heads of the Black, Smoky, and Balsam ranges, and deck a few summits of
the Blue Ridge, resorted to either from liking, or to avoid his enemies;
and it is only when pushed by hunger or when his tooth has become
depraved by a bait of hog, taken during one of these starving periods,
that he appears on the lower slopes or in the cultivated valleys.
However, there are some localities, much lower than those mantled by
the fir forests, where the black bear still roams. In some sections of
the lower French Broad he is occasionally seen. The region of the Great
Hog-back, Whiteside, Satoola, and Short-off, afford some sport in this
line for the hunter; while among the Nantihalas frequent successful
hunts are undertaken.
For bear-driving in the Black mountains, the best place for a stranger
who really wishes to kill a bear, and who feels himself equal to so
arduous a tramp, is “Big Tom” Wilson’s, on Cane river. To reach it, you
take the stage from Asheville to Burnsville, and then ride or walk from
the village 15 miles to the home of the old hunter. He is familiar with
every part of the mountains. He it was that discovered the body of
Professor Mitchell. Another good starting point would be from some cabin
on the Toe river side, reaching it by leaving the main traveled road at
a point, shown you by the native, between Burnsville and Bakersville. A
start might be made on the Swannanoa side; but the guides close at the
base of the mountains have become perverted by too much travel from
abroad, and will show more anxiety about securing pay for their
accommodations and services than interest in driving up a bear. Judging,
however, from the number of traps set in the latter locality, one would
form the idea that bears pay frequent visits to the cornfields.
For a drive in the Smoky mountains, read the sketch on deer hunting. The
region of the Cataluche, 22 miles north of Waynesville, is an excellent
place to visit. The log-cabin of Tyre McCall on the head-waters of the
French Broad, and near Brevard, would afford fair headquarters for him
who wished to rough it. Deer and bear roam on the Tennessee Bald within
five miles of the cabin. Tyre is a horny-handed but hospitable host, and
would hunt with you in earnest.
In the Nantihalas, Alexander Mundy’s is the point from which to start
on a bear hunt. Further into the wilderness, on the far boundary of
Graham county, rise the Santeelah and Tellico mountains. At Robbinsville
information can be obtained regarding the best hunter with whom to
remain for a week’s sport.
With this slight introduction, the writer proposes to convey to the
reader some idea of what bear hunting in the heart of the Alleghanies is
like; what one must expect to encounter, and what sort of friends he is
likely to make on such expeditions. Besides the usual equipments carried
by every hunter, it would be well to take a rubber blanket and have the
guide carry an ax.
It was one night about the 1st of December that we were in camp; eight
of us, huddled together under a low bark roof, and within three frail
sides of like material. Around the camp lay seventeen dogs. The ground
beneath us was cold and bare, except for a thin layer of ferns lately
bundled in by some of the party. Before the front of the shelter, lay a
great fire of heavy logs, heaped close enough for a long-legged sleeper
to stick his feet in, while his head rested on the bolster log. The hot
flames, fanned by a strong wind, leaped high and struggled up into the
darkness. On long sticks, several of the group were toasting chunks of
fat pork; others were attending to black tin pails of water boiling for
coffee, while the remaining few were eating lunches already prepared.
The wood crackled, and occasionally the unseasoned chestnut timber
snapped, sending out showers of sparks. Around and within the circle of
fire-light, stood the trees with stripped, gaunt limbs swaying in the
wind. Above, clouds rolled darkly, concealing the face of the sky.
The temporary camp of a party of mountaineers on the hunt for Bruin, as
viewed by night, presents a scene of unique interest. It is a shelter
only for the time being; no one expects to return to it, for by the
following night the hounds may be 20 miles away, and the drivers and
standers toasting bear steaks in their cabins, or encamping on some
distant height preparatory to resuming on the morrow the chase of a
bruin who had through one day eluded their pursuit. The mountain
straggler often sees by the trail which he follows, the ashes and
scattered black brands of an extinguished fire, and the poles and birch
bark of an abandoned camp. At this view he imagines he has some idea of
a hunter’s camp; but it is like the conception of the taste of an oyster
from a sight of the empty shell.
