July 18, 2025 • 17 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, long before ultralight backpacks and trail apps, 67-year-old Emma Gatewood became the first woman to hike the entire Appalachian Trail alone. With nothing but a pair of Keds, a homemade denim sack, and an iron will, she walked over 2,000 miles through some of the roughest terrain in America. But what pushed her onto the trail wasn’t just adventure — it was the aftermath of years in an abusive marriage and a quiet belief that she deserved more.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American
people coming to you from the city where the West begins,
Fort Worth, Texas. The Appalachian Trail is just over thirteen
hundred miles of rugged wilderness, and at just sixty seven
years old, Emma Gatewood set out to be the first
(00:33):
woman to hike it all the way through. Here to
tell her incredible story is award winning journalist and author
Ben Montgomery, along with Emma Gatewood's youngest daughter, Lucy Gatewood seeds,
Let's take a listen.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
It's Rachel Marks and you that in your life.
Speaker 3 (01:01):
Here he is the one, the only having next jo, gotcha?
Speaker 4 (01:08):
I have Emma Gatewood standing by to talk to you.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
Now.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
Where are you from? Emma Gallipolis? Ohio, I amma. Now
that your children are grown, what do you do for excitement? Oh?
I hike? You hike? Yes? You mean you just keep
walking on it? How what kind of walking do you do?
Speaker 2 (01:25):
I walked the Oregon Trail this year? Oh you walked it?
Speaker 3 (01:29):
Yes? I mean like Lewis and Clark.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
Yes?
Speaker 2 (01:32):
When was this this year? You walked the Oregon Trail
this year? How did you arrive at that kind of
the past time?
Speaker 5 (01:41):
Oh?
Speaker 4 (01:41):
I didn't have anything else to do. Family is all
married and gone, and I just wanted to do something.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
How old are you? Seventy two? And how long was
this trip that you were in? Two thousand miles? You
walked a thousand? What are you walking for? I like
to walk, andn't I just? But isn't it done?
Speaker 4 (02:06):
I have to spend the summer that way.
Speaker 3 (02:07):
Don't you? Isn't it dull if you don't have some
objective of some kind? Well? I after the other end?
What happened? You? Turn around? Walk back again? Well?
Speaker 4 (02:17):
This year I walked up Centennial left to Portland, from
where Independence, Missouri.
Speaker 5 (02:28):
Emma Gatewood met and married when she was eighteen years
old a man ten years older than her named PC Gatewood,
and they started what would be a thirty year marriage
and produce eleven children. What no one really knew except
the people who lived there with the Gatewood families, that
(02:48):
Emma and Pc Gatewood fought a lot, and that PC
Gatewood was a hard fisted barbarian and often beat his
wife senseless.
Speaker 6 (03:00):
When I was eight years old, things got so rough
that Mama left Mama would be horrified at my telling
this story because she never ever referred to it in
any of her interviews. That I think it's an important
part of her personality, her character, her strength, and how
(03:25):
her self confidence prevailed.
Speaker 5 (03:29):
But nobody in the outside world really knew until one
fight they had sort of erupted into public view, and
Emma got some help from the mayor of a neighboring
town who essentially gave her shelter until she could filed
for divorce, and she did that in nineteen forty and
she started the first time to make it on her own.
At that point, most of the children were grown and gone.
(03:51):
They had left the house, and so there were just
two kids left, both in their teen years when Emma
filed for divorce, and this is when she started walking.
In nineteen fifty four, she decided she was going to
try to hike the Appalachian Trail.
Speaker 6 (04:06):
She wanted to do something that was noteworthy that no
one else had done. There weren't a lot of hikers
on the trail, no one had hiked it from end
to end in one season, and no woman had ever
hiked it, and that inspired her. She decided she.
Speaker 5 (04:23):
Could do it. She didn't know much about what this
trail was like. She didn't know exactly where it went.
She had read his story about it in a copy
of National Geographic magazine, had colorful pictures and painted a
very roseate scene on the Appalachian Trail. It said anyone
in moderate physical condition could hayfoot straw foot from Georgia
(04:43):
to Maine. It said it was as wide as a
mac truck. There was a shelter within every day's walk.
