The Tracks of Our Predecessors
Rocks rose out of the sea and became mountains. Plants clothed them and animals lived among the plants, all evolving and changing over the millions of years. A few thousand years ago, a dense green mantle of giant trees covered the Smokies. Bears roamed the forest and bison followed their ages-old trails across the mountains. Beavers built dams across lowland streams, and meadows followed when the beavers moved on. Elk and deer came out of the forest to feed in the meadows and cougars and wolves hunted the elk and deer. It might have gone on this way for even more thousands of years.
But then people came. First Indians, then settlers, then the lumber companies. What was the impact of this new element, this two-legged animal? How did the forest and its life change? Is it now returning to its former state? In trying to answer these questions we may learn something about the ecological role of people not only in the Smokies but also in much of eastern North America, most of which resembled the Smokies in its forest cover when people first arrived on the scene.
For at least several thousand years groups of humans have lived in the lowlands around the Great Smokies. Use of the highlands themselves by these earlier groups was probably limited, however. Our history of peoples in the mountains begins with reports of explorers who visited the Cherokees in the late 17th and 18th centuries. They found this tribe, which is thought to have left the ancestral Iroquoian territory and moved southward about the year 1000, dispersed in small villages along foothill streams in a great arc around the Southern Appalachians. Primarily an agricultural people, the Cherokees tended fields of corn, squash, beans, melons, and tobacco around their thatched log cabins. But they also hunted and fished, and gathered wild plant materials for both food and trade. Although the mountains harbored spirits that were not entirely friendly, the Cherokees camped in coves and gaps to hunt bear and deer, to gather nuts and berries, and to gather stone for implements. Early reports from the Smokies noted the large numbers of deer, bear, and beaver skins being traded by the Cherokees. Quite possibly, they set fire to attract game and promote the growth of berry bushes, thus creating some of the mysterious grass balds atop the Smokies. For purposes of trade and warfare they established trails through the mountains. Such a trail across Indian Gap remained the principal cross-mountain route until early this century.
What effect did all this have on the tapestry of life in the mountains? Undoubtedly the Cherokees increased the area of open land, although some of their cropland might have been established on old beaver meadows. They may also have reduced the numbers of game and fur animals, although 18th-century travelers in the region still could be amazed at the abundance of deer, bison, beaver, cougars, and other animals. No species except the bison is known to have disappeared during the years the Cherokees had sole dominion over the land, and they may have contributed in some way to this one loss. With relatively small numbers in the Smokies, and a lack of highly destructive implements, especially guns, the Cherokees apparently changed the ecological picture only slightly in the days before contact with Europeans.
In the 1790s settlers, legally or illegally, began taking over former Cherokee land in the Smokies, beginning with two of the broader lowland valleys, the Oconaluftee and Cades Cove. As the Cherokees yielded more and more land, by treaty or to theft, settlement by the new Americans proceeded up other valleys, until by 1826 almost every watershed was occupied by at least a few families. Clearing and occupation of land continued through the 19th century, the largest concentrations developing in the Sugarlands (along the West Prong of Little Pigeon River), Greenbrier Cove, and Cataloochee, in addition to the earliest areas of settlement. In 1926, when land buying for the newly authorized park began, there were 1,200 farms and 7,300 people within the park boundaries. By this time, however, farming in the Smokies had passed its peak.
By contrast with earlier Indian inhabitants, the farmers had considerable impact on the land. Most obvious was the removal of forest to make homesites, cropland, and pastures. By 1902, eight percent of the land on the Tennessee side of the Smokies and seven percent on the North Carolina side had been cleared. As settlement proceeded up a hollow farmers were confronted with steeper and steeper slopes. The inevitable results of trying to raise corn on the sides of mountains were rapid loss of fertility and then of the soil itself, as the heavy rains leached out nutrients and washed away first the humus and then the mineral soil beneath. In this wilderness where virgin land was still abundant, many mountaineers simply cleared a new patch when the old one gave out. Horace Kephart, a midwesterner who lived among such farmers on the North Carolina side early in the 20th century, recorded their approach to cultivation. They would clear land and get out two or three crops of corn.
“When corn won’t grow no more I can turn the field into grass a couple of years,” Kephart’s informant says.
“Then you’ll rotate, and grow corn again?” Kephart asks, a bit ingenuously.
“La, no! By that time the land will be so poor hit wouldn’t raise a cuss-fight.”
“But then you must move, and begin all over again.” Kephart counters. “This continual moving must be a great nuisance.”
Kephart overstates the case, however, because most stayed in one house for two to three generations, or about 50 to 75 years.
Clearing and the erosion that sometimes followed were relatively local and distinct effects of settlement. Uses of uncleared forest land had widespread, but more subtle, effects. Selected white pines and yellow-poplars were cut for lumber; oaks for shingles; and hickories mostly for firewood. Other species were put to less important, miscellaneous uses. Many plants were collected for food and dyes or for medicinal purposes. Ginseng, which has a forked root highly prized in China for its supposed medicinal and aphrodisiac values, was nearly eliminated by eager “sang” diggers who sold the roots for export. Probably even more pervasive was the influence of livestock. Hogs, and sometimes cattle and sheep, were allowed to roam the forests, grazing, browsing, and rooting for a living. Mast—acorns, chestnuts, and beechnuts—formed an important part of the diet of hogs, but these omnivorous creatures ate all sorts of plants and small animals. As anyone knows who has observed a grazed woodlot, livestock can quickly impoverish the ground and shrub layers of a forest. Grazing and browsing, along with use of fire, prevented the return of forest to the grass balds. All these uses of the forest undoubtedly changed the proportions of many tree and lesser plant species in the total forest composition. Precisely how much they did so cannot now be determined.
