American Tourister

"This one here, and this one here, and this one here," he says, guiding my hand over his wispy scalp and putting my finger where once a bone-drill had been. Tuffy is 77 years old, a former wrestler of both animals and men, and now he runs Baby Bear Habitat, a roadside attraction in Cherokee, North Carolina.

Tuffy is a mighty stump of a man, five foot something, and his past as a wrestler shows itself in his barrel-chest and thick neck. Nailed to the walls inside Baby Bear Habitat are Tuffy's old wrestling togs -- zebra stripes, leopard skin, gold lamé -- and black-and-white glossies of some of wrestling's greats like Chief Wahoo McDaniel, Luscious Lonnie Loveless and Handsome Jimmy "The Boogy Woogy Man" Valiant. Tuffy knew them all, and in his day he could kick all their asses.

"I was tough. Yea, boy, I thought I was just something else," Tuffy says, oblivious to the families of tourists who walk into "Baby Bear Habitat," sniff the funk of mildewed wrestling togs and wet bears, and instinctively huddle closer together against the off-key weirdness of Tuffy's peculiar little roadside world.

Tuffy's Baby Bear Habitat is a classic product of the Great American Roadside. It's an example of a sub-species of American spectacle that is dying out in this age of corporate theme parks, water worlds and video arcades. Part shrine, part zoo, part scrapbook and junkyard, it's a tourist attraction cobbled from the detritus of one man's life.

Tuffy started his career in the 1930's as a teen-age carny wrestler, a scrappy kid in trunks and a cape who traveled the country with itinerant fairs and fought all comers. A middleweight, he quickly became a star of the professional wrestling circuit. "But then middleweights, they weren't so popular anymore," Tuffy says. "Everybody wanted the big guys. So there wasn't no money in it."

Tuffy took his act to Mexico, where the little guys were still popular. But then Tuffy got a match with Mexico's national champ. The champ downed Tuffy with a Kangaroo Kick, but Tuffy came back and threw the champ with his patented move, the Monkey Foot. Then Tuffy finished off the champ with a Back Breaker. The crowd didn't like that at all. They pelted Tuffy with fireworks and drove him out of the country, back to the USA, where he reclaimed the unprofitable title of World Middleweight Champ and held it from 1944 to 1946.

Tuffy finally retired from the ring after he got thrown onto the concrete apron and needed the holes drilled in his skull to drain a blood clot.

After they drilled the holes in his head, Tuffy started wrestling alligators. It was a career move that would eventually lead him to Cherokee.

IT'S appropriate that Tuffy Truesdell ended up in Cherokee. Tuffy is one of the classic characters from the era of American post-war tourism, and Cherokee is one of America's classic tourist towns, a jumble of gift shops, restaurants and motels spilled in the southern foothills of the Smoky Mountains like brightly colored litter along the sides of the highway.

The town of Cherokee is located on the edge of the Qualla Boundary, which is the 56,000-acre reservation for the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians, three hours north of Atlanta. It's the largest reservation east of Wisconsin, and the 10,000 members of the Eastern Band are the descendants of the Cherokee who chose to hide in the Smoky Mountains rather than walk the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma after their forced removal in 1838.

Through the 19th century, almost all the Cherokee survived -- albeit in poverty -- by farming. A growing population put excessive demands on the limited land base of the reservation until, by 1970, no Cherokee family made its living in agriculture. Today, the Cherokee of the Qualla Boundary survive on government assistance, employment off the reservation and tourism. Especially tourism.

All of Cherokee, like Tuffy Truesdell's Baby Bear Habitat, is a product of the industry James Agee tagged as "the Great American Roadside," a cultural institution that was born in all its vulgar vernacular glory in the 1930s. In 1934 Agee wrote: After the autoist had driven round and round for awhile, it became high time that people should catch on to the fact that as he rides there are a thousand and ten thousand little ways you can cash in on him en route. Within the past few years, the time ripened and burst. And along the Great American Road, the Great American Roadside sprang up prodigally as morning mushrooms, and completed a circle which will whirl for pleasure and for profit as long as the American blood and the American car are so happily married.

Once they got their cars, the tourists began looking for places to go and things to see. The tourist strip in Cherokee began as a few craft shops and refreshment stands, and by the 1930s, Cherokee was accommodating the ambitious motorists who were trekking into the Smokies. World War II slowed the development, but once the boys came home, Cherokee took off. Flush with victory and cash, everyone bought a car and everyone hit the road and everyone wanted to go see the Indians. But not just any Indians. They wanted picturebook Indians. And Indians live in tipis, right? And they all wear feathered bonnets, right?