It really gave some people the wrong idea about what
it might take to hike two thousand and fifty miles.
After all the kids were grown and gone, she was
owning a little trailer park and tucking away money she
(05:03):
was saving. Her social Security jacket was not very much,
but she wouldn't need very much for a hike the
Apple Legend Trail. In nineteen fifty five, and she was
setting off on long walks. It was a common thing
for her to walk sometimes what we would think long
distances ten miles fifteen miles, to visit a friend and
come back home. She always found refuge in the outdoors
(05:25):
in order to get away from her husband. She would
run out into the woods and hide, and so the
woods for her was a haven. A lot of people
think of it as a difficult place to exist, and
for her think it came to represent a safe place.
And so she was completely comfortable in the wood.
Speaker 6 (05:43):
And so she prepared without telling anyone where she was
going what she was up to, and she flew to
Maine and decided that she would start from Mount to Todden, Maine,
and then hiked to Mouth Or before Georgia.
Speaker 7 (06:00):
I was going to hike that trail and just not
tell anybody so that nobody could try to stop me.
And I didn't know what to pack, but I figured
common sense had gotten me through that far, so it
should probably keep on getting me through. Got myself on
a bus, and before you could say, I'm a Rowena
Caldwell Gatewood, are you out of your blooming mind?
Speaker 6 (06:21):
I was in Maine.
Speaker 4 (06:22):
Oh.
Speaker 7 (06:22):
I started hiking the very next day.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
And you've been listening to the story of Emma Gatewood,
the first woman to ever hike the Appalachian Trail. And
what a story, what a life lived, married at eighteen,
eleven children and married to a violent man who beat her.
And what was so interesting is listening to her daughter
talk about the fact that she didn't want to talk
about it to anybody. The woods were the refuge for her.
(06:50):
The marriage in the end and that violence, well, something
came of it for Emma, and then what came of
it was eleven children. And what came of it was
this desire, this connection with nature that led to that
inspiring idea verse to be the first woman to ever
hike the Appalachian Trail two fifty miles. When we come back,
(07:11):
what happens next with Emma Gatewood here and our American Stories.
Speaker 5 (07:28):
Please habibe here.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
Again, and I'd like to encourage you to subscribe to
our podcast on Apple Podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, or wherever
you get your podcasts. Every story we are here is
uploaded there daily, and your support goes a long way
to keeping the great stories you love from this show
coming again. Please subscribe to the Our American Stories podcast
(07:52):
at Apple Podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, or wherever you get
your podcasts, and we continue with our American Stories and
the story of Emma Gatewood, the first woman to hike
(08:15):
the Appalachian Trail all the way through, and she just
happened to be sixty seven years old when she did it.
And here to continue the story is author Ben Montgomery,
along with Emma Gatewood's youngest daughter, Lucy Gatewood, seeds, let's
pick up where we last left off.
Speaker 5 (08:35):
So she set off first from Maine in nineteen fifty
four and didn't make it very far. She got lost
only within one hundred miles from Mount catad In, which
was the northern terminus at the time, and she thought
she was going to die. She had this experience where
she couldn't find the trail, she had run out of food,
she had broken her glasses, one of those terrible black
(08:56):
flies had bitten her on the eye, which was all swollen,
and she thought, well, if if I'm going to die,
this is as good a place as any. And she
laid down on a rock and was just ready to
wait away, I guess, and decided, you know what, I'm
going to try. I'm going to give it one more
shot and try to find the trail again. She got
up and made it back to the trail and found
her way back to a rainbow camp, which was one
(09:18):
of the fish camps that she had walked through before.
And there were some men out there, some of the
park rangers at Baxter State Park, who saw her coming,
and they were like.
Speaker 6 (09:26):
You're too old to be doing this. You need to
go home.
Speaker 5 (09:29):
So she did sort of defeat it. She planned a
hike two thousand and fifty miles, and she had made
it less than fifty, and so she started putting things
together for another attempt. She wasn't done with the trail.
The trail wasn't done with her yet, and that's when
nineteen fifty five she told her children she was going
on a walk. And when they heard from her again,
she had dropped a postcard in the mail at Roanoke, Virginia, saying,
(09:52):
by walk, I mean I'm hiking the Appalachian Trail. So
that was the first many of them knew that she
was on this quest.
