Title: Gatlinburg and the Great Smokies
Author: Ernie Pyle
Release date: September 6, 2019 [eBook #60246]
Language: English
Credits: Produced by Stephen Hutcheson, Lisa Corcoran and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
Ernie Pyle
ONE OF HIS FAVORITE PHOTOS
PRICE—FIFTY CENTS
Printed In The Great Smokies
THE MOUNTAIN PRESS
Gatlinburg, Tennessee
In the Fall of 1940, Ernie Pyle and “that girl” who rode with him (his wife, “Jerry”) came to Gatlinburg and Ernie wrote eleven columns for the Scripps-Howard Newspapers about the village of Gatlinburg, the native people and a trip he took to LeConte.
With permission of the Scripps-Howard Newspaper Alliance and Wm. Sloane Associates Inc., Publishers, these columns are reproduced in this little booklet.
They are good reading—by one of the truly great writers of our time. They are about things close to the heart of all who love the Smokies. They are simple (as is all great writing) sincere and touched by a quaint and whimsical humor.
I wish to thank Loye W. Miller, Editor of the Knoxville (Tennessee) News-Sentinel, and Bert Vincent, Strolling Reporter, for their kind help and cooperation in re-printing these columns.
C.C. Callaway
Gatlinburg, Tenn.—1951
All Rights Reserved
For four years I’ve been trying to get to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and to write some masterful columns about the astounding manner in which Nature splattered her contours and evolutions over this part of the globe.
But I monkeyed around and monkeyed around, and the first thing I knew here was President Roosevelt down here dedicating the thing, and stealing all my glory.
But I just figured, well, the mountains are still here and the words are still in the dictionary, so I might as well come on anyway and compose a little deathless literature on the Smokies, even if Mr. Roosevelt did beat me to the draw.
So here we are in Gatlinburg, the north entrance to the great park. Gatlinburg once consisted of five families. But today, thanks to tourist money, it is an amazingly charming little city, oozing with handicraft shops and tasteful inns and lovely stone houses and saddle horses and pretty girls in jodhpurs.
Gatlinburg lies in a cup, and low wooded mountains rise on every side, and a little river runs behind the town, and the main street goes a little uphill and around a couple of bends, and it is all just like you’d want a mountain resort to be.
Right now is the peak of the fall color season, and the mountains are aflame with red and yellow and green, and anybody who can see them without some kind of a gladness at being alive must be a dull soul indeed.
Centuries ago, white pioneers from England and Scotland came into these mountains and set up their homes. They were so isolated that our so-called progress largely passed them by.
They grew up to be a little race distinct. There is no denying that a mountain man is different from a plains or city man. I can’t exactly tell you the difference, but there is something basically rugged in his character that would be nice to have within yourself.
There are old men in these mountains who would feel embarrassed and naked if the long rifle did not rest on its nails in the wall. You can walk into the hills right behind Gatlinburg and still hear even the children saying “hit” for “it,” and “heerd” for “heard.”
You can still find leather tanning in the homes, and weaving and spinning, and people who make their own furniture, and think it a sin to tend garden on Sundays.
It was to preserve a little of this for posterity, and also to open up the magnificent scenery of the Smokies to the great taxpaying public, that the Great Smokies National Park was created.
It started in 1923, when the states of Tennessee and North Carolina began buying mountain land from the big timber companies. John D. Rockefeller Jr. played an important part. He matched, dollar for dollar, every cent put up by the two states.
In 1926, Congress authorized the establishment of a Park. The land already bought was turned over to the Federal Government, and the Government itself bought more.
The National Park Service actually moved in and took charge about 10 years ago. Today the park is well up among the older western parks in the facilities it has created for the public, such as roads, camp grounds, hiking and horse trails. As far as I can see, every thing has been tastefully done. You have a feeling that the park is “right.”
This year visitors to the park will run more than 800,000. It is open all year, but summer and fall are the big seasons. In June, July and August you can’t even find a place to sleep in Gatlinburg if you arrive late.
The Great Smokies Park is roughly 54 miles long and 19 miles wide at the widest point. It is oval shaped. Except for a few high, level pastures, it is tremendously rugged throughout its entirety. It has 16 peaks more than 6000 feet high.
Vegetation is lush, clear to the top of the highest peak. There is no timberline in these mountains. Balsam and spruce grow thick in the upper regions. In summer the rainfall is almost tropical, and in winter heavy snows blanket the trees and slopes into a fairyland.
Almost constantly a gray haze hangs like a thin veil over the pile after pile of far, high, ridges. That is why these mountains are called The Smokies. They say that no one knows for sure what causes this haze, but one explanation credits it to tiny particles of moisture rising from the heavily-soaked vegetation.
The park is half in Tennessee and half in North Carolina. The high, sharp backbone of the Smokies cuts the park in two, and along this backbone runs the state line. A horse trail follows this backbone the length of the Park, but there is no motor road up there.
A fine macadam highway crosses the Park, from Gatlinburg to Cherokee, on the Carolina side. And a few gravel roads stab short distances into the hills from several entrances.
Aside from that, the public must take to foot or horseback to see the vast, beckoning interior of the Park. And since taking to foot is one of life’s accomplishments which I am most prodigious at, to coin a phrase, we shall take to foot in a Herculean way about tomorrow.
When I go to see a National Park, I like to walk in it.
I don’t want to mope along with a tourist party behind a naturalist, and I don’t want to ride no damned horse. I just want to get out all by myself like a hermit and square off my shoulders and head uphill.
There is plenty of walking for a fellow like me in the Great Smokies. In fact there are 675 miles of trails that meander all over this vast park.
But the main trails patronized by tourists are the five different routes which lead up to the top of Mt. Le Conte, nearly 6600 feet high. Many people make it up and back in one day. But others, like myself add 95 per cent to the pleasure by staying on top all night.
