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.