cars gridlocked as drivers and passengers disembarked to feed panhan-
dling bears—became daily events in summer. Cherokee, North Carolina,
the principal eastern entrance, became a bizarre roadside strip of souvenir
stands offering plastic native artifacts manufactured in the remote home
continent of natives: Asia. Many of the Eastern Band Cherokees shilling the
souvenirs wore Plains Indian attire, most obviously big chieftain’s head-
dresses. At the main western entrance, the hamlet of Gatlinburg quickly
grew into a nightmarish version of Las Vegas—nightmarish because Gatlin-
burg had the neon but no blowzy sex shows, much less gambling and
hardly ever the substantial architecture and confident self-mockery of Las
Vegas. Inside the park’s domain, the Park Service consciously promoted
the Smokies as Yellowstone or Badlands. Promotional photography empha-
sized large rocks in the park, evocative of, say, Utah. Horseback opportu-
nities for visitors seemed indigenous enough but also suggested a western
experience. More blatant was the remaking of an old community, Cades
Cove, into ‘‘one big farm’’ crowded with cattle. Margaret Lynn Brown, the
Smokies’ own most intimate visitor and biographer, observes that hereby
a defunct aggregation of small farms was transformed into the Ponderosa
of fondmemory.
Meanwhile, too, as in the West but more egregiously so, the Park Ser-
vice, working with game and fish experts and managers, early began to
manipulate and ‘‘improve’’ wildlife amenities. There would be no preda-
tors in the park, humans or other. Bears, being cute, were a fine attraction
providing one does not mind traffic jams in so-called wilderness. Certainly
fishing might be improved, following the enormous damage loggers had
caused watersheds, creeks, and rivers. Native catfish were disdained, how-
ever, being bottom-feeders and boring to serious anglers. So western trout,
nonnatives, were introduced. If a certain stream deemed prime for trout
already contained a competing native fish, managers were not above poi-
soning the stream to make way.
Later—during the s, s, and s—when Americans had
changed their mind about predators, or at least the idea or principle of
predators, the service permitted reintroduction of red wolves to the park.
Red wolves, relatively small and furtive, once abounded in the mountains
where farmland and burned spots maintained an edge environment that,
in turn, encouraged high prey populations of rabbits and raccoons. The
wolf introducers and Park Service were obliged to abandon the project,
however, once they figured that surviving animals had left the park, ap-
parently looking for food. By the s most of the Smokies had again be-