Thousands of people visit the Smoky Mountains National Park, located in Tennessee, every year and view Cades Cove, but they do not know the complete history of it. In 1818, the cove was a completely different place, there were no roads or cleared fields, only acres upon acres of forest. Something many people do not know is that there were Cherokee Indians living on the land, in fact, the cove was named after an Indian chief, Chief Kade. The Indians were living in the cove for years before the first white settlers arrived in 1818, the Oliver family. From 1819 to now, 2022, the cove has changed and developed greatly from the wooded expanse it once was. The Smoky Mountains National Park contains several interesting stories of the history, the murders, and the ghost stories that have occured within the park.

It was 1819 when the first white settlers arrived at the cove, they were called the Oliver family. The family consisted of three people, John Oliver, his wife Lucretia, and their daughter Polly. When the family first arrived at the cove, there were no roads, cleared fields, or other white inhabitants. The Oliver family made the trip during the fall and did not anticipate the winter being so harsh and did not prepare enough food or supplies for the trip. The family would have starved during that time if the Cherokee Indians had not left dried pumpkin on their doorstep for them. The Cherokees had survived in the cove long before anyone else and were peaceful with the family because they were the only white inhabitants in the area, and therefore weren’t a threat to the Indians or the food sources. The Oliver family had survived in the cove, for the most part alone, before they had their second child, a baby girl named Martha. Around this time, other settlers from Carter County, the place where the Oliver family lived before, began migrating to the cove after seeing the success that the family had. As more and more settlers moved to the cove, the Cherokees felt threatened by the increasing number and feared that the influx of people would threaten their possession of the land itself. Feeling this way. The Cherokees grew more hostile and violent towards the settlers. They would kill any settlers who wandered too far into the mountains into their territory, one settler, Abraham Jobe, the cove physician, recalls his uncle who was murdered by the Cherokees, “My uncle was out hunting one day and had wandered out farhter than usual into the mountains, and did not return that night, and when search was made for him next day he was found in a deserted Indian camp, on his knees leaning up against the side of the camp, where he had been murdered by Indians. They had cut off one of his fingers and fled”. After the many violent acts that were performed by the Cherokee, the local militia rounded up the remaining Indians and forced them to walk the “trail of tears” into Oklahoma territory. Among the local militia that drove them out was John Oliver, the man the Indians had helped survive.

 After the Cherokee were driven out, the cove had a period of prosperity. The soil had great fertility and was perfect for farming and growing crops because there was a swamp near the bottom of the cove that provided water to make the soil great for farming. During this time, the first church in the cove was established by two brothers, Richard and William Davis. Everyone in the community pitched in to help build the church and the people put their handprints on the ceiling using sap, which can still be viewed today. Richard served as the moderator and William served as the clerk of the church until they moved to Georgia in 1839. Even after they left, the church represented to the community their single most important accomplishment. The people of the cove became very religious after the church had been built. Another thing that was also very important in the community was education. Many people think that because they lived in the woods, far from other civilizations, that they acted almost as savages. The opposite is actually true, the people in the cove valued education and community life very highly. The children went to a school inside the cove, where the picnic area now sits, in Blount County called Crib Gap School. A man who lived in the cove, Abraham Jobe, said that the education that the children got was more common sense and reasonable as well as better adapted to the wants of the people than the curriculum of studies generally taught now in the higher schools. Another thing is, during this time, the iron industry in the cove was developing very quickly. The first iron forge to begin operations in Cades Cove was the Cades Cove Bloomery Forge. It was built in 1827 by Daniel D. Foute, and located where the millrace leaves the fork in the river. This was one of the only “businesses” in the cove so this is where many of the men in the cove worked. Unfortunately, the operation shut down in 1847 due to no profitable resources being found.

