Mountaineers

Mountaineers:

"I was less troubled by vermin [in the mountain cabins] than in the low country, yet so much so that I adopted the habit of passing the night on the floor of the cabins, rather than in their beds. The furniture of the cabins is rather less meagre than that of a similar class of habitations in the lower region. In the northern parts, it is common to see a square frame in which are piled a dozen bed quilts. Notwithstanding the ignorance of the people, books are more common than even in the houses of the slave-owners on the planting districts. They seemed fond of reading aloud, those who were able--in a rather doleful and jolting manner. Their books are generally the cheapest and tawdriest of religious holiday books as Mr. Sears' publications, Fox's Martyrs, the Biography of Distinguished Divines ...The Alarm to the Unconverted, The Cause and Cure of Infidelity. [I never] met with Pilgrim's Progress or Robinson Crusoe. (1860, Olmsted pp.258-259)

"At night...to find a house at which my horse could be suitably fed...I followed a cart path up a pretty brook in a mountain glen, till I came to an irregular-shaped cattle yard in the midst of which was a rather picturesque cabin, the roof being secured by logs laid across it and held in place by long upright pins...An old man and his wife, with one hired man, were the occupants; they had come to this place from North Carolina two years before. They were very good, simple people; social and talkative, but at frequent intervals the old man, often in the midst of conversation...would groan aloud and sigh out, 'Glory to God!' or 'Oh, my blessed Lord!' or Lord, have mercy on us!...and the woman would respond with a groan....They talked with great geniality and kindness, however, and learning that I was from New York said that I had reminded them, 'by the way I talked,' of some New York people who had moved near to where they had lived in North Carolina and whom they seemed to have much liked. 'They was well larned people,' the old man said; 'though they warn't rich, they was as well larned as any, but they was the most friendly people I ever see. Most of our country folks, when they is well larned, is too proud, they won't hardly speak civil to the common; but these Yorkers was n't so the least bit; they was the civilest people I ever seed. When I see the gals coming over to our housen, I nat'rally rejoiced; they always made it so pleasant. I never see no people who could talk so well.'

"He and his wife frequently referred to them afterwards, and complimented me by saying that 'they should have know me for a Yorker by my speeching so much like them.' (1860, Olmsted, pp. 266-267)

"...the native-born of the Blue Ridge, no matter what else he may lack, is rich in time, a possession denied to the foreign invader who keeps his hoe in the tool-house where he can find it when he wants it. The mountain man leaves his in the field, and when he wants it, if he cannot find it, he drops the subject. The ancient art of 'settin' around' has been cultivated until it has grown into an integral part of life, you discover upon asking a mountain woman, who has waited in town half a day for someone to come, what she did with her time, and receive the illuminating reply, 'Oh, I jest sot.'...

"The perfect type, of which the rest of us are but modifications, is illustrated by the man from Turkey Pen Gap, to see whom move is a revelation. It is as though eternity were ever present in his consciousness. It was he who said in his inimitable drawl, 'I would rather go up a mountain than daown one. For when you go up, you cain't hurry, and when you come daown, you have to.'

"When a mountaineer unexpectedly completes a piece of work or makes some unwanted exertion, you may be tempted to think it the result of forethought, but if you ask him about it he will probably tell you it was because he 'tuk-a-notion'. Life has many consolations run on the 'tuk-a-notion' principle.

"'We're powerful poor around here, but we don't mean no harm by it,' is the cheery greeting you get when you visit an ancient native of the forest who you know does not think himself poor at all. He has plenty of time, the thing he values most. It was he who used to tell his reminiscences of the war, into which he had been drafted much against his will, and concerning the meaning of which he in common with his neighbors was not very clear. When you asked him about it, he knit his brows, 'studied' a minute, then slowly said, 'Law, which side was I on?' But though the mountaineer may have been puzzled concerning the meaning and advantages of the War of the Rebellion, which he sometimes classified as "a rich man's war and a poor man's fight," and escaped if he could, it must not be supposed that he was either cowardly or uncertain where he understood the issue, a witness to the contrary being what occurred at King's Mountain that stormy day so long ago." (1913 Morley, pp. 10-11)"There is something intrinsically, stubbornly English in the nature of the mountaineer: He will assimilate nothing foreign. In the Smokies the Eastern Band of Cherokees still holds its ancient capital on the Okona Lufty river, and the whites mingle freely with these redskins, bearing them no such despite as they do negroes, but eating at the same table and admitting Indians to the white compartment of a Jim Crow car. Yet the mountain dialect contains not one word of Cherokee origin, albeit many of the white can speak a little Cherokee.

