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Title: At home in the smokies
Author: United States. National Park Service
Release date: December 10, 2023 [eBook #72365]
Language: English
Original publication: Washington DC: National Park Service, 1984
Credits: Carla Foust, Steve Mattern, Thiers Halliwell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AT HOME IN THE SMOKIES ***
[Illustration:
At Home
In the Smokies
]
Handbook 125
At Home
In the Smokies
A History Handbook for
Great Smoky Mountains National Park
North Carolina and Tennessee
Produced by the
Division of Publications
National Park Service
U.S. Department of the Interior
Washington, D.C. 1984
_Using This Handbook_
This theme handbook, published in this new edition on the 50th
anniversary of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, tells the story of
the people who settled and lived in the mountains along the Tennessee
and North Carolina border. Part 1 gives a brief introduction to the
park and its historical sites. In Part 2, Wilma Dykeman and Jim Stokely
present the history of the region from the early Cherokee days to
the establishment of the park in 1934 and the renewed interest in
the past in the 1970s; this text was first published by the National
Park Service in 1978. Part 3 gives a brief description of the major
historical buildings you can see in the park. For general information
about the park and its wildlife, see Handbook 112.
National Park Handbooks, compact introductions to the great natural
and historic places administered by the National Park Service, are
published to support the National Park Service’s management programs at
the parks and to promote understanding and enjoyment of the parks. This
is Handbook 125.
_Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data_
Main entry under title: At home in the Smokies. (National park
handbook; 125)
Rev. ed. of: Highland homeland/Wilma Dykeman and Jim Stokely. 1978.
Includes index.
Supt. of Docs, no.: I 29.9/5:125
1. Great Smoky Mountains (N.C. and Tenn.)--Social life and customs.
2. Great Smoky Mountains (N.C. and Tenn.)--History. 3. Great Smoky
Mountains National Park (N.C. and Tenn.)--Guide-books. 4. Cherokee
Indians--History.
I. Dykeman, Wilma. Highland homeland. II. United States. National
Park Service. Division of Publications. III. Series: Handbook (United
States. National Park Service. Division of Publications); 125.
F443.G7A8 1984 976.8’89 84-600108
ISBN 0-912627-22-0
=Part 1= =Recapturing the Past= =4=
Smoky Mountain Heritage 7
=Part 2= =Highland Homeland= =12=
_By Wilma Dykeman and Jim Stokely_
Homecoming 17
_Rail Fences_ 30
Land of the Cherokees 35
The Pioneers Arrive 49
_Rifle Making_ 60
A Band of Cherokees Holds On 63
From Pioneer to Mountaineer 73
_Spinning and Weaving_ 94
The Sawmills Move In 97
Birth of a Park 107
The Past Becomes Present 121
_Handicrafts_ 132
Coming Home 137
=Part 3= =Guide and Adviser= =146=
Traveling in the Smokies 148
Oconaluftee 150
Cades Cove 152
Other Historic Sites in the Park 154
Related Nearby Sites 156
Armchair Explorations 157
Index 158
[Illustration:
Part 1
Recapturing the Past
]
[Illustration:
Joseph S. Hall
_Aden Carver of Oconaluftee was a carpenter, stone mason, millwright,
deacon, and preacher. He was more versatile than some men but
representative of many who worked hard and enjoyed their lives in the
Smokies._
]
Smoky Mountain Heritage
Seemingly endless ridges, forests, mountain streams, waterfalls, and
wildlife attract hundreds of thousands of travelers each year to Great
Smoky Mountains National Park on the Tennessee-North Carolina border.
Many are drawn by a long procession of wildflowers and shrubs bursting
into bloom in the spring and by the colorful foliage of the hardwoods
in the fall. Thousands hike the park’s many trails, which range from
short spurs to the 110 kilometers (70 miles) of the Appalachian Trail
that runs through the park. Also attracting wide interest are the
park’s historical sites and the lifeways of the mountain people. They
are pleasant surprises in the midst of all of nature’s richness. They
are physical ties with our ancestors, many of whom traveled from
their homelands across the sea to build new homes in the relatively
unexplored continent of North America.
The National Park Service has preserved some of the historic
structures in Great Smoky Mountains National Park so that we, and
future generations, can better understand how our forefathers lived.
By walking through and closely examining their finely crafted--and
crudely crafted--log houses, barns, and other farm buildings we gain
a new respect for their diligence and perseverance. The hours spent
hewing massive beams, preserving foods for winter use, and making
clothes from scratch are nearly incomprehensible in our age of machines
and computers. The mountainous terrain demanded hard work, and the
isolation fostered a zealous independence. The land truly molded a
resourcefulness and hardiness in the Smokies character.
The story of these mountain people and communities is told in Part 2
of this handbook by Wilma Dykeman and Jim Stokely, who can look out on
the expanse of the Great Smokies from their family home in Newport,
Tennessee. Their engaging story of the Smokies is illustrated with
historic photographs that largely come from the park’s files. Although
the identities of many of the photographers are unknown (see page 160),
we are no less indebted to them. They have helped to preserve the
history and folkways of the Great Smokies people, who played a part in
molding and defining our national character.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
[Illustration:
Charles S. Grossman
_In the old days, housekeeping in the Smokies allowed few if any
frills. Aunt Rhodie Abbott, and most other women, worked as hard as
any man as they went about their daily chores keeping their families
fed and clothed._
]
[Illustration:
Part 2
Highland Homeland
]
[Illustration]
[Illustration:
_A home in the Smokies usually meant a simple log house nestled in the
hills among the trees and amidst the haze._
National Park Service
]
Homecoming
It is summer now, a time for coming home. And on an August Sunday in
the mountain-green valley they call Cataloochee, the kinfolk arrive.
They come from 50 states to gather here, at a one-room white frame
Methodist church by the banks of the Big “Catalooch.” The appearance of
their shiny cars and bulky campers rolling along the paved Park Service
road suggests that they are tourists, too, a tiny part of the millions
who visit and enjoy the Great Smoky Mountains each year. Yet these
particular families represent something more. A few of them were raised
here; their ancestors lived and died here.
They are celebrating their annual Cataloochee homecoming. Other
reunions, held on Sundays throughout the summer, bring together
one-time residents of almost every area in the park. Some of the places
instantly recall bits of history: Greenbrier, once a heavily populated
cove and political nerve-center; Elkmont, where a blacksmith named
Huskey set out one winter to cross the Smokies and was discovered
dead in a bear trap the next spring; and Smokemont on the beautiful
Oconaluftee River, at one time the home of the Middle Cherokee and the
very heart of that Indian Nation.
These are special days, but they observe a universal experience as
old as Homer’s Ulysses, as new as the astronauts’ return from the
moon: homecoming. It is an experience particularly significant in the
Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Here, at different times and in
different ways, people of various races and heritage have reluctantly
given up hearth and farm so that today new generations can come to this
green kingdom of some 209,000 hectares (517,000 acres) and rediscover a
natural homeland which is the heritage of all.
Beginning on Canada’s Gaspé Peninsula as a limestone finger only 2.5
kilometers (1.5 miles) wide, the Appalachian mountain system that
dominates eastern America slants about 5,000 kilometers (3,000 miles)
southwest across New England and the Atlantic and border states
into northern Georgia and Alabama, culminating in the grandeur and
complexity of the Great Smoky Mountains. This range, which marks the
dividing line between Tennessee and North Carolina, is high; its
58-kilometer (36-mile) crest remains more than 1,500 meters (4,900
feet) above sea level. It is ancient--the Ocoee rocks here are
estimated to be 500-600 million years old--and its tall peaks and
plunging valleys have been sculpted by nature through the action of
ice and water during long, patient centuries. The odd and fantastic
courses of the rivers here indicate that they are older than the
mountains. The Great Smokies are a land of moving waters; there is no
natural lake or pond in this area, but there are some 1,000 kilometers
(620 miles) of streams with more than 70 species of fish. A generous
rainfall, averaging as much as 229 centimeters (90 inches) per year in
some localities and 211 centimeters (83 inches) atop Clingmans Dome,
nourishes a rich variety of plantlife: more than 100 species of trees,
1,200 other flowering plants, 50 types of fern, 500 mosses and lichens,
and 2,000 fungi. The mixed hardwood forest and virgin stands of balsam
and spruce are the special glories of the Smokies.
Many of the species of birds that make the Smokies their home do not
have to leave to migrate; by migrating vertically, from the valleys to
the mountaintops in summer and back down in winter, they can experience
the equivalent of a journey at sea level from Georgia to New England.
Animals large and small find this a congenial home, and two, the wild
boar and the black bear, are especially interesting to visitors. The
former shuns people, but the latter is occasionally seen along trails
and roadsides throughout the Smokies.
When the Great Smoky Mountains were added to the National Park System
in 1934, a unique mission was accomplished: more than 6,600 separate
tracts of land had been purchased by the citizens of Tennessee
and North Carolina and given to the people of the United States.
Previously, most national parks had been created from lands held by the
Federal Government. The story of the Great Smokies is, therefore, most
especially and significantly, a story of people and their home. Part of
that story is captured in microcosm on an August Sunday in a secluded
northeastern corner of the park: Cataloochee.
History is what the homecoming is about. The people of Cataloochee
worship and sing and eat and celebrate because they are back. And being
back, they remember. They walk up the narrow creeks, banked by thick
tangles of rhododendron and dog-hobble, to the sites of old homesteads.
They watch their small children and grandchildren wade the water
and trample the grass of once-familiar fields. They call themselves
Caldwell, Palmer, Hannah, Woody, Bennett, Messer. For exactly a
century--from the late 1830s and the coming of the first permanent
white settlers to the later 1930s and the coming of the park--men
and women with these names lived along Cataloochee Creek. But these
pioneers were not the first to inhabit a valley that they called by an
Indian name.
[Illustration:
Alan Rinehart
_With their trusty mule and sourwood sled, Giles and Lenard Ownby haul
wood for making shingles._
]
By “Gad-a-lu-tsi,” the Cherokees meant “standing up in ranks.” As they
looked from Cove Creek Gap at the eastern end of the valley across
toward the Balsam Mountains, they used that term to describe the thin
stand of timber at the top of the distant range. Later, the name became
“Cataloochee,” or the colloquial “Catalooch,” and it referred to the
entire watershed of the central stream.
The Cherokees liked what they saw. They hunted and fished throughout
the area and established small villages along one of their main trails.
The Cataloochee Track, as it came to be known, ran from Cove Creek Gap
at the eastern edge of the present-day park up over the Smokies and
down through what is now the Cosby section of eastern Tennessee. It
connected large Indian settlements along the upper French Broad River
in North Carolina with the equally important Overhill Towns of the
Tennessee River.
By the early 1700s, Cataloochee formed a minor portion of the great
Cherokee Nation whose towns and villages extended from eastern
Tennessee and western North Carolina into northern Georgia. But as time
went on, and as the white settlements pushed westward from the wide
eastern front, the Cherokees lost dominion over this vast area. In
1791, at the treaty of Holston, the Cherokees gave up Cataloochee along
with much of what is now East Tennessee. Five years later the state
of North Carolina granted 71,210 hectares (176,000 acres), including
all of Cataloochee, to John Gray Blount--brother to William Blount,
governor of the Territory South of the Ohio River, as Tennessee was
then called. Blount kept the land for speculation, but it eventually
sold for less than one cent per hectare. Now that the Cherokees had
relinquished the land, no one else seemed to want it. Even the famous
Methodist Bishop Francis Asbury, first sent as a missionary to America
in 1771, apparently wavered in his spirit when confronted with the
Cataloochee wilderness. In his journal in 1810 he lamented:
“_At Catahouche I walked over a log. But O the mountain height after
height, and five miles over! After crossing other streams, and losing
ourselves in the woods, we came in, about nine o’clock at night....
What an awful day!_”
During the 1820s, only a few hunters, trappers, and fishermen built
overnight cabins in the area. Then in 1834, Col. Robert Love, who
had migrated from Virginia, fought in the Revolutionary War, and
established a farm near the present city of Asheville, purchased the
original Blount tract for $3,000. To keep title to the land, Love was
required to maintain permanent settlers there. He encouraged cattle
ranging and permitted settlers choice locations and unlimited terms,
and by the late 1830s several families had moved into Cataloochee.
Probably the first settler to put down roots was young Levi Caldwell,
a householder in his early twenties seeking a good home for his new
family. The rich bottomlands and abundant forests of Cataloochee
offered that home, and before Levi Caldwell died in 1864 at the age of
49, he and his wife “Polly” (Mary Nailling) had 11 children. Levi was a
prisoner during the Civil War, and two of his sons, Andrew and William
Harrison, fought on different sides. Because he had tended horses for
the widely feared band of Union soldiers called Kirk’s Army, Andy
received a $12 pension when the war was over. William, who might have
forgiven and forgotten his differences with the Union as a whole, was
never quite reconciled to his brother’s pension.
Although he was older than Levi Caldwell by a full 21 years, George
Palmer arrived later at Catalooch. The Palmers had settled further
northeast in the North Carolina mountains, on Sandy Mush Creek, and
seemed content there. But when George decided to start over, he and his
wife, also named Polly, took their youngest children, Jesse and George
Lafayette, and crossed the mountains south into Cataloochee. They began
again.
Other families trickled in. As elsewhere in Southern Appalachia,
buffalo traces and old Indian trails and more recent traders’ paths
gradually became roads and highways penetrating the thick forests and
mountain fastnesses. In 1846, the North Carolina legislature passed
an act creating the Jonathan Creek and Tennessee Mountain Turnpike
Company, which was to build a road no less than 3.7 meters (12 feet)
wide and no steeper than a 12 percent grade. Tolls would range from 75
cents for a six-horse wagon down to a dime for a man or a horse and one
cent for each hog or sheep. After a full five years of deliberation
and examining alternatives, the company selected a final route and
constructed the highway with minor difficulty. The road fully utilized
the natural contours of the land and was at the same time a generally
direct line. It followed almost exactly the old Cherokee Trail.
[Illustration:
Edouard E. Exline
_Cataloochee and Caldwell--the names are nearly synonymous. The Lush
Caldwell family once lived in this sturdy log house with shake roof
and stone chimneys on Messer Fork. At another time, this was the home
of the E. J. Messers, another of Cataloochee’s predominant families._
]
The Cataloochee Turnpike was the first real wagon road in the Smokies.
It opened up a chink in the area’s armor of isolation. Travel to and
from the county seat still required the better part of three days,
however. Two of the rare 19th century literary visitors to these
mountains--Wilbur Zeigler and Ben Grosscup, whose book _The Heart of
the Alleghanies_, appeared in 1883--entered Cataloochee along this
road. Their reaction provides a pleasant contrast to that of Bishop
Asbury; they speak of the “canon of the Cataluche” as being “the most
picturesque valley of the Great Smoky range:”
“_The mountains are timbered, but precipitous; the narrow, level lands
between are fertile; farm houses look upon a rambling road, and a
creek, noted as a prolific trout stream, runs a devious course through
hemlock forests, around romantic cliffs, and between laureled banks._”
During the 1840s and 1850s, some 15 or 20 families built their sturdy
log cabins ax-hewn out of huge chestnuts and poplars, and then built
barns, smokehouses, corncribs, and other farm shelters beside the rocky
creeks. George Palmer’s son Lafayette, called “Fate” for short, married
one of Levi Caldwell’s daughters and established a large homestead by
the main stream. Fate’s brother, Jesse, married and had 13 children; 6
of these 13 later married Caldwells.
[Illustration:
_Pages 22-23: These proud people all dressed up in their Sunday best
are members of the George H. Caldwell family._
H. C. Wilburn
]
They ate well. The creek bottomlands provided rich soil for tomatoes,
corn and beans, cabbage and onions, potatoes and pumpkins. Split
rail fences were devices to keep the cattle, hogs, and sheep out of
the crops; the animals themselves foraged freely throughout the
watershed, fattening on succulent grasses and an ample mast of acorns
and chestnuts. Corn filled the cribs, salted pork and beef layered the
meathouse, and cold bountiful springs watered the valley.
The Civil War erupted in 1861. Although Cataloochee lay officially in
the Confederacy, this creek country was so remote, so distant from the
slave plantations of the deep South, that no government dominated.
Raiding parties from both sides rode through the valley, killing and
looting as they went. Near Mt. Sterling Gap at the northern end of the
watershed, Kirk’s Army made a man named Grooms play a fiddle before
they murdered him. The people of Catalooch kept his memory alive
throughout the century by playing that ill-starred “Grooms tune.”
But the war was only an interlude. Five years after its end,
Cataloochee was estimated to have 500 hogs, sheep, milch cows, beef
cattle, and horses; some 900 kilograms (2,000 pounds) of honey; and
about 1,250 liters (1,320 quarts) of sorghum molasses. Sizable apple
crops would begin to flourish during the next decade, and by 1900
the population of the valley would grow to over 700. Producing more
than they themselves could use, these farmers began to trade with the
outside world. They took their apples, livestock, chestnuts, eggs,
honey, and ginseng to North Carolina markets in Fines Creek, Canton,
and Waynesville, and to Tennessee outlets in Cosby, Newport, and
Knoxville. With their cash money, they changed forever the Cataloochee
of the early 1800s.
They sold honey and bought the tools of education. Using the tough,
straight wood of a black gum or a basswood, a farmer hollowed out a
section of the trunk with a chisel. He then slid a cross-stick through
a hole bored near the bottom. Upon transplanting a beehive into the
trunk and leaving an entrance at the bottom, he covered the top with
a solid wooden lid and sealed it airtight with a mixture of mud and
swamp-clay. In August, especially after the sourwoods had bloomed
and the bees had built up a store of the delicately flavored honey,
the beekeeper took a long hooked honey knife, broke the sealing, and
cut out squares of the light golden comb to fill ten-gallon tins. He
never went below the cross-stick; that honey was left for the bees. An
enterprising family might trade 10 tins of honey in a season. And at
the market, they would turn that honey into school supplies for the
coming year: shoes, books, tablets, and pencils.
[Illustration:
_Like many others in the Smokies, Dan Myers of Cades Cove kept a few
bees. He apparently was a little more carefree than some about the
tops of his bee gums, or hives. Some old boards or scraps of tin, with
the help of a couple of rocks, sufficed, whereas most people sealed
their wooden tops with a little mud._
Charles S. Grossman
]
There were too few families on Big Cataloochee for both a Methodist and
a Baptist church. In 1858 Colonel Love’s son had deeded a small tract
there for the Palmers, Bennetts, Caldwells, and Woodys to use as a
Methodist meetinghouse and school. Since then, the Messers and Hannahs
and several others had formed a community of their own 8 kilometers (5
miles) north, across Noland Mountain, along the smaller valley of the
Little Cataloochee. They built a Baptist church there in 1890.
But the differences were not great. One of the Big Cataloochee’s sons
became and remained the high sheriff of sprawling Haywood County with
the well-nigh solid support of the combined Cataloochee vote. Running
six times in succession and against a candidate from the southeastern
part of the county, he was rumored to have waited each time for the
more accessible lowlands to record their early returns. Then he simply
contacted a cousin, who happened to be the recorder for Cataloochee,
who would ask in his slow, easy voice, “How many do you need, cousin?”
The preacher came once a month. He stayed with different families in
the community and met the rest at church. More informal gatherings,
such as Sunday School and singings, took place each week. And during
late summer or fall, when crops were “laid by” and there was an
interval between spring’s cultivation and autumn’s harvest, there came
the socializing and fervor of camp meeting. A one-week or ten-day
revival was cause for school to be let out at 11 o’clock each morning.
The children were required to attend long and fervent services. But
between exhortations there were feasts of food, frolicking in nearby
fields and streams, and for everyone an exchange of good fellowship.
Besides these religious gatherings, women held bean-stringings and
quilting bees, men assembled for logrollings or house-raisings to clear
new lands and build new homes. One of the few governmental intrusions
into Cataloochee life was the road requirement. During the spring and
fall, all able-bodied men were “warned out” for six days--eight if
there had been washout rains--to keep up what had become the well-used
Cataloochee Turnpike. If a man brought a mule and a bull-tongue plow
instead of the usual mattock, he received double time for ditching the
sides of the road. This heavy work gave the men both a chance to talk
and something to talk about. But any of them would still have said that
the hardest job of the year was hoeing corn all day on a lonely, stony
hillside.
By the early 1900s, Cataloochee had become a mixture of isolation from
the outside world and communication with it. Outside laws had affected
the valley; in 1885 North Carolina passed the controversial No Fence
law, which made fences within townships unnecessary and required
owners to keep cattle, sheep, horses, and hogs inside certain bounds.
But other laws were less heeded; local experts have estimated that
95 percent of Cataloochee residents made their own whisky. Several
families subscribed to a newspaper--“Uncle Jim” Woody took _The Atlanta
Constitution_--and almost everyone possessed the “wish-book:” a
dog-eared mail order catalog. But no one in Little Cataloochee bought
an automobile.
The valley thrived on local incidents. A man shot a deputy sheriff and
hid out near a large rock above Fate Palmer’s homestead; Neddy McFalls
and Dick Clark fed him there for years. Will Messer, a master carpenter
and coffinmaker over on Little Catalooch, had a daughter named Ola.
Messer was postmaster, and the post office acquired her name. Fate
Palmer’s shy son, Robert, became known as the “Booger Man” after he hid
his face in his arms and gave that as his name to a new teacher on the
first day of school.
George Palmer, son of Jesse and brother to Sheriff William, devised a
method of capturing wild turkeys. He first built a log enclosure, then
dug a trench under one side and baited it with corn. The next morning
10 turkeys, too frightened to retrace their steps through the trench,
showed up inside the enclosure. But when George stepped among them and
attempted to catch them, the turkeys gave him the beating of his life.
Thereafter he was called “Turkey George.” And his daughter, Nellie,
lent her name to one of the two post offices on Big Catalooch.
[Illustration:
_“Turkey George” Palmer of Pretty Hollow Creek in Cataloochee used to
tell people that he had killed 105 bears. Most of them he trapped in
bear pens._
Edouard E. Exline
]
Yet the simplicity of life could not insulate the Cataloochee area
from “progress.” As the 20th century unfolded, scattered individual
loggers gave way to the well organized methods of large company
operations. Small-scale cutting of yellow-tulip poplar and cherry
boomed into big business during the early 1900s. Suncrest Lumber
Company, with a sawmill in Waynesville, began operations on Cataloochee
Creek and hauled out hardwood logs in great quantities. Although the
spruce and balsam at the head of the watershed were left standing, the
logging industry, with its capital, manpower, and influence, vastly
altered the valley.
With the late 1920s came an announcement that the states of North
Carolina and Tennessee had decided to give the Great Smoky Mountains to
the nation as a park. The residents of Cataloochee were incredulous.
They were attached to this homeplace; they still referred to a short
wagon ride as a trip and called a visit to the county seat a journey.
But the park arrived, and the young families of the valley moved away,
and then the older ones did the same. Gradually they came to understand
that another sort of homeland had been established. And the strangers
who now visit their valleys and creeks can look about and appreciate
the heritage these settlers and their descendants left behind.
The old families still come back. They return to this creek on the
August Sunday of Homecoming. In the early morning hours they fill the
wooden benches of tiny Palmer’s Chapel for singing and preaching and
reminiscing; at noon they share bountiful food spread on long plank
tables beside clear, rushing Cataloochee Creek; in the mellow afternoon
they rediscover the valley. For what lures the stranger is what lures
the old families back. They come to sense again the beauty and the
permanence and even the foggy mystery of the Great Smokies. And this
that beckons them back is that which beckoned the Indian discoverers of
these mountains hundreds of years ago.
Rail Fences
“Something there is that does not love a wall,” poet Robert Frost once
wrote. Likewise, many mountain people felt something there is that does
not love a fence. Fences were built for the purpose of keeping certain
creatures out--and keeping other creatures in. During early days of
settlement there were no stock-laws in the mountains. Cattle, mules,
horses, hogs, sheep, and fowls ranged freely over the countryside. Each
farmer had to build fences to protect his garden and crops from these
domestic foragers as well as some of the wild “varmint” marauders.
Rail fences had several distinct merits: they provided a practical
use for some of the trees felled to clear crop and pasture land; they
required little repair; they blended esthetically into the surroundings
and landscape. Mountain fences have been described as “horse-high,
bull-strong, and pig-tight.” W. Clark Medford, of North Carolina, has
told us how worm fences (below) were built:
[Illustration: H. Woodbridge Williams]
[Illustration: Charles S. Grossman]
“There was no way to build a fence in those days except with
rails--just like there was no way to cover a house except with boards.
First, they went into the woods, cut a good ‘rail tree’ and, with axes,
wedge and gluts, split the cuts (of six-, eight- and ten-foot lengths
as desired) into the rail. After being hauled to location, they were
placed along the fence-way, which had already been cut out and made
ready. Next, the ‘worm’ was laid. That is, the ground-rails were put
down, end-on-end, alternating the lengths--first a long rail, then a
short one--and so on through. Anyone who has seen a rail fence knows
that the rails were laid end-on-end at angles--not at right angles, but
nearly so. One course of rails after another would be laid up on the
fence until it had reached the desired height (most fences were about
eight rails high, some ten). Then, at intervals, the corners (where the
rails lapped) would be propped with poles, and sometimes a stake would
be driven. Such fences, when built of good chestnut or chestnut-oak
rails, lasted for many years if kept from falling down.”
One of the most valuable fences ever constructed in the Smoky Mountains
was surely that of Abraham Mingus. When “Uncle Abe,” one-time
postmaster and miller, needed rails for fencing, he “cut into a field
thick with walnut timber, split the tree bodies, and fenced his land
with black walnut rails.”
The variety of fences was nearly infinite. Sherman Myers leans against
a sturdy post and rider (above) near Primitive Baptist Church. Other
kinds of fences are shown on the next two pages.
