Daniel Ellis (Unionist) - Influence Today

Influence Today

Today Ellis is hardly remembered outside of Carter County with his legacy perhaps swept up in a healing repression of the horrors, cruelty, and upheaval of the Civil War in the Appalachian mountains. However, his writings seem to be emerging from obscurity as the Civil War experience of the Appalachian south gains more attention from historians.

Thrilling Adventures of Daniel Ellis remains in print and, despite its narrative excesses, is largely regarded as an invaluable, if highly partisan, accounting of conditions in wartime Appalachia. Some modern critics feel Ellis exaggerates his own role; Ellis' contemporaries maintain that he was too modest to adequately convey his war record.

The wartime tales of Ellis have also made some recent inroads into popular culture: Thrilling Adventures was used as a source (and inspired a scene or two) by Charles Frazier for his celebrated novel, Cold Mountain, which was later adapted into a major motion picture released in 2003.

• A character based upon Ellis (and Ellis himself) appears in Cameron Judd's "Mountain War Trilogy":
  • The Phantom Legion: A Novel of Unionist Resistance in Tennessee and North Carolina, February–December 1863 (New York, 1997).
  • Season of Reckoning: A Novel of Unionist Resistance in Tennessee and North Carolina, January 1864-February 1866 (New York, 1997).
  • The Shadow Warriors: A Novel of Unionist Resistance in Tennessee and North Carolina, September 1860-January 1863 (New York, 1997).