This peaceful time came to an end when the Civil War started. During the war, Tennessee remained loyal to the union, but it was surrounded by states loyal to the confederate, because of this, the states around them used guerrilla warfare against the civilian population of Tennessee. Even though the people living in the cove were far away from the population of Tennessee, they were not safe during these attacks. North Carolinian raiders had access to the cove through a gap called Ekanetalee. The raiders would periodically strip the people of their food supply, livestock and crops. Many of the people in the cove were unable to afford to replace what the raiders had destroyed or broken, they were once again forced to live off the land. Elijah Oliver, a descendant of John Oliver, was a key part in the survival of the cove people. He was a skilled hunter who could usually bring in three to six deer a day. When the cove was raided, the cove was left with no powder for their guns, and were unable to kill larger game such as deer. Elijah Oliver came up with a way to build snares and small traps in order to catch smaller game such as rabbits, squirrels, and birds. With all the small game they were able to catch, they sold it outside the cove and the people could now afford to replace the items that were destroyed or stolen during the raids.

After suffering through the period of the Civil War, cove life began to evolve. Many more cabins and barns as well as mills were being built as more people moved to the cove. Peter Cable, who moved to the cove in 1825, designed systems of dikes, sluices, and log booms which are placed across creeks. A dike is a ditch or watercourse, a sluice is a sliding gate or other device for controlling the flow of water, and a log boom is a barrier created in a river, designed to catch floating logs or sticks. He was also documented to have invented farming tools, but those tools are unknown as of now. Another important person in the cove was John P. Cable, Peter Cables’ nephew, who moved to the cove in 1865. He settled in the lower end of the cove near the junction of Forge and Mills creek where the water flowed at a high speed. Because of where the rivers met, it was the perfect place to build a mill and that’s what he did. Previously, there were no other mills in the cove so the people would have to travel fifteen to twenty miles just to obtain flour that could be eaten. With John’s mill now in the cove, flour could now be more accessible to the people. This mill also began the development of water power in the cove, as it was powered by water from the two creeks using a wheel on the side of the mill. This mill can still be viewed in the cove today. The development of the mill did not stop there. Frederick Shields, the son of older cove inhabitant Robert Shields, built the first overshot wheel structure that would replace smaller turbine mills. This structure housed vital equipment for milling and bolting wheat flour, a sash saw for lumber production, as well as using one of the largest known native rocks in the Smoky Mountains for grinding corn. This mill would later become a gathering place for the community and meant that the people in the cove rarely needed to leave the cove for resources. There was only one person who frequently left the cove, Leason Gregg. Leason opened the first mercantile business inside the cove in 1873. He built a store on the Cable farm and that was known as the first store inside the cove; it now serves as a gift shop for visitors. Leason would buy the cove people’s produce and go into the town outside the cove to sell them. While in town he would also buy dry goods such as sugar, coffee, and salt to sell to the people in the cove.

Another few things that were interesting about the cove were the cabins, the wildlife, and the landscape. The Oliver family’s original cabin can still be seen in the cove, but just the chimney of it, about fifty feet from the house they later built.  Most of the cabins in the cove were either square or rectangular as these shapes were easier to build and used less resources and energy. During the time, only one cabin did not fit the normal, the Elijah Oliver cabin. His cabin is what is called a formative dog trot house. A dog trot house is when there is an open-ended passage that runs through the center of the house that separates the two enclosed living quarters. Unfortunately , when the land was purchased to make it a national park, the park services tore down all of the frame houses and destroyed them, so only a few original cabins still stand. Another unfortunate thing is that these cabins used to be furnished until someone stole almost all the furniture from the park, the remaining original pieces can only be viewed inside a museum in Gatlinburg. With the cove not being very densely populated, the animal population was high. There were many different species of animals that used to live in the cove, but some longer reside there any more. The most common animals to see in the cove were deer. Venison was the cove people's main diet, it's what they ate almost every day. Since this was their main diet, many of the men in the cove were hunters who brought back food for the whole community. The second most common animal to find was the black bear. The bear was mainly only hunted for sport, but when someone did bring back a bear, they would celebrate within the community and everyone would eat bear meat. Other animals found in the cove would be rabbits, squirrels, and coyotes. These animals would usually be caught in the smaller traps and used when deer meat would get scarce. An animal that used to call the cove home was the red wolf. None of the cove people liked the animal and neither did anyone else outside the cove. The wolves would kill livestock and ruin crops inside and outside of the cove. Many people would just kill the wolves because they were a liability to their investments, but in 1843, the state of Tennessee put a bounty on wolves, offering anyone $3 per wolf scalp they brought in. Even with the cove being mostly forest, there wasn’t much diversity among the trees. Chestnut trees made up over 30% of the population… The fields that most of the farmers inside the cove used were called Spence Fields, which rested on the shoulder of Thunderhead Mountain. The mountain was 5,530 feet tall and stood about 3,000 feet above Cades Cove. This mountain and the mountains around it were the reasons why it is called the Smoky Mountains. Wisps of fog and clouds that resembled smoke rest near the mountaintops, earning the mountains their name. Cades Cove itself was actually named after the Cherokee Chief, Chief Kade, who had been one of the Indians to help out the Oliver family.

