Visiting Our Past: Uncovering the Hot Springs myth — maybe Rob Neufeld, Visiting Our Past A history story can be repeated so many times that it becomes truth. Often, you search for authoritative sources and find just one — the progenitor, which lacks a source for its information. For example, historian Terrell Garren, in his book, "Mountain Myth," traces the key statistic used to characterize Western North Carolina as Unionist during the Civil War to a man with ulterior motives. The oft-cited false numbers first appeared in a campaign biography by Alexander Hamilton Jones, trying to win a U.S. congressional seat reserved for Unionists in North Carolina.