All right, after all that heartache let me tell you the most gloriously ridiculous true story on this whole mountain — how a rich man's hunting fantasy loosed a plague of wild boar across the entire Southern Appalachians. It happened right up on Hooper Bald.
Around nineteen-oh-eight, a wealthy, well-connected fellow named George Gordon Moore — a man so charming and mysterious some folks think he helped inspire the character of Gatsby — got his hands on a big piece of this high mountain. And Moore had a dream: his own private game preserve, a wild kingdom in the clouds where he and his fancy friends could come hunt exotic beasts. So he fenced off Hooper Bald, and he stocked it. And I do mean stocked it.
Onto this one Carolina mountaintop, starting around nineteen twelve, he turned loose: buffalo. Elk. Colorado mule deer. Two hundred wild turkeys. Ten thousand pheasant eggs. Thirty-some bears, including Russian brown bears. And — this is the fateful part — thirteen genuine European wild boar, the real tusked article, shipped over from the old country.
Well. The buffalo struggled, the elk wandered, and most of the grand experiment fizzled out like rich men's schemes tend to do. But the wild boar? The boar looked around at these endless mountains and thought: this'll do nicely. They broke through the fences, they bred, they scattered — and their descendants are out there right now, this very minute, all through these mountains and clear into the Smokies. Big mean tusked hogs, four hundred pounds of bad attitude, rooting up the whole forest — every one of them descended from one bored millionaire's imported hunting stock up on Hooper Bald. So if a wild boar ever crosses this road in front of you, tip your hat. You've just met George Gordon Moore's living legacy — the wildest souvenir anybody ever left in these hills.
Photo: Dominicus Johannes Bergsma · CC BY-SA 4.0
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