Latest / Wildlands Podcast — National Parks, Public Lands & Survival / #017 - Great Smoky Mountains, Part 1: The History | The Cherokee, Tsali & the Park That Was Bought

Transcript

#017 - Great Smoky Mountains, Part 1: The History | The Cherokee, Tsali & the Park That Was Bought · Wildlands Podcast — National Parks, Public Lands & Survival

0:11
12 million people visit this park every single
0:15
year. That is more than Grand Canyon and Yellowstone
0:18
combined. More than any other national park in
0:21
the entire United States system, by a wide margin.
0:24
And here's the strange part. Unlike almost every
0:27
other major park in this country, the federal
0:30
government did not simply set this land aside
0:32
from territory it already owned. It had to be
0:36
bought, piece by piece, farm by farm, from thousands
0:40
of individual families, schoolchildren donating
0:42
pennies, and one of the richest men in America
0:45
writing a check large enough to finally close
0:47
the gap. This is the only way a park this significant
0:51
has ever been built in the history of the national
0:53
park system. And underneath that fundraising
0:56
story sits an older and harder one, a homeland
0:59
taken by force, a small group of families who
1:02
refuse to leave, and one man's choice to sacrifice
1:05
himself so the rest could stay. This is a genuinely
1:09
layered history, and I want to give it the room
1:12
it deserves. This is Wildlands. I'm Sean. Know
1:18
the land before you reach it. Great Smoky Mountains
1:21
Part 1. The History. We are going to cover the
1:25
Cherokee homeland and the Trail of Tears, the
1:28
industrial logging era that stripped much of
1:31
this mountain range bare, the improbable fundraising
1:34
campaign that turned private land into a national
1:36
park, and how this became, by a wide margin,
1:40
the most visited park in the country. Let's get
1:43
into it. Start with the name itself, because
1:47
it tells you something true before we get to
1:50
anything else. The Cherokee called these mountains
1:53
Shackanage, the place of the blue smoke. Anyone
1:57
who has stood at an overlook here at dawn understands
2:01
immediately where that name comes from. The forest
2:04
itself produces a natural haze, a fine mist that
2:08
hangs in the hollows and drifts along the ridgelines,
2:11
caused by the sheer volume of vegetation releasing
2:14
organic compounds into the cool mountain air.
2:17
The Cherokee were not describing a curiosity.
2:21
They were describing something they considered
2:23
sacred, a landscape that seemed to breathe. According
2:28
to the park's own historians, Cherokee presence
2:31
in this region goes back something like 12 ,000
2:34
years, quite possibly with earlier peoples here
2:36
before them. By the time European settlers arrived
2:40
in the 1700s, the Cherokee were living in established
2:43
communities organized around seven clans. Longhair,
2:47
Blue, Wolf, Wild Potato, Deer, bird, and paint
2:52
governed by a genuinely sophisticated dual leadership
2:55
structure, a peace chief managing internal community
2:58
affairs, and a separate war chief handling conflict
3:01
and external relations. This was not a simple
3:06
or loosely organized society. It was a functioning
3:09
civilization with its own government, its own
3:12
agriculture, and its own deep, specific knowledge
3:15
of this exact mountain range, developed over
3:18
more than a hundred generations. and they had
3:22
extraordinary raw material to work with. These
3:25
mountains are, by a considerable margin, one
3:28
of the most biologically diverse temperate regions
3:31
on the entire planet. The park protects well
3:34
over 19 ,000 documented species, with scientists
3:37
estimating tens of thousands more likely still
3:40
undiscovered or unnamed within its boundaries.
