by bluewaters | Jan 10, 2018 | Uncategorized
When you come into Hayesville from the East over U.S. 64, you cross Chunky Gal Mountain and pass through Shooting Creek. To the north rise the Tusquittees, aloof and mysterious and unapproachable. To the southeast looms the legendary Standing Indian. And to the west, beyond the lush valley of the Hiawassee stands Brasstown Bald.
All of which is by way of an introduction to place-names and the little known stories behind them. Let’s start with Chunky Gal. She’s a favorite among mountain place names. Maybe it’s because the name suggests a rollicking, foot-tapping fiddle tune. The facts, however, call for a lonesome tune, a ballad of young love nipped in the bud.
It all began when this was brooding wilderness and the land was home to the Cherokees.
There was an Indian maiden living on Shooting Creek. She was dark-eyed and buxom, the envy of her more skinny tribal sisters. And she had a handsome brave from the Wayahs for a beau.
After months of steady courting, the young lovers announced they were going to get married. But, for some unexplained reason, the girl’s father opposed the marriage.
So they ran away. They headed for the young brave’s home beyond the high mountains to the east. But the way was steep and long, the going slow. Time and again, in their climb to the sky, they had to stop and rest.
Meanwhile, the girl’s father discovered she had fled the village. He organized a party of fleet-footed warriors and took out in pursuit. He caught the fleeing lovers at the big spring in the gap of the mountain where they had paused to drink and catch their breath.
The irate father grabbed his daughter and warned the young brave he would be skinned alive if he ever showed up in the Shooting Creek again. And then he took his daughter back home.
And when the white settlers moved in and asked the Indians the name of the mountain they had crossed to get to Shooting Creek, the Indians said: “It’s Chunky Gal”.
Nobody knows what the Indians called the Shooting Creek section. It may have been Hiawassee, which is to say “savannah” or “meadow”.
It the early days, the pioneers met on the creek to hold shooting matches with their muzzle loading rifles, shooting for beef, deer or bear, turkey or whiskey. So they called it Shooting Creek.
Brasstown, now renowned as the home of the John C. Campbell Folk School, came by its name when some Indians turned up a rich load of gold. They thought it was brass and called the site of their strike “Brasstown” and built a village there.
Fires Creek, long an Eden of place for trout, was named for a man who first lived there by the name of Fires.
Peckerwood was named for an Indian known to the whites as Jim Peckerwood who lived about the fork of the branch.
Compass Creek got its name from Robert Henry, a surveyor and Revolutionary War veteran, who dropped his compass in the stream as he was crossing it.
Cherry Mill Creek was named for John Tucker Cherry who settled on a little stream just outside of what is now Hayesville in 1844 and built himself a gristmill.
Tusquittee is the name of a mountain range, a stream and a community. It is pure Cherokee, meaning “place of the rafters”.
Butcher Knife Ridge came by its name because a man named Tom Lance found a butcher knife there.
Couch Gap was so named because during the American Civil War its cliffs were a hiding place for dodgers and slackers who lived on wild hog meat.
Hurricane Creek got its name from a gif blow that blew down all the trees along the creek.
Nobody remembers his name, but he was a chair maker. So folks called the branch he lived on Chairmaker Branch.
Licklog came from the Davis family who felled trees not far from the church in that vicinity and cut.
Chonooga, which is say “groundhog” in Cherokee, got its name because folks caught so many groundhogs there.
Some folks say that the creek called Sweetwater was named by the Cherokee. Others say the settlers gave it that name because everybody on the creek raised sorghum cane and made molasses.
Medlock Creek was named for Medlock, Quals Creek for slave owned Robert Henry who set her free and built her a house at the foot of the mountain.
Stamey Cove is really Sunday Branch, named for a man named Sunday. Boon Gap was named for Bill Boon and Steve Gap for Stephen Kitchens.
