“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.
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.