When it's high summer in eastern Tennessee and the mountain laurel is in full leaf; when three times as many tourists travel here as to Yellowstone, and their boom boxes and bickering echo from hollow to hollow; when the Florida lawyers have settled into their mountain dachas and Dolly Parton is playing to packed crowds in Dollywood, the Great Smoky Mountains can seem to have little left to fire the imagination. But even a landscape so thoroughly picked-over has its secret history and its hidden geography. Not far from the North Carolina border, for instance, there's a spot that campers rarely visit. It has no scenic overlook or waterfall, no trail sign or historical marker. But to a few old-timers and their kin it holds the promise of buried treasure. They call it the Honey Pot.

One Sunday afternoon last August, Larry Hartman, a ranger for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, was patrolling nearby when he spotted a pickup truck at the side of the road. Reaching for his park radio, Hartman called in the make and registration——it was a 1986 Toyota, battered and blue, with North Carolina plates—and waited for the dispatcher to confirm his suspicions. Then he headed into the trees. The wind was rising as he walked, carrying the scent of rhododendron and Cherokee roses, and the sky was threatening rain. Halfway up the draw, he turned and bushwhacked along the ridge, circling back toward the truck An hour later, another ranger joined him at a predetermined location, and a third took position farther up the slope. Then they crouched in silence and waited.

Seen from that vantage, the road snaking through the trees below marked an old and bitter dividing line in the mountains. On one side was national forest; on the other, national parkland. On one side, trees could be cut, animals hunted, plants gathered and sold. On the other side, every living thing was protected by law. Some seventy-five years earlier, park commissions in North Carolina and Tennessee b...