Life in the cove went on like this until 1926 when the government bought Cades Cove and made it into a national park. The park now has a campground, a camp store, riding stables, picnic areas, and the eleven mile loop road where the settlers originally lived. The campground is split into three sections, a generator section where the campers are allowed to run their generators from 8:00 am to 8:00 pm, the tent section where you can also run generators but can only camp in a tent, and the quiet section where no generators are allowed to be run and has room for both tents and campers. Below the slope that the generator section sits on is the camp store, not the one that Leason Gregg built, but a newer one. The store sells camping supplies, fresh food, snacks, soft serve, very few groceries, souvenirs, and has bike rentals. One of the most busy attractions at the campground is the riding stables. The park provides horseback riding along a one-mile trail, given you pay, led by a ranger who tells you about the trees and wildlife along the trail as well as making jokes about catching bigfoot. The picnic area is right on the creek that runs through the campground, this is also a place that kids in the campground go to play. The loop road wasn’t built until after the land was bought and is now for cars and bikes so people can drive through the cove and view the cabins and barns the settlers had built and lived in and gives visitors a chance to see the wildlife roaming in the cove. The park also has park rangers who live in cabins in the campground, the rangers are also volunteers, it is not usually a paying job. The rangers’ jobs are to walk around the campground and check the sites to make sure people have their tags and they aren’t overstaying their reservation, to look out for the visitors safety, and to keep cars moving in the cove so there aren’t always a lot of traffic jams, or what some families call them, bear jams. Bears and deer are the most common wildlife species to see in the park, just going one time around the cove, you are most likely to see a bear and almost definitely see deer. You no longer will see wolves in the park though, they were removed because they were growing endangered in that area due to larger predators killing them and other animals eating their food supply. In… the park tried to introduce red wolves back into the cove but the same thing happened, they began dying off or leaving the cove all together. 

Even though the cove developed from the rugged place it once was, disasters still happened. Since 1931, there have been 470 deaths in the cove, the majority of the fatalities being vehicle accidents and plane crashes, but 19 of these cases were murders or missing persons cases. One of the biggest murder cases was in 1976 when ranger detected a plume of smoke coming from a nearby pine forest while perched 120 feet up in a fire tower. Upon investigating, the source of the smoke was found: five bodies that were drenched in gasoline, burning in a ditch off the side with a shovel lying nearby. The victims were three young boys, still dressed in pajamas, and two adult females. Autopsy reports state that before their bodies had been set on fire, they had been bludgeoned to death. The victims were later identified as Annette Bishop, aged 37, her three sons, William Bradford III, 14, Brenton, 10, and Geoffrey, 5, along with the mother of Annette’s husband’s mother, Lobelia Bishop who lived with the family. The only member missing was William Bradford Bishop Jr., Annette’s husband and father to the kids. When the police arrived at the home to investigate, they found it empty, but blood splatters could be found in multiple rooms. They also found that the family’s 1974 Chevrolet station wagon and Leo, their golden retriever, were missing. Brad hardly seemed like the homicidal type, he graduated from Yale university and served four years in the U.S. Army. Weeks later the station wagon was found parked just the Jakes Creek trailhead in the Smoky Mountains National Park. Both the FBI and the park rangers went on a team search for about two days, finding nothing. There were several call-ins, claiming they had seen Brad Bishop, but all these leads fell through. To this day, Brad Bishop has never been found and many believe he never left the Smoky Mountains, that he is still somewhere in the deep thickets of the forest. Another interesting murder case took place directly inside the cove. A University of Tennessee student had parked in the Abrams Falls parking lot and discovered the body of a woman, lying about forty feet from the road. She appeared to have been severely beaten and then fatally shot in the head where she was then dragged onto the bank of the creek. The woman was not identified until a month later when her brother-in-law from Indiana traveled to Tennessee and confirmed that the body was Emily Phyllis Moore. She had been reported missing in Indiana two days before her body was found in the park, but due to the computer technology in 1976, the case was not flagged when the state of Tennessee was searching for the identity of the body. The killer was found to be Leslie Diane Standifer, a woman who Emily and her husband had been financially involved with; it was essentially a bad business deal that led to the death of Emily Moore. Standifer was convicted and sent to  the Federal Correctional Institute for Women in Alderson, West Virginia, where she tried to escape after cutting a hole in the fence, she was apprehended two days later in New Mexico. Aside from murders, there were also plane crashes and missing persons cases.  There have also been seventy-three deaths from plane crashes and five missing persons cases, none of which have been solved.