[Illustration: _In this post and rider variation, rails are fastened to
a single post with wire and staples._
National Park Service
]
[Illustration: _Mary Birchfield of Cades Cove had an unusual fence with
wire wound around crude pickets._
Charles S. Grossman
]
[Illustration: _The Allisons of Cataloochee built a picket fence around
their garden._
Charles S. Grossman
]
[Illustration: _In the summer, farmers enclosed haystacks to keep
grazing cattle away._
Charles S. Grossman
]
[Illustration: _Ki Cable’s worm, or snake, fence in Cades Cove is one
of the most common kinds of fencing._
Charles S. Grossman
]
[Illustration: _Poles were used at John Oliver’s Cades Cove farm to
line up the wall as it was built._
Charles S. Grossman
]
[Illustration:
_The plight of their Cherokee ancestors is revealed in the faces of
Kweti and child in this photograph taken by James Mooney._
Smithsonian Institution
]
Land of the Cherokees
The Cherokees were among the first. They were the first to inhabit the
Smokies, the first to leave them and yet remain behind. By the 1600s
these Indians had built in the Southern Appalachians a Nation hundreds
of years old, a way of life in harmony with the surrounding natural
world, a culture richly varied and satisfying. But barely two centuries
later, the newly formed government of the United States was pushing the
Cherokees ever farther west. In the struggle for homeland, a new era
had arrived: a time for the pioneer and for the settler from Europe
and the eastern seaboard to stake claims to what seemed to them mere
wilderness but which to the Cherokees was a physical and spiritual
abode.
Perhaps it was during the last Ice Age that Indians drifted from Asia
to this continent across what was then a land passage through Alaska’s
Bering Strait. Finding and settling various regions of North America,
this ancient people fragmented after thousands of years into different
tribal and linguistic stocks. The Iroquois, inhabitants of what are
now the North Central and Atlantic states, became one of the most
distinctive of these stocks.
By the year 1000, the Cherokees, a tribe of Iroquoian origin, had
broken off the main line and turned south. Whether wanting to or being
pressured to, they slowly followed the mountain leads of the Blue Ridge
and the Alleghenies until they reached the security and peace of the
mist-shrouded Southern Appalachians. These “Mountaineers,” as other
Iroquois called them, claimed an empire of roughly 104,000 square
kilometers (40,000 square miles). Bounded on the north by the mighty
Ohio River, it stretched southward in a great circle through eight
states, including half of South Carolina and almost all of Kentucky and
Tennessee.
Cherokee settlements dotted much of this territory, particularly in
eastern Tennessee, western North Carolina, and northern Georgia. These
state regions are the rough outlines of what came to be the three
main divisions of the Cherokee Nation: the Lower settlements on the
headwaters of the Savannah River in Georgia and South Carolina; the
Middle Towns on the Little Tennessee and Tuckasegee rivers in North
Carolina; and the Overhill Towns with a capital on the Tellico River in
Tennessee.
Between the Middle and the Overhill Cherokee, straddling what is
now the North Carolina-Tennessee line, lay the imposing range of the
Great Smoky Mountains. Except for Mt. Mitchell in the nearby Blue
Ridge, these were the highest mountains east of the Black Hills in
South Dakota and the Rockies in Colorado. They formed the heart of the
territorial Cherokee Nation. The Oconaluftee River, rushing down to the
Tuckasegee from the North Carolina side of the Smokies, watered the
homesites and fields of many Cherokees. Kituwah, a Middle Town near the
present-day Deep Creek campground, may have been in the first Cherokee
village.
[Illustration:
National Park Service
_Adventurers were drawn to the Great Smoky Mountains and the
surrounding area in the 18th century. In 1760 a young British agent
from Virginia, Lt. Henry Timberlake, journeyed far into Cherokee
country. He observed Indian life and even sketched a map of the
Overhill territory, complete with Fort Loudoun, “Chote” or Echota, and
the “Enemy Mountains.”_
]
For the most part, however, the Cherokees settled only in the foothills
of the Smokies. Like the later pioneers, the Cherokees were content
with the fertile lands along the rivers and creeks. But more than
contentment was involved. Awed by this tangled wilderness, the Indians
looked upon these heights as something both sacred and dangerous. One
of the strongest of the old Cherokee myths tells of a race of spirits
living there in mountain caves. These handsome “Little People” were
usually helpful and kind, but they could make the intruder lose his way.
If the Cherokees looked up to the Smokies, they aimed at life around
them with a level eye. Although the Spanish explorer Hernando DeSoto
and his soldiers ventured through Cherokee country in 1540 and
chronicled generally primitive conditions, a Spanish missionary noted
17 years later that the Cherokees appeared “sedate and thoughtful,
dwelling in peace in their native mountains; they cultivated their
fields and lived in prosperity and plenty.”
They were moderately tall and rather slender with long black hair and
sometimes very light complexions. They wore animal skin loincloths and
robes, moccasins and a knee-length buckskin hunting shirt. A Cherokee
man might dress more gaudily than a woman, but both enjoyed decorating
their bodies extravagantly, covering themselves with paint and, as
trade with whites grew and flourished, jewelry.
The tepee of Indian lore did not exist here. The Cherokee house was a
rough log structure with one door and no windows. A small hole in the
bark roof allowed smoke from a central fire to escape. Furniture and
decorations included cane seats and painted hemp rugs. A good-sized
village might number 40 or 50 houses.
Chota, in the Overhill country on the Little Tennessee River, was
a center of civil and religious authority; it was also known as a
“Town of Refuge,” a place of asylum for Indian criminals, especially
murderers. The Smokies settlement of Kituwah served as a “Mother Town,”
or a headquarters, for one of the seven Cherokee clans.
These clans--Wolf, Blue, Paint, Bird, Deer, Long Hair, and Wild
Potato--were basic to the social structure of the tribe. The Cherokees
traced their kinship by clan; marriage within clans was forbidden. And
whereas the broad divisions of Lower, Middle, and Overhill followed
natural differences in geography and dialect, the clans assumed great
political significance. Each clan selected its own chiefs and its own
“Mother Town.” Although one or two persons in Chota might be considered
symbolic leaders, any chief’s powers were limited to advice and
persuasion.
The Cherokees extended this democratic tone to all their towns.
Each village, whether built along or near a stream or surrounded by
protective log palisades, would have as its center a Town House and
Square. The Square, a level field in front, was used for celebrations
and dancing. The Town House itself sheltered the town council,
plus the entire village, during their frequent meetings. In times
of decision-making, as many as 500 people crowded into the smoky,
earth-domed building where they sat in elevated rows around the council
and heard debates on issues from war to the public granary.
Democracy was the keynote of the Cherokee Nation. “White” chiefs
served during peacetime; “Red” chiefs served in time of war. Priests
once formed a special class, but after an episode in which one of
the priests attempted to “take” the wife of the leading chief’s
brother, all such privileged persons were made to take their place
alongside--not in front of--the other members of the community.
Women enjoyed the same status in Cherokee society as men. Clan kinship,
land included, followed the mother’s side of the family. Although the
men hunted much of the time, they helped with some household duties,
such as sewing. Marriages were solemnly negotiated. And it was possible
for women to sit in the councils as equals to men. Indeed, Nancy Ward,
one of those equals who enjoyed the rank of Beloved Woman, did much to
strengthen bonds of friendship between Cherokee and white during the
turbulent years of the mid-18th century. The Irishman James Adair, who
traded with the Cherokees during the years 1736 to 1743, even accused
these Indians of “petticoat government.” Yet he must have found certain
attractions in this arrangement, for he himself married a Cherokee
woman of the Deer Clan.
[Illustration:
Smithsonian Institution
_A Cherokee fishes in the Oconaluftee River._
]
[Illustration:
Charles S. Grossman
_A team of oxen hauls a sled full of corn stalks for a Cherokee
farmer near Ravensford, North Carolina. Oxen were more common beasts
of burden in the mountains than horses mainly because they were less
expensive._
]
Adair, an intent observer of Indian life, marveled at the Cherokees’
knowledge of nature’s medicines: “_I do not remember to have seen or
heard of an Indian dying by the bite of a snake, when out at war, or
a hunting ... they, as well as all other Indian nations, have a great
knowledge of specific virtues in simples: applying herbs and plants,
on the most dangerous occasions, and seldom if ever, fail to effect
a thorough cure, from the natural bush.... For my own part, I would
prefer an old Indian before any surgeon whatsoever._...”
[Illustration:
_Pages 40-41: At Ayunini’s house a woman pounds corn into meal with a
mortar and pestle. The simple, log house is typical of Cherokee homes
at the turn of the century. This one has stone chimneys, whereas many
merely had a hole in the roof._
]
The Indians marveled at nature itself. A Civil War veteran remarked
that the Cherokees “possess a keen and delicate appreciation of the
beautiful in nature.” Most of their elaborate mythology bore a direct
relation to rock and plant, animal and tree, river and sky. One myth
told of a tortoise and a hare. The tortoise won the race, but not by
steady plodding. He placed his relatives at intervals along the course;
the hare, thinking the tortoise was outrunning him at every turn, wore
himself out before the finish.
The Cherokees’ many myths and their obedience to nature required
frequent performance of rituals. There were many nature celebrations,
including three each corn season: the first at the planting of this
staple crop, the second at the very beginning of the harvest, the third
and last and largest at the moment of the fullest ripening. One of the
most important rites, the changing of the fire, inaugurated each new
year. All flames were extinguished and the hearths were swept clean
of ashes. The sacred fire at the center of the Town House was then
rekindled.
One ritual aroused particular enthusiasm: war. Battles drew the tribe
together, providing an arena for fresh exploits and a common purpose
and source of inspiration for the children. The Cherokees, with their
spears, bows and arrows, and mallet-shaped clubs, met any challenger:
Shawnee, Tuscarora, Creek, English, or American. In 1730, Cherokee
chiefs told English emissaries: “Should we make peace with the
Tuscaroras ... we must immediately look for some other with whom we can
be engaged in our beloved occupation.” Even in peacetime, the Cherokees
might invade settlements just for practice.
But when the white man came, the struggle was for larger stakes. In
1775 William Bartram, the first able native-born American botanist,
could explore the dangerous Cherokee country and find artistry there,
perfected even in the minor arts of weaving and of carving stone
tobacco pipes. He could meet and exchange respects with the famous
Cherokee statesman Attakullakulla, also known as the Little Carpenter.
And yet, a year later, other white men would destroy more than
two-thirds of the settled Cherokee Nation.
Who were these fateful newcomers? Most of them were Scotch-Irish, a
distinctive and adventuresome blend of people transplanted chiefly from
the Scottish Lowlands to Northern Ireland during the reign of James
I. Subsequently they flocked to the American frontier in search of
religious freedom, economic opportunity, and new land they could call
their own.
In the late 1600s, while the English colonized the Atlantic seaboard
in North and South Carolina and Virginia, while the French settled
Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana ports on the Gulf of Mexico, and
while the Spanish pushed into Florida, 5,000 Presbyterian Scots left
England for “the Plantation” in Northern Ireland. But as they settled
and prospered, England passed laws prohibiting certain articles of
Irish trade, excluding Presbyterians from civil and military offices,
even declaring their ministers liable to prosecution for performing
marriages.
The Scotch-Irish, as they were then called, found such repression
unbearable and fled in the early 18th century to ports in Delaware and
Pennsylvania. With their influx, Pennsylvania land prices skyrocketed.
Poor, rocky soil to the immediate west turned great numbers of these
Scotch-Irish southward down Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley and along
North Carolina’s Piedmont plateau. From 1732 to 1754, the population
of North Carolina more than doubled. Extravagant stories of this new
and fertile land also drew many from the German Palatinate to America;
during the middle 1700s these hardworking “Pennsylvania Dutch” poured
into the southern colonies.
Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia were colonies of the crown, and
the Scotch-Irish and Germans intermarried with the already settled
British. These Englishmen, of course, had their own reasons for
leaving their more conservative countrymen in the mother country and
starting a whole new life. Some were adventurers eager to explore a
different land, some sought religious freedom, not a few were second
sons--victims of the law of primogeniture--who arrived with hopes of
building new financial empires of their own. They all confronted the
frontier.
They encountered the Cherokee Nation and its vast territory. Earliest
relations between the Cherokees and the pioneers were, to say the
least, marked by paradox. Traders like James Adair formed economic ties
and carried on a heavy commerce of guns for furs, whisky for blankets,
jewelry for horses. But there was also deep resentment. The English
colonies, especially South Carolina, even took Indian prisoners and
sold them into slavery.
The Spanish had practiced this kind of slavery, arguing that thus the
Indians would be exposed to the boon of Christianity. The English
colonies employed what were known as “indentured servants,” persons who
paid off the cost of their passage to America by working often as hard
as slaves. And in later years both the white man and some of the more
prosperous Cherokees kept Negro slaves. Such instances in the Nation
were more rare than not, however, and a Cherokee might work side by
side with any slave he owned; marriage between them was not infrequent.
Be that as it may, the deplorable colonial policy of enforced servitude
at any level, which continued into the late 1700s, sowed seeds of
bitterness that ended in a bloody harvest.
Like the pioneers, the Cherokees cherished liberty above all else and
distrusted government. Both left religion to the family and refused
to institute any orthodox system of belief. Even the forms of humor
were often parallel; the Cherokee could be as sarcastic as the pioneer
and used irony to correct behavior. As one historian put it: “The
coward was praised for his valor; the liar for his veracity; and
the thief for his honesty.” But through the ironies of history, the
Scotch-Irish-English-German pioneers of the highlands, who were similar
to the Cherokees in a multitude of ways and quite different from the
lowland aristocrats, became the Indians’ worst enemy.
Their conflict was, in a sense, inevitable. The countries of England
and France and their representatives in America both battled and
befriended the Cherokees during the 18th century. Their main concern
lay in their own rivalry, not in any deep-founded argument with the
Indians. As they expanded the American frontier and immersed themselves
in the process of building a country, the colonists inevitably
encroached upon the Cherokee Nation.
[Illustration:
Smithsonian Institution
_In 1730, Sir Alexander Cuming took seven Cherokee leaders to England
in an attempt to build up good relations with the tribe. Among the
group was the youth Ukwaneequa (right), who was to become the great
Cherokee chief Attakullakulla._
]
In 1730, in a burst of freewheeling diplomacy, the British sent a
flamboyant and remarkable representative, Sir Alexander Cuming, into
remote Cherokee country on a mission of goodwill. After meeting with
the Indians on their own terms and terrain, Cuming arranged a massive
public relations campaign and escorted Attakullakulla and six other
Cherokee leaders to London, where they were showered with gifts and
presented at court to King George II. The Cherokees allied themselves
with Britain, but this did not discourage the French from trying to
win their allegiance. When the English in 1743 captured a persuasive
visionary named Christian Priber who sought to transform the Cherokee
Nation into a socialist utopia, they suspected him of being a French
agent and took him to prison in Frederica, Georgia. He was left to die
in the fort.
The British soldiers were not as friendly as British diplomats. During
the French and Indian War of the late 1750s and the early 1760s, when
England battled France for supremacy in the New World, English soldiers
treated the Cherokees with disdain and violence. The Cherokees returned
the atrocities in kind. The frontier blazed with death and destruction;
each side accumulated its own collection of horrors endured and meted
out. Although Cherokee chiefs sued for peace, Gov. William Henry
Lyttleton of South Carolina declared war on them in 1759. The Carolinas
offered 25 English pounds for every Indian scalp. A year later the
Cherokees, under the command of Oconostota, captured Fort Loudoun at
the fork of the Tellico and Little Tennessee rivers. But in June of
1761, Capt. James Grant and some 2,600 men destroyed the Nation’s
Middle Towns, burning 600 hectares (1,500 acres) of corn, beans, and
peas, and forcing 5,000 Cherokees into the forests for the winter.
After the English defeated the French in 1763, the British government
moved to appease the Indians and consolidate its control of the
continent. A British proclamation forbade all white settlement beyond
the Appalachian divide. But the proclamation was soon to be broken.
Pioneers such as Daniel Boone and James Robertson successfully led
their own and neighbors’ families through Appalachian gaps and river
valleys until a trickle of explorers became a flood of homesteaders.
During the next decade, settlers poured across the mountains into
Kentucky and northeastern Tennessee.
While England was regaining the friendship of the Cherokees, the
American colonists were alienating both the Indians and the British.
In the late 1760s a group of North Carolinians calling themselves
Regulators opposed taxation, land rents, and extensive land grants
to selected individuals, and caused unrest throughout the Piedmont.
In 1771, at Alamance, an estimated 2,000 Regulators were defeated by
the troops of British Gov. William Tryon. Thousands of anti-royalist
North Carolinians fled westward as a result of this battle. Alexander
Cameron, an English representative living in the Overhill Towns, wrote
in 1766 that the pioneer occupation of Cherokee lands amounted to an
infestation by villains and horse thieves that was “enough to create
disturbances among the most Civilized Nations.”
The protest spirit of the Regulators spread to the New England colonies
during the early 1770s. By 1776, when the American Revolution began,
the Cherokees had understandably but unfortunately chosen to take
the British side. Britain issued guns to all Indians and offered
rewards for American scalps, yet this was not enough to secure the
over-mountain territory for the English crown. Within a year, American
forces were fighting for the frontier, and in a coordinated pincer
movement, Col. Samuel Jack with 200 Georgians, Gen. Griffith Rutherford
with 2,400 North Carolinians, Col. Andrew Williamson with 1,800
South Carolinians, and Col. William Christian with 2,000 Virginians
demolished more than 50 Cherokee towns. Two treaties resulted from this
campaign; more than 2 million hectares (5 million acres) of Indian
land, including northeastern Tennessee, much of South Carolina, and all
lands east of the Blue Ridge, were ceded to the United States.
[Illustration:
_Ayunini, or Swimmer, was a medicine man. He was a major source of
information about Cherokee history, mythology, botany, and medicine
when James Mooney of the Bureau of American Ethnology visited the area
in 1888._
Smithsonian Institution
]
Peace did not follow the treaties, however. Dragging Canoe, pock-marked
son of Attakullakulla, decided to fight. Against the wishes of many
Cherokee chiefs, he organized a renegade tribe that moved to five
Lower Towns near present-day Chattanooga where they became known as
the Chickamaugas. But the eventual outcome of the drama had already
been determined. Despite conflict and danger, the settlers pushed on.
In 1780 the Tennesseans John Sevier and Isaac Shelby joined forces
with those of William Campbell from Virginia and Joseph McDowell from
North Carolina and managed to win a decisive victory over the English
at Kings Mountain, South Carolina. By fighting Indian-style on rugged
hillside terrain, they overwhelmed a detachment of General Cornwallis’
southern forces under Col. Patrick Ferguson. These over-mountain men
immediately returned to Tennessee and in reprisal for Indian raids
during their absence destroyed Chota and nine other Overhill Towns,
slaughtering women and children as well as Cherokee warriors.
In 1783, with the end of the Revolution, all hope for the survival
of the original Cherokee Nation was extinguished. Although the newly
formed American government attempted to conciliate the Indians, it
could not prevent its own citizens from hungering for ever larger bites
of land. Treaties with the loose Cherokee confederation of clans became
more and more frequent. As if by fate, a disastrous smallpox epidemic
struck the Cherokees; the number of warriors dwindled to less than
half of what it had been 50 years before. The Cherokee capital was
moved from Chota southward into Georgia. In 1794 Maj. James Ore and 550
militiamen from Nashville, Tennessee, obliterated the Chickamaugas and
their Five Towns.
Most of the Cherokees parted with the Smokies. At the Treaty of Holston
in 1791, they gave up the northeastern quarter of what is now the park.
Seven years later, they ceded a southern strip. And at Washington,
D.C., in February of 1819, nearly a century after their first treaty
with the white man in 1721, the Cherokees signed their 21st treaty.
This time they parted with a quarter of their entire Nation, and they
lost the rest of their sacred Smoky Mountains. Scattered families
continued to live in the foothills. But the newcomer--this pioneer
turned settler--had arrived.
[Illustration:
_Between her many had-to-be-done tasks around the house, Mollie
McCarter Ogle rocks her daughter Mattie on the porch._
Laura Thornborough
]
The Pioneers Arrive
Into the Smokies they came, but the coming was slow. The early pioneers
of the Old Southwest had conquered the lowlands of North Carolina and
Tennessee with relative ease. The higher country of the Great Smoky
Mountains, set into the Southern Appalachians like a great boulder
among scattered stones, would yield less quickly.
The pioneers began, as the Cherokees had done, with the most accessible
land. The level Oconaluftee valley, stretching its timbered swath
from present-day Cherokee, North Carolina, on up into the forks
and tributaries of the Great Smokies, beckoned with at least some
possibilities to the hopeful settler. As early as 1790, Dr. Joseph
Dobson, a North Carolina Revolutionary War veteran who had accompanied
Rutherford on his 1777 campaign against the Cherokees, entered into
deed a tract on the Oconaluftee. But the claim was void; the valley
still belonged to the Indians.
John Walker had also ridden with Rutherford. His son Felix, a student
and friend of Dr. Dobson, lawfully received in 1795 a sizable land
grant to the valley. Young Walker was more than willing to let settlers
attempt development of this wild area. Two North Carolina families
decided to try. John Jacob Mingus and Ralph Hughes took their wives and
children and journeyed into the “Lufty” regions of the Smokies. They
cleared small homesteads by the river; they were all alone.
In 1803, Abraham Enloe and his family moved up from South Carolina and
joined the growing families of Mingus and Hughes. Enloe chose land
directly across the river from John Mingus, and by 1820 Abraham’s
daughter Polly had married John, junior. “Dr. John,” as the younger
Mingus was respectfully called in his later years, learned much about
medicine from the scattered Cherokees remaining in the area.
Other families, Carolinian and Georgian and Virginian alike, arrived
and stayed. Collins, Bradley, Beck, Conner, Floyd, Sherrill: these and
others settled beside the river itself, and their children moved along
the creeks and branches. Fresh lands were cleared, new homes built; the
Oconaluftee was being transformed. And further to the southwest, Forney
Creek was being claimed by Crisps and Monteiths, Coles and Welches;
Deep Creek had already been colonized by Abraham Wiggins and his
descendants.
The Tennessee side of the Smokies, furrowed by its own series of
rivers and creeks, awaited settlement. By 1800 a few Virginians and
Carolinians were drifting into the four-year-old state of Tennessee,
willing to settle.
The first family of Gatlinburg was probably a mother and her seven
children. This widow, Martha Huskey Ogle, brought five sons and
two daughters from Edgefield, South Carolina. Richard Reagan, a
Scotch-Irishman from Virginia, and his family joined the Ogles and
began to clear land. His son, Daniel Wesley Reagan, born in 1802, was
the first child of the settlement and later became a leading citizen of
the community. The elder Reagan was fatally injured when a heavy wind
blew the limb from a tree on him, reminding the little community once
more of the precarious nature of survival in this free, stern country.
Maples, Clabos, and Trenthams followed the Ogles and the Reagans into
the Gatlinburg area. Nearby Big Greenbrier Cove became known as “the
Whaley Settlement.” Some settlers traveled directly across the crest
of the Smokies, via Indian and Newfound Gaps, but these old Cherokee
trails and cattle paths were rough and overgrown. Horses could barely
make it through, and most possessions had to be carried on stout human
shoulders. Besides the usual pots, tools, guns, and seeds were the
Bibles and treasured manmade mementos.
Many settlers, having been soldiers of the Revolution, had received
20-hectare (50-acre) land grants for a mere 75 cents. They pushed along
the West Prong of the Little Pigeon River, past Gatlinburg, up among
the steep slopes of the Bull Head, the Chimney Tops, the Sugarland
Mountain. This narrow Sugarlands valley, strewn with water-smoothed
boulders and homestead-sized plateaus of level land, attracted dozens
of families. But this rocky country forced the settlers to clear their
fields twice, first of the forest and then of the stones.
The work of clearing demanded strong muscles, long hours, and sturdy
spirits. It meant denting the hard armor of the forest and literally
fighting for a tiny patch of cropland. Men axed the huge trees with
stroke after grinding stroke, then either wrenched the stumps from the
earth with teams of oxen or burned them when they had dried. Some
trees were so immense that all a man could do was “girdle” them, which
meant deep-cutting a fatal circle into the bark to arrest the flow of
sap. Such “deadenings” might stand for years with crops planted on the
“new ground,” before the trees were finally cut and often burned. Logs
and stumps from the virgin forest often smouldered for days or weeks.
[Illustration:
Edouard E. Exline
_Uncle George Lamon sits next to one of his honey bee boxes at his
home in Gumstand, near Gatlinburg._
]
The soil itself was rich and loamy with the topsoil of centuries.
Land that had produced great forests could also nourish fine crops.
During the first year of settlement, all able-bodied members of the
family helped cultivate the new ground. Such land demanded particular
attention. Using a single-pointed “Bull tongue” plow to bite deep into
the earth and a sharp iron “coulter” to cut tough roots left under the
massive stumps, a succession of plows, horses, and workers prepared
and turned the newly cleared field. The first man “laid off” the rows
into evenly spaced lengths, the second plowed an adjacent furrow, and
the wife or children dropped in the seed. A third plow covered this
planted row by furrowing along its side. A short while later, the same
workers would “bust middles” by plowing three extra furrows into the
ground between the seeded rows. This loosened the soil and destroyed
any remaining roots.
While fields throughout the Smokies were yielding to the plow, even
more isolated coves and creeks were being penetrated and settled.
Gunters, Webbs, McGahas, and Suttons found their way into Big Creek.
And in 1818, John Oliver walked into a secluded Tennessee cove, spent
the night in an Indian hut, and then became familiar with one of the
most beautiful and productive spots in all the Great Smokies. This
broad, well-watered basin of fertile land was named after the wife of
an old Cherokee chief; it was called Kate’s Cove, later Cades Cove.
John Oliver settled in that cove. Three years later--two years after
the decisive 1819 treaty with the Cherokees--William Tipton settled
there legally, bought up most of the land, and parceled it out to
paying newcomers. David Foute came and established an iron forge in
1827. By mixing iron ore with limestone and charcoal, this “bloomery
forge” produced chunks of iron called “blooms.” The forge, similar to
many which sprang up throughout Appalachia, was indeed an asset, but
its low-grade ore and the cost of charcoal forced it to close only 20
years later.
[Illustration:
Edouard E. Exline
_Most families had several scaffolds in their yards on which they
dried fruits, beans, corn, and even duck and chicken feathers for
stuffing pillows._
]
[Illustration:
Charles S. Grossman
_Near most houses was a smokehouse in which meat was cured and often
stored for later use._
]
[Illustration:
Charles S. Grossman
_Fruits and other goods were stored in barns or sheds, often located
over cool springs._
]
Russell Gregory built a homestead high in the cove and ranged cattle
on a nearby grassy bald. These mysterious open meadows scattered
throughout the Smokies were of unknown origin. Had Indians kept them
cleared in years gone by? Had some unexplained natural circumstance
created them? Pioneers and later experts alike remained baffled and
attracted by the lush grass which, growing among forest-covered crags
and pinnacles, provided excellent forage for livestock. The present-day
Parson’s and Gregory Balds were named for enterprising farmers who made
early use of this phenomenon. Peter Cable, a friend of William Tipton,
joined the valley settlement in Cades Cove. Cable’s son-in-law, Dan
Lawson, expanded Cable’s holdings into a narrow mountain-to-mountain
empire.
