The elusive origins of a 200-year-old travelogue

by Jack Neely

Chances are you've seen colorful scraps of it somewhere, an imaginative tourist's description of a rowdy, irreverent Knoxville, 200 years ago. Little parts of it are strewn through the library in books and files. I think I first ran across it when the inestimable Jim Dykes (at least I've never dared to estim him) quoted it in a column, maybe 15 years ago. Since then, it's appeared in a half-dozen books, some of them published nationally. It's in a book about East Tennessee taverns, it's in a guidebook to the Smoky Mountains, it's even in a scholarly history of the American banjo—a salty page from a travel journal always ascribed to "traveler James Weir, 1798."

In all those quotations, the description's original source is never cited. Knoxville is pretty well stocked with historical documents, but the librarians I've spoken with know of no complete copy of Weir's travelogue. I've talked to authors who've quoted it; they don't recall seeing an original version. When I suggested it as an inscription for a marble marker down on Volunteer Landing, I hesitated. For all I knew, Jim Dykes made up the story himself, just to perplex the First Family bluebloods. All the places I'd seen excerpts of the passage were books and articles published in the 1980s and '90s, after the Dykes column came out. The passage sounds Dykesean, the sort of thing Jim would make up if he were to make up such a thing—not that he'd be the sort of guy who'd make up something or that there'd be anything wrong with it if he did.

But then I ran across a Weir excerpt in another book called The Outlaw Years: The History of the Land Pirates of the Natchez Trace, published in 1930. Weir's description is there to illustrate a chapter about the Harpe brothers, the mass-murderers who began their bloody binge in Knoxville the year Weir allegedly visited. The book's not footnoted, and its lengthy bibiliography includes several ancient, out-of-print texts that don't show up on the library radar. At least we know the elusive Weir manuscript is pre-Dykes.

Last week, McClung Collection director Steve Cotham found me a copy of a letter that caused a stir when it made the rounds in 1982. Written during the World's Fair to then-Mayor Tyree, the letter is signed by Douglas Brockhouse, a St. Louis attorney who identified himself as the great-great-great-grandson of James Weir, the oft-quoted "traveler." He said Weir, a South Carolinian, had passed through Knoxville and his way to Kentucky and spent six months hereabouts in 1799, teaching school and writing poetry. Brockhouse supplied a typed transcript of the original text.

For clarity, I took the liberty of fixing some spelling and punctuation, but these are Weir's own words from Brockhouse's letter:

"Now this country is settled with people from all parts of America and some from Europe, and as they come from different climes, so are their principles and aspirations [different]....

"I, at length, arrived at the infant city of Knox..... At first...my heart rejoiced to see [the] local situation and gay structures which seemed to reflect honor on the inhabitants (this town is four miles below the confluence of [the] French Broad and Holston on the north side of the River on a considerable eminence. The houses are irregular and interspersed.) When I came into this town, I found not so many masterly strokes of architecture as I did expect...." So this may be the first critique of Knoxville architecture: just gay enough to reflect honor but irregular and less than masterly.

Weir continues: "It was on a day of Court when I came. There the town was confused with a promiscuous throng of every denomination. Some talked, some sang, but mostly all did profanely swear. I stood aghast; my soul shrunk back to hear the horrid oaths and dreadful indignities offered to the Supreme Governor of the Universe who with one frown is able to shake them into non-existence.... There was what I never did see before...on Sunday: dancing, singing, playing of cards...."

That description of Knoxville on a godless Sunday in 1798 may be Weir's most startling paragraph. Another out-of-state traveler 147 years later was equally aghast at how little entertainment was allowed in Knoxville on a Sunday. I'd include it just for contrast, but I get the impression people are tired of my quoting John Gunther.

"This town...abounds with as many vicious practices as any other," Weir continues. "It is said by a gentleman of the neighborhood 'that the Devil is grown so old that it renders him incapable of traveling and that he has taken up in Knoxville and there hopes to spend the remaining part of his days in tranquillity as he believes he is among friends....'"

Brockhouse's letter is the longest transcript of the Weir diary I've seen anywhere—but, oddly, it doesn't include some of the most-often quoted portions—the part about whiskey and brandy being cheap in Knoxville and the descriptions of "women yelling from doorways, gamblers, hard-eyed and vigilant, blanket-clad Indians, leather-shirted woodmen, the half-naked Negroes playing banjo while the crowd whooped and danced...." (That's the part that got the attention of that banjo scholar, because it's apparently an unusually early description of white people responding to music of the African banjo.) Much of that section is included in that 1930 book, more or less verbatim, but only as a paraphrase of Weir's descriptions, outside of quotation marks. The Brockhouse letter contains ellipses, suggesting he didn't include everything Weir said about Knoxville.

Cotham sent Mr. Brockhouse a letter, trying to nail down the location of the original, complete document, maybe even get a photocopy of it, but never heard back. I learned that Mr. Brockhouse still has a law practice in St. Louis—but so far, he's not returning my calls, either. Maybe he's traveling. Wherever he is, I hope he's taking notes.