On October 28, 2006, a 72-year-old woman was returning home from walking her dog when she came around the corner of her house and encountered a female black bear with three cubs. The mother bear attacked the woman, inflicting minor scratches and bites to the woman’s leg, hand, and arm. The Mountain Press newspaper reported that the bears may have been rummaging through garbage on the deck of the home just prior to the attack.

The incident occurred at 9:45 in the morning, a time of day when wild bears would avoid places with humans present, but when food conditioned bears could be active.

In the days following the attack, Tennessee state wildlife officials captured and euthanized all four bears. Agency officials believed that because the bears had become so food conditioned and because they had already been involved in an attack on a person, the bears would always pose a threat to human safety.

News reports that surfaced after the events indicated that people in the area had been feeding bears for some months.

The tremendous public outcry over the incident focused attention on the critical need to properly handle garbage and other types of people food in bear country. The city of Gatlinburg already had an ordinance requiring residents near the national park boundary to use bear-proof garbage cans and dumpsters. State regulations prohibit feeding bears. Yet, with hundreds of overnight rental cabins and second homes in the area, the rules are not always followed.

Crowds of tourists often gather to watch bears scavenge through unsecured dumpsters and trash cans. Many individuals and groups, including the Humane Society of the United States, have decried the incident and called for stepped-up enforcement of existing rules.

A similar bear incident occurred over the summer in the same area. A local resident stopped his car to photograph a mother bear and two cubs. When he stopped, his pet dachshund escaped and ran toward the bears. The man attempted to intercede and the mother bear swatted him, inflicting a six inch gash in his cheek.

State wildlife officials attempted to capture the mother bear, but were unsuccessful. They did capture the two cubs, which are being reared at the Appalachian Bear Rescue in Townsend, TN. They will be raised with minimal human contact and eventually be released back into the wild.

Both incidents also underscore why the park service does not allow pets on most park trails.

Of the events, park superintendent Dale Ditmanson said, they “point to the need for some improved interagency communication, more visitor education, and tighter enforcement.”

Three years of hellbender research conducted by Dr. Michael Freake of Lee University and myriad students and volunteers has answered some questions about hellbenders in the Smokies, but raised others.

First of all, hellbenders are very choosy about where they live. Their entire range is between southern New York and northern Alabama (west to Arkansas). Within this area they are only found in rocky rivers and larger streams with swift, cool, clean, well-oxygenated water. They have very little tolerance for silt or other types of pollution.

Consequently, in most states hellbenders are now listed as threatened or endangered. In Great Smoky Mountains National Park, however, the researchers have discovered that the hellbender is doing OK. The Little River watershed in particular boasts a healthy and dynamic population of hellbenders.

Elsewhere in the Smokies the picture is a bit murkier. Streams like Deep Creek and the Oconaluftee River appear to be ideal habitat, but the researchers have found few of the species there. Because of widespread concern about the status of hellbenders, Freake plans to keep looking for several more years.

Freake says water quality in the Smokies is very good and that his students have even found impressive numbers of hellbender larvae. Elsewhere scientists have been alarmed to find few signs of hellbender reproduction.

Hellbenders are surprisingly long-lived. Individuals over 25 years old have been recorded. The world’s largest hellbender was captured in the Smokies in 1946. It was 29 inches long.

Favorite hellbender foods include crayfish, aquatic insects, and small fish.

Outside the national park, anglers using bait occasionally catch a hellbender. Anglers who do so should release the frightening-looking but harmless salamanders as quickly as possible. Hellbenders are not poisonous and seldom bite.

The Lee University research is sponsored by grants from the Great Smoky Mountains Conservation Association, the Appalachian Highlands Science and Learning Center, and other sources.

Most northbound thru-hikers start in March or April. When they cross Fontana Dam into Great Smoky Mountains National Park, they have completed 160 miles (7%) of the “A.T.” So arduous is the terrain, that at this point, about half have already quit.

Still, notable waves of thru-hikers trod through the park between late March and early May. Many use the road junction at Newfound Gap to travel down to Gatlinburg or Cherokee to resupply, eat some very large meals, and get in a little R & R.

Seventy-one miles of the A.T. pass through the Smokies, and the trail reaches its zenith here, 6,625′, just below the summit of Clingmans Dome.

Not everybody who sets foot on the A.T. is a thru-hiker; in fact, most aren’t. Over three million people hike a piece of the trail every year. If you would like to be one of them, a good place to start in the park is Newfound Gap at the Tennessee/North Carolina state line. To learn more, stop by Sugarlands Visitor Center and see the AT exhibit.

As if their apprehension of modern medicine weren’t enough of an obstacle, most families lived miles, even days away from a physician. Procrastination was not an option, as doctors were summoned to birth babies, treat injuries, and even operate. Travel was difficult on a good day and dangerous more times than not. One stormy evening upon returning from a house call, Dr. West of Bryson City crossed a flood-swollen river in his buggy and was swept away and drowned. Dr. Bob Medford’s feet often froze to his stirrups while riding many a frigid night into Cataloochee on his trusted horse, John.