People had told me the Alum Cave trail was the prettiest and most spectacular. So, the day before starting, I went over to Park Headquarters to inquire and get my bearings.
I wound up talking to Assistant Chief Ranger Harold Edwards. He wears a uniform and has a desk and lots of papers on it, so I believed every word he said.
He said it would take me five hours to climb the Alum Cave trail. He said it would be the longest five and a half miles I ever walked. He said it was very steep, and footing irregular.
Well, it is possible I misunderstood Ranger Edwards, but I doubt it. Also it is possible that I’m a better man than I thought. But that seems somewhat fantastic, since I think I’m practically perfect to start with. So I can only deduce that Ranger Edwards, in spite of being a nice fellow, simply has days when he isn’t all there.
For, instead of five hours, I was on top of Mt. Le Conte in two hours and 50 minutes. And since I had prepared myself for a terrible ordeal, it seemed like the shortest five and a half miles I ever walked. It was, in fact, smooth and nice all the way up.
Poor Mr. Edwards. I guess he meant well, but he just didn’t realize he was talking with one of the mountain-climbingest goats this side of Tibet.
In preparation for this historic stroll I awoke at 7 a.m., yawned a couple of times, and went back to sleep for half an hour. Then I ate breakfast, read the morning paper, got those old gray pants out of the back of the car and, as a final gesture, put them on.
Also I filled up the little chamois pack sack which That Girl made for my gallant walk through the Rockies last year from the United States to Canada.
In this pack sack I put an extra sweater, four hankerchiefs (because I still have a cold), an extra pair of socks, two Hershey bars, two oranges, an old ham sandwich, and an extra pack of cigarettes, in case my wind gave out.
I did not take my sun glasses, nor a camera, nor a bottle of water, nor a ten-pound toilet kit, nor my new tuxedo, since past experience as an Alpinist has shown that such things are all a lot of nonsense.
It was 9:20 a.m. when I stepped out of Ranger Edwards’ car, shook hands, and, without once looking back, plunged into the jungle. Exciting experiences were not long in coming.
I hadn’t gone 200 yards when I came upon two couples standing in the trail, talking. They didn’t see me coming, so I had to walk around them. As I did so one woman said, “Oh excuse me,” and I said, “That’s all right.”
Fifty yards farther on I came upon a man with a cane, sitting against a tree. He said, “Are those people still gabbing back there?” and I said, “Yes,” and he said, “I thought so.”
When I had been walking an hour and a half, I met two young men coming down the trail like rockets. We stopped and smoked a cigarette together. They had walked clear to the top already this morning, and were well on their way back down, and it was now only 10:45. It was then I began to smell a mouse in Mr. Edwards’ sinister warnings about the trail.
“How far along am I?” I asked. It was my impression I was barely getting started.
“Oh, you’re half way there,” they said.
“And the trail ahead, how is it?” I asked.
“No steeper than you’ve come over,” they said. By that time Mr. Edwards’ mouse smelled real bad. But I was glad, too, for if there’s one thing I like about a mountain trail it’s for there not to be much more of it. I lunged on, and disappeared around a bend.
At 12 o’clock sharp, I came around another bend and there ahead, across a valley stood a sharp precipice. They had told me that right behind this precipice lay the Le Conte Lodge.
I stood a minute, and tried to judge how long it would take to get there. Distances in the mountains are very deceptive. Out West you can see a long way, hence an actual distance is much farther than it looks. I remember once, in the high Rockies, figuring it would take an hour to get to a certain ridge, but it actually took three hours.
So with this in mind, I estimated one hour to get to this precipice. And shiver these old timbers, if I wasn’t there in 10 minutes. The climb was over, and I hadn’t even eaten my sandwich.
Just as I topped the ridge, I turned around in the direction of Park Headquarters, and looked far down toward where Ranger Edwards was probably nestling behind his desk, and I puckered up my mouth and said, “Five hours Pvvvvvvtt.”
* * * * * * * *
P. S.—And now that I’ve used up this whole column bragging on myself, I suppose I’ll have to get to work tomorrow and tell you what I saw on the trip. Hope I can think of something good.
This Le Conte Lodge, they say, is the highest mountain lodge east of the Rockies. It stands at 6400 feet. With one exception, it is the only place within the boundaries of the Great Smokies National Park where you can stay all night. And the only way to get up here is to walk or ride a horse.
The Lodge is open about seven months of the year. In winter it gets to 40 below up here, and the buildings lie deep in snow. The hottest they remember it being in summertime is 68, and the people who work here get so used to cool summers that they almost die when they go down to the valley heat of Gatlinburg, a mile below.
The lodge can put up 44 people. They charge $4 a day for room and two meals. In the three mid-summer months the place is full every night. But right now there aren’t so many. Unless somebody shows up late, I will be the lone guest tonight.
In the old days up here, all the beds were of balsam boughs. City fellers who walked up the mountain could go back home and tell of sleeping on a bed of brush and limbs.
But now this is a National Park, and you can’t even cut a twig from a tree. So visitors have to be content with nice modern mattresses and Hudson’s Bay blankets.
Some amazing people have walked into Le Conte Lodge. One 94-year-old man climbed the mountain on foot. An 83-year-old woman came up under her own steam. And another man past 80 walked up alone, got caught by darkness within 200 yards of the Lodge but didn’t know where he was, so lay down on the ground and slept all night. He walked on in after daylight, feeling fine.
But let me tell you about my walk up the mountain. On the Alum Cave trail, by which I came, there is no place where you walk along an actual precipice that drops off straight down for thousands of feet. But I can say that if you are up here, and should suddenly find yourself in desperate need of a precipice, there are some places that would serve as excellent substitutes.
