Читать книгу The Ultimate Fly-Fishing Guide to the Smoky Mountains - Greg Ward - Страница 9

THE STORY OF TROUT FISHING in the Great Smoky Mountains and the surrounding region has been largely ignored in print. Whether for sport or sustenance, fishing has long been a favorite American pursuit. Trout fishing in the crystal-clear waters of the Smokies has occupied a special place in the fabric of mountain life since before the arrival of the settlers.

The Cherokee were perhaps the first people to encounter the local brook trout. The Cherokee name for these colorful little fish was “unahnvsahti,” according to my old friend Adam Smith, a tribal member who often showed me roots and herbs when I frequently visited the reservation. Some sources believe that the Cherokee also called the native fish “adaja.” At best it is a wild guess, which is noted here merely to add to the overall confusion.

What is known, though, is that for the Cherokee, fishing was not a recreational pastime, although it was not altogether an arduous affair. Like all eastern tribes they used bone hooks and choke stones. Brook trout served as trail fare for Native American travelers crossing the rugged mountains. A favorite and very effective method of getting trout was to sprinkle a pool or two with poison made from local plants, such as the bark of the black walnut tree. After being stricken by the poison, the fish, which were usually stunned, floated to the surface and were easily gathered. Additionally, ground-up yellow buckeye nuts and goat’s rue (also called devil’s shoestring) were used. These nuts contain the compound aesculin, which attacks the nervous system of trout. The rootstock of the goat’s rue contains rotenone, although not so concentrated as the NPS used to gut Abrams Creek in the 1960s.

The use of a weir was another fishing technique employed by the Cherokee. A “V” of rocks was positioned in a stream. At the point of the “V,” a weir was fastened down. Fish were driven downstream to be caught in the weir. This sort of effort was often a cooperative undertaking by several families or even an entire village and typically occurred on larger streams. A community fish fry usually followed. White settlers took possession of these stone weirs and used them for generations. Today most have been dynamited by game wardens, but I know the location of at least one on the Nolichucky River.

Early settlers arriving in the Tennessee Valley found the cloud-covered peaks mantled in the most diverse hardwood forest in the world. Preferring to carve a living out of the many rich river bottoms, most settlers bypassed the Smokies. Those who chose to live in the isolated mountains picked the rich coves and scattered bottomlands. As the population grew, some settlers moved westward, while others moved farther up the slopes of the mountains in search of tillable land. Travel was difficult, and hard cash was scarce. The region became a backwater area in America’s great western movement of the 19th century. It developed its own distinct culture, independent and self-reliant; the area’s colorful lifestyle flourished for almost a century.

Like the Cherokee, the mountain people looked upon the brook trout as a dependable source of food rather than a form of sport. Referred to as “specs” by these mountaineers, brook trout originally prospered in all waters above an elevation of 2,000 feet. The hardworking mountain people must surely have enjoyed fishing for these little fighters. Early accounts repeatedly speak of daily catches of hundreds of fish. Fishing methods such as poisoning and weirs were adopted from the Cherokee.

One favorite method commonly used in this region was known as “choking.” Store-bought fish hooks were out of the reach of the economically depressed mountain people, but their resourcefulness sidestepped this problem neatly. A suitable bait was tied to a length of string and dropped into the water. When a trout would take the bait, the trick was to quickly jerk the fish out onto the bank before it had a chance to expel the bait. According to old-timers, many a meal of fresh trout came to the table as a result.

While visiting Catluche River (Cataloochee) in the 1880s, Wilbur G. Zeigler and Ben S. Grosscup, who authored The Heart of the Alleghanies or Western North Carolina: Comprising its Topography, History, Resources, People, Narratives, Incidents, and Pictures of Travel Adventures in Hunting and Fishing, encountered a young boy who had caught a “mess” of brook trout using a snare made of horse tail hair that was very effective when the little streams were a bit riley. The lad explained to them that he made a running noose in a long horse hair or two or three of ’em tied together on the end of a pole. The boy would watch the water behind a log until he spotted a big trout. The boy would then drop the noose over the head of the fish, and with a quick jerk, snake the trout free from the stream. Sounds like fun.

Logging in the Smokies prior to the 1880s was insignificant compared to what occurred in the next 55 years. The abundant forests of the southern mountains had not escaped the attention of the growing nation’s appetite for wood. Large-scale logging operations descended upon the southern Appalachians near the close of the 19th century. The shrill sound of the narrow-gauge locomotives laboring up steep grades could be heard from northern Virginia to Georgia. The Smokies, situated in the middle of this widespread activity, yielded over 1 billion board feet of lumber by 1935.