3:43
Southern Appalachia largely escaped the direct
3:45
scouring of the last Ice Age glaciers that flattened
3:48
much of the continent to the north. which means
3:50
these mountains functioned as a refuge, a place
3:53
where plant and animal lineages that vanished
3:55
elsewhere in North America simply kept living,
3:58
generation after generation, undisturbed for
4:02
millions of years. That is part of why the Smokies
4:06
are sometimes called the salamander capital of
4:09
the world. Around 30 distinct salamander species
4:13
live here, more than anywhere else on Earth of
4:16
comparable size. many of them found nowhere else
4:20
at all. The Cherokee were not living in an ordinary
4:22
forest. They were living inside one of the richest,
4:25
oldest, most intact ecosystems remaining in the
4:29
temperate world, and their knowledge of it reflected
4:32
that. UNESCO recognized exactly this significance
4:36
decades later, designating the park an International
4:40
Biosphere Reserve for its global ecological importance,
4:44
one of the relatively few places in eastern North
4:47
America, to receive that kind of international
4:49
scientific recognition. The first Euro -American
4:53
settlers who arrived in the late 1700s largely
4:57
coexisted with their Cherokee neighbors for a
5:00
time trading, occasionally intermarrying, learning
5:03
some of the land from people who already knew
5:06
it intimately. That coexistence did not last.
5:11
By 1805, mounting pressure had forced the Cherokee
5:14
to cede formal control of the Smokies to the
5:17
United States government. And then, in 1830,
5:20
President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal
5:23
Act into law, the beginning of the end of any
5:26
real Cherokee sovereignty over this land. What
5:30
followed, in 1838, was one of the darkest chapters
5:34
in American history, and it happened, in part,
5:37
in these exact mountains. Federal troops under
5:40
General Winfield Scott began systematically rounding
5:43
up Cherokee families throughout the southeast
5:46
and forcing them into detention camps ahead of
5:49
a forced march west to Indian Territory in what
5:52
is now Oklahoma. The journey became known as
5:57
the Trail of Tears. Approximately 4 ,000 Cherokee
6:01
died along the way or in the disease -ridden
6:04
camps beforehand from exposure, from starvation,
6:07
from illness. on a forced six -month journey
6:11
through winter conditions with inadequate food,
6:14
clothing, or shelter. This was not an accident
6:18
of poor planning. It was the direct, foreseeable
6:22
result of a policy designed to remove an entire
6:25
nation from land the United States government
6:28
wanted for itself. Families were frequently given
6:31
only minutes to gather what they could carry
6:33
before being marched to holding camps, often
6:36
at bayonet point. while soldiers looted or burned
6:40
homes behind them. Winter arrived partway through
6:42
the journey west, and conditions in the camps
6:45
and along the route were genuinely brutal inadequate
6:47
food, contaminated water, and diseases like measles
6:52
and whooping cough moving rapidly through crowded,
6:54
poorly supplied groups of people already weakened
6:57
by exposure and grief. The Cherokee were not
7:02
the only nation forced along a version of this
7:04
same route during this period, but their removal
7:07
specifically, and the scale of death involved,
7:10
became one of the defining atrocities of 19th
7:13
century American Indian policy. But not every
7:18
Cherokee family made that journey. And the story
7:21
of the ones who stayed is one I want to tell
7:23
carefully, because it is genuinely moving, and
7:26
it directly explains why there is still a Cherokee
7:29
nation living beside this park today. A number
7:32
of Cherokee families fled into the deepest, most
7:36
remote parts of these mountains rather than surrender
7:39
to Scots soldiers hiding in caves and hollows
7:42
in terrain so rugged that the army genuinely
7:44
struggled to pursue them. Among the resistance
7:46
leaders was a man named Tzali. The details of
7:51
the Tzali story have been told and retold over
7:53
the generations, and like most oral history passed
7:56
down for nearly two centuries, the specifics
7:59
vary somewhat between versions. But the core
8:03
of it holds consistent. Tzali, his wife, his
8:06
brother, his sons, and their families were seized
8:09
by soldiers as part of the roundup. According
8:12
to the accounts, a soldier treated Tzali's wife
8:14
roughly during the march, and in the ensuing
8:17
struggle, a soldier was killed. Solly's group
8:20
fled into the mountains, eventually hiding, according
8:23
to Cherokee oral tradition, in a cave near what
8:26
is now Clingman's Dome, the highest point in
8:28
the entire park. General Scott, unable to hunt
8:33
down Solly's band through the rugged terrain
8:35
himself, struck a deal with a separate group
8:38
of Cherokee living along the Akanalufti River,
8:40
led by a man named Chief Drowning Bear and his
8:43
adopted son, William Holland Thomas. If that
8:46
group would help track down Solly, and hand him
8:48
over, they themselves would be permitted to remain
8:51
in their homeland, exempt from removal. According
8:55
to Cherokee oral tradition, when Tzali learned
8:58
of this arrangement, he made a choice that has
9:01
echoed through Cherokee memory ever since. He
9:04
turned himself in voluntarily, along with his
9:07
brother and his two elder sons, understanding
9:09
that his surrender and execution would let the
9:12
rest of his people and the Akanalefti band that
9:15
had struck the bargain remain in these mountains.