Cades Cove, with its vast farmland, soon rivaled Oconaluftee and
Cataloochee. The lower end of the cove sometimes became swampy, but
this pasture was reclaimed by a series of dikes and log booms. To
escape an 1825 epidemic of typhoid in the Tennessee lowlands, Robert
Shields and his family moved up into the hill-guarded cove. Two of his
sons married John Oliver’s daughters and remained in Cades Cove. A
community had been formed.
But the life in these small communities was not easy. Each family
farmed for a living; each family homestead provided for its own needs
and such luxuries as it could create. Isolation from outside markets
made cash crops, and hence cash itself, relatively insignificant.
The settlers of the Great Smokies depended upon themselves. They
built their own cabins and corncribs, their own meat- and apple- and
spring-houses. They cultivated a garden whose corn, potatoes, and other
vegetables would last the family through the winter. They set about
insuring a continuous supply of pork and fruit and grains, wool and
sometimes cotton, and all the other commodities necessary to keep a
family alive.
Living off the land required both labor and ingenuity. These early
settlers did not mind fishing and hunting for food throughout the
spring, summer, and early fall, but there were also the demands of
farming and livestock raising. They carved out of wood such essentials
as ox yokes and wheat cradles, spinning wheels and looms. Men
patiently rebuilt and repaired anything from a broken harness to a
sagging “shake” roof made of hand-riven shingles. Children picked
quantities of wild berries and bushels of beans in sun-hot fields and
gathered eggs from hidden hen nests in barn lofts and under bushes.
They found firewood for the family, carried water from the spring,
bundled fodder from cane and corn, and stacked hay for the cattle,
horses, mules, and oxen.
[Illustration:
Edouard E. Exline
_Food also was stored in pie safes. The pierced tin panels allow air
into the cabinet but prevent flies from getting at the food._
]
[Illustration:
Aiden Stevens
_In the days before refrigerators, many methods and kinds of
containers were used in preserving and storing foods. Corn meal, dried
beans and other vegetables, and sulphured fruits were kept in bins
made from hollow black gum logs._
]
Women made sure that the food supply stretched to last through the
winter. They helped salt and cure pork from the hogs that their
husbands slaughtered. They employed a variety of methods to preserve
vital fruits and vegetables. Apples, as well as beans, were carefully
dried in the hot summer or autumn sun; water, added months later, would
restore a tangy flavor. Some foods were pickled in brine or vinegar.
Women also used sulphur as a preservative, especially with apples.
Called simply “fruit” by the early settlers, apples such as the
favorite Limbertwigs and Milams gave both variety and nutrition to the
pioneer diet. A woman might peel and slice as much as two dishpans of
“fruit” into a huge barrel. She would then lay a pan of sulphur on top
of the apples and light the contents. By covering the barrel with a
clean cloth, she could regulate the right amount of fumes held inside.
The quickly sulfurated apples remained white all winter and were
considered a delicacy by every mountain family.
Food, clothing, shelter, and incessant labor: these essentials formed
only the foundation of a life. Intangible forces hovered at the edges
and demanded fulfillment. As hardy and practical as the physical
existence of the pioneers had to be, there was another dimension
to life. The pioneers were human beings. Often isolated, sometimes
lonely, they yearned for the comforts of myth and superstition and
religion--and the roads that led in and out. The Cherokees in their
time had created such comforts; they had woven their myths and had
laced the Smokies with a network of trails. Now it was the white man’s
turn.
The early settlers of the Great Smoky Mountains were not content to
remain only in their hidden hollows and on their tiny homesteads.
Challenging the mountain ranges and the rough terrain, they
constructed roads. In the mid-1830s, a project was undertaken to lay
out a road across the crest of the Smokies and connect North Carolina’s
Little Tennessee valley with potential markets in Knoxville, Tennessee.
Although the North Carolina section was never completed, an old roadbed
from Cades Cove to Spence Field is still in existence. When Julius
Gregg established a licensed distillery in Cades Cove and processed
brandy from apples and corn, farmers built a road from the cove down
Tabcat Creek to the vast farmlands along the Little Tennessee River.
By far the most ambitious road project was the Oconaluftee Turnpike. In
1832, the North Carolina legislature chartered the Oconaluftee Turnpike
Company. Abraham Enloe, Samuel Sherrill, John Beck, John Carroll, and
Samuel Gibson were commissioners for the road and were authorized
to sell stock and collect tolls. The road itself was to run from
Oconaluftee all the way to the top of the Smokies at Indian Gap.
Work on the road progressed slowly. Bluffs and cliffs had to be
avoided; such detours lengthened the turnpike considerably. Sometimes
the rock was difficult to remove. Crude blasting--complete with
hand-hammered holes, gunpowder inside hollow reeds, and fuses of
straw or leaves--constituted one quick and sure, but more expensive,
method. Occasionally, the men burned logs around the rock, then
quickly showered it with creek water. When the rock split from the
sudden change in temperature, it could then be quarried and graded
out. Throughout the 1830s, residents of Oconaluftee and nearby valleys
toiled and sweated to lay down this single roadbed.
This desire and effort to conquer the wilderness also prompted the
establishment of churches and, to a lesser extent, schools. In the
Tennessee Sugarlands, services were held under the trees until a small
building was constructed at the beginning of the 19th century. The
valley built a larger five-cornered Baptist church in 1816. Prospering
Cades Cove established a Methodist church in 1830; its preacher rode
the Little River circuit. Five years later, the church had 40 members.
Over on the Oconaluftee, Ralph Hughes had donated land and Dr. John
Mingus had built a log schoolhouse. Monthly prayer meetings were held
there until the Lufty Baptist Church was officially organized in 1836.
Its 21 charter members included most of the turnpike commissioners plus
the large Mingus family. Five years later, the members built a log
church at Smokemont on land donated by John Beck.
Nothing fostered these settlers’ early gropings toward community more
than stories. Legends and tall tales, begun in family conversations and
embellished by neighborly rumor, forged a bond, a unity of interest,
a common history, in each valley and on each meandering branch. For
example, in one western North Carolina tradition that would thrive well
into the 20th century, Abraham Enloe was cited as the real father of
Abraham Lincoln. Nancy Hanks, it was asserted, had worked for a time in
the Enloe household and had become pregnant. Exiled to Kentucky, she
married Thomas Lincoln but gave birth to Abraham’s child.
Stories mingled with superstition. The Cherokees dropped seven grains
into every corn hill and never thinned their crop. Many early settlers
of the Smokies believed that if corn came up missing in spots, some
of the family would die within a year. Just as the Cherokees forbade
counting green melons or stepping across the vines because “it would
make the vines wither,” the Smokies settlers looked upon certain events
as bad omens. A few days before Richard Reagan’s skull was fractured,
a bird flew on the porch where he sat and came to rest on his head.
Reagan himself saw it as a “death sign.”
Superstition, combined with Indian tradition, led to a strangely exact
form of medicine. One recipe for general aches and pains consisted of
star root, sourwood, rosemary, sawdust, anvil dust, water, and vinegar.
A bad memory required a properly “sticky” tea made of cocklebur and
jimsonweed.
A chief medicinal herb was an unusual wild plant known as ginseng.
Called “sang” in mountain vernacular, its value lay in the manlike
shape of its dual-pronged roots. Oriental cultures treasured ginseng,
especially the older and larger roots. Reputed to cure anything from
a cough to a boil to an internal disorder, it was also considered an
aphrodisiac and a source of rare, mystical properties. But scientific
research has never yielded any hard evidence of its medicinal worth.
[Illustration:
Alan Rinehart
_Aunt Sophie Campbell made clay pipes at her place on Crockett
Mountain and sold them to her neighbors and to other folks in the
Gatlinburg area._
]
Settlers used ginseng sparingly, for it brought a high price when sold
to herb-dealers for shipment to China. The main problem lay in locating
the five-leaved plants, which grew in the most secluded, damp coves of
the Smokies. Sometimes several members of a family would wait until
summer or early fall, then go out on extended “sanging” expeditions.
The search was not easy. During some seasons, the plant might not
appear at all. When it did, its leaves yellowed and its berries
reddened for only a few days. But when a healthy “sang” plant was
finally found, and its long root carefully cleaned and dried, it could
yield great financial reward. Although the 5-year-old white root was
more common, a red-rooted plant needed a full decade to mature and was
therefore especially prized. Greed often led to wanton destruction of
the beds, with no seed-plants for future harvests. Ginseng was almost
impossible to cultivate.
Ginseng-hunting became a dangerous business. Although Daniel Boone dug
it and traded in it, later gatherers were sometimes killed over it. One
large Philadelphia dealer who came into Cataloochee in the mid-1800s
was murdered and robbed. Anyone trying to grow it, even if he were
successful, found that he would have to guard the plants like water in
a desert. Indeed, the rare, graceful ginseng became a symbol for many
in the mountains of all that was unique, so readily destroyed, and
eventually irreplaceable.
As much as the pioneers drew on Indian experience, they also depended
on their own resourcefulness. One skill which the early settlers
brought with them into the Smoky Mountains involved a power unknown to
the Cherokees. This was the power of the rifle: both its manufacture
and the knowledge of what the rifle could do.
The backwoods rifle was a product of the early American frontier.
Formally known as the “Pennsylvania-Kentucky” rifle, this long-barreled
innovation became a standby throughout the Appalachians. To assure
precise workmanship, it was made out of the softest iron available.
The inside of the barrel, or the bore, was painstakingly “rifled” with
spiralling grooves. This gradual twist made the bullet fly harder
and aim straighter toward its target. The butt of the weapon was
crescent-shaped to keep the gun from slipping. All shiny or highly
visible metal was blackened, and sometimes a frontiersman would rub his
gun barrel with a dulling stain or crushed leaf.
But the trademark of the “long rifle” was just that: its length.
Weighing over 2.5 kilograms (5.5 pounds) and measuring more than
1.2 meters (4 feet), the barrel of the backwoods rifle could be
unbalancing. Yet this drawback seemed minor compared to the superior
accuracy of the new gun. The heavy barrel could take a much heavier
powder charge than the lighter barrels, and this in turn could, as an
expert noted, “drive the bullet faster, lower the trajectory, make the
ball strike harder, and cause it to flatten out more on impact. It does
not cause inaccurate flight....”
The Pennsylvania-Kentucky rifle became defender, gatherer of food,
companion for thousands of husbands and fathers. Cradled on a rack of
whittled wooden pegs or a buck’s antlers, the “rifle-gun” hung over the
door or along the wall or above the “fire-board,” as the mantel was
called, within easy and ready reach. It was the recognized symbol of
the fact that each man’s cabin was his castle.
Equipped with a weapon such as this, pioneer Americans pushed back
the frontier. The fastnesses of the Great Smoky Mountains gradually
submitted to the probing and settling of the white man. The fertile
valleys were settled, the hidden coves were conquered. The Oconaluftee
Turnpike to the top of the Smokies was completed in 1839. And in that
fateful year, disaster was stalking a people who had known the high
mountains but who had not known of the ways of making a rifle.
[Illustration:
National Park Service
_A young Smokies lad stands proudly with his long rifle and powder
horn before heading off to the woods on a hunting excursion._
]
Rifle Making
Of all the special tasks in the Great Smoky Mountains, rifle making was
perhaps the most intricate and the most intriguing. From the forging of
the barrel to the filing of the double trigger and the carving of the
stock, the construction of the “long rifle” proved to be a process both
painstaking and exciting. After the barrel was shaped on the anvil,
its bore was cleaned to a glass-like finish by inserting and turning
an iron rod with steel cutters. When the rod could cut no more, the
shavings from the bore were removed. The rifling of the barrel, or
cutting the necessary twists into the bore, required a 3-meters-long
(10-foot) assembly, complete with barrel, cutting rod, and rifling
guide. The 1.5-meter (5-foot) wooden guide, whose parallel twists had
been carefully cut into it with a knife, could be turned by a man
pushing it through the spiral-edged hole of a stationary “head block.”
The resulting force and spin drove the cutting rod and its tiny saw
into the barrel, guiding its movement as it “rifled” the gun.
[Illustration:
National Park Service
]
[Illustration]
Most of the rifles in the Smokies had an average spin or twist of about
one turn in 122 centimeters (48 inches), the ordinary original length
of the barrel. A later step--“dressing out” the barrel with a greased
hickory stick and a finishing saw--usually took a day and a half to be
done right. Likewise, the making of a maple or walnut rifle stock, or
the forging of the bullet mold, led gunsmiths to adopt the long view
of time and the passing of days in the Great Smoky Mountains. Two such
gunsmiths were Matt Ownby and Wiley Gibson. Ownby (above) fits a
barrel to an unfinished stock as the process of rifle making nears
its end. Gibson (below), the last of four generations of famous Smoky
Mountain gunsmiths, works at his forge in Sevier County, Tennessee.
Over the years Gibson lived in several places in Sevier County, and
in each one he set up a gun shop. As he tested one of his finished
products (above), Gibson commented: “I can knock a squirrel pine blank
out of a tree at 60 yards.”
[Illustration: Charles S. Grossman]
[Illustration:
_Walini was among the Cherokees living on the Qualla Reservation in
North Carolina when James Mooney visited in 1888._
Smithsonian Institution
]
A Band of Cherokees Holds On
The Cherokees who remained in the East endured many changes in the
early 1800s.
As their Nation dwindled in size to cover only portions of Georgia,
Alabama, North Carolina, and Tennessee, the influence of growing
white settlements began to encroach on the old ways, the accepted
beliefs. Settlers intermarried with Indians. Aspects of the Nation’s
civilization gradually grew to resemble that of the surrounding states.
The Cherokees diversified and improved their agricultural economy. They
came to rely more heavily on livestock. Herds of sheep, goats, and
hogs, as well as cattle, grazed throughout the Nation. Along with crops
of aromatic tobacco, and such staples as squash, potatoes, beans, and
the ever-present corn, the Cherokees were cultivating cotton, grains,
indigo, and other trade items. Boats carried tons of export to New
Orleans and other river cities. Home industry, such as spinning and
weaving, multiplied; local merchants thrived.
Church missions and their attendant schools were established. As early
as 1801, members of the Society of United Brethren set up a station of
missionaries at a north Georgia site called Spring Place. And within
five years, the Rev. Gideon Blackburn from East Tennessee persuaded his
Presbyterians to subsidize two schools.
In 1817, perhaps the most famous of all the Cherokee missions was
opened on Chickamauga Creek at Brainerd, just across the Tennessee
line from Georgia. Founded by Cyrus Kingsbury and a combined
Congregational-Presbyterian board, Brainerd Mission educated many
Cherokee leaders, including Elias Boudinot and John Ridge. Samuel
Austin Worcester, a prominent Congregational minister from New England,
taught at Brainerd from 1825 until 1834. He became a great friend of
the Cherokees and was referred to as “The Messenger.”
In 1821, a single individual gave to his Nation an educational
innovation as significant and far-reaching as the influx of schools. A
Cherokee named Sequoyah, known among whites as George Gist, had long
been interested in the “talking leaves” of the white man. After years
of thought, study, and hard work, he devised an 86-character Cherokee
alphabet. Born about 1760 near old Fort Loudoun, Tennessee, Sequoyah
had neither attended school nor learned English. By 1818, he had moved
to Willstown in what is now eastern Alabama and had grown interested in
the white man’s ability to write. He determined that he would give his
own people the same advantage.
[Illustration:
Smithsonian Institution
_Sequoyah displays the Cherokee alphabet he developed._
]
The first painstaking process he tried called for attaching a mark to
each Cherokee word. These marks soon mounted into the thousands. As
he sensed the futility of this one-for-one relationship, he examined
English letters in an old newspaper. His own mind linked symbols of
this sort with basic sounds of the Cherokee tongue. After months of
work, he sorted out these sounds and assigned them symbols based, to
a large extent, upon the ones he had seen in the newspaper. When he
introduced his invention to his fellow Cherokees, it was as if he
had loosed a floodgate. Within the space of a few weeks, elders and
children alike began to read and write. The change was incredible.
Sequoyah himself vaulted into a position of great respect inside
the Nation. One of his many awestruck visitors, John Howard Payne,
described him with the finest detail and noted that Sequoyah wore
“... _a turban of roses and posies upon a white ground girding his
venerable grey hairs, a long dark blue robe, bordered around the lower
edge and the cuffs, with black; a blue and white minutely checked
calico tunic under it, confined with an Indian beaded belt, which
sustained a large wooden handled knife, in a rough leathern sheath;
the tunic open on the breast and its collar apart, with a twisted
handkerchief flung around his neck and gathered within the bosom of the
tunic. He wore plain buckskin leggings; and one of a deeper chocolate
hue than the other. His moccasins were unornamented buckskin. He had
a long dusky white bag of sumac with him, and a long Indian pipe, and
smoked incessantly, replenishing his pipe from his bag. His air was
altogether what we picture to ourselves of an old Greek philosopher.
He talked and gesticulated very gracefully; his voice alternately
swelling, and then sinking to a whisper, and his eye firing up and then
its wild flashes subsiding into a gentle and most benignant smile._”
During the 1820s, Sequoyah moved west to Arkansas. Preoccupied with the
legend of a lost band of Cherokees somewhere in the Rocky Mountains,
he initiated several attempts to discover the group. But age caught
up with him. He died alone in northern Mexico in the summer of 1843.
He had brought his Nation a long way. His name would be immortalized
in the great redwood tree of the Far West, the giant sequoia. And
in a sense his spirit lived on in the first Cherokee newspaper--the
_Cherokee Phoenix_--which was established in 1828 at New Echota, with
Elias Boudinot as its editor and Samuel Worcester as its business
manager.
[Illustration:
Smithsonian Institution
_Students stand before the original school building at Dwight Mission,
the first Cherokee mission west of the Mississippi River. The one-room
log schoolhouse is very much like those the white settlers built and
used for years in the Smokies._
]
The Cherokees also made remarkable changes in government. In 1808, they
adopted a written legal code; a dozen years later, they divided the
Nation into judicial districts and designated judges. The first Supreme
Court of the Cherokees was established in 1822, and by 1827 the Nation
had drawn up an American-based Constitution. The president of the
constitutional convention was a 37-year-old leader named John Ross. A
year later, he began a 40-year term as principal chief of his people.
But whatever the progress of the internal affairs of the Cherokee
Nation, political relations with the United States steadily
disintegrated. Although the first quarter of the 19th century saw a
sympathetic man, Return Jonathan Meigs, serve as America’s southern
Indian agent, even he and his position could not prevent the relentless
pursuit of Indian territory.
In 1802 and 1803, the U.S. Government set a dangerous precedent for
the Cherokees. In return for Georgia’s abandonment of her claims to
the Mississippi Territory, the United States agreed to extinguish all
Indian titles for lands lying within Georgia. This indicated that the
government was no longer prepared to defend the Cherokee Nation.
President Thomas Jefferson acted to alleviate some of the Cherokee
loss. He suggested a program of removal west to a portion of the newly
acquired Louisiana Purchase. Most Cherokees hated the plan, yet some
harassed bands made the trip to what is now Arkansas. The foot was in
the door; hereafter, the government could point to a few Cherokees in
Arkansas and direct others there. Even though 800 eastern Cherokee
warriors fought alongside Americans during the War of 1812, the United
States came to recognize only the government of the Cherokees West.
But what of the Cherokees East? They waited. They pursued daily
routines while the pressures around them gathered and grew. And by
1828, these pressures had reached a degree which showed the Cherokees
that the final crush was on.
[Illustration:
Smithsonian Institution
_Elias Boudinot (top), editor of the_ Cherokee Phoenix, _bowed to
pressure and joined those willing to move west_.
]
[Illustration:
Smithsonian Institution
_John Ross remained firm in his opposition to the removal of the
Cherokees. He was in the last group to leave._
]
It began inside the Nation. In the winter of 1828, an old Cherokee
councilman, Whitepath, rose up in rebellion against the new
constitution. Suspicious of the Nation’s whirlwind progress, fearful
of the Nation’s stormy enemies, Whitepath attempted to persuade his
15,000 countrymen to hold fast to the ways of the past. He assembled
a series of localized meetings, where he advocated the abandonment of
white religion, society, economy. He called for a return to tribal
organization, but his call fell on younger ears and his plan was doomed
to failure.
The Cherokees turned to John Ross for leadership. Like Sequoyah,
John Ross possessed both grace and ability. These assets, combined
with courage, enabled him to accomplish seemingly remote goals for
his people. This handsome statesman, educated by his own father,
represented the middle ground of Cherokee policy. Though refusing the
reactionism of a Whitepath, John Ross also rejected any proposal to
move west. For he knew that his people had lived here in the Smokies
and belonged here, and he would not have them forced from their
homeland.
Andrew Jackson would. This stern Tennessee soldier and politician
began his career as a headlong Indian fighter and never lost the zeal.
Although Jackson the soldier had been aided numerous times by Cherokee
warriors, Jackson the politician was determined to move the Cherokees
west. And in the watershed years of 1828 and 1829, Andrew Jackson was
elected and sworn in as President of the United States.
Events conspired against the Nation. In July of 1829, in what is now
known as Lumpkin County, Georgia, a few shiny nuggets of gold were
discovered on Ward’s Creek of the Chestatee River. Within days, fortune
hunters swarmed into the territory; more than 10,000 gold-seekers
squatted on Cherokee lands, disregarded Cherokee rights, and pillaged
Cherokee homes. With Jackson’s support, the Georgia legislature passed
laws confiscating Indian land, nullifying Indian law, and prohibiting
Indian assembly. By the end of 1829, the script for Cherokee removal
had been blazoned in gold.
But there was more. Andrew Jackson asked Congress for “a general
removal law” that would give him prime authority in the matter at
the same time that it formed the basis for future treaty negotiation.
Congress passed the Removal Act, which included a half-million dollar
appropriation for that purpose, in May of 1830. Davy Crockett, whose
legendary exploits and down-to-earth compassion made him perhaps the
best representative of the mountain spirit, was a U.S. congressman
at the time. Although his grandfather had been murdered by Dragging
Canoe, Davy Crockett argued against and voted against the bill. He
was the only Tennessean to do so, and he was defeated when he ran for
reelection.
Cherokee leaders sought help from the U.S. courts. Their friend and
missionary, sober and troubled Samuel Worcester, fell victim to a
Georgia law “prohibiting the unauthorized residence of white men within
the Cherokee Nation.” Worcester appealed to the Supreme Court, which
in February of 1832 considered the case of _Worcester v. Georgia_. On
March 3, a feeble Chief Justice John Marshall read the Court’s decision
to a packed room: all the Georgia laws against the Cherokee Nation were
declared unconstitutional.
Elias Boudinot, editor of the _Phoenix_ and a special friend of
Worcester, wrote to his brother and expressed the Nation’s joy and
relief:
“_It is glorious news. The laws of the state are declared by the
highest judicial tribunal in the country to be_ null and void. _It is a
great triumph on the part of the Cherokees.... The question is forever
settled as to who is right and who is wrong._”
Yet Andrew Jackson would not stand for such a settlement. “John
Marshall has made his decision,” Jackson thundered, “now let him
enforce it.” This was the single instance in American history where
the President so bluntly and openly defied a Supreme Court ruling. The
situation grew more bleak. Worcester was released from jail only after
appealing to the “good will” of the state of Georgia. Matters worsened
as Georgia conducted its Cherokee Lottery of 1832, and thousands of
white men descended onto lots carved out of the Cherokee land.
[Illustration:
Smithsonian Institution
_Major Ridge signed a treaty ceding all of the Cherokees’ land in the
east to the United States. He, his son John, and his nephew Elias
Boudinot were “executed” on June 22, 1839._
]
Boudinot and several other Cherokee leaders, including John Ridge,
grew discouraged to the point of resignation. Jackson’s attitude as
President, coupled with Georgia’s unrelenting attack and the Supreme
Court’s inability to stop it, caused a change of heart in Boudinot and
Ridge. Boudinot stepped down from the _Phoenix_ and, with Major Ridge,
became an important spokesman for a minority faction of Cherokees which
was prepared to move west. However, John Ross continued to speak for
the vast majority who rejected any discussion of removal.
By 1835, the rift between the Ridge party and John Ross’ followers had
become open and intense. Seeking to take advantage of this division,
Jackson appointed a New York minister, J.F. Schermerhorn, to deal with
Boudinot and Ridge. The Cherokee supporters of Ross hated this “loose
Dutch Presbyterian minister” and referred to him as “The Devil’s Horn.”
On several occasions, Ross attempted to negotiate a reasonable solution
with Washington. He was frustrated at every turn. In November of 1835,
he and the visiting John Howard Payne were arrested by the Georgia
militia. In jail, Payne heard a Georgia guard singing “Home Sweet Home”
outside his cell. Payne asked the man if he knew that his prisoner had
written the song; the guard seemed unimpressed. After spending nine
days in jail, Ross and Payne were released without any explanation for
their treatment.
Ross traveled on to Washington to resume negotiations. While he was
there, Schermerhorn and the Ridge party drew up and signed a treaty.
Endorsed by a scant one-tenth of the Nation’s 16,000 Cherokees, this
treaty ceded to the United States all eastern territory in exchange
for $5 million and a comparable amount of western land. Cherokees
throughout the Nation registered shock and betrayal; Boudinot and
Ridge, their lives already threatened numerous times, would be murdered
within four years. Yet despite Ross’ protestations of fraud, the U.S.
Senate ratified the minority Treaty of New Echota by one vote. A new
President, Martin Van Buren, authorized Gen. Winfield Scott to begin
the removal of all Cherokees in the summer of 1838.
Scott, while determined to carry out the removal, tried in vain to
restrain his troops from inflicting undue hardships. Scott’s soldiers
moved relentlessly through the Nation. As one private remembered it in
later years:
“_Men working in the fields were arrested and driven to the stockades.
Women were dragged from their homes by soldiers whose language they
could not understand. Children were often separated from their parents
and driven into the stockades with the sky for a blanket and earth for
a pillow._”
The soldiers built 13 stockades in North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee,
and Alabama. Using these as base camps, they scattered throughout the
countryside with loaded rifles and fixed bayonets. As they herded
Indians back toward the forts, bands of roving outlaws burned the
homes, stole the livestock, robbed the graves. Throughout the summer, a
stifling drought settled over the hot, depleted Nation. By August, many
of the captured Cherokees had succumbed to sickness or even death.
