Travel letter penned by a youthful John D. Muller and addressed to his mother while on a hiking trip in the mountains of upstate South Carolina and western North Carolina in the company of an older man identified only as "the Professor" [perhaps a faculty member at the College of Charleston, where Muller enrolled as a freshman in 1887]. Written on letterhead stationery of Caesar's Head Hotel, this note details the men's perambulations from Hendersonville, N.C., to Caesar's Head and Greenville, S.C., with discussion of the difficulties they encountered in trying to find lodging along the way, including night time stopovers in a stranger's homestead, a former resort once known as Buck Forest Hotel, and Caesar's Head Hotel and breakfast at Cohasset, mountain home of Margaret Adger Smythe McKissick, daughter of Ellison Smythe, of Charleston, and wife of Anthony Foster McKissick. While at Ceasar's Head Hotel, Muller and his fellow traveler had taken "a mile tramp" to view Jones Gap from an overlook called "The Bluff"; letter also includes observations on a railroad layover at Spartanburg, S.C., with reference to the large number of bicycles there and a visit with Methodist minister W.A. Rogers and wife. Travel by train took Muller and his companion from Sullivan's Island to Spartanburg, S.C., and then to Hendersonville, N.C., from which they set out to walk to Caesar's Head, S.C. A postscript, dated 16 July 1894, indicates that they had reached Greenville, S.C., after having journeyed on foot through the woods with the sun as their guide. Muller describes the Buck Forest Hotel, a one-time hunting lodge later operated as a hotel, as "a rather forlorn looking building, ornamented with many antlers of various deer which had be[en] killed during the past forty or fifty years....The proprietor no longer bothers himself about possible guests. He tried to put us off...but we used a little persuasion and so obtained a bed....His name is Carson, and he is a distant relative of the famous frontiersman, Indian scout, trapper & hunter Kit Carson...."