Speaker 6 (09:58):
And so she had a Troy guide, and she had foodstuffs,
and she had changes of clothes, and she had tools,
and I don't know why all she did carry, but
she didn't get very far until she realized that she
couldn't carry a fifty pound pack on her back. So
she took out a half of that and sent it home.
(10:20):
And then each time that she hiked, she would pare
it down till she got down to about an eighteen
pound pack that she carried, and she decided to start
a month earlier in April, but she flew through Georgia
and started at Mount Oblethorpe, which is where the original
(10:42):
trail started.
Speaker 5 (10:46):
She brought with her not much. She had a shower
curtain to keep the rain off and she slept under
that occasionally. She had an army blanket for warmth. She
had a gingham dress that she could shake out in
the event she had passed through a town because she
wanted to look proper, and occasionally carried some food stuffs
dried milk, raisins, peanuts, but she was not prepared for
(11:09):
what she faced on the trail, which often was swollen
creeks and rivers, improperly blazed trails. She got lost the
number of times there were great stretches that had not
been maintained, which means trail had sort of disappeared back
into the forest floor. In nineteen fifty five, there were
two back to back weather events that wreaked havoc right
(11:30):
up the Appalachian Mountains. Two hurricanes made landfall back to
back off the coast of North Carolina. They dumped unprecedented
amounts of rain on the Appalachian region, and she was
out there alone on the Appalachian Trail during both of
those hurricanes. She would write in her diary things like
walked nine miles through water today, nearly got blown off
(11:53):
from mountains, and that sort of thing, But she never
mentioned anything about hurricanes. And I'm not sure to this
day that she that she was walking through these two hurricanes.
One night, she spends the night on some picnic tables
up out of the rain with two boys. There were
Navy boys, and they were on a fishing expedition. They
had like eight days to kill and so they were
(12:15):
just doing a short hike on the Appalachian Trail and
doing a lot of so they all stayed together at
the same shelter the night before, and then Ema, of course,
gets up very early in the morning starter hikes before
the sun comes up. And she made it down the
trail to Clarendon Gorge, which was a sizely gorge, and
there had been a footbridge that connected one side of
the gorge to the other, but that because the flood
(12:38):
had washed away, and she had no idea how she
was going to get across, and she walked upstream aways
and downstream aways trying to find safe pass that you couldn't,
and realized that maybe these boys, who were probably going
to be coming up the trail behind her, could help,
and so she sat down and waited on them. Here.
They came a shot while later, and they decided, and
(12:58):
all their juvenile was them, that the best way to
get the three of them across would be to tie
themselves together. And they had several lengths of parachute cord,
and so they wound up wrapping Emma Gatewood up sort
of in between them. The three of them stood together,
the boys on the outside, Emma in the middle, and
they just lashed themselves together with the notion that they
(13:18):
could get across the river like this, and it worked.
They took baby steps across the river. She was scared
to death. I'm not even sure she ever really learned
how to swim, but they made it across, and she
untied herself and said, well, boys, you got Grandma across.
It worked out for them. She kept right on going.
(13:40):
She did have to rely over and over again on
the kindness of strangers. She had some know how, some
survival skills just from being reared on the farm. She
knew the earth, She knew berries, she knew nuts, she
knew what plants you could eat, she knew mushrooms. Anything
that could be harvested she knew, and she often did.
(14:00):
But Yeah, by and large, if she needed a place
to stay or a meal, she was not scared of
introducing herself to strangers. If she met you, she would
often become your correspondent. She would write to the people
to new friends that she had met, collect their address
upon meeting, you know, in her little journal. She could
not have done it without help from people at key Spot,
(14:24):
and she wasn't afraid to ask for help. This one
great story that hits home on that I talked to
a man named Robert Thompson. He lived with his family
in Orford, New Hampshire, and he said that one day,
it was in nineteen fifty five, there was a knock
at the door and his family was just about to
sit down for dinner, and his mother went to the
(14:45):
door and opened the door, and there stood in Emma Gatewood,
looking like she had walked all the way from Georgia
to Hampshire. And in his memory he said that Grandma
gate would just stepped sort of past his mother and
sat down at the table, and as she was making
her way there, she said, I'm Grandma Gatewood. What's for dinner.