Vineyards Mountain on Shooting Creek honors an abandoned enterprise started by an unremembered Englishman who covered the mountain with grape vines. But the grapes failed to prosper and he returned to England.
Woman Gap was named by the Indians who stole a settler’s woman and held her captive there for a spell.
Potrock Bald was named for a large rock on top of the mountain that was hollowed out by an Indian medicine man and used to steep his medicinal herbs.
Weatherman Bluffs wasn’t coined to honor a local meteorologist, but was named for Juckerson Weatherman who lived at the base of the bluff.
Cullakanee is a corruption of the Cherokee word Kalanu meaning the “the raven”.
The list of original place names is endless. And if you take the time to inquire you will come up with the how and why of them. But for us…Chunky Gal tops them all!
by bluewaters | Jan 8, 2018 | Uncategorized
Mountain folk sprinkle their talk with proverbs and proverbial sayings. Some of their language is pretty descriptive. The expressions help them say what they feel about everything, covering the field of life unto death. Whatever the occasion, a local is never at a loss for an appropriate saying in the local store or around the hearth fire, the talk is often sparked with wisdom and wit.
Chances are if you hang around a spell you’ll hear the following….
As pore as bear that’s wintered up in the balsams
Weddin’ without courtin’ is like vittles without salt
Good looks in a woman haint worth as much to a man as good cookin’ and wavin’ ways
Beauty never made a kettle sing
Never get your horse into a place where you can’t turn around
A buggy whip can’t take the place of corn
Those who dance must pay the fiddler
Whatever goes over the devil’s back will have to go under his belly
A lean dog for a long chase
An old dog barks sittin’ down
If the subject happens to deal with a wasteful woman, one is apt to say “she threw more out the back door than her man could tote in the front”.
A mountain man might sit silently by while an absent neighbor was being raked over the coals and then put a quietus to the talk by saying “I ain’t been in his shoes and I can’t gauge his footsteps.”
Then there are others such as:
A man without a knife ain’t worth a wife
Talk’s cheap but it takes money to buy bread and butter
It’s never too late to mend
No man stays far from a sweet mouth and a good table
Pretty is as pretty does
Where there’s bees there’s honey
The rain don’t know broadcloth from jeans
A woman’s excuses are like her apron, easily lifted
If you want to catch the calf, give a nubbin to the cow
What can’t be cured must be endured
Don’t neglect your own field to plant your neighbor’s
Don’t hist one foot until the other’s settin’ flat
You can’t teach your granny how to pick geese
You’d better watch a frisky heifer
Cast not the helve after the ax
A skittish horse won’t carry double
Don’t miss her no more than a cold draft after the door’s shut
Don’t smother the goose with the featherbed
He’s not the best carpenter who makes the most chips
Sap-risin’ time is lovin’ time
A lonesome heart ain’t good to bear
The back pays for the mouth eats
Don’t eat the lean and leave the fat
You can’t lose what you ain’t got
Feed him good and sweet talk him and he’ll hang close around your doorstep
Not worth the salt that goes into his bread
Sit down and rest yourself, settin’s cheaper’n standin’
The sun is the poor man’s clock
He’d buy a load of cord wood to peddle out in hell if you’d give him till Christmas to pay for it
He’ll take anything that’s not too hot to hold or too heavy to tote
All of which is by of recalling that folks in the mountains use some pretty descriptive language!
by bluewaters | Jan 4, 2018 | Uncategorized
There is a wonderful and comparatively unknown world of myth waiting to be mined along the highways and by-ways of these mountains. To discover this bonanza of fancy, you must seek out the old ones and listen with the attentiveness and faith of a child to the things they have to tell.
When they set to talking, the jingle of the mythmaker’s coinage in their heads, they give new and wondrous meaning to this valley, or yonder mountains, or that river bend, or the great mass of stones jutting there toward the sky.
As the nuggets of myth and fancy crop up, take a map of the Carolina highlands and mark the spot where each find was made. For this is to be your guide into a land where the mythmaker left his mark. You will want to go up this road and down that one, stopping here to listen for strange voices and pausing there to look for strange creatures.