These cuttings devastated the land and the wildlife. The brook trout, which require unpolluted, cold water, could not cope with silt-choked streams, high water temperatures, dams, and other factors. Concerned fishermen shipped in rainbow trout in the early 1900s. The adaptable rainbow prospered. Anglers of that era contend that fishing during the first 30 years of the 20th century was the best ever seen in these mountains. The streams were free of overhead cover that now shades most of them. Many forms of aquatic insects prospered in the sunlight to a greater degree than they can today in the shaded waters. Open glades, then common alongside many streams, were alive with grasshoppers, the favorite summer bait of that time. Trout were said to have averaged more than a pound each.

Walter Cole, a resident of Gatlinburg was born in the Sugarland and roamed the Smokies before the arrival of the logging companies. At the time I knew him, he was in his late 90s, and he shared these memories with me one morning in 1980.

As I remember, I was 7 years old when my father and older brother allowed me to come along when they crossed over Blanket Mountain, by the Huskey Gap Trail, to fish for trout in Little River. We packed in our cornmeal, skillet, lard, coffee, blankets, ax, and gun. We had our crop laid in, with harvesting time still a ways off. In those days, anybody could just go up in the mountains, build a shelter, and stay as long as they wanted, huntin’ and fishin’.

The logging people hadn’t come yet, and the creeks were swarming with speckle trouts, thick as gnats. It was always dark as sundown, fishin’ for them, with the big hemlocks and poplars shading out the light. It was easy to catch all the 10-to 14-inch fish you wanted then. I’ve even caught a few that were a tad longer than 16 inches.

We set up camp and gathered enough stickbait to last all day, then cut us a good birch sapling for a fishin’ pole. We started up the creek, stringing our catch on a stick till it wouldn’t hold another fish. We set it down in a deep pool to keep it cool, moving on upstream doing the same until we had caught all we wanted. On the way back to camp, we collected the hidden fish, fried them whole in hot grease, and ate them with nothin’ except cornbread. That was the best eatin’ I ever had. We would do that every summer, sometimes staying for weeks living on fish and game we’d sometimes shoot. Come frost, we’d be sure to be home to get in the corn and cut wood.”

Cole later went to work for the Little River Logging Company, where he did a bit of everything. He recalled the riotous living in the Elkmont camp, where moonshine, gambling, fast women, and fishing were as much a part of living as sawdust and splinters.

I was there when the first rainbow trout came into camp from Michigan. They raised them up in a run next to Little River. When they were ready to release them in the creeks, they turned half of them loose in Little River and hauled the others over Huskey Gap, by a mule-pulled wagon, in rain barrels, to the West Prong of the Little Pigeon. I believe the year was 1911. The fishery people have been trying to figure out what has driven the “specs” off. I can tell you in one word—rainbow. The brook trout’s time has passed. Someday I figure the rainbow may have to give way to the brown trout, just the same way.

For years it was assumed that sport fishing in the Smokies was almost solely a local endeavor and that it was pretty much rudimentary bait fishing with pole and line. This is hardly the case, though, as modern fly-fishing as it’s practiced today found its way to these waters almost as quickly as it did to the Catskills.

During these early years of fly-fishing, the Smokies attracted the attention of serious anglers. Some were sport fishermen whose lines were tipped with a feathery fly; others preferred to cast dynamite into a pool.

The American angling scene, which during the late 1880s had seen the introduction of brightly colored flies for trout, was undergoing a change of its own during these times. An angler from New York, Theodore Gordon, was experimenting with a new technique for taking trout. Correspondence between Gordon and F. M. Halford, an Englishman dubbed the “father of dry fly-fishing,” led to Halford’s sending Gordon a sample of English dry flies. From this beginning, the sport of dry fly-fishing spread from Gordon’s home waters in the Catskills down the Appalachian range. In the southern Appalachians, however, it was not nearly as quickly embraced as in many other regions, but the time lapse is far shorter than was once assumed.

Most early anglers of the South used the old “buggy whip” style rods or a simple cane pole from cane breaks such as those still found along Hesse Creek. The buggy whip rods were sometimes homemade from such materials as ash, birch, hickory, or cherry. Hair from the tail of a stallion or gelding was used to make fishing line. (Many experienced fishermen shunned the use of hair from a mare or filly because it was believed that contact with urine weakened the strength of the hairs.)

