The Return of the Lord of the Forest?

Klandagi, or “lord of the forest,” was the Cherokee name for cougar. The Cherokee revered the big cat; that and the owl were the only two animals to reach the seventh (highest) level of purity and sacredness. 

Once fairly common in the Smokies, this noble beast’s reign once spread from the Yukon to the southern Andes and from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

It’s no surprise that such an impressive animal with such extensive range could come to be known by so many different names; other common names include mountain lion, panther, painter, and catamount.

Europeans, however, didn’t revere Klandagi. To them, cougars were large and scary nocturnal predators. During mating season, they produce a piercing shriek said to resemble a woman’s scream. They competed for game and killed livestock. Settlers feared and loathed the big cats. They were shot on sight and hunted with abandon. This persecution, coupled with the destruction of habitat, led to the extirpation of cougars in the eastern U.S. by the early 20th century.

The last report of a wild mountain lion being killed in the Smokies was in 1920. According to the story, Tom Sparks was herding sheep in Spence Field when a lion attacked him. Sparks said he fought the animal off, inflicting a deep wound in the cat’s shoulder. A few months later a mountain lion was killed near present-day Fontana Village; the cat’s left shoulder blade had been cut in two. It was believed this was the cat Sparks had wounded.

Sightings in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park continued, however. In a 1977 report on the status of mountain lions in the park, 12 sightings had been reported from 1908-1965 and 31 sightings from 1966-1976; reports of cougars have continued since. Biologists and game managers shrugged those sightings off as either cases of mistaken identity or “western” cougars that had either been released by hunters or captive cougars that had escaped.

But this gris-gris of the mountains is not going gently into that good night despite the fact that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declared the “eastern” cougar extinct in 2015. The declaration simply added another layer of intrigue. The USF&W relies on the taxonomy of S.P. Young and E.A. Goldman, established in 1946, that lists 15 subspecies of cougar in the country. The eastern cougar was known as Felis concolor cougar. Since then the genus name has been changed to Puma, and recent DNA investigations seem to point to only six subspecies. Five of those are from Latin America, leaving only one puma in North America, Puma concolor cougar.

And this cougar is showing up in the East. A male cat killed in June 2011 was found, through DNA testing, to have originated in the Black Hills of South Dakota. In 2014 another male cougar was killed in Arkansas, and DNA testing also linked this animal to the Black Hills of Wyoming and/or South Dakota. The first confirmed female cougar east of the Mississippi was noted in northwest Tennessee in 2015, and there have been five other sightings from trail cameras in Humphreys and Obion counties.

Closer to the Smokies, the Tennessee Wildlife Resources (TWR) received photos of a cougar in January that was purportedly taken in Kodak, about 22 miles south of Knoxville. Though TWR hasn’t confirmed the sighting, it seems Klandagi could be returning home.

About the author: Don Hendershot is a naturalist in Waynesville, North Carolina.