And right here is good as place as any to begin the pilgrimage into the mountain myth world – here in the narrow-walled valley of the Nantahala, which the Cherokees called the Valley of the Noonday Sun.
Up there where the overhanging cliff is the highest is the haunt of the great snake Uwtsunta, the bouncer, named by the Cherokee because it moved by jerks like a measuring worm, with only one part of its body on the ground at a time. Uwtsunta generally stayed on the east side where the sun came first in the morning and used to cross by reaching over the highest point of the cliff until it could get a grip on the other side, when it pull over the rest of its body. The snake was so immense that when it was stretched thus across its shadow darkened the whole valley below, and only when the sun was straight overhead did any light filter into the valley.
Now travel into the Great Smokies. There fast under Clingman’s Dome lies the mystic Lake of Miracles, a body of water visible only to those with second sight. Wounded animals, particularly bear, could be healed by bathing it.
At the head of Cheowa River on the Macon-Graham border is Swim Bald mountain where a monster horney once had its nest. When it wasn’t flying above the treetops it was sunning itself on the bald. It was so fierce it drove away anyone who came near the mountain.
At Whiteside Mountain in Jackson County near Cashiers is where Utlunta or Spear-finger, whose food was human livers attempted to build a great rock bridge through the air to Hiawassee near Murphy – a distance of a hundred miles – but lightning destroyed the span before it was completed. Pieces of the bridge can still be seen.
Near East Laport is Jutaculla Rock, which bears the handprint of the giant Jutaculla who could drink a stream dry at a gulp and who used lightning as arrows for his bow.
There are two bald spots on a mountain at the head of Little Snowbird Creek near Robbinsville where a mysterious being, having the form of a giant, with head blazing like the sun, once landed. When it flew away the herbage was burned away where he had landed, thus the bald spots.
Above Bryson City on the Tuckaseegee River is a deep hole where a family of water bears lived. And there are two red dogs, the Cherokee used to say, who lived under the water just above the village of Cherokee.
Gregory Bald in northern Graham County was known to the Cherokee as “Rabbit Place”. Here the rabbits had their townhouse and here lived under their chief, the Great Rabbit. In olden times people could see him. He was as large as a deer, and all the little rabbits were subject to him.
Throughout the mountains, according to the old Cherokee storytellers, there is a race of spirits called Yunwi Tsunsdi or Little People, who live in rock caves. They are little fellows, hardly reaching up to a man’s knee but well-shaped and handsome, with long hair falling almost to the ground. They are great workers and fond of music.
At Franklin is the famous Nikwasi mound, which is peopled by the Nunnehi or the Immortals.
Tsulkalu, the slant-eyed giant, had his home on the Pigeon River near Waynesville.
These are only a few of the places where the myth world of the mountains comes alive. There are many, many more. And as you talk to the old, you will learn of them and put them on your map.
by bluewaters | Jan 2, 2018 | Uncategorized
The past dies slowly back in the hills. Old ways and old customs still prevail. And there are folks with old memories and old tales.
There are hand-hewn cabins and slow ticking clocks, quilting bars and battlin’ blocks. There are split rail fences and log barns. And mules and horses, wagons and sleds. There are men who still know how to use an axe and a froe and crosscut saw.
Old timers who can notch and mortise and tenon, join and rive. There are places where the water supply still comes from a spring out back of the house.
Places in the dark wrinkles of the hills where the axe and the chopping block, the woodshed and the woodpile feed the fireplace and the wood burning cook stove.
To see and know these things, you have got to get off the beaten path. You have got to take the winding, twisting little dirt tracks that lead into the hidden valleys and into the high coves. Sometimes you have to do a spell of walking, cross a foot log, squeeze through a fence.
It is then and only then, that you come upon an older way of life. It is only then that the eye and ear behold something that was supposed to have died a long, long time ago.