Cherokee's Hollywood heritage has left its traces in the names of local businesses on the strip: Redskin Motel, Tipi Restaurant, Fort Tomahawk Trading Post, Flaming Arrow Campground. Nevermind the facts of history -- that the Cherokee never lived in tipis, didn't wear feathered war bonnets -- it's the Chuck Connors in redface that the vacationers wanted to see. .

Through the '50s and '60s America's great car culture and the flourishing Great American Roadside inspired the Great American Roadtrip. It became an annual summertime ritual and rite. Roadtrips became a central part of American identity, as the restive population gassed up, lashed the ice chest to the roof and trekked off into the wilderness of American roadside mythology, carrying out a simulated performance of frontier adventure. The view from the car window came to define the American tourist's gaze, and the roadside came to contain the cacophony of myths and symbols -- big, loud, bawling and insistently fluorescent -- that composed America's public culture, the kind of stuff that made French semioticians wet their pants.

But the roadside has changed since the interstate highways have been built. The roadtrip is no longer relished, it's only tolerated, because when travel is done along the interstates, which are roads with no roadsides, the trip itself is not part of the process. The old U.S. highways -- the site of the Great American Roadside -- have been left to wither, and withering with them are the monkey farms, the gator ranches, and the local museums that once suckered the spare change out of the pockets of Pop's bermuda shorts. The blue highways of the Great American Road are now mostly forgotten by the American masses, and prowled only by kitsch hounds, scholars of popular culture, and feature writers.

There are a few exceptions where the old-style roadside tourism has survived -- even flourished -- and Cherokee, North Carolina, is prominent among them.

THE Oconaluftee River runs through Cherokee, but in summertime it's hard to hear. The shallow, cold water running over smooth river rocks is a delicate sound, and it can't compete with the ceaseless flow of traffic that growls through the town on U.S. Highway 19. Almost four million cars a year pass through Cherokee, not counting the throbbing hordes of Harley Davidson riding clubs. (Nothing like Hell's Angels, these are black-T-shirted, gray-haired mom and pop bikers settled onto their cruisers like they're Barcaloungers, the riders wearing bracelets of braided leather color-matched to their liver spots.) The Great Smoky Mountain National Park is the nation's most visited park, hosting 9.3 million tourists last year, and if you're going there it's next to impossible to avoid Cherokee.

Tourism is not simply idle entertainment, it's the connubial bed where history and myth mingle their juices. Teaching mythifried history lessons is a big part of Cherokee's business, and the central didactic spectacle is the outdoor drama "Unto These Hills."

If you have ever worn the Hawaiian shirt and coonskin cap of an American tourist, you most likely have seen, or thought about seeing, an outdoor drama. It's America's proletarian theater. Families that have never waited for Godot or stood in line for tickets to "Cats," each summer pack the outdoor amphitheaters to see the grand spectacles of history and hokum like Florida's "Cross and Sword," which tells the story of the Spanish settlement of St. Augustine, or "Horn in the West," in Boone, N.C., which dramatizes the struggle of Daniel Boone to open a passage through the mountains. Currently there are almost 100 outdoor dramas staged each summer across the country.

In 1946, the Cherokee Historical Association was formed to develop Cherokee as a tourist attraction. A committee within the association suggested commissioning an outdoor drama, so they contacted the theater department at the University of North Carolina, which was ground zero for the outdoor drama movement.

The idea for outdoor drama began with the work of Paul Green. Green had been a classmate of Thomas Wolfe at UNC and had won the Pulitzer Prize in 1927 for his play "In Abraham's Bosom." Green was commissioned to write a play to commemorate the 350th anniversary of the first English attempt to colonize the New World on Roanoke Island. Green was a harsh critic of the false heroes and tawdry values perpetuated in Hollywood movies, so he jumped at the chance to write a historical drama. The result was "The Lost Colony," which continues to be produced each summer on Roanoke Island.

Green had been influenced by the marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht, and had worked with Brecht's one-time collaborator Kurt Weil. Green had been associated with assorted marxist theatrical groups, but throughout his career remained an advocate of Jeffersonian democracy, and he considered his work to be a part of the southern renaissance of the 1930s. Green's work was motivated by the desire to create a form of theater for the people, a way to reach ordinary Americans with political messages.

Green worked out of the University of North Carolina, and that school's theater department was the center of outdoor drama up into the 1960s. So when the boosters from Cherokee wanted an outdoor drama written, they went to UNC, and there they commissioned a graduate student, Kermit Hunter, to write them a play. At the same time, the Historical Association opened the Oconaluftee Indian Village, a living history museum.