Of course, those who could afford it used silk fly line that had to be greased before each fishing trip. If you fished until noon, it often was necessary to unspool the fly line to be put in a butter-churn-looking spindle to dry in the sun. Store-bought gut leaders were equally inconvenient. When you bought them, they were almost as stiff and brittle as uncooked spaghetti. Soaked overnight in a tin leader box between layers of damp felt, they became much like the leaders fly-fishermen would recognize today.

Most Appalachian trout fishermen lacked the funds to purchase the $5 Charles F. Orvis fly rods or even the $1 bamboo rods pictured in the large mail-order catalogs. There was at least one local rod builder located in Pigeon Forge. The Ramsey Rods, built completely from scratch, lacked the exquisite craftsmanship of those from the shops in the East; yet they exhibited a fine feel and were affordable. Those that remain today are treasured by their owners.

I met Ernest Ramsey around 1973. At the time Ramsey had long ago stopped making split-cane bamboo rods, but he still tied flies. His pattern selection consisted of perhaps a dozen different flies, the most exotic being a single dun wing Royal Coachman. The flies were dirt cheap in 1970, $3 a dozen, and if you looked closely at them you might easily have guessed they were a bit over-priced. However, they caught trout—and lots of them—on a consistent basis. They were also tough as nails, taking more abuse than any flies you could order from Vermont in those days. He always offered us a sip from a fruit jar whenever we made a stop by his home on Middle Creek. Smooth, no; but warming, yes.

Ramsey’s fly-tying business was more of a sideline, as he was perhaps Sevier County’s best-known trainer and fighter of gamecocks. To say he had a never-ending supply of fresh hackles would be quite an understatement. Ramsey showed me his rod-making gear once and offered to sell it to me along with a big armload of Tonkin bamboo in the raw. I was perhaps 20 years old then and way too smart to waste money on those dust-encrusted contraptions.

Each little community had its own group of devoted hunters and anglers. They spent an enormous amount of time hunting bear or raccoon, and fishing. Having a reputation for being in the mountains at all hours was also useful to those making moonshine. The phrase “going fishing” often implied one was going to brew “corn squeezins.” I sometimes wonder if trout, which are fond of sweet corn, did not develop this taste during the days of moonshine making, when mash was commonly dumped in the streams!

Trout fishing gradually became a form of recreation with the locals and the ever-increasing stream of tourists coming to explore the Smokies. The use of bait slowly gave way to the use of artificials. In those days, each streamshed of the Smokies had a few men who worked as guides for fishing, hiking, or hunting, as the era of the traveling hunter/fisherman was becoming popular nationwide.

The earliest published writing on recreational fishing dates to 1883 when coauthors, Wilbur G. Zeigler and Ben S. Grosscup, published The Heart of the Alleghanies or Western North Carolina: Comprising its Topography, History, Resources, People, Narratives, Incidents, and Pictures of Travel Adventures in Hunting and Fishing. Avid anglers who were particularly fond of the Cataloochee, they devoted an entire chapter to trout fishing. “With Rod and Line” opens with:

Streams, from which the angler can soon fill his basket with trout, are not wanting in these mountains. It is the cold, pure waters, that spring from the perpetual fountains of the heights, that this royal fish inhabits. Show me a swift and amber-colored stream, babbling down the mountains slope under dense, luxurious forests, and, between laureled banks, issuing with rapids and cascades into a primitive valley, and I will insure that in it swims, in countless numbers, the prized fish of the angler.

Robert S. Mason, in his now out-of-print book, The Lure of the Smokies, published in 1927, devoted several pages to fishing in the Smoky Mountains. He listed the names of guides who were available for hire, flies that were most effective, and comments from a number of long-time anglers of the region. Among Mason’s favorites was Matt Whittle of Gatlinburg.

Whittle, a horticulturalist by trade, fished the streams of the Smokies all his life, and prior to the creation of the park was perhaps the best-known angler on the Tennessee side of the mountains. His roots in the region go back to the earliest settlers in the Little Pigeon River drainage. John “Bullhead” Whaley sold to Whittle brothers some 800 acres in what became Cherokee Orchard. Located in the shadow of the western flank of Mount Le Conte, it was a prosperous business. When the NPS acquired the Whittle property in 1933, the brothers were tending to about 6,800 apple trees, representing some 47 varieties. They also commercially grew Virginia boxwoods, eastern hemlocks, azaleas, andromeda, and other nursery stock. The NPS gave the owners of the nursery 30 years to abandon the orchard in increments of one third of the land per decade. Each season the fruit was picked and shipped to market until the last tract of orchard was relinquished in 1963. The once-thriving fruit trees and other ornamentals have been overtaken by weeds, vines, and finally the forest itself. If you know where to look, you can still find gnarled apple trees producing small, tasty apples.

