wilderness experiences for visitors, since even as a young man he was the
legendary tracker and killer of bears, the pathfinder and trailmaker. Wilson
died peacefully at age eighty-three in .
By that time, the great timber cut-down in the South approached its cli-
macteric, and the Blacks were not unaffected. During the s the newly
organized Southern Railway established a hub in Asheville, with branches
into the backwoods territories of Tennessee and both Carolinas. This ac-
celerated the taking of timber north of Asheville, even though logs still had
to be hauled by wagon over bad roads to the railhead. Then in —the
year of Wilson’s death and the state forester’s first assessment of market-
able timber in the region—several outside timber cutters from Pennsylva-
nia, Ohio, and Illinois suddenly gained leases or purchased thousands of
acres in the Blacks, including a swath of Mount Mitchell itself. They brought
in their own light rails, locomotives, and harvesting gear, and their assault
on the range was a blitzkrieg. In a few years, previously unreachable stands
of spruce, pine, and hardwood were gone and steep ridges were laid bare
to erosion. Discarded treetops, limbs, and branches (collectively known as
slash) lay bleaching in the sun—volatile stuff awaiting the first lightning
strike, live cinder from a locomotive’s stack, or discarded cigar. The moun-
tains had always known fire, but now a new and terrible fire regime was
under way, annihilating soil and surviving flora and fauna alike. Had Big
Tom survived a few more years, still fit for the climb and hunt, there would
have been nothing for him to do. The deer and bears—Wilson killed some
of the latter himself—were gone. The range (Wilson and his contem-
poraries were herders, too) was effectively closed by the clear-cut and fires
several years before North Carolina’s fencing reform. Farmers’ cropland,
always tiny, barely fed the people and could never support big herds. And
despite eager talk of an inclined rail to the top of Mount Mitchell, tourism
was badly compromised by fire-blackened ridges and endless (and ugly)
piles of slash along railroad tracks. What to do? What else but make a park
for hikers, climbers, birders, and general nature seekers. Tourism—Elisha
Mitchell’s now-old dream—would redeem the Blacks.
Asheville’s business and political elite had been campaigning for an
Appalachian National Park in western North Carolina since the s (even
as the great cut-down began). Governors and upland members of Congress
got nowhere with the proposal, though, and by mid- a timber com-
pany was advancing toward the summit of Mount Mitchell. But now Ashe-
ville’s most prominent son, Locke Craig, was governor, and he proposed