representative who came to check on him that morning.
The four words are recorded in the agency representatives report. He said, “Do not go back.”
Then he stopped speaking again and did not speak again for another 3 days. And when he did speak again, it was about ordinary things, the food, the cold, whether his family had been notified of his return.
He did not speak about the mountains. He did not answer questions about the mountains.
When the mountains were mentioned, he looked at the wall. The other three did not speak at all.
For the duration of the period, they were monitored by the agency. W. Calhoun, the man with no recorded first name, was found dead in his room on the morning of November 19th.
The cause of death was recorded as heart failure. He was the first. The second was Seth Arlo, the mountaineer.
On November 24th, 3 weeks after coming out of the mountains, Seth Arlo was found in his room, having injured himself in a manner that the AY’s official record described in language that had been carefully chosen to be as uninformative as possible as self-inflicted wounds to the face.
What the agency record did not say, but what the physician’s private notes described in full was that Seth Arlo had destroyed both of his eyes with his own hands in his locked room in the night without making a sound that anyone in the adjacent rooms had heard.
He survived. He lived for another 19 years blind in a care facility outside Knoxville.
He never explained what he had done or why. He never spoke about the mountains.
When visitors came, and in the early years, some people came, drawn by the story that was beginning to circulate in fragments through the region.
He turned his face toward the wall and was silent until they left. He died in 1895.
He left no written account of any kind. George Whitmore and Daniel Foss survived the immediate period and were eventually released from agency supervision.
What became of them is the matter of the letters found beneath a floorboard in 1951.
And that is the third chapter of this story. But first, the 15 who did not come back.
And the question that the agency classified along with its physicians report, and that has never in the 148 years since November of 1876 been officially answered, what did 19 men find in the Great Smoky Mountains that only four came out of?
And what did those four find that made one of them destroy his own eyes rather than keep seeing it?
The Great Smoky Mountains in October of 1876 were not the mountains that exist in the popular imagination today.
Accessible, mapped, traversed by maintained trails and visited by millions of people annually. They were in 1876 among the least documented significant mountain ranges in the eastern United States.
The Cherokee had lived in and around the range for centuries before their removal in the 1830s, and their knowledge of the terrain was extensive and detailed.
But that knowledge had not been transferred into any format that the geological surveys cgraphers could use.
And in any case, the forced removal of the Cherokee from their ancestral territory had severed the continuity of that knowledge in ways that no subsequent effort had repaired.
What the survey knew about the Great Smokies in 1876 was limited and in places contradictory.
The existing maps were based on partial surveys from the 1820s and 1830s conducted under conditions that did not favor accuracy.
And supplemented by accounts from hunters and trappers whose roots did not necessarily correspond to the range’s actual geography.
The agency knew the mountains were there. It knew approximately how large they were. It knew very little else with confidence.
Marsh had researched the range before his departure with his customary thoroughess. He had read every existing survey account he could locate.
He had spoken with men who had hunted the upper ranges. He had interviewed through an intermediary an elderly Cherokee man living in western North Carolina who had been born in the mountains before the removal and who had spent his childhood in the upper terrain that Marsh intended to survey.
The intermediary’s account of this interview, preserved in Marshia’s own preparation notes, records the following.
The elderly man had been willing to talk about the mountains in general terms. The terrain, the weather patterns, the water sources, the best routes between the lower and upper elevations.
He had been willing to talk about all of this. But when the intermediary had asked about one specific area, a section of the upper range that Marsh had identified from the existing partial maps as his primary survey target, a high basin that the old maps marked only with a symbol the intermediary couldn’t identify.
The elderly man had stopped talking. He had sat for a while in silence. Then he had said in the language that the intermediary translated as best he could.
That place has a name. The name means the place where the heir is wrong.
He said we did not go there. Our people did not go there. There was an understanding among our people that you do not go there.
He said the understanding was very old, older than anyone could say when it had begun.
The intermediary had asked, “What is wrong with the air there?” The elderly man had said, “It is not the air.”
We called it that because it is the closest thing in our language to what the place is.
The air is not wrong. The place is wrong. He said, “I cannot explain it more than that.