Situated as above described, we were improving an opportunity afforded
for devouring the whole oyster. Our encampment was on Old Bald; not the
famous shaking mountain, but of the Balsams, eight miles south of
Waynesville. A few days previous, a denizen of Caney Fork, while
crossing the mountain by the new dug road, came face to face with a
black bear, gray about the nose and ears, and of enormous size, as he
said. Did you ever hear a tale where the bear was not of size too large
to swallow? The denizen of the valley had no fire-arms with him, so
both, equally frightened, stood staring at each other, until the denizen
of the mountain shuffled into the beech woods. This report considerably
interested the Richland settlers. They laid their plans for an early
hunt, and had them prematurely hatched by information brought in by the
highest log-chopper on the creek, that his yard had been entered the
last past night by some “varmint,” and a fine hundred-pound hog
(otherwise known as a mountain shad) killed and eaten within the
pig-pen. The log-chopper had followed the trail for some distance, but
without avail.
That same afternoon our party climbed the mountain by an old
bridle-path, arriving just before sunset at a place admirably suited for
a camp. Two steep ridges, descending from the main mountain top, hold
between them the channel of a sparkling brook. Its water is crystal in
clearness and icy cold. The wood, principally beech, is green with
casings of moss, and the cold rocks in the brook’s bed and on the slopes
above it are covered with a like growth. Where the trail enters the
water the ground is level on one bank, and here we decided to kindle our
fire, and, as the air was quite chilly, bearing indications of a storm,
to erect a light shelter.
Dry leaves and twigs make excellent tinder for a flint’s spark to settle
and blaze in, and enough seasoned logs, bark, and limbs always lie
scattered through this forest to afford campfires. Our’s was soon
flaming. The loosened bark of a fallen beech furnished us the material
for the roof and sides of a shelter, which we built up on four forked
limbs driven into the ground and covered with long poles. It was secured
against wind assaults by braces.
Near where we encamped, and below on the Beech Flats, stand trees as
stately and magnificent as any ever touched by woodman’s ax. We noticed
several cherries measuring four and a half feet through, and towering,
straight as masts, 70 feet before shooting out a limb; poplars as erect
and tall to their lower branches and of still greater diameter;
chestnuts from 15 to 33 feet in circumference, and thousands of sound,
lofty linns, ashes, buckeyes, oaks, and sugar maples. A few hemlocks
considerably exceed 100 feet in height. A tree called the wahoo, grows
here as well as on many of the ranges. It bears a white lily-shaped
flower in the summer. Numerous cucumber trees are scattered on the
slopes. These with the beech, water birch, black birch or mountain
mahogany, black gum, red maple, and hickory, form the forests from the
mountain bases to the line of the balsams. On the Beech Flats there is
no underbrush, except where the rhododendron hedges the purling streams.
In places the plain path, the stately trees, and the level or sloping
ground, covered only with the mouldering leaves of autumn, form parks
more magnificent than those kept in trim by other hands than nature’s.
The best hounds, known as the “leaders,” were fastened to poles stuck in
the ground at the corners of our lodge. This was done to prevent them
starting off during the night on the trail of a wolf, raccoon, or
wildcat, thereby exhausting themselves for the contemplated bear hunt.
The rest of the pack were either standing around, looking absently into
the fire, or had already stretched themselves out in close proximity to
it.
“The way them curs crawl up to the blaze,” said Wid Medford, “is a shore
sign thet hits goin’ ter be cold nuff ter snow afore mornin’.”
No one disputed his assertion, and so, relative to this subject, he spun
a story of how one of his hounds, one night many years since, had crept
so close to the camp fire that all of his hair on one side was burnt
off, and Wid awoke to detect the peculiar scent and to feel the first
flakes of a snow storm that fell three feet deep before daylight. As
though this story needed something to brace it up, Wid continued:
“Whatever I talk of as facts, you kin count on as true as Scriptur.”
Israel Medford, nicknamed Wid, the master-hunter of the Balsam range, is
a singular character, and a good representative of an old class of
mountaineers, who, reared in the wilderness, still spend most of their
time in hunting and fishing. He possesses a standard type of common
sense; an abundance of native wit, unstrengthened by even the slightest
“book-larnin’;” is a close observer, a perfect mimic, and a shrewd judge
of character. His reputation as a talker is wide-spread; and, talking to
the point, he commands the closest attention. His conversation abounds
in similes; and, drawn as they are from his own observation, they are
always striking. He is now sixty-five years old, and has been all his
life a resident of Haywood county.