Sort of gave birth to this idea that if you're
(15:06):
hiking the Appleachan Trail, you come to expect a lot
of help. Like there's something called trail magic. People leave
food and water and other things out beside the trail
for hikers because they know somebody's gonna need it. And
that idea of trail magic started in nineteen fifty five
with Grandma Gatewood.
Speaker 6 (15:26):
Mama loved to sing, and when she reached the top
of Mount Cataden was she climbed three times. She sang
America the Beautiful.
Speaker 5 (15:39):
She said, I've done it. I said I'd do it,
and I've done it. But she wasn't done. She had
become the first woman to solo through hike the Appalachian Trail.
That means hike by herself in one direction. She two
years later, in nineteen fifty seven, decided she's just gonna
do it again, and she took essentially the same stuff
and set off in the same direction, and she became
(16:00):
the first person to ever hike the entirety solo hike,
the entirety of the Appalachian Trail twice, and then she
tried again a few years later. By the way, she
in nineteen fifty nine hiked the Oregon Trail, which is
two thousand miles from Independence, Missouri to Portland, Oregon, to
celebrate the organ centennial. And then she stitched together a
third what they called section hike the Appalachian Trail, where
(16:23):
she had done the entirety of the trail but at
different times, and she finished that in nineteen sixty four.
So that made her the first person to ever walk
the entirety of the Appalachian Trail three times. She's a
record she still holds.
Speaker 6 (16:37):
I've been asked about our reaction, the children's reaction to
her hiking the trail. Did we worry, No, Mama always
took care of herself. We know she was independent, We
knew she would do what she was capable and able
to do, and so there was nothing story about.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
And a terrific job on the production editing and storytelling
by our own Greg Hengler and Reagan Habib, and what
a story about resilience and my goodness, when the daughter
was asked whether she worried about her mom hiking the
trail alone, which by the way she did three times.
Did we worry know? Mama always knew how to take
(17:24):
care of herself. The story of Emma Gatewood and the
story of resiliency and triumph over adversity. Here on our
American Stories.
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American
people coming to you from the city where the West begins,
Fort Worth, Texas. The Appalachian Trail is just over thirteen
hundred miles of rugged wilderness, and at just sixty seven
years old, Emma Gatewood set out to be the first
(00:33):
woman to hike it all the way through. Here to
tell her incredible story is award winning journalist and author
Ben Montgomery, along with Emma Gatewood's youngest daughter, Lucy Gatewood seeds,
Let's take a listen.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
It's Rachel Marks and you that in your life.
Speaker 3 (01:01):
Here he is the one, the only having next jo, gotcha?
Speaker 4 (01:08):
I have Emma Gatewood standing by to talk to you.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
Now.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
Where are you from? Emma Gallipolis? Ohio, I amma. Now
that your children are grown, what do you do for excitement? Oh?
I hike? You hike? Yes? You mean you just keep
walking on it? How what kind of walking do you do?
Speaker 2 (01:25):
I walked the Oregon Trail this year? Oh you walked it?
Speaker 3 (01:29):
Yes? I mean like Lewis and Clark.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
Yes?
Speaker 2 (01:32):
When was this this year? You walked the Oregon Trail
this year? How did you arrive at that kind of
the past time?
Speaker 5 (01:41):
Oh?
Speaker 4 (01:41):
I didn't have anything else to do. Family is all
married and gone, and I just wanted to do something.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
How old are you? Seventy two? And how long was
this trip that you were in? Two thousand miles? You
walked a thousand? What are you walking for? I like
to walk, andn't I just? But isn't it done?
Speaker 4 (02:06):
I have to spend the summer that way.
Speaker 3 (02:07):
Don't you? Isn't it dull if you don't have some
objective of some kind? Well? I after the other end?
What happened? You? Turn around? Walk back again? Well?
Speaker 4 (02:17):
This year I walked up Centennial left to Portland, from
where Independence, Missouri.
