Waterfall Wanderers

Written By: Stuart Ferguson - Shakespeare and Company | Issue: 2021/11 – November

Last month’s very entertaining article by Carol Bryson about a 19th-century visit to Whitewater Falls reminded me of my favorite chronicler of our area cascades, Jim Bob Tinsley of Brevard. 

Like Carol’s writing, Tinsley’s 1988 Land of Waterfalls: Transylvania County, North Carolina has just the sort of lively cultural history regarding our natural wonders usually lacking in modern accounts. For instance, he tells us about two Cherokee names for Whitewater: Charashilactay and Thronateska. 

Land of Waterfalls manages to be a full-fledged antiquarian account of Transylvania County told through its innumerable beauty spots. And Tinsley’s black and white images of the falls–he was a navy photographer in World War II–are expert in capturing scale and atmosphere (he often features hikers or fishermen, including his father).

But as we’re in the midst of hunting season, let’s focus on one of Tinsley’s interests in his book: the early hunters and explorers of the area that’s now Sapphire and Toxaway. 

Much of the author’s information came from the journals of novelist William Gilmore Simms, who spent many weeks with a party led by Nathan Lankford,  Aleck Wood, and Jim Fisher in the fall of 1847. 

These “long hunters” would leave civilization for months at a time in pursuit of bear, deer, and other animals, returning with “preserved meat, tanned leather, and furs” for customers in Asheville, Greenville, and Spartanburg. The area around Toxaway Mountain, called by the Cherokee Sequa—and also known then as Hogback (or Big Hogback or Great Hogback, to differentiate it from Hogback Mountain in South Carolina)–was the center of rich game lands that embraced the upper reaches of the French Broad; the Balsam Mountains; and the headwaters of streams draining into the Savannah River. Puncheon Camp (its namesake Puncheon Camp Mountain lies on the southwest shores of today’s Lake Toxaway) was a permanent six-room structure (though none of the chambers communicated with the others) that the long hunters used as a base.

Puncheon Camp or a nearby locale was one of the so-called “lying camps” chronicled by Simms that the woodsmen held as a celebration at the end of their hunt. There they feasted and drank, and boasted of their exploits, their dogs (named Wonder, Hawk, and Guard) and their heavy, iron-mounted long rifles, which also had monikers, such as Old Ellen, Sore Shins, and the Columbian Orator, and were made by talented gunsmiths in southern Transylvania County.

The Transylvania Heritage Museum in Brevard grew out of Jim Bob Tinsley’s interest in local history. Tinsley’s wonderful book is now out of print and a copy found online will cost you around $50.