That night as he sat cross-legged close to the fire, turning in the
flames a stick with a slice of fat pork on it, with his broad-brimmed
hat thrown on the ground, fully exposing his thick, straight, gray
locks, and clear, ruddy, hatchet-shaped face, bare but for a red
mustache, lighted up with youthful animation, he kept shaking the index
finger of his right hand, while in his talk he jumped from one subject
to another with as much alacrity as his bow legs might carry him over
the mountains.
“What I don’t know about these mountings,” said he, directing his keen
blue eyes upon one member of the group, “haint of enny profit to man or
devil. Why, I’ve fit bars from the Dark Ridge kentry to the headwaters
of the French Broad. I’ve brogued it through every briar patch an’
laurel thicket, an’ haint I bin with Guyot, Sandoz, Grand Pierre, and
Clingman over every peak from hyar to the South Caroliny an’ Georgy
lines? Say?”
“What do you mean by ‘brogued it’?” was asked.
“Crawled, thets what hit means; just as you’d hev to do ef you perused
every pint o’ the mountings; ef you went through Hell’s Half Acre; ef
you slid down the Shinies, or clim the Chimbleys.”
“Hit’s rough thar,” remarked a broad-shouldered, heavy-mustached young
fellow, named Allen.
“Rough?” resumed Wid, “wal, I reckon hit is.”
“But a man can git in rough places right on this slope, can’t he?” some
one inquired.
“In course,” remarked another hunter, “Wid, you cum powerful nigh
peeterin’ out nigh hyar, wunct, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Wid, now devoting his attention partly to a boiling pot of
coffee, “Thet day war a tough un. Hit war a hot summer day. We,--thet
is, Bill Massey who’s awmost blind now, Bill Allen who gin up huntin’
long ye’rs ago, my brother El, me, an’ sev’ral others,--we started a bar
on the Jackson county line nigh Scotts creek in the mornin’. We driv
till arter-noon, an’ in the chase I got below hyar. I heered the dogs up
on Ole Bald, an’ abearin’ down the ridge-top I was on. Powerful soon I
seed the bar comin’ on a dog-trot under the trees. He war a master
brute!”
“How big, Wid?”
“Four-hunderd an’ fifty pound, net. Thinks me to myself, ‘Gun fust,
knife next’; fer, you see, I war clean played out with the heat and long
run, an’ I war in favor o’ bringin’ the thing to a close; so I brought
my ole flint-lock to my shoul’er. This is the very gun I hed then,” and
he tapped the battered stock of a six-foot, black-barreled, flint-lock
rifle.
“I wouldn’t hev your cap arrangements. This kind never misses fire; an’
rain never teches hit, fer this ’ere kiver, ter put over the pan, keeps
hit as dry as a tarripin hull.”
“Go on with the story,” exclaimed an interested auditor.
“Jist tend ter brilin’ your bacon, Jonas, an’ let me travel ter suit my
own legs. I fetched my gun to my shoul’er an’ fired. The brute never
stopped, but I knowed I’d hit him, for I hed a dead sight on his head;
an’, like blockade whisky, a ball outer thet black bore allus goes to
the spot. He’s a thick-skulled varmint, I thought. I dropped my gun, an’
pulled my knife. On he cum. He didn’t pay no more tenshun to me then ef
I’d bin a rock. I drew back a step, an’ as he brashed by me, I bent over
him, grabbin’ the ha’r o’ his neck with one hand, an’ staubed him deep
in the side with the knife in the other. Thet’s all I knowed for hours.”
“Did you faint?” some one asked.
“Faint?” sneered Wid, sticking out his square chin and showing his
teeth. “You ass! You don’t reckon I faint, do you? Women faint. I fell
dead! You see all the blood in me jumped over my heart into my head, an’
ov course hit finished me fer a time.”
“A dead faint,” was suggested.
“I don’t like thet word, stranger. But, the boys an’ dogs cum on me a
second arter. Bill Allen cut my veins an’ in a short time I cum round,
but I war sick fer a week.”
“How about the bear?”
“Hit lay dead by the branch below, staubed clean through the heart.”
Before the story ended, a noise like thunder came rolling to us through
the forests. Owing to the strange time of the year for a thunder storm,
we were slow in realizing that one was brooding, but repeated peals and
long rumbling echoes, preceded by vivid flashes of light in the northern
sky, soon convinced us of this fact. The wind changed, grew stronger,
and soughed dismally through the trees. Rain began pattering on the bark
roof: it came in slight showers, ceasing with each gust and flaw, then
descending in torrents. The fire grew fiercer under these attempts to
smother it, and with the shifting of the wind, much to our discomfiture,
smoke and sparks were driven under the roof. Occasionally, a strong
blast would make us draw up our feet as the flames, leveled to the
ground, whirled in on us.