Speaker 5 (02:28):
Emma Gatewood met and married when she was eighteen years
old a man ten years older than her named PC Gatewood,
and they started what would be a thirty year marriage
and produce eleven children. What no one really knew except
the people who lived there with the Gatewood families, that
(02:48):
Emma and Pc Gatewood fought a lot, and that PC
Gatewood was a hard fisted barbarian and often beat his
wife senseless.
Speaker 6 (03:00):
When I was eight years old, things got so rough
that Mama left Mama would be horrified at my telling
this story because she never ever referred to it in
any of her interviews. That I think it's an important
part of her personality, her character, her strength, and how
(03:25):
her self confidence prevailed.
Speaker 5 (03:29):
But nobody in the outside world really knew until one
fight they had sort of erupted into public view, and
Emma got some help from the mayor of a neighboring
town who essentially gave her shelter until she could filed
for divorce, and she did that in nineteen forty and
she started the first time to make it on her own.
At that point, most of the children were grown and gone.
(03:51):
They had left the house, and so there were just
two kids left, both in their teen years when Emma
filed for divorce, and this is when she started walking.
In nineteen fifty four, she decided she was going to
try to hike the Appalachian Trail.
Speaker 6 (04:06):
She wanted to do something that was noteworthy that no
one else had done. There weren't a lot of hikers
on the trail, no one had hiked it from end
to end in one season, and no woman had ever
hiked it, and that inspired her. She decided she.
Speaker 5 (04:23):
Could do it. She didn't know much about what this
trail was like. She didn't know exactly where it went.
She had read his story about it in a copy
of National Geographic magazine, had colorful pictures and painted a
very roseate scene on the Appalachian Trail. It said anyone
in moderate physical condition could hayfoot straw foot from Georgia
(04:43):
to Maine. It said it was as wide as a
mac truck. There was a shelter within every day's walk.
It really gave some people the wrong idea about what
it might take to hike two thousand and fifty miles.
After all the kids were grown and gone, she was
owning a little trailer park and tucking away money she
(05:03):
was saving. Her social Security jacket was not very much,
but she wouldn't need very much for a hike the
Apple Legend Trail. In nineteen fifty five, and she was
setting off on long walks. It was a common thing
for her to walk sometimes what we would think long
distances ten miles fifteen miles, to visit a friend and
come back home. She always found refuge in the outdoors
(05:25):
in order to get away from her husband. She would
run out into the woods and hide, and so the
woods for her was a haven. A lot of people
think of it as a difficult place to exist, and
for her think it came to represent a safe place.
And so she was completely comfortable in the wood.
Speaker 6 (05:43):
And so she prepared without telling anyone where she was
going what she was up to, and she flew to
Maine and decided that she would start from Mount to Todden, Maine,
and then hiked to Mouth Or before Georgia.
Speaker 7 (06:00):
I was going to hike that trail and just not
tell anybody so that nobody could try to stop me.
And I didn't know what to pack, but I figured
common sense had gotten me through that far, so it
should probably keep on getting me through. Got myself on
a bus, and before you could say, I'm a Rowena
Caldwell Gatewood, are you out of your blooming mind?
Speaker 6 (06:21):
I was in Maine.
Speaker 4 (06:22):
Oh.
Speaker 7 (06:22):
I started hiking the very next day.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
And you've been listening to the story of Emma Gatewood,
the first woman to ever hike the Appalachian Trail. And
what a story, what a life lived, married at eighteen,
eleven children and married to a violent man who beat her.
And what was so interesting is listening to her daughter
talk about the fact that she didn't want to talk
about it to anybody. The woods were the refuge for her.
(06:50):
The marriage in the end and that violence, well, something
came of it for Emma, and then what came of
it was eleven children. And what came of it was
this desire, this connection with nature that led to that
inspiring idea verse to be the first woman to ever
hike the Appalachian Trail two fifty miles. When we come back,
(07:11):
what happens next with Emma Gatewood here and our American Stories.