9:18
Tzali, his brother, and his sons were executed
9:22
near the mouth of the Tukasegi River. His sacrifice
9:25
became and remains one of the foundational stories
9:30
of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, a single
9:33
man's choice that allowed several hundred of
9:36
his people to stay on their homeland rather than
9:39
be marched a thousand miles west. That group
9:43
of Cherokee who remained joined by others who
9:46
slipped back from the removal march or evaded
9:48
capture entirely became the ancestors of the
9:51
eastern band of cherokee indians who live to
9:54
this day on the koala boundary land the tribe
9:58
purchased outright rather than a reservation
10:01
granted to them bordering the southern edge of
10:04
what is now the national park the koala boundary
10:08
today covers roughly 80 square miles across several
10:11
counties in western north carolina a small fraction
10:14
of the original Cherokee homeland, but a genuine,
10:17
sovereign, continuously inhabited piece of it.
10:21
The Eastern Band gained federal recognition in
10:24
the 20th century, and today numbers more than
10:26
16 ,000 enrolled members. When you enter the
10:30
park through the Akina Lufti entrance near Cherokee,
10:33
North Carolina, you are entering through land
10:35
immediately adjacent to a nation whose ancestors
10:38
survived. Specifically, By refusing to leave
10:42
these mountains, that history is not background
10:44
information. It is the reason the park's southern
10:48
boundary looks the way it does on a map. After
10:52
the Cherokee removal, European -American settlement
10:55
of these mountains accelerated. And for roughly
10:59
a century, this became genuine, hardscrabble
11:02
Appalachian farming country. Scots, Irish, and
11:06
German settlers built log cabins. cleared small
11:09
mountain farms, raised livestock, and built the
11:12
kind of tight -knit, isolated mountain communities
11:15
that Appalachia became famous for, communities
11:17
like Cades Cove, in the Tennessee section of
11:20
what is now the park, which had itself originally
11:23
been Cherokee hunting ground before its first
11:25
European settlement around 1818. These were subsistence
11:30
farmers working steep, difficult mountain terrain,
11:33
generation after generation. often on the same
11:37
family land for a hundred years or more by the
11:39
time this story reaches the 20th century. Cades
11:44
Cove in particular grew into a substantial, thriving
11:47
mountain community by the mid -1800s. A flat,
11:51
fertile valley ringed by mountains, eventually
11:53
home to several hundred residents, multiple churches,
11:57
a working gristmill, and a school. It was isolated
12:00
enough that the community developed its own distinct
12:03
customs and dialect, shaped by generations of
12:07
relative separation from the outside world, and
12:10
connected enough by its own internal roads and
12:13
institutions that it functioned as a genuinely
12:15
self -sufficient mountain society. That isolation
12:20
is exactly why so many of Cades Cove's original
12:22
buildings survive today, largely untouched when
12:25
the park bought out the valley in the 1930s.
