Wooah fellas!
You are totally glamorizing and mystifying the "Native American", which has become the trend over the decades.
The average Scottish cattle rustler of the 16th Century would have had most of the same skill set as any American Indian, plus some metal working skills, which is why one group overwhelmed the other. Most of those early pioneers were fresh off the boat from Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and Germany. They walked into the wilderness with the knowledge they brought with them, added a bit of the local skill set and used all of it to stay alive.
Personally, in a survival setting, I would prefer to emulate the winners of that contest between Indians and settlers, not the losers!
There was also no uniform Native American culture or skill set. They were thousands of separate warring tribes scattered over the diverse climates of North America, each group doing what was necessary to remain alive in their own areas. People are still doing the same thing except many are white, fresh out of college and equipped with Bic lighters, outboard motors on their canoes, much better camping gear and the most modern firearms.
Kephart lived among the people of the southern Appellation Mountains in the early 1900s. Those people had only a remote connection to any "Indians" and were living the exact same lifestyle as all the other people in that area. The "Cherokee" of that area are not recognized as official members of the tribe, just hill country people like everyone else in the area.
It is a little known fact that from 1836 onward it was not legal to be a Native American and reside east of the Mississippi River without specific government permission. Some people claimed to be "Indians", but they were not.
Rural lifestyle, bad roads and isolation were the common state of being in the southern hill country. It is the way my grandfather and thousands of others grew up and was really not a special deal.
Dig a little deeper into the Kephart story. He was a librarian that abandoned wife and children to run off to the woods (ROTTW as we call it) and write articles for the outdoor magazines of the day, but not too far into the woods. When he got tired of the "wilderness life" he would jump into his automobile and run to town and check into a hotel to type up his notes and mail them in and keep the cash flow moving. He was a severe alcoholic and some say he developed his fondness for the southern hill people because of their good quality moonshine (we were in our prohibition era then, alcohol was illegal). He finally died an early death when he crashed his Ford into a tree while drunk.
He also made lots of enemies in those hills! His work led to the government seizure of large tracks of private land from both large and small holders for the "preservation of the wilderness". The large national parks and wilderness areas of the southern U.S. highlands are formed from his efforts. The government actually went in and removed all traces of civilization to give the area the illusion of untouched wilderness! Millions enjoy those parks today, but the people that lost their land to the efforts were "resentful" to say the least.
He was so disliked in some circles that he went armed to the teeth at all times. Almost every camp scene shows him carrying or near firearms of the most modern type for his day. They were not for protection against wild beasts! He was especially fond of semiautomatic rifles and shotguns and habitually carried a revolver in a shoulder holster. One of the traits of those isolated hill people is that they will kill you and bury you in a laurel covered ravine in short order.
He put together a good book, but so did Nesmuck, and Townsend Wheeland and many others of that era, and Nesmuck's work mirrors theirs.
Those writers were all "outdoorsmen", and they were writing about the outdoors as a recreational activity. They were not preppers or survivalists as we view the modern trends. The people living in the cabins around them were the survivalists and preppers. But back then they were simply normal people doing what everyone did to stay alive. The writer's version of outdoor life was often collected and written about from stationary base camps or crude shacks rented from the locals and within sight of a house or road.
But it is a beautiful land.
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