Speaker 5 (07:28):
Please habibe here.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
Again, and I'd like to encourage you to subscribe to
our podcast on Apple Podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, or wherever
you get your podcasts. Every story we are here is
uploaded there daily, and your support goes a long way
to keeping the great stories you love from this show
coming again. Please subscribe to the Our American Stories podcast
(07:52):
at Apple Podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, or wherever you get
your podcasts, and we continue with our American Stories and
the story of Emma Gatewood, the first woman to hike
(08:15):
the Appalachian Trail all the way through, and she just
happened to be sixty seven years old when she did it.
And here to continue the story is author Ben Montgomery,
along with Emma Gatewood's youngest daughter, Lucy Gatewood, seeds, let's
pick up where we last left off.
Speaker 5 (08:35):
So she set off first from Maine in nineteen fifty
four and didn't make it very far. She got lost
only within one hundred miles from Mount catad In, which
was the northern terminus at the time, and she thought
she was going to die. She had this experience where
she couldn't find the trail, she had run out of food,
she had broken her glasses, one of those terrible black
(08:56):
flies had bitten her on the eye, which was all swollen,
and she thought, well, if if I'm going to die,
this is as good a place as any. And she
laid down on a rock and was just ready to
wait away, I guess, and decided, you know what, I'm
going to try. I'm going to give it one more
shot and try to find the trail again. She got
up and made it back to the trail and found
her way back to a rainbow camp, which was one
(09:18):
of the fish camps that she had walked through before.
And there were some men out there, some of the
park rangers at Baxter State Park, who saw her coming,
and they were like.
Speaker 6 (09:26):
You're too old to be doing this. You need to
go home.
Speaker 5 (09:29):
So she did sort of defeat it. She planned a
hike two thousand and fifty miles, and she had made
it less than fifty, and so she started putting things
together for another attempt. She wasn't done with the trail.
The trail wasn't done with her yet, and that's when
nineteen fifty five she told her children she was going
on a walk. And when they heard from her again,
she had dropped a postcard in the mail at Roanoke, Virginia, saying,
(09:52):
by walk, I mean I'm hiking the Appalachian Trail. So
that was the first many of them knew that she
was on this quest.
Speaker 6 (09:58):
And so she had a Troy guide, and she had foodstuffs,
and she had changes of clothes, and she had tools,
and I don't know why all she did carry, but
she didn't get very far until she realized that she
couldn't carry a fifty pound pack on her back. So
she took out a half of that and sent it home.
(10:20):
And then each time that she hiked, she would pare
it down till she got down to about an eighteen
pound pack that she carried, and she decided to start
a month earlier in April, but she flew through Georgia
and started at Mount Oblethorpe, which is where the original
(10:42):
trail started.
Speaker 5 (10:46):
She brought with her not much. She had a shower
curtain to keep the rain off and she slept under
that occasionally. She had an army blanket for warmth. She
had a gingham dress that she could shake out in
the event she had passed through a town because she
wanted to look proper, and occasionally carried some food stuffs
dried milk, raisins, peanuts, but she was not prepared for
(11:09):
what she faced on the trail, which often was swollen
creeks and rivers, improperly blazed trails. She got lost the
number of times there were great stretches that had not
been maintained, which means trail had sort of disappeared back
into the forest floor. In nineteen fifty five, there were
two back to back weather events that wreaked havoc right
(11:30):
up the Appalachian Mountains. Two hurricanes made landfall back to
back off the coast of North Carolina. They dumped unprecedented
amounts of rain on the Appalachian region, and she was
out there alone on the Appalachian Trail during both of
those hurricanes. She would write in her diary things like
walked nine miles through water today, nearly got blown off
(11:53):
from mountains, and that sort of thing, But she never
mentioned anything about hurricanes. And I'm not sure to this
day that she that she was walking through these two hurricanes.
One night, she spends the night on some picnic tables
up out of the rain with two boys. There were
Navy boys, and they were on a fishing expedition. They
had like eight days to kill and so they were
(12:15):
just doing a short hike on the Appalachian Trail and
doing a lot of so they all stayed together at
the same shelter the night before, and then Ema, of course,
gets up very early in the morning starter hikes before
the sun comes up. And she made it down the
trail to Clarendon Gorge, which was a sizely gorge, and
there had been a footbridge that connected one side of
the gorge to the other, but that because the flood
(12:38):
had washed away, and she had no idea how she
was going to get across, and she walked upstream aways
and downstream aways trying to find safe pass that you couldn't,
and realized that maybe these boys, who were probably going
to be coming up the trail behind her, could help,
and so she sat down and waited on them. Here.
