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,