I was never there. No one I knew was ever there. But the understanding of why you do not go there was passed down very carefully because the reason for not going was important enough to pass down carefully.
The intermediary had asked what is the reason. The elderly man had said the reason is that some places do not want to be entered and some places if you enter them anyway do not let you be the same afterward.
He said, “Some places change what a person is.” He said this in a way that the intermediary translated carefully, noting that the original language was more precise than the English rendering suggested, that the elderly man was not speaking metaphorically, but was making a specific claim about a specific mechanism.
Marsh read this account in his preparation notes and marked it with a single annotation.
The annotation said, “Local superstition, note terrain accordingly.” He went anyway. The Cutler family, who had watched the 11 men pass on the morning of October 3rd, had not been the only people to see them in the lower elevations.
Three other farmsteads along the approach road had observed the party, and all of them gave consistent accounts in the investigations that followed.
11 men well equipped, moving in good order, the two guides out front. Nothing unusual, nothing to remark on.
What happened to the party after it entered the upper terrain is a matter of inference because Marsh was the man who would have kept the expedition record, the daily log of position, progress, and findings.
And Marsh did not come back. The log did not come back. No document from the original survey party was ever recovered.
What we know of their first weeks comes from a single source. A folded sheet of paper found in the possession of one of the four men who eventually came out tucked inside his boot.
When the agency physician examined him, the physician removed the paper, read it, and included a transcription of its contents in his private notes rather than in his official report.
The paper had been written by Marsh himself. The handwriting was identified by comparison with examples from his agency files.
The date on the paper was October 15th, 12 days into the expedition, approximately halfway through the planned survey period.
What Marsh wrote on that paper in the careful hand of a man accustomed to precise field notation was not a survey record.
It was not a geological observation. It was not a position report or a weather note or any of the other things that a survey log would contain.
It was a warning. He wrote, “If this reaches anyone outside the party, know this.
We found the basin on October 11th. We should not have entered it.” Hulkcom and Vance refused to go in.
They said they would wait at the basin’s edge, and we entered without them. On the second day in the basin, we lost two men.
I do not know how. They were present at camp in the evening and absent in the morning, and there was no sign.
On the third day, the basin did what it does to the sound. I cannot explain this except to say that sounds do not behave correctly here.
A man shouting cannot be heard 20 ft away. A sound with no visible source can be heard very clearly.
On the fourth day, we found the structure here. The writing changed. The letters were slightly larger, slightly less controlled, the change in a careful man’s handwriting that indicates a corresponding change in his interior state.
He wrote, “I will not describe the structure in this document because I do not want this document to be the thing that brings other people here.
I will say only that it is old, older than any structure I have encountered in 40 years of fieldwork in this country, and that it is not abandoned.
Something uses it. I do not know what. I am leaving this note with the party’s youngest member and instructing him to keep it in his boot and to get out of these mountains by whatever means are available to him.
He wrote, “The basin does not want us to leave. I do not know how else to describe it.
I mean this in a practical sense, not metaphorically. The paths out of the basin change.
We have tried four times to retrace our route and found terrain that was not there when we entered.
Hulkcom and Vance are gone from the basin edge. We do not know if they left or if something else happened.
He wrote, “The party is reduced. I will not write the number.” He wrote, “If you are reading this and you are not someone I know, do not come here.
The survey can wait. Nothing in these mountains is worth what finding it costs, he wrote.
E Marsh, October 15th, 1876. Below the date he had written one more line in letters that were noticeably different from the rest.
Smaller, pressed harder. The letters of a man writing something he is not sure he should write.
He wrote, “The structure has windows. There is something in the windows. It has been there every time I have looked.
It looks back. The physician read this. He transcribed it into his private notes. He did not include it in his official report.
He placed the original paper in an envelope, sealed the envelope, and locked it in his desk drawer.
When he died in 1901, the envelope was among his papers. His family did not know what it was and discarded it with other items they could not identify.
The transcription in his private notes survived. The private notes were donated to the University of Tennessee archives by the physician’s grandson in 1967.
They remained uncataloged until 2009 when an archivist working through a backlog of uncataloged donations opened the physician’s notebook and read the transcription of Marsha’s paper.
The archivist made a photocopy. He filed the notebook. He took the photocopy home. He has not spoken publicly about it.