They came a shot while later, and they decided, and
(12:58):
all their juvenile was them, that the best way to
get the three of them across would be to tie
themselves together. And they had several lengths of parachute cord,
and so they wound up wrapping Emma Gatewood up sort
of in between them. The three of them stood together,
the boys on the outside, Emma in the middle, and
they just lashed themselves together with the notion that they
(13:18):
could get across the river like this, and it worked.
They took baby steps across the river. She was scared
to death. I'm not even sure she ever really learned
how to swim, but they made it across, and she
untied herself and said, well, boys, you got Grandma across.
It worked out for them. She kept right on going.
(13:40):
She did have to rely over and over again on
the kindness of strangers. She had some know how, some
survival skills just from being reared on the farm. She
knew the earth, She knew berries, she knew nuts, she
knew what plants you could eat, she knew mushrooms. Anything
that could be harvested she knew, and she often did.
(14:00):
But Yeah, by and large, if she needed a place
to stay or a meal, she was not scared of
introducing herself to strangers. If she met you, she would
often become your correspondent. She would write to the people
to new friends that she had met, collect their address
upon meeting, you know, in her little journal. She could
not have done it without help from people at key Spot,
(14:24):
and she wasn't afraid to ask for help. This one
great story that hits home on that I talked to
a man named Robert Thompson. He lived with his family
in Orford, New Hampshire, and he said that one day,
it was in nineteen fifty five, there was a knock
at the door and his family was just about to
sit down for dinner, and his mother went to the
(14:45):
door and opened the door, and there stood in Emma Gatewood,
looking like she had walked all the way from Georgia
to Hampshire. And in his memory he said that Grandma
gate would just stepped sort of past his mother and
sat down at the table, and as she was making
her way there, she said, I'm Grandma Gatewood. What's for dinner.
Sort of gave birth to this idea that if you're
(15:06):
hiking the Appleachan Trail, you come to expect a lot
of help. Like there's something called trail magic. People leave
food and water and other things out beside the trail
for hikers because they know somebody's gonna need it. And
that idea of trail magic started in nineteen fifty five
with Grandma Gatewood.
Speaker 6 (15:26):
Mama loved to sing, and when she reached the top
of Mount Cataden was she climbed three times. She sang
America the Beautiful.
Speaker 5 (15:39):
She said, I've done it. I said I'd do it,
and I've done it. But she wasn't done. She had
become the first woman to solo through hike the Appalachian Trail.
That means hike by herself in one direction. She two
years later, in nineteen fifty seven, decided she's just gonna
do it again, and she took essentially the same stuff
and set off in the same direction, and she became
(16:00):
the first person to ever hike the entirety solo hike,
the entirety of the Appalachian Trail twice, and then she
tried again a few years later. By the way, she
in nineteen fifty nine hiked the Oregon Trail, which is
two thousand miles from Independence, Missouri to Portland, Oregon, to
celebrate the organ centennial. And then she stitched together a
third what they called section hike the Appalachian Trail, where
(16:23):
she had done the entirety of the trail but at
different times, and she finished that in nineteen sixty four.
So that made her the first person to ever walk
the entirety of the Appalachian Trail three times. She's a
record she still holds.
Speaker 6 (16:37):
I've been asked about our reaction, the children's reaction to
her hiking the trail. Did we worry, No, Mama always
took care of herself. We know she was independent, We
knew she would do what she was capable and able
to do, and so there was nothing story about.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
And a terrific job on the production editing and storytelling
by our own Greg Hengler and Reagan Habib, and what
a story about resilience and my goodness, when the daughter
was asked whether she worried about her mom hiking the
trail alone, which by the way she did three times.
Did we worry know? Mama always knew how to take
(17:24):
care of herself. The story of Emma Gatewood and the
story of resiliency and triumph over adversity. Here on our
American Stories.
Host
Lee Habeeb
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