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