Removal itself began during the autumn. A few early contingents had
been moved out along the Tennessee River in large two-decker keelboats.
The majority would travel overland. Thirteen detachments of about
1,000 each, plus 645 wagons carrying the sick and aged, departed from
southeastern Tennessee. Early on in their journey, the weather changed.
Winter stalked the doomed procession with the tenacity of a bloodhound.
By the time the Cherokees crossed the Mississippi River many had died
because of lack of food and warmth. In March of 1839, the dwindling
band reached what is now Oklahoma. Four thousand Cherokees, almost
one-third of all who left their mountain homeland, had been taken by
the cold, hard hand of death.
The tragedy would be recorded in history as the “Trail of Tears.” Along
the route, old Whitepath died. The wife of John Ross gave her blanket
to a sick child and herself suffered fatal exposure. A white Georgia
volunteer summarized the needless pain in one short sentence: “That
Cherokee removal was the crudest work I ever knew.” But disaster was
not the final conqueror. For out of that cruelty came sacrifice; out of
that death came rebirth.
[Illustration:
Smithsonian Institution
_Ginatiyun tihi, or Stephen Tehee, was born in Georgia six months
before the removal of the Cherokees to the West. He served as a tribal
delegate to Washington in 1898._
]
The improbable source of that rebirth was a farmer named Tsali. Old
Man Charley. Until October of 1838, he was simply another Indian to
be herded to the stockade. A lieutenant and three other soldiers
were assigned to capture all Cherokees along the headwaters of the
Oconaluftee. As the patrol traveled up the Little Tennessee River, it
rounded up Tsali, his family, and a few friends. The soldiers prodded
the Indians with bayonets and forced Tsali’s wife to hasten her steps.
Driven to anger and desperation, Tsali called the other warriors to
action. In the quick, sudden tangle that followed, at least one soldier
was killed. Tsali and his small band fled across the river high into
the Great Smoky Mountains. They hid in a massive rock shelter at
the head of Deep Creek. Located on top of a steep cliff, the actual
camping place lay in the midst of extensive, thick laurel and hemlock
“roughs.” Several hundred other Cherokees escaped from the soldiers or
the stockades and found similar hiding places on the rugged, overgrown
sides of the Smokies. Most of them lasted out the winter, subsisting at
a near-starvation level on roots, herbs, nuts, and small game.
[Illustration]
Confronted with such determination and the likelihood of a prolonged,
wearisome mission of search and arrest in the rugged mountains, General
Scott offered a compromise. If Tsali and his small party would come
down and give themselves up for punishment, the rest of the Cherokee
fugitives would be allowed to stay in the mountains until a solution
could be reached by all sides. Scott sent W. H. Thomas, a white man who
had grown up with the Cherokees, into the Smokies to present the terms.
Thomas found Tsali, who silently listened and decided on his own accord
to accompany Thomas out of the mountains. Early in the year of 1839,
Tsali and his brother and his eldest son were shot by a firing squad.
The youngest son, Wasituna (for Washington) was left to take word of
the deaths back to the Cherokees who remained in their hills.
They had held onto their homeland in the Great Smoky Mountains. By
nothing more than the thin grip of desperate determination, they had
held on, and they would remain. Reinforced by General Scott’s promise,
scattered friends in the East, and Thomas’ political negotiations
with Washington and North Carolina, the Cherokee remnant soon became
the Eastern Band. Their homeland would now be known as the Qualla
Reservation. So the Cherokees East, along with the white pioneers of
the Great Smokies, turned together to brace the mountainous challenge
of the 19th century.
[Illustration:
Smithsonian Institution
_Tsiskwa-kaluya, or Bird Chopper, was son of Yonahguskah, the famous
Cherokee chief and spokesman who stayed with the small group in the
Great Smoky Mountains._
]
[Illustration:
_Aaron Swaniger was an individualist who occasionally stayed in Cades
Cove. To some “mountaineers” he was a “hillbilly.”_
Edouard E. Exline
]
From Pioneer to Mountaineer
While events of the early 19th century in the surrounding southland
and the nation were moving inexorably toward conflict on bloody
battlefields to decide issues which could not or would not be resolved
in the political arena, people in the Great Smokies were pursuing their
struggle to survive and adapt to their stern and splendid surroundings.
The early explorers, the long hunters, the initial homesteaders, the
trailblazers and the groundbreakers--these had forever set a human
seal upon the wilderness. Now it was the time of pioneer becoming
mountaineer. Henceforth, as new settlers or curious travelers or
specialized seekers in a dozen fields made their way into the
mountains, they would find someone already there to welcome them.
That “someone” was becoming known by terms which might alternately
serve as a source of description, derision, or definition. Highlander.
Hillbilly. Mountaineer. The least offensive word was “highlander,”
with its overtones of the misty Scottish landscape and fierce clan
loyalties from which many of the Smokies’ family lines had recently
descended. “Mountaineer” varied. Used to denote the proud individualism
that characterized many of the stalwart men and women whose roots held
deep and fast in this isolated place, “mountaineer” was a strong,
acceptable name. But turned into a catchword for some picturesque,
inadequate character who divided his time between the homemade dulcimer
and the home-run distillery, “mountaineer” was suspect. “Hillbilly”
came to verge on insult, as it conjured up cartoons of lanky, sub-human
creatures who were quick to feud, slow to work, and often indifferent
to the “progress” by which helpful visitors would like to transform
mountain lives and attitudes.
Of course, the trouble with any single word that tried to summarize
these complex and distinctive lives was its limited ability to convey
more than a stereotype or a single facet. Yet the 19th and early
20th centuries saw the rise and wide adoption of such terms, with an
accompanying unease--sometimes outrage--on the part of those described.
This tension has persisted into the present day, for Southern
Appalachian natives often have felt they have been misunderstood, or
exploited, by the curious outlanders.
The visitors indeed were curious--curious about mountain people
but also about topography, altitudes, plants, wildlife, and the
rich variety of natural resources abounding throughout these hills.
Naturalists and botanists followed the lead of Frenchman André Michaux
and Philadelphian William Bartram, who had come collecting plants in
the Southern mountains during the previous century. It was Michaux who
had told mountain herb-gatherers about ginseng’s commercial value,
and Bartram who had discovered and described the showy flame azalea
brightening the spring woods.
[Illustration:
_Cherokee veterans of Thomas’ Legion attending a Confederate reunion
in the early 1900s in New Orleans include (front from left) Young
Deer, unidentified man, Pheasant, Chief David Reed, (back from left)
Dickey Driver, Lt. Col. W. W. Stringfield, Lt. Suatie Owl, and Jim
Keg. Stringfield was a white officer in the legion which participated
with varying degrees of success in several skirmishes in the Smokies
and, perhaps more importantly, which helped build the Oconaluftee
Turnpike across the mountains._
National Park Service
]
Among 19th-century arrivals, S. B. Buckley wrote the earliest
comprehensive botanical report of the Great Smokies. He marveled at
that scenery, “surpassing anything we remember to have seen among the
White Mountains of New Hampshire,” and at the variety of flora. “Here,”
he wrote in the mid-1800s, “is a strange admixture of Northern and
Southern species of plants, while there are quite a number which have
been found in no other section of the world.” Later naturalists would
share his enthusiasm and enlarge on his studies.
Journalists came. One was a reporter named Charles Lanman, secretary
to Daniel Webster, who rode through the hills in 1848 and wrote a book
called _Letters from the Alleghany Mountains_. Through his descriptive
adventures readers had a glimpse into a region more remote to their
experience than many foreign countries. If the Smokies were described
by him as one large upthrust, perhaps that was because he saw the range
through a purple haze. He wrote at one point:
“_This mountain is the loftiest of a large brotherhood which lies
crowded together between North Carolina and Tennessee. Its height
cannot be less than five thousand feet above the level of the sea ...
and all I can say of its panorama is that I can conceive of nothing
more grand and imposing._”
Lanman was only the first of many writers who would come seeking high
adventure and good copy, but his lack of exactitude about the physical
features of the mountains was soon to be remedied by another group of
visitors. Some scientists could not be content with hunters’ yarns
and the poetic prose of journalists; they wanted precise facts and
figures by which both native and stranger could better appreciate the
landscape.
One of these was Thomas Lanier Clingman, whose career included being
a U.S. senator and a Confederate general as well as a scientist. A
contemporary historian described him as being arrogant, aggressive,
with “more than common ability” but limited scientific knowledge,
whose chief service lay in arousing public curiosity in the mountains,
mineralogy, and geography. He became involved in a scholarly feud
with Dr. Elisha Mitchell, a transplanted Connecticut professor at
the University of North Carolina, over which peak constituted the
highest point east of the Mississippi River. While they were trying
to settle the question, Mitchell was killed in an accidental fall on
the slopes of the North Carolina pinnacle which later was given his
name. Clingman’s name came to grace the mountain he had explored and
measured: 2,025-meter (6,643-foot)-high Clingmans Dome on the crest of
the Great Smokies, only 13 meters (43 feet) lower than the lofty Mt.
Mitchell.
The most fascinated and impressive visitor during these years of the
mid-19th century came from another mountain terrain. Arnold Guyot,
remembered today by the peak at the eastern end of the Great Smokies
which bears his name, was born in Switzerland in 1807. His studies in
physical geography had won him distinction throughout Europe before he
came to America and accepted a chair at Princeton University in 1854.
Paul Fink, a historian of the Great Smoky Mountains, has said that
although forerunners of Guyot glimpsed segments of the Smokies and
described certain details,
“_it remained for this man of foreign birth to penetrate these
mountains, spend months among them, measure their heights for the first
time, and have drawn under his own direction the first map we have
showing the range in detail_.”
Clingman secured for his friend Guyot a local guide named Robert
Collins. The mountain man and the professor struggled through the
roughest laurel “hells” and up the steepest slopes, measuring,
calibrating, and finally naming many of the unknown heights. Guyot’s
journals combined precision and poetry, and they related the awesome
Smokies to the human scene in ways that had not been previously
possible. From that point on, natives and visitors alike could both
know and appreciate more of this green homeland. But, as Paul Fink
has pointed out, “With Guyot’s labors the early explorations of the
Smokies ceased.”
Why? What happened to cut off so abruptly the increasing flow of
visitors to this virgin country? The happening was war.
The Great Smokies country, with its upland farms and small home crafts,
was not in the mainstream of the decisive struggle between a plantation
South and an industrial North. Nor was it in the mainstream of the
violent action that convulsed its surrounding region. There had been
slaves in some of the more prosperous mountain households, but few
citizens in the Great Smokies area would have waged war either to
defend or abolish the peculiar institution.
What some did resist was being conscripted by either side. “Scouting”
became a well-used word defining a new experience in the Smokies. It
applied to anyone hiding out in the hills to escape going into the
Confederate or the Union army. Secretly supplied with food and clothes
by their families and sympathetic friends, such “scouts” could hold out
for years against the searches of outlander officials. Sometimes they
did in fact become scouts, guiding escaped captives from Andersonville
and other Confederate prisons through the mountains toward northern
territory, and those fleeing from Yankee prisons toward their southern
homes.
Many of the mountain people, of course, followed the example of their
neighbors throughout the region and put on the formal uniform of
blue or gray. There were sharp divisions within counties, towns, and
families in the choice between state and nation. Perhaps no single
section of the United States was as bitterly torn in its allegiance.
Tennessee and North Carolina had long held strong Union sentiments;
but when Lincoln called for troops in the aftermath of the firing on
Fort Sumter, the two states officially rallied to the Confederate
cause. North Carolinians, who had been notably reluctant to leave the
Union and who bristled at the injustices of “a rich man’s war and
a poor man’s fight,” nonetheless sent more men to the Confederacy
than any other state. Many of these were western North Carolinians,
following the leadership of their own Zebulon (Zeb) Baird Vance, born
in Buncombe County and occupying the governor’s chair in Raleigh during
the war. Yet the fact that adjoining East Tennessee was overwhelmingly
Union--and sent more men into the Federal forces than some of the New
England states--affected the North Carolinians as well. With the two
states’ actual secession from the Union, numerous mountain pockets
in effect seceded from their states and chose to remain loyal to the
Union. Thus the little rebellion inside the larger revolt compounded
the agonizing conflict of war and made every cove and community and
hearthside a potential battleground.
[Illustration:
Charles S. Grossman
_Mountain women and girls had to be proficient at making many things,
for there weren’t many--if any--stores nearby. Over the years, Hazel
Bell and many another woman spent hours and hours churning butter._
]
And no matter which army the men marched with, their characteristics
remained surprisingly intact. The historian of one North Carolina
Confederate regiment described some of the soldiers from Haywood County:
“_These mountain men had always been accustomed to independence
of thought and freedom of action, and having elected for their
company officers their neighbors and companions, they had no idea of
surrendering more of their personal liberty than should be necessary to
make them effective soldiers. Obedient while on duty and independent
while off duty, this spirit to a marked degree they retained to the
close of the war._”
The experience of Radford Gatlin concentrated in a single episode
both the sharp divisions and the ironies of war in the mountains.
Gatlinburg, now a commercial and flourishing tourist mecca at the edge
of the park, bears the name of a man who was driven out of that town
because of his unpopular stand during the war. The sturdily built,
enterprising, and somewhat arrogant Gatlin was not a man to conceal
his beliefs. With his wife and a slave woman he had come from North
Carolina by way of Jefferson County, Tennessee, to the community known
as White Oak Flats and had established a successful general store and
a less successful church: the New Hampshire Baptist Gatlinites. When
Dick Reagan was appointed postmaster for a new postal service to be
established in White Oak Flats in 1860, the office was located amidst
the axes, guns, coffee, sugar, and bells of Gatlin’s store, and Reagan
renamed the post office, and therefore the town, after his good friend
the storekeeper.
But when war came and Radford Gatlin not only supported the Confederacy
but made heated speeches in its favor, the strongly Unionist villagers
turned against him. After being beaten by a band of masked men, Gatlin
abandoned his claim to thousands of hectares that now lie within the
park and departed forever from the place that was to perpetuate his
name if not his memory.
[Illustration:
_Page 80: Aunt Celia Ownby cards, or straightens, wool fibers that
have already been washed._
]
[Illustration:
Edouard E. Exline
_Page 81: Hettie, Martha, and Louisa Walker run cotton through a gin
built by their father, John. He made the rollers out of hickory and
the rest out of oak. Three people were required to operate the gin:
one to feed the cotton into it and one on each end to turn each of the
rollers. The ginned cotton fell into a white oak basket, also made by
John Walker._
]
[Illustration:
Charles S. Grossman
_Wash day was a laborious one of lifting large buckets of water and
stirring steaming kettles of dirty clothes._
]
[Illustration:
Maurice Sullivan
_Over another fire, Mrs. Kate Duckett and daughter Tennie of Coopers
Creek make hard soap. Mrs. Duckett stirs the lard with a wooden paddle
as Tennie fans the fire with a hawk wing before dipping into the
kettle with a gourd scoop. It was a five-hour process._
]
The war’s severest hardships followed in the wake of the outliers, or
the bushwhackers. These scavengers favored no cause. As the war dragged
on, they ambushed and raided, stealing meat from the smokehouse, corn
from the crib, and farm animals from barn and pasture. Scarcity and
want became commonplace throughout the mountains. In North Carolina’s
Madison County, a group of citizens broke into a warehouse and laid
claim to a valuable commodity, salt. Economic want enflamed political
emotions. In Tennessee’s Sevier County, controversial “Parson”
Brownlow, Methodist circuit-rider turned newspaper editor turned
politician, sought refuge in the shadow of the Smokies with Unionist
sympathizers when Knoxville came under Confederate control.
A well-known army unit operated in the Smokies: Col. William Thomas’
Confederate 69th-N.C., known as Thomas’ Legion of Indians and
Highlanders. “Little Will,” as he was affectionately called, had become
the effective spokesman in Washington and at the state level for the
eastern remnant of the Cherokee. When the Civil War came and he chose
to stay with the South, the Cherokees chose to stay with him. For a
while, they secured mineral supplies for the Confederacy, including
alum and saltpeter for gunpowder. The Legion guarded Alum Cave in
the Smokies. Under Thomas’ direction, his unit also worked on the
Oconaluftee Turnpike.
In December 1863, after Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside had secured Knoxville
for the Union, Col. William J. Palmer and the 15th Pennsylvania Cavalry
attacked Thomas’ camp near Gatlinburg. After a short battle, Thomas
and his troops retreated across the mountains into North Carolina.
One month later, Confederate Gen. Robert P. Vance decided to remedy
the situation in the mountains. With 375 cavalry, 100 infantry, and
artillery, he marched from Asheville, joined Thomas and 150 Indian
troops in Quallatown, and crossed the Smokies during a bitterly cold
spell. While Thomas remained in Gatlinburg, Vance proceeded toward
Newport, camped on Cosby Creek deep in the Smokies, and was
surprised there by none other than Colonel Palmer and his 15th-Pa.
In the resulting rout, General Vance was captured along with about
everything else: men, horses, medical supplies, food, ammunition. In
February, Thomas and his Legion were engaged once more, in the Great
Smoky Mountains near the mouth of Deep Creek. The result was another
defeat, this time by the 14th Illinois Cavalry under Maj. Francis
Davidson.
Thomas and his Legion did not win mighty military victories for the
Confederacy; Governor Vance even accused Thomas’ command of being “a
favorite resort for deserters.” But it appears that this strange little
mountain force did act as a deterrent against wholesale raids in the
Smokies by Federal sympathizers, and to some extent, raids by marauding
bushwhackers. As for “Little Will” himself, mental disorder in later
years brought him his own personal civil war and its losing battles. He
died in a North Carolina hospital.
An equally well-known force in the Great Smokies during the war was
a band of Union raiders led by Col. George W. Kirk. One contemporary
called him “Kirk of Laurel,” referring to a remote watershed in Madison
County where the colonel often camped. Kirk’s most effective march
into the Smokies came near the close of the war, in the early spring
of 1865. With 400 cavalry and 200 infantry he entered the mountains
through East Tennessee’s Cocke County, via Mt. Sterling, and marched
into Cataloochee. Turning aside a Confederate company there, he went
on to Waynesville, then proceeded to Soco Valley and back across the
Smokies.
Kirk raided, released Federal prisoners, skirmished with home guards,
and scattered general fear throughout the mountains. In fact, his main
achievement for his cause lay in diverting Confederate troops and
keeping them scattered on the home front rather than mobilized on the
battlefields where they were desperately needed. Try as they might,
the Confederates could not find enough of the “silver-greys” or the
“seed-corn”--as those too old and too young for regular service were
called--to totally protect their homeland from Kirk’s men, or from
renegade bushwhackers who had no cause but plunder and pillage.
As the Civil War drew toward its final convulsion, the mountain area
engaged in a more familiar struggle for survival. Food was scarce,
soda and salt almost non-existent. Women leached lye from wood ashes
and made soda. There was no substitute for salt; when available, it
cost a precious dollar a pound. Bitter enmities divided families,
communities, and counties. Life had never been easy in the mountains;
now it was rigorously difficult. And the people in this land of “make
do or do without” learned new ways to make do. Continuing old habits
and traditions up their isolated coves and along their steep hillsides,
they created a life that was distinctive, rugged, and adapted to its
natural surroundings.
One historian, John Preston Arthur, has described the mountain woman’s
day as follows:
“_Long before the pallid dawn came sifting in through chink and window
they were up and about. As there were no matches in those days, the
housewife ‘unkivered’ the coals which had been smothered in ashes the
night before to be kept ‘alive’ till morning, and with ‘kindling’ in
one hand and a live coal held on the tines of a steel fork or between
iron tongs in the other, she blew and blew and blew till the splinters
caught fire. Then the fire was started and the water brought from
the spring, poured into the ‘kittle,’ and while it was heating the
chickens were fed, and cows milked, the children dressed, the bread
made, the bacon fried and then coffee was made and breakfast was ready.
That over and the dishes washed and put away, the spinning wheel, the
loom or the reel were the next to have attention, meanwhile keeping a
sharp lookout for the children, hawks, keeping the chickens out of the
garden, sweeping the floor, making the beds, churning, sewing, darning,
washing, ironing, taking up the ashes, and making lye, watching for
the bees to swarm, keeping the cat out the milk pans, dosing the
sick children, tying up the hurt fingers and toes, kissing the sore
place well again, making soap, robbing the bee hives, stringing
beans for winter use, working the garden, planting and tending a few
hardy flowers in the front yard, such as princess feather, pansies,
sweet-Williams, dahlias, morning glories; getting dinner, darning,
patching, mending, milking again, reading the Bible, prayers, and so on
from morning till night; and then all over again the next day._”
[Illustration:
Joseph S. Hall
_Mrs. Clem Enloe of Tight Run Branch was 84 years old when Joseph S.
Hall photographed her in 1937. “I was told that if I took her a box
of snuff, she would let me take her picture.” That’s the snuff in
her blouse. She didn’t give in so easily on everything. She refused
to observe the park’s fishing regulations and fished every season of
the year. She was filling a can with worms when Hall approached. “See
that,” she said pointing to the can, “I use them for fishing and I’m
the only one in this park who’s allowed to.”_
]
[Illustration:
Edouard E. Exline
_The one-room log schoolhouse at Little Greenbrier, like the somewhat
larger Granny’s College at Big Greenbrier, provided the basics in
reading, writing, and arithmetic._
]
[Illustration:
Edouard E. Exline
_And judging by the smiles of Margaret Tallent and Conley Russell, the
place was lots of fun._
]
[Illustration:
Edouard E. Exline
_Herman Matthews conducts a class in the school’s last year of
operation, 1935. He was the only teacher who had completed college._
]
Emergencies of health and sickness affected the daily routines.
“Doctor-medicine” might have its place, but home remedies were
considered most reliable--and available. A doctor with his saddlebag
of pills and tonics might be a day’s ride or more away from the
patient. But nature’s medicine chest lay almost at the doorstep. Plants
in swamp and meadow, leaves and bark and roots of the forest: all
healed many ailments. From ancient Cherokee wisdom and through their
own observations and testing, mountain people learned the uses of
boneset, black cohosh, wild cherry, mullein, catnip, balm of gilead,
Solomons-seal, sassafras, and dozens of other herbs and plants.
While they found one school and laboratory in the woods and hills
around them, the people of the Great Smoky Mountains also worked to
provide themselves with more orthodox classrooms. Continuing customs
that had begun before the War, the residents of many little communities
“made-up” a school. This meant that they banded together, and each
contributed to a small fund to pay a teacher’s salary for the year.
The “year” was usually three months. John Preston Arthur left a vivid
memoir of his experience in one of these so-called “old-field” schools,
which were located on land no longer under cultivation:
“_In lieu of kindergarten, graded and normal schools was the Old-Field
school, of which there were generally only one or two in a county,
and they were in session only when it was not ‘croptime.’ They were
attended by little and big, old and young, sometimes by as many as a
hundred, and all jammed into one room--a log cabin with a fireplace
at each end--puncheon floor, slab benches, and no windows, except
an opening made in the wall by cutting out a section of one of the
logs, here and there. The pedagogue in charge (and no matter how
large the school there was but one) prided himself upon his knowledge
of and efficiency in teaching the three R’s--readin’, ’ritin’ and
’rithmetic--and upon his ability to use effectively the rod, of which
a good supply was always kept in stock. He must know, too, how to make
a quill pen from the wing-feather of a goose or a turkey, steel and
gold pens not having come into general use. The ink used was made from
‘ink-balls’--sometimes from poke-berries--and was kept in little slim
vials partly filled with cotton. These vials, not having base enough to
stand alone, were suspended on nails near the writer. The schools were
paid from a public fund, the teacher boarding with the scholars._”
During the latter 1800s, free schools began to replace subscription
schools. But the quality and methods of education did not appear
to change drastically. Across the Smokies, in East Tennessee’s Big
Greenbrier Cove, Granny’s College provided the rudiments of public
education for many students and was an example of similar schools in
the Great Smokies region. Lillie Whaley Ownby remembered the house
which was turned into a school:
“_Granny College was built before the Civil War by Humphry John Ownby.
This house was two big log houses, joined together by a huge rock
chimney and a porch across both rooms on both sides of the house. The
houses were built of big poplar logs. The rooms were 18×20 feet and
both rooms had two doors and two windows. The floor was rough, hewn
logs. There was a huge fireplace in it. The living room had a partition
just behind the doors and a cellar about 8×10 feet._”
After Mrs. Ownby’s father had acquired the old log building, he went to
Sevierville, the county seat, and proposed to the school superintendent
that he would furnish this house if the county would supply a teacher
for Big Greenbrier children. This was agreeable, and Granny’s College,
as it was locally known, came into being.
“_The men made benches, long enough for three or four to sit on. The
back was nailed up on some blocks and the children used the wall for a
back rest. There was no place for books except on the benches or floor.
Dad furnished wood for the fire. The boys carried it in and kept the
fire going. Everyone helped in keeping the house clean and keeping
water in the house._”
Church as well as school was a personalized part of family and
community life in a way not known in more formal, urban situations.
Each fulfilled not only its own specific function, spiritual or
intellectual, but also satisfied social needs. The doctrine was
strictly fundamentalist; the dominant denominations were Baptist and
Methodist, although the Presbyterian influence was also present,
especially in the schools that were founded with both money and
teachers drawn from other regions of the country.
Each summer, Methodist camp meetings brought families together under
the long brush arbors for weeks of sociable conversation and soulful
conversion. The visiting ministers’ feast of oratory was matched only
by the feast of victuals prepared by housewives over the campfires as
they cooked and exchanged family news, quilt patterns, recipes, and
“cuttings” from favorite flowers and shrubs.
Baptists were the most numerous denomination. They divided themselves
into many categories, among others the Primitives, the Freewills, the
Missionaries, and one small group called the Two-Seed-in-the-Spirit.
Their rules were strict: no violins in church, no dancing anywhere.
To be “churched,” or turned out of the congregation, was heavy
punishment--and not infrequent.
One aspect of church that incorporated an important feature of mountain
life was its singing. In ancient Ireland and Wales songsters had been
accompanied on the harp. Settlers had brought the Old Harp song book
of early hymns and anthems with them from the British Isles, and on
down the valleys and across the mountains into these remote byways.
