There was an epic written in Babylon about B.C. 2000 concerning a king named Gilgamesh and a wild man named Enkidu who became great friends. They go to a great mountain to cut trees, but before they can cut the trees, they must fight the god of the mountain, Humbaba. Gilgamesh goes in front of Enkidu, who has a healthy fear of the mountain, having lived on the mountain. The king decides if they conquer Humbaba, they will put a monument atop the mountain which will intitle them to immortality.

In A.D. 1834, there was a modern Gilgamesh, named Elisha Mitchell, who with his mountain friend, Big Tom Wilson, climbed to the top of the Black Dome in the Black mountains of North Carolina. He went there not to cut trees, but to measure the height of what he believed to be the highest mountain in the Eastern United States. There arose a controversy between Mitchell and a man named Thomas Clingman, who claimed that the highest one was another close by.

The body was painfully and laboriously brought down from its watery grave and buried in Asheville, but a year later, his remains were carried to the top of the mountain and laid in a shallow grave covered by rocks where all who knew him felt he deserved to be.

The loss of Dr. Mitchell's life was a blow to the scientific community of North Carolina and to the University where he taught in Chapel Hill. Trained as a minister and educated at Yale, he later joined the faculty of the University of North Carolina as a professor of Mathematics.

Since that fated day, Big Tom Wilson became a legend to all who heard the story. The colorful mountaineer lived in a typical crudely built mountain house 7 1/2 miles beneath the peak of the Dome where he spent most of his time bear-hunting, watching for game poachers and acting as guide to curious travelers ambitious enough to climb the mountain where the tragedy took place. He loved to talk, telling the story over and over, never tiring of its repetition. But most of all he liked to tell stories of how he tracked bears through the forest.

Many were the curious who beat a track to his door at the foot of the mountain; some to hear his story; some to retrace themselves the long trek to the top. Such was the intent of a party of engineers who were working on the spiral "Loops" of the Clinchfield Railroad near Altapass, some 50 years later.

On an "engineer's holiday", a party of four, Hattan, Deacon, Morrison and Gilkeson, set out to climb the mountain on a bright autumn day in October, 1907. The weather was ideal and predicted to hold for the next few days. On the morning of the 6th, following the east prong of the Caney River, the party reached Big Tom's residence. Upon arriving at the house, clearly marked by a sign over the front porch, it seemed deserted. Deacon and Morrison stayed at the house while Hattan and Gilkeson went in search of information. Finding Dick Wilson, Big Tom's son, they persuaded him to act as their guide and rented two pack mules to carry their gear.

Big Tom, now 87, no longer acted as guide for the strenuous mountain climb, but his six foot two frame still showed the strength of long years of warfare with the bears. His short cropped beard framed his face under a black, wide brimmed, stovepipe hat, pulled down until it almost covered his tranquil blue eyes. His still almost unlined face belied his advanced age and although he walked with a handmade cane, it was more for prevention or protection than need. He was a mild man, simple and unassuming - proud that no one knew the mountain as he did. Skinning bears seemed to be his greatest pleasure - telling about them the next best.

The party laboriously wended its way over creek beds and thick underbrush until they came to a mass of ragged projections covered with deadened tree trunks, where the vegitation changed to thick balsam growth, tall grasses and slippery rock ledges. At the top was a crag about 200 ft. high where the stunted growth was peppered occasionally with the heavy balsams, but the dead trunks of trees stood out like tall gravestones in a forest which had tried desperately to grow in the rocky soil.

The Black Dome was renamed Mt. Mitchell and from the summit of this magnificant dome, the whole world seemed to stretch out below in an endless chain of peaks and ridges bathed in ribbons of muted color in the late evening sun. In the crevices where one mountain's shadow fell across the other, were great splotches of dark blue, standing out in contrast to the fleecy white of an occasional cloud pierced by a craggy peak. Towards the south the Great Smokies loomed through the familiar haze that named them. Towards the northeast stretched the long range of the Alleghanies, Table Rock, Hawk's Bill and beyond that, Grandfather Mountain.

Dr. Elisha Mitchell fell to his death as did Gilgamesh in the ancient epic, but the monument stands above the mountain named in his honor as a claim to his immortality.