Today’s guest post was written by Jim Casada.

Al Dorsey

A few weeks back Tipper featured Pap and Paul singing what is to me a haunting and heart touching song, “Gonna Catch a North Wind.” For those who have been blessed to follow her blog long enough, it was also offered back in 2011. As will sometimes happen, the lyrics of the song stuck in my mind, with those saying “You can’t catch fish on Main Street” making a particularly striking impression. That’s because during my Bryson City, N. C. boyhood you could catch fish on one of the little town’s two main drags. It is named Everett Street, not Main Street, and a bridge on it spans the Tuckaseigee River.

It’s probably frowned on if not downright illegal today, but at that point in time a number of locals regularly fished from the bridge. The leader of the bridge brigade was an eccentric old fellow named Al Dorsey. Of all the “quare” characters it was my privilege to know growing up, Al Dorsey had to be the strangest. His offbeat personality and bizarre lifestyle held great allure for boys. Frequent admonitions from my parents to the effect “you don’t need to be hanging around that dirty old man,” together with their strange silence when I inquired why they felt that way, merely added to his mystique. 

An old river rat, to me Al was merely a local incarnation of some of the less savory of Mark Twain’s Mississippi River characters. Neither that consideration nor the fact he was pretty much a stranger to soap and water seemed to justify Mom and Dad’s reservations. At the time, however, none of the bevy of youngsters who spent appreciable time with him fishing in the badly polluted Tuckaseigee River, and I was well to the forefront in that gang, realized just how sordid a background he had or how checkered his life had been. He merely seemed to be a local equivalent of “Catfish John,” who would be immortalized in song by Allison Krauss and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.

Every year when summer rolls around and miserably hot, humid days leave the high country sweltering in midday misery, my thoughts wander back to yester-youth and the simple joys of catfishing. I had a whole bunch of “holes” in the Tuckaseigee where I matched wits with Mr. Whiskers, although none of them were more than a mile upstream or down from the Everett Street Bridge. Mostly though, my fishing focused on the bridge and the shady areas underneath it. On the north side of the river, where a dry goods store abutted the bridge on one side of the street and the local pool hall on the other, there was another appealing part of the overall catfish equation. That was where Al Dorsey kept his home-made, flat-bottomed boat chained to a tree. He maneuvered the boat with a long pole rather than a paddle, and “his” stretch of river was a relatively short one circumscribed by rapids at either end of a section of flat water less than a mile in length.

As I write these words I am looking at the front page of the Bryson City Times for November 6, 1925. The lead news for that week focused on Dorsey, revealing an aspect of his life unknown to me until long after I reached adulthood. The headline reads:  “Al Dorsey, Slayer of Muse, Gets Sentence of Ten Years. Was Tried for Second Degree Murder.” The subhead, in an interesting bit of editorializing mixed with news, states “Sentence Regarded as Extremely Light.” When I first read this account, realization finally dawned why my parents suggested it would be best to avoid Al’s company, never mind that Dad did acknowledge Dorsey was masterful when it came to catching catfish.

My thinking, throughout boyhood and beyond, had been that they discouraged connection with old Al because he always looked unkempt; drank more than a bit; wore a visible layer of grime on his ankles and lower legs instead of socks; and dressed in a somewhat unusual fashion for hot weather with overalls, long johns, a long-sleeved shirt, and brogans. The clodhoppers were worn on feet which, like the rest of his body, were unwashed. When one was downwind of Al the air tended to be pungent indeed. Yet I found him, as did other boys, endlessly fascinating. He treated us kindly, kept a watchful eye on our youthful shenanigans, and readily shared his considerable knowledge of the fine art of catching catfish.  

Interestingly, the newspaper account makes no mention whatsoever of the circumstances behind the affray although it goes into lurid detail about the actual event. However, oral history, conversations over the years with multiple contemporaries of Dorsey, and the official transcript of the trial fill in the blanks. Dorsey discovered a railroad engineer who worked for the Southern Railway and boarded in Bryson City, Troy Muse, was having an affair with his fetching red-headed wife, nee Minnie Watkins. He reportedly said: “If I’d been able to lay my hands on a gun when I caught them, I’d have shot the son of a bitch right then, and I’ll do it yet. You wait and see.” When weeks passed and nothing happened, most folks aware of the situation believed things had calmed down.

That was the situation on September 21, 1925, when hundreds of local residents were topping off a lovely Indian Summer day by attending a Mutt and Jeff show just up Main Street from the town square. It was at that point, according to multiple witnesses, that Dorsey approached Muse, stuck out his hand, and made comments to the effect that they should shake and forget their differences. As they shook hands Dorsey produced a revolver and shot Muse in the abdomen at point-blank range. They then struggled, with Dorsey emptying his pistol and hitting Muse a second time in the knee. It was only at this juncture that Muse pulled his handgun and fired at a fleeing Dorsey. My father, a teenager at the time, was among the first to arrive at the scene. He said Muse left the scene without saying a word, while Dorsey, who was slightly wounded in the shoulder, moaned “Oh Lordy, he’s killed me. I’m kilt. I’m kilt.”