Come to the wilds of the Snowbird Mountains, where there are streams to ford and footlogs to walk, where the country is high and peaceful and wind blows fresh and damp.
by bluewaters | Dec 30, 2017 | Uncategorized
Strange things come to pass in the mountains. Like “The Vivian”, a homemade 50-foot steamboat that plied the Little Tennessee in the early 1920’s with barges piled high with lumber.
Or the whaleboat that never saw the sea, and the hair-raising ridge of the three lumberjacks who dared gravity and a spring freshet.
A few old times are still around who remember “The Vivian” which was used to transport lumber from the Kitchen Lumber Company’s big band mill at a point above the present Cheoah Dam to the then Southern Railroad terminus at the town of Fontana.
The hull of “The Vivian” was constructed of balsam, her wheels and paddles of native white oak. She was operated by a sawmill boiler engine that gave her power to pull several barges loaded down with lumber.
The whaleboat came long before “The Vivian”, making its debut in 1893. And her first and only trip is legend now. Nobody remembers how it all started. But it followed the Paul Bunyan-Mike Fink pattern, which essentially is the pattern of boast and dare.
The lumber barons of the North had just discovered the rich, virgin timber stands in the Carolina mountains and had moved in with ax and saw. This was rugged country then, remote and sparsely settled the state’s last frontier, still home to the bear and the owl and the wildcat.
Lumber camps sprang up like mushrooms and into the hills swarmed a rough, tough breed of men that worked hard and played hard. They were men born with an ax in their hands – Danes and Swedes and Norwegians. Men who knew how to level a forest like a swarm of locusts moving through a wheat field. And in their bunkhouses of a Saturday night the peartenin’ juice flowed freely, the talk loud and tall, and sometimes tempers flared to match the fire of the jug.
Perhaps it was on such a night, amid loud talk and loud boasts that the idea of the whaleboat and the river ride was born.
Be that as it may, folks woke up one morning to a racket of hammers and saws right here in Robbinsville. They moseyed out of their houses and down the street and came upon a strange sight. They saw a thing taking shape that looked like a canoe. But it was no ordinary canoe. It was 10 times bigger than any canoe any of them had ever seen. They were told that it was to be a whaleboat. And what, asked the townsfolk, was a whaleboat needed for up here in these mountains where the streams offered only bass and trout?
Some of the lumberjacks said they were aimin’ to go whalin’ just the same. And they roared with laughter. They said if there weren’t any whales in the creeks hereabouts, then they’d just pile into the whaleboat and go where there were whales. The townsfolk shook their heads and reckoned the lumberjacks had gone plumb crazy.
Finally the whaleboat was finished. And then the lumberjacks fetched a wagon and a team of oxen and hauled the whaleboat out of town and down to Snowbird Creek. There they floated it down to the Cheoah River and from there to Johnson’s post office, then hauled it by ox-wagon to Rocky Point and put it in the Little Tennessee River.
In April, with the snows melting and the creeks and rivers running high, three lumberjacks showed up and allowed as how they aimed to ride that whaleboat right out of the mountains and down to New Orleans.
The would-be Mike Finks were Calvin Lord, Sam McFalls and Mike Crise. They loaded some provisions into the whaleboat and then got in. With long poles they pushed away from the bank at Rocky Point and out into the Little Tennessee.
There was quite a crowd to see them off. Word had spread up and down the coves and into the hills. And the folks came to take a look. Many a man shook his head that morning and reckoned that would be the last they would ever see of the three lumberjacks. Nobody figured the whale-boaters would be alive come sundown.
There were some tight spots along the Little Tennessee. Places where the river pitched over great boulders and where the river plunged right down the mountain. But the three lumberjacks were laughing and joking and shouting as they took off and swept out of sight.
The stream was fat and sassy and on a tear. Some of the folks figured the three would not get more than two or three miles down the stream, if that far. So somebody suggested it would be fit and proper to organize a party to cut across the hills and start searching for them.
