Creating the Land of the Sky: Tourism and Society in Western North Carolina.

Creating the Land of the Sky: Tourism and Society in Western North Carolina. By Richard D. Starnes. Modern South. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, c. 2005. Pp. xvi, 240. $35.00, ISBN 0-8173-1462-8.)

Richard D. Starnes presents here a social and economic history of the tourism industry in western North Carolina from the 1820s to the present. He examines the interplay between regional interests and national clienteles, local elites and average citizens, Native and European Americans, and blacks and whites, to draw a thickly textured portrait of the coevolution of a region and one of its dominant industries.

The author draws on numerous local and national sources, including newspapers, local archives, promotional materials, and oral histories. The oral histories, particularly interviews with non-elite citizens in the tourism industry, are especially valuable. Tourism is a business, whatever is being sold (or more accurately, rented), whether mountain scenery, so-called authentic experiences with Cherokee Indians, clear air, repose in a four-star hotel, or a wilderness adventure; and Starnes clearly locates North Carolina's tourist industry in the national economy.

Chapter 1, beginning in the early nineteenth century, tells the early story of settlement and railroad building and escape from lowcountry fevers and humidity in the summer. The chapter centers on Henry Grady's proclamation of the New South as a progressive place for business. In the decades after this proclamation, tourism, railroad building, and logging created a vital regional economy in western North Carolina. The second chapter examines the turn-of-the-century period in which

Appalachia was invented, whether by thoughtful scholars such as Horace Kephart or popularizers like Frances Fisher Tiernan, whose phrase "Land of the Sky" was subsequently adopted by local boosters (p. 37). During this period America discovered the "strange land and peculiar people" of Appalachia, a stereotype that has been traded on ever since (p. 35).

The history of Asheville is examined for the same period in chapter 3. The ambitions of this city were epitomized in 1924 by its professional baseball team beating Ty Cobb's Detroit Tigers, a cause for celebration, at least in Asheville. Local records and national media are interwoven in this chapter to create an excellent urban history, with careful attention given to the numerous social classes that made up the city.

Another form of tourism is the lure of clean, mountain air for religious inspiration in denominational retreats such as Ridgecrest, Montreat, and Lake Junaluska. A variant on the tradition of camp meetings and mountain work among Protestants, these camps became pilgrimage sites for Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians. These retreats evolved into sources of renewal for the lowcountry, mainstream, institution-bound aspects of their parent organizations.

The Great Depression of the 1930s was cataclysmic for businesses generally. In the mountains, however, the creative destruction of capital, coupled with government programs such as the Works Progress Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps, and the Public Works Administration, created a period of economic renewal, a story of development that is told in chapter 5. The sixth chapter expands the aperture beyond social history to reflect on the cultural significance of tourism-fueled images such as the mountaineer or the Cherokee Indian. Starnes finds a mixed picture--money flows inward, self-respect flows outward--that is typical of many cultural tourism destinations. In Starnes's description of the Cherokee's opening of a Harrah's Casino, described in an epilogue, we find history again repeating itself, this time as farce.

Although at the edge of its scope, I would like to have seen in this book a consideration of "why tourism." Starnes states without critical reflection that "since the early nineteenth century, visitors have traveled to western North Carolina to enjoy the region's scenery, mild climate, and other attractions" (p. 2). This suggests (and I suspect it is true) that America has been a nation of tourists from the get-go. Creating the Land of the Sky: Tourism and Society in Western North Carolina gives a thorough regional portrait of one of the longest-standing destinations of American tourists.

ALLEN W. BATTEAU 

Wayne State University