Blount County Patriarch

Life in the Great Smokies in the 19th century and during the pre-Park days of the 20th century might justifiably be described as arduous, hardscrabble, marginal, or demanding. Thriving in the region, as opposed to merely surviving, required a special breed—hardworking, skilled with their hands, ingenious when it came to making tools or developing shifts and expedients to simplify their daily lives, and being tough as a well-seasoned piece of hickory. Invariably these were folks who lived close to and love the land. They innately realized theirs was a special and in many ways a blessed existence.

Reading the works of early outlander writers such as Horace Kephart and Margaret Morley presents a strikingly different picture. One is left with the impression that those calling the highlands their homeland were, virtually without exception, sorry specimens of the human race. Smokies settlers are described as “sullen,” “shiftless,” “perversely suspicious,” and being ignorant to a degree that “passes all common sense.” Such depictions are patently unfair, and one approach to counteracting the sensationalism found in popular early books on the region is through careful examination of individuals representing some of the salient, more interesting characteristics of yesteryear’s staunch sons and daughters of the Smokies. 

Look to the history of the steep ridges and deep hollows of the Smokies region of east Tennessee, and immediately one family name, Walker, stands out as being exemplary of hard-working, fiercely independent folks. You encounter it in place names—Walker Camp Prong, Walker Fields, and Walker Valley. On the North Carolina side is Walker Gap, and one peripatetic member of the family, William Pickens Walker, lived up to his surname by making long trips to court a mountain lass on the sunny side of the Smokies.

The story of the Walker sisters of the Little Greenbrier area is well known. Six of seven daughters in this family of 11 children never married. One of the spinsters died in 1931, not long before formal establishment of the Park, but the remaining five lived their entire existence on the family’s land, with the last dying in 1964. Through a special dispensation, even though their land was absorbed with the park, they were allowed to remain on the family homestead. For decades they would be a tourist attraction and earn a marginal but honorable living raising their own crops; and garnering cash through expedients such as selling crafts, bits of poetic doggerel, and fried apple pies to charmed visitors to what became known as Five Sisters Cove.

Theirs is a charming tale which has been recounted numerous times, perhaps most notably in a feature article in the April 27, 1946 edition of the Saturday Evening Post. Yet for all the allure of their close-to-the-earth ways, when it comes to unusual lifestyles, they are left in the dust of history when compared to the saga of a distant relative, William Marion Walker.

Commonly known as “Big Bill” or “Black Bill,” Walker was, in the local vernacular, “much of a man” not only in stature but in behavior. He grasped life’s slings and arrows with unwavering optimism and enthusiasm. In appearance and to no small degree in his life’s story he resembled a saturnine Old Testament patriarch. It wasn’t every day you came across a man nearing 80 years of age who could “jump up and clap his heels together twice before he landed.” A skilled gun maker, dedicated bear hunter, successful farmer, beekeeper extraordinaire, barrel maker, miller, and community leader, Walker was, after his own peculiar fashion, deeply religious. He was also a visionary early conservationist, who resisted, almost to the end of his life, repeated attempts by logging interests to buy virgin timber land he owned on Thunderhead Prong. After a stroke late in life he finally relented and sold a parcel to Colonel W. B. Townsend of the Little River Lumber Company. Even then he asked that the timber not be cut and it remained unlogged until after Townsend’s death in 1936. 

For all of his myriad abilities to wrest a living from mountain land, obvious love for the Smokies, vibrant personality and zest for life, legendary status as a hunter, and the respect accorded him by his neighbors in Blount County and beyond, it was Walker’s interpretation of the Bible and highly unusual view of what constituted suitable marital practices which earned the man lasting notoriety. Born in 1838, he married Nancy Caylor in 1859 and the newlyweds established a homestead, the first settlers to do so, in the fertile bottomlands along the Little River’s Middle Prong. To this day the area is locally known as Walker Valley. Bill and Nancy had seven children, although only three of them reached adulthood. 

Yet, with the marriage still in its early stages, Walker convinced himself that following the Old Testament example of David made it suitable in God’s eyes for him to have multiple bedmates. Accordingly, a second woman, Mary Ann Moore, came into the home. In time Mary Ann would bear seven children and the household apparently lived in harmony. Indeed, Nancy served as midwife for Mary Ann’s children when they were born and, in time, became the midwife for the growing Walker Valley community. Eventually Walker built a separate cabin for Mary Ann and her children on the opposite side of the river, but there is no concrete evidence suggesting that this involved anything but convenience as opposed to disharmony.

As if the marital situation was not already complex enough, Walker, once he resettled Mary Ann and her brood, apparently had a hankering either for more children or additional female company. He established a relationship with a third woman, Mary “Moll” Stinnett. The couple had a dozen children. There was apparently no formal marriage or bigamy, but certainly Mary Ann and Moll fit the mold of common-law spouses.

