Part 2

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 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.

BREAKFAST EXCELLENT

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.

BID ADIEU

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.

GATLINBURG, Tenn., Oct. 30, 1940—

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.

FIVE FAMILIES DOMINATE

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 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.

HAVE SENSE OF HONESTY

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.

GATLINBURG, Tenn., Oct. 31, 1940—

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.

OGLES ARE OLDEST

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.

WHALEYS OWN PLENTY

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.”

THE MAPLES FAMILY

Maples—There are two brothers of the older Maples generation. One is Squire I. L. Maples, who once owned a store (I don’t 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.

ANDY HUFF

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.

GATLINBURG, Tenn., Nov. 1, 1940—

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 DRY AND DROLL

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.”

POCKETS TIPS

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.

WENT TO SEE ANDY HUFF

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.

GATLINBURG, Tenn., Nov. 2, 1940—

CADES COVE

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.”

‘HEARTS-A-BUSTIN’ WITH LOVE’

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.

GATLINBURG, Tenn., Nov. 4, 1940—

A GOOD BEAR STORY

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.

WILEY OAKLEY