Nantahala National Forest: A History

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PART I

THE STORY OF NANTAHALA

We heard a noise like an airplane flying real low, reported a fisherman to the sheriff of Macon County, and then it went silent."

Then we heard a loud bang, his buddy added.

When did you hear this? the sheriff asked.

Yesterday.

Yesterday?

Yeah, we were fishing at Nantahala Lake. We fished all day and didn’t get back home until after dark.

Shortly after noon on September 12, 1985, Sheriff George Moses called District Ranger Lewis Kearney. I need help with a search party, the sheriff told him. Sounds like a plane went down yesterday in the national forest west of Nantahala Lake.

U.S. Forest Service (USFS) personnel and county deputies gathered near Big Choga. Sheriff Moses, Ranger Kearney and a search party hiked west up a steep trail toward the ridge forming the boundary between Macon and Clay Counties. Radio communication between Kearny, a USFS dispatcher and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) confirmed the presumption of a downed plane in Nantahala National Forest (NNF). If you find it, call us back with the plane’s tail number, said the FAA official.

Meanwhile, Clay County sheriff Tony Woody also received the report of a plane crash and organized two search parties. Asheville-Citizen Times reporter Bob Scott joined the group that got lost. To this day, I still don’t know where we were, said Scott, now mayor of Franklin.

Sheriff Woody and a private aircraft pilot departed a small Tusquitee airstrip for an aerial view. Near Weatherman Bald (4,960 feet) and County Corners (5,419 feet), where Macon, Clay and Cherokee Counties meet, they spotted the wreckage. The second Hayesville rescue group arrived at the crash site and discovered scattered airplane debris around an intact instrument panel. They searched the scene for survivors. Somewhere in the wilderness, Scott heard their radio transmissions.

How many people were killed? the airborne sheriff asked the ground crew.

Sheriff, we can’t find any bodies.

Now, boys. This is serious business. That plane didn’t get there by itself.

The Hayesville Rescue Squad was combing the scene when the Macon County search party arrived. Sheriff Moses and his team helped search the wreckage for the pilot’s body. There were no signs of a fire. No smoke. No explosions. And no body.

Kearney radioed the crash scene report of the evidence found—and not found—to the FAA. The FAA contacted the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The search crews departed the rim of Fires Creek and hiked down into Clay County after dark, presumably descending into the watershed on the Shinbone Ridge trail to the end of FSR 340. The next day, federal agents and other officials arrived to investigate the scene.

Mystery and intrigue; conspiracy and international crimes; a compelling plot with an unusual twist or two; drugs, weapons and a plane crash with a missing pilot—it all sounds more like a dramatic mystery made for a movie than the beginning of a nonfiction book on the history of a national forest.

At 8:44 a.m. the previous day, a Knoxville resident found a dead man, dressed in combat-style fatigues and expensive Italian shoes, lying in his front yard next to a partially opened parachute. In a green army duffel bag, the man had $15 million worth of cocaine. Authorities also found knives, night-vision goggles, rope, automatic weapons, nearly $5,000 in cash, six South African gold coins, a personal address book and keys to an airplane. The plane’s identification number on his keys matched that of the twin-engine Cessna-404 found in NNF.

A Knoxville air traffic controller had tracked an unidentified airplane on radar on September 11. The pilot, however, had not filed a flight plan or made radio contact with the tower. The radar had traced its flight path looping around Knoxville and heading back toward North Carolina on a southeasterly heading. Investigators learned later that the forty-year-old pilot, Andrew Thornton II, a former Lexington, Kentucky narcotics officer and an attorney turned drug dealer, parachuted to his death before his Cessna, placed on autopilot, ran out of gas. While in the army in the 1960s, Thornton was an experienced paratrooper with the 101st Airborne Division. The government awarded him a Purple Heart for injuries received during the Dominican Republic rebellion. Later, in the 1970s, after a six-month prison sentence for marijuana trafficking, Thornton became a leader of The Company, a Kentucky-based drug smuggling ring. More than three hundred members, including policemen and politicians, owned more than $26 million in boats and planes. That September in 1985, his plane, equipped with long-range fuel tanks, was carrying him back from Colombia in South America.