He has not published it. He provided a copy without explanation to a researcher at the university’s history department in 2011 who provided a copy to a colleague who provided a copy to the person who is telling you this story tonight.
The copy exists. The transcription is real. And what Edward Marsh wrote on a folded piece of paper on October 15th, 1876 and hid in the boot of the youngest member of his party is the closest thing to a direct account that anyone has of what the survey party found in the upper reaches of the Great Smoky Mountains.
It is not close enough to answer the question, but it is close enough to understand why the agency classified everything it had and why Calvin Prior, who led 19 men in to find those 11, did not come back out.
Calvin Prior had read nothing of Marsh’s warning when he led his 19 men into the Great Smoky Mountains on October 29th, 1876.
The paper had not yet been found. The physician had not yet examined the four survivors.
The agency knew only that 11 men had gone in and hadn’t come out on schedule and that the weather and the terrain might account for this and that someone needed to go in and find them.
Prior was given the assignment because he was the best available man for it and because he did not refuse difficult assignments.
He asked for three days to assemble his party and was given two. He studied the existing maps which he knew to be unreliable and supplemented them with information from hunters who knew the lower ranges.
He spoke to the Cutler family. He established the point of the survey party’s last confirmed sighting and planned his approach from there.
He kept a personal journal. He had kept personal journals in the field for 20 years.
A habit, he said, that had nothing to do with the agency and everything to do with his belief that fieldwork was wasted if it wasn’t observed and that observation required writing.
His journals from previous expeditions had been donated by his widow after his death to the Knox County Historical Archives.
They are detailed, precise, occasionally ry. The journals of a man who was comfortable in difficult places and who wrote about them the way you write about places you understand.
The journal from the 1876 rescue mission is different from the others. It begins normally.
The first three days of entries, October 29th through October 31st, are the entries of a man doing familiar work under difficult conditions.
The weather, the terrain, the pace of the party, which was faster than ideal because urgency competed with caution and urgency was winning.
Notes on specific members of the rescue party, their capabilities, their limitations, his assessment of how they would perform if the situation became extreme.
He noted on October 31st that two members of the party were expressing reluctance to continue above a certain elevation.
He did not name them. He wrote, “Two of the volunteers are losing their nerve.
This is understandable but inconvenient. I have spoken to them and they will continue. The reluctance is not cowardice, I think, but something more specific.
They seem to have a particular concern about the upper range that they cannot articulate clearly.
One of them said only that he had heard things from men who knew the mountains.
I asked what things. He said he did not know exactly, only that the things were sufficient to make those men unwilling to go above a certain point.
I noted this and we continued. The entry for November 1st is brief. Prior wrote, “We found the first camp today.
It was marshes. The equipment markings confirmed it. The camp had been broken down properly, not abandoned in haste.
Everything that should have been packed was packed. The fire pit was cold. I estimate the camp was last used 8 to 12 days ago, which is consistent with the timeline of the disappearance.
We found no signs of the party beyond the camp itself. We found no indication of what direction they had moved from this point.
The guides I brought are studying the terrain. Tomorrow we try to determine the route forward.
He wrote, “One thing I will note, the camp was in order, but there was something about it that I cannot account for in practical terms, and will therefore note here without interpretation.
The camp had been set in a clearing. The clearing had a quality of silence that I have not encountered in the field before.
I have worked in mountains for 20 years and I know the silences of high terrain.
They are large silences, the silences of open spaces and thin air. This silence was different.
It was the silence of something that has been muffled. Sound did not carry across the clearing in the way that sound carries in open mountain terrain.
I tested this. I walked to the far edge of the clearing and spoke at normal volume and could not be heard by the men at the center.
The distance was perhaps 40 ft. This should not be possible. I do not have an explanation.
The entry for November 2nd is the longest in the journal. It is also the last complete entry.
Prior wrote, we found the basin today. He wrote, “I understand now why the survey party did not return on schedule.
The basin is I want to be precise here. Because precision is the thing I can still offer.
The basin is approximately 3 mi across, oriented east to west, bounded on three sides by ridge lines that are steeper than the terrain below suggests they should be.
