The Land of the Blue Smoke: Three Chapters of the Smoky Mountains

The name on the morning mist

Wake up early in these mountains — earlier than the crowds, before the sun clears the ridgeline — and the valleys fill with a blue-gray haze that drifts between the layers of peaks like something breathing. The Cherokee, who called themselves Tsalagi and lived in these mountains for thousands of years, had a name for it: Shaconage, "the place of the blue smoke." It is the oldest story these mountains have, and it is still written on the sky every morning.

Spanish explorers under Hernando de Soto encountered the Cherokee in the southern Appalachians as early as 1540. Their towns dotted the river valleys — Kituwah, the Mother Town, the first Cherokee settlement and place of origin for the people, in what is now western North Carolina. Along the Oconaluftee River, from the Cherokee village name Egwanulti, "by the river," the waters were considered sacred; an archaeological survey identified a Cherokee settlement along the Oconaluftee just inside today's park — the only known permanent Cherokee village within the park's boundaries, likely destroyed by General Griffith Rutherford's army in 1776.

The nineteenth century brought the treaties, the land cessions — the Cherokee relinquished their last claims to the Smoky Mountain lands in 1819 — and then, in 1838 and 1839, the Trail of Tears: a grueling forced march on foot to Oklahoma and Arkansas that took most of the Cherokee from their homeland. But the story doesn't end there, and it matters that it doesn't. About eight hundred Cherokees living along the remote Oconaluftee were not subjected to removal. Under Principal Chief Yonaguska and his adopted son William Holland Thomas — a white man adopted into the tribe, the only European American ever to serve as its chief — Thomas spent decades purchasing roughly 50,000 acres around the Oconaluftee with his own and tribal funds. Tsali, a Cherokee leader, resisted the Army and was executed by the United States in exchange for the lives of the small band he protected.

The result is the Qualla Boundary, first surveyed in 1876: a land trust of more than 51,000 acres supervised by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, home to the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, a sovereign nation headquartered at Cherokee, North Carolina, at the park's southern entrance. In 1996 the Eastern Band reclaimed Kituwah itself, the Mother Town. And in 2019, for the first time in generations, tribal members legally gathered sochan — green-headed coneflower, a traditional Cherokee food — inside the national park under a new federal policy, described as a reconciliation acknowledging the Cherokee claim to their ancestral homeland.

The mountains you came to visit were somebody's home for millennia before they were anybody's vacation. That is not a footnote. That is the first chapter.

The valley that became a community

The second chapter belongs to the settlers who came after — and it began, like so many Smoky Mountain stories, with a family and a winter they nearly didn't survive.

In 1818, John Oliver, his wife Lucretia, and their young daughter Mary arrived in Cades Cove and began to settle it — the first permanent European-American settlers in the cove. The Cherokee were present with an active settlement there, and Lucretia Oliver later said the family survived their first winter only through Cherokee generosity: dried pumpkin, given to strangers. John Oliver was a War of 1812 veteran and a collier — a charcoal maker — by trade; the cabin that stands in the cove today was built in the 1820s, yards from the original, and generations of Olivers farmed there until the park era.

The valley grew. Cades Cove held 271 people in 1830, 685 in 1850, 708 in 1900. The farms were small — rarely more than 150 acres, a fifth to two-fifths cleared for crops and pasture — and the economy was stockraising, diversified agriculture, hunting, and fishing. It was a hard life made beautiful by stubbornness: Daniel Foute opened a bloomery forge in the cove in 1827 to fashion metal tools; Robert Shields built a tub mill on Forge Creek in 1835; John P. Cable's gristmill rose around 1870. In nearby Little Greenbrier, the schoolhouse built in 1882 served as school and Primitive Baptist church for 54 years under nearly fifty teachers, with some children walking barefoot up to nine miles for winter classes.

For a century, the Smokies held this world intact: self-reliant mountain communities living between the ridgelines, raising what they ate, making what they needed.

The saws

Then came the third chapter, and it nearly ended the mountains.