"Unto These Hills" was Hunter's masters thesis. It was first performed in 1950 and you can still see it each weeknight throughout the summer, weather permitting. It's the story of the encounter between the West and the Native Americans, and like the tourist strip businesses like the "Redskin Motel" and the "Tipi Restaurant," "Unto These Hills" also shows its '50s heritage.

Like all outdoor dramas, "Unto These Hills" is a grand production that includes music, dance and dialogue. It contains bang enough to keep the kids from falling asleep, and the separation between performance and audience is breached each time a battle is staged and the choking gunsmoke rolls over the crowd.

No matter the nudges that have been given to Kermit Hunter's script over the years, it is still a story of happy reconciliation. The drama begins with Hernando DeSoto first marching into Cherokee country in 1540, his linear drumbeat interrupting a sensuous Indian dance. Cut to 1811. The almost 300-year history of massacres and small-pox are summarized thusly: "America was growing up. The past became a hazy dream."

"Unto These Hills" avoids indicting the systematic eradication and removal of the Native Americans and blames all the disruptions on the "white trash" causing problems on the frontier. Even President Andrew Jackson, who, by today's standards, was an unemployable Indian-killing psychopath, comes off as an unwilling participant in the Indian Removal. The play ends with the U.S. government agreeing to let the Cherokee remain on their lands in the mountains, everybody happy to be a part of the American family.

The dysfunctional aspects of the American family reveal themselves at unlikely moments, however. As I left the Mountainside Theatre after the final hugs of "Unto These Hills," I heard an exhausted mother say to her kids, sounding like a cavalry lieutenant and eerily echoing the history of U.S.-Indian relations, "We'll do the village in the morning, then we're outta here."

JACK Crowe stands in front of a five-foot high cone of battered tin that is painted white and airbrushed in purple with the name "Walking Elk." A young boy and girl stand beside him in front of the tin tipi. A mother stands back and pops a Polaroid snapshot. She takes the photo and hands the camera back to Crowe, along with two one dollar bills. The family of tourists walks away down the street, past the boxes of rubber-tipped spears, Mexican-made bullwhips, and stacks of Navaho bath mats.

Crowe walks into Baby Bear Habitat and lifts the fluorescent orange feathered headdress from his shaved skull. He rubs his head and pulls out a pack of Marlboro lights which are tucked into his beaded waist sash.

"I made $30 yesterday, and that was my busy day," he says. Crowe says he can't find a job anyplace else so he works the tourist business, posing for pictures with kids who want souvenirs of their trip to Indian land.

"This is what I got to do to keep my boys in school," Crowe says, pulling hard on his cigarette. He's angry, but boastful. He says most of the Cherokee, despite extensive government subsidies, live in poverty. He blames it on the tribal council and the local business owners, most of whom are white and lease their stores from the Cherokee council.

"There's a man up the street, he won't let Indian kids into his shop. There's a lot of 'em like that. Don't like the locals at all. And this is Indian land."

Crowe is working in a competitive business. There are a dozen men who wear the orange headdresses standing around different parts of town, posing for Pictures With the Chief. Crowe and the others have to live within a contradiction: they know the Cherokee never lived in tipis, especially tin ones, and never wore the feathered war bonnets, especially fluorescent orange ones, but that is the image of Indians the tourists want to see. So he poses with the kids and smiles at their parents and spits out his anger between customers inside Baby Bear Habitat, expressing himself through disjointed, arbitrary statements:

"The government doesn't like the Indian and has been trying to terminate us for 500 years....I tell you, if something happens in this country, the Indians will side with the blacks.... Is God gonna get even first, or are the Cherokee gonna have to do it themselves? We could start a war. It took the U.S. 3,000 pony soldiers to track down Geronimo, how many do you think it'd take to track down a Cherokee?...I'm a shaman, a medicine man I call it. I can make shit happen. And I don't even have to leave the house....I say the least you can do is kill me. And then I'll be mad. I'm an Indian. And I got Indian rights. I'm a part of this land. I'll come back."

Jack Crowe puts his headdress back on and gets ready to go back outside to stand by his tin tipi. He rubs his arm, where a smiley face is tattooed on his left biceps.

A woman walks in wearing a "Virginia is For Lovers" T-shirt, and Jack Crowe tosses aside his apocalyptic threats. He winks at me and says, "Looks like I'll have to move to Virginia."

PUBLISHED IN CREATIVE LOAFING Aug. 6, 1994