The notes of this music were not round but shaped, and shape, rather
than placement on a staff, indicated the note. This method simplified
reading the music; and as the unaccompanied, usually untrained, singers
took their pitch from a leader, they proceeded in beautiful harmony,
usually in a minor key.
The mournful sound of minor chords was also familiar in the ballads
common throughout the hills. Death and unrequited love were their
recurring themes, whether they reached back to England and the Scottish
borders, as in “Lord Thomas and Fair Elender,” or recounted some
local contemporary affair. Beside their blazing hearths during long,
lonely winter evenings, or at jolly gatherings or through lazy summer
Saturday afternoons, mountain people remembered the past and recorded
the present as they sang, altering and adding to the ballads which had
been taught to them and which in turn would be handed on to another
generation.
And among those visitors who would begin to search the mountains during
the approaching 20th century, the folk song collectors and the ballad
seekers could find here a repository of rare, pure music--much of
it now forgotten even in its own homeland. The visitors would find a
way of life that might seem static but which was, indeed, changing.
For the early pioneers had yielded to the authentic mountaineer. His
log cabin was being replaced by sash-sawn lumber in a frame house.
Extensive apple orchards and corn crops yielded the basic ingredients
not only for fruit and bread but for the luxuries of a brandy and
whisky known also as moonshine, white lightning, Old Tanglefoot.
[Illustration:
_Pages 88-89: Butchering was a chore shared by nearly everyone in a
family. Here, the Ogles--Earl, Horace, Collie, and Willard--butcher a
hog as they get ready for a long winter._
National Park Service
]
Hunting and fishing, which had been necessities for the first settlers,
eventually turned into sport as well. Buffalo, elk, wolves, beavers,
passenger pigeons, and a variety of other game disappeared early and
forever, leaving only the memory of their presence in names like
Buffalo Creek, Elk Mountain, Wolf Creek, Beaverdam Valley, Pigeon
River. But deer, black bear, fox, raccoon and other animals remained
to challenge the mountain man and his dogs. The relationship between
a hunter and his hounds was something special. A dog shot or stolen
could be cause for a lifelong feud. Names of individual dogs--Old Blue,
Tige, Big Red--were cherished by their owners, as were certain breeds.
The Plott dogs, named after the bear hunters who bred them in Haywood
County’s Balsam range, were famous for their tenacity and strength in
hunting bear.
One of the sharpest condemnations that could be laid on a mountain man
concerned the hunting dogs. An early resident of Roaring Fork above
Gatlinburg was a “hard, cruel man,” despised by his neighbors and in
turn despising them. He had frightened children and cut a fellow “till
he like to bled to death.” Finally--and most devastatingly--it was
agreed that “he was the type of fellow that would pizen your dog.”
[Illustration:
Edouard E. Exline
_Three children look on as he works at his shaving horse on a stave.
His coopering equipment includes a draw knife, crow cutter, jointing
plane, stave gauge, and barrel adze._
]
[Illustration:
Edouard E. Exline
_At his blacksmith shop Messer shapes a small metal piece, one of many
he turned out just to keep his farm running._
]
[Illustration:
Edouard E. Exline
_Here is Messer the tanner, scrubbing the pelt side of a hide with a
scythe blade after taking it out of the vat and removing the spent
bark with a long-handled strainer._
]
[Illustration:
Edouard E. Exline
_In the mountains you had to work hard at being self-sufficient. And
some men did better than others. One such man was Milas Messer of Cove
Creek. Setting barrel staves to the hoop takes a bit of coordination,
but Messer makes it look easy._
]
Livestock raising was important throughout the Great Smoky Mountains.
Stock laws had not yet been passed, and rail fences were built to
keep cattle, horses, hogs, or sheep _out_ of gardens, fields, and
yards rather than _in_ pastures, pens, and feedlots. Animals roamed
the fields and woods. Hogs fattened themselves on the mast of nuts
and roots from the great chestnut, oak, and hickory forests; cattle
grazed on the grassy balds in summertime. By mid-May, farmers in the
coves and valleys had driven their cattle into the high places of the
Smokies. Once every three weeks or so thereafter, they returned to salt
and “gentle” them, thus keeping them familiar with their owners. In
October, before the first snowfall, the cattle were rounded up. If the
season had been good, livestock drives to near or distant markets began.
[Illustration:
Charles S. Grossman
_Salt licks are among the few remaining pieces of evidence of the
great herding activity that once flourished in the Smokies. Notches
were cut into logs or chiseled into rocks so the salt wouldn’t be
wasted as it would be if placed on the ground. The salt was good for
the cattle, and the regularity of the procedure helped to keep them
from becoming completely wild._
]
During both the roundup and the drive, livestock marks played a
critical role of identification. These were devised by each farmer--and
acknowledged by his neighbors--as the “brand” signifying ownership.
These might be various “crops,” “knicks,” and “notches:” an “underbit”
(a crop out of the under part of the ear), or a “topbit” or a
“swallow-fork” cut in the skin below the neck, or a combination of them
all. If several kinds of animals were included on a livestock drive,
there was a settled rule of procedure. Cattle led the way, followed by
sheep, then hogs, and finally turkeys, which were usually the first
to start peering toward the sky and searching for the night’s resting
place.
All of these plodding, grunting, gobbling creatures were kept in
order with the help of one or two good dogs. If a hunter’s dogs were
valuable, a livestock drover’s dogs were invaluable. “Head’em,” the
drover called, and his dogs brought recalcitrant animals into line,
nipping the slow to hurry and curious to remain orderly.
During a long day’s drive to the county seat, or a several weeks’
journey to the lowlands of the Carolinas or Georgia, men and beasts
surged forward in a turmoil of shouting and noise, dust and mud,
autumn’s lingering heat and sudden chills. But on these journeys,
the men left their small mountain enclaves for a brief glimpse of
the larger world. They returned home not only with bolts of cloth
and winter supplies of salt and coffee, but also with news and fresh
experiences.
And accounts of these experiences were related in a language that was
part of the mountaineer’s unique heritage. That language revealed
a great deal about the people; it was strong and flexible, old yet
capable of change, sometimes judged “ungrammatical” but often touched
with poetry. In a later century, students and collectors would come
here seeking the Elizabethan words, the rhythmic cadences of this
speech. It harkened back to a distant homeland.
The mountain person’s “afeard” for afraid, or “poke” for paper
bag, were familiar to Shakespeare. In Chaucer could be found the
mountaineer’s use of “holpt” for helped, and such plurals as “nestes”
and “waspes.” Webster confirmed that “hit” was Saxon for it, and the
primary meaning of “plague” was anything troublesome or vexatious
(the mountain man might well say someone was plaguing him). The habit
of turning a noun into a verb often added strength to an otherwise
dull sentence: “My farm will grow enough corn to bread us through the
winter,” or, when speaking of the heavy shoes that were brogans, “Those
hunters just brogued it through the rough places.”
The daily poetry and humor of the mountain language was caught in
the names of places--Pretty Hollow Gap, Charlie’s Bunion, Fittified
Spring, Miry Ridge, Bone Valley--and in descriptive words like “hells”
and “slicks” for the tangled laurel and rhododendron thickets. It was
present in the familiar names of plants: “hearts-a-bustin’-with-love,”
“dog-hobble,” “farewell summer.” And the patterns of their quilts,
pieced with artistic patience and skill, bore names such as “tree of
life,” “Bonaparte’s March,” and “double wedding ring.”
Thus, the mountain people adapted their language, as they had their
lives, to the needs and beauty of this land they called home. And
contrary to what might seem the case, these later residents were a more
nearly distinctive group than that which had first come. The pioneers
had been a fairly heterogeneous group, but as the years passed, those
with itching feet and yearning minds moved on to other frontiers.
Restless children wandered west in search of instant gold and eternal
youth. In time, those remaining behind became a more and more cohesive
group, sharing a particular challenge, history, folklore, economy,
dream. Their lives were gradually improving. They had earned the
privilege and joy of calling this their homeland.
Spinning and Weaving
[Illustration:
National Park Service
]
[Illustration: National Park Service]
Like Homer’s Penelope, like the Biblical spinners and weavers, like
their sisters at the wheel and loom in many times and places, women of
the Great Smokies simultaneously fulfilled the need for sturdy cloth
and a need for creating esthetic designs and pleasing patterns. Frances
Goodrich, who spent four decades helping to preserve and honor the
region’s handicrafts, wrote:
“Hardly any other subject arouses so much enthusiasm and interest
in a circle of mountain women as does the subject of weaving and
its kindred arts. This is true whether the participants in the talk
are themselves weavers or only their kinsfolk. Such work has for
generations taken the place of all other artistic expression, and
everyone, at least in the days of which I am telling, knew something by
experience or by watching the work or by hearsay and tradition, of this
fine craft.
... In the younger women who were learning to weave and keeping at it,
I could see the growth of character. A slack twisted person cannot make
a success as a weaver of coverlets. Patience and perseverance are of
the first necessity, and the exercise of these strengthen the fibers
of the soul.... One who has had to do with hundreds of mountain girls
... has told me that never did she find one to be of weak and flabby
character whose mother was a weaver: there was always something in the
child to build on.”
Turning animal and vegetable fibers into cloth necessitated several
steps. The fibers had to be washed and then carded, or straightened,
with wire-toothed implements. Then the women combed the carded fibers
and rolled them onto a rod called a distaff, hence the distaff side of
the family. In the next step, Aunt Rhodie Abbott (above) stretches,
twists, and winds the fibers with a spinning wheel in Cades Cove.
The women then dyed some of the yarn. In the last step, Becky Oakley
(above) weaves the yarn into cloth on a loom. Then the women had to turn
the cloth into clothes and other things.
[Illustration:
_In some places the Little River Lumber Company, and other logging
firms, sent logs cascading down the mountain sides in intricately
constructed chutes._
Little River Lumber Company
]
The Sawmills Move In
A people and their style of life do not change drastically in one year
or two years or three. The year 1900, then, does not define a time
when thousands living in the Great Smokies suddenly abandoned their
19th-century ways and traditions and bounded into the modern world.
Real transition would come only with the upheavals of the succeeding
decades, only as a result of America’s industrialization and two world
wars and the arrival of a national park. Yet the beginning of a new
century did inject one major new element into the lifestream of the
Great Smoky Mountains: the lumber companies and their money.
The people who lived here had logged before. A man might operate a
family enterprise along some hillside or in a low-lying cove, using
a few strong-armed relatives or neighbors to help cut and move the
choicest timber of the forest. Andy Huff, for example, established
a small sawmill in Greenbrier Cove in 1898. Leander Whaley had cut
yellow-poplar, buckeye, and linden from the upper cove--along Ramsey
Prong--during the 1880s. These and a few other individual loggers
felled the largest and most accessible of ultra-valuable woods such as
cherry, ash, walnut, hickory, and the giant yellow-poplar, or “tulip
tree.” They used steady, slow-plodding oxen to drag the heavy logs to
mill, then hauled the lumber to markets and railroads in stout-bedded
wagons drawn by four mules, double-teamed.
But the virgin timber soon attracted a wider attention. In 1901, a
report on the Southern Appalachians from President Theodore Roosevelt
to Congress concluded simply that “These are the heaviest and most
beautiful hardwood forests of the continent.” Of the Great Smokies in
particular, the report noted that besides the hardwoods the forest
contained “the finest and largest bodies of spruce in the Southern
Appalachians.” Lumber entrepreneurs were equally impressed. In that
same year, three partners paid about $9.70 per hectare for the
34,400-hectare ($3/85,000-acre) bulk of the Little River watershed.
Some 20 years later, Col. W. B. Townsend moved from Pennsylvania and
took control of Little River Lumber Company.
On the North Carolina slopes of the Smokies, companies purchased land
in swaths stretching from ridge to ridge, staking off watersheds like
so many claims. In 1903, W. M. Ritter Lumber Company set up its
operations along Hazel Creek. A year later, Montvale Lumber Company
moved into the adjacent Eagle Creek area. To the west of Montvale
would, in time, lie the Kitchin mill and its Twentymile Creek domain;
to the east of Ritter, Norwood Lumber Company embraced the reaches of
Forney Creek. And looming beside and above them all stood the 36,400
timbered hectares (90,000 acres) of the Champion Coated Paper Company,
an area that included Deep Creek and Greenbrier Cove and the headwaters
of the Oconaluftee River.
The companies needed men to cut the trees, skid the logs, work
the animals, saw the lumber, lay the roads. They called upon the
mountaineers who still owned small tracts in Cades Cove and Cataloochee
and lower Greenbrier and throughout the Smokies; or they allowed some
workers who had sold forested land to stay in their homes, though
now on company property; or they brought in hired hands from outside
and housed them and their families in dormitory-like buildings and
readymade “towns.” These mushrooming mill villages--Elkmont on
the Little River, Crestmont on Big Creek, Proctor on Hazel Creek,
Ravensford and Smokemont and Fontana--provided a booming cash market
for homegrown food and, as soon as the money changed hands, imported
products.
More often than not, residents of the Great Smoky Mountains drove to
and from market in covered wagons that protected their goods. Because
the drive to an outside market such as Waynesville, Newport, or
Maryville might take two or even three days, local families sold what
they could to the loggers and sawmill men. They set up honey and apple
stands along the roads and offered grapes in season. They supplied
stores with butter and eggs. Children could trade in one egg for a
week’s supply of candy or firecrackers.
A businesslike atmosphere filtered through the quiet of the Smokies.
Though wolves and panthers had largely disappeared by 1910, fur buyers
and community traders enjoyed a brisk exchange in mink, raccoon, fox,
and ’possum hides. Oak bark and chestnut wood, called “tanbark” and
“acid wood” because they were sources of valuable tannic acid, brought
$7 per cord when shipped to Asheville or Knoxville. As the sawmills
flourished, makeshift box houses of vertical poplar and chestnut planks
gave way to more substantial weatherboarded homes of horizontal lengths
and tight-fitting frames. Slick, fancy, buggy-riding “drummers” peddled
high-button shoes and off-color stories. The spacious Wonderland Park
Hotel and the Appalachian Club at Elkmont, and a hunting lodge on
Jake’s Creek graced the once forbidding mountainsides.
Undergirding this development was a growing cash base: peaches
and chestnuts, pork and venison, wax and lard--translated into
money--brought flour and sugar, yarn and needles, tools and ammunition.
Yet in the midst of this new-found activity, many clung to their old
habits. Children still found playtime fun by sliding down hills of
pine needles and “riding” poplar saplings from treetop to treetop.
Hard-shell Baptist preachers, such as the hunter and “wilderness
saddle-bagger” known as “Preacher John” Stinnett, still devoted long
spare hours, and sometimes workdays as well, to reading The Book: “I
just toted my Bible in a tow sack at the handle of my bull tongue and
I studied it at the turn of the furrow and considered it through the
rows.”
But whatever the immediate considerations of the hour happened to be,
logging was the order of the day. From the Big Pigeon River, all the
way to the Little Tennessee, the second generation of timber-cutters
had moved into the Smokies on a grand scale.
The companies, with their manpower, their strategically placed
sawmills, and their sophisticated equipment, produced board feet of
lumber by the millions. The rest of the country, with its increased
demands for paper and residential construction, absorbed these millions
and cried for more. By 1909, when production attained its peak in the
Smokies and throughout the Appalachians, logging techniques had reached
such an advanced state that even remote stands of spruce and hemlock
could be worked with relative ease. Demand continued unabated and even
received a slight boost when World War I broke out in 1914.
[Illustration:
_Pages 100-101: Sawmills, such as this one at Lawson’s Sugar Cove,
were quickly set up in one location and just as quickly moved to
another as soon as the plot was cleared._
National Park Service
]
High volume covered high costs. The Little River Lumber Company,
perhaps the most elaborate logging operation in the Smokies, cut a
total of two billion board feet. Cherry, the most valuable of the
woods, with its exquisite grain and rich color, was also the scarcest.
Yellow-poplar, that tall, straight tree with a buoyancy that allowed it
to float high, turned out to be the most profitable of all saw timber.
Coniferous forests, the thick, dark regions of pungent spruce and
hemlock, yielded a portion of the company’s output.
Extraction of such proportions was not easy. Timber cruisers combed the
forests, estimating board feet and ax-marking suitable trees. Three-man
saw teams followed the cruisers. One, the “chipper,” calculated the
fall of the tree and cut a “lead” in the appropriate side. Two sawyers
then took over, straining back and forth upon their crosscut saw until
gravity and the immense weight of the tree finished their job for
them. The work was hard and hazardous. Sometimes, if the lead were
not cut properly, the trunk would fall toward the men; sudden death
or permanent injury might result from the kickback of a doomed tree’s
final crash, or from a moment’s carelessness.
To remove the felled timber, larger companies laid railroad tracks far
up the creeks from their mills. At the eastern edge of the Smokies, for
instance, one such terminus grew into the village of Crestmont, which
boasted a hotel, two movie theaters, and a well-stocked commissary.
Such accommodations seemed a distant cry indeed from the upper branches
of Big Creek, gathering its waters along the slopes of Mt. Sterling,
Mt. Cammerer, and Mt. Guyot. Workers from improbable distances--even
countries “across the waters,” such as Italy--teamed with the mountain
people to push a standard gauge track alongside the boulder-strewn
streams. Bolted onto oaken ties that were spaced far enough apart to
discourage foot travel, the black rails drove ahead, switched back to
higher ground, crossed Big Creek a dozen times before they reached the
flat way station of Walnut Bottoms.
Dominated by powerful, blunt-bodied locomotives, the railroads gave
rise to stories that were a flavorful blend of pathos and danger.
“Daddy” Bryson and a fireman named Forrester were killed on a sharp
curve along Jake’s Creek of Little River. Although Forrester jumped
clear when the brakes failed to hold, he was buried under an avalanche
of deadly, cascading logs. There were moments of comedy as well as
tragedy. In the same river basin, Colonel Townsend asked engineer Noah
Bunyan Whitehead one day when he was going to stop putting up all that
black smoke from his train. Bun answered: “When they start making white
coal.”
Railroads could reach only so far, however. The most complex phase of
the logging process was “skidding,” or bringing the felled logs from
inaccessible distances to the waiting cars. As the first step, men
armed with cant hooks or short, harpoon-like peavies, simply rolled the
logs down the mountainsides. Such continuous “ball-hooting,” as it was
called, gouged paths which rain and snow etched deeper into scars of
heavy erosion. Sometimes oxen and mules pulled, or “snaked,” the timber
through rough terrain to its flatcar destination. Horses soon replaced
the slower animals and proved especially adept at “jayhooking,” or
dragging logs down steep slopes by means of J-hooks and grabs. When
the logs gained speed and threatened to overtake them, the men and
nimble-footed horses simply stepped onto a spur trail; the open link
slipped off at the J-hook and the logs slid on down the slope under
their own momentum.
Even more ingenious skidding methods were devised. Splash-dams of
vertical hemlock boards created reservoirs on otherwise shallow, narrow
streams. The released reservoir, when combined with heavy rains,
could carry a large amount of timber far downstream. In the mill
pond, loggers with hobnailed boots kept the logs moving and uncorked
occasional jams. Another method devised to move virgin timber down
steep slopes was the trestled flume. The large, wooden graded flumes
provided a rapid but expensive mode of delivery. One carried spruce off
Clingmans Dome.
There were, finally, the loader and skidders. The railroad-mounted
steam loader was nicknamed the “Sarah Parker” after “a lady who must
have been real strong.” The skidder’s revolving drum pulled in logs by
spectacular overhead cables. Loaded with massive timber lengths, these
cables spanned valleys and retrieved logs from the very mountaintops.
[Illustration:
Little River Lumber Company
_Massive steam-powered skidders pulled logs in off the hills to a
central pile. Then the loaders took over and put the logs on trains,
which carried them to the mills._
]
To coordinate all of these operations efficiently required skill and
judgment. The lumber companies devised numerous approaches to the
problem of maximum production at lowest cost. They contracted with
individuals; Andy Huff, for example, continued to run a mill at the
mouth of Roaring Fork and paid his men a full 75 cents for a 16-hour
day. The corporations sometimes worked together; in one maneuver,
Little River helped Champion flume its spruce pulpwood to the Little
River railroad for shipment to Champion’s paper mill at Canton, North
Carolina. Haste and carelessness could lead to shocking waste. When one
company moved its operations during World War I, 1.5 million board feet
of newly cut timber was left to rot at the head of Big Creek.
The ravages of logging led to fires. Although fires were sometimes set
on purpose to kill snakes and insects and to burn underbrush, abnormal
conditions invited abnormal mishaps. Parched soil no longer held in
place by a web of living roots, dry tops of trees piled where they had
been flung after trimming the logs, and flaming sparks of locomotives
or skidders: any combination of these caused more than 20 disastrous
fires in the Smokies during the 1920s. A two-month series of fires
devastated parts of Clingmans Dome, Siler’s Bald, and Mt. Guyot. One
holocaust on Forney Creek, ignited by an engine spark, raced through
the tops of 24-meter (80-foot) hemlocks and surged over 5 kilometers
(3 miles) in four hours. A site of most intense destruction was in the
Sawtooth range of the Charlie’s Bunion area.
Despite the ravages of fire, erosion, and the voracious ax and saw, all
was not lost. Some two-thirds of the Great Smoky Mountains was heavily
logged or burned, but pockets of virgin timber remained in a shrinking
number of isolated spots and patches at the head of Cataloochee, the
head of Greenbrier, and much of Cosby and Deep Creek. And as the 1920s
passed into another decade, the vision of saving what was left of this
virgin forest, saving the land--saving the homeland--grew in the lonely
but insistent conscience of a small number of concerned and convincing
citizens.
[Illustration:
National Park Service
_George Washington Shults and some neighbors snake out large trunks
with the help of six oxen. Sometimes the lumber companies would hire
such local people to handle a specific part of the operation. Today we
call the process subcontracting._
]
[Illustration:
Little River Lumber Company
_Of the many kinds of trees logged in the Great Smokies, the largest
and most profitable were the yellow-poplars, more commonly known as
tulip trees. A man could feel pretty small standing next to one of
them._
]
[Illustration:
Little River Lumber Company
_The great scale of the logging machinery was like nothing the Smokies
had seen before. Long trains carried loads of huge tree trunks to
sawmills after the flat cars were loaded by railroad-mounted cranes._
]
[Illustration:
_Conducting a preliminary survey of the park’s boundaries in 1931 are
(from left) Superintendent J. Ross Eakin, Arthur P. Miller, Charles E.
Peterson, O. G. Taylor, and John Needham._
George A. Grant
]
Birth of a Park
Logging dominated the life of the Great Smoky Mountains during the
early decades of the 20th century. But there was another side to
that life. Apart from the sawmills and the railroads and the general
stores, which were bustling harbingers of new ways a-coming, the higher
forests, the foot trails, and the moonshine stills remained as tokens
of old ways a-lingering. One person in particular came to know and
speak for this more primitive world.
Horace Kephart was born in 1862 in East Salem, Pennsylvania. His Swiss
ancestors were pioneers of the Pennsylvania frontier. During his
childhood, Kephart’s family moved to the Iowa prairie, where his mother
gave him a copy of the novel _Robinson Crusoe_ by Daniel Defoe. In
the absence of playmates on the vast Midwest grassland, young Kephart
dreamed and invented his own games, fashioned his own play swords and
pistols out of wood and even built a cave out of prairie sod and filled
it with “booty” collected off the surrounding countryside.
Horace Kephart never forgot his frontier beginnings. He saved his
copy of _Robinson Crusoe_ and added others: _The Wild Foods of Great
Britain_, _The Secrets of Polar Travel_, Theodore Roosevelt’s _The
Winning of the West_. Camping and outdoor cooking, ballistics and
photography captured his attention and careful study.
Kephart polished his education with periods of learning and library
work at Boston University, Cornell, and Yale. In 1887 he married a
girl from Ithaca, New York, and began to raise a family. By 1890, he
was librarian of the well-known St. Louis Mercantile Library. In his
late thirties, Kephart grew into a quiet, intense loner, a shy and
reticent man with dark, piercing eyes. He remained an explorer at
heart, a pioneer, an individual secretly nurturing the hope of further
adventures.
Opportunity arrived in a strange disguise. Horace Kephart’s largely
unfulfilled visions of escape were combined with increasingly prolonged
periods of drinking. Experience with a tornado in the streets of St.
Louis affected his nerves. As he later recalled:
“... _then came catastrophe; my health broke down. In the summer of
1904, finding that I must abandon professional work and city life, I
came to western North Carolina, looking for a big primitive forest
where I could build up strength anew and indulge my lifelong fondness
for hunting, fishing and exploring new ground._”
[Illustration:
George Masa
_Horace Kephart, librarian-turned-mountaineer, won the hearts of the
Smokies people with his quiet and unassuming ways. He played a major
role in the initial movement for a national park._
]
He chose the Great Smokies almost by accident. Using maps and a compass
while he rested at his father’s home in Dayton, Ohio, he located the
nearest wilderness and then determined the most remote corner of that
wilderness. After his recuperation he traveled to Asheville, North
Carolina, where he took a railroad line that wound through a honeycomb
of hills to the small way station of Dillsboro. And from there, at
the age of 42, he struck out, with a gun and a fishing rod and three
days’ rations, for the virgin mountainside forest. After camping for a
time on Dick’s Creek, his eventual wild destination turned out to be a
deserted log cabin on the Little Fork of the Sugar Fork of Hazel Creek.
His nearest neighbors lived 3 kilometers (2 miles) away, in the equally
isolated settlement of Medlin. Medlin consisted of a post office, a
corn mill, two stores, four dwellings, and a nearby schoolhouse that
doubled as a church. The 42 households that officially collected
their mail at the Medlin Post Office inhabited an area of 42 square
kilometers (16 square miles). It was, as Kephart describes it:
“... _the forest primeval, where roamed some sparse herds of cattle,
razorback hogs and the wild beasts. Speckled trout were in all the
streams. Bears sometimes raided the fields and wildcats were a common
nuisance. Our settlement was a mere slash in the vast woodland that
encompassed it._”
But it was also, for Horace Kephart, a new and invigorating home. He
loved it. He thrived in it. At first he concentrated his senses on
the natural beauty around him, on the purple rhododendron, the flame
azalea, the fringed orchis, the crystal clear streams. Yet as the
months passed, he found that he could not overlook the people.
The mountain people were as solidly a part of the Smokies as the
boulders themselves. These residents of branch and cove, of Medlin
and Proctor and all the other tiny settlements tucked high along the
slanting creekbeds of the Great Smoky Mountains, these distinctive
“back of beyond” hillside farmers and work-worn wives and wary
moonshine distillers lodged in Kephart’s consciousness and imagination
with rock-like strength and endurance.