The first part of the trip, in the lower altitudes, is deep in a forest of trees and bushes. Rhododendron roots make a tangle that is absolutely tropical. You can’t see 10 feet into it, and this is where the bears used to hide when hunters got after them.
Of course, there is no hunting in the park now, so the bears don’t have to hide any more. The bears in the Smokies are black bears, a little smaller and a little faster on the bite than the Yellowstone bears.
The favorite bear story around here is about the woman tourist who got bit on her behind. She was just getting into her car after taking pictures of some cubs, when Mama Bear ran up and bit the lady right where she sits down. It made a gash three inches long 9 and an inch and a half deep. The doctor who tended it said it was a good thing the lady was fat.
They say there are at least 600 black bears in the park. But hikers on the trails needn’t worry about them. They’re not like the Yellowstone bears. They’ll run as soon as they see you. And if they don’t, I will.
After an hour and a half of walking, I had risen above the matted rhododendron vines, risen away from the bounding little rock-bedded mountain stream, risen to heights where the trail came out from among the trees and one could stand and look forever.
And it was then I realized for the first time in my life, that there can be as much majesty and stirring beauty in Eastern mountains as in the Rockies.
Many times on the trail I just stopped and stared and stared. I don’t know that I have ever seen a lovelier sight than the onward-stretching undulations of the haze-softened and color-splashed immensities of the Great Smoky Mountains.
Once, deep in the woods, I sat down on a rock to rest. It was quiet as the grave, and I had the feeling that I might almost have been the first man here.
Suddenly I heard a rattling in the trees. It startled me at first, and then I saw a flash of movement, and realized it was a squirrel running down a tree trunk.
I sat there real still. Soon there was another squirrel. And then another. They were odd little fellows—only half as big as the ordinary squirrel. Later I learned the mountain people call them “boomers.”
One of them walked a fallen log right up to within six feet of me, and sat there on his haunches, eating and staring.
I gave a little whistle. He stared harder. Then I whistled again. And several more times. And maybe you think I didn’t feel silly, and a little thrilled, too, when a bird started answering me. Yessir. I’d whistle, and the bird would whistle right back. It made me feel like Audubon or Thoreau or somebody.
That went on for five minutes. But finally I had to go. So I got up and said, “To hell with you, you lousy little squirrels and birds, you’d probably eat me up if you had a chance.”
Any savage squirrel that attacks me will get the toe of my boot right where he sits down, that’s what he’ll get. No squirrel is going to eat me up. I got up to the top of the mountain without anything else happening.
Jack Huff is a mountain man. All of his 30-odd years have been spent here in the Smokies. And for 17 of those years he has been the entrepreneur at the top of Mt. Le Conte.
He owns the Le Conte Lodge. Seven months of the year he feeds and beds and maybe entertains the hikers and horsemen who come up the trail.
Jack Huff was just out of high school when he first came to the top of Mt. Le Conte, and he had visions of building a mountaintop tent camp for hiking vacationers. That was long before there was even a horse trail up here. Everything that came up had to come on men’s backs.
Today three pack horses arrive every afternoon loaded with supplies, and the lodge consists of a whole row of cabins, and two small log lodges, and a big house for the Huffs’ own living quarters. And Jack is still building.
Jack Huff seems timid at first, but he really enjoys talking to people if he likes them. They say he can size up a new arrival in ten seconds. If the new arrival is a heel, Jack Huff is polite but his conversation becomes a minimum.
Few vacationers can out-think this product of the Smokies. He listens nightly to the radio news; he absorbs scores of passionate orations on world affairs from his guests before the big fireplace; he reads the papers and magazines.
He is a man of many abilities, too. He builds his own cabins, he has a flair for architecture; construction is his hobby. And he weaves. On the big loom in the dining room he has woven all the lovely curtains for the lodge windows.
He got his weaving, among other things, from the Pi Phi Settlement School down in Gatlinburg. That is a school founded 28 years ago by the college sorority, to bring a better education to the mountaineers. Pretty Pi Phis come from all over to teach there.
A girl named Pauline Whaling came down from the north, to teach the mountaineers. She was out of Monmouth College in Illinois, and Northwestern University.
But whether she taught, or got taught, I can’t quite decide. For she married Jack Huff, and came to the mountain with him. And when their little boy was born, he came to the mountain too—a husky, tow headed example of a good life.
For seven years Pauline Whaling has been on the mountain, working with her own hands, helping run things. She is beautiful in her heavy boots and leather jacket.
She leaps around the terrace of the lodge like a gazelle. She was up at 4 this morning to see Jack off on an early trip down the 11 mountain. She herself has hiked the tough eight-mile Newfound Gap trail in two hours flat. She is bountifully happy. “Up here is peace,” she says.
A mountaineer’s strength is in his heart, and not necessarily in a big body. Jack Huff weighs only 150 pounds, and stands sort of folded up with his hands in his pockets. But his walking feats are astounding.
He has walked 15,000 miles up and down this mountainside. He kept count of his round trips until three years ago, and at that time they had passed 1000. It is seven miles each way, and exactly a mile gained in altitude.
He has often made two round trips in one day, packing great loads up the trail on his back. There are some mighty men in these mountains. Listen to this story:
Andy Huff is Jack’s father. He owns the big Mountain View Hotel down in Gatlinburg. He has lived down there for 40 years, but he has never seen his son’s lodge up here, although it’s only two hours by horseback. “I just haven’t got time to go,” says Andy Huff.
But Jack’s mother saw Le Conte Lodge before she died. She made one trip. Just one. That trip sounds like a legend, but it’s true. She came up on her son’s back.
It was 14 years ago. Mrs. Huff was a semi-invalid. She wanted to see the sunset from the peak before she died.