12:28
The sheer remoteness that had shaped the community
12:31
for a century also meant fewer families had already
12:34
sold out to developers or logging interests before
12:37
the park could step in. Then, around the 1890s
12:42
and into the early 1900s, something changed the
12:45
mountains dramatically. Industrial logging arrived.
12:49
Large timber companies, many of them based far
12:52
from Appalachia in Pennsylvania, Illinois, even
12:55
as far as New York began buying up mountain land,
12:58
that individual farming families found difficult
13:00
to work themselves, specifically the steep, forested
13:04
slopes that could not be easily farmed but held
13:06
enormous stands of old -growth timber. Companies
13:09
built railroads directly into the mountains to
13:11
haul logs out and began cutting some of the last
13:14
substantial stands of old -growth forest remaining
13:16
east of the Mississippi River. This was not selective,
13:21
careful logging. It was large -scale, industrial,
13:25
clear -cutting. and it moved through these mountains
13:28
with real speed and real consequence, stripping
13:32
slopes bare, altering watersheds, and threatening
13:35
to permanently erase a forest ecosystem that
13:38
had been developing, in places, for many thousands
13:41
of years. The mechanics of it were genuinely
13:45
industrial in scale. Companies built entire narrow
13:48
-gauge railroad networks specifically to reach
13:51
remote timber stands, complete with steam -powered
13:54
skidders and cable systems capable of hauling
13:56
massive logs down impossibly steep terrain. Entire
14:00
logging camps sprang up deep in the mountains,
14:02
housing hundreds of workers at a time, and once
14:05
an area was cut, the crews and the rail lines
14:08
simply moved on to the next slope. Some of the
14:11
trees fell during this era were true giants.
14:14
Tulip poplars, chestnuts, and hemlocks that had
14:18
been growing since before European settlement
14:20
of the continent. Some estimated at 400, 500
14:24
years old or more. Once one of those trees came
14:27
down, that specific genetic lineage and that
14:30
specific span of continuous forest growth was
14:34
simply gone, permanently, regardless of anything
14:37
done afterward. By the early 1920s, people who
14:42
cared about this landscape could see clearly
14:44
where the logging industry was heading. and the
14:46
same instinct that had already created national
14:49
parks across the American West began looking
14:51
East. In 1923, a woman named Ann Davis, after
14:57
visiting several Western national parks, came
15:00
home and suggested that a similar park should
15:02
be created here, in the Smokies, reasoning that
15:06
the National Park Service, having already established
15:09
parks across the West, ought to have something
15:12
within reach of the much larger population living
15:15
in the East. The idea caught on quickly among
15:19
conservation -minded business leaders in Knoxville
15:22
and Asheville, and organizations like the Great
15:24
Smoky Mountains Conservation Association began
15:28
pushing hard for federal protection before the
15:30
logging companies finished the job entirely.
15:34
And here is where this park's origin story becomes
15:37
genuinely unlike almost any other national park
15:40
in the country. Every major national park established
15:44
up to this point Yellowstone, Yosemite, Glacier,
15:48
Grand Canyon, all of them had been carved from
15:50
land the federal government already owned outright,
15:53
out west. The Smokies presented a completely
15:57
different problem. This land, virtually all of
16:00
it, was privately owned by small farming families
16:03
who had lived here for generations, and increasingly
16:06
by large timber companies who had bought it up
16:09
specifically to log it. The federal government
16:12
at the time had no legal mechanism and, frankly,
16:15
no political appetite to simply purchase that
16:18
much private land itself. In 1926, Congress passed
16:23
a bill signed by President Calvin Coolidge authorizing
16:27
the creation of Great Smoky Mountains National
16:29
Park, but with a critical catch. The park would
16:32
not actually be established, and the National
16:35
Park Service would not take over management.
