[Birds chirping]
[Sims] Looking out from Myrtle Point on Mount LeConte,
it's hard to imagine the Great Smoky Mountains
as anything other than the lush national park
that draws millions every year.
But a century ago,
the park's third-highest peak
was also one of its only bastions of wilderness
amid the march of industry.
[Aday] There'd been so much logging
that had gone on in southern Appalachia,
and LeConte was one of those areas
that still looked relatively untouched.
[Sims] The Champion Fibre Company owned the mountain,
and Colonel David Chapman
with the Great Smoky Mountains Conservation Association
struck a deal
that would set the stage for turning the logging-scarred Smokies
into a national park.
And according to Ken Wise,
[Wise] Hi.
[Sims] the retired co-founder of UT Libraries'
Great Smoky Mountains Regional Collection,
the group needed someone to get a camp ready.
[Wise] The Great Smoky Mountains Conservation was trying to
procure that land for a new national park,
and they wanted somebody up on LeConte to keep sanitary conditions
and to build a cabin for people to visit
and just take care of the area
until they could take possession of the mountain.
[Sims] A 24-year-old from Knoxville caught Chapman's attention.
By the time the conservation association recruited him,
Paul Adams was already an experienced outdoorsman,
co-founding both the East Tennessee Ornithological Society
and the Smoky Mountains Hiking Club.
This new job would send him to the summit of Mount LeConte for nearly a year
starting in the summer of 1925.
But national park librarian- archivist Michael Aday says
Adams' mother didn't like the idea of her son being alone in the mountains.
[Aday] And she wanted him to have a companion
and she recommended that he should get a dog.
[Sims] As fate would have it,
a friend was taking care of a police dog
after its owner, a Knoxville detective,
was killed in a gun battle.
He invited Adams over to meet it,
and the pair seemed to bond instantly.
With some negotiation,
Adams bought the powerful black German shepherd
named Cumberland Jack II for $250,
equal to more than $4,000 today.
And he gave his canine companion a new name
to match their mountainous home.
[Wise] He changed it to Smoky Jack.
[Sims] Adams recognized the dog's intelligence
and knew the newly dubbed Smoky Jack
could be more than just a friend atop LeConte.
[Aday] David Chapman, who was a World War I veteran,
told him about the U.S. Army and the cavalry
how they took dogs and trained them to run dispatches behind lines.
So Paul Adams decided that
he would be able to train Jack
to do something similar.
[Sims] Keeping with the military inspiration,
Adams went to an army salvage store in Knoxville.
[Wise] He had a set of saddlebags made for the dog.
[Sims] The saddlebags, originally intended for cavalry horses,
gave the German shepherd a new purpose.
[Aday] He trained Jack to go from the top of Mount LeConte
all the way down to Ogle's Store in Gatlinburg.
And he would put a note, a shopping list, and some money in the bags.
And Mr. Ogle was the only person who could actually handle the dog.
He'd take the money and put nails or flour or whatever it was,
put them in the saddle bags, put the change in there,
and the dog would run right back up the mountain.
[Sims] For nine months,
Smoky Jack made the trek to and from the mountaintop,
carrying up to 30 pounds at a time,
while Adams built the first permanent camp on Mount LeConte.
[Aday] It was a very crude sort of a balsam log lean-to
with an outdoor kitchen.
[Sims] Adams documented their adventures atop LeConte in journals
that were later turned into novels.
Some stories recount the dog's heroics
like the time he helped Adams back to camp
after a fall in Huggins Hell.
[Wise] They got on a rather narrow ridge
and Paul fell off
and he was knocked unconscious
and when he wakes up, his water bottle had broken
but the dog is still there.
[Sims] Others detail the lengths Adams went to in breaking Jack's bad habit
of killing chickens on homestead farms.
[Wise] So Paul took one of the chickens that he had to buy
and took a piece of wire
and wrapped it around the dog's neck
and let it rot for a week.
[Sims] The pair also popped up in newspapers
with tales of the "Young Man of the Mountain"
and his "fine German police dog."
[Aday] It really is sort of the first chapter
of the story about Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
[Sims] But spring 1926 spelled an early end for the duo's time on LeConte.
[Wise] Paul Adams got fired after the first year.
We don't know why.
It may have been he just didn't quite have enough experience to run camp.
And it was taken over by Andy Huff's son, Jack Huff,
who built what we now have, the LeConte Lodge.
[Sims] Adams and his saddlebag- wearing sidekick left the Smokies
and eventually moved to Crab Orchard in Cumberland County.
[Wise] And he changed the dog's name back to Cumberland Jack.
[Sims] Cumberland Jack stayed at his partner's side for nearly a decade more
living to the ripe old age of 14.
Adams buried his constant companion on his land
and continued his work as a celebrated naturalist
until his death in 1985.
[Music fades]
Though their time on Mount LeConte was brief
and the camp they built no longer stands,
Adams and Cumberland Jack still have a foothold in the park's foggy foothills.
[Aday] Cumberland Jack and Paul Adams are
revered, legendary figures in the history of the Smokies.
[Sims] The Great Smoky Mountains Collections Preservation Center in Townsend
houses one of the few surviving relics of their work.
[Aday] Everyone always wants to see Cumberland Jack's saddlebags.
This is sort of a physical representation
of the work and the minutia that went into
building support for establishing a park in southern Appalachia.
From little acorns, mighty oaks grow,
and this is an amazing little acorn that we have in the collections.
[Sims] And beyond historical archives,
the duo's adventures live on in print.
[Wise] Paul Adams is a fixture in the lore of the Great Smoky Mountains,
and the dog is just probably the most fascinating part.
[Sims] Wise, who co-edited the book Smoky Jack based on Adams' journal,
says it acts as a period piece
for a pivotal point before the park.
[Wise] The book has these episodes
with really good human interest
happening in the Smokies
at that critical time when we're
trying to decide if it can be a national park.
[Music fades]
[Sims] Whether it's pinched in well-worn leather,
printed on a page,
or even presented on a Gatlinburg eatery,
[Car passing]
the legacy Paul Adams and Cumberland Jack left behind lives on
with the millions of visitors
who come to the Great Smoky Mountains every year
and, perhaps more so,
with the adventurous hikers who reach the top
of Mount LeConte.
[Birds chirping]