week of 5/22/02
 
 
 

Big Tom Wilson was legendary mountain man
By George Ellison

Most folks in this area are aware that Mt. Mitchell in the Black Mountains in Yancey County is, at 6,684 feet, the highest peak in eastern North America. Many also know that it is named for Professor Elisha Mitchell, who died in a fall on his future namesake in 1587 while trying to establish his claim that it was indeed the highest such peak.

So far so good ... but do you know who discovered Mitchell’s body in the pool at the base of a waterfall? Well, it was Thomas D. (Big Tom) Wilson, the legendary hunting and mountain guide. I have always been interested in the exploits of this region’s hunters and guides ... and none of them is more renowned than Big Tom.

The occasion for this column is some Big Tom material that I recently chanced upon in a book published in the late 19th century. But before we turn to that material, let’s sketch in Big Tom’s life.

Big Tom was born in a cabin on the Toe River in Yancey County in 1825. In 1852 he married a young woman with the wonderful name of Niagra Ray. The next year they moved to a cabin on the headwaters of the Cane River, where Big Tom served as the gamekeeper for a vast tract of virgin wilderness known as the Murchison Preserve.

One of the reasons for his widespread fame came from the publication of a book in 1888 by Charles Dudley Warner titled On Horseback : A Tour in Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee (Boston, MA: Houghton, Mifflin and Company). Warner was a northern newspaper editor and author who wrote several novels and a biography of Washington Irving.

While traveling through the southern mountains collecting the materials that went into On Horseback, Warner inevitably wound up spending some quality time with Big Tom. Here are some highlights of that encounter:

“From Burnsville the next point in our route was Asheville (but) at the moment the easiest thing to do seemed to be to ride down to Big Tom Wilson’s (because) not to see him was to miss one of the most characteristic productions of the country, the typical backwoods-man, hunter, guide ... Big Tom’s plantation has an open-work stable, an ill-put-together frame house, with two rooms and a kitchen, and a veranda in front, a loft, and a spring-house in the rear. Chickens and other animals have free run of the premises. Some fish-rods hung in the porch, and hunter’s gear depended on hooks in the passage-way to the kitchen. In one room were three beds, in the other two, only one in the kitchen. On the porch was a loom, with a piece of cloth in process. The establishment had the air of taking care of itself.”

As is often the instance with memorable personalities, Big Tom’s most striking attribute was his spiritual vitality, not his physicality: “Big Tom Wilson, as he is known all over this part of the state, would not attract attention from his size. He is six feet and two inches tall, very spare and muscular, with sandy hair, a long, gray beard, and honest blue eyes. He has a reputation for great strength and endurance; a man of native simplicity and mild manners ... There was an entire absence of braggadocio in Big Tom’s talk, but somehow, as he went on, his backwoods figure loomed larger and larger in our imagination, and he seemed strangely familiar. At length it came over us where we had met him before. It was in Cooper’s novels. He was the Leather-Stocking exactly. And yet he was an original; for he assured us that he had never read the ‘Leather-Stocking Tales.’

“ ... From Wilson’s to the peak of Mitchell it is seven and a half miles; we made it in five and a half hours ... As we approached the top, Big Tom pointed out the direction, a half mile away, of a small pond, a little mountain tarn, overlooked by a ledge of rock, where Professor Mitchell lost his life. Big Tom was the guide that found his body. That day as we sat on the summit he gave in great detail the story, the general outline of which is well known.

“... Professor Mitchell (then in his sixty-fourth year) made a third ascent in June 1857. He was alone, and went up from the Swannanoa side. He did not return. No anxiety was felt for two or three days, as he was a good mountaineer, and it was supposed he had crossed the mountain and made his way out by the Caney River. But when several days passed without tidings of him, a search party was formed. Big Tom Wilson was with it. They explored the mountain in all directions unsuccessfully. At length Big Tom separated himself from his companions and took a course in accordance with his notion, of that which would be pursued by a man lost in the clouds or the darkness. He soon struck the trail of the wanderer, and, following it, discovered Mitchell’s body lying in a pool at the foot of a rocky precipice some thirty feet high. It was evident that Mitchell, making his way along the ridge in darkness or fog, had fallen off. It was the ninth (or the eleventh) day of his disappearance, but in the spare mountain air the body had suffered no change. Big Tom brought his companions to the place, and on consultation it was decided to leave the body undisturbed till Mitchell’s friends could be present. There was some talk of burying him on the mountain, but the friends decided otherwise, and the remains, with much difficulty, were got down to Asheville and there interred. Some years afterwards, I believe at the instence of a society of scientists, it was resolved to transport the body to the summit of Mt. Mitchell; for the tragic death of the explorer had forever settled in the popular mind the name of the mountain.

“... The summit is a nearly level spot of some thirty or forty feet in extent either way, with a floor of rock and loose stones. The stunted balsams have been cut away so as to give a view. The sweep of prospect is vast, and we could see the whole horizon except in the direction of Roan, whose long bulk was enveloped in cloud. Portions of six States were in sight, we were told, but that is merely a geographical expression. What we saw, wherever we looked, was an inextricable tumble of mountains, without order or leading line of direction, — domes, peaks, ridges, endless and countless, everywhere, some in shadow, some tipped with shafts of sunlight, all wooded and green or black, and all in more softened contours than our Northern hills, but still wild, lonesome, terrible. Away in the southwest, lifting themselves up in a gleam of the western sky, the Great Smoky Mountains loomed like a frowning continental fortress, sullen and remote. With Clingman and Gibbs and Holdback peaks near at hand and apparently of equal height, Mitchell seemed only a part and not separate from the mighty congregation of giants.

“In the centre of the stony plot on the summit lie the remains of Mitchell. To dig a grave in the rock was impracticable, but the loose stones were scooped away to the depth of a foot or so, the body was deposited, and the stones were replaced over it. It was the original intention to erect a monument, but the enterprise of the projectors of this royal entombment failed at that point. The grave is surrounded by a low wall of loose stones, to which each visitor adds one, and in the course of ages the cairn may grow to a good size. The explorer lies there without name or headstone to mark his awful resting-place. The mountain is his monument. He is alone with its majesty. He is there in the clouds, in the tempests, where the lightnings play, and thunders leap, amid the elemental tumult, in the occasional great calm and silence and the pale sunlight. It is the most majestic, the most lonesome grave on earth.”

George Ellison is a writer who lives in Bryson City. He wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C. 28713, or at ellisongeorge@cs.com