Dubbed the “Izaak Walton” of the Smokies, Whittle understood the habits of his quarry as few have on either side of the Smokies. Going against the common belief of his day that indicated matching the hatch when fishing with flies, Whittle felt it was of no real importance what kind of fly you used, but how you fished with what you were using, and how the fish were feeding. Whittle often left his orchard-and-shrubbery business to guide “Yankee” fishermen up the streams of the Smokies. Well-known angler George La Branche is said to have been among those who accompanied Whittle into the Smokies.

In the 1990s when I spent considerable time with Joe Manley, he recounted frequently going fly-fishing with Whittle, whom he credited with showing him where and how to fish the streams of the Smokies. Manley says that he was introduced by Whittle to such famous anglers as Ben East and Joe Brooks of Outdoor Life as well as Ozark Ripley. Manley described Matt Whittle as the most knowledgeable angler and expert of local flora of the Smokies.

According to Manley, one of Whittle’s favorite stories involved fishing with George La Blanche, the noted Yankee fly-fishing expert of his era. George La Branche, along with Theodore Gordon had property (it is now inundated) along the Neversink River in New York. La Branche pioneered fishing dry flies on fast water, something new to the sport in the early 1900s. According to Manley, Whittle had a acquired a copy of La Branche’s book, The Dry Fly and Fast Water Fishing with the Floating Fly on American Trout Streams (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1914). Whittle initiated correspondence with La Branche, which resulted in the then most famous fly-fishermen in the country visiting the Smokies.

“Matt told me that George La Branche had the most delicate fly presentation he ever saw,” noted Manley. “He schooled Matt in the importance of checking the fly in the air to get a delicate delivery. A powerful caster, La Branche was skillful enough to whip his silk fly line so that the fly stopped motionless in midair only an inch from the water at the head of a plunge pool. His flies were on the surface before his leader or line touched the surface. Matt said he owed a lot to what La Branche taught him.”

I am of the opinion that Manley’s footprints in the lore of fly-fishing in the Smokies are not only largely unknown, but by some presumably scholarly sources, virtually ignored. Manley and I met and chatted on numerous occasions. In the 1940s and 1950s he was perhaps the best-known angler in the state, knowing outdoor writers and editors of sporting journals from many locales. Along with taking Ben East of Outdoor Life fly-fishing in the Smokies on several occasions, he also accompanied Charles N. Elliott, a Georgia native who was also an editor at that well-known New York-based sporting publication. Elliott befriended me in the mid-1970s when we first met at an outdoor-writer’s conference. Ironically, at the time I was putting together my first Great Smoky Mountains National Park trout fishing guidebook.

Perhaps the most respected fly-fishermen in the South at that time, Elliott did not believe that a detailed guidebook on the remote waters of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park was a good idea. He thought it should be carefully considered because of the increased fishing traffic that might follow. An entire book could be devoted to Charles Elliott’s contributions to fly-fishing for trout in the southern Appalachian Mountains. He was a forest ranger for many years, and then later he was the longest-serving editor at Outdoor Life, from 1956 to 1974. His home waters are the Cohutta Wilderness Area in northern Georgia, but he frequented the streams in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park when he had the opportunity. The more you learn about Elloitt, the more interesting he is to the lore of fly-fishing for trout in the Smokies. For example, Mark Trail is a newspaper comic strip created by cartoonist Ed Dodd in 1946 and loosely based on the life and career of Elliott, who died in 2000. The Mark Trail strip centers on environmental and ecological themes. In 2006, King Features syndicated the strip to nearly 175 newspapers. Among Dodd’s efforts with the Mark Trail character is the book Mark Trail in the Smokies!: A Naturalist’s Look at Great Smokey Mountains National Park and the Southern Appalachians, which was published in 1989.

In the 1930s when Elliott worked at the Atlanta Journal Constitution, he told me that he was befriended by a promising young writer named Margret Mitchell. She had written her first and only novel, Gone With The Wind, when she was struck down by a motorist in downtown Atlanta.

