Into the Smokies they came, but the coming was slow. The early pioneers of the Old Southwest had conquered the lowlands of North Carolina and Tennessee with relative ease. The higher country of the Great Smoky Mountains, set into the Southern Appalachians like a great boulder among scattered stones, would yield less quickly.
The pioneers began, as the Cherokees had done, with the most accessible land. The level Oconaluftee valley, stretching its timbered swath from present-day Cherokee, North Carolina, on up into the forks and tributaries of the Great Smokies, beckoned with at least some possibilities to the hopeful settler. As early as 1790, Dr. Joseph Dobson, a North Carolina Revolutionary War veteran who had accompanied Rutherford on his 1777 campaign against the Cherokees, entered into deed a tract on the Oconaluftee. But the claim was void; the valley still belonged to the Indians.
John Walker had also ridden with Rutherford. His son Felix, a student and friend of Dr. Dobson, lawfully received in 1795 a sizable land grant to the valley. Young Walker was more than willing to let settlers attempt development of this wild area. Two North Carolina families decided to try. John Jacob Mingus and Ralph Hughes took their wives and children and journeyed into the “Lufty” regions of the Smokies. They cleared small homesteads by the river; they were all alone.
In 1803, Abraham Enloe and his family moved up from South Carolina and joined the growing families of Mingus and Hughes. Enloe chose land directly across the river from John Mingus, and by 1820 Abraham’s daughter Polly had married John, junior. “Dr. John,” as the younger Mingus was respectfully called in his later years, learned much about medicine from the scattered Cherokees remaining in the area.
Other families, Carolinian and Georgian and Virginian alike, arrived and stayed. Collins, Bradley, Beck, Conner, Floyd, Sherrill: these and others settled beside the river itself, and their children moved along the creeks and branches. Fresh lands were cleared, new homes built; the Oconaluftee was being transformed. And further to the southwest, Forney Creek was being claimed by Crisps and Monteiths, Coles and Welches; Deep Creek had already been colonized by Abraham Wiggins and his descendants.
The Tennessee side of the Smokies, furrowed by its own series of rivers and creeks, awaited settlement. By 1800 a few Virginians and Carolinians were drifting into the four-year-old state of Tennessee, willing to settle.
The first family of Gatlinburg was probably a mother and her seven children. This widow, Martha Huskey Ogle, brought five sons and two daughters from Edgefield, South Carolina. Richard Reagan, a Scotch-Irishman from Virginia, and his family joined the Ogles and began to clear land. His son, Daniel Wesley Reagan, born in 1802, was the first child of the settlement and later became a leading citizen of the community. The elder Reagan was fatally injured when a heavy wind blew the limb from a tree on him, reminding the little community once more of the precarious nature of survival in this free, stern country.
Maples, Clabos, and Trenthams followed the Ogles and the Reagans into the Gatlinburg area. Nearby Big Greenbrier Cove became known as “the Whaley Settlement.” Some settlers traveled directly across the crest of the Smokies, via Indian and Newfound Gaps, but these old Cherokee trails and cattle paths were rough and overgrown. Horses could barely make it through, and most possessions had to be carried on stout human shoulders. Besides the usual pots, tools, guns, and seeds were the Bibles and treasured manmade mementos.
Many settlers, having been soldiers of the Revolution, had received 20-hectare (50-acre) land grants for a mere 75 cents. They pushed along the West Prong of the Little Pigeon River, past Gatlinburg, up among the steep slopes of the Bull Head, the Chimney Tops, the Sugarland Mountain. This narrow Sugarlands valley, strewn with water-smoothed boulders and homestead-sized plateaus of level land, attracted dozens of families. But this rocky country forced the settlers to clear their fields twice, first of the forest and then of the stones.