So Jack made a light wooden chair. He put arms on it for her, and a board rest for her feet. He put her in it; they lifted her onto his back, and ran the straps over his shoulders. Mrs. Huff weighed 90 pounds. In her lap she carried a kitten.
Jack Huff, packing his mother on his back, made those seven miles to the top of Mt. Le Conte in exactly five hours. He stopped only a few times, and that was for his mother to rest, rather than him. “She’s the only person who ever came up the mountain backwards,” he says. They still talk about it with awe around Gatlinburg.
Mrs. Huff stayed a week on the mountain, in a tent. But it rained all the time. She never saw the sunset. Finally the dampness became too much for her. One afternoon Jack wrapped her in a raincoat, put her into her chair, and packed her back down the mountain.
Soon after that he started building a log cabin for her, so she would have a drier place to stay the next time. But she didn’t live to see it.
That old cabin is the original house of today’s Le Conte Lodge. Jack would like to keep it, for sentiment. But he says it isn’t built right, and soon it will have to come down.
Yesterday afternoon, while Jack Huff and I were sitting in front of the fireplace at the top of Mt. Le Conte, a couple of weary strangers came around the corner of the lodge.
They asked for succor—for a night’s lodging and a spot of food and a touch of bandage for sore heels—and they got it, in good Smoky Mountain fashion.
They turned out to be two of the nicest strangers who ever came to a mountaintop. They were Cleveland business men, out on a vacation trip. One was John F. Wilson, white-haired general manager of the Equity Savings & Loan Co. The other was Carr Liggett, who has his own advertising agency.
A man who has just climbed a mountain feels a wonderful sense of accomplishment. He takes off his shoes and sprawls out with a feeling of honestly earned repose. The thin air and the great height and the unbridgeable gap in character between us and all those soft souls down below gives you a puffy pride, and you expand and expound at great length. We all did that.
The afternoon wore on into early mountain darkness, and after supper we felt like purring. Then Jack Huff came with more great logs. And we sat warm before the fireplace and under the hanging gasoline lantern and we all waxed, you might say, a little philosophic.
We finished the war (England won); we finished the election (we’re keeping the result secret); we wrapped up and shipped off the WPA; we scouted the Andes and climbed a bit around the Alps; we discussed the proper way to drive an automobile; we went through the entire curriculum of sectional dialects in America; we achieved a new definition of civilization as meaning the advance of human kindness, and decided civilization is going ahead despite everything; we told stories of bears and prodigious feats of walking; we decided how a fireplace should be built; we took up the Negro question and we talked of bank loans; we poured some steel and we figured out the best way to build an air force. It’s astounding what a half-dozen people can talk about in one evening on a mountaintop.
And then, as sort of dessert for our ruminations, Mr. Wilson carried us back to pioneer days, when our hardy ancestors first came to this country.
And so soothing were the bandages on Mr. Wilson’s feet, and so heady the wine of warmth upon Mr. Wilson’s brow, that he condemned all modern conveniences as a lot of nonsense. As for him, he’d take the pioneer way of cold bedrooms and candlelight and straw ticks. Those were the days, and those were the men, said Mr. Wilson.
And in climactic conclusion, Mr. Wilson declaimed that of all 13 the abominations upon this earth the most despicable in his life was steam heat.
Whereupon we all retired to our cold bedrooms. If Mr. Wilson had got up this morning swearing he had slept like a baby, I think I would have kicked his sore heel. But he didn’t. He damn near froze to death, just as I did. Pioneers—Bah.
But the morning sun can do much for a man. Today was clear, and our breakfast was excellent, and we faced the prospect of our seven-mile return hike almost with eagerness.
Since I like to walk alone, I started out ahead of my new friends. Twice during the first half of the downhill journey I stopped to rest. But after the second sitting, I never stopped again.
The truth is, I was afraid to stop. That rheumatic knee of mine got worse and worse. Every downward step plunged it into a kettle of hot agony. It creaked so loud I couldn’t hear the birds sing. It went back and forth through sheer force of habit, and I knew that if ever I interrupted its rhythmic routine to rest, I’d never get it started again.
So on and on I walked, through an eternity, and it was close to noon when suddenly the forest-roofed trail broke out into the open, and some cars were sitting around, and I knew here was the end of the rainbow. The Great Walker had made it home. He collapsed on a rock.
Now my Cleveland friends should have been no more than five minutes behind. But time passed. And more time. And they didn’t come. Finally I got to worrying, and thinking of bears or snakes or broken legs.
At last—three-quarters of an hour behind me—they came, limping and halt.
Mr. Wilson’s toes somehow had got all mixed up with each other, and wound up a mass of blood inside his boots. And Mr. Liggett discovered he had some muscles that hadn’t been used since he was marching down roads in France in 1918. We were, as they say in the South, a “sorry” trio.
It is with a breaking heart that I recount this, for I believe Mr. Wilson intends to tell some heroic story about it around Cleveland. But I say this is a democracy, and if my own frail knee must suffer the cruel scrutiny of the public spotlight, then Mr. Wilson’s torn toes shall not hide in privacy.
We bid each other a hikers’ adieu. My Cleveland friends started right home. Personally I’m not at all sure of them, even though Mr. Wilson is a rugged pioneer. If they do not return soon, I hope The Cleveland Press will send out an expedition.
As for me—well, don’t you worry about me, folks, I’m safe and happy right here in bed with a hot pad around my knee. If anybody should care to hire me to pack something back up the mountain tomorrow, I’ll consider it for a million dollars. Not very seriously, though.
Nearly a million tourists a year are now coming to see the wonders of the Great Smoky Mountains. But I’ll bet not one in 1000 ever finds out anything about the greatest wonder of all—and that is the people of Gatlinburg.