The impact of settlement on certain wildlife species is more easily seen. Elk disappeared about the time the earliest pioneers moved in. The beaver, an easily trapped animal, was nearly gone by the end of the 19th century. Wolves and cougars, hunted because they sometimes killed livestock—and uncomfortable in the presence of people—followed soon after. Deer, bear, and turkey persisted but in much-reduced numbers, with the bears retreating to rough, wild country in the central heights. Smaller animals fared better, although such hunted species as raccoon, opossum, and gray squirrel perhaps suffered some reduction.
About 1900 a new era began, bringing the greatest shock yet to Great Smokies ecosystems. Large lumber companies, having logged off the big timber of New England and the Great lakes states, turned their attention to the virgin stands of the Southern Appalachians. Setting up sawmills at the fringes of the mountains, they rapidly worked their way up the coves, just as Cherokees and settlers had done before them. Railroads, built to carry logs to the mills, were extended upstream as cutting progressed. In some watersheds, such as those of the Little River, Big Creek, and the Oconaluftee, nearly all species of trees were taken. In others, such as Abrams Creek, West Prong of the Little Pigeon, and Cataloochee, cutting was selective. By the late 1920s, logging, added to settlement practices, had at least partially cleared more than 60 percent of the land in the Great Smoky Mountains.
Though for a time it proved an economic boon, logging was easily the most destructive form of land use the region was ever subjected to. The removal of forest cover and the skidding of logs down steep mountainsides caused widespread erosion. This weakened the foundation for regrowth and clogged streams with sediment, thereby reducing their quality for sustaining aquatic life. In the wake of logging came forest fires, probably the worst these mountains have seen. Heaps of dried branches trimmed from logs made perfect tinder for fires started by engine sparks, careless matches, or lightning strikes. In the 1920s disastrous fires roared up the East Prong of Little River, up Forney Creek to Clingmans Dome, and over the slopes around Charlies Bunion. Scars from some of these fires have still not healed today.
What was the net biological effect of the presence of people in the mountains in 1926, the year Congress authorized Great Smoky Mountains National Park? Broadly speaking, the forest and its animals had been diminished but the plants and animals of grassland and brush had increased. The gray wolf was gone but the meadowlark had arrived. In 1930 the American people inherited lands that were still about 40 percent virgin forest, the largest such chunk of forest left in the East. The rest of the park was a patchwork of uncut forest, young second growth, and openings dotted with houses and barns and fringed with stone walls and fences. The park therefore preserved much of the primeval splendor of the Smokies, but the activities of people would long remain visible in it, and some of these would deliberately be maintained as part of the region’s historical heritage.
Today most of the former fields, except those such as Cades Cove that are purposely kept open, have returned to forest. But it is still easy to recognize these grown-over fields by the types of trees on them. Many bear a nearly solid stand of straight-stemmed yellow-poplars. Others are marked by a dense growth of pines. Dr. Randolph Shields, who grew up in Cades Cove and became chairman of the biology department at nearby Maryville College, has watched the plant succession on old fields in the Cove since about 1930. He has found there that pines usually are the first trees to spring up among the grasses, herbs, and blackberries and other shrubs that follow field abandonment. On moist ground, yellow-poplars usually come up under the pines, but sometimes hemlock and white pine form a second tree stage under the pioneering Virginia or pitch pines. Where yellow-poplars come in, they usually shade out the light-loving pines in about 40 years. Gradually the many species of the cove forest become established under the yellow-poplars, presaging the mixed stand of big trees that will complete the cycle initiated by clearing the land. On the drier slopes it may take about 100 years for the pines to be shaded out by the red maples, oaks, and hickories that eventually become dominant in such areas.
As you might expect, animal life changes with the progression of plant succession. Meadowlarks, bobwhites, woodchucks, and cottontails are replaced by red-eyed vireos, wood thrushes, chipmunks, and white-footed mice as grassland and shrubs give way to forest. With age and woodpecker activity, tree cavities develop in the forest, providing homes for an additional complement of animals such as screech owls, flying squirrels, raccoons, bears, and opossums.
Under the protection accorded by its designation as a national park several animals have made a dramatic comeback in the Smokies. Bears once again roam the entire mountain area. Turkeys are frequently seen in such places as Cades Cove, where openings break the mantle of forest. In recent years sporadic beaver activity has been noted in the park. Even cougars are occasionally reported, although their presence has not been conclusively established. But wolves, elk, and bison—animals that symbolize the Indian’s America—probably cannot be brought back.
Nature again reigns supreme in the Smokies. We may never see here the numbers of wildlife that surprised the first explorers, but we can see remnants of the giant-treed forests that greeted them, and we can marvel at the undulating expanse of green, a beautiful suggestion of the vast hardwood forest that once cloaked eastern America.