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, he was a much-heralded bear–and–coon hunter, with a perfect love for Plott hounds, a sporting breed developed in the Smokies. Hunicutt’s three best-known hounds were Dread, Jolly, and Old Wheeler. When he was age 46 in 1926 and the region was abuzz with efforts to create the national park, Hunnicutt published Twenty Years of Hunting and Fishing in the Great Smokies (Knoxville: S.B. Newman & Company). A 216-page, soft-covered book, that contains numerous photographs of hunters and fishermen, their camps and hounds. In 1951 Hunnicutt published a second edition that consisted of 188 pages.
Hunnicutt and Cathey would spend weeks at a time on the upper reaches of Deep Creek. An amusing tale concerning one of their trips tells of the two leaving camp one morning at the forks of the Left Prong and the mainstream of Deep Creek. Cathey was to fish the Left Prong until supper, and Hunnicutt the Right Prong. Hunnicutt found the fish less than cooperative, and returned to camp empty-handed. Cathey had not yet made it back, so after waiting for a while, Hunnicutt decided to try his hand up the Left Prong and meet Cathey on his return trip. He’d fished approximately 300 yards of the creek, creeling eleven nice trout along the way, when he rounded a bend and saw Cathey, who had 90 trout strung over his shoulder. Hunnicutt asked Cathey if he was mad about his coming to meet him. Cathey’s reply was short and rather stern, as he eyed the eleven fish at Hunnicutt’s side: “No, but had you not come to meet me, I would have had a hundred trout when I reached camp.”
During the late 1960s and early 1970s while researching my various books on fishing the Great Smokiy Mountains National Park, I encountered a surprising number of old men who shared their stories of Uncle Mark. They are too numerous to note here, but the zeal with which each one of these old-timers told me their Cathey recollections was as telling as was their tales. Doubtless he was a dashing daredevil of an old bachelor, who as a youth rode logs bareback down the shoots, and later in life chased bears over the ridges so long as the baritone bays of his Plott hounds could be heard.
Carl Standing Deer of the Qualla Reservation was perhaps the best-known sport angler among the Cherokees during the early years of the park. Standing Deer, whose greatest claim to fame rested on his deadly aim with his hand-built bow, proudly referred to himself as the grandson of Suyetta, the revered Cherokee storyteller. Standing Deer was a dyed-in-the-wool traditionalist, who used horsehair lines after gut and even nylon lines were available, and scorned flies, preferring stickbait and wasp larvae. Standing Deer considered Deep Creek to have the finest fishing in the Smokies, and was occasionally available as a guide. He often posed in his chief attire along the main thoroughfare of Cherokee, and one can only wonder how many kids from my generation had their photos taken with the war-bonnet-wearing chief by an old Browning Hawkeye camera for the modest charge of 25 cents.
After the national park was formed, the fishing changed. Gradually, bait fishing became illegal in all park waters. Creel and size limits were imposed. Auto access to many streams became a thing of the past. With the building of Fontana Dam, the park grew as the Tennessee Valley Authority turned over much of the land it had acquired from residents who would have been isolated as a result of the impounding of the Little Tennessee River. The power from Fontana Dam was funneled into the nation’s atomic research center at Oak Ridge. The Smokies were the site of some secret road-building practice for the Army Corps of Engineers and of other experiments for the military.
Until 1947 the streams