By DEREK HODGES

Staff Writer

SEVIERVILLE — History hasn’t done much to record how the Osage orange plant may very well have had a huge role in breaking the Tennessee Confederate Army a century and a half ago. When he put pen to paper for his first book, Stephen Lyn Bales set out to change that.

Bales is the author of Natural Histories: Stories From the Tennessee Valley and the keynote speaker for next weekend’s first Rose Glen Literary Festival at Walters State Community College’s Sevier Campus. He’s also one of the fairly small group of people who can tell you how a shrub native to the Red River Valley in Texas helped beat Tennessee’s boys in gray on their home turf.

“Osage orange is the only plant that is not native to the Tennessee Valley that I included in the book because the story is so incredible,” Bales explains. “It was just too good not to put in.”

Bales, a naturalist at the Ijams Nature Center in Knoxville, talks about the plants and animals of the river valley of East Tennessee with the dedication and passion of a child ticking off his Christmas list. What local folks will likely find interesting about him when he speaks next weekend is his ability to spread that excitement to those who may never even have heard of Osage orange, a wiry bush with big thorns and a bumpy, green, inedible fruit.

“The wood of Osage orange is very pliable. In fact, it’s named after the Osage Indians, who used the wood to make bows because it was so flexible,” Bales explains. “It also makes a great hedge plant because it grows together so thick that you can’t get through it.”

This is where the story gets really good. Before the invention of barbed wire, farmers across the country would plant Osage orange in hedge rows around their property. Some of the plants can still be found growing wild from Ohio to Florida, and even in our own Smoky Mountains where stragglers survive from the lines planted a century or more ago.

After a couple years, the bushes would grow together so thick it was almost impossible to get through them.

“You could keep people out and your livestock in,” Bales says. “All across the country, there were thousands and thousands of miles of Osage orange hedges.”

It was behind a few of those miles that Union soldiers perched themselves during the Battle of Franklin, south of Nashville. As they crossed open fields and meadows between the opposing camps on a mission to launch an offensive, the Confederate Army of Tennessee was surprised to find a row of Osage orange standing between them and their enemy.

“They started trying to cut their way through and the Union soldiers were just picking them off,” Bales says. “The Confederates lost more men at that hedge row than in any other part of the battle.

“Thousands of men died there. I went to the battlefield when I was researching the book. That hedge row isn’t there anymore, but I walked through the area where it stood. It was really eerie to be there where thousands of guys had died. I was there late in the evening and they fought late in the evening.”

As it turned out, the battle essentially “broke the back” of the Confederates in Tennessee, Bales says.

The full story of Osage orange, as well as 15 other plant and animal species native to the Tennessee River Valley is told in Natural Histories. Bales, who had his first job out of college working in production at The Mountain Press and has since written regular nature columns for other publications, pitched the idea for the text to eight publishers before coming to an agreement with the University of Tennessee Press to print a volume that details history, both natural and human, through the plants and animals of the area.

The book details things such as how the valley has changed over the years, moving from a riverbed to a series of lakes thanks to the Tennessee Valley Authority dams. While that has meant some tough changes for some species of animals such as local salamanders — they’re not included in Bales’ first book, but he’s promising they’ll be in a sequel he’s about to start writing — it’s also brought new diversity to the area.

“The bald eagle is not native to the Tennessee Valley; the golden eagle is,” Bales says. “Having the lakes here made this the perfect habitat for bald eagles.”

Bales comes by his love of the outdoors naturally. His family has lived in the Smokies for generations — the two Bales cabins on the Roaring Fork Motor Nature Trail belonged to his great-grandfather and great-great uncle — and he grew up less than a half mile from the national park’s boundaries.

“I grew up in the national park. I was always up there,” he says. “We’re so lucky to have a national park right there.”

It was falling in love with nature and the world around him in those boyhood explorations that set him on a course to write his book.

“I think it’s a universal experience for anybody who spends time outdoors to want to capture it, copy it and share it somehow,” Bales says.

Of course, experiences do not necessarily a book make. Bales spent years buried in stacks of books and doing research on the Internet before even the first word of Natural Histories was set on the page.

“With nonfiction you do tons of research,” he says. “I spent a lot of time in local libraries.”

Besides doing your research, Bales is going to offer other tips to aspiring writers during the literary festival, including working consistently on their manuscripts and taking advantage of those first few, quiet hours of the day.

“I actually became a morning person when I was writing,” he says. “(Fellow writer and author) Sam Venable told me that’s what I’d have to do. It’s really true. You get up that extra hour or two early and the house is quiet. You can sit down and focus and you’re not exhausted like you are if you try to write at the end of the day.”

dhodges@themountainpress.com