The Barefoot Ranger

In 1884, Arthur Woody took his first breath up in the Blue Ridge range of north Georgia. Back then, mountain people like his parents lived in isolated log cabins with a patch of cultivated land hacked out of the endless forest. Their livestock grazed in the woods and the outside world of towns such as Dahlonega were days away down dirt wagon tracks, often impassibly muddy, that long ago served as Cherokee trails.

Survival was never assured on their subsistence farms. Working to put away enough food for the winter was deadly earnest. But for Arthur, it could be a joy, too — fishing for speckled trout in the bubbling streams, hunting wild turkey and deer in the woods, or good eating from whatever the garden or larder could provide.

This was paradise . . . mostly. Arthur hated the farming part, but he loved learning the secrets of the woods and the habits of the animals with his father, Abraham.

When Arthur was 10, he was old enough to go on a deer hunt with the men from neighboring farms. Fellowship, adventure, fun and the promise of delicious venison hung in the air. Something darker must have hung in the air, too, though Arthur couldn’t have identified it with all that noise and excitement.

In those days, deer hunting wasn’t a sport. It was a communal quest for meat. The men hunted with packs of dogs. Once the dogs scented a deer, they gave chase, baying out in the distance. A deer had little chance of escape as the dogs ran it to exhaustion and waited until the men finally arrived and shot it.

That’s how it had always been done. But this time, as his father showed the boy the buck’s carcass, Arthur must have sensed sadness as much as joy. His father said, “Take a good look at this deer, Son. You’ll never see another. This is the last deer in the Georgia mountains.”

The last deer?

Woody with granddaughter Jean, early 1940s

But it was true. Since the removal of the Cherokee in 1838, the settlers of this mountainous country had hunted the deer to extinction, as they already had the buffalo, the wolves and the black bears who used to inhabit these woods. By the end of the 19th century, the forest was virtually empty of game.

And it was about to get worse.

In the early 20th century, big logging companies, hungry for virgin timber, bought out many of the mountain farms, then clear-cut the mountains in every direction. Stripped of timber, the wooded hills became a wasteland of stumps. Rain eroded the unprotected slopes, washing mud and debris into the clear mountain streams, and wiping out the trout. And unbelievably, over the next decades, whatever was left of the chestnut trees that once filled the forest, nourishing man and beast, were killed off by an incurable, unstoppable blight.

Arthur was lucky to grow up in Suches, Ga., which escaped clear-cutting. He got as good a formal education as the local schoolhouse could provide, but his real education took place in the woods. He knew every hollow, every thicket that might hide turkey, every mountain pool that still held a few specs (as mountain people called the native brook trout), and every trail. He hunted squirrels and turkey for the table.

But he never forgot that hunt for the last deer when he was 10. He promised himself that somehow, someday, he would bring deer back to the mountains.

The logging and mining interests that stripped north Georgia of its resources and beauty were ravaging the rest of the nation, too. Few laws protected the environment. No place, however remote, however beautiful, was safe. Realizing this, President Theodore Roosevelt used his “bully pulpit” to champion the nation’s natural wonders before they were gone forever. To help restore places already devastated, he established the U.S. Forest Service in 1905. And in 1911, the Forest Service purchased 31,000 acres in north Georgia.

Woody went to work for them on a survey crew in 1912. The 28-year-old proved invaluable. He knew all the landowners and property lines. He helped purchase properties and establish forest boundaries. He was promoted to forest guard, charged with protecting federal lands from fire and poachers. He did this job so well that in 1918, the Forest Service named him ranger in charge of the Blue Ridge Ranger District which would eventually encompass 200,000 acres. Within those acres, he convinced his Forest Service superiors to set aside 40,000 acres as a wildlife refuge. The Blue Ridge Wildlife Management Area was the first in the nation. (Today there are almost 600 WMAs across the U.S.)

Ranger Woody — or just “Ranger,” as many called him — oversaw the reforestation of his beloved mountains. But what good was a forest without animals to inhabit it? The Forest Service said, in effect, “That’s not our job.” Woody disagreed. His motto was, “If it needs done, do it, and get permission after it’s too late for them to change it.” He and his two sons began to stock the empty streams with native trout and introduced rainbow and brown trout shipped from Colorado and Washington state. Within a few years, trout were thriving all through the reserve.