A fresh look at Cherokee Nation

Author G Sam Piatt

If you enjoy fly-fishing or spinning rod fishing for rainbow, brown, brook and golden trout in a clear mountain stream, you need to know about the adventuresome trip I took last weekend to the Great Smoky Mountains with the Kentucky Outdoor Press Association.

Soc Clay, our professional long-distance driver, showed us it’s a six- to seven-hour drive from the Ashland-Portsmouth area by taking U.S. 23 all the way to Asheville, N.C., driving west on Interstaye-40 from there through Maggie Valley, making a 15-minute climb up a high mountain, then dropping down into the valley of the Eastern Tribe of the Cherokee Nation.
Frieda Huskey, marketer and promoter of the good things offered the visitor by the good Cherokee people, was our host. We spent that first night, Thursday, April 14, in the El Gamino Motel. The next day we were able to move into our two log cabins in the Cherokee Campground, located just across Paint Town Road from the motel.
The cabins lay back under the trees along the banks of Soco Creek, a happy little stream that sings and murmurs as it winds by just down a gentle slope from the front porch.
The stream, like others in the area, is stocked three times a week with trout reared at the Cherokee Fisheries & Wildlife Management’s own hatchery. Trout often reproduce, too, in these cold mountain streams, setting the stage for battling wild, native trout. A two-day permit from Cherokee Fisheries is reasonably priced.
Our affable guide, Steve McCoy (he said he is 5/8ths Irish and 3/8ths Cherokee) took us to other streams earlier Friday and everyone in our 10-person party seemed to catch a few fish.
I watched McCoy, fishing just on the other side of the stream from me, catch and release three straight trout on his fly rod. After he supplied me with a fly like the one he was having success with, even I managed to catch one. The fight these trout put up is magnified by the run they make through the swift waters of the stream.
That afternoon, back at the cabins where we would spend the next two nights, Chris Irwin of Ashland, KOPA’s secretary and a former fishing guide on Cave Run Lake, decided to try his luck in the stream in front of us. In a short time he caught and released 14 trout on a spinning outfit using small spinners. KOPA President Tom Clay, who hosts a weekly outdoors show on WSAZ-TV News Channel 3, also got in on the action.
That night, as we all got together for fellowship on the front porch of the cabin, the rain began to fall. It fell on the cabin roof throughout the night, and by next morning Soco Creek has raised about three feet, turning its soft murmur into more of a roar. Even so, the all rock bottom stream did not muddy, but the swift water all but ended fishing for a day.
The storm front that sent us rain and wind spawned many tornadoes across the south, killing 22 people in eastern North Carolina, around Raleigh.
Other writers and broadcasters on the trip included Bob Danner and Joan Maddox, Don and Leah Kirk and Carl and Carrie Stambuagh.
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The Kirks, from Alabama, where Don Kirk has a two-hour daily radio talk show on outdoor sports broadcast across the Mid-west, spent part of Friday evening and night talking on the cell phone with their daughter, Loryn, who had taken refuge in the bathroom of her home n Alabama, where several people also were killed by twisters.
The Stambaughs, of Ashland, had the advantage of youth to help them enjoy our tour on Saturday. At Mingo Falls, where Soc and I, whose legs don’t have quite the spring of yesteryear, could only sit in the parking lot and look at that long flight of wooden stairs leading up the side of the mountain, sprung up the 157 steps and brought us back a photo of this magnificent waterfall.
The Cherokee Campground, owned and operated by Joy and Lee Craig and managed by Barry Craig, for all its woodsy, stream-side setting, is still within walking distance of downtown Cherokee and a new thing now on the scene: Harrah’s Cherokee Casino.
Yes, the Cherokee now have their own gambling house, where the slots blink and click and ping 24 hours a day as busloads of tourists come from miles around to make their donations.
Say what you will of gambling, this casino has greatly improved the life of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Nation, which numbers about 13,000 residents. Fifty percent of the profits go to improving life for them. It has helped build a new K-12 school, as well as a Alternative School, where children ages 1-5 are being taught to speak and write the Cherokee language – the language that was spoken during the winter of 1838-1839, when the U.S. Government set the Indians on “The Trail of Tears,” the long march West to what is now Oklahoma .
According to McCoy, at the rate of the casino’s current pay-out, when a young person of the current generation, who is a certain percentage Cherokee, reaches the age of 18 and has earned their high school diploma, they get a check for more than $90,000. It can be used for furthering their education, or for a new car, a new home, whatever they want. Then, once they reach 21, twice a year they will receive a check of perhaps $4,000 to $6,000.
Saturday night in the campground, Granny’s Kitchen, the downtown restaurant that offers a delicious buffet three meals a day, catered a dinner that included some traditional Cherokee dishes, and, yes! Deep-fried rainbow trout.
McCoy and three other Cherokee Braves performed Indian songs and dances. Also there we got to meet Internationally-known Cherokee artist Davy Arch, as well as Myrtle Driver, the Beloved Woman of the Eastern Band of Cherokees.
There is a lot to do in Cherokee besides fish and gamble, included among them touring a beautiful new museum filled with artifacts and recording the history of a proud people.
And, for sure, the old tourist sights and events – Indian dances, climbing black bears – along The Strip where you took your children in the 1960s and 1970s are still there. But nowadays, everything seems to have a cleaner, brighter appearance.
For information on Cherokee Campground & Craig’s Log Cabins, call (828) 497-9838 or 488-3373, or log on to the web site cherokeesmokies.com/camp.
To line up guide service with McCoy for fishing, or for hunting, including black bear, reach him on his cell phone at (828) 788-2748.
Information on the entire area is available on www.cherokeesmokies.com..
G. SAM PIATT can be reached at (606) 932-3619 or Gsamwriter@aol.com.