The situation became unendurable, and in a lull of the storm we crawled
out in the open air; tore down our camp, and changed it around with its
back wall towards the wind. This occupied but a few minutes, and we were
soon ensconced again. It was a wretched night. We lay tight together,
like spoons, the six middle men being well protected from cold, but not
from leaks in the roof. The two end men fared less comfortably with one
side exposed. No one slept unless it was the gray-headed Medford,
hardened by 1001 nights of like experience. The rain ceased before
morning, but the temperature was considerably below the freezing point,
and icicles had formed on the end of the roof fartherest from the fire.
All night we had shifted and changed our positions, and the gray light
of dawn found us in the ashes, seemingly close enough to the fire to
blister our faces, suffering in martyr-like submission with smoke in our
eyes and backs cold.
I never saw a man with a good appetite for breakfast after a night of
wakefulness beside a camp fire. After a long tramp, you can eat the
roughest food with relish, but there is nothing tempting about hot
coffee without sugar and cream, dry cornbread and fat meat, in the
ashes, on a cold, raw morning before the stars have paled in the sky.
However, on the unpleasant prospect of seven hours elapsing before
another snack, on this occasion we did stuff down some solid food, and
drank copiously of the coffee.
At this time an artist, seated at some distance up the brook, would have
seen a spectacle of striking interest for the subject of a painting. In
the center of his canvas he would have placed a huge fire with blaze,
ten feet high; behind it, half hidden by smoke and flame, the outlines
of a rude shelter; around it, their rugged features brightly lighted up,
a group of shivering mountaineers, some wrapped to their hat rims in
blankets, others with closely buttoned coats, and all squatting on the
ground or standing leaning on their rifles; the dogs in all imaginable
postures, either crouched close to the fire, or, outside the human
circle, struggling for the possession of a dry crust; the great, mossed
trunks of trees springing from the ferny rocks and slopes on which moved
fantastic shadows. He could have shown the stillness of the air by the
straightness of the column of ascending smoke, and the winter chill by
the gaunt branches encased in ice. But the sounds of camp life--striking
characteristics of the scene--would have eluded him. No brush could have
conveyed to the canvas the snarling of the dogs, the laugh of a
strong-lunged hunter, or Wid’s startling imitation of the hoot of the
owl, awakening the echoes of the gorges and responses from the
night-bird just repairing to his roost.
We ascended Old Bald by a trail termed the “winds.” It was icy
underfoot, and some of the party had severe falls before we issued, from
the dwarf beeches, upon the bare backbone of the range. Although no
breeze was stirring that morning on the north side of the mountain, a
bitter, winter blast was sweeping the summit. It cut through our
clothing like wizard, sharp-edged knives that left no traces except the
tingling skin. This blast had chased off every cloud, leaving clear,
indigo-blue depths for the sun, just lifting over Cold Spring mountain,
to ride through. As we reached the bare, culminating point of the narrow
ridge between Old Bald and Lone Balsam, the sun had cleared himself from
the mountain tops; and, red and round, doubly increased in size, he was
shedding his splendor on a scene unsurpassed in beauty and wild
sublimity. The night rain, turning to sleet on the summits of the
mountains, had encased the black balsam forests, covering the Spruce
Ridge and Great Divide, in armors of ice. They glistened like hills and
pinnacles of silver in the sunlight. Below the edges of these iced
forests, stood the deciduous trees of the mountains, brown and bare. No
traces of the storm clung to them. The hemlocks along the head-prongs of
the Richland were green and dark under the shadows of the steep
declivities. No clouds were clinging to the streams through the valleys,
and visible in all the glory of the frosty morn, lay the vale of the
Richland, with its stream winding through it like an endless silver
ribbon. The white houses of Waynesville were shining in the sunlight
pouring through the gap towards the Pigeon. No smoke was circling above
their roofs. The quiet of night apparently still pervaded the street.
High, and far behind it, rose the mystic, purple heights of the
Newfound.
On the side towards the south the scene was different. Mountains are
here rolled so closely together that the valleys between them are hidden
from sight. There are no pleasant vales, dotted with clearings or
animated by a single column of cabin smoke. No evergreens are to be seen
beyond the slope of the Balsams. That December morning the vast ranges
looked black and bare under the cutting wind, and far off, 30 miles on a
bee-line through space, rose Whiteside and its neighboring peaks,
veritably white from snow mantling their summits.