Manley also told me that Matt Whittle also fished with Ozark Ripley, one of the best-known outdoor writers of the early 1900s, who had moved from Missouri to Chattanooga in the 1930s. Ozark Ripley was the colorful pen name for John Baptiste de Macklot Thompson (generally referred to as John B. Thompson), who was educated in France prior to World War I. An avid fly-fisherman, Ripley lived in east Tennessee where he continued his passion for float fishing for smallmouth bass he had engaged in while operating out of the Ozarks. Perhaps the most interesting of all Smoky Mountains fly-fishing lore lies in this man and his relationships with Ernest Peckinpaugh. Many fly-fishing historians credit the invention of the popping bug to Ernest H. Peckinpaugh of Chattanooga, Tennessee, prior to World War I. The legend of Peckinpaugh’s invention was recounted by Robert Page Lincoln (Bloody Abe’s boy) in 1952:

To E. H. Peckinpaugh, of Chattanooga, Tennessee, belongs the honor of having invented the cork-bodied bass bug…. According to Peckinpaugh he had accidentally dropped a cork bottle stopper on the stream which he was fishing and as it floated away with the current he was suddenly struck with the idea of making a floating bass bug out of cork. As a result he ran the stem of a hook through a cork …. Instead of feathers he used a pinch or two of bucktail hair, tying in the thatch at the head of the fly as it were. While this initial lure was quite crude, Peckinpaugh was amazed at the fish that it took …. All this took place in the year 1907.

Quite the marketer, Peckinpaugh entered into agreements with well-known anglers of the 1900s to have their names associated with special bugs and flies in his diverse line. Along with Ozark Ripley, the list includes Zane Grey and Dr. Henshall. Here’s where the story gets interesting though. Long before migrating to Chattanooga or meeting Ernest Peckinpaugh, Ripley had been in contact with none other than Theodore Gordon, the Fly Father. According to Ozark’s published remarks, a letter Gordon wrote to him in 1903 indicated that the Wizard of the Neversink was making dressing popping bugs prior to this time. I’m still searching for the still-missing parts to this mystery, but Whittle’s association with the country’s first fly-fishing icons raises many questions that are still unanswered for those who seek a truly accurate account of the history of fly-fishing in the Smoky Mountains.

Fly-fishing for trout also has roots on the North Carolina side of the park, although by comparison they’re pretty vanilla. The Hazel Creek area was one of the most developed regions of the Smokies prior to the formation of the National Park. It was also the stomping ground of Colonel Calhoun and the well-known Hazel Creek Fishing Club. From their lodge, which was located on Hazel Creek near the present-day Calhoun backcountry campsite, members hunted boar, bear, and deer during the winter, and fished for trout during the summer. During the tenure of the Hazel Creek Club Fishing, much of the water was private fishing, complete with a club warden to prevent any of the 600 people living in the Hazel Creek valley from fishing these waters, which had been stocked with rainbow trout by “Squire” Granville Calhoun of Bryson City. Despite the fact the adjacent slopes were denuded and splash dams had been a determent to the stream, in surprisingly short order Hazel Creek gained a reputation as the finest trout stream in the East. Tales of the exploits of these rough-and-ready men and their favorite hounds are still the subject of lively discussions among locals.

One of the most famous duos of the mountains included two North Carolina men named Samuel Hunnicutt and Mark Cathey. Natives of the Bryson City/Deep Creek area, they were said to have been inseparable companions from the turn of the century through the 1920s. Deep Creek, which they considered the best fishing in the country, was a favorite haunt of both. Cathey occasionally guided fishermen into the Smokies. He accompanied Horace Kephart up Deep Creek on a number of Kephart’s many trips. Kephart, aside from being one of the earliest outdoor scribes to give accounts of the Smokies and an outspoken advocate for the formation of the national park, was fond of trout fishing in these mountains. Cathey took considerable satisfaction in allowing his guest to watch him bewitch trout using his “dance of the fly.” Using a long cane pole, he would dabble the fly over the water in a figure eight, enticing even the most wary and sullen trout into a vicious strike.

Cathey was born on Conley Creek near Whittier in 1871 and lived most of his life on Indian Creek, a feeder stream to Deep Creek. He died of an apparent heart attack while hunting during mid-autumn in 1944. On the afternoon of his death, he left his sister’s cabin on Hughes Branch to get a mess of squirrels. Cathey did not return and was later found stone cold with his back against a large oak with his rifle in lap and his loyal Plott hound lying beside him. His tombstone epitaph in a Bryson City cemetery simply reads: “Beloved Hunter and Fisherman was himself caught by the Gospel Hook just before the season closed for good.” Doubtless Cathey was well known on the North Carolina side of the Smokies, but his fame was far less than that of Matt Whittle.

