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.