“The old man went through the motions like a sleight-of-hand performer. The whole operation of loading took barely ten seconds.”
After Black Bill’s own children had grown, he went to the nearby town of Maryville and requested and received a school in the valley for children yet to come. He governed his settlement, yet he was not merely a governor. He was a remarkable man, an individualist who also built a community.
After Black Bill’s death in 1919, life in Tremont continued as before. Families still ate turkey and pheasant, squirrel and venison, sweet potatoes and the first greenery of spring, onions. Children’s bare feet remained tough enough to break open chestnut burrs. Mothers continued to put dried peaches in a jar full of moonshine, let it sit a day or two, and test their peach brandy with a sip or two. And on Christmas, fathers and sons “got out and shot their guns” in celebration.
Legend has it that Black Bill Walker once went into a cave after a bear and came out alive—with the hide. The story is probably true, for he did many things on a grand scale. He was the patriarch not only of a large family, but of a community.
National Park Service
Intervals of violence interrupted the daily routine. Farmers with cattle and sheep freely roaming the ridges sometimes made it hard for others to grow corn and similar crops. A hunter’s bear and ’coon dogs might kill some sheep. One “war” ended with a fire on Fodder Stack Mountain that raced down into Chestnut Flats and killed a number of sheep. No humans died, but the sheep men killed all the hunting dogs in the vicinity.
H. C. Wilburn
“It is point blank aggravating, I can’t walk a log like I used to,” Aden Carver told H. C. Wilburn as he crossed Bradley Fork in October 1937 at the age of 91.