The entrance from the south, the direction we came from, is narrow. Perhaps 30 ft wide between the RGELine walls.
A man could miss it in bad visibility. A man could find it and choose not to enter.
He wrote, “Our guides would not enter.” They stopped at the entrance and refused. I asked them why.
The older guide said nothing. The younger guide said, “There is a word for this place.”
He said it in a language I did not recognize. Not Cherokee or not purely Cherokee, something older or more specific.
He said the word means the place that has already eaten. He said, “When a place is eaten, it is not hungry, but it still takes.”
He said, “We will wait here for you.” He wrote, “I did not argue with them.
I have learned not to argue with guides who refuse a specific place when they are otherwise willing men who have been reliable throughout the approach.
Their refusal is information. I noted it and entered the basin with the remaining 17 men.
He wrote, “The basin is quiet in the same way that the camp clearing was quiet, but more so, much more so.
Within 200 yards of the entrance, sound had ceased to behave correctly. I will not speculate on the mechanism.
I will record only the observable fact. Sounds made within the basin do not travel normally.
A shout carries perhaps 10 to 15 ft. A whisper in certain conditions can be heard much further.
We adapted our communication accordingly, he wrote. We found the structure at approximately midday. Here the journal entry paused.
There is a physical gap in the text. Not a blank space, but a place where the pen had rested on the page long enough to leave a small blot of ink.
The blood of a man who stopped writing and sat with his pen touching the paper while he thought about what to write next.
He wrote, “I will describe the structure in this journal because this journal is my record and my record should be complete.
The structure is built into the north wall of the basin, partially below ground and partially above.
The above ground portion is low, perhaps 8 ft at its highest point, and constructed from a stone that is not native to this range.
I know the geological formations of this part of the country and the stone this structure is made from does not occur within any distance I can account for.
It is gray black fine grained and has a quality of surface that I cannot describe accurately in geological terms.
It appears almost smooth but when you put your hand on it the texture is not what your eye has prepared you for.
He wrote, “The structure has no door in any conventional sense. It has an opening.
The opening is approximately 4 ft high and 2 ft wide. There is no mechanism to close it.
There is no visible interior from the opening. The interior is dark beyond what the conditions explain.
Light does not enter the opening in the way that physics would predict. I brought a lantern to the opening and the light stopped at the threshold as though it had reached the edge of something, he wrote.
I didn’t enter the structure. No one entered the structure, he wrote. But while we stood at the entrance to the basin and studied the structure, we became aware that something in the structure was studying us.
He wrote, “I have written that sentence and I recognize that it is not the kind of sentence that belongs in a field journal.
I am writing it anyway because it is the most accurate description I can provide of what occurred.”
We became aware gradually over a period I estimate at 15 to 20 minutes that the opening of the structure was occupied not by a person, not by an animal in any sense.
I recognize by something that was present in the darkness of the opening and that was directing its attention toward our position with a consistency and equality that is the functional definition of the word watching.
He wrote, I gave the order to withdraw from the basin. He wrote. That is the last order I will describe in this journal because the journal entry for November 2nd is the last thing Calvin Prior wrote.
What happened between the afternoon of November 2nd and the morning of November 3rd when four men walked out of the mountains and 15 did not has no record.
There is no subsequent entry in the journal. There is no account from any of the four survivors because three of them never spoke about the mountains.
And the fourth, Daniel Foss, the carpenter, spoke only in the fragments that will constitute the next part of this story.
Prior’s journal was recovered with the four survivors. It was in a pack that Daniel Foss was carrying along with no other items belonging to Calvin Prior.
Foss was never asked in any interview that was recorded why he had Prior’s journal.
He was never asked what had happened to Prior. The agency representatives who debriefed the survivors, if debriefed is the right word for a process in which the subjects said nothing, did not press these questions in any way that the records reflect.
The journal was taken from Foss. It was sent to Washington. It was classified within 4 days of its receipt.
It was declassified in 1968, 92 years after the events it describes, as part of a routine review of 19th century classified materials.
The reviewer noted that the journal had been classified under a designation that no longer existed in the AY’s current classification system, a designation from the 1870s that the reviewer could find no documentation to explain.