Medford had been right in his prediction; snow had fallen, but not in
our immediate vicinity. Before noon, as we had good reasons to believe,
the wintry character of the scene would be changed under the influence
of the sun in an unclouded sky. As we descended into the low gap between
Lone Balsam and the next pinnacle of the Balsams, Ickes, who had started
in advance, came out in sight, on the ridge top, at a point some
distance below us. Just at the moment he appeared, a turkey rose, like a
buzzard, out of the winter grass near him, and was about to make good
its flight for the iced forests beyond, when his gun came to his
shoulder, a flash and a report succeeded, and the great bird whirled and
fell straight downward into the firs. The mountaineers yelled with
delight. Shot-guns being little used in this section, shooting on the
wing is an almost unheard of art. Not one of those bear hunters had ever
seen a shot of like nature, and the unostentatious young sportsman was
raised to a high notch in their estimation. When we reached him, he had
already descended into the grove and returned with his game. It was
somewhat bruised, and feathers considerably ruffled from falling through
tree-tops upon a rocky ground.
A mountain turkey is no small game. This one was a magnificent specimen;
a royal turkey-gobbler, that by stretching his brilliant neck would have
stood four feet high. Stripped of his green and blue bronzed plumage,
and prepared for the oven, he weighed 24 pounds. In the neighborhood of
Waynesville I have bought the same birds about Christmas time for 50
cents a piece, and the hunter, who, with heavy rifle, had ranged the
cold mountain top before day-break, and then brought his game eight
miles down the winding trail, felt satisfied with this sum (all he had
asked) as compensation for his labor and skill as a sportsman. Perhaps
he weighed the fun of killing the bird on his side of the scales.
We now reached the edge of the great forests of the balsam
firs,--forests which mantle nearly every peak above 6,000 feet in
altitude in North Carolina. The balsam is one of the most beautiful of
evergreens. When transplanted, as it is occasionally, to the valleys of
this region, it forms an ornamental tree of marked appearance, with its
dark green, almost black, foliage, its straight, tapering trunk and
symmetrical body. In the rich dark soil in some of the lofty mountain
gaps it attains to a height of 150 feet, and in certain localities
growing so thickly together as to render it almost impossible for the
hunters to follow the bear through its forests. It is of two sorts,
differing in many particulars, and termed the black and white or male
and female balsams. Every grove is composed of both black and white
balsams, and no single tree is widely separated from its opposite sex.
The black balsam has a rougher bark, more ragged limbs, and darker
foliage than the white. The latter is more ornamental, with its
straight-shooting branches and smooth trunk; it bears blisters
containing an aromatic resinous substance of peculiar medicinal
properties. A high price is paid for this balsam of firs, but it seems
that the price is not in proportion to the amount of time and labor
necessary to be expended in puncturing the blisters for their contents,
for very little of it is procured by the mountaineers. It covers every
high pinnacle of the Balsam mountains. On some slopes, however,
extending only a few hundred yards down from the top before blending,
and disappearing into the deciduous forests; but on other slopes, like
those descending to the west prongs of the Pigeon, it reaches downward
for miles from the summit of the mountains, forming the wildest of
wooded landscapes.
Although the observer, from the outer edge of this sombre wood-line,
fails to see any foliage but that of the balsam, when he enters the
shadows he discovers a number of trees and shrubs, peculiar to the firs
forests of the extreme mountain heights. Of the trees indigenous to the
valleys, the wild cherry and hawthorn appear to be the only species
growing here. The most ornamental of the trees of the firs forests is
the Peruvian, with its smooth, slender trunk, and great branches of
brilliant red berries, which appear in the early fall and hang until the
severest frosts. Its bark and berries taste like the kernel of a
peach-pit, and are frequently mixed by the mountaineers in their whisky,
as a bitters having the flavor of peach brandy. Here also spring the
service tree, with its red, eatable berry, ripe in August; the balsam
haw, with its pleasant tasting black fruit; the Shawnee haw; the Peru
tree; the small Indian arrow wood; and thick in some of the most darkly
shaded localities, hedges of the balsam whortle-berry, a peculiar
species of that bush, bearing in October a jet black berry, juicy and
palatable, but lacking the sweetness of the common whortle-berry, which
is also found on heights above 6,000 feet in altitude.