Although many mountain families were far removed from medical care, there were numerous physicians and hospitals in the surrounding towns of Maryville, Knoxville, Waynesville, and Asheville. Even some of the communities in the Smokies were fortunate enough to have doctors living within them. These physicians toiled tirelessly yet expected little in return, often accepting chickens, honey, and even the occasional quart of moonshine as compensation for their services.

Such was the case in Cades Cove, where from 1840 on, there was hardly a time the cove folk were without a doctor. One of the more prominent ones, Dr. Calvin Post, came to the cove from New York in 1846, set up practice, and served as a physician and community leader for nearly 30 years. A geologist as well, he mapped and mined the cove for gold and found none, but promoted the healing power of the waters flowing from its other mineral veins.

Though the mountains yielded no rush of gold, by the turn of the 20th century a “timber rush” was on, bringing with it lumber companies and their physicians. The Little River Lumber Company employed Dr. Bruce Montgomery for its timber towns of Elkmont, Tremont, and Townsend, establishing one of the first organized health care programs in the area.

For a flat monthly fee of $1.70 per employee, Dr. Montgomery treated illness, injury, and birthed his share of babies. He swore the babies always came with the blowing of the daily 5:00 a.m. “wake-up whistle,” saying that the sound of it signaled not only the beginning of the workday, but the beginning of life itself!

Organized health care soon came to other parts of the Smokies when the Pi Beta Phi medical clinic opened in Gatlinburg. German-born Dr. Charles Hoffman held classes at the clinic and trained local women in midwifery and in assisting him in his “kitchen-table surgeries,” holding down patients or administering ether, drop by drop, onto a cloth for anesthesia. He also “doctored” in Greenbrier, Cosby, and The Sugarlands. He was a familiar sight, as he rode horseback–usually with pipe in mouth–over miles of foot trails and wagon-rutted roads to reach the most remote farms, sometimes staying for days and nights on end.

A few miles from Gatlinburg, The Pittman Community Center was established and Dr. Robert Thomas, an ordained minister and missionary, arrived in 1926. Dr. Thomas maintained a clinic and on his horse, Old Maud, made countless “cabin calls.” It was said that during one 24-hour period, he “traveled 57 miles, wore out three horses, forded nine swollen creeks, and got soaked to the skin twice, as six of his cases that day were critical.”

He often served double duty as preacher and doctor, and when summoned to the delivery of a baby officiated at both the “birthin’” and the “baptizin’.”

Sassafras was another common remedy and good “sweater-outer” of fevers. Old timers believed if you drank sassafras in March you wouldn’t need a doctor the rest of the year.

Other popular preventatives included:
* a tea made from yellowroot, wild cherry, tuliptree bark, and “white lightnin’”
* eating rhubarb weekly during spring
* taking anvil dust mixed with cream
* drinking a concoction of rusty nails soaked in water

Hazel Bell Kuszmaul: “We did not have any plumbing in our house. There was a spring some distance from our home, and sometimes in bad storms that spring would have so much water run through it that we couldn’t use the muddy water. So then we had to go to the spring house where my grandfather had lived. His water source was more secure, so we carried water from there–it was half a mile at least to carry water back to our house.”
Vole [Mathes] recalls he only had a little bit of schooling, “maybe a couple of months at Liberty School,” so he never learned to read or write. But, he says, “that has never slowed me down.” He says he started working seriously, around age eight or nine, when “I got old enough to be of some use to the moonshiners. I made moonshine myself when I was strong enough to carry two sacks of sugar (100 lbs. each), one on each shoulder.”
Clyde Bell: “The moonshiners were always in the market for something that they could make liquor from, and since brandy was more expensive than white lightening moonshine…we picked blackberries and blueberries by the bucket full.
Over the summer, we picked hundreds of gallons, and we were paid 10 cents for a gallon bucket. That’s the way that we got our shoes for the new school year.
Another way we made money was to hoe corn…we worked twelve hours a day for about 25 cents per day.”
Wilma Bell Proffitt: “So the only activities that we ever had that you could call social life is in the summertime on Saturdays the boys would get together over at Liberty (a little community) and they would compete against each other with baseball.
And we girls would go and sit on a post or something and watch them play baseball, but we had so much work to do at home, carrying our own water…We had no modern facilities–no furnace or anything like that…”

Hazel Bell Kuszmaul: “In the summertime, when we would work in the cornfield and garden, we’d get so hot, we would climb to that falls and take along some old clothing. We could sit in a stone that had been shaped by the flowing of the stream into a seat.

In fact, it was almost like a bathtub. It had a little place in it, and you could get in there and sit down, and would that ever feel good when we’d come in and it’d be so terribly hot!”

Dewey Webb: “I was young when I sold my part of the land to the Park, and though they didn’t give me much, I put what I got in the bank in Newport.

Then the bank went bust and I lost everything, though I eventually got part of it back.”