16:37
until a minimum of 150 ,000 acres had first been
16:41
acquired and handed over to the federal government
16:44
entirely through private fundraising and state
16:47
contributions. The government itself was only
16:51
willing to commit $2 million toward the effort.
16:55
So, a genuinely remarkable multi -year fundraising
16:59
campaign began. The states of Tennessee and North
17:02
Carolina each committed to raising substantial
17:04
sums. The initial arrangement specified $2 million
17:07
from each state, contingent on the other state
17:10
matching it, which created its own political
17:13
drama when Tennessee initially struggled to hit
17:16
its number. Private citizens across both states
17:20
contributed. Schoolchildren across Tennessee
17:22
and North Carolina donated their own pennies
17:25
and nickels toward buying land for a park most
17:28
of them would never personally visit. It is a
17:32
genuinely moving detail. Easy to treat as a footnote,
17:35
but worth sitting with. Children in Knoxville
17:38
and Asheville classrooms handing over their lunch
17:40
money because they had been told this forest
17:43
was worth saving. The fundraising drive faced
17:46
real, serious obstacles along the way. Tennessee,
17:49
in particular, struggled at points to hit its
17:52
required matching contribution, threatening to
17:55
derail the entire arrangement Congress had set
17:57
up. Since North Carolina's pledge was explicitly
18:00
contingent on Tennessee matching it dollar for
18:03
dollar, National Park Service officials, deeply
18:06
invested in seeing this eastern park succeed
18:08
after decades of parks existing only out west,
18:11
worked behind the scenes to keep both states
18:14
moving forward even when the numbers looked shaky.
18:17
This was not a smooth, inevitable process unfolding
18:21
exactly as planned. It was a genuinely uncertain
18:24
multi -year campaign that could plausibly have
18:27
failed at several different points along the
18:29
way, saved as much by persistence and improvisation
18:32
as by any single donor. Even with state funding,
18:36
private citizen donations, and federal seed money
18:39
combined, the total still fell short of what
18:42
was needed to buy out the logging companies and
18:45
the thousands of individual landowners across
18:47
the necessary acreage. The gap was finally closed
18:51
in the late 1920s. when John Dee, Rockefeller
18:55
Jr., one of the wealthiest men in America, donated
18:58
$5 million specifically toward completing the
19:01
land purchase, a single contribution as large
19:05
as everything the two state governments had raised
19:07
between them. With Rockefeller's gift, the fundraising
19:11
target was finally within reach. But raising
19:16
the money to buy the land was only half the problem,
19:19
because there was one significant complication.
19:22
people were still living on it. Unlike a park
19:25
carved from already federal western land, buying
19:28
this park meant buying out thousands of individual
19:30
mountain families, some of whom had lived on
19:33
the exact same family land since the 1840s, three
19:37
or four generations deep in some cases. Park
19:41
commissions in both states went door -to -door,
19:43
farm -to -farm, offering each family a choice,
19:46
accept fair market value for their land and leave,
19:49
or in certain cases, except a lifetime lease
19:52
that would let them remain in their homes until
19:54
they died, after which the land would revert
19:57
fully to the park. Many families took the lifetime
20:01
lease option, choosing to live out their remaining
20:03
years on land that was, technically, already
20:06
federal property. Others simply took the buyout
20:10
and left the only home many of them had ever
20:12
known. Not everyone accepted the arrangement
20:16
quietly. In Cades Cove specifically, A man named
20:20
John Oliver, great -grandson of the Valley's
20:23
original 1818 settlers, fought the land seizure
20:27
through the Tennessee Supreme Court three separate
20:29
times, arguing the community had been promised
20:33
it would be spared. He lost every appeal, and
20:36
on Christmas Day of 1937, he finally left the
20:40
ancestral home his family had held for over a
20:42
century. Others found a different path. A man
20:46
named Kermit Cogren negotiated a lease to return
20:49
to Cades Cove after initially being forced out
20:51
and lived there with his wife for the rest of
20:53
his life, known to generations of park visitors
20:56
as Mr. Cades Cove for the honey he sold from
20:59
hives at his homestead. He died in 1999, meaning
21:03
a genuine, original resident of that mountain
21:06
community was still legally living inside a national
21:09
park 65 years after it was established. The Walker
21:14
sisters, five unmarried siblings who inherited
21:17
their father's farm, held a lifetime lease on
21:19
their land until the National Park Service finally
21:22
gained full control of the property in 1964,
21:25
when the last surviving sister passed away. That
21:29
farmhouse still stands today, preserved specifically
21:31
because of how long they held on. It is worth
21:34
being honest about what this meant on the ground.