He declassified it by default as the rules required and it was transferred to the National Archives where it has sat ever since in a collection of miscellaneous 19th century geological survey documents available to any researcher who knows to request it.
Very few researchers know to request it. The ones who have requested it have not as a group published their findings.
There is a reason for this. The reason is that the journal written full produces an effect that most researchers find difficult to describe in academic language.
One of them in private correspondence with a colleague described it this way. There is a quality to Prior’s final entry that is not present in his earlier entries or in any of his previous journals.
It is the quality of a man writing from the edge of something he cannot see the shape of.
A man who is precise and methodical by nature and who is applying all of his precision and methodology to describe something for which precision and methodology are insufficient instruments.
Reading it is like watching a very good carpenter try to build something with the wrong tools.
The effort is evident. The inadequacy of the tools is evident. And the thing being built is not going to hold.
Daniel Foss went home to Knoxville in December of 1876, 6 weeks after coming out of the Great Smoky Mountains.
He went home to a wife named Clara and two children, a boy of seven and a girl of four.
He resumed as well as he could the ordinary business of a man’s life in a midsized Tennessee city in the late 19th century.
He continued his carpentry work. He went to church on Sundays. He was by the accounts of people who knew him, a quiet man who had always been somewhat quiet and who was after the autumn of 1876 somewhat quieter.
He did not speak about the mountains. This was not difficult to sustain in the early years because the agency had made clear through the representatives who managed the survivors transition back to civilian life that speaking about the expedition was not something it encouraged.
The agency had classified the relevant records. The agency preferred that the matter remain classified in the mouths of the people who had been present as well.
It communicated this preference through channels that left no documentary record of the communication which is its own kind of record.
F complied whether he would have spoken anyway absent the agency’s preference is a question the letters address obliquely but do not answer directly.
The letters were found in 1951, 75 years after the expedition, when the house Foss had lived in, which had passed through several owners since his death in 1921, underwent substantial renovation.
The renovation required lifting several sections of flooring in the secondstory bedroom. Beneath one section, inside a cavity that showed signs of deliberate preparation, the edges of the cavity had been smoothed and the interior had been lined with oil cloth was a locked metal box.
The box contained 43 letters written in Daniel Foss’s handwriting, addressed to no recipient, signed with his initials, and dated across a period of nearly 40 years from 1877 to 1918.
The renovation contractor who found the box turned it over to the current homeowner, who turned it over to the Knox County Historical Society.
The historical society cataloged it, copied the letters, and eventually shared the copies with several researchers.
The originals remain in the society’s collection. The letters are not a continuous narrative. They are not a systematic account of what happened in the mountains.
They are what 40 years of private correspondence with no recipient looks like. Fragmented, recursive, circling the same material from different angles at different stages of a man’s life, returning to certain images and certain moments, the way traumatized memory returns to things it cannot process and put away.
What follows is drawn from the letters directly. From a letter dated January 1877, written 6 weeks after his return.
I have not spoken of it to Clara and I will not. This is not because I do not trust her.
It is because putting the words in my mouth would make them more real than they presently are.
And I am not certain I can bear them more real. I am holding the reality of those five days at a specific distance like a lamp held at arms length, far enough not to burn, close enough to see.
I am managing this distance carefully. I do not know what happens if I lose the distance.
From a letter dated October 1879, the 3rd anniversary of the expedition. Whitmore came to see me last month.
He did not say anything about the mountains. We spoke for 2 hours about nothing in particular, and he left.
But before he left, he stopped at the door and looked at me for a moment, and I understood that the looking was the visit, that everything else had been the approach to it.
The looking lasted perhaps 5 seconds. We both understood everything that was in it. We did not speak it.
He left. I think that is probably the last time I will see him. Some understandings are too large to revisit.
From a letter dated spring 1883. What I think about most which I have not permitted myself to write until now is not the structure.
It is not what was in the structure. It is the sound or the absence of sound or whatever the correct description is for what the basin did to sound.
I have tried to find comparable experiences. I have asked people carefully without explaining why I was asking whether they had ever been in a place where sound did not carry.
Some of them describe mines or certain caves. I have been in mines and in caves.
It is not the same. In a mine or a cave, the sound is absorbed.
In the basin, the sound was I want to say redirected as though it went somewhere.
