State

By BILL SHARPE It took place hundreds of years after the Cherokee gave up the chase; Cotton .McGuire's story of a fantastic niouutaintop park. Last Stand of the ill was the craziest thing Graham County had ever seen, and they still talk about it throughout the Smokies. The house itself was the biggest log house ever built in these mountains. It was two stories high, 90 feet long, and contained 14 rooms. It had two (may¬ be four) bathrooms — real bath¬ rooms, the first ones ever installed in the county. And it had a telephone with a line which straggled for miles through the wildest mountain land — across gorges, through laurel slicks and primeval forests, and over rivers and creeks. The oddest thing about this house was the fact that it was built on Hoop¬ er Bald, a 5,429-foot peak deep in the Snowbird Mountains, so remote that few, even of the mountain people, ever visited its top. The house was completed in 1910, and then in 1911 local people were re¬ cruited, at $1.25 a day, to pile fantasy on fantasy. They were set to building a rail fence — eight rails high — around 600 acres of land on the bald. Perhaps this was one of the great log fences of all time. Then they built an even greater barrier — an eight- foot high wire fence around 1,000 acres! Many persons now living in western North Carolina participated in this strange matter, among them a young¬ ster named Garland McGuire. Because he was so conspicuously a tow-head, the 16-year-old lad was called Cotton McGuire, a name now widely known and respected among men who use the rugged Snowbirds. With others, young McGuire worked with growing wonder and awe on the mountain-top ranch, but one day there came the most stunning sur¬ prise of all. Stock for the farm arrived. It consisted of eight buffalo, 16 elk. 200 wild turkeys, six mule deer. 34 bear — cinnamon and black — and 13 hogs! But hogs such as few people in America had ever seen. They were Prussian boar, "big up in front," says Cotton, "and little back behind, with curling lushes eight inches long and long tails." They are said to have been imported from Germany. Getting this livestock to the ranch was a chore which engaged the inter- Buffalo est and much of the labor of the whole countryside, and was an event which will never be forgotten in Graham County. Some of the game came in crates by rail to Murphy and was hauled by wagons 30 miles to the game preserve. Some went on to the Andrews station for transfer to lumber rail line. It took one wagon and four horses or oxen to haul one buffalo. Cavalrymen from a State Guard unit THE STATE, Vet XX; No. 17. Entered at second-class mailer, June 1. 1933. at the Poitofflco at Raleigh, North Carolina, under the act of March 3, 1879. Published by Sharpe PubUthlng Co., Inc., Lawyers Bldg., Raleigh. N. C. Copyright, 19S2, by the Sharpe Publishing Co., Inc.