Two days after the search parties located the Cessna in NNF seventy miles south of Knoxville, USFS agents found 220 pounds of cocaine ($56 million worth) about fifteen miles farther south in Chattahoochee National Forest. Beside a large meadow, army duffel bags dangled from a parachute stuck in a tree. The locked duffel bags held zippered, black nylon bags. Those contained individually wrapped packages of cocaine marked USA 30 or USA 10. The packaging and markings matched those found on the pilot.

On December 23, 1985, the New York Times reported that a 175-pound bear apparently died of an overdose of cocaine after discovering a batch of it. Surrounding the black bear in a forest outside Blue Ridge, Georgia, forty opened packages with traces of cocaine also matched those carried by Thornton.

The stories of search-and-rescue operations in the mountains of Western North Carolina could fill up the pages of their own book about the history of NNF. Inclement weather, slippery waterfalls, disorientation and inexperience have caused serious and sometimes fatal mishaps. However, the Cherokee Nation embraced this rugged area of five-thousand-foot peaks and dense forests as their home. The remote Southern Appalachians also attracted white settlers, explorers and an agency forming a new national forest.

The Appalachian Mountains stretch from Maine to Alabama. From the north, the Southern Appalachians enter North Carolina and divide into parallel ranges. The Unaka Mountains border Tennessee. The Blue Ridge Mountains lie seventy miles east of the Unakas. In the southern Unakas, known as the Unicoi Mountains, several cross-ranges—like the Balsams, the Cowees, the Nantahalas and the Snowbirds—span the area between the parallel ranges as if reaching toward its twin range in a geological gesture of friendship.

In a 1953 edition of The State, Bill Sharpe compared the Southern Appalachians to a ladder:

[They] arrive at the North Carolina border, after a prim and proper journey through Virginia [and] things begin to happen…makes geographers and geologists splutter with explanations and reach for unscientific adjectives…a maze of valley, ridge and river bemuse the traveler and send him home hardly knowing where he has been.…Try some unscientific thinking. Here is a ladder, with the eastern post representing the Blue Ridge, the western post the Unakas. Connecting these twin ranges of the Appalachians are tremendous cross-ranges, bridges of land, [like]…the rungs or steps of the ladder. The rungs separate river basins, each with its own elaborate water system. The rungs do not always go across directly and completely. Some are bent; and there are splinters, both on the upright posts and the rungs. And even the splinters have smaller splinters.

In the southwestern corner of North Carolina, the Nantahala region is one of the wettest regions in the country—second only to the Pacific Northwest. As headwater streams gather volume and force, they carve narrow valleys, deep ravines and winding channels. Streams join rivers, like the Tuckasegee, Valley, Whitewater and Cullasaja. The Nantahala River changed its course over time, carving a gorge through softer limestone. The Chattooga River, in part, flows freely as a national wild and scenic treasure. The basin of the Little Tennessee River attracts scientists for watershed research. Power companies have dammed other rivers—like the Hiwassee, Cheoah and the Little Tennessee—creating scenic mountain lakes. Some of Nantahala’s streams tumble over ledges into gorgeous cascades and waterfalls, such as 411-foot Whitewater Falls, the highest in the East. West of Pisgah National Forest and south of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, these 500,000 well-watered acres make up Nantahala National Forest.

With its vast aquatic resources, Nantahala’s rivers influenced the location of settlements and villages established in Western North Carolina, like the Cherokee settlements of Nikwasi and Cowee on the banks of the Little Tennessee. In the early 1700s, South Carolina colonists established trade with the Cherokees in the Nantahala region, exporting deer hikes traded by the Cherokees from Charleston. From 1721 to 1777, treaties with the Cherokees ceded lands in South Carolina, Georgia, Virginia and North Carolina, including parts of their Nantahala homeland. The Treaty of Hopewell, signed in 1785 with the new American government, ceded more land in North Carolina, as well as tracts in Kentucky and Tennessee. Negotiations, treaties and battles between the Cherokees and the federal and state governments continued for the next three decades.