As though the basin was collecting it, taking it in, and the things that were in the basin, the sounds with no source, the sounds that had no business being audible at the distances we heard them.
I have thought about those sounds for seven years and I believe though I cannot prove this that they were the sounds the basin had collected and was giving back, not creating, returning.
I do not know why I believe this. It is the only explanation I have been able to construct that feels accurate.
From a letter dated 1887, 11 years after the expedition. I went back to the lower mountains last summer, not to the basin, not anywhere near the basin, but into the lower range below the elevation where everything changes.
I did not tell Clara where I was going. I said I was visiting a client in Mville.
I rode into the mountains and spent one night on the trail below the upper elevations and then came back down.
I went because I needed to know whether the mountains themselves had changed or whether I had changed, whether what I carry from those five days lives in the mountains or in me.
The answer as far as I can determine is both. The lower mountains are ordinary mountains.
Beautiful in the way mountains are beautiful. Large and indifferent and themselves without reference to the people who move through them.
I found nothing there that corresponded to what I carry. But on the second evening, descending, I heard something.
It was distant. It was at a much higher elevation than where I was, so far up the range that the sound should have been inaudible.
But the wind was coming from the north, from the high range, and it carried something down with it that I heard very clearly for perhaps 30 seconds.
I will not write what it was. I will write only that it was one of the sounds from the basin, one of the sourceless sounds.
One of the ones I had decided in seven years of trying to account for them might have been wind or animal or the psychological effects of extreme stress on auditory perception.
It was not wind. It was not an animal. I know this with a certainty I cannot justify and do not need to justify because I was there and I heard it.
And certainty does not always require justification. I came down from the mountains faster than I had gone up.
I have not been back. From a letter dated 1891. Whitmore died last year. I did not attend the funeral.
I sent a letter to his wife. She wrote back a brief note thanking me.
She did not ask how I had known her husband. I was grateful for this.
The two guides, Hulkcom and Vance, the ones who refused to enter the basin and who were gone from the basin entrance when we tried to come back out, were never found.
The agency inquiry listed them as missing with the rest. I have thought about this.
I have thought about it for 15 years. The two possible explanations are that they were taken by whatever took the others, in which case their refusal to enter did not protect them.
Or they left. They recognized something at the basin entrance that told them what was happening and they left the mountains before anything could happen to them.
I prefer the second explanation. I have preferred it for 15 years. I have no evidence for it.
But if they left, if they knew enough to leave, then they knew something before we entered the basin that they did not share with us.
And the question I have carried for 15 years is why didn’t they tell us?
Why did Hulkcom and Vance who refused to enter who had the knowledge that would have saved at least some of us?
Why did they stand at the basin entrance and say nothing useful while we went in?
I have one answer. It is not a comfortable answer. The answer is that they did tell us the elderly man that Marsh interviewed before the expedition.
His account is in Marsh’s preparation notes which I read before the rescue mission. The account of the place where the air is wrong.
The understanding that is very old and that was passed down carefully because the reason for not going was important enough to pass down carefully.
Hulcom and Vance told us through the elders account. They told us we did not listen because we categorized what we were told as superstition and moved it to the footnotes of our preparation.
Some things cannot be moved to the footnotes from the final letter dated November 1918 written when Foss was 69 years old and as it turned out 3 years before his death.
I am writing this because I have decided it should exist even if no one reads it.
42 years is a long time to carry something alone. I do not know whether writing it makes it lighter or heavier.
I expect the answer is heavier, but I am going to write it anyway. This once in full.
What was in the structure was not an animal and not a person and not a thing I have a category for.
I will not describe its appearance because the appearance was secondary to the effect. And the effect is what matters.
The effect was this. Looking at it, being looked at by it, produced a change in perception that I can only describe as a removal, not of the senses, not of consciousness, of something else, something I do not have a precise word for that I will call for the purposes of this letter.
The sense of being singular. The sense that you are one thing located in one place at one time.
That you are not the same as what is around you. Whatever was in the structure removed that sense.
While it looked at us, we ceased to feel like individual people and began to feel like I have struggled with this for 42 years, like material.
Like substance that has not yet been organized into anything, like the state of a thing before it becomes a thing.
