In 1904, after a stay with his parents, Kephart moved alone to a small abandoned cabin in the Tennessee Mountains, which he describes as "far up under the lee of those Smoky Mountains that I had learned so little about. With the pressure of his job, an impending separation from his wife and six children, and increased problems with drinking, Kephart left his position and his family in 1903. Born in Pennsylvania, educated at Yale, and trained as a librarian, Kephart had enjoyed a distinguished career as a scholar of the American West at the St. Kephart (1862 - 1931) sought the "Back of Beyond" to begin a new life. Besides, I wanted to enjoy a free life in the open air, the thrill of exploring new ground, the joys of the chase, and the man's game of matching my woodcraft against the forces of nature, with no help from servants or hired guides." Again, I had a passion for early American history and, in Far Appalachia, it seemed that I might realize the past in the present, seeing with my own eyes what life must have been to my pioneer ancestors a century or two ago. With an inborn taste for the wild and romantic, I yearned for a strange land and a people that had the charm of originality. "When I went south into the mountains I was seeking a Back of Beyond. In the second chapter of his book, "Our Southern Highlanders: a Narrative of Adventure in the Southern Appalachians and a Study of Life among the Mountaineers" (1913, 1922), Horace Kephart wrote of some of the forces which had impelled him to leave his materially comfortable earlier life to live in primitive conditions in the Appalachian Mountains of western North Carolina.
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