Gatlinburg is unique, there’s no question about it. Ten years ago it had a population of 75, and the mountain people just scraped along from one meal to the next.
Today Gatlinburg, thanks to tourists, has a population of 1300 and is rolling in wealth. And what is unique about it—and delightful too—is that the money is going into the pockets of the old original families here, who for so long had almost nothing.
There are now approximately 40 business establishments in town. At least half of them are owned within four families. They are families that have been here for generations. And of the other half, not more than half a dozen are owned by outsiders.
Many a slick fellow has arrived here, expecting to buy out these easy marks for nothing or sign them up on a trick lease. But in every case, they say, the smart fellow has left town without his own shirt.
The surprising thing about this whole evolution is two-fold:
1—That the local people had the shrewdness to hold on to things.
2—That they had the ability themselves, with almost no experience, to do the necessary job of building for and satisfactorily serving a million tourists a year.
The answer to the first is fundamental. It lies in the mountain man’s absolute refusal to give up his land. Money as such doesn’t mean much to a mountain man. It is land that he values, and craves. Once he has land, he won’t give it up.
As a consequence, outsiders can’t buy land in Gatlinburg. No matter what they offer, the mountain man says, “I don’t want to sell. I wouldn’t have no place to pasture my cow.”
The answer to the second is simply that the mountain men of Tennessee are smart. You can’t make anything else out of it. They’re just natively smart, that’s all.
If you go up into the old graveyard on the hillside just back of town, you’ll find at least half the names on the gravestones divided among five families. Those families are—Ogle, Whaley, Maples, Reagan and Huff. The first four have been here for generations. The Huffs came 40 years ago.
Four of these five families control Gatlinburg. They reap most of the profit, and they likewise take the responsibility and do the good deeds.
There are four key business establishments in Gatlinburg. They 16 are the three big hotels and the huge general store. The Ogles own the store. And the Huffs, Whaleys and Maples each own a hotel. And every one of the four, in addition owns numerous tourist courts, filling stations, gift shops, saddle-horse concessions, restaurants.
These four families, working together, competing but friendly, have been almost super-wise in their development of Gatlinburg.
Their building has been tasteful. Largely inexperienced in running hotels, they have created three delightful places.
And wisest of all, they haven’t taken unfair advantage of the flood of tourist gold which has descended upon them. They aren’t killing their golden geese. They have deliberately agreed among themselves to keep prices down.
Hotel rates in Gatlinburg are amazingly low. At such prices you’d expect shoddy service and poor rooms. But everything is modern, clean and pleasant.
The hotels are staffed by local mountain people, and they have pride and friendliness, clear down to the lowliest charwoman, that wouldn’t permit them to do a shoddy job.
Tourists support almost every one of the 1300 people in Gatlinburg. Nobody is out of work who wants to work. Even the people out in the hills live off the tourists, through their weaving, basketry and woodwork.
We have been in most of the “faddy” places and big tourist centers in America. In not one of them have we seen the plums fall into the laps of the old-time residents of the place. Gatlinburg is the only exception.
Why, it’s just as though fame and millions of people were suddenly to descend upon our crossroads in Indiana. And instead of financiers from Chicago grabbing everything, my Dad would put up a fine hotel, and Harry Bales would build a three-story gift shoppe, and Doc Sturm would create six big tourist courts, and Claud Lockeridge would own all restaurants, filling stations and sight-seeing busses. And we’d all get richer than hell.
Fame, please come to Indiana and make us farmers rich.
Everyone who has been to Hawaii knows about “The Big Five.” How these five old families control most everything in Hawaii. It is one of the tightest, and also in my opinion one of the best monopolies in the world.
Well, Gatlinburg is just like Hawaii in that respect. There are five leading families here. Four of these families hold the reins. The fifth, although old and numerous and doing all right, could not be considered a member of the “control.”
In Gatlinburg it could be called “The Big Four.” Let me tell you about these families.
Ogle—They, I think, are probably the oldest. An Ogle started the first store here, back before the Civil War. The Ogles have ways been the merchants of the Smokies.
Charlie Ogle is the head Ogle today, and he runs the general store that is one of the sights of Gatlinburg.
As business grew they kept building on more additions. The store rambles and juts around all over the place. It has separate grocery, shoe, hardware, women’s-wear departments.
You can buy things here you can’t get even in Knoxville—provided Charlie, or his son, Earl, can locate them. They say you can get anything here from a hairpin to a threshing machine.
So I put them to the test. I asked if they had “G. Washington” coffee, which is the powdered kind you just stir into a cup of hot water. That Girl carries it so she can have her morning coffee in hotel rooms. Not one grocery in ten has it, we’ve found.
But Ogle’s came through. They had it all right.
Whaley—The Whaleys too have been here a long time. Steve Whaley is the head man of the family. One son manages the hotel. Another son manages the tourist court. There is also a filling station in the family, and a saddle-horse concession, and they rent out nearly half a block of business buildings.
I was talking to one of the Whaley boys of my pleasure in seeing the rich harvestings from the tourist crop kept in local hands.
“Yes,” he said, “and I think we deserve it. We’ve always been poor and had to scratch. It wasn’t many years ago that I was hoeing corn right where the hotel stands now. We always had enough to eat, like most farmers do, but we never had any money to get any of the things we wanted. I think it’s right that we have some of it now.”
Maples—There are two brothers of the older Maples generation. One is Squire I. L. Maples, who once owned a store (I don’t 18 know how the Ogles allowed that) and was once postmaster. The other brother is David Crockett Maples. They are direct descendants of the famous Davy Crockett, who died a hero in the Texas Alamo.
Davy Crockett Maples was a rural mail carrier. He carried the mail up into the higher Smokies, to Sugarlands, and the little way-back settlements.
