Beginning on Canada’s Gaspé Peninsula as a limestone finger only 2.5 kilometers (1.5 miles) wide, the Appalachian mountain system that dominates eastern America slants about 5,000 kilometers (3,000 miles) southwest across New England and the Atlantic and border states into northern Georgia and Alabama, culminating in the grandeur and complexity of the Great Smoky Mountains. This range, which marks the dividing line between Tennessee and North Carolina, is high; its 58-kilometer (36-mile) crest remains more than 1,500 meters (4,900 feet) above sea level. It is ancient—the Ocoee rocks here are estimated to be 500-600 million years old—and its tall peaks and plunging valleys have been sculpted by nature through the action of ice and water during long, patient centuries. The odd and fantastic courses of the rivers here indicate that they are older than the mountains. The Great Smokies are a land of moving waters; there is no natural lake or pond in this area, but there are some 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) of streams with more than 70 species of fish. A generous rainfall, averaging as much as 229 centimeters (90 inches) per year in some localities and 211 centimeters (83 inches) atop Clingmans Dome, nourishes a rich variety of plantlife: more than 100 species of trees, 1,200 other flowering plants, 50 types of fern, 500 mosses and lichens, and 2,000 fungi. The mixed hardwood forest and virgin stands of balsam and spruce are the special glories of the Smokies.
Many of the species of birds that make the Smokies their home do not have to leave to migrate; by migrating vertically, from the valleys to the mountaintops in summer and back down in winter, they can experience the equivalent of a journey at sea level from Georgia to New England. Animals large and small find this a congenial home, and two, the wild boar and the black bear, are especially interesting to visitors. The former shuns people, but the latter is occasionally seen along trails and roadsides throughout the Smokies.
When the Great Smoky Mountains were added to the National Park System in 1934, a unique mission was accomplished: more than 6,600 separate tracts of land had been purchased by the citizens of Tennessee and North Carolina and given to the people of the United States. Previously, most national parks had been created from lands held by the Federal Government. The story of the Great Smokies is, therefore, most especially and significantly, a story of people and their home. Part of that story is captured in microcosm on an August Sunday in a secluded northeastern corner of the park: Cataloochee.
History is what the homecoming is about. The people of Cataloochee worship and sing and eat and celebrate because they are back. And being back, they remember. They walk up the narrow creeks, banked by thick tangles of rhododendron and dog-hobble, to the sites of old homesteads. They watch their small children and grandchildren wade the water and trample the grass of once-familiar fields. They call themselves Caldwell, Palmer, Hannah, Woody, Bennett, Messer. For exactly a century—from the late 1830s and the coming of the first permanent white settlers to the later 1930s and the coming of the park—men and women with these names lived along Cataloochee Creek. But these pioneers were not the first to inhabit a valley that they called by an Indian name.
Alan Rinehart
With their trusty mule and sourwood sled, Giles and Lenard Ownby haul wood for making shingles.
By “Gad-a-lu-tsi,” the Cherokees meant “standing up in ranks.” As they looked from Cove Creek Gap at the eastern end of the valley across toward the Balsam Mountains, they used that term to describe the thin stand of timber at the top of the distant range. Later, the name became “Cataloochee,” or the colloquial “Catalooch,” and it referred to the entire watershed of the central stream.
The Cherokees liked what they saw. They hunted and fished throughout the area and established small villages along one of their main trails. The Cataloochee Track, as it came to be known, ran from Cove Creek Gap at the eastern edge of the present-day park up over the Smokies and down through what is now the Cosby section of eastern Tennessee. It connected large Indian settlements along the upper French Broad River in North Carolina with the equally important Overhill Towns of the Tennessee River.
By the early 1700s, Cataloochee formed a minor portion of the great Cherokee Nation whose towns and villages extended from eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina into northern Georgia. But as time went on, and as the white settlements pushed westward from the wide eastern front, the Cherokees lost dominion over this vast area. In 1791, at the treaty of Holston, the Cherokees gave up Cataloochee along with much of what is now East Tennessee. Five years later the state of North Carolina granted 71,210 hectares (176,000 acres), including all of Cataloochee, to John Gray Blount—brother to William Blount, governor of the Territory South of the Ohio River, as Tennessee was then called. Blount kept the land for speculation, but it eventually sold for less than one cent per hectare. Now that the Cherokees had relinquished the land, no one else seemed to want it. Even the famous Methodist Bishop Francis Asbury, first sent as a missionary to America in 1771, apparently wavered in his spirit when confronted with the Cataloochee wilderness. In his journal in 1810 he lamented: