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
