Book Review: Beyond the Quiet Hills

Title: Beyond the Quiet Hills

Author: Gilbert Morris & Aaron McCarver

Date: 1997

Publisher: Bethany House

ISBN: 1-55661-886-7

Length: 351 pages

Quote: “I’ve got a life here with my grandparents, after I was abandoned by a father...Besides, I’m thinking of getting married.”

Basically this is a Teen Romance, set in an historical period when teenagers were legally allowed to marry each other. (Or adults, if they so chose.) Two stepbrothers feel attracted to one girl, and two other girls are also interested in them. As if that weren’t enough “sweet romance” for any reader, there’s also an adult romance between the widowed older couple whose marriage makes the boys stepbrothers, though it’s low-key, the way adult romances really seem to have been in the 1770s.

It is not a particularly well crafted romance. The characters get what sense of reality they have from the fact that they were real; that is, there was a real Watauga settlement, where the names and situations of some of the settlers are known to history, and the minor characters in this book really did most of the things Morris and McCarver have them do in the story, under the names Morris and McCarver give them. (The sheriff’s name is lost to history, the authors admit in a note at the end, so they imagined him as Hawk. When we see Hawk acting as sheriff, that part of his story is fact.) They were the wise, brave leaders of their day. Some of them later made epic mistakes, but that came after the years when this story takes place. In the 1770s they were the parent figures to the first generation of people on the Tennessee and North Carolina border.

In the 1770s the English and Cherokee people were trying very very hard to be “brothers,” learning each other’s lore and language, actively rewarding intermarriage, and (as we see in the novel) political rumblings of discontent were working against that early attempt at “brotherhood.” And, as always, hate was most attractive to individuals who had nothing else to offer their community: Morris and McCarver don’t try to characterize the haters on the Cherokee side, but they do bring to life and characterize the English ones, who probably were as vile as this book makes them seem, and might have been worse.

Their story gives the authors plenty of plot against which to set a predictable story of a young man who has background, money, courage, looks, and brains, and three pretty girls after him, but finds happiness when he confesses his selfishness and self-pity as a sin and becomes a more serious Christian.

I read this novel in a way that made it a more interesting literary experience than can usually be expected from a Sunday School romance. I stored two different works of fiction in separate places and read them concurrently, in the odd bits of time I had in each place. Both novels happened, just by chance, to be about the southern Appalachian mountain region: Beyond the Quiet Hills, and then Harriette Simpson Arnow’s Dollmaker, which is among at least the top fifty novels written in English in the twentieth century. I’ve seen the Watauga country, but Beyond the Quiet Hills does not bring it to my mind’s eye; when I first read The Dollmaker I had not seen Detroit, but the novel brought it to my mind’s eye and I recognized it when I saw it. I noticed how Arnow kept President Roosevelt and “Old Man Flint” in the background and gave her fictional characters a lively, plausible, tragic and comic story all their own; Morris and McCarver rely on history for their plot, even the events that push the hormone-ridden teenagers together and apart. I noticed how tastefully both novels present what Joyce Carol Oates so memorably called “the reality of sex” for middle-aged women—which is to say, apart from something to giggle about with the men we love, children—and how each of the babies produced by the middle-aged romance that runs through The Dollmaker is a young character in its own right, such that no matter how many times I’ve read it I’m apt to cry when one of them dies; the pre-teen children in Beyond the Quiet Hills are just names. Reading these books together was a real study in Why Christian Literature Is Often Overlooked or Belittled In the Literary Community. Prejudice can be a factor, but Sunday School novels tend to make it so easy...

Then I thought about what these novels have in common. Both of them are something that’s not always been easy to find: a fictional treatment of Applachian mountain people as we really are—when not begging and poor-mouthing to social workers, or showing off our disdain for those who do. The perception that social workers, and similar breeds of selfish Lady Bounti-Fools, exist in order to be stripped as bare as a coal mine has its reasons for existing—why else do they exist?—but the art and literature it spawned were dreadful and did a great deal to turn mountain people against the arts. In Beyond the Quiet Hills as in The Dollmaker, mountain people may not be wealthy but are certainly competent to take care of themselves and their own; they’re even people we might want to know.

Nancy Ward is the one I find most interesting. Historians have never been sure exactly how to describe her. As a young girl she’d had a special role in religious ceremonies; as a teenaged widow she’d led a war party to exact revenge, so she could fairly be called a war chief—but by the time she was written about in English she wasn’t going to war any more. Her title was Ghigau, which translates as “Beloved Woman” (or “Lady” or even “Mother”). What exactly it meant may have been undergoing transition .Cherokee society was not bound by feudal hierarchies. People wanted to seem modest rather than pompous about any honors higher than simply being the leader of this particular group on this particular occasion, which was all "chief" meant. Probably most Cherokees, male and female, really were chiefs; Benge, who wasn't even a Cherokee, was called a chief. Nancy Ward’s menfolks ranked higher than the other chiefs. So did she. Thinking in English influenced by other cultural traditions, I tend to read Nancy Ward as a war chief trying to earn the rank of peace chief, except that those weren’t Cherokee phrases and nobody even seems to know how badly they misrepresent the woman’s actual life. Anyway she was a lady of considerable influence; her second husband was English, her opinions were highly regarded, and as an adult she generally stood for peace. This novel includes her best known scene, where some young Cherokee warriors wanted to take a White woman hostage, and Ward said to them something translated in words like “If you want the honor of fighting old ladies, fight me--if you dare.” They didn’t. She was among the Watauga settlement’s main claims to fame...

But that’s the sort of thing that makes me wonder how different the effect of an historical novel, or even of a terse historical study, must be on readers depending on how much history they have already read. Growing up as near to the Watauga settlement as I did, having read as much about Nancy Ward as I did (and about Daniel Boone and John Sevier and Attakullakulla, too), I see her name in Beyond the Quiet Hills and instantly remember her story and think, “So that’s part of this story too!” Which it is. I can picture a schoolgirl in Auckland or Port of Spain getting hold of a copy of this book, liking its conflicted prize of a romantic hero, never having read the names of Nancy Ward or even John Sevier. “So, some of the things the hero(es) and heroine(s) of the romance are thinking about are that one of the neighbors stopped the Cherokee haters from killing an English woman, and another one leaned over the walls of a fort to drag another woman up out of danger during a battle. Well. They lived in interesting times.” Real Hillbillies get more meaning out of the same words. As I’ve said about some of the historical nonfiction books I’ve reviewed here: good historical fiction works if you don’t know the true stories behind it, but it’s much more fun if you do. 

As for the Englishmen of the Watauga settlement, although they were in line with the political philosophy that predominated in Richmond and Raleigh in the 1770s, by the 1790s they would have diverged so far that some would call them traitors. I wouldn’t say traitors, myself. They had a point of view. Any really comprehensive book of U.S. history will discuss that, although when I was in school...well, it was the era of “social studies” and feeble history books. Perhaps it’s better if those who don’t know the full biographies of Daniel Boone and John Sevier remember them best as the young, gallant fellows they were in the 1770s, when Sevier distinguished himself by leaning over a wall to haul a girl in out of danger, and Boone had yet to kill a bear in a fair fight and clean his knife by carving “D BOON KILL A BAR” on a nearby tree. But it would be a pity if readers of this book thought that “John Sevier”was just another random name the authors picked off old lists for a fictional character, like “Hiram Shoate”or “Jacob Spencer." 

I did enjoy Beyond the Quiet Hills—the part of it that attempts to flesh out the facts. The fictional romance I could have skipped, but teenaged readers will probably enjoy it.