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 Branche’s book, The Dry Fly and Fast Water Fishing with the Floating 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