Born in 1880, Samuel Hunnicutt grew up on Deep Creek at the mouth of Bumgarner Branch just upstream from Indian Creek, approximately a mile north of the Deep Creek Campground area. Never rightly accused of having a bashful bone in him, from this youth onward Hunnicutt was known for announcing his approach with a loud yodel-yell, which he noted was “perfect.” Aside from being a fisherman, he was a much-heralded bear–and–coon hunter, with a perfect love for Plott hounds, a sporting breed developed in the Smokies. Hunicutt’s three best-known hounds were Dread, Jolly, and Old Wheeler. When he was age 46 in 1926 and the region was abuzz with efforts to create the national park, Hunnicutt published Twenty Years of Hunting and Fishing in the Great Smokies (Knoxville: S.B. Newman & Company). A 216-page, soft-covered book, that contains numerous photographs of hunters and fishermen, their camps and hounds. In 1951 Hunnicutt published a second edition that consisted of 188 pages.

Hunnicutt and Cathey would spend weeks at a time on the upper reaches of Deep Creek. An amusing tale concerning one of their trips tells of the two leaving camp one morning at the forks of the Left Prong and the mainstream of Deep Creek. Cathey was to fish the Left Prong until supper, and Hunnicutt the Right Prong. Hunnicutt found the fish less than cooperative, and returned to camp empty-handed. Cathey had not yet made it back, so after waiting for a while, Hunnicutt decided to try his hand up the Left Prong and meet Cathey on his return trip. He’d fished approximately 300 yards of the creek, creeling eleven nice trout along the way, when he rounded a bend and saw Cathey, who had 90 trout strung over his shoulder. Hunnicutt asked Cathey if he was mad about his coming to meet him. Cathey’s reply was short and rather stern, as he eyed the eleven fish at Hunnicutt’s side: “No, but had you not come to meet me, I would have had a hundred trout when I reached camp.”

During the late 1960s and early 1970s while researching my various books on fishing the Great Smokiy Mountains National Park, I encountered a surprising number of old men who shared their stories of Uncle Mark. They are too numerous to note here, but the zeal with which each one of these old-timers told me their Cathey recollections was as telling as was their tales. Doubtless he was a dashing daredevil of an old bachelor, who as a youth rode logs bareback down the shoots, and later in life chased bears over the ridges so long as the baritone bays of his Plott hounds could be heard.

Carl Standing Deer of the Qualla Reservation was perhaps the best-known sport angler among the Cherokees during the early years of the park. Standing Deer, whose greatest claim to fame rested on his deadly aim with his hand-built bow, proudly referred to himself as the grandson of Suyetta, the revered Cherokee storyteller. Standing Deer was a dyed-in-the-wool traditionalist, who used horsehair lines after gut and even nylon lines were available, and scorned flies, preferring stickbait and wasp larvae. Standing Deer considered Deep Creek to have the finest fishing in the Smokies, and was occasionally available as a guide. He often posed in his chief attire along the main thoroughfare of Cherokee, and one can only wonder how many kids from my generation had their photos taken with the war-bonnet-wearing chief by an old Browning Hawkeye camera for the modest charge of 25 cents.

After the national park was formed, the fishing changed. Gradually, bait fishing became illegal in all park waters. Creel and size limits were imposed. Auto access to many streams became a thing of the past. With the building of Fontana Dam, the park grew as the Tennessee Valley Authority turned over much of the land it had acquired from residents who would have been isolated as a result of the impounding of the Little Tennessee River. The power from Fontana Dam was funneled into the nation’s atomic research center at Oak Ridge. The Smokies were the site of some secret road-building practice for the Army Corps of Engineers and of other experiments for the military.

Until 1947 the streams of the Smokies were annually restocked with large numbers of both brook and rainbow trout, in an effort to provide park visitors with “quality” fishing. Rearing stations were operated at the Chimneys, Tremont, Cades Cove, and on Kephart’s Prong. Today, the Smokies offer fine sport fishing for rainbow and brown trout. Fishing for brook trout was sharply curtailed in 1975 when a large number of brook trout streams were closed to all fishing, and it then became illegal to kill a brook trout.

This area is rich in tradition and fishing tales. When tramping down the banks of these streams, it is always interesting to wonder what happened along these trails in previous years.