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The biggest stars, the brightest age. ATT WNBA All-Star 2025 comes to Indianapolis July 18th through 19th. Tune into the game July 19th at 8:30 p.m. Eastern Time on ABC. 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 1,300 miles of rugged wilderness and at just 67 years old, Emma Gatewood set out to be the first 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. It's Roucho Marks in you. That's your life.
Here he is, the one, the only What have we next, George? George, I have Emma Gatewood standing by to talk to you.
Now where are you from, Emma? Galler Police, Ohio.
Well, Emma, now that your children are grown, what do you do for excitement? Noah hike. You hike, Kent? You mean you just keep walking all the time? What kind of walking do you do?
I walked the Oregon Trail this year. Oh. You walked it? Yes. I mean like Lewis and Clark?
Yes. When was this? This year. You walked the Oregon Trail this year? How uh how did you arrive at that kind of a pastime?
Oh, I um didn't have anything else to do. The family's all married and gone and I just wanted to do something. Hmm. How old are you? Uh you said seventy two, huh?
And how long was this trip that you uh... Two thousand miles.
Okay. You want to find What were you walking for? I like to walk and I just uh like to spend the summer that way. Don't you uh isn't it dull if you don't have some objective of some kind?
So when you got to the other end, what happened? You turn around and walk back again, huh? Uh well the uh this year I walked up Centennial up to Portland. From where? Independence, Missouri.
Emma Gatewood met and married when she was 18 years old. A man 10 years older than her named P.C. Gatewood, and they started what would be a 30-year marriage. and produce 11 children. What no one really knew except the people who lived there with the Gatewood family was that Emma and P.C.
Gatewood fought a lot, and that P.C. Gatewood was a hard. Hard-fisted barbarian, and often beat his wife senseless. 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. But I think it's an important part of her personality, her character, her strength, and how her self-confidence prevailed. Uh 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 file for divorce. And she did that in 1940.
And she started for the first time to make it on her own. At that point, most of the children were grown and gone. 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 1954, she decided she was going to try to hike the Appalachian Trail. 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 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 a story about it in a copy of National Geographic Magazine.
It had colorful pictures and painted a very roseate scene on the Appalachian Trail. It said anyone in moderate physical condition could hayfoot strawfoot from Georgia 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 2,050 miles.
After all the kids were grown and gone, she was owning a little trailer park and tucking away money. She was saving her Social Security check. It was not very much, but she wouldn't need very much for a hike in the Appalachian Trail in 1955. And she was setting off on long walks. It was a common thing for her to walk, sometimes what we would think, long distances - 10 miles, 15 miles-to visit a friend and come back home.
She always found refuge in the outdoors. 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, I think it came to represent a safe place. And so she was completely comfortable in the woods.
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 Catawden, Maine, and then hike to Mount Oberfork, Georgia. I was gonna hike that trail and just not tell anybody. It was 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, Emma Rowena Caldwell Gatewood, are you out of your blooming mind? I was in Maine. Oh, I started hiking the very next day. 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 18, 11 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. The marriage in the end and that violence, well, something came of it for Emma.
And then what came of it was 11 children, and what came of it was this desire, this connection. with nature. that led to that inspiring idea of hers. to be the first woman. to ever hike the Appalachian Trail 2,050 miles.
When we come back, what happens next with Emma Gatewood here? On our American stories. Lee Habib here 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 air 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 at Apple Podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, or wherever you get your podcasts. Life's messy. We're talking spills, stains, pets, and kids.
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And we continue with our American stories and the story of Emma Gatewood. The first woman to hike the Appalachian Trail all the way through. And she just happened to be 67 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.
So she set off first from Maine in 1954 and didn't make it very far. She got lost only within 100 miles from Mount Katahdin, 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 flies had bitten her on the eye, which was all swollen. And she thought, well, 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 waste away, I guess, and decided, you know what, I'm gonna try, I'm gonna 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 Rainbow Camp, which is one 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, You're too old to be doing this. You need to go home.
So she did sort of defeat it. She planned to hike 2,050 miles and she had made it less than 50. 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 in 1955, 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, 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. And so she had a trail 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 50-pound pack on her back.
So she took out a half of that and sent it home. And then each time that she hiked, she would pare it down until she got down to about an 18 pound pack that she carried. And she decided to start a month earlier. in April. But she flew to Georgia and started at Mount Ogathor.
which is where the original trail has started. 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 to pass through a town because she wanted to look proper, and occasionally carried some foodstuffs: dried milk, raisins, peanuts.
But she was not prepared for what she faced on the trail, which often was swollen creeks and rivers, improperly blazed trails. She got lost a number of times. There were great stretches that had not been maintained, which means the trail had sort of disappeared back into the forest floor. In 1955, there were two back-to-back weather events that wreaked havoc right 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 those hurricanes. She would write in her diary things like, walked nine miles through water today, nearly got blown off a mountain, that sort of thing. But she never mentioned anything about hurricanes, and I'm not sure to this day that she knew 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. They were Navy boys and they were on a fishing expedition. They had like eight days to kill, and so they were 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 Emma, of course, gets up very early in the morning to start her hike 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 of the flood had washed away and she had no idea how she was going to get across. And so she walked upstream a ways and downstream a ways, trying to find safe paths 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 short while later and they decided in all their juvenile wisdom 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 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.
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. 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 spots, and she wasn't afraid to ask for help. There's 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 1955, there was a knock at the door, and his family was just about to sit down for dinner. And his mother went to the door and opened the door, and there stood Emma Gatewood, looking like she had walked all the way from Georgia to New Hampshire. And in his memory, he said that Grandma Gatewood 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 hiking the Appalachian 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 1955 with Grandma Gatewood. Mama loved to sing.
And when she reached the top of Mount Catatin, which she climbed three times, she sang America the Beautiful. 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, 1957 decided she was going to do it again and she took essentially the same stuff and set off in the same direction and she became 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 1959 hiked the Oregon Trail, which is 2,000 miles from Independence, Missouri to Portland, Oregon, to celebrate the Oregon Centennial.
And then she stitched together a third, what they call section hike of the Appalachian Trail, where she had done the entirety of the trail, but at different times. And she finished that in 1964.
So that made her the first person to ever walk the entirety of the Appalachian Trail three times, which is a record she still holds. 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 to worry about. 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? No, Mama always knew how to take care of herself. The story of Emma Gatewood.
and the story of resiliency and triumph over adversity. Here on Our American Stories. There's nothing like sinking into luxury. At washablesofas.com, you'll find the Anibay sofa, which combines ultimate comfort and design at an affordable price. And get this, it's the only sofa that's fully machine washable from top to bottom, starting at only $699.
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These athletes don't just play the game, they elevate it. The biggest stars, the brightest age. ATT WNBA All-Star 2025 comes to Indianapolis July 18th through 19th. Tune into the game July 19th at 8:30 p.m. Eastern Time on ABC.
You heard it before many times. Water is life. But do you know that almost half of the homes on the Navajo Reservation do not have clean running water? With your support, St. Bonaventure Indian Mission and School is ready to give water to Navajo families.
So we invite you to help provide this precious gift of life to those in need. Contrary to many average Americans, Navajo families survive on just 10 gallons of water per day. You can help support St. Bonaventure's water delivery program by By going to stbonaventure mission.org. This is an iHeart Podcast.