The situation, with Black Bill siring upwards of two dozen children (some sources suggest as many as 42) left a genealogical Gordian knot. One complicating consideration is that his children by Mary Ann Moore and Moll Stinnett retained their mother’s last name. Then add the fact that a noted local hunter, religious figure, and member of the Stinnett clan, “Preacher” John Stinnett, was Black Bill’s son-in-law (he married Walker’s legitimate daughter, Jane) and you have kinship links sufficiently complex to bring anyone studying the situation either pure delight or abject dismay. 

To add additional fuel to an already roaring genealogical fire, one Stinnett woman, possibly Walker’s illegitimate daughter, had an out-of-wedlock child by a famed hunter from the North Carolina side of the Smokies, Sam Hunnicutt. In his own way as much of a character as Walker and the author of the quaint Twenty Years Hunting and Fishing in the Great Smoky Mountains, old Sam apparently adhered to the name-related pattern set by Walker and his women, for the wood’s colt went by the surname Stinnett.

Virility and the ability to provide for an incredible number of offspring aside, there were other fascinating facets to Walker’s character. One contemporary literary figure, Knoxville’s Robert L. Mason, recognized as much. The author of The Lure of the Great Smokies (1927), Mason was a frequent contributor to major magazines of the early 20th century. He wrote an article for a 1915 edition of Recreation magazine, “Famous Hunters of the Great Smokies,” in which Black Bill figures prominently.

Walker styled himself “the old trapper of Tuckaleech” (Tuckaleechee would later be renamed Townsend) and reckoned “I allus was somewhat of a fool about the woods. When I was young they wasn’t nothin’ about the mountains I didn’t want to l’arn, an’ they wasn’t no resky thing I didn’t want ter do!” For an individual of ordinary stature, merely firing the muzzleloader he had crafted and named “Old Death” could well have been considered “resky.” It weighed 20 pounds and fired a two-ounce ball. For Black Bill though, risky behavior involved things such crawling into a bear’s den armed only with a spear or dealing up-close with wounded bruins without reloading his gun. 

Walker had the physique, strength, and fearlessness, to deal with bears or indeed anything which crossed his path. Mason describes him, at a point when he was well into his 70s at the time, as “a figure decidedly Tolstoyan, with simple habits of living to match, head handsomely grizzled with a mass of heavy, iron-gray hair.” He stood well over six feet tall, weighed a well-muscled 190 pounds, and in younger years had been a self-described “mostly muscle and the rest, fool!” 

A grand storyteller, Walker relished sharing reminiscences of a day when he encountered 20 bears concentrated in a small area where chestnuts were abundant. Although he may have burnished the story a bit, according to Black Bill this particular outing occurred during General James Longstreet’s siege of Major General Ambrose Burnside’s Union troops in Knoxville. Walker’s description of the situation, with a major military campaign nearby and him facing bears all around him, carries all the hallmarks of a classic mountain teller of tales. “The air was tremblin’ with cannon. Or hit might ‘a’ been me a-tremblin! We actually seed twenty b’ar thet day an’ killed six! The woods was a-swarmin’ with b’ar.”

Walker remained vigorous until the final two years of his life, when a stroke laid him low. Four of his daughters by Moll Stinnett nursed and cared from him during this period. He died on the penultimate day of 1919 and for some reason, rather than being buried in his beloved Walker Valley his final resting place was in the Townsend’s Bethel Cemetery. Colonel Townsend, as a mark of his deep respect for the old mountain man, provided a train to convey Walker’s body from the area of the Wye, where the Middle and West prongs of the Little River merge, to Townsend. Two years later Nancy would be buried alongside him.

The storied Smokies have produced many a quaint and “quair” character, but anyone familiar with the life of Black Bill Walker must see that few rival him in terms of either interest or eccentricity. He lived a full and fulfilling life strictly according to his own dictates and heedless of the views of others. For all his bizarre marital status, he seems to have been universally respected, and knowingly or not there are almost hundreds, and quite possibly thousands of folks resident in east Tennessee and beyond who are descendants of this Smokies icon.

The Walkingest Walker

Black Bill Walker was a man who, as a die-hard bear hunter, could easily eat up mile after mile of Smokies terrain. Yet when it came to covering ground, he paled alongside another member of the extended clan, William Pickens Walker (1862-1956). Pickens Gap, situated at the head of Sugar Fork just above the Pinnacle along the main Smokies ridge line separating Blount and Swain counties, is named for him. The same likely is true of Walker Gap on Welch Ridge.

Pickens somehow met a young maiden from the Kirklands Creek area east of Bryson City and conducted his courtship with her by foot. That involved a one-way walk of several dozen miles—up to the main Appalachian ridge line separating North Carolina and Tennessee, down Hazel Creek, up Rowan Branch and through Walker Gap, up the road along the Tuckaseigee River to Bryson City, and thence onward to the home of his beloved. His ardor was rewarded. He first married Sarah Watkins then, after she died at an early age, her younger sister Charity Lucinda. As a man who made round trips afoot embracing the better part of 100 miles just to pay court, he must be reckoned the walkingest Walker.