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 the same way.
For 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