You"ll hear it before you see it. The steady ripple, the splash of trout, the distant laughter of hikers. That"s the Little Pigeon River, threading its way through Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee. Long before tourists tubed it and fly fishers angled in it, this river was how people stayed afloat. The Cherokee tribe fished in it. Settlers built grist mills along it. Towns like Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge grew up next to it. Even the river"s name is a nod to the past—the passenger pigeon, once common in the area, vanished by the early 1900s.