He is retired now. He hasn’t much to do with his time. So he uses it up milking a cow. He has one cow, and they say she gives about a pint of milk. But neither hail nor sleet nor dark of night stays Davy Crockett on his daily rounds to milk that beloved cow.
Rel Maple is Davy Crockett’s son. He owns the Gatlinburg Inn, the newest of the town’s hotels. He also owns the Log Cabin Cafe, and a gift shop, and there is a tourist court in the family. The Maples are doing real well.
Huff—Andy Huff is Gatlinburg’s most prominent man. He is the civic leader. He starts things, and finishes them. What he suggests, the other three usually do.
Andy Huff came to Gatlinburg 39 years ago from Greene County, in Tennessee. He was a lumber man. He owned big saw-mills and cut timber.
In the old days there wasn’t any place around here for a stranger to stay, so Andy Huff put up wayfarers at his house. But the lumber men who stayed with the Huffs liked it so well they’d bring friends. That got to the point where they couldn’t all get in the Huff house.
So in 1916 Andy Huff built a frame hotel, which looked like a house, just to accommodate the lumber men. He has been in the hotel business ever since.
The old-time visitors to Gatlinburg always stayed with Andy Huff at his Mountain View Hotel. But it is no longer an amateur affair. It is a huge place, sitting on a hillside, and they have served as many as 900 meals in a day there.
These four families are numerous with children, as mountain families usually are. As each family’s wealth grows, it is invested in some new business for one of the children.
Mountain children do go away, but somehow they always come back. The Huffs, the Ogles, the Whaleys, the Maples—each one has a generation in its 20s and 30s, and they are all in the family business up to their necks.
Almost without exception, they carry in their hearts the mountain man’s love of the land. And as long as that lasts, the “Big Four” of Gatlinburg will endure.
Uncle Steve Whaley is probably the most engaging man in Gatlinburg. He has always lived here; always been a farmer and a trader.
He raised a big family here on the Little Pigeon River, in good mountain fashion. And then, in his middle years, the irresistible flood of human events rolled through the Great Smoky Mountains and tinged everybody’s life with change and Uncle Steve’s life changed too.
Today he is a power in these parts. He owns a big hotel, and lots of other things. He is a business magnate. He is the elder Morgan of his clan. His children are at the steering wheel, but I suspect that Uncle Steve drives relentlessly from the back seat.
We are staying in Uncle Steve’s hotel—the Riverside. It is managed by his son Dick. Uncle Steve just wanders around and about. Sometimes tourists stop out front and ask him if this is a good hotel. He’ll say, “Well, I’ve been staying here for quite a spell, and I like it all right.” He never tells them he owns it.
When Uncle Steve first was badgered into setting up a tourist camp, he swore to all the family that it would be the end of the Whaleys and all they’d slaved for and saved.
But in the first year it made so much money that Uncle Steve built a frame hotel, and this made so much money he built a big modern hotel, and it’s making so much money they’re putting on an addition this winter. It’s hard telling where the thing will stop.
Uncle Steve is dry and droll. He’s dumb like a fox, and old fashioned like fluid drive. He’s about as skinny as I am, and his nose hangs over at the end like Puck’s. He sort of halfway grins when he talks, and his humor is so left-handed you don’t know half the time whether he’s joking or not.
He loves to talk about being an ignorant hillbilly. It gets funnier and funnier as it gradually dawns on you how all-fired smart Uncle Steve really is.
“I was educated at Bear Pen Holler University,” he says. That is his name for the School of Experience. “I don’t know nothin’ about nothin’, very much.”
If a local townsman asks him the population of Gatlinburg, or the number of tourist cabins here, or who plans to do what, Uncle Steve always says “I don’t know.” And he says it in a tone which implies, “Why you askin’ me, you know I don’t know nothin’ about nothin’.”
But I’ll bet there isn’t a minor item about anything that is or ever was in Gatlinburg that Uncle Steve doesn’t know.
“I don’t know no more about runnin’ a hotel now than when I started, and I didn’t know nothin’ then,” says Uncle Steve. “All I know is you cook and make the beds—and charge ’em a little.” That seems to me a pretty good basis to start on.
“I never kept a book in my life,” Uncle Steve says. “I never kept no track of how much I spent or how much I took in.” He apparently has stopped talking. You’re just ready to reply, or change the subject. And then finally, as a small afterthought, Uncle Steve looks over at you slantlike and says in a low voice, “I always come out a little ahead though.”
Uncle Steve still is known to carry up a tourist’s bag occasionally, and pocket the tip. He doesn’t do it for a joke either. When the tourists later find out who he is, they’re rattled about having tipped him. It doesn’t rattle Uncle Steve though.
They tell how he got appendicitis a few years ago and went to Knoxville to be operated on. At the hospital, they took down his financial history before operating. They asked what he did, and he said he worked for an old widow woman over at Gatlinburg who ran a boarding house. Didn’t get nothin’ for it, just worked for his room and board. A price, in accordance, was agreed upon for the operation.
But when Uncle Steve began to convalesce, the doctors began to be flabbergasted. For here came a stream of the most astounding visitors to see this old man—Knoxville hotel managers, bank presidents, big politicians, land owners, Government officials. The doctors began to smell a mouse, and then they really investigated. But it was too late. He had already paid his bill.
Often older people bore you to death. But when we’re downstairs we kind of keep peeking around hoping Uncle Steve will come and sit with us. And very often he does.
One night he and I went up to see Andy Huff, who owns the big Mountain View Hotel. They are direct competitors, but they’re old friends too. We sat and gabbed with Andy for an hour or so, and then Andy drove us home.
“How you standing the cooking down at the Riverside?” Andy Huff asked me.
“Well the cooking’s all right,” I said, “but the owner kind of gets on my nerves.”