Some of the men ran, some of them did not run. I do not know what distinguished the ones who ran from the ones who didn’t.
Whether it was something in their prior experience or something in their constitution or simply chance, I ran.
Prior did not run. Prior walked toward the structure. I have written that sentence. I will write the next one.
The last I saw of Calvin Prior. He was walking toward the opening of the structure in the north wall of the basin.
He was walking slowly and he was not running and he did not look like a man who had decided to do something.
He looked like a man who was being called. I do not know what happened after that.
I ran and I did not stop. Two others ran with me, Foss and Arlo, who you already know came out, and one other who did not make it to the edge of the basin, who was there when we entered the trees and not there when we stopped and looked back.
We came out of the mountains the next morning. I do not remember the night.
I have never remembered the night. Whatever happened in the hours between our leaving the basin and our arriving at the farmer’s road at dawn is not in my memory.
It is a gap, not a trauma blackened gap, not a dissociated episode, but a clean, complete absence of any content whatsoever.
8 to 10 hours gone. I have had 42 years to decide what this means and I have not decided.
I have settled for the functional approach. I do not know what happened in those hours and I have chosen to treat this not knowing as information rather than as a problem to be solved.
What I know is this. I came out. Seth Arlo came out and gouged his eyes out 3 weeks later.
Rather than continue to see whatever it was he was still seeing, W. Calhoun came out and died of a heart that stopped 18 days later in a locked room.
George Whitmore came out and lived for 15 years in a silence that was thorough and absolute and that I respected because it was the same silence I lived in.
And Calvin Prior walked toward the structure. And I do not know what happened after that.
I am putting these letters in a box. I am putting the box under the floor.
If someone finds them, they will know what I knew. Whether knowing helps them, I cannot say.
I will say only this, which is the thing I have been most reluctant to write and which I am writing now because I am 69 years old and the reluctance has run out.
After I came home in December of 1876, after I resumed my life, after the first year and the second, in the long decades of quiet, there were times, not many, but some, when I would be in a familiar place doing a familiar thing, and I would feel the thing that the structure took, the sense of being singular.
I would feel it return. And for a moment, just a moment before my ordinary consciousness reasserted itself, I would also feel something else.
Something at a great distance in the direction of the mountains. Something that was aware of me in the same way I was becoming aware of it.
I am not saying the thing is still there. I know it is still there.
I have known this for 42 years. I am saying that it still remembers us.
DF November 1918. The Great Smoky Mountains today are the most visited national park in the United States.
More than 12 million people pass through them annually. There are 500 miles of maintained trails.
There are visitor centers and ranger stations and campgrounds and paved roads and gift shops and restaurants at the park’s edges.
The mountains are in the contemporary sense completely accessible. They are also very large. The park encompasses over 500,000 acres.
Of those 500,000 acres, a significant portion is designated wilderness. Terrain that is not served by maintained trails and that is not in any practical sense regularly visited by anyone.
The high basins of the upper range are among the least visited parts of the park.
The terrain is steep, the weather is unpredictable, and the designation of the area as wilderness means that the infrastructure of accessibility does not extend to it.
In 500,000 acres of mountain wilderness, a basin three miles across is a small thing.
It is not on any map in the park’s visitor materials. It is not referenced in any trail guide.
It does not have a name in any document currently accessible to the public. If it has a name in any document not accessible to the public, that document has not been found.
The Geological Survey classified the records of the 1876 expedition and the 1876 rescue operation.
It classified the physicians report and Prior’s journal. In 1968, Prior’s journal was declassified by a routine reviewer who did not understand what he was declassifying.
The other materials, the physician’s report, the agency’s internal communications, the records of the survivors management remained classified under the original designation.
In 2003, a researcher submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for all materials related to the 1876 survey of the Great Smoky Mountains.
She received, after an 8-month wait, a partial response. Some materials were released, others were denied.
The denial cited a classification designation that the AY’s current classification manual does not contain.
A designation, the denial letter noted, from the 19th century that remains in force under continuity provisions that it declined to specify.
The researcher appealed. The appeal was denied. She did not pursue the matter further. She told a colleague in an email that the colleague has shared with researchers who have come after her that the denial itself was informative.