21:37
Whatever the fairness of the compensation offered,
21:40
This was still the wholesale displacement of
21:42
an entire regional population, following directly,
21:45
if quietly, in the historical pattern of the
21:48
Cherokee removal a century before it, even though
21:52
the scale, the mechanism, and the violence involved
21:55
were entirely different. Timber companies that
21:59
had bought land specifically to log it were bought
22:02
out as well, in some cases after they had already
22:05
clear -cut substantial portions of what they
22:07
sold. The logging, did not stop instantly. Everywhere.
22:13
The moment the fundraising campaign succeeded,
22:16
some cutting continued on parcels not yet formally
22:19
transferred, which is part of why significant
22:22
sections of what is now Old Growth Forest inside
22:26
the park were, in fact, never logged at all,
22:29
having been in the more remote, harder -to -access
22:33
sections that the timber companies simply had
22:36
not reached yet when the purchase went through.
22:39
Some of the largest remaining stands of old -growth
22:42
forest east of the Mississippi River survive
22:45
inside this park today, specifically because
22:49
the land purchase arrived just in time to stop
22:52
the saws before they reached those particular
22:54
slopes. By 1934, enough acreage had finally been
23:00
transferred to the federal government to meet
23:03
the threshold Congress had set eight years earlier,
23:06
and Great Smoky Mountains National Park was officially
23:09
established on June 15th of that year. The park's
23:12
development through the rest of the Depression
23:14
-era 1930s leaned heavily on the Civilian Conservation
23:18
Corps, the same federal jobs program that built
23:22
infrastructure across national parks, nationwide.
23:27
CCC crews built trails, bridges, fire lookout
23:30
towers, and campground facilities throughout
23:33
the Smokies, much of which is still standing
23:36
and still in active use today. nearly a century
23:38
later. These camps also employed thousands of
23:43
young men during one of the worst economic crises
23:46
in American history, giving them a wage, a trade,
23:49
and in a considerable number of cases, a lasting
23:53
connection to a landscape they helped physically
23:55
build. At its peak, the Smokies hosted more CCC
23:58
camps than almost any other park in the entire
24:01
system, evidence of just how much physical infrastructure
24:04
needed to be built here essentially from nothing
24:06
since Unlike western parks that already had some
24:10
development, this land had been private farms
24:13
and logging tracks just years before. Many of
24:16
the trails, stone bridges, and rustic buildings
24:19
hikers still use today were built by these same
24:22
young men, working for a dollar a day, sending
24:25
most of that money home to families struggling
24:27
through the Depression. Many of them had never
24:30
seen mountains like these before arriving, coming
24:32
from cities and struggling farms across the country,
24:35
and a fair number ended up staying in the region
24:38
permanently after their enrollment ended, marrying
24:41
locally and raising families in the same towns
24:44
that ring the park today. The park was formally
24:48
dedicated on September 2, 1940, when President
24:52
Franklin Delano Roosevelt stood at Newfound Gap,
24:55
the mountain pass that straddles the exact border
24:57
between Tennessee and North Carolina, and, standing
25:00
with one foot literally on each side of the state
25:02
line, dedicated the park, in his words, for the
25:05
permanent enjoyment of the people. It had been
25:09
17 years since Ann Davis's original suggestion
25:12
after her Western Park trip. 17 years of fundraising,
25:16
lobbying, door -to -door negotiations with thousands
25:18
of individual families, and one enormous check
25:21
from Rockefeller to build, essentially from scratch,
25:25
