Cup your hands tightly together and tilt them toward the floor. Imagine the seam where they meet as a river and the lifelines on your palms as tributaries. If someone slowly poured water into your hands, it would run out over the tips of your little fingers like a tiny waterfall. You have just created your own watershed. Geographers define watersheds as basins surrounded by mountains and ridges drained by streams that coalesce in a single river. Social scientists think of watersheds differently, as turning points in one's life or in human history. Through the Mountains: The French Broad River and Time presents the inseparable integration of the evolution of place and people in the watershed of the French Broad River, which swings northeast around the Great Smoky Mountains, the most heavily visited national park in America. A watershed's terrain, its rivers, and its climate shape its flora and fauna.

Though present in the French Broad watershed for about five milliseconds of the earth's history, our influence on the course of its waters and weather is far greater in the short run of millennia than its sculpting of us. The impact of our past and future deeds along the French Broad, though varying in specific details, are in aggregate no different from the effects of human habitation along any or all of America's rivers. Every major watershed--from the Kennebec across the country to the Sacramento--has been fashioned by periods of geologic upheaval and subsidence; colonization and settlement by paleo-people arriving from Eurasia; invasion of European immigrants driven west in flight from ravages of the Little Ice Age and in pursuit of dominating wealth; eviction of native Indians; internecine warfare; unfettered industrialized exploitation of natural resources and resulting rampant pollution; of economic depression and pandemic, and, of late, environmental awareness and pockets of restoration. Thus, the story of the French Broad is the large story of all of America's great rivers, but small enough to tell. Rising in the Blue Ridge of North Carolina and passing through Asheville, the French Broad river swings wide to the north around the Great Smokies before breaking out of the mountains near Newport, Tennessee, bound for Knoxville. There it joins the Holston to form the Tennessee. Four smaller rivers feed the French Broad: Swannanoa, Pigeon, Nolichucky, and Little Pigeon. The Pigeon, marks the northern boundary of Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

Its smaller sibling, the Little Pigeon, carved the valley occupied by the tourist meccas of Sevierville, Pigeon Forge, and Gatlinburg. The Nolichucky drains North Carolina's rugged mineral district above Spruce Pine. The shortest is the Swannanoa, but in many ways it cradles some of the watershed's oldest prehistoric Indian sites. The French Broad watershed is the heart of Western North Carolina and the epicenter of tourism in East Tennessee. More than 1 million people make their homes in the French Broad watershed and nearly 16 million visit annually. Remember the game: "Rock, Paper, Scissors"? Your parents or grandparents may have played it with you. Paper wraps rock. Scissors cut paper.

Rock breaks scissors. Which of the three is most powerful? Now consider this: water or rock? Those clear drops falling from the sky that dampen our gardens feel so benign--except when delivered in deluges that flood our farms and cities, laying waste to much we have built in a river's path. Rock, on the other hand, appears totally enduring. So utterly permanent the Blue Ridge Mountains seem--but they are not.