The Wild East: A Biography of the Great Smoky Mountains and The Great Smokies: From Natural Habitat to National Park.

By Margaret Lynn Brown. (Gainesville and other cities: University Press of Florida, c. 2000. Pp. [xxii], 457. $44.95, ISBN 0-8130-1750-5.)

The Great Smokies: From Natural Habitat to National Park. By Daniel S. Pierce. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2000. Pp. xviii, 254. Paper, $18.95, ISBN 1-57233-079-1; cloth, $40.00, ISBN 1-57233-076-7.)

Margaret Lynn Brown and Daniel S. Pierce join contemporary historians like Mark David Spence and James A. Pritchard who have contemplated the growth of the National Park Service, the cultural constructions of wilderness implicit in its policies, and the consequences of those policies for landscape, wildlife, and dispossessed humans. While others focus on western parks, Brown and Pierce offer the most significant recent studies on the creation of a southeastern park and the challenges it provided. "Only a certain audacity ... could locate a national park where nature had been plowed, logged, and conquered," Brown writes; her study, then, is a history of "restoring--and even creating--[a national park]" in the South (p. 10).

Brown draws upon a recurrent theme of environmental history--the cultural construction of wilderness. Despite a slight tendency to romanticize earlier residents, Brown shows that the manipulation of the Smokies by the Cherokee and white mountain people of the nineteenth century was far-reaching. Approaching nature from different cultural traditions, both groups burned balds, grazed livestock, and spread non-native plants. Later, lumbermen brought a new cultural vision, defining trees "as a natural resource ready for efficient extraction--then followed by scientific management for future harvest ..." (p. 50). Propelled by new steam-powered equipment, the level of environmental degradation associated with the lumber industry in the Smokies was unprecedented. Clear-cutting and skidder erosion brought fires, floods, and declining biodiversity.

Other regional residents saw in the mountains the financial possibilities of scenic tourism. Indeed, the creation of a national park was an urban dream. Entrepreneurs and naturalists from Knoxville, Tennessee, and Asheville, North Carolina, pushed for the purchase of privately held land and the dispossession of families rooted in the Smokies for a century or more. Brown traces the human-induced environmental change that resulted from the Park Service's promotion of tourism at the expense of nature itself, a theme previously explored by Richard West Sellars and others. New Deal agencies crafted the new "wilderness" by expanding automobile access and manufacturing a rustic, backward vision of Appalachia. Park Service landscape architects in the 1950s recreated the "Wild East" in the image of western parks, introducing horses and trout fishing but with dire consequences for native species. Brown observes that the new environmentalism, represented by the 1964 Wilderness Act, exposed the conflict between tourism and preservation inherent in the Park Service's mandate. There was resistance to attempts to reduce human contact with bears, eradicate non-native species like the European boars, and restore native brook trout. Restoration efforts even met opposition from some "environmentalists." Hikers, for example, loved the balds, and they resisted restoration and the resurgence of woody plants.

Brown's well-executed prose is buoyed by her thorough reading of the literature and her exhaustive research, which includes over 100 oral histories. A few books cited in footnotes do not appear in the bibliography, and maps illustrating the locations of pre-park residents, lumber companies, or the contested North Shore Road are needed. These are minor concerns in an otherwise excellent monograph.

Pierce's solid effort, The Great Smokies, suffers somewhat in comparison to Brown's far-reaching study. Pierce essentially offers a traditional political history of the 1920s campaign to create a new national park. He is particularly effective in illuminating the role of urban businessmen, who believed the park would bring badly needed roads and economic development. Pierce's strength is his analysis of the political debate that followed. There was no consensus within the federal bureaucracy about the park's site, and the Forest Service resisted its location in mountains heavily used by lumber companies. These companies and other park opponents were defeated by a coalition of urban boosters and state officials; a public relations campaign emphasizing economics and civic pride; and a donation by John D. Rockefeller Jr. that shored up federal support and provided money to purchase land. In these purchases, Pierce discovers the inequities of dispossession and environmental change. Poorer residents were forced to leave, except those who became living museum pieces in Cades Cove. Alternatively, wealthy Knoxvillians who owned vacation homes received generous lifetime leases. Pierce regrets the loss of "family and community that made life in the Smokies special for its residents" (p. 173). However, by Pierce's own account, they faced a declining population, a backward economy, and the lure of outside employment.

Pierce pays short shrift to the pre-park history, relying primarily on secondary sources and drawing his account of the timber industry almost solely from one 1958 report. He also examines Park Service management in a cursory fashion. For example, policies over the maintenance of "desirable" animals were the subjects of decades-long debates; Pierce discusses them in three pages (pp. 178-81). Nonetheless, Pierce's political focus complements Brown's study of the human impact on the environment of the park lands. Historians interested in national parks in general and the Smokies in particular are well served by both volumes.

KATHLEEN A. BROSNAN
University of Tennessee at Knoxville