Fishing for native brook trout here in the Blue Ridge country began thousands of years ago when the earliest Indians arrived on the scene. Cherokees and white settlers alike fished for brook trout for both food and sport. Today it is an important component of the region’s tourist-driven economy.

The Cherokees - who emerged as a distinct tribal entity about a thousand years ago during the Mississippian Period - knew the native brook trout as “adaja.” They fished for “adaja” in the cold headwater streams using various methods that included bone hooks and lines made from plant fibers and seines.

Where a pool was created by boulders, they threw plant materials containing toxins into the water so as to temporarily destabilize adaja’s nervous system. These toxins wouldn’t poison the fish’s flesh so as to make it dangerous to eat. They simply caused the fish to float to the surface where they could be collected in baskets. Two of the plant materials utilized in this manner were yellow buckeye nuts, which contain aesculin, and the rootstock of a common roadside vetch called goat’s rue or devil’s shoestring (“Tephrosia virginica”), which contains rotenone.

One of the most entertaining accounts of trout fishing during the 19th century is contained in a volume entitled The Heart of the Alleghanies or Western North Carolina: Comprising its Topography, History, Resources, People, Narratives, Incidents, and Pictures of Travel Adventures in Hunting and Fishing (Raleigh, N.C.: Alfred Williams & Co., 1883). The authors, Wilbur G. Zeigler and Ben S. Grosscup, devote an entire chapter, “With Rod and Line,” to this topic. The opening paragraph gives a sense of Zeigler and Grosscup’s often florid style:


“Streams, from which the angler can soon fill his basket with trout, are not wanting in these mountains. It is the cold, pure waters, that spring from the perpetual fountains of the heights, that this royal fish inhabits. Show me a swift and amber-colored stream, babbling down the mountains slope under dense, luxurious forests, and, between laureled banks, issuing with rapids and cascades into a primitive valley, and I will insure that in it swims, in countless numbers, the prized fish of the angler.”


The authors caution the reader about proper footwear (rubber boots), artificial flies, rods and lines.
They maintained that “a slender birch cut from the bank of the stream will answer every purpose of a ringed and jointed rod; for reels with lines of fifty or more yards can not be used with any advantage. A silk or hair line, as long as the pole, is all the length required.”

The best fishing they saw in WNC was executed “by a mountaineer, one day in early June, who used a green-winged, yellow-bodied, artificial fly with a stick-bait worm strung on the hook.” This fellow caught a trout with every cast. The reader is advised that a “stick-bait is a small, white worm found in tiny bundles of water-soaked sticks along the edges of streams.” They also observed that “In early spring, with a light sinker on your line, the common, red angle-worm on a featherless hook can be used with advantage.”

One of the numerous streams Zeigler and Grosscup sampled was Cataloochee Creek, located in Haywood County within the boundaries of the present day Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
But this well over a half century before the park was founded. “Our party of sixteen ladies and gentlemen, which, on a fishing excursion, visited the Cataluche river in the early part of June, 1879, put up at Mr. Palmer’s, the first farm house reached after passing the ford. At that time a high, pine picket fence enclosed the yard surrounding a roomy house, with large, open hall through its center, and a long, wide porch in the rear. In spite of our numbers, the farmer and his wife volunteered to accommodate us all, and did so in a satisfactory manner.


“The river is no more than 100 yards from the house, and soon after our arrival that day two of us, with our rods, started for its banks. It was just after dusk, and white millers and gnats were fluttering above and dropping into the water. The stream seemed perfectly alive with trout, coming up in sight with a splatter to secure these dainty morsels. The hour was propitious, and we improved it. Without moving from a line of smooth, deep-flowing pools, we secured a mess of forty trout before it became too dark to cast our lines.”


While visiting Cataloochee Valley, Zeigler and Grosscup encountered a young boy who had caught a stringer of 100 trout using “a hair line and a fly made of a crooked pin, wound with a small piece of red flannel and a black and white feather.” When not fishing with this artificial gear, the boy told the authors that he used young hornets, grasshoppers, and stickbait.

After awhile, the boy volunteered the information that he really didn’t need either lures or bait to catch trout: “I use a snare,” he said. “They’re first-rate tricks where the water is still an’ a little riley. You see I make a runnin’ noose in a long horse hair, or two or three of ‘em tied together on the end of a pole. I watch behind a log till I see a big trout, an’ then I drop the noose over his head, an’, with a quick jerk, snake him out. I’ve caught lots that way.”

I’ve written about Mark Cathey a lot through the years in various publications. But there may be some of you out there who don’t know about Cathey — and those of you who do know about him will surely never tire of reading about him one more time. It’s virtually impossible to write about trout fishing and leave out Uncle Mark.

Here in the Smokies region, no one doubts that Mark Cathey was hands down the finest hunter and the most adroit fisherman yet produced in the Smokies region. And he is equally renowned as a colorful character. Eyes light up with warmth and humor when “Uncle Mark” stories are being told.

He born on Conley Creek near Whittier in 1871 and lived most of his life on Indian Creek, a tributary of Deep Creek in the present day Great Smoky Mountains national park about four miles north of Bryson City. He earned his living as a lumber-herder, trapper, and hunting or fishing guide. When the splash dams on the creeks in the Smokies were released, lumber-herders ran along the banks to clear jams. Some few, like Cathey, had the agility and courage to ride the logs down the creek, ducking branches and risking sure death in the event of a miscue.

“Physically,” one friend recalled, “he was lean and lank, but not tall, and with all as tough as a mountain hickory. He was the nervous, wiry type. He had piercing eyes. He had an innate courtesy and refinement about him.”

As a trout fisherman, Cathey was without peer. Folks came from all over the country just to watch him fish. His favorite fly was a yellow-bodied gray hackle. He perfected a method of “skippety-hopping” the fly on the surface of a stream in a dance that drove trout into a feeding frenzy.

“When we’d make camp, I’d put a pot of water on for coffee,” a friend remembered, “and Mark’d be back with enough trout to feed five men before the water could boil.”

Cathey was a modest man, but he would allow that “I have been accused of being the best fisherman in the Smokies.”

He spoke in a musical drawl that was memorable. One listener noted that “he sounded like W.C. Fields with an Irish accent.” Mark Cathey stories abound. Here are two having to do with trout fishing.

One visiting fisherman spent the day with only two small trout to show for his efforts. Encountering Cathey, he asked, “How many did you get?” Cathey replied, “My basket is empty.” To which the visitor replied, “Well, I’m not surprised.” Cathey responded, “But I ain’t fished as yet,” and proceeded to use the sorriest fly the other fisherman could come up with to catch his “leemit.”

Another outsider — all duded up in spiffy outdoor clothes and carrying a 15-inch bowie knife — caught a small trout that he reeled in to the very tip of his rod. “Sir, I have caught a fish,” he said to Cathey, his guide, “what do I do now?” Cathey replied, “Sir, climb out there on that pole and stob that there fish to death with that bowie knife.”

One afternoon in October of 1944, Cathey left his sister’s house where he then lived on Hughes Branch to hunt a squirrel. His sister had requested one to go with some sweet potatoes she was preparing for dinner. When he failed to return by dark, a search party was formed. He was found about midnight, the victim of a heart seizure. Here in Swain County, it’s said that he was sitting under a large oak, his rifle across his lap, his dog by his side.

The epitaph on Mark Cathey’s tombstone in the cemetery above Bryson City, with its characteristic touch of warmth and humor, seems fitting: “Beloved Hunter and Fisherman Was himself caught by the Gospel Hook just Before the season closed for good.”

(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., 287713, or at ellisongeorge@cs.com

 

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