Cold Mountain

Charles Frazier

2 ideas

1. Inman's desertion and walk home

   W. P. Inman, a Confederate soldier wounded at Petersburg in 1864, walks out of a military hospital in Raleigh and travels on foot for months across war-torn North Carolina toward Cold Mountain and Ada Monroe, a woman he knew only briefly before the war. Along the way he faces Home Guard hunters of deserters, a corrupt preacher, predatory strangers, and grieving widows. He reaches home and reunites with Ada, then is shot and killed by the Home Guard. The case shows that surviving the journey does not buy a safe arrival: the violence the traveler fled is waiting at the destination.

2. Ada and Ruby rebuild a farm

   Ada Monroe is a Charleston minister's daughter educated in music, languages, and art. After her father dies she is left on a mountain farm she cannot run, and she nearly starves. Ruby Thewes, an unschooled local woman raised almost feral by a neglectful father, moves in on the condition that they work as equals, and she teaches Ada to plant, barter, butcher, and read the weather. Together they turn a failing property into one that can feed them through the winter.

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