Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories

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I COME FROM a race of storytellers.

My father’s family-the Arrowoods and the McCourys-settled in the Smoky Mountains of western North Carolina in 1790, when the wilderness was still Indian country. They came from the north of England and from Scotland, and they seemed to want mountains, land, and as few neighbors as possible.

The first of the McCourys to settle in America was my great-great-great-grandfather Malcolm McCoury, a Scot who was kidnapped as a child from the island of Islay in the Hebrides in 1750, and made to serve as a cabin boy on a sailing ship. He later became an attorney in Morristown, New Jersey; fought with the Morris Militia in the American Revolution; and finally settled in what is now Mitchell County, western North Carolina, in 1794. Yet another “connection” (a distant cousin) is the convicted murderess Frankie Silver (1813-1833), who was the first woman hanged for murder in the state of North Carolina.

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