Coming Home
Tremont. This Tennessee valley of the Middle Prong of the Little River does not differ widely from Deep Creek or Greenbrier or Cosby or most of the other branches and hollows of the Smokies. Each, including Tremont, penetrates the hills, divides them like a furrow, and protects its own rocky, racing stream with a matting of thick, green growth. Nearby Cades Cove and North Carolina’s Cataloochee might guard a few hectares of lush, hill-cradled pasture or farmland, but even these are stamped with the clear, cool air and feel of the Great Smoky Mountains.
So Tremont is representative. And, perhaps because of this, it is a symbol—a symbol of both the mystery and the clarity of the mountains which give it a name. There is, for example, the legend of a small boy who wandered into the backcountry above the “Sinks” and was lost for two days. Uncle Henry Stinnett, a worried neighbor, searched in vain for the boy until he dreamed, on the second night, of a child sleeping near a log on a familiar ridge. Henry Stinnett renewed the search, and the boy was indeed found asleep “under the uprooted stump of a tree.”
And side by side with such a strange vision exists its opposite: the unforeseen. In August of 1947, a young woman was sunbathing on the boulders of the river. While she enjoyed the rays of the warm sun downstream, the high upper reaches of the prong were being flooded by the swollen, flash attacks of a hidden cloudburst. Within minutes, the woman drowned in a hurtling wall of water.
Yet there is also a clarity here that offsets the unknown. It is a quality of outlook, a confidence of ability and expectation for the future as immense as the mountains which inspire it. But it is an awareness grounded in the facts of history and anecdote and the crisp, fresh sounds of children’s voices.
“Black Bill” Walker knew about children; he had more than 25 himself. A double first cousin to the father of Little Greenbrier’s Walker sisters, “Black Bill” or “Big Will” Walker moved into the lonely valley in 1859. He was only 21 years old then, and his name was simply William. He was accompanied by his strong 19-year-old wife, Nancy.
His mother was a Scot, a member of the McGill clan. His father, Marion, was another of those multitalented frontiersmen: miller, cattleman, orchardist, bear hunter, saddlebag preacher. William took up where his parents left off. He became the leader, the ruler of the community he had started. He was rumored to have been a Mormon, although denominations mattered little in the wilderness. He and Nancy raised seven children. Later wives bore him approximately 20 more.
He milled his own corn and built log cabins for each of his families. He fashioned an immense muzzle-loading rifle, nicknamed it “Old Death,” and handled it with rare skill. Horace Kephart, in a 1918 magazine article, tells of a conversation he had with the 80-year-old hunter:
“Black Bill’s rifle was one he made with his own hands in the log house where I visited him. He rifled it on a wooden machine that was likewise of his own make, and stocked it with wood cut on his own land. The piece was of a little more than half-ounce bore, and weighed 12½ pounds ... the old hunter showed me how he loaded....
“‘My bullets are run small enough so that a naked one will jest slip down on the powder by its own weight. When I’m in a hurry, I pour in the powder by guess, wet a bullet in my mouth, and drop it down the gun. Enough powder sticks to it to keep the ball from falling out if I shoot downhill. Then I snatch a cap from one o’ these strings, and—so.’