Initially silent and suspicious of this stranger in their midst,
families gradually came to accept him. They approved of his quietness
and his even-handed ways, even confiding in him with a simple
eloquence. One foot-weary distiller, after leading Kephart over
kilometers of rugged terrain, concluded: “Everywhere you go, it’s
climb, scramble, clamber down, and climb again. You cain’t go nowheres
in this country without climbin’ both ways.” The head of a large family
embracing children who spilled forth from every corner of the cabin
confessed: “We’re so poor, if free silver was shipped in by the carload
we couldn’t pay the freight.”
Kephart came to respect and to wonder at these neighbors who combined a
lack of formal education with a fullness of informal ability. Like him,
many of their personal characters blended a weakness for liquor with a
strong sense of individual etiquette. He heard, for example, the story
of an overnight visitor who laid his loaded gun under his pillow; when
he awoke the next morning, the pistol was where he had left it, but the
cartridges stood in a row on a nearby table.
He met one George Brooks of Medlin: farmer, teamster, storekeeper,
veterinarian, magistrate, dentist. While Brooks did own a set of
toothpullers and wielded them mercilessly, some individuals practiced
the painful art of tooth-jumping to achieve the same result. Uncle
Neddy Carter even tried to jump one of his own teeth; he cut around the
gum, wedged a nail in, and made ready to strike the nail with a hammer,
but he missed the nail and mashed his nose instead.
None of these fascinating tales escaped the attention of Horace
Kephart. As he regained his health, the sustained energy of his probing
mind also returned. Keeping a detailed journal of his experiences,
he drove himself as he had done in the past. He developed almost an
obsession to record all that he learned, to know this place and people
completely, to stop time for an interval and capture this mountain way
of life in his mind and memory. For three years he lived by the side
of Hazel Creek. Though he later moved down to Bryson City during the
winters, he spent most of his summers 13 kilometers (8 miles) up Deep
Creek at an old cabin that marked the original Bryson Place.
Kephart distilled much of what he learned into a series of books. _The
Book of Camping and Woodcraft_ appeared in 1906 as one of the first
detailed guidebooks to woodsmanship, first aid, and the art we now call
“backpacking,” all based on his personal experience and knowledge.
There is even a chapter on tanning pelts. But the most authoritative
book concerned the people themselves. _Our Southern Highlanders_,
published in 1913 and revised nine years later, faithfully retraces
Kephart’s life among the Appalachian mountain folk after he “left the
tame West and came into this wild East.” And paramount among the wilds
of the East was the alluring saga of the moonshiner.
[Illustration:
Laura Thornborough
_Wiley Oakley, his wife, and children gather on the porch of their
Scratch Britches home at Cherokee Orchard with “Minnehaha.” Oakley
always said, “I have two women: one I talk to and one who talks to
me.”_
]
[Illustration:
National Park Service
_Oakley was a park guide before there was a park. And in that role
he nearly always wore a red plaid shirt. He developed friendships
with Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller and became known as the “Will
Rogers of the Smokies.”_
]
In Horace Kephart’s own eyes, his greatest education came from the
spirited breed of mountain man known as “blockade runners” or simply
“blockaders.” These descendants of hard-drinking Scotsmen and Irishmen
had always liked to “still” a little corn whisky to drink and, on
occasion, to sell. But as the 1920s opened into the era of Prohibition,
the mountain distiller of a now contraband product reached his heyday.
He found and began to supply an expanding, and increasingly thirsty
market.
Stealth became the keynote in this flourishing industry. Mountaineers
searched out laurel-strangled hollows and streams that seemed remote
even to their keen eyes. There they assembled the copper stills
into which they poured a fermented concoction of cornmeal, rye, and
yeast known as “sour mash” or “beer.” By twice heating the beer and
condensing its vapors through a water-cooled “worm” or spiral tube,
they could approximate the uncolored liquor enjoyed at the finest New
York parties. And by defending themselves with shotguns rather than
with words, they could continue their approximations.
In this uniquely romantic business, colorful characters abounded on
both sides of the law. Horace Kephart wrote about a particular pair
of men who represented the two legal extremes: the famous moonshiner
Aquilla Rose, and the equally resilient revenuer from the Internal
Revenue Service, W. W. Thomason.
Aquilla, or “Quill,” Rose lived for 25 years at the head of sparsely
populated Eagle Creek. After killing a man in self-defense and hiding
out in Texas awhile, Rose returned to the Smokies with his wife and
settled so far up Eagle Creek that he crowded the Tennessee-North
Carolina state line. Quill made whisky by the barrel and seemed to
drink it the same way, although he was occasionally seen playing his
fiddle or sitting on the porch with his long beard flowing and his
Winchester resting across his lap. His eleventh Commandment, to “never
get ketched,” was faithfully observed, and Quill Rose remained one
of the few mountain blockaders to successfully combine a peaceable
existence at home with a dangerous livelihood up the creek.
W.W. Thomason visited Horace Kephart at Bryson City in 1919. Kephart
accepted this “sturdy, dark-eyed stranger” as simply a tourist
interested in the moonshining art. While Thomason professed innocence,
his real purpose in the Smokies was to destroy stills which settlers
were operating on Cherokee lands to evade the local law. He prepared
for the job by taking three days to carve and paint a lifelike
rattlesnake onto a thick sourwood club. During the following weeks,
he would startle many a moonshiner by thrusting the stick close and
twisting it closer.
When Kephart led the “Snake-Stick Man” into whiskyed coves in the
Sugarlands or above the Cherokee reservation, he found himself
deputized and a participant in the ensuing encounters. More often
than not, shots rang out above the secluded thickets. In one of these
shootouts, Thomason’s hatband, solidly woven out of hundreds of strands
of horsehair, saved this fearless revenuer’s life.
[Illustration:
_Aquilla Rose stands proudly with his mowing machine outside his home
near Eagle Creek. He didn’t stand that still when revenuers came
around._
National Park Service
]
All the wonders of the Great Smoky Mountains--the nature, the people,
the stories, and the battles and the jests--affected Horace Kephart
mightily. This man whose own life had been “saved” by the Smokies began
to think in terms of repaying this mountain area in kind. For during
his years on Hazel Creek and Deep Creek and in Bryson City, he saw the
results of the “loggers’ steel,” results that caused him to lament in
a single phrase, “slash, crash, go the devastating forces.” In 1923 he
summarized his feelings about the lumber industry:
“_When I first came into the Smokies the whole region was one superb
forest primeval. I lived for several years in the heart of it. My
sylvan studio spread over mountain after mountain, seemingly without
end, and it was always clean and fragrant, always vital, growing new
shapes of beauty from day to day. The vast trees met overhead like
cathedral roofs.... Not long ago I went to that same place again. It
was wrecked, ruined, desecrated, turned into a thousand rubbish heaps,
utterly vile and mean._”
[Illustration:
Edouard E. Exline
_When the Civilian Conservation Corps moved into the Smokies in the
1930s, young men from the cities saw moonshine stills firsthand.
Here one pretends to be a moonshiner and hangs his head low for the
photographer._
]
[Illustration:
_Grace Newman sits enraptured as Jim Proffit plays the guitar._
Burton Wolcott
]
Kephart began to think in terms of a national park. He and a Japanese
photographer friend, George Masa, trekked the Smokies and gathered
concrete experience and evidence of the mountains’ wild splendor. At
every opportunity, Kephart advocated the park idea in newspapers, in
brochures, and by word of mouth. He proudly acknowledged that “I owe
my life to these mountains and I want them preserved that others may
profit by them as I have.”
The concept of a national park for these southern mountains was not a
new one in 1920. Forty years earlier, a retired minister and former
state geologist, Drayton Smith, of Franklin, North Carolina, had
proposed “a national park in the mountains.” In 1885, Dr. Henry O.
Marcy of Boston, Massachusetts, had discussed future health resorts in
America and had considered “the advisability of securing under state
control a large reservation of the higher range as a park.” By the turn
of the century, the Appalachian National Park Association was formed in
Asheville, North Carolina, and publicized the idea of a national park
somewhere in the region, not specifically the Great Smokies. When the
Federal Government seemed to rule out this possibility, the Association
devoted the bulk of its time and effort to the creation of national
forest reserves.
But people like Horace Kephart knew the difference between a national
park that safeguarded trees and a national forest that allowed logging.
In 1923, a group supporting a genuine Great Smokies park formed in
Knoxville, Tennessee. Mr. and Mrs. Willis P. Davis, of the Knoxville
Iron Company, in the summer of that year had enjoyed a trip to some
of the country’s western parks. As they viewed the wonders preserved
therein, Mrs. Davis was reminded of the natural magnificence near her
own home. “Why can’t we have a national park in the Great Smokies?” she
asked her husband.
Back in Knoxville, Mr. Davis began to ask that question of friends
and associates. One of these was Col. David C. Chapman, a wholesale
druggist, who listened but did not heed right away:
“_Not until I accidentally saw a copy of President Theodore
Roosevelt’s report on the Southern Appalachians did I have any idea of
just what we have here. In reading and rereading this report I learned
for the first time that the Great Smokies have some truly superlative
qualities. After that I became keenly interested in Mr. Davis’ plan and
realized that a national park should be a possibility._”
The Davises and Chapman led the formation of the Great Smoky Mountains
Conservation Association. Congressmen and Secretary of the Interior
Hubert Work were contacted. Work endorsed the project, and two years
later Congress passed an act authorizing associations in Tennessee and
North Carolina to buy lands and deed them to the U.S. Government.
Problems immediately presented themselves. The citizens would have
to buy this park. Unlike Yellowstone and other previous land grants
from the Federal Government, the Smokies were owned by many private
interests and therefore presented a giant challenge to hopeful fund
raisers. To further complicate matters, no group had the power to
condemn lands; any property, if secured at all, would have to be
coaxed from its owner at an appropriately high price. Finally, and
most discouragingly, park enthusiasts faced an area of more than 6,600
separate tracts and thousands of landowners.
Yet events conspired to give the park movement a sustaining drive. The
lumber companies had made the people of the Smokies more dependent
on money for additional food, modern-day clothing, and new forms of
recreation. World War I and the coming of the highways had instilled
a restlessness in the mountain people, a yearning for new sights and
different ways of living. Some began to echo the sentiments of one
farmer who, after realizing meager returns for his hard labor on rocky
fields, looked around him and concluded, “Well, I reckon a park is
about all this land is fit for.”
Determined leadership overcame obstacles large and small. Behind
Chapman’s professorial appearance--his wire-rimmed glasses and
three-piece suits and unkempt hair--was a man who had been a colonel
in World War I, a man who had resolved to make the dream of a national
park into a reality. Along with Chapman as the driving force, associate
director of the National Park Service Arno B. Cammerer provided the
steering and the gears. Cammerer’s marked enthusiasm for incorporating
the Great Smokies into the national park system added a well-placed,
influential spokesman to the movement. By spring of 1926, groups in
North Carolina and Tennessee had raised more than a million dollars.
Within another year, the legislatures of the two states each had
donated twice that amount.
With $5 million as a nest egg, park advocates turned to the actual
buying of lands. Cammerer himself defined a boundary which included the
most suitable territory and which, as it turned out, conformed closely
to the final boundary. Chapman and his associates approached individual
homeowners. Sometimes they received greetings similar to one on a
homemade sign:
“_Col. Chapman. You and Hoast are notify. Let the Cove People Alone.
Get Out. Get Gone. 40 m. Limit._”
The older mountain people clung desperately to what they had. Even
though the buyers were prepared to issue lifetime leases for those who
wanted to stay, they found it difficult to remove this resolute band
from their homeland.
Many of the Smokies’ residents--the younger, more mobile, more
financially oriented ones--accepted the coming of the park with a
combination of fatalism and cautious hope. Gradually they acknowledged
the fact that a park and its tourist trade might be a continuing asset,
whereas the prosperity from logging had proved at best only temporary.
After John D. Rockefeller, Jr., through the Laura Spelman Rockefeller
Memorial Fund, doubled the park fund with a much-needed gift of an
additional $5 million, renewed offers of cash completely melted many
icy objections.
The lumber companies followed suit, but for higher stakes. Champion
Fibre, Little River, Suncrest, Norwood, and Ritter were among the 18
timber and pulpwood companies that owned more than 85 percent of the
proposed park area. They fought to stay for obvious economic reasons,
yet they were prepared to leave if the price was right. Little River
Lumber Company, after considerable negotiation with the state of
Tennessee and the city of Knoxville, sold its 30,345 hectares (75,000
acres) for only $8.80 per hectare ($3.57 per acre).
The vast holdings of Champion Fibre Company were at the very heart of
the park, however, and the results of the company’s resistance to a
national park were central to success or failure of the whole movement.
Champion’s 36,400 hectares (90,000 acres) included upper Greenbrier,
Mt. Guyot, Mt. LeConte, the Chimneys, and a side of Clingmans Dome,
crowned by extensive forests of virgin spruce. This splendid domain
was the cause of hot tempers, torrid accusations, rigid defenses, and
a hard-fought condemnation lawsuit. In the end, however, on March
30, 1931, Champion Fibre agreed to sell for a total of $3 million,
a sum which took on added appeal during the slump of the disastrous
Depression.
Four days after this agreement, Horace Kephart died in an automobile
accident near Cherokee, North Carolina. An 8-ton boulder was later
brought from the hills above Smokemont to mark his grave in Bryson City.
Only a few years earlier Kephart had said:
“_Here to-day is the last stand of primeval American forest at its
best. If saved--and if saved at all it must be done at once--it will be
a joy and a wonder to our people for all time. The nation is summoned
by a solemn duty to preserve it._”
And it was, indeed, preserved. The Federal Government in 1933
contributed a final $2 million to the cause, establishing the figure
of $12 million as the grand total of money raised for the park. On
September 2, 1940, with land acquisition almost completed, President
Franklin D. Roosevelt dedicated the Great Smoky Mountains National Park
“for the permanent enjoyment of the people.”
The park movement’s greatest victory, coming as it did at Kephart’s
death, lent a special significance to his life. For his experience
symbolized the good effects that a national park in the Great Smoky
Mountains could create. These mountains and their people inspired him
to write eloquently of their truth and endurance; his own health seemed
to thrive in the rugged, elemental environment of the Smokies. Perhaps
most important of all, he discovered here the impact of what it can
mean to know a real home. Having found a home for himself, he labored
tirelessly for a national park to give to his fellow countrymen the
same opportunity for wonder and renewal and growth.
[Illustration:
George A. Grant
_An early morning fog cloaks the dense vegetation and rolling hills at
Cove Creek Gap. Such scenes inspired many people to rally around the
idea of purchasing land for a park._
]
[Illustration:
National Park Service
_Those attending a meeting March 6, 1928, when a $5 million gift from
the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial was announced, included (front
from left) former Tennessee Gov. Ben W. Hooper, Willis P. Davis,
E. E. Conner, David C. Chapman, Gov. Henry H. Horton, John Nolan,
Knoxville Mayor James A. Fowler, (back from left) Kenneth Chorley,
Arno B. Cammerer, Wiley Brownlee, J. M. Clark, Margaret Preston, Ben
A. Morton, Frank Maloney, Cary Spence, and Russell Hanlon._
]
[Illustration:
_John Walker, the patriarch of a large self-reliant family, admires
cherries he raised at his home in Little Greenbrier._
Jim Shelton
]
The Past Becomes Present
As early as 1930, citizens and officials across the United States had
begun to realize that a new additional park would indeed encompass
and preserve the Great Smoky Mountains. Hard-working Maj. J. Ross
Eakin, the first superintendent of the park, arrived at the beginning
of the next year from his previous post in Montana’s Glacier National
Park and was quickly introduced to the cold, mid-January winds of the
Great Smokies and some of the controversies that had arisen during
establishment of the park.
At first, Eakin and his few assistants limited their duties to
the basics; they marked boundaries, prevented hunting, fought and
forestalled fire. But as the months passed, as the park grew in size
and its staff increased in number, minds and muscles alike tackled the
real problem of shaping a sanctuary which all the people of present and
future generations could enjoy.
Help came from an unexpected quarter. The economic depression that had
gripped the country in 1930 tightened its stranglehold as the decade
progressed. In the famous “Hundred Days” spring of 1933, a special
session of Congress passed the first and most sweeping series of
President Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation. The Civilian Conservation
Corps, created in April, established work for more than two million
young men. CCC camps, paying $30 a month for work in conservation,
flood control, and wilderness projects, sprang up.
As far as the young, struggling Great Smoky Mountains National Park was
concerned, this new CCC program could not have come at a better time.
Through the Corps, much-needed manpower converged by the hundreds on
the Smokies from such places as New Jersey, Ohio, and New York City.
Supervised by Park Service officials and reserve officers from the U.S.
Army, college-age men first set up their own camps--17 in all--and
then went about that old familiar labor in the Smokies, landscaping
and building roads. In addition, they constructed trails, shelters,
powerlines, fire towers, and bridges.
Some of their tent-strewn camps were pitched on old logging sites with
familiar names like Smokemont and Big Creek. Others, such as Camp No.
413 on Forney Creek, were more remote but no less adequate. Ingenuity,
sparked by necessity, created accommodations which made full use of
all available resources. At Camp Forney, for instance, there was a
barracks, a messhall, a bathhouse, and an officers’ quarters. Water
from clear, cold Forney Creek was piped into the kitchen; food was
stored in a homemade ice chest. The residents of the camp, seeing no
reason why they should rough it more than necessary, added a library, a
post office, and a commissary in their spare time.
The CCC men, their ages between 18 and 25, did not forget recreation.
As teams organized for football, baseball, boxing, wrestling, and
soccer, the hills resounded with unfamiliar calls of scores and
umpires’ decisions, while the more familiar tussles of boxing and
wrestling raised echoes of old partisan matches throughout the hills.
At times, these young workers answered the urge to ramble, too. One of
them later recalled his days as a radio man on the top of Mt. Sterling:
“_It was seven miles steep up there, and sometimes I’d jog down about
sundown and catch a truck for Newport. That’s where we went to be with
people. The last truck brought us back after midnight._”
A minor problem sometimes arose when the CCC “outsiders” began dating
local girls; farming fathers sometimes set fires to give the boys
something else to do during the weekends. The conflict of cultures was
thrown into a particularly sharp light when a Corps participant shot a
farmer’s hog one night and shouted that he had killed a bear!
On the whole, however, the Civilian Conservation Corps program in the
Great Smoky Mountains was a major success. In one or two extremely
rugged areas of the park, retired loggers were hired in 10-day shifts
to hack out or even drill short trail lengths. The rest of the
965-kilometer (600-mile) trail system, together with half a dozen
fire towers and almost 480 kilometers (300 miles) of fire roads and
tourist highways, was the product of the CCC. When Superintendent Eakin
evaluated the work of only the first two years of the CCC’s operation,
he equated it with a decade of normal accomplishment.
Through these and similar efforts, which included almost 110 kilometers
(70 miles) of the famous Appalachian Trail, the natural value of the
Great Smoky Mountains became a recognized and established lure for
thousands, eventually millions, of visitors. But there was another
resource that remained untapped, a challenge to the national park
purpose and imagination. This resource was first overlooked, then
neglected, and finally confronted with respect. The resource was the
people and their homes.
Many previous owners of park land had received lifetime leases that
allowed them to live on in their dwellings, work their fields, and cut
dead timber even while tourists streamed through the Smokies. Some
of the lessees, such as those living near Gatlinburg, saw a new era
coming, thrusting back the street-ends until motels and restaurants
and craft shops pushed against an abandoned apple orchard or a 10-plot
cemetery or a deserted backyard laced with lilacs. These rememberers of
an earlier time relinquished their lands in the park, more often than
not resettling within sight of the mountain range and the homeland they
had just left.
Yet a few lessees, those living further up the valleys, deeper into
the mountains, or isolated from the well-traveled paths, these few
folks stayed on. The Walker sisters of Little Greenbrier Cove were
representative of this small group.
John Walker, their father, was himself the eldest of his parents’ 15
children. In 1860, at the age of 19, he became engaged to 14-year-old
Margaret Jane King. The Civil War postponed their wedding, and John,
an ardent Unionist who had enlisted in the First Tennessee Light
Artillery, spent three months in a Confederate prison and lost 45
kilograms (100 pounds) before he was exchanged and provided with a
pension. In 1866, they were finally married. After Margaret Jane’s
father died, the young couple moved into the King homestead in Little
Greenbrier.
They had eleven children: four boys, seven girls. John remained a
strong Republican and Primitive Baptist; he liked to boast that in a
long and fruitful lifetime he had spent a total of 50 cents on health
care for his family (two of his sons had once required medicine for the
measles). Margaret Jane was herself an “herb doctor” and a midwife,
talents which complemented John’s skills as a blacksmith, carpenter,
miller, farmer. Once, as Margaret Jane was chasing a weasel from her
hens, the reddish-brown animal bit her thumb and held on; she calmly
thrust her hand into a full washtub, where the weasel drowned in water
stained by her blood.
[Illustration:
Joseph S. Hall
_Columbus “Clum” Cardwell of Hills Creek, Tennessee, worked in the CCC
garage at Smokemont. That experience led to a 23-year career as an
auto-mechanic at the national park._
]
[Illustration:
Edouard E Exline
_Little Greenbrier Cove was known to some people as Five Sisters Cove
because of the Walker sisters’ place just above the schoolhouse. The
Walkers had their garden and grape arbors close to the house for handy
tending._
]
[Illustration:
Edouard E Exline
_Inside, everything was neat as a pin with coats, hats, baskets, guns,
and what-have-you hanging on the newspaper-covered walls._
]
[Illustration:
Edouard E Exline
_Sitting on the front porch are (from left) Polly, Louisa, and Martha.
Also on the porch is a loom made by their father (see page 120) and a
spinning wheel._
]
The children grew up. The three older boys married and moved away. The
youngest, Giles Daniel, left for Iowa and fought in World War I. Sarah
Caroline, the only one of the daughters ever to marry, began her life
with Jim Shelton in 1908. Hettie Rebecca worked for a year or two in
a Knoxville hosiery mill, but the Depression sent her back home. When
Nancy Melinda died in 1931, the original home place was left in the
hands of five sisters; Hettie, Margaret Jane, Polly, Louisa Susan, and
Martha Ann.
They lived the self-sufficiency of their ancestors. They stated simply
that “our land produces everything we need except sugar, soda, coffee,
and salt.” Their supplies came from the grape arbor, the orchard, the
herb and vegetable garden; the sheep, hogs, fowl, and milch cows; the
springhouse crocks of pickled beets and sauerkraut; the dried food and
the seed bags and the spice racks that hung from nails hammered into
the newspaper-covered walls of the main house. The material aspects of
their surroundings represented fully the fabric of life as it had been
known in the hundreds of abandoned cabins and barns and outbuildings
that dotted the landscape of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
And the Walker sisters were not about to give up their way of life
without a struggle. In a poem, “My Mountain Home,” Louisa expressed the
family’s feelings:
“_There is an old weather bettion house
That stands near a wood
With an orchard near by it
For all most one hundred years it has stood_
“_It was my home in infency
It sheltered me in youth
When I tell you I love it
I tell you the truth_
“_For years it has sheltered
By day and night
From the summer sun’s heat
And the cold winter blight._
“_But now the park commesser
Comes all dressed up so gay
Saying this old house of yours
We must now take away_
“_They coax they wheedle
They fret they bark
Saying we have to have this place
For a National park_
“_For us poor mountain people
They dont have a care
But must a home for
The wolf the lion and the bear_
“_But many of us have a title
That is sure and will hold
To the City of peace
Where the streets are pure gold_
“_There no lion in its fury
Those pathes ever trod
It is the home of the soul
In the presence of God_
“_When we reach the portles
Of glory so fair
The Wolf cannot enter
Neather the lion or bear_
“_And no park Commissioner
Will ever dar
To desturbe or molest
Or take our home from us there._”
[Illustration:
Joseph S. Hall
_Before leaving for Lufty Baptist Church, Alfred Dowdle and his family
of Collins Creek pose for Joseph S. Hall, who was studying linguistics
in the Smokies for the Park Service._
]
In January of 1941, however, the Walker sisters relented a little and
sold their 50 hectares (123 acres) to the United States for $4,750
and a lifetime lease. Partly because of this unique situation, this
special lifestyle, park officials delayed any well-defined program to
recreate and present a vanishing culture. When the _Saturday Evening
Post_ “discovered” the Walker sisters in 1946, tourists in the Smokies
flocked to the Walker home as if it were a museum of Appalachia.
The sisters themselves tolerated the visitors, even sold mountain
“souvenirs.” But the years passed, three of the sisters died, and in
1953 Margaret Jane and Louisa wrote to the park superintendent:
“_I have a request to you Will you please have the Sign a bout the
Walker Sisters taken down the one on High Way 73 especially the reason
I am asking this there is just 2 of the sister lives at the old House
place one is 70 years of age the other is 82 years of age and we can’t
receive so many visitors. We are not able to do our Work and receive so
many visitors, and can’t make sovioners to sell like we once did and
people will be expecting us to have them...._”
The park, of course, cooperated and helped the sisters until Louisa,
the last, died in 1964.
Increasingly the park recognized the value of the human history of
the Smokies. Out of that recognition came interpretive projects and
exhibits at Cades Cove, Oconaluftee, Sugarlands, and a variety of other
sites which showed and still show the resiliency and the creativity of
the Appalachian mountaineer.
The same mix of problem, potential, and progress has made itself felt
on the Eastern Band of the Cherokees. Their population within the
Qualla Boundary doubled from approximately 2,000 in 1930 to more than
4,000 forty years later. This increase has only pointed more urgently
to the economic, social, and cultural challenges confronting the
Cherokees.
By 1930, the inhabitants of the Qualla Boundary had reached a kind of
balance between the customs of the past and the demands of the present.
Most families owned 12 or 16 hectares (30 or 40 acres) of woodland,
with a sixth of that cleared and planted in corn, beans, or potatoes.
A log or frame house, a small barn and other outbuildings, and the
animals--a horse, a cow, a few hogs, chickens--rounded out the Cherokee
family’s possessions, which about equalled those of the neighboring
whites. The Eastern Band itself was unified by two main strands: first,
the land tenure system by which the more than 20,230 Qualla hectares
(50,000 acres) could be leased, but not sold, to whites; and second,
the lingering social organization of the clan.