She wrote, “They classified something in 1876 and they have not declassified it in 127 years.
In my experience, the things agencies classify for that long are the things they genuinely do not want anyone to know.
Not the embarrassing things, not the illegal things, the things that don’t fit, the things that would require too much explaining.
She wrote, “I don’t know what they found in those mountains, but I know they found something they’ve been keeping for 127 years.
And I know that whatever it is, it was enough to make a man who had used his eyes without incident for 27 years decide 3 weeks after coming out of those mountains that he would rather not use them anymore.
She did not publish her research. She moved to a different area of historical inquiry.
When asked in a later interview why she had abandoned the FOIA project, she said, “Some questions have answers you can live with, and some questions have answers you can’t.”
I started to feel like the answer to this one might be the second kind.
And I decided I was not interested in confirming that at the cost of whatever confirming it would cost.
The four men who came out of the Great Smoky Mountains in November of 1876 are all dead.
The 15 who did not come out have been dead for 148 years. Edward Marsh, who wrote a warning on a folded piece of paper and hid it in a young man’s boot, has been dead for 148 years.
Calvan Prior who walked toward the opening of a structure in a basin in the upper range has been dead for 148 years.
The structure has not been dead for 148 years. Daniel F wrote, “It still remembers us.”
He wrote this in 1918, 42 years after the expedition. And he meant it not as a metaphor, but as a practical observation.
The observation of a man who had felt at intervals over four decades something at a great distance directing its attention in his direction.
He died in 1921. His house passed through several owners. The box stayed under the floor for 30 more years after his death through two world wars and the invention of television and the beginning of the atomic age until a renovation contractor lifted the wrong section of flooring in 1951 and found 43 letters written to no one.
The box is in the Knox County Historical Society. The letters are in the box.
The copies are in the hands of researchers who have not published their findings and do not explain why.
And in the upper range of the Great Smoky Mountains, in a high basin 3 m across, bounded on three sides by ridge lines that are steeper than the terrain below, suggests they should be accessible through an entrance 30 ft wide in the south wall.
There is a structure built into the north wall, partially below ground, partially above. Gray black stone that does not occur naturally in this range.
An opening 4 ft high and 2 ft wide. No mechanism to close it. And in the opening, in the darkness that light does not enter in the way that physics would predict, something that has been there long enough to be described as old by a man who had been doing fieldwork for 40 years and had never seen anything he would call old in that sense.
Something that when you stand in front of it removes the sense of being singular.
The sense of being one thing in one place at one time. Something that when you walk away from it, if you walk away from it, follows you with an attention the distance does not diminish.
12 million people visit the Great Smoky Mountains each year. They walk the maintained trails and take photographs and buy things at the gift shops and drive the paved roads and see the mountains from a distance that the infrastructure of accessibility maintains for them.
In 500,000 acres, a basin 3 m across is a small thing, small enough to miss.
Small enough to have been missing from every official map and every trail guide and every visitor material for 148 years.
The mountains are beautiful. Edward Marsh did not write this, but he would have agreed with it.
He had spent 11 years in mountain ranges and he found them consistently beautiful and was not inclined toward sentimentality about wild places.
The Great Smokies are beautiful. The haze that gives them their name sits in the valleys in the morning.
And the light that comes through it is a particular quality of light that painters have tried to capture for two centuries.
The basin is beautiful too in May when the light is right. James Aldrich wrote this about a different hollow in a different part of the mountains in a different year.
But the observation applies broadly to places that look like peace and are not. There are places in these mountains that do not want to be entered.
There is at least one place that once you have entered it does not let you leave entirely.
Daniel Foss left a box under a floorboard. He left 43 letters in the box.
He spent 42 years writing to no one about something he could not put down.
He was a carpenter, careful, methodical, precise in his work, a man who built things to last.
What he built in those 43 letters was not a warning exactly. It was not an explanation.
It was something else. The thing you make when you have been somewhere that no account can adequately convey and you know that no account can adequately convey it and you make the account anyway because the alternative is to have been there completely alone.
He built a record for whoever was going to find it. You have found it now.
The mountains are still there. The structure is still there. And whatever is in the structure has had 148 years of practice at being patient.