Along with these deaths, there have been several ghost sightings reported through the Smoky Mountains. One of these stories was about a man who married a woman born during a thunderstorm; back during this time, people thought that if you were born during a thunderstorm, you would die by lightning. The man’s wife was paranoid to use anything metal, she wouldn’t use a metal bed frame and even though she was a quilter, she wouldn’t use a metal needle. She made her husband a quilt using the red shirt he was wearing when they had their first argument. She later got very sick and the doctor couldn’t save her. On her deathbed she made her husband promise two things, he would keep her quilts in the family and that her quilts should never be put on a metal bed. The man did not keep to his promise when he brought his new wife home and she insisted on using a metal bed frame. The first night that they used the metal frame, it was really cold so the new wife got up and grabbed the red quilt to put on the bed. The woman woke in the middle of the night to the ghost of the first wife standing over the bed when all of a sudden a lightning bolt  struck down from above. The wife had been knocked out and when she came to she found her husband’s charred body next to her and the bed was reduced to nothing but a pile of ashes with the quilt still intact. Another strange tale that happened in the Smoky Mountains is the story of a man named Jack who was down pretty bad and needed some money. He heard about a mill owner who couldn’t hire anyone because his mill was haunted. Anyone who worked there died on their first day but Jack wasn’t scared so he took the job. He worked the whole day with no problem until it turned night and a lone man came up to Jack after he had just shut off all of the mill equipment. The man asked Jack to run his corn and Jack agreed even if it was late into the night and the man said he was the first to ever do right by him. Since he was the first to do this, the man gave him a silver knife and told Jack that it was powerful against witches. That night, Jack was cooking his dinner in the skillet and it suddenly got dark. When Jack looked to the window, he saw twelve black cats sitting there. One of the cats got off of the window sail and crawled up to the stove he was cooking on, reaching out a paw and saying “Sooop dollll”. The word “Sop” meant to soak something in gravy and the word “doll” was used to mean a person's soul. The cat kept trying to put its paw into the food Jack was cooking but he kept pulling it away from it, realizing that the cat was trying to poison his food and steal his soul. The cat eventually got its paw into the food and that’s when Jack cut off its paw with the silver knife he had been given. The cat ran back out the window and with his food being ruined, Jack threw it into the fire and watched as the cat paw turned into a woman's hand with a ring on it. The next day when Jack returned to his job at the mill and the owner was surprised to find him still living. When he questioned Jack about it, he said that the witches had tried to kill him but he successfully evaded their tricks. That's when Jack showed the owner the woman's hand who the owner then identified as his wife's hand by the wedding ring that was on it. The mill owner went to confront his wife who was at the time meeting with her friends at their house. Jack would later learn that the owner set the house on fire with his wife and her friends in it, ridding the town of all its witches at once.

The Smoky Mountains is a very popular vacation place for people to travel to , yet many remain unbeknownst to the actual history that has occurred inside it. The idea of this paper was to educate people on the events that have taken place inside the Smoky Mountains and inform them some influencing facts that have come from the mountains as well. From 1818 to 2022 the cove has changed and developed into the national park it is today. From the Indians to the tourists that now camp in its campground, the cove is now a very historical place that could serve to educate many people. The Smoky Mountains National Park contains several interesting stories of the history, the murders, and the ghost stories that have occured within the park.