These clans, which largely paralleled the five main towns of Birdtown,
Wolftown, Painttown, Yellow Hill, and Big Cove, stabilized the
population into groups and offered, through such methods as the dance,
an outlet for communication and expression. Through the Friendship
dance, for example, young people could meet each other. The Bugah dance
depended upon joking and teasing among relatives. And the revered
Eagle dance celebrated victory in the ball games between Cherokee
communities.
The whirlwind changes of the mid-20th century tipped whatever balance
the Cherokees had gained. The Great Depression, World War II, and the
explosion of tourism and mobility and business opportunity brought
inside the Qualla Boundary both a schedule of modernization and a table
of uncertainty. The dance declined in importance. Surrounding counties
seemed to take better advantage of the new trends than these natives
who had been cast into a political no-man’s-land.
By the 1950s, the Eastern Band could look forward to a series of
familiar paradoxes: relatively poor education; a wealth of small
tourist enterprise and a dearth of large, stable industry; an
unsurpassed mountain environment and an appalling state of public
health. A 1955 survey of health conditions, for instance, found that
90 percent of 600 homes in seven Cherokee districts had insufficient
water, sewage, and garbage facilities. More than 95 percent of the
housing was substandard. Diseases springing from inadequate sanitation
prevailed.
The situation changed and is still in the process of change. The
Eastern Band could not and cannot allow such oversight, such
undercommittment. The Qualla Boundary Community Action Program
sponsored day-care centers in several Cherokee communities. In the
years surrounding 1960, three industries manufacturing products
from quilts to moccasins located at Cherokee and began to employ
hundreds of men and women on a continuing, secure basis. A few years
later, community action turned its efforts to the housing problem;
as the program drove ahead, 400 homes were either “constructed or
significantly improved,” reducing the percentage of substandard houses
to about 50 percent. As for living facilities, the percentages have
been exactly reversed: 90 percent of homes now have septic tanks and
safe water.
The Cherokee Boys’ Club, a nonprofit organization incorporated in 1964,
has improved the quality of life within the Qualla Boundary. The club’s
self-supporting projects include a complete bus service for Cherokee
schools and garbage collection for the North Carolina side of the
Smokies. Along with the Qualla Civic Center, the Boys’ Club serves a
useful socializing function as the modern equivalent to past dances and
rituals.
[Illustration:
Smithsonian Institution
_Dances are associated with certain traditional Cherokee games.
Separate groups of women and lacrosse-like players are about to begin
a pre-game dance in 1888._
]
[Illustration:
Smithsonian Institution
_Nine men celebrate a game victory with an Eagle Dance in 1932._
]
[Illustration:
Charles S. Grossman
_Samson Welsh shoots arrows with a blow gun at the Cherokee Indian
Fair in 1936._
]
Perhaps the soundest of the native Cherokee businesses is the Qualla
Arts and Crafts Mutual. Since 1947, the Qualla Co-op has marketed
the work of hundreds of Indian craftsmen. Magnificent carvings of
cherry and walnut and baskets of river cane and honeysuckle preserve
the skills and art of the past and symbolize the performance and the
promise of the Eastern Band of the Cherokees.
The Tennessee portion of the Great Smoky Mountains has seen its share
of major accomplishments through imagination and hard work. One such
accomplishment is Gatlinburg’s Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts,
known as the Pi Beta Phi Settlement School during the early years of
the century.
In 1910, Gatlinburg comprised a half-dozen houses, a couple of general
stores, a church, and scant educational facilities. Perhaps 200
families lived in the upper watershed of the Little Pigeon River,
and these families looked to Gatlinburg for trading, visiting, and
whatever learning they could reasonably expect to receive during
their lifetimes. In that year, the national sorority of Pi Beta Phi
decided to establish a needed educational project somewhere in rural
America; after discussing a possible site with the U.S. commissioner
of education, who suggested Tennessee, and the state commissioner, who
chose Sevier County, and the county superintendent, who pointed to the
isolated community of Gatlinburg, the group picked this little village
in the shadow of the Great Smokies as the area in which they would work.
On February 20, 1912, Martha Hill, a neatly dressed and determined
young brunette from Nashville, opened school in an abandoned Baptist
church at the junction of Baskins Creek and the Little Pigeon River.
Thirteen suspicious but willing pupils, their ages ranging from 4
to 24, offered themselves for instruction. At first, attendance was
irregular, but by Christmastime, a celebration at the schoolroom drew
a crowd of 300. Miss Hill, herself tired and a bit ill from spending
exhausting hours nursing several sick neighbors, had to be brought to
the party by wagon from a cottage she had leased for $1.50 per month.
The winter warmed into spring and the one-room school grew into a
settlement school. Workers from Pi Beta Phi organized a sewing club
for girls, a baseball club for boys. Martha Hill gathered some books
together to form the nucleus of a library. Students built barns and
chicken houses on land bought with sorority and community contributions.
During the next two years, achievements small and large piled upon each
other. The library expanded to almost 2,000 books; school enrollment
swelled to well over 100. Pi Phi sank a second well, tended a fruit
orchard, took the children on their first trip to Maryville. The people
of Gatlinburg began to accept the school both in spirit and in fact.
Activities branched out into other fields. In the fall of 1920,
nurse Phyllis Higinbotham, an experienced graduate of Johns Hopkins,
converted the old cottage into a hospital. Endowed with both unswerving
dedication and unending friendliness, “Miss Phyllis” walked and rode
from house to house, trained midwives, taught hygiene, and persuaded
doctors from Knoxville and Sevierville to keep occasional office hours
in Gatlinburg. In 1926, after firmly establishing a model rural health
center, Phyllis Higinbotham became state supervisor of public health
nurses for Tennessee.
As time passed, the county and the burgeoning town assumed greater
responsibility for the Pi Beta Phi Settlement School’s crucial progress
in the vital areas of health and education. But the broad-based school
was by no means undermined. Almost as soon as it had arrived in
Gatlinburg, Pi Phi had begun offering adult courses in home economics,
agriculture, weaving, and furniture making. These courses formed the
basis for a true cottage industry which in the late 1920s benefitted
more than 100 local families. And when the coming of the Great Smoky
Mountains National Park assured a constant wave of tourism, the
products of folk culture in the Smokies rode the crest of that wave.
The present-day Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, located upon a
peaceful estate in the heart of commercial Gatlinburg, attests to the
imagination of a generous group, the cooperation of a chosen community,
and the lasting good works of both. Like Qualla, like the CCC camps,
like the park today, and, most of all, like the Walker place, Arrowmont
signifies the profound beauty that can result when people practice a
simple respect for their homeland.
Handicrafts
Woods and meadows, fields and mines and swamps, every part of the
natural scene yielded some material that could be transformed into
a handcrafted article of usefulness and beauty. From the trees
came richly grained lumber for furniture and musical instruments,
sturdy timber for tools and utensils, and softer wood for whittling
“play-pretties” and purely decorative objects. Wood-working, even
sculpture, became one of the outstanding skills of mountain artisans.
All the crafts involved in textile design and production were part of
the region’s history: weaving and spinning, quilting and braiding and
hooking, making dyes from roots, barks, vegetables, herbs. Baskets were
woven from oak and hickory splits, from river cane, and honeysuckle
vines.
Cherokee and mountaineer alike shared designs and shapes for
the baskets made from different materials for uses ranging from
egg-gathering to household storage.
[Illustration:
Laura Thornborough
]
[Illustration: Alan Rinehart]
And, as illustrated by Mrs. Matt Ownby (above) and Mack McCarter
(above), basketmaking was something done by both men and women. Clay,
fashioned on rude, homemade potter’s wheels of the earlier days,
provided pots and pitchers of primitive handsomeness and daily utility.
Broomcorn and sedge offered materials for rough but effective brooms.
Leather crafts arose from the need for harnesses on mules and horse,
and shoes on people. Skinning, treating, tanning were just the first
steps of a long, demanding process of turning raw hide into usable
leather. The use of corn shucks illustrated with special clarity the
mountain person’s inventiveness in utilizing everything he raised or
acquired. Corn shucks could make a stout chair-bottom or a captivating
little mountain doll. Nimble fingers turned the husks into a dozen
different articles. In his _Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands_,
Allen H. Eaton wrote in 1937: “We must try to find the qualities of
excellence which these people have developed before insisting that
they accept our formula for living, thinking, and expression....
Better certainly, if we know, as those who have worked and lived in
the Highlands have had a chance to know, what are the standards and
the ideals to which the people cling. But even that experience should
not be necessary for us to understand and to cherish the spirit of the
young highlander who, after expressing gratitude to the missionary who
had come in to help build a school, said with characteristic mountain
frankness, ‘Bring us your civilization, but leave us our own culture.’”
[Illustration:
Alan Rinehart
_Claude Huskey and Mack McCarter make chairs at one of the shops in
Gatlinburg in the 1930s._
]
[Illustration:
Edouard E. Exline
_John Jones was the miller in the late 1930s at the Mingus Creek Mill
in Oconaluftee._
]
[Illustration:
Charles S. Grossman
_Tom and Jerry Hearon, along with John Burns, hew a log trough with a
broad ax and adze._
]
[Illustration:
Charles S. Grossman
_With a mallet and ax, Tom and Jerry Hearon split logs into bolts from
which to make shingles._
]
[Illustration:
Charles S. Grossman
_Dave Bohanan feeds cane between the rollers as he makes sorghum
molasses._
]
[Illustration:
National Park Service
_A Smokies resident builds a flat bed for his sourwood sled._
]
[Illustration:
_A visit to the cabin of John and Lurena Oliver takes a family back to
yesteryear in Cades Cove._
Fred R. Bell
]
Coming Home
Tremont. This Tennessee valley of the Middle Prong of the Little River
does not differ widely from Deep Creek or Greenbrier or Cosby or most
of the other branches and hollows of the Smokies. Each, including
Tremont, penetrates the hills, divides them like a furrow, and protects
its own rocky, racing stream with a matting of thick, green growth.
Nearby Cades Cove and North Carolina’s Cataloochee might guard a few
hectares of lush, hill-cradled pasture or farmland, but even these are
stamped with the clear, cool air and feel of the Great Smoky Mountains.
So Tremont is representative. And, perhaps because of this, it is a
symbol--a symbol of both the mystery and the clarity of the mountains
which give it a name. There is, for example, the legend of a small boy
who wandered into the backcountry above the “Sinks” and was lost for
two days. Uncle Henry Stinnett, a worried neighbor, searched in vain
for the boy until he dreamed, on the second night, of a child sleeping
near a log on a familiar ridge. Henry Stinnett renewed the search, and
the boy was indeed found asleep “under the uprooted stump of a tree.”
And side by side with such a strange vision exists its opposite: the
unforeseen. In August of 1947, a young woman was sunbathing on the
boulders of the river. While she enjoyed the rays of the warm sun
downstream, the high upper reaches of the prong were being flooded by
the swollen, flash attacks of a hidden cloudburst. Within minutes, the
woman drowned in a hurtling wall of water.
Yet there is also a clarity here that offsets the unknown. It is a
quality of outlook, a confidence of ability and expectation for the
future as immense as the mountains which inspire it. But it is an
awareness grounded in the facts of history and anecdote and the crisp,
fresh sounds of children’s voices.
“Black Bill” Walker knew about children; he had more than 25 himself.
A double first cousin to the father of Little Greenbrier’s Walker
sisters, “Black Bill” or “Big Will” Walker moved into the lonely
valley in 1859. He was only 21 years old then, and his name was simply
William. He was accompanied by his strong 19-year-old wife, Nancy.
His mother was a Scot, a member of the McGill clan. His father, Marion,
was another of those multitalented frontiersmen: miller, cattleman,
orchardist, bear hunter, saddlebag preacher. William took up where
his parents left off. He became the leader, the ruler of the community
he had started. He was rumored to have been a Mormon, although
denominations mattered little in the wilderness. He and Nancy raised
seven children. Later wives bore him approximately 20 more.
[Illustration:
_Legend has it that Black Bill Walker once went into a cave after a
bear and came out alive--with the hide. The story is probably true,
for he did many things on a grand scale. He was the patriarch not only
of a large family, but of a community._
National Park Service
]
He milled his own corn and built log cabins for each of his families.
He fashioned an immense muzzle-loading rifle, nicknamed it “Old Death,”
and handled it with rare skill. Horace Kephart, in a 1918 magazine
article, tells of a conversation he had with the 80-year-old hunter:
“_Black Bill’s rifle was one he made with his own hands in the log
house where I visited him. He rifled it on a wooden machine that was
likewise of his own make, and stocked it with wood cut on his own land.
The piece was of a little more than half-ounce bore, and weighed 12½
pounds ... the old hunter showed me how he loaded...._
“‘_My bullets are run small enough so that a naked one will jest slip
down on the powder by its own weight. When I’m in a hurry, I pour in
the powder by guess, wet a bullet in my mouth, and drop it down the
gun. Enough powder sticks to it to keep the ball from falling out
if I shoot downhill. Then I snatch a cap from one o’ these strings,
and--so._’
“_The old man went through the motions like a sleight-of-hand
performer. The whole operation of loading took barely ten seconds._”
After Black Bill’s own children had grown, he went to the nearby town
of Maryville and requested and received a school in the valley for
children yet to come. He governed his settlement, yet he was not merely
a governor. He was a remarkable man, an individualist who also built a
community.
After Black Bill’s death in 1919, life in Tremont continued as before.
Families still ate turkey and pheasant, squirrel and venison, sweet
potatoes and the first greenery of spring, onions. Children’s bare feet
remained tough enough to break open chestnut burrs. Mothers continued
to put dried peaches in a jar full of moonshine, let it sit a day or
two, and test their peach brandy with a sip or two. And on Christmas,
fathers and sons “got out and shot their guns” in celebration.
Intervals of violence interrupted the daily routine. Farmers with
cattle and sheep freely roaming the ridges sometimes made it hard
for others to grow corn and similar crops. A hunter’s bear and ’coon
dogs might kill some sheep. One “war” ended with a fire on Fodder Stack
Mountain that raced down into Chestnut Flats and killed a number of
sheep. No humans died, but the sheep men killed all the hunting dogs in
the vicinity.
[Illustration:
H. C. Wilburn
_“It is point blank aggravating, I can’t walk a log like I used to,”
Aden Carver told H. C. Wilburn as he crossed Bradley Fork in October
1937 at the age of 91._
]
By the early 1920s, change was creeping into the valley. The Little
River Lumber Company persuaded Black Bill’s children to do what
he would not do: sell the timber. From the mid-twenties to the
mid-thirties, more than 1,000 workers lived in the logging town
of Tremont, patronized the Tremont Hotel, and hauled away tens of
thousands of the virgin forest’s giants.
With the Great Smoky Mountains National Park came the CCC. The Civilian
Conservation Corps camp on the old lumber site, together with a Girl
Scout camp that would last until 1959, signaled a retreat--and a
progression--from the extractive industry of the past. Although the
CCC disbanded during World War II, a modern-day CCC arrived in 1964.
The Job Corps combined conservation work, such as trail maintenance
and stream cleaning, with training in vital skills of roadbuilding,
masonry, and the operation of heavy machinery.
Then, in 1969, Tremont entered a new era. The previous years of
innovation seemed to prepare the secluded valley for a truly fresh and
creative effort in education. The Walkers would have been proud of what
came to be the Environmental Education Center.
The Center draws on both original and time-tested techniques to teach
grade school children basic awareness and respect for the natural
world around them. Because its achievements are both fundamental and
effective, and because it treats a splendid mountain area as a lasting
and deserving homeland for plants and animals and human beings, the
story of Tremont culminates this history of the Great Smoky Mountains.
For here is one of the ways the Smokies can be best used: as a wild
refuge and a living laboratory where young people may discover the
deeper meaning of the park’s past and why, for the future, there is a
park at all.
The Environmental Education Center, administered by Maryville College
from 1969 through 1979 and since then by Great Smoky Mountains Natural
History Association, evolved through planning by both the park and
nearby county school systems. One of the rangers, Lloyd Foster, became
so attached to the ideas being presented that he obtained a leave of
absence from his work, persistently promoted the project, and became
Tremont’s first director. Experienced teachers such as Elsie Burrell
and Randolph Shields helped Foster convert talk into action, rhetoric
into experience.
The center soon offered a real alternative to conventional and
overcrowded schools caught in the midst of industrialization.
Teacher-led or parent-supervised classes from a multitude of states and
cities organized themselves, paid a base fee for each member, and came
to the valley for one week during the year. Within months, Tremont was
teaching elementary students at the rate of thousands per year. The
organizers retained their informal, camp-like approach to interested
groups and added to the original dining room and two dormitories an
audiovisual room and a laboratory complete with powerful microscopes.
As the program expanded, children could fulfill their imaginative
promptings in an art room, or build a miniature skidder in the crafts
room, or turn to a library of extensive readings.
As the idea of environmental education at Tremont and elsewhere spread
by word of mouth, volunteers from across the country arrived and aided
those already at work. High school and college students participated in
and still attend weekend conferences on the activities and the progress
of the Center.
They learn, first of all, fundamental concepts that are expressed
simply: “You don’t have to have a lot of fancy buildings to do a good
program,” or “You know, sometimes we teach a lot of theory and we don’t
really get down to--I guess you’d call it the nitty-gritty,” or even
“Now don’t chicken out, the way some of you did last time, step in the
water.”
They learn of “quiet hour,” when, at the beginning of the week, each
child stakes out a spot for himself in the woods, beside the stream,
wherever choice leads. For an hour each day, in sun or rain, everybody
seeks his or her own place and is assured of peace and privacy. A girl
writes a poem to her parents; a fourth-grader contemplates on a rock
by the water; and almost everyone who observes the quiet hour looks
forward to it eagerly each day.
[Illustration:
Fred R. Bell
_In an attempt to capture the spirit of the old days, a family climbs
about a Cades Cove barn._
]
[Illustration:
_Pages 142-143: Members of the Tilman Ownby family of Dudley Creek,
near Gatlinburg, gather for a reunion in the early 1900s. Many of
their descendants still live in the Smokies area today._
National Park Service
]
They learn about the highly effective lessons that are scattered
throughout the week, lessons such as “man and water,” “stream ecology,”
“continuity and change.” Imaginative gatherings become not the
exception but the rule: “Sometimes we take a group of children, divide
them into members of a make-believe pioneer family, and take them up
into a wilderness area, an area which is truly pristine, almost a
virgin forest. And we let the kids imagine that they are this pioneer
family, and that they are going to pick out a house site.” In one game
called “succession,” a boy from blacktopped, “civilized” Atlanta might
search along a road for signs of life on the pavement, then in the
gravel, then in the grass, then within the vast, teeming forest. And a
day’s trip to the Little Greenbrier schoolhouse gives the children of
today a chance to experience what it was like when the Walker sisters
and their ancestors sat on the hard wooden benches and learned the
three R’s and felt the bite of a hickory switch.
It may seem odd that modern children should enjoy so much a trip to
school. But enjoy it they do, for as they fidget on the wooden benches
or spell against each other in an old-fashioned “spelldown” or read a
mid-1800s dictionary that defines a kiss as “a salute with the lips,”
they enter into a past place and a past time. For a few minutes, at
least, they identify with the people who used to be here in these
Smokies--not “play-acting” but struggling to survive and improve their
lives.
The schoolhouse itself is old, built in 1882 out of poplar logs and
white oak shingles. Its single room used to double as a church for the
community, but now the two long, narrow windows on either side open out
onto the protected forest of the park. A woman stands in the doorway,
dressed in a pink bonnet and an old-fashioned, ankle-length dress. She
rings a cast iron bell. The children, who have been out walking on
this early spring morning, hear the bell and begin to run toward it.
Some of them see the school and shout and beckon the others. In their
hurry, they spread out and fill the clearing with flashes of color and
expectation. The woman in the doorway is their teacher.
[Illustration:
_Children anxiously line up to go back a few years with Elsie Burrell
at the one-room schoolhouse in Little Greenbrier._
Clair Burket
]
They have spanned a century and longer. They now live in more worlds
than one, because they have come to the place where their spirit lives.
It is again homecoming in the Great Smoky Mountains.
[Illustration:
Part 3
Guide and Adviser
]
Traveling in the Smokies
“You can’t get there from here,” an oldtimer might tell you about
traveling in the Smokies, and you might think that’s true when you
get on some of the back roads in the area. But if you stick mostly to
the paved roads and use your auto map and the map in this book, you
should not have much or any trouble finding your way around Great Smoky
Mountains National Park.
The park, which is administered by the National Park Service, U.S.
Department of the Interior, is located along the border between North
Carolina and Tennessee. It can be reached by major highways in both
states and by the Blue Ridge Parkway, which connects the park with
Shenandoah National Park in Virginia. Newfound Gap Road, the only road
that crosses the park, connects Gatlinburg, Tennessee, with Cherokee,
North Carolina. It is closed to commercial vehicles.
There are just a few other roads within the park itself, so travel
between distant points is quite roundabout and time consuming. But you
will see plenty of nice scenery along the way. Because this handbook
focuses on the history of the area, the travel information does, too.
But by no means should you let the limited scope presented here limit
what you do. We encourage you to enjoy the scenic views, flowers,
shrubs, and wildlife as you travel to and through the historic sites.
For example, while you’re in the Cable Mill area at Cades Cove, you
might take the trail to Abrams Falls. It’s a delightful short hike to a
beautiful spot in the park. And if you take the Roaring Fork Auto Tour,
you might hike the 2.4 kilometers (1.5 miles) through a hemlock forest
to Grotto Falls. There are plenty of other short hikes in the park,
and when you take them you may come across decaying ruins of early
settlements.
Visitor Centers
Park headquarters and the major visitor center are at Sugarlands, 3.2
kilometers (2 miles) south of Gatlinburg. Other visitor centers are at
Cades Cove and at Oconaluftee, both of which are prime historical areas
in the park. The Sugarlands and Oconaluftee centers are open 8 a.m. to
4:30 p.m. during the winter, with extended hours the rest of the year.
The Cades Cove center, located in the Cable Mill area on the loop road,
is open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. from mid-April through October. Exhibits
at the Cades Cove and Oconaluftee centers feature the human history of
the Smokies. The relative flatness of the Cades Cove area makes this
the best place to bicycle in the park.
Walks and Talks
Some of the guided walks and evening programs deal with history.
Check schedules at the visitor centers and campgrounds or in the park
newspaper.
Mountain lifeways and skills are demonstrated periodically from early
spring through October at the Pioneer Farmstead at Oconaluftee, Cades
Cove, Mingus Mill, and Little Greenbrier School. At Oconaluftee you
can walk through a typical Smokies farm and see many of yesteryear’s
household chores being demonstrated. At Cades Cove, you can see, among
other things, how sorghum and wooden shingles were made. Millers
seasonally operate the gristmills near Oconaluftee and at Cades Cove.
All of these demonstrations indicate that the good old days were not
easy ones.
Further Information
For more detailed travel and natural history information, see Handbook
112, _Great Smoky Mountains_, in this National Park Service series.
This book and an extensive array of literature about various aspects
of the park are sold at the Sugarlands, Oconaluftee, and Cades Cove
visitor centers by a nonprofit organization that assists the park’s
interpretive programs. For a price list, write to: Great Smoky
Mountains Natural History Association, Gatlinburg, TN 37738.
Specific questions can be addressed to: Superintendent, Great Smoky
Mountains National Park, Gatlinburg, TN 37738. The headquarters’
telephone number is (615) 436-5615.
Accommodations and Services
You can obtain gasoline, food, lodging, and camping supplies in most
communities near the park in both Tennessee and North Carolina. Several
campgrounds are located in both the park and in the nearby towns.
Within the park, only LeConte Lodge and Wonderland Hotel offer
accommodations, and they are limited. A half-day hike up a mountain
trail is required to reach LeConte Lodge, which is open from mid-April
to late October. Rustic hotel accommodations and food service are
provided at Wonderland Hotel in Elkmont from June 1 to October 1.
Write to the chambers of commerce in the communities near the park for
general travel advice and for current information on the availability
of lodging facilities.
Safety
While touring the park’s historical sites, stay on the trails, keep
children under control, enjoy the farm animals at a distance, and stay
safely away from the millwheels and other machinery.
While traveling throughout the park, beware of the many black bears no
matter how tame they may appear. If they approach your vehicle, keep
the windows closed. Do not feed the bears!
And keep in mind that the weather can change quickly in the Smokies and
that hypothermia can strike not only in the winter but at any season.
Be careful not to become wet and/or chilled. Carry extra clothing.
See Handbook 112, _Great Smoky Mountains_, for more precautions and
information about the black bear, hypothermia, and other dangers.
Regulations
Roads within the park are designed for scenic driving, so stay within
the speed limits and be alert for slow vehicles and for others exiting
and entering. Pull off the roads or park only at designated areas.
Gasoline is not sold in the park, so be sure to fill your tank before
heading on a long trip.
Do not leave valuables inside a locked car where they can be seen.
Leave them home, take them with you when you leave your vehicle, or
lock them in the trunk.
Hunting is prohibited in the park. Firearms must be broken down so
they cannot be used. The use of archery equipment, game calls, and
spotlights also is prohibited.
All plants, animals, and artifacts are protected by Federal law here.
Do not disturb them in any way. Fishing is permitted subject to state
and Federal regulations and licensing.
All overnight camping in the backcountry requires a backcountry permit.
Otherwise, camp and build fires only in designated campground sites.
We suggest that you do not bring pets. They are permitted in the park
but only if on a leash or under other physical control. They may not be
taken on trails or cross-country hikes. Veterinary services are found
nearby. If you want to board your pet during your stay here, check with
the nearby chambers of commerce.
Oconaluftee
Self-sufficiency and individuality were strong traits in the Smokies.
Each person had to do a variety of tasks, and each family member had
to help or complement the others. Just as Milas Messer (see pages
90-91) exemplified these traits personally, the Pioneer Farmstead at
Oconaluftee on the North Carolina side of the park represents them
structurally. Various buildings have been brought here to create a
typical Smokies farmstead on the banks of the Oconaluftee River.
In the summer and fall farm animals roam about the farmstead and a
man and a woman carry out daily chores to give you an idea of what
the pioneers had to do just to exist. At first these Jacks- and
Jills-of-all-trades had no stores to go to. They made their own tools,
built their own houses and barns and outbuildings, raised their own
food, made their own clothes, and doctored themselves, for the most
part.