"There is something intrinsically, stubbornly English in the nature of the mountaineer: He will assimilate nothing foreign. In the Smokies the Eastern Band of Cherokees still holds its ancient capital on the Okona Lufty river, and the whites mingle freely with these redskins, bearing them no such despite as they do negroes, but eating at the same table and admitting Indians to the white compartment of a Jim Crow car. Yet the mountain dialect contains not one word of Cherokee origin, albeit many of the white can speak a little Cherokee.

"In our county some Indians always appear at each term of court, and an interpreter must be engaged. he never goes by that name, but by the obsolete title linkister or link'ster, by some lin-gis-ter." (1913, Kephart, p. 290)[See Tourism]

"...it is not to be overlooked that the mountains were cursed with a considerable incubus of naturally weak or depraved characters, no lowland 'poor whites', but a miscellaneous flotsam from all quarters, which, after more or less circling round and round, was drawn into the stagnant eddy of highland society as derelicts drift into the Sargasso Sea. In the train of western immigration there were some feeble souls who never got across the mountains. These have been described tersely as the men who lost heart on account of a broken axle.

"The anemic element thus introduced is less noticeable in Kentucky than in Virginia and the States farther south--for the reason, no doubt, that it took as least two axles to reach Kentucky--but it exists in all parts of Appalachia. Moreover, the vast roughs of the mountain region offered harborage for outlaws, desperadoes of the border, and here many of them settled and propagated their kind. In the backwoods one cannot choose his neighbors. All are on equal footing. Hence the contagion of crime and shiftlessness spreads to decent families and tends to undermine them. (1913, Kephart, Our Southern Highlands, p.372)

Mountaineer - First Settlers

"...in the winter of 1768-69 the first permanent occupation of eastern Tennessee was made by a few families from North Carolina.

"About this time there broke out in Carolina a struggle between the independent settlers of the piedmont and the rich trading and official class of the coast. The former rose in bodies under the name of Regulators and a battle followed in which they were defeated. To escape from the persecutions of the aristocracy, many of the Regulators and their friends crossed the Appalachian Mountains and built their cabins in the Watauga region. Here, in 1772, there was established by these 'rebels' the first republic in America, based upon a written constitution 'the first ever adopted by a community of American-born freemen.' Of these pioneers in 'The Winning of the West,' Theodore Roosevelt says: 'As in western Virginia the first settlers came, for the most part, from Pennsylvania, so in turn, in what was then western North Carolina and is now eastern Tennessee, the first settlers came mainly from Virginia, and indeed, in great part, from this same Pennsylvania stock.'

"Such was the stuff of which the Appalachian frontiersmen were made. They were the first Americans to cut loose entirely from the seaboard and fall back upon their own resources. They were the first to establish governments of their own, in defiance of king and aristocracy. Says John Fiske:

'Jefferson is often called the father of modern American democracy; in a certain sense the Shenandoah Valley and adjacent Appalachian regions may be called its cradle. In that rude frontier society, life assumed many new aspects, old customs were forgotten, old distinctions abolished, social equality acquired even more importance than unchecked individualism. The notions, sometimes crude and noxious, sometimes just and wholesome, which characterized Jeffersonian democracy, flourished greatly on the frontier and have thence been propagated eastward through the older communities, affecting their legislation and their politics more or less according to frequency of contact and intercourse.

Massachusetts, relatively remote and relatively ancient, has been perhaps least affected by this group of ideas, but all parts of the United States have felt its influence powerfully. This phase of democracy, which is destined to continue so long as frontier life retains any importance, can nowhere be so well studied in its beginnings as among the Presbyterian population of the appalachian region in the 18th century.'" (1913 Kephart, pp.366-368)

"The first frotniersmen of the Appalachians were those Swiss and palatine Germans who began flocking into Pennsylvania about 1682. They settled westward of the Quakers in the fertile limestone belts at the foot of the Blue Ridge and the Alleghanies....

