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This chapter discusses at length two of the best-publicised periodicals the 1890s, whose relationship reveals much about the reception in wider late-Victorian print culture of the conceptual integration of form and content that increasingly became associated with the little magazine genre. The slyly marketed Yellow Book (1894–97) is arguably the most notorious yet also the most ingeniously commercialist little magazine of all time, and it styled itself a ‘book’ for good reason. By emulating the appearance of a book, its editors and publisher John Lane at the Bodley Head hoped to safeguard their publication against the ephemerality and relative lack of prestige of periodical texts. The magazine drew a number of large advertisers and sold remarkably well until it was implicated in the Wilde trial in 1895. Its characteristic appearance had at that point become so recognisable that the magazine, as well as its rivals at the Savoy (1896) founded by the Yellow Book’s ousted alleged ‘Decadent’ ringleaders Arthur Symons and Aubrey Beardsley, felt that they needed to rethink their design aesthetic. Some material characteristics associated with the little magazine had become iconic and associated with transgressive content.

This chapter focuses on Lieutenant Colonel John Randolph Lane. Tall and erect, Lane was a robust man with a stocky build. He was three days away from his twenty-eighth birthday, but a chest-length black beard made him look older. Despite his uniform of Confederate gray, he looked more like a farmer than an army officer. Before the war, he was a farmer, turning over the sod every spring in the rolling fields of central North Carolina's Chatham County. He had the hardy look of a man accustomed to the outdoors—a strong face with rough-hewn features—but he also projected a natural dignity that befitted his current occupation. Lieutenant Colonel Lane was now second-in-command of the 26th North Carolina—one of the largest infantry regiments in the Army of Northern Virginia.

This chapter discusses how a coalition of postwar southerners reevaluated those old supply solutions to the region's water problems—dams and reservoirs—and moved in a completely different direction. Like allies around the nation, the Sun Belt's countryside conservationists thought dams and river structures were the problems and not the solutions. For these activists, the Wild and Scenic Chattooga River solved a new problem. In a region that lacked significant free-flowing rivers, the Chattooga's new designation illustrated a new relationship between southern water and southern power. Author John Lane described his personal Chattooga experiences in order to demonstrate why the river attracts people and what the river delivers to those who know and use it today. Bearing Lane's context in mind, one must remember that in the end, the Chattooga River was consciously left wild and brought to the national whitewater boating and environmental community for preservation.