The log house here is a particularly nice one, for John Davis built
it with matched walls. He split the logs in half and used the halves
on opposite walls. The two stone chimneys are typical of the earliest
houses. Davis’ sons, then 8 and 4, collected rocks for the chimneys
with oxen and a sled.
Behind the house is an essential building, the meathouse. Here meat,
mostly pork, was layered on the shelf at the far end and covered with
a thick coating of salt. After the meat had cured, it was hung from
poles, which go from end to end, to protect it from rodents. In the
early years especially, bear meat and venison hung alongside the pork.
[Illustration:
_At the Pioneer Farmstead in Oconaluftee you can get a glimpse of what
daily farm life was like in the Smokies. Besides the ongoing kitchen
tasks, chores included tending cows and chickens, cutting and stacking
hay, building and repairing barns and wagons, and a thousand other
things._
]
Apples were a big part of the settlers’ diet in a variety of forms:
cider, vinegar, brandy, sauces, and pies. And of course they ate them,
too, right off the tree. The thick rock walls on the lower floor of
the apple house protect the fruit from freezing in winter. The summer
apples were kept on the log-wall second floor.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
The Indians’ maize, or corn, was the most essential crop on the typical
Smokies farmstead. Besides being used as food for livestock, it was the
staple for the pioneers themselves. With corn they made corn bread, hoe
cakes, corn meal mush, and even a little moonshine. The harvested crop
was kept dry in a corncrib until used.
As the pioneers became more settled and turned into farmers, they built
barns to provide shelter for their cows, oxen, sheep, and horses, plus
some of their farming equipment and hay. The large, log barn at the
Oconaluftee Farmstead is unusual. It is a drovers’ barn--a hotel for
cattle and other animals driven to market. The barn is located close to
its original site.
Most farmers had a small blacksmith shop where they could bang out a
few tools, horseshoes, hinges, and, later on, parts for farm machinery.
These structures were not very sophisticated; they just had to provide
a little shelter so the fire could be kept going and to protect the
equipment--and to keep the smith dry--during inclement weather.
The springhouse served not only as the source of water but as a
refrigerator. Here milk, melons, and other foods were kept, many of
them in large crocks. The water usually ran through the springhouse
in one half of a hollowed out log, or in a rock-lined trench. On hot,
muggy days, a child sent to the springhouse for food or water might
tarry a moment or two to enjoy the air conditioning.
The farmstead is open all year, but the house is open only from May to
November.
Cades Cove
Just as Oconaluftee represents self-sufficiency and individuality,
Cades Cove illustrates those traits, plus something else: a sense of
community. Here individuals and families worked hard at eking out a
living from day to day, but here, too, everyone gathered together from
time to time to help harvest a crop, raise a barn, build a church,
and maintain a school. The structural evidence of this helping-hand
attitude still stands today in Cataloochee (see pages 154-155) and in
Cades Cove.
At its peak in 1850, Cades Cove had 685 residents in 132 households. A
few years after that the population shrank to 275 as the soil became
overworked and as new lands opened up in the West. Then the population
rose again to about 500 just before the park was established.
The State of Tennessee had acquired this land in 1820 from the
Cherokees and then sold it to speculators, who in turn sold plots to
the settlers. They cleared most of the trees and built their houses
at the foot of the surrounding hills. Corn, wheat, oats, and rye were
raised on the flat lands, whereas the slopes were used for pastures,
orchards, and vegetable gardens. The Park Service leases some of the
land here today to farmers to keep the cove open as it was in the early
settlement days.
[Illustration:
_The Methodist Church, Cable Mill, and Gregg-Cable house are just
three of the many log or frame structures still standing in Cades Cove
today._
]
In Cades Cove you will find some of the finest log buildings in
America. Some are original; the others come from elsewhere in the
park. The first log house on the 18-kilometer (11-mile)-loop-road tour
belonged to John and Lurena Oliver, who bought their land in 1826.
Their cabin, with its stone chimney and small windows, is typical of
many in the Smokies, and it remained in the Oliver family until the
park was established. A stone in the Primitive Baptist Church cemetery
just down the road commemorates John and Lurena, the first permanent
white settlers in the cove. The church was organized in 1827, and
the log building was used until 1887, though the members, who were
pro-Union, felt they had to shut it down during the Civil War because
of strong rebel sentiment.
The Methodist Church supposedly was built by one man, J. D. McCampbell,
in 115 days for $115, and after he was done he served as its preacher
for many years. The frame Missionary Baptist Church was built in 1894
by a group that split from the Primitive Baptists in 1839 because it
endorsed missionary work.
Elijah Oliver’s log house may well be one of the first split-levels.
The lower kitchen section off the back formerly was the home of the
Herron family and was brought here and attached to the main house.
This is a good place to see some of the many auxiliary structures most
families had: springhouse, barn, and smokehouse.
Many families also had a tub mill with which they could grind a bushel
of corn a day. When they had more corn to grind, they would take it to
a larger mill, such as John Cable’s. His was not the first waterwheel
mill in Cades Cove, but it is the only remaining one today. It has been
rehabilitated a few times, but the main framing, the millstones, and
some of the gears are original.
In the Cable Mill area are several other structures that have
been brought here from other parts of the park. Among them is the
Gregg-Cable house, possibly the first frame house in Cades Cove. It
was built by Leason Gregg in 1879 and later became the home, until her
death in 1940, of Becky Cable, John’s daughter. At different times
the house served as a store and a boardinghouse. The blacksmith shop,
barns, smokehouse, corncrib, and sorghum mill are representative of
such structures in the Smokies.
Heading east from the mill area, you come to the Henry Whitehead and
Dan Lawson places. At both you can see some of the best log work,
inside and out, within the park, and both have brick instead of stone
chimneys. These houses represent the transition between the crude log
house and the finer log house. Further down the road is “Hamp” Tipton’s
place, where you can see an apiary or bee gum stand. Honey, sorghum,
and maple syrup were common sweets for folks in the Cove.
The last house on the loop road is the Carter Shields place, a
one-story log house with loft. This cabin is about the average size
of Smokies cabins, but it is a bit fancier than most with its beaded
paneling in the living room and a closed-in stairway.
The buildings in Cades Cove are open all year except for the churches
and a few other structures.
Other Historic Sites in the Park
Cades Cove and Oconaluftee are the primary locations of historic
structures in the national park, but elsewhere there are a few
interesting buildings to see.
From Gatlinburg head south on Airport Road, which runs into Cherokee
Orchard Road in the park. Soon you come to Noah “Bud” Ogle’s place.
Ogle and his wife, Cindy, started farming here on 160 hectares (400
acres) in 1879. Here you can see a log house, log barn, and restored
tub mill.
South of the Ogle place you come to Roaring Fork Auto Tour. On this
one-way 8-kilometer (5-mile) tour you can see that nature has reclaimed
most of the Roaring Fork community. Among the few remaining buildings
are Jim Bales’ corncrib and barn, plus a log house that was moved here.
Home for Ephraim Bales, his wife, and nine children consisted of two
joined log cabins. The smaller one was the kitchen, and in front of its
hearth is a “tater hole.” Family members could lift up a floor board,
remove some potatoes from storage, and toss them on the fire to bake.
Other structures here include a corncrib and barn.
A log house and mill are the only structures that remain of the many
that belonged to Alfred Reagan, one of Roaring Fork’s more talented
residents. He was a farmer, blacksmith, preacher, miller, storekeeper,
and carpenter. His house was more refined than most in the Smokies.
The Roaring Fork Auto Tour road is open from mid-April to mid-November.
[Illustration:
_On the way to and from Sugarlands you can take side trips to (below)
Mingus Mill, Little Greenbrier School, and Bud Ogle’s place at
Roaring Fork. Plan on devoting nearly a full day to visit isolated
Cataloochee, where you can see (below) the Caldwell home, schoolhouse,
Palmer Chapel, and several other structures._
]
[Illustration: National Park Service ]
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
In the Oconaluftee Valley just north of the Pioneer Farmstead is
Mingus Mill, built for Abraham Mingus in the 1870s by Sion Thomas
Early. This gristmill, the finest and most advanced in the Smokies,
has a water-powered turbine beneath it. Water flows down a millrace
and flume to the mill, and, when the flume gate is raised, fills the
penstock to power the turbine. The mill has two sets of grinding
stones, one for corn and one for wheat. The mill was in operation until
1936, reopened for a few months in 1940, and reconditioned by the Great
Smoky Mountains Natural History Association in 1968. It is open daily
from May through October with a miller usually on duty to explain its
workings.
North of Mingus Mill is Smokemont. All that remains of this small
community is the Oconaluftee Baptist Church, a frame structure that
sits high on a bluff.
Just off Little River Road between Sugarlands and Tremont is Little
Greenbrier School (see pages 85 and 144). In the summer an interpreter
often is on hand to help children, and adults, understand what going to
school was like in the Smokies. The road to the school is narrow and
unpaved and not the easiest to negotiate in inclement weather, so you
may want to walk in.
Several buildings are still standing in the isolated Cataloochee area
on the North Carolina side of the park. They include Palmer Chapel,
Beech Grove School, and the Jarvis Palmer, Hiram Caldwell, and Steve
Woody homes. Most of the buildings are open, and a ranger is on duty to
answer your questions. The fields are mowed to maintain the cove effect
from early settlement days. Reaching Cataloochee from the north means a
lengthy trip on unpaved road; from the south it’s a bit easier. If you
have the time, visiting Cataloochee is worth the extra effort.
Related Nearby Sites
A number of nearby sites are related in one way or the other to the
history of the Great Smoky Mountains. Here are a few that you might
visit while vacationing in the Smokies:
The arts, crafts, and lifeways of the Cherokees are portrayed by the
tribe at the Qualla Reservation, adjacent to the North Carolina side
of the park. The Museum of the Cherokee Indian displays a collection
of artifacts, and the Oconaluftee Living Indian Village shows typical
early Cherokee life in log structures. The play “Unto These Hills”
tells the story of the Cherokees and their encounters with Europeans
settling in the Smokies and of the forced removal of most of the
tribe to Oklahoma in 1838. About 4,000 Cherokees live on the Qualla
Reservation today.
The Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Gatlinburg has done much to
perpetuate the pottery, weaving, and other skills indicative of the
Smokies people. The school displays and sells objects created by local
artisans.
The Museum of Appalachia in Norris, Tennessee, just north of Knoxville,
has 30 restored pioneer log structures, a representative farmstead, and
more than 200,000 artifacts of mountain life.
The Blue Ridge Parkway, administered by the National Park Service, has
several log houses, a gristmill, a reconstructed farm, and other early
American buildings. Much of the 755-kilometer (469-mile), parkway,
which adjoins Great Smoky Mountains National Park near Oconaluftee and
runs north into Virginia, is quite far from the park, but some of the
historic points of interest are in the southern portion. The Folk Art
Center, at milepost 382, displays traditional crafts of the Southern
Highlands.
[Illustration:
_At Mabry Mill on the Blue Ridge Parkway you can see old-time skills
demonstrated in the summer and fall. Weaving is just one of many
traditional crafts taught at the Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts
in Gatlinburg._
]
Armchair Explorations
General histories of the Great Smoky Mountains:
Elizabeth Skaggs Bowman, _Land of High Horizons_, 1938
Carlos C. Campbell, _Birth of a National Park_, 1960
Michael Frome, _Strangers in High Places_, 1980
Horace Kephart, _Our Southern Highlanders_, 1922
Horace Kephart, _Journals_ at Western Carolina University
Robert Lindsay Mason, _The Lure of the Great Smokies_, 1927
Roderick Peattie, ed., _The Great Smokies and the Blue Ridge_, 1943
Laura Thornborough, _The Great Smoky Mountains_, 1937
Cherokee history:
James Adair, _The History of the American Indians_, 1775
William Bartram, _Travels_, 1792
John P. Brown, _Old Frontiers_, 1938
William H. Gilbert, _The Eastern Cherokees_, 1943
Henry T. Malone, _Cherokees of the Old South_, 1956
James Mooney, _Myths of the Cherokees_, 1900
Charles C. Royce, _The Cherokee Nation of Indians_, 1887
William L. Smith, _The Story of the Cherokees_, 1927
Henry Timberlake, _Memoirs_, 1765
Grace Steele Woodward, _The Cherokees_, 1963
Other historical works:
W. C. Allen, _The Annals of Haywood County_, 1935
John Preston Arthur, _Western North Carolina_, 1914
John C. Campbell, _The Southern Highlander and His Homeland_, 1921
Wilma Dykeman, _The French Broad_, 1955
Allen H. Eaton, _Handicrafts of the Southern Highlands_, 1937
Paul Fink, “Early Explorers in the Great Smokies,” _East Tennessee
Historical Society Bulletin_, 1933
Joseph S. Hall, _Smoky Mountain Folks and Their Lore_, 1960
Joseph S. Hall, _Yarns and Tales from the Great Smokies_, 1978
Archibald Henderson, _The Conquest of the Old Southwest_, 1920
Charles Lanman, _Letters from the Alleghany Mountains_, 1849
Ruth W. O’Dell, _Over the Misty Blue Hills: The Story of Cocke County,
Tennessee_, 1950
John Parris, articles in _The Asheville Citizen-Times_
Randolph Shields, “Cades Cove,” _Tennessee Historical Quarterly_, 1965
Randolph Shields, _The Cades Cove Story_, 1977
Foster A. Sondley, _A History of Buncombe County_, 1930
Wilbur Zeigler and Ben Grosscup, _The Heart of the Alleghanies_, 1883
Robert Woody, “Life on Little Cataloochee,” _South Atlantic
Quarterly_, 1950
Index
_Numbers in italics refer to photographs, illustrations, or maps._
=Abbott, Rhodie=, _11_, _94-95_
=Adair, James=, 39
=American Revolution=, 45, 47
=Animals=, 18, 91-92, 98
=Appalachian National Park Association=, 114
=Appalachian Trail=, 122
=Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts=, 130, 131, 156
=Arthur, John Preston=, 83, 84, 86
=Attakullakulla=, 42, _44_
=Ayunini= (Swimmer), _40-41_, _46_
=Bartram, William=, 42, 75
=Beck, John=, 49, 56, 57
=Bell, Hazel=, _78_
=Big Greenbrier Cove=, 50, 86
=Blount, John Gray=, 19
=Bohanan, Dave=, _135_
=Boone, Daniel=, 45, 58
=Boudinot, Elias=, 63, 65, _66_, 67, 68
=Bradley family=, 49
=Brainerd Mission=, 63
=Bryson City=, 109
=Buckley, S. B.=, 75
=Burns, John=, _134_
=Burrell, Elsie=, _144_
=Cable Mill=, _152_, 153
=Cades Cove=, 51, 52, 56, 137, _138_, _141_, 148, 152-53
=Caldwell family, George H.=, _22-23_
=Caldwell family, Levi=, 20, 21
=Caldwell family, Lush=, 21
=Caldwell home=, _155_
=Cameron, Alexander=, 45
=Cammerer, Arno B.=, 116-17, _118_
=Campbell, Aunt Sophie=, _58_
=Cardwell, Columbus “Clum”=, _123_
=Carver, Aden=, _6_, _140_
=Cataloochee=, 17, 18-29, 155
=Champion Coated Paper (Fibre) Company=, 98, 119
=Chapman, David C.=, 114, 116, 117, _118_
=Charlie’s Bunion=, 105
=Cherokee Indians=:
alphabet, 63-64;
Civil War, _74_, 79;
community and homelife, _40-41_, 43, 63, 150;
Eastern Band (Qualla Reservation), 71, 127-30, 156;
government, 37, 39, 65;
photos, _34_, _38_, _44_, _46_, _63,
4_, _65_, _66_, _67_, _69_, _71_, _128_;
removal, 65-70;
rituals and religion, 39, 42, 43, 57, 63, 127-29;
settlement, 17, 19, 35-37, 49-52, _70_;
treaties, 45, 47, 68
=Chickamauga Indians=, 47
=Chota=, 37, 47
=Churches=, 25, 56-57, 63, 86-87, _126_, _152_-53, _154_, 155
=Civil War=, 77-79, 82-83
=Civilian Conservation Corps=, _114_, 121-22, 123, 140
=Clark, Dick=, 27
=Clingman, Thomas Lanier=, 76
=Clingmans Dome=, 18, 76, 103, 105
=Collins family=, 49
=Community life=, 25, 27, 29
=Conner family=, 49
=Cove Creek Gap=, _118_
=Crestmont=, 98, 102
=Crockett, Davy=, 67
=Cuming, Alexander=, 44
=Davis, John=, 150
=Davis, Willis P.=, 114, 116, _118_
=Deep Creek=, 49-50
=DeSoto, Hernando=, 36
=Dowdle family, Alfred=, _126_
=Dragging Canoe=, 47
=Duckett, Kate=, 79, _81_
=Dwight Mission=, _65_
=Eakin, J. Ross=, _106_, 121, 122
=Economy=, 77, 98-99
=Education=, 65, 84-87, _85_, 130-31, 140-41, 145, _155_. _See also_
Little Greenbrier School House
=Elkmont=, 17, 98, 99
=Enloe family, Abraham=, 49, 56, 57
=Enloe, Mrs. Clem=, _83_
=Environmental Education Center=, 140-41, 145
=Farming=, 52, 54, 151
=Fences=, 29, _30-33_, 91
=Floyd family=, 49
=Folk Art Center=, 156
=Folk culture=, 57. _See also_ Homelife
=Fontana=, 98
=Forge, iron=, 51-52
=Forney Creek=, 49, 105
=Foute, David=, 51
=French and Indian War=, 44-45
=Gatlin, Radford=, 78-79
=Gatlinburg=, 50, 78, 123, 130, 148
=Geology=, 17-18
=Gibson, Wiley=, _60_, _61_
=Ginatiyun tihi= (Stephen Tehee), _69_
=Gold=, 66
=Granny’s College=, 86
=Great Smoky Mountain Conservation Area=, 116
=Great Smoky Mountains National Park=:
accommodations, 149;
founding, 18, 29, 114, 116-17, 119, 123, 126;
map, _14-15_;
nearby sites, 156;
officials, _106_, 107, _118_, 119;
safety and health, 149;
site, 148;
size, 17;
visitor centers, 148, 149
=Great Smoky Mountains Natural History Association=, 155
=Greenbrier=, 17
=Gregg-Cable house=, _152_, 153
=Gregory, Russell=, 52
=Gregory Bald=, 52
=Guyot, Arnold=, 76-77
=Guyot, Mount=, 102, 105
=Handicrafts=, _94-95_, 131-35, _156_
=Hearon, Tom and Jerry=, _134-35_
=Higinbotham, Phyllis=, 131
=Hill, Martha=, 130
=Homelife=, 52, _53-55_, _78_, 79, _80-81_, 83-84, 87, _88-89_, _90_,
_94-95_, 150-51
=Housing=, _4-5_, _12-13_, _16_, _21_, _40-41_, 91, _136_, _150_,
_152_, 153, 154-55
=Huff, Andy=, 97, 105
=Hughes family, Ralph=, 49, 56
=Huskey, Claude=, _134_
=Jackson, Andrew=, 66-67
=Jefferson, Thomas=, 65
=Job Corps=, 140
=Jones, John=, _134_
=Kephart, Horace=, 107-110, 112, 114, 119, 138;
photo, _108_
=Kituwah=, 36, 37
=Lamon, George=, _51_
=Language=, 92-93, 126
=Lanman, Charles=, 75
=Little Greenbrier Cove=, 123, 125
=Little Greenbrier School House=, 84, _85_, _144_, 148, _154_
=Little River Lumber Company=, 97, 99, 117, 140
=Love, Robert=, 20
=Lumber industry=, 29, 97-105, 117, 119;
photos, _96_, _100-101_, _103_, _105_.
_See also_ Little River Lumber Company
=Lyttleton, William Henry=, 44
=Mabry mill=, _156_
=McCarter, Mack=, _132-33_, _134_
=McFalls, Neddy=, 27
=Marshall, John=, 67
=Maps=, _14-15_, _36_, _70_
=Matthews, Herman=, 84, _85_
=Medlin=, 108
=Meigs, Return Jonathan=, 65
=Messer family, E.J.=, 21
=Messer, Milas=, _90-91_, 150
=Messer, Will=, 27
=Mingus, Abraham=, 31
=Mingus family, John Jacob=, 49, 56
=Mingus mill=, 149, _154_-55
=Mitchell, Elisha=, 76
=Mitchell, Mount=, 36, 76
=Music=, 87, 91, 114
=Myers, Dan=, _26_
=Myers, Sherman=, _31_
=Newman, Grace=, _114_
=Oakley family, Wiley=, _111_
=Oakley, Becky=, _94_
=Oconaluftee=, 49, 56, 148, _150-51_
=Ogle family, Martha Huskey=, 50
=Ogle, Mollie McCarter=, _48_
=Ogle family=, 87, _88-89_
=Ogle home, Noah “Bud”=, _154_
=Oliver family, John and Lurena=, 33, 51, 52, _136_, 152-53
=Ownby, Celia=, 79, _80_
=Ownby, Giles and Lenard=, _19_
=Ownby, Humphry John=, 86
=Ownby, Lillie Whaley=, 86
=Ownby, Matt=, _60_
=Ownby, Mrs. Matt=, _132_
=Ownby family, Tilman=, _142-43_
=Palmer family, George=, 20, 21, 27, _28_
=Palmer, Lafayette=, 21, 27
=Palmer, Jesse=, 21
=Parson’s Bald=, 52
=Payne, John Howard=, 64, 68
=Plants=, 18, 75;
medicinal, 57-58, 84
=Proctor=, 98
=Proffitt, Jim=, _115_
=Qualla Arts and Crafts Mutual=, 130
=Ravensford=, 98
=Reagan family, Richard=, 50, 78
=Ridge, John=, 63, 67
=Ridge, Major=, _67_, 68
=Rifle, long=, 58, _59-61_
=Roads=, 21, 25, 27, 56, 59, 79, 148
=Robertson, James=, 45
=Rockefeller, Jr., John D.=, 117
=Roosevelt, Franklin D.=, 119, 121
=Roosevelt, Theodore=, 97, 116
=Rose, Aquilla=, 110, 112, _113_
=Ross, John=, 65, _66_, 68
=Schermerhorn, J.D.=, 68
=Scott, Winfield=, 68, 71
=Sequoyah= (George Gist), 63-65;
portrait, _64_
=Settlers, white=, 42-52, 152
=Sherrill family, Samuel=, 49, 56
=Shields family, Robert=, 52
=Shults, George Washington=, _104_
=Siler’s Bald=, 105
=Smokemont=, 17, 98
=Swaniger, Aaron=, _72_
=Thomas, William=, 79
=Thomason, W.W.=, 110, 112
=Tipton, William=, 51
=Tremont=, 137-38
=Tryon, William=, 45
=Tsali=, 69, 71
=Tsiskwa-kaluya= (Bird Chopper), _71_
=Van Buren, Martin=, 68
=Vance, Zebulon B.=, 77
=Walker, William “Black Bill”=, 137-38, _139_
=Walker, John=, 79, _120_, 123
=Walker, Nancy=, 137, 138
=Walker sisters=, 79, 123-127;
photos, _81_, _124_
=Walini=, _62_
=Welsh, Samson=, _128_
=Whaley family=, 50
=Whitepath=, 66, 69
=Whisky=, 91, 110, 112-_14_
=Wiggins family, Abraham=, 50
=Worcester, Samuel Austin=, 63, 65, 67
=Work, Hubert=, 116
✩ GPO: 1984--421-611/10001
Handbook 125
The cover photograph was taken by Ed Cooper. The rest of the color
photography, unless otherwise credited, was taken by William A. Bake of
Boone, North Carolina. Nearly all of the black-and-white photographs
come from the files of Great Smoky Mountains National Park. About half
of them were taken in the 1930s for historic recording purposes by
Edouard E. Exline and Charles S. Grossman on behalf of the National
Park Service. Exline was a landscape architect with the Civilian
Conservation Corps and a photographer by avocation. Grossman was a
structural architect for the park who was in charge of the cultural
preservation program. The other photographers who have been identified
are Laura Thornborough, who resided in the Smokies and wrote the book
_The Great Smoky Mountains_; Joseph S. Hall, who has studied and
written about linguistics of the Smokies since the 1930s; Harry M.
Jennison, a research botanist from the University of Tennessee who
worked in the park from 1935 to 1940; H.C. Wilburn, a CCC history
technician who collected and purchased artifacts of mountain life;
Maurice Sullivan, a CCC wildlife technician who subsequently became
a Park Service naturalist; Alden Stevens, a museum specialist for
the Park Service; Jim Shelton, husband of one of the Walker sisters,
Sarah Caroline; George Masa, who established the Asheville Photo
Service shortly after World War I; Burton Wolcott; and National Park
Service photographers George A. Grant, Alan Rinehart, Fred R. Bell, M.
Woodbridge Williams, and Clair Burket.
Many of the logging photographs were donated to the park by the Little
River Lumber Company. Most of the photographs of Cherokees come from
the National Anthropological Archives at the Smithsonian Institution;
many of them were taken by James Mooney in the Smokies area in 1888.
National Park Service
U.S. Department of the Interior
As the Nation’s principal conservation agency, the Department of the
Interior has responsibility for most of our nationally owned public
lands and natural resources. This includes fostering the wisest use
of our land and water resources, protecting our fish and wildlife,
preserving the environmental and cultural values of our national
parks and historical places, and providing for the enjoyment of life
through outdoor recreation. The Department assesses our energy and
mineral resources and works to assure that their development is in
the best interest of all our people. The Department also has a major
responsibility for American Indian reservation communities and for
people who live in Island Territories under U.S. administration.
[Illustration:
At Home
In the Smokies
ISBN 0--912627-22-0
]
* * * * *
Transcriber’s note
In the original captions for photographs/drawings were often on a
separate page from its image. In these versions, they have been placed
under the image.
Directional words for the phototgraphs, i.e., below, right, etc. have
been changed in this version to point to the correct photographs.
Minor punctuation errors have been changed without notice.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized. Spelling has
been retained as published.
Index entries that were out of alphabetical order has been corrected.
The name Jim Proffitt/Proffit was spelled once each way in the text.
Both spellings have been retained.
The following Printer errors have been changed.
=CHANGED= =FROM= =TO=
Page 17: “particularly signifcant” “particularly significant”
Page 86: “Humphy John Ownby” “Humphry John Ownby”
Page 95: “fibers with a spining” “fibers with a spinning”
Page 158: “=Park Assocation=” “=Park Association=”
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