a park that the federal government could not
25:27
simply declare into existence the way it had
25:30
out West. And today, Great Smoky Mountains National
25:34
Park is the single most visited national park
25:38
in the entire United States system, more than
25:41
12 million visitors a year, well ahead of Grand
25:44
Canyon or Yellowstone. Part of that is simple
25:48
geography. This park sits within a day's drive
25:51
of a huge percentage of the American population,
25:54
which was precisely Ann Davis's original argument
25:58
back in 1923. And part of it... is a detail that
26:03
surprises a lot of first -time visitors. Unlike
26:06
almost every other major national park, there
26:09
is no entrance fee to get into the Smokies at
26:11
all. That is not an oversight. It is written
26:15
directly into the original land transfer agreements
26:19
from the 1930s. A condition of the deal that
26:23
ensured the roads that had been public thoroughfares
26:26
for the mountain communities being displaced
26:29
would remain free, and open to the public forever,
26:33
rather than becoming a toll road into a federal
26:35
park. It is one of the few tangible threads connecting
26:39
today's 12 million annual visitors directly back
26:43
to the specific legal terms of a land deal struck
26:46
nearly a century ago with communities that no
26:49
longer exist in the form they did then. Step
26:52
back and look at the full arc of it. 12 ,000
26:57
years of Cherokee presence. organized into a
27:00
genuine, functioning civilization, with its own
27:04
government and its own name for these mountains
27:06
as sacred ground. A forced removal that killed
27:10
thousands and nearly erased that presence entirely,
27:14
stopped only by the sacrifice of one man and
27:17
the resistance of a small remnant who refused
27:20
to leave. A century of Appalachian farming families
27:23
building a genuine mountain culture on this land,
27:26
followed by an industrial logging operation that
27:29
came within years, maybe less, of stripping the
27:32
last old -growth forest east of the Mississippi
27:35
Bear. And then an improbable rescue. Two state
27:39
governments, thousands of private citizens, schoolchildren
27:43
emptying their pockets, and finally one of the
27:45
richest men in America, all combining to buy
27:48
this land back. family by family, specifically
27:51
so it could never be logged or developed again.
27:55
19 ,000 documented species living inside boundaries
27:59
that exist today, specifically because that rescue
28:03
happened when it did, and not five or ten years
28:07
later, after more of the old growth had already
28:09
fallen. A biodiversity refuge that survived the
28:12
Ice Age intact nearly did not survive the 20th
28:16
century. and now draws more visitors annually
28:18
than any other park in the country, most of whom
28:21
have no idea any of this happened before they
28:24
arrived. Every layer of that history is still
28:26
here, if you know where to look, in the log cabins
28:29
still standing in Cades Cove, in the Cherokee
28:32
families still living on the Koala Boundary today,
28:35
in the old growth trees that survived because
28:38
the money arrived just in time, and in the fact
28:41
that you can still drive into this park without
28:43
paying a dime. because of a promise made to people
28:46
who had to leave their homes to make room for
28:49
it. Next episode, part two, The Visit. Cade's
28:52
Cove and its historic buildings, Clingman's Dome,
28:55
the synchronous fireflies that draw crowds every
28:57
June, a section of the Appalachian Trail, and
29:00
how to actually navigate the busiest national
29:03
park in the country without spending your whole
29:06
trip in traffic. Everything for the Smoky Series
29:08
historical sites, current trail conditions, and
29:12
visitor information. is at wildlandsnews .com.
29:17
I'm Sean Spainhour. This has been Wildlands.
29:20
Know the land before you reach it. See you Thursday.