Horace Kephat's The Tell-Tale Heart

Horace Kephart was born in 1862 in Pennsylvania, but he spent much of his youth in Iowa. He had become the director of the Mercantile Library in St. Louis in Missouri. Also he became an expert in exploration, be outdoors and to study nature was one of his greatest passions.
Kephart was married very young, but her marriage turned out to be very unhappy. He began drinking, he lost his job and his wife left him. In the end he had a nervous breakdown.
He decided to start over a new life. He wanted to take refuge in places far away from everything and everyone. So he chose the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee. He lived surrounded by nature, learning the habits and customs of the inhabitants of those regions. He became interested in their culture and their history.
He wrote many articles on his experience, but in the end he wrote an
The family is patriarchal. The power was in the hands of the oldest male, who could decide on every aspect of life; the woman, submissive to the head of the family, (authoritarian, strict with the children and often brutal) was the queen of the hearth, and her home was his kingdom. Relations between husband and wife and between them and the children were cold and detached. A woman could not leave the house without getting permission from her husband. The man was the Lord, and the woman had to obey him. In addition, women of the mountains were getting married very young, about fourteen or fifteen. Young wives became mothers of many children, something like seven or ten children. We have also seen in the film "Songcatcher" that pregnant women did not ask for any physician during the entire period of gestation. The only "doctors" who asked for advice were older women who belonged to the community. These older women gave advice to pregnant women, and sometimes prescribed some home