“I don’t wonder,” said Andy Huff. “When you get all you can stand of it, check out and come down to my hotel.”
So I said I guess we’d stick it out this time, but I’d stay with Andy the next trip.
But next morning Uncle Steve had another solution figured out. He said:
“If you stay at the Mountain View next time, Rel Maples and me will be sore. If you stay at the Gatlinburg Inn, me and Andy Huff will be sore. If you stay here again, the other two will be sore. So I guess I’ll just have to build a fourth hotel before you get back, so you can have a place to stay.”
I think it would be nice if Uncle Steve built a hotel and gave it to me to run. I don’t know nothin’ about nothin’ either, very much. So I’d be bound to make a success.
In a desperate effort, I presume, to make up for his outrageous misjudgment of my walking prowess, Assistant Chief Ranger Harold Edwards devoted his weekly day of rest to showing me some of the interior of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
We drove over to Cade’s Cove in the far western end of the park. Cade’s Cove is several thousand acres of flat farm land set right down in the middle of the Smoky Mountain chain. Its floor is at 1800 feet elevation, and mountains ring it on every side.
In the old days, the people of Cade’s Cove lived in a Shangri La almost as isolated as a Tibetan monastery. They sent almost nothing to market. They made their own clothes, ground their own meal, butchered their own meat.
Only one road ran into Cade’s Cove, and it was a pretty bad road until the park and the CCC got hold of it. Even today it winds and twists down over the pass to the tune of 200 hairpin turns. It isn’t a scary road at all, just a crooked one.
Some families left the Cove when the Government took over, but 19 families remain. They have cars and trucks and tractors, and a school and a store and even a post office with an R. F. D. carrier. They are still pretty much their own world.
But Mr. Edwards comes from the Montana mountains, and he is nuts about flat land.
You know those little two-pronged stickers that come off onto your clothes by the hundreds when you walk through the weeds in the fall. In Indiana we always called them Spanish needles. Here in the mountains they call them “beggar’s lice.”
Miss Laura Thornburgh lives in Gatlinburg and loves the Smokies so much she’s written a book about them. One evening she sent us over a beautiful bouquet of Hearts-a-Bustin’-with-Love.
I’ll bet that one stops you. It is a local shrub, or hedge, or flower, or tree. I don’t know what you call it. Anyway it looks like Christmas holly at first glance. But when you get up close, you see it has been a round pod, and then it has broken open and out have come four red berries, just like lights on a chandelier. It is lovely.
The real name of it is Wahoo, but around here it is always called “Hearts-a-Bustin’-with-Love.”
On the day that America registered for conscription, the Park Service set up its counter and registered all travelers and wayfarers and residents of the Park.
One Ranger had to hike five miles back into the mountain wilderness to register a boy who had been crippled since childhood with infantile paralysis. There is no road back there, only a foot trail.
I have a sneaking feeling that if this young man had never been registered at all, nobody would have gone to the penitentiary over it.
I can’t be as astonished by some of the local expressions as the discoverers would like you to be. The mountaineers say “shoe lastes” for “shoe last,” and they say “you’uns,” and “heerd,” and “poke” for sack, and “whistle pig” for groundhog, and “ketched” for caught, and so on.
Yet when I was a boy in Indiana there were people within three miles of us who talked that way. And I have cousins back home (nice people too) who say “you-uns” and “we’uns” and “ketched.” I don’t have to go out of the family to dig up a little picturesque grammar. In fact, I don’t even have to go out of the room.
Copyright 1947 by Wm. Sloane Associates, Inc.
Special permission to re-print this bear story was granted by Wm. Sloane Associates, Inc., of New York City, Publishers of “Home Country”, by Ernie Pyle, which book contains this story.
Uncle Steve Cole lives on at his old home place, right in the park. He is a typical mountain man of the old school—a good mountain man, the kind who lives right and does right.
I dropped in one afternoon to talk to him. Uncle Steve lit a fire, and sat down beside it and began spitting in the fireplace. He wasn’t chewing tobacco, but he spit in the fireplace all the time anyhow.
Uncle Steve had killed more bears than any man in these mountains. He says so himself, and others say so too. He hasn’t the remotest idea how many he has killed. But he has killed bears with muzzle-loaders, modern rifles, deadfalls, clubs, axes, and he even choked one to death with his bare hands.
I got him to tell me that story. He and a neighbor went out one night. The dogs treed a bear. The way Uncle Steve tells it would take half an hour, and that’s too long for us. But the essence of it was that they built a fire, the bear finally came down the tree. Uncle Steve stood there until the bear’s body was pressing on the muzzle of the gun, and then he pulled the trigger. “I figured I couldn’t miss that way,” Uncle Steve laughs.
He didn’t miss, but the shot didn’t kill the bear. He ran 50 yards or so, and then the dogs were on him. And the first thing Uncle Steve knew the bear had clenched his great jaws right down on a dog’s snoot, and was just crushing it to pieces.
Now Uncle Steve’s gun was an old-fashioned, sawed-off muzzle-loading hog rifle, and he didn’t have time to reload it. So to save the dog, he just rushed up to the bear from behind, put his legs around the bear, and started prying the dog’s snoot out of the bear’s mouth.
“And before I knew what happened,” says Uncle Steve, “the bear let go of the dog, and got my right hand in his mouth, and began a-crunchin’ and a-growlin’ and a-eating on my hand.
“One long tooth went right through the palm of my hand, and another went through the back of my hand. There wasn’t nothin’ for me to do but reach around with my left hand for the bear’s throat. I got him by the goozle and started clampin’ down. Pretty soon he let go. Then I just choked him till he was deader’n 4 o’clock.” Uncle Steve spit in the fireplace.
Mrs. Cole was sitting on the bed, listening. Nobody said anything for a minute. Then Mrs. Cole chuckled and said, “Four o’clock ain’t dead.”