Meanwhile, the three lumberjacks were beginning to regret their venture. Once they had left Rocky Point it was like shooting down a flume, albeit a big difference. The difference was the rocks that lay hidden under the surface of the water or stuck up like small mountains. But the whaleboat had been built well. The three lumberjacks held on for dear life as the whaleboat skidded and bounced over the boulders, rammed into others and twisted and whiled away, always forced into the main stream.
Just before sundown, they were swept close to the north bank of the river where they quickly caught sight of some overhanging branches. McFalls made the first grab. He got hold of a limb but the boat was being pulled so swiftly he lost his grip. Then Crise tried. He held fast but was almost pulled out of the boat. Lord grabbed him and held on. Between them they worked the whaleboat into the bank, inching closer and closer, limb by limb, until finally they landed it and pulled it out of the water.
Once ashore, they bedded down for the night. When daylight came they agreed to resume their trip. A little later they got to the mouth of Rabbit Creek. And there on the bank was the party of men that had come out looking for them. They spend three days there until the freshet subsided, then went onto the Harden farm where they grounded the whaleboat for good.
When they went ashore at the Harden farm, it was exactly a week after leaving Rocky Point. They left the whaleboat right there. They figured they had better stick to lumbering, which they did.
Sometime later, somebody came along and took possession of the whaleboat and hauled it off to Lenoir City in Tennessee. Nobody knows whatever happened to the whaleboat after that. But be that as it may, nobody ever again attempted to duplicate the feat of the three lumberjacks.
Only “The Vivian” came along to ply more placid waters. But after a few years when the Kitchen band mill moved its operations, “The Vivian” was dismantled and became only a legend along with the whaleboat.
by bluewaters | Dec 26, 2017 | Uncategorized
The spine tingling, bugle-like call of the Plott hounds has been ringing through these hills for over 200 years. They are the most famous bear dogs in all the land. For downright courage and persistence, they have been the pick of many a mountain bear hunter since Henry Plott developed the breed back in 1780.
Their exploits are legion and the years have shaped them into a legend. A thousand tales testify to their talents. Like the men who followed them, they have fierce passion for the chase. They are relentless trackers and strong winded.
The Plott hounds trace their ancestry back to the Old World, back to a breed that must have been just about the best hunting dogs that ever lived. How they came to America and how they grew up and survived in the North Carolina wilderness is one of those stories that fits into the pattern of the empire builders.
The story begins in Germany in 1750 when two young brothers decided to pull up stakes and seek their fortune in America. They set out for the promised land with their meager cash earnings, a few possessions and three large dogs. Nobody knows what kind of dogs they were, but the brothers thought they would be useful in hunting bear, deer and buffalo on the frontier.
One of the brothers never saw the strange new country where he expected to carve out a home and hunt and farm. He died during the long voyage and was buried at sea. But the other borther completed the journey and, with the dogs, as his only remaining companions form the homeland, struck out for North Carolina. He settled in Cabarrus County where he married and raised a family. His name was Jonathan Plott. His descendants still live in Plott Valley, in the shadow of Plott Balsam, a 6,000 foot peak near Waynesville in Haywood County.
Old Jonathan Plott would probably be surprised to find a valley and a mountain and a range of mountains, as well as a creek bearing the family name. He probably would be even more surprised and amazed to find that it has been the dogs he brought from Germany that have made the name Plott a legend.
In 1780, his son Henry bred these dogs to curs and obtained a relentless tracker. Hound blood was introduced for the sake of the nose, but since then the strain has been kept pure. The Plott hounds range in color from the original brindle to buckskin. Some of the latter have a small white marking on their chests. They typically have hound faces and ears. Their alertness and eagerness to please their masters make them good companions as well as good hunters. For years the Plott hounds were little known outside the mountains except by the tales carried out by folks who had been privileged to hunt with them.
