Part 1

GATLINBURG _And_ THE GREAT SMOKIES _By Ernie Pyle_

_Ernie Pyle_ ONE OF HIS FAVORITE PHOTOS

PRICE—FIFTY CENTS

Printed In The Great Smokies THE MOUNTAIN PRESS Gatlinburg, Tennessee

_Foreword_

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

GATLINBURG, Tenn., Oct. 24, 1940—

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.

PASSED BY TIME

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.

PARK IS OVAL SHAPE

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.

MT. LE CONTE LODGE, Great Smokies Park, Oct. 25, 1940—

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.

BACK TO SLEEP

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.

DISTANCES DECEPTIVE

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.

MT. LE CONTE LODGE, Great Smokies Park, Oct. 26, 1940—

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.

BEARS DON’T HIDE

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 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.

STARES AT BEAUTY

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.

WATCHED SQUIRRELS

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.

LE CONTE LODGE, Great Smokies Park, Oct. 28, 1940—

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 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.

GATLINBURG, Tenn., Oct. 29, 1940—

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.