Uncle Steve didn’t dignify her quibble with an answer. He just spit in the fireplace again.
The most famous man in the Smokies, as far as visitors are concerned, is Wiley Oakley. He is called “The Roamin’ Man of the Mountains.” He is 55, and all his life he has just wandered around through the Smokies.
He is a natural woodsman, with a soul that sings in harmony with the birds and the trees and the trees and the clouds. His English is spectacular, and on many things he is as naive as a baby. But on other things he almost shocks you with his meticulous knowledge.
He has a house in the hills, and a rustic-craft shop in Gatlinburg. Most of his life he has made a living as guide to hunters, and later to tourists. There are industrialists by the score in America who worship at Wiley Oakley’s feet after a few days in the mountains with him.
He is a famous teller of tall tales (but he won’t tell one on Sunday). He has been on the radio, and on one trip to New York was offered a contract. It scared him so badly he took the train home without saying goodbye.
Throughout his wandering, Wiley has dropped past home often enough to raise a dozen children. They are all grown now, except one.
Wiley himself has run the same cycle as his beloved mountains. In the beginning they were virginal, untouched, natural. But now they have become public characters—both the mountains and Wiley—before the curious eyes of a million people a year.
Maybe they have both been changed a little by it; a little professionalism has come to them both. But that’s all right. For what good would the Smokies be, or Wiley Oakley either, if they remained under a bushel?
One of the places a visitor to Gatlinburg must see is the Mountaineer Museum. This is a collection of some 2000 old-fashioned mountain articles, gathered by Edna Lynn Simms.
Mrs. Simms came from Knoxville 24 years ago. She herself roamed the mountains long before the tourists came. She picked up articles, and lore, and the language of the hills. She has a bubbling enthusiasm for everything she sees or hears, an enthusiasm that has not begun to simmer down even after 24 years of mountain discovery.
Mrs. Simms’ museum is the best collection of mountain stuff in the Smokies. And in her own head is one of the finest collections of mountain speech and legend. Why, she has quoted so long that she talks like a mountain woman herself.
This, I’m sure you will be relieved to know, is the last of the columns on the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
This is the biggest and best known National Park east of the Mississippi. Its mountain mass is the highest in the East; its people are as picturesque as any left in America.
And yet friends here say that on their trips out West, and even down below in their own deep South, they frequently talk with people who have never heard of the Smokies.
But that can never happen again. After the current mass of words which this column has fired into the air, anybody who never heard of the Smokies will have to be jailed as a fifth-columnist. This is the final warning.
The head man of the Great Smokies Park is Ross Eakin. His men say he has one of the smoothest-working organizations in the Park Service. He has been in charge here from the start. Before that he was superintendent at Glacier, and at Grand Canyon.
The Smokies have been fortunate in having the CCC and the WPA. Without them to do the work and do it cheaply, the Park Service would have been decades reaching its present advanced stage of improvements.
They have built hundreds of miles of trail, and fire roads for trucks, and camping grounds and bridges and even beautiful stone buildings for Park Headquarters, at one time there were 17 CCC camps in the park, and even now there are seven.
The park does have, it seems to me, one definite lack. And that is enough Rangers for direct contact with the public. The park charges no admission, so you are not stopped or given information when you drive in.
The public’s hunger for authentic information is expressed in the experience of one of the Rangers. When he first came here, he took a rustic cottage in a tourist court, right in town, but every evening the tourists would see him come home from work in his uniform, and from then till bed time there was a line at his door. He finally had to move.
Both Assistant Chief Ranger Harold Edwards, on the Tennessee side, and Assistant Chief Ranger James Light, on the Carolina side, have driven us all around through the interior of the park on fire roads—gravel truck trails not open to the public.
We enjoyed these trips, yet as far as I can see, the most spectacular views in the Park are available right from the cross-park highway, or from the trails out of Gatlinburg.
A horse trail follows the backbone of the high mountain ridge from one end of the park to the other. This is a part of the Appalachian Trail which runs from Maine to Georgia. Each summer large groups come and ride the whole 71 miles of this trail, camping out at night, taking a week or more for the journey.
There is one place on this trail, called Charlie’s Bunion, which I have not yet seen. It is a place where you ride or walk (or crawl if you’re like me) across a narrow, wind-swept ledge where it drops straight off for 1500 feet. There aren’t many such places in the Smokies, but this one is a lulu.
Charlie’s Bunion is only a four-mile hike from the main paved highway that crosses the Park. Some day, if my game knee ever gets fully recovered, I’ll have to hike up there and peek over the edge. I hope my knee never gets better.
When the Smokies became Government land, a great many people were moved out. But also a great many were left in. Today there are around 400 native mountain people still living in the Tennessee half of the park, probably an equal number on the Carolina side.
But it is hard for them. They are no longer masters of their own souls. His independence is a mountain man’s staff of life, and the reason he was here in the first place.
Today a mountain man in the park dare not go hunting. He can’t even have a gun, unless he’s a trusted old-timer allowed to keep it for sentimental reasons.
He cannot trap. He cannot cut down a tree. He dare not cut balsam boughs for an outdoor bed. When a mountain schoolteacher wants to give some of the boys a whuppin’, he has to get a Park Warden to cut the switches for him.
The mountain people live within the shell of their traditional existence, but it is an empty shell. The spirit has gone out of the old log house; an unseen guard stands watch at the door over their liberties. They are gradually leaving.
It is impossible both to retain, and to exhibit publicly, a natural way of living. Two more generations, and the old mountain culture of the Smokies will live only in the museums and the empty log cabins with Government signs on them, and in the schools that teach the newly educated youngsters how to weave and spin and hew as their forefathers did. That’s all that will be left.