Local physician Dr. A. M. Bennett initially attended Muse, who had made his way to his lodgings at the Cooper House, where Horace Kephart spent so many years. Realizing he needed specialized treatment, Bennett recommended getting Muse to Asheville’s Mission Hospital as quickly as possible. A Southern Railways train conveyed him there but he died within hours. 

In a marked departure from today’s judicial proceedings, the murder trial occurred only six weeks later. Local emotions ran high; so much so that the impaneled jurors came from neighboring Macon County rather than being selected from Swain County residents. Most people felt that Dorsey should be tried for first degree murder, and when the solicitor “positively refused,” notwithstanding the grand jury having returned a true bill, those in attendance, as well as many in the legal community, were outraged. Dorsey was found guilty of second degree murder and sentenced to “not over ten nor under eight years at hard labor in the state penitentiary.” Apparently his time of actual imprisonment was even shorter, because the 1930 census shows him living in Bryson City.

Of course my acquaintance with Al came long afterwards. Interestingly, he was born about as close to having a silver spoon in his mouth as Swain County could offer, with his parents being affluent pillars of the community. Upon release from prison he returned to live with them in their showplace home. In its heyday the two-story house which sat sort of catty-corner across the street from the Presbyterian Church was one of the finest residences in the entire county. But by the time I knew Dorsey his parents were long deceased and their place of grandeur, with all its cupolas, intricate woodwork, and sweeping porches, offered only faded glory and decrepitude. 

That mattered little to me as a boy, and from the time I was 10 or 11 on into my mid-teens I spent a lot of time around old Al. His distinct bodily aroma notwithstanding, those times were pure pleasure. Throughout the summer he fished, day and night, in the waters of the Tuckaseigee. During the day he ran trot lines and throw lines, did a lot of pole watching on the bank, and also made his way up and down the river in his john boat. At night he fished from the bridge. To a starry-eyed boy enchanted by anything connected with hunting or fishing, his knowledge of the river had a mysterious, magical quality about it and he willingly, even eagerly, shared his knowledge of how to catch catfish, something at which he was a true master.

Everyone in town knew him, and at one point during my close acquaintance with old Al he accomplished something which was the talk of local barber shops and the gang at nearby Loafer’s Glory for weeks. One night while fishing off the bridge he hooked a mighty catfish on the only decent rig he owned, a steel rod-and-reel outfit equipped with nylon line. An epic battle ensued, with scores of people lining the sidewalk on the bridge as it unfolded. After the better part of a half hour Al managed to ease the fish close towards shore and then, carefully working his rod around a series of street lights which set atop the bridge railing, he made his way down the bank at the south end of the bridge. As the catfish wallowed in the shallows he waded into the river, ran his arm through its mouth, and wrestled it onto the bank. It weighed upwards of fifty pounds, a veritable giant for a mountain stream.

At some point, long after my halcyon days of innocent youth spent in his company, the decaying mansion in which he lived reached a point of no return. A local physician bought the property, razed the building, and erected an office. Dorsey moved to a slab shack nearby and somehow eked out a living. Then, in the final decade of his life, a simple act of charity wrought a glorious change in him. 

The recently widowed wife of a local taxi driver gave him her deceased husband’s clothes. Somehow this small token of caring and concern awakened long dormant pride in Al. According to the lady, “from then on he started dressing up even though until that point I never knew him to wear a decent pair of shoes or socks in the summer.” It was also during this time that he began attending First Baptist Church and was converted. A photograph of Al (see top of post for photo) taken during this period shows a man whose appearance is at stark contrast with the man I knew. While he sports a few days’ worth of whiskers, otherwise he is neat, with his hair well combed, and is niftily dressed in a shirt and sport jacket.

Old Al was one of those delightful characters, and today they seem to be in short supply, who made the Smokies of my boyhood a wonderful place to come of age. This troubled, tattered soul may not have been the finest of role models, but he was a first-rate mentor when it came to one particular type of fishing. The man lent a degree of color to my youth which has only become more striking with the passage of time and the acquisition of additional knowledge about him. Whatever may have been his shortcomings and sins, my memories of him are filled with nothing but fondness, I will never hear Alison Krauss sing “Catfish John,” without thinking of “Catfish Al” and being stirred by the lyrics, “I was proud to be his friend.” 

He takes his final rest near his parents in the beautifully situated and lovingly maintained Bryson City Cemetery (https://friendsofthebccemetery.org). For decades nothing but a battered and bent funeral home marker denoted Al’s grave site, but now a marble slab, fittingly engraved with his name and a catfish, takes me back to a mystical time and a singularly memorable mentor each time I wander that way. 

—Jim Casada (Copyright 2022)

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I hope you enjoyed Jim’s post as much as I do. Jim’s book A Smoky Mountain Boyhood is a must have for anyone who enjoys stories from the mountains. You can find it on his website here. Scroll down the page and you’ll see the book.

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