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WCU - Great Smoky Mountains - A Park for America

Early Explorers in the Great Smokies

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Item 1 - Early Explorers in the Great Smokies
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Early Explorers in the Great Smokies

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  • 58 East Tennessee Historical Society's Publications he delineates the Chilhowie Mountains, naming them "Enemy Mountains", and outlines the course of what is now called Abrams Creek, draining Cades Cove and the western end of the Tennessee side of the Smokies.11 During many of these years white traders had been visiting and dwelling among the Cherokee, but seem to have left no accounts descriptive of the mountains themselves. It is sincerely to be regretted that the steps of William Bartram, naturalist and traveller, were not directed a few miles further east when he visited the country of the Cherokee in 1776, for the pen of this gifted writer would surely have given us a word picture of the early Smokies, a picture that would be most enlightening at this late date. When the colonies declared themselves independent of Great Britain, North Carolina was claiming jurisdiction over the western country, and was entering into treaties with the Indians for cessions of land. The Smokies, and much of the main chain along the state line, were called the Great Iron Mountains at that time, but the name was not so firmly fixed that it did not call for a more definite description, as appears in the treaty of July 20, 1 yyy, where the bounds of the Indian hunting grounds were designated in part "from the mouth of Camp Creek a southeast course to the top of Great Iron Mountain, being the same which divides the hunting grounds of the Overhill Cherokee from the hunting grounds of the Middle Settlements".12 This same name was used in the act of the North Carolina assembly of 1777, erecting Washington District into Washington county.13 But in 1789, when North Carolina ceded its western lands to the Federal Government, to form the "Territory of the United States of America South of the River Ohio", a new term appears, for the boundary was described, in part, as "to the Painted Rock, on French Broad River; thence along the highest ridge of said mountain to the place where it is called the ' "Great Iron" or "Smoky Mountain", etc." This is the first official use of the name Smoky, nor has my research revealed its earlier use elsewhere. When and by whom the name was coined does not appear, but it is certain that it owes its source to the same misty blue haze that also gave the name to the Blue Ridge lying to the eastward. 11 Samuel C. Williams (ed.), Memiors of Lieut. Henry Timberlake (Johnson City, 1927). 12 Charles C. Royce, "The Cherokee Nation of Indians", in Bureau of American Ethnology, Fifth Annual Report (Washington, D. C, 1887), ISO. 13 State Records of N. C, XXVI, 141. ™Ibid., XXV, 4.
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Great Smoky Mountains - A Park for America

This digital collection was created to contribute to the public's understanding of the forces and ideas that led to the establishment of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 1934. The most vi...

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