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CHRISTIAN REID |
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Born in Salisbury, NC, Frances Christine Fisher Tiernan took the pen name "Christian Reid" to allow her to compete with her male counterparts. She often wrote of the western part of her state in a style often described by later critics as "a graceful, limpid style", "bland" and "sylvan romances". There is in her fiction an over-reliance on the picturesque that was popular in the years following the Civil War. Yet, her work stands apart from the many narratives of travel in Appalachia in its honest and realistic portrait of life in southern society. Short stories such as A Summer Idyl, a serialized romance is interwoven with descriptions of rustic lives, and soaring vistas. The "Land of the Sky", another serialized story of summer travelers in the western state, is believed by many to have given the region its name. |
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"On the western side of this "land of the sky" runs the chain of the Great Smoky --- comprising the groups of the Iron, the Unaka, and the Roan Mountains --- which, from its massiveness of form and general elevation, is the master-chain of the whole Allegheny range. Though its highest summits are a few feet lower than the peaks of the Black mountain, it presents a continuous series of high peaks which nearly approach that altitude --- its culminating point, Clingman's Dome, rising to the height of six thousand six hundred and sixty feet. Though its magnitude is much greater than that of the Blue Ridge, this range is cut at various points by the mountain-rivers, which with resistless impetuosity tear their way through the the heart of its superb heights in gorges of terrific grandeur. Scenery grand as any which tourists cross a continent to admire is buried in these remote fastnesses, utterly unknown save to the immediate inhabitants of the country, and a few adventurous spirits who have penetrated thither. For the wild magnificence of the scenes along its water-ways, Western North Carolina cannot be surpassed. The fame of the French Broad has somewhat gone abroad, but who knows anything of the Pigeon and Tennessee, the Tuckaseege and Hiawassee? The beauties in which the lesser streams abound are scarcely heeded by the people themselves, and one find glens in which the silver flash and rainbow-spray of tumultuous cataracts make the forest glorious, where one feels that the spot, as far as sight-seers are concerned, is virgin indeed." |
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Rare Books |
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