In 1901, Pennsylvania capitalist Colonel W. B. Townsend chartered the Little River Lumber Company and the Little River Railroad, bought up wooded land across Sevier County, and built a great band mill at the company town named Townsend after him — just down the road from where you'll be staying. The Little River Railroad laid 150 miles of track, none of which remains; its geared Shay locomotives, built for grades no ordinary engine could climb, dragged the forest out tree by tree. Log camps at Elkmont and Tremont housed workers' families in portable "set off houses" grouped in rows the crews called "string towns." On the North Carolina side, paper manufacturer Peter Gibson Thomson's Champion Fibre amassed 420,000 acres of timberlands and built a mammoth pulp mill at Canton; Champion's narrow-gauge logging railroads are today's hiking trails.

The scale is hard to picture now. About 110,000 acres of old-growth forest still remain in the park — even though 99 percent of the old growth that once covered the eastern United States is gone. The devastation is what galvanized everything that followed: people watched the mountains they'd loved being flayed, and they decided to stop it.

The movement had its prophets. Horace Kephart, a former St. Louis library director who came to the Smokies in 1904 after a personal breakdown, lived in a remote Hazel Creek cabin and wrote Our Southern Highlanders (1913) — becoming, as one historian put it, "one of the fiercest proponents for saving the Smokies from further destruction at the hands of the logging companies." Mount Kephart bears his name. George Masa, a Japanese immigrant photographer running an Asheville studio, climbed the peaks until he knew the topography better than anyone alive, recorded the official names of park features, charted the Appalachian Trail's route through the park, and sent his photographs to former First Lady Grace Coolidge and John D. Rockefeller Jr. He died penniless in 1933, never seeing the park; Masa Knob was named for him in 1961.

The money came from everywhere. In March 1928, the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial announced a $5 million gift in memory of Rockefeller's mother — half of all private donations — that ensured the movement's success. A grassroots drive raised more than $500,000, some of it pennies and nickels from Tennessee schoolchildren. Both states appropriated millions more. In 1925, Townsend agreed to deed his company's holdings — some 76,500 acres — to the park for about $3.58 an acre.

Congress authorized the park in 1926; it was formally established in 1934. Some 4,000 men in 22 Civilian Conservation Corps camps built its roads, trails, fire towers, and structures. And on September 2, 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt stood at the Rockefeller Monument at Newfound Gap and dedicated Great Smoky Mountains National Park — more than 521,000 acres across two states, today America's most-visited national park.

The sisters who stayed

One story from the park's making deserves to be told, because it captures the mountain character better than any statistic.

In Little Greenbrier, five unmarried sisters — Margaret Jane, Polly, Louisa, Hettie, and Martha Walker — inherited the family farm, and when the park land commission came in the 1930s to buy them out, they refused to sell. Fearing the bad publicity of condemning five elderly sisters, the commission balked. In 1941 the Walkers sold for $4,750 in exchange for a lifetime lease, and kept living the traditional mountain life: spinning, weaving, farming — their land, they said, produced everything they needed except sugar, soda, coffee, and salt. A 1946 Saturday Evening Post article made them famous. The last sister, Louisa, died in 1964, and the National Park Service assumed the farm.

They weren't resisting the park. They were simply unwilling to leave the only world they'd ever known — and the park, to its credit, let them stay to the end of it.

The light show

There is a postscript the Walkers would have loved. In the moist cove hardwood forests around Elkmont — the old logging camp that became a Knoxville summer colony — lives Photinus carolinus, the synchronous firefly. Every June, for a few weeks, the males flash in unison, whole hillsides blinking as one. The phenomenon was brought to the scientific world's attention by naturalist Lynn Frierson Faust, who grew up in a family cabin at Elkmont and watched the "Light Show" every spring of her childhood; researchers later documented the synchronization. It is one of the great natural spectacles in North America, and it happens a short drive from your door, on summer nights, in the dark woods.

Sleep in the place of the blue smoke

These mountains have been a Cherokee homeland, a settler's valley, a logging empire, and a national park — sometimes all in one lifetime. The mist still rises the way it did when it was called Shaconage. The fireflies still flash over Elkmont. The Walker sisters' cabin still stands in Little Greenbrier.

Ember Den, Obsidian Den, and Smoky Opal Den — Zara's Getaways' three Smoky Dens — sit in the heart of this story, near the Townsend and Elkmont corridors where the logging railroads once ran and the park begins. Hike the old logging grades. Drive Cades Cove at dawn. Stand at Newfound Gap where Roosevelt dedicated the park. And in the early morning, watch the blue smoke rise between the ridges — the oldest name these mountains have, still being spoken.