Part 3

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?

SEES MUSEUM

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.

GATLINBURG, Tenn., Nov. 5, 1940—

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.

HEAD MAN

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.

DRIVEN AROUND

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.

MANY MOVED

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.

Transcriber’s Notes

—Silently corrected a few typos.

—Retained publication information from the printed edition: this eBook is public-domain in the country of publication.

—In the text versions only, text in italics is delimited by _underscores_.

End of Project Gutenberg's Gatlinburg and the Great Smokies, by Ernie Pyle