The Death of a Mountain Man

Celebrating the legacy of expert tracker Dwight McCarter

“It’s the first few thousand miles, after that a man gets limber with his feet!” – Sgt. Buster Kilrain, “The Killer Angels” by Michael Shara.

It’s impossible to figure how many mountain miles Dwight McCarter walked in his 80 years. He was raised in the mountains by a family steeped in the mountains. The Smokies were his backyard before he joined the Park Ranger Service after a stint in the Army in 1967. He spent 30 years as a park ranger. According to an elegantly written Garden & Gun profile in 2015 – his territory covered 521,000 acres and 800 miles of trails. After retirement, he remained a tracker, a guide and a naturalist.

His son Rob said that even at the age of 75, Dwight could cover 30 miles in the park without breaking a sweat, adding that his father was known as the best man tracker on the Eastern Seaboard. He was limber on his feet

A life in the mountains

McCarter’s lineage in the mountains can be traced all the way back to the first family of Gatlinburg. Both his father Marvin McCarter and his mother Pearl Ogle McCarter can trace their lineage back to Martha Jane Huskey Ogle, whose husband William started the first cabin in the area built by someone of European descent. When William died before finishing, Martha moved her family from South Carolina to the mountains and became the matriarch of White Oak Flats – later Gatlinburg – and beyond.

Marvin’s fourth great-grandfather James married Rebecca Ogle. She was the second child of William and Martha Jane.

Pearl’s third great-grandfather was Thomas Isaac Ogle Sr., the third of William and Martha Jane’s children. Thomas was born in 1784, two years after Rebecca for the record. And would have moved with his mother and family to the mountains before he turned 20.

Marvin, Dwight’s dad, was born in the Sugarlands and raised his family in the Roaring Fork community. He was a master horseman and outdoorsman who loved the mountains – a trait he passed down to his children. He owned and operated McCarter’s Riding Stables for years, dying in 2017 at the age of 89.

Dwight wasn’t the only one of Marvin’s children who took after their dad. His younger brother Curt helped operate the family riding stables and was known as an unparalleled rider as well as one of the foremost experts on the anthropology, geology, history and navigation of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

Dwight McCarter

Never has someone been more qualified for a job as park ranger than Dwight McCarter.

He started as a fire watcher. His job was to sit atop a tower watching for lightning strikes or smoke or other indications of fire. If he spotted a strike, he’d chart the spot and then go check it out.

However, his talents were quickly recognized, and he became a full-time ranger known for his tracking skills and knowledge. If anything in the mountains was knowable, there was a good chance Dwight knew it.

Talking to renowned author Daniel Wallace for the Garden & Gun piece, McCarter – an author himself – pointed to a line of ants who found the crumbs of their lunch. Earlier he had explained how when he was following a trail in the mountains, he’d look for the white broken branches, stems, leaves or other plant life that would serve like a shining beacon to the sharp-eyed mountain man. The white was how he rescued roughly 30 people lost in the mountains in his career

“See how they’re finding your food?” he told Wallace. “They’re following a formic acid trail. When they’re on the trail, it’s easy, they just crawl right to it.”

“This is what my grandmother taught me when I was a boy. When I lost something she said, Act like an ant. Circle out from the place you last saw it, looking in wider and wider circles, and then zigzag back in, until you find what you’re looking for. For the ants, it’s formic acid; for me, it’s the white.”

The ones he couldn’t find

We don’t want to be maudlin. We’re not going to speculate on what or how he felt about it, but McCarter was involved in two of the biggest unsolved missing persons cases in the park’s history. In 1969, six-year-old Dennis Martin was hiking with family up along the high ridges near the Tennessee-North Carolina mountains. They met another group of hikers near Spence Field and while the adults sat to chat, Dennis and the only boys decided to sneak up on the group and try to scare them. The older boys when one direction, Dennis went another. He was never seen or heard from again.

He hadn’t been out of sight for five minutes when the search began, escalating in panic. His father ran two miles down the trail looking for him, his grandfather ran down the trail to get park rangers’ help. The largest search in the park’s history ensued.

Searchers faced two major problems. First, a massive torrential downpour flooded the area. Second, the sheer number and inexperience of the would be rescue-team made coordination difficult and tracking nearly impossible.

Among the trackers were groups of Boy Scouts, whose own muddy tracks proved confusing for trackers. In fact, McCarter said a pair of child’s tracks – were found leading down to a stream. The tracks showed a child missing a shoe, but the one shoe mark that remained was the kind that Dennis had been wearing.

Park officials decided, however, the tracks were likely a Boy Scouts, even though all the scouts had two shoes. McCarter believed that Martin had lost his shoe but made it to the stream. After that, no one knows.

Search and rescue procedures were improved after that. Certainly, lessons were learned. But those don’t give the answers that many desperately want, even years later. In 2019, McCarter hiked back up to Spence Field for a Knoxville News Sentinel piece. You can’t help but wonder if McCarter and a smaller group of dedicated searchers had been used, would the outcome have been different. Would they have at least found some trace of the missing boy?

The other big unsolved mystery involves teenager Trenny Gibson who was on a field trip to what was then Clingman’s Dome. The group made the short hike to Andrews Bald. On the way back, her friends stopped to rest but she pushed on and was never seen again. Tracking dogs followed her scent back up the Forney Ridge Trail to the Appalachian Trail which runs above the Dome. The scent finally led the dogs off the trail. Had she missed the connection that would lead her back to the parking lot, walked up to the AT and got lost? Or had she gone willingly with someone up the trail? Had she been taken?

McCarter told WBIR that some of the dogs detected her scent along the roadside about a mile and a half from Newfound Gap and then nothing else. It was 1976. Seven years after Martin, the techniques were better, but the young girl was never found.

The ones he saved

Of course, McCarter rescued many more than those who didn’t come back down the mountain. In speaking with Wallace, he talks about a young boy named Phillip – a Floridian visiting the mountains who walked away from his family and got lost. Phillip had been lost for three days before McCarter was put on the case. He’d been out of town when the boy went missing.

He tracked the boy through the woods, spotting the white of the snapped branches and stems that Phillip had broken along the way. He’d fallen off a waterfall hurt himself. McCarter and started making the zigzagging patter that he’d learned from his grandmother.

The boy was banged up but OK. McCarter told Wallace about the conversation he’d had with Phillip before the teams got to them to carry him off the mountain.

He asked if Phillip had any questions about what happened while he was lost. He didn’t want the boy to carry the fear of the unknown forest through the rest of his life.

“Do you have any questions as to what happened to you here these last three days? Anything that made you scared? Because we need to get it over with. You don’t want to go back to Florida and live with something that’s going to haunt you for the next fifty years. We need to put a name to it right now.”

Phillp did. He asked about a rustling he’d heard in the leaves at night. He asked about loud huffing sounds. The first was a deer mouse. The second was likely deer, which huff at each other when they angry.

McCarter – who was born into the mountains, raised in them and worked them all his life – knew them as well as anyone since at least since his great grandmother arrived in them. They were his birthright, in many ways, and his legacy. But more than that, he knew how to demystify them. He used that knowledge to comfort a little lost boy.

Rest in peace, Dwight. You earned it.

Did you know Dwight McCarter? Let us know in the comments!