Big Santeetlah Creek, Cheoah Ranger District. National Forests of North Carolina Historic Photographs, D.H. Ramsey Library, Special Collections, University of North Carolina–Asheville.

Watersheds of Nantahala National Forest. Illustration, Ken Czarnomski, architect/illustrator/cartographer/naturalist, phoenix2reach@gmail.com.

South Carolina opened former Cherokee territories to white settlers, offering some tracts as land grants to Revolutionary War veterans. In 1787, the Chattooga River became the boundary between South Carolina and Georgia. By 1807, commissioners wanted to mark the line between Georgia and North Carolina. In a meeting at the Buncombe County Courthouse in Asheville, North Carolina, officials agreed to start the boundary line at the juncture of North and South Carolina at the Chattooga River and run due west along the 35th meridian. Georgia’s governor hired Major Andrew Ellicott in 1811 to survey the rough terrain. On the east bank of the Chattooga River, Ellicott inscribed a rock with the initials N-G, for North Carolina–Georgia. In an 1813 dispute, commissioners from North and South Carolina hired other surveyors to reassess the area. The surveyors chiseled a new cornerstone, several feet downstream, with the inscription LAT 35 AD 1813 NC+SC. Known as Commissioners Rock and recognized today as the true tristate juncture, hikers often misidentify it as Ellicott Rock. In 1973, the district ranger of Nantahala National Forest completed documentation to have the site designated as a national historic site.

A USFS employee inspects Commissioners Rock, marking the intersecting point between North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. USFS.

Disputes between landowners along the state line continued, especially in the early 1900s, when the U.S. government expressed interest in buying unwanted land for a new national forest. Some claimed that locals had moved the state survey markers; others believed that landowners had moved Commissioners Rock. A 1926 USFS map describing the creation of NNF notes, The Forest Service location of the line established the fact that Commissioners Rock had not been moved, but also determined that the line does not follow the 35th degree, being some distance south of this latitude.

In 1819, another federal treaty ceded a large amount of the Cherokees’ remaining land, leaving them with small remnants of their homeland in parts of Georgia, Tennessee and Western North Carolina. People of European descent moved in quickly. By 1820, settlers occupied vacated lands in what is now Macon County. New settlers bought property at public auctions in Waynesville. They built homes, barns and roads. They cleared land for agricultural fields and harvested timber for wagons, firewood, building supplies and other items. Between 1829 and 1830, Franklin built its first courthouse. In 1830, President Andrew Jackson’s policy to remove the Cherokees from the Southern Appalachians passed in Congress by a slim margin. In 1838, the Removal began. At least four thousand of the fifteen thousand Cherokee men, women and children forced to march to Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears died during the journey.

By 1891, Southern Railway’s Murphy Branch rail line had opened the region to miners, businessmen, entrepreneurs, lodge owners and visitors. The State Board of Agriculture and tourism departments promoted the mountains’ scenic beauty and health benefits. The hardwood forests found in the Southern Appalachians attracted northern logging companies. Loggers built sawmills near railroads to ship the lumber to markets. Portable mills processed lumber at one site and then moved to greener ones. Mountainsides became bare and eroded. Discarded brush caught fire and inflamed acres. Anxious citizens and early conservationists began voicing concern.

When Dr. Chase P. Ambler moved from Cincinnati to Asheville in the late 1800s, he fell in love with the Western North Carolina mountains. Disturbed by the vast destruction of the region’s forests, he vowed to protect them. He advanced the idea that some of the forests should belong to the people as a national forest or a national park and not be destroyed and exploited for the monetary gains of a few.

In 1899, Ambler helped create the Appalachian National Park Association. At a meeting that November, North Carolina governor Locke Craig declared, The Government must preserve this valuable gift of nature for the benefits of all the people and now is the accepted time. In a letter to Congress pleading for the government’s help, leaders of the association wrote, "The Southern Appalachians are of unsurpassed attractiveness…the national government… by methods of scientific forestry [can] preserve the forest as a heritage and a blessing to unborn generations…. It is the duty of the national government to protect the water supply of the