"In time as their leases in Ulster began to expire, the Scotch-Irish themselves come in conflict with the Crown, by whom they were persecuted and evicted. Then the Ulstermen began immigrating in large numbers to Pennsylvania. Froude says, 'In the two years that followed the Antrim evictions, thirty thousand Protestants left Ulster for a land where there was no legal robbery, and where those who sowed the seed could reap the harvest.'...Being by tradition and habit a border people, the Scotch-Irish pushed to the extreme western fringe of settlement amid the Alleghanies.

"They were not over-solicitous about the quality of soil....and so, when eastern Pennsylvania became crowded, the overflow of settlers passed not westward but southwestward, along the Cumberland Valley, into western Maryland and then into the Shenandoah and those other long, narrow, parallel valleys of western Virginia....This western region still lay unoccupied and scarcely known by the Virginians themselves.

"And the southwestward movement, once started, never stopped. So there went on a gradual but sure progress of northern peoples across the Potomac...until the western piedmont and foot-hill region of Carolina was settled, chiefly by Pennsylvanians.

"The late William L. Saunders, Secretary of State and archivist of North Carolina, said in one of his historical sketches that 'to Lancaster and York counties in Pennsylvania, North Carolina owes more of her population than to any other known part of the world.'" (1913 Kephart, pp. 361-364)

"Our highlanders are the most homogeneous people in the United States. In 1900, out of a total population of 3,039,835, there were only 18,617 of foreign birth. This includes the cities and industrial camps. Back in the mountains, a man using any other tongue than English, or speaking broken English, was regarded as a freak. Nine mountain counties of Virginia, four of West Virginia, fifteen of Kentucky, ten of Tennessee, nine of North Carolina, eight of Georgia, two of Alabama and one of South Carolina had less than ten foreign-born residents each. Three of them had none at all. (1913, Kephart, pp. 378-379)

Mountaineer Children

"The children have few toys other than rag dolls, broken bits of crockery for 'play-purties', and such 'ridey-hosses' and so forth as they make for themselves. They play few games, but rather frisk about like young colts without aim or method. Every mountain child has at least one dog for a playfellow, and sometimes a pet pig is equally familiar. In many districts there is not enough level land for a ballground. A prime amusement of the small boys is 'rocking' (throwing stones at marks or at each other), in which rather doubtful pastime they become singularly expert.

"To encourage a child to do chores about the house and stable, he may be promised a pig of his own the next time a sow litters. To know when to look for the pigs an expedient is practiced that I never heard of elsewhere: the child bores a small hole at the base of thumbnail. I was assured by a mountain preacher that the hole 'will grown out to the edge of the nail in three months and twenty-four days'--the period, he said, of a sow's gestation (in reality the average term is about three months).

"Most mountaineers are indulgent, super-indulgent parents. The oft-heard threat 'I'll w'ar ye out with a hick'ry!" is seldom carried out. The boys especially, grow up with little restraint beyond their own natural sense of filial duty. Little children are allowed to eat and drink anything they want--green fruit, adulterated candy, fresh cider, no matter what--to the limit of repletion; and fatal consequences are not rare. I have observed the very perversity of license allowed children, similar to what Julian Ralph tells of a man on Bullskin Creek who, explaining why his child died, said that 'No one couldn't make her take no medicine; she just wouldn't take it; she was a Baker through and through, and you never could make a Baker do nothin' he didn't want to!'

"The saddest spectacle in the mountains is the tiny burial-ground, without a headstone or headboard in it, all overgrown with weeds, and perhaps unfenced, with cattle grazing over the low mounds or sunken graves. The spot seems never to be visited between interments. I have remarked elsewhere that most mountaineers are singularly callous in the presence of serious injury or death. They show a no less remarkable lack of reverence for the dead. Nothing on earth can be more poignantly lonesome than one of these mountain burial-places, nothing so mutely evident of neglect." (1913, Kephart, pp. 259-261)

"The first time that a party of these people [from 'The Little Fork of Sugar Fork of Hazel Creek'] went to the railroad [the Murphy, NC branch], they were uneasy and suspicious. Nearing the way-station, a girl in advance came upon the first negro she ever saw in her life, and ran screaming back: "My goddamighty, Mam, thar's the boogerman--I done seed him!" (1913, Kephart, pp.23-24)

Mountaineer 'Flotsam', Outlaws, Desperadoes

"Within the same period, in another but not distant court, a desperado from the Shelton Laurel, on trial for murder, admitted that he had shot six men since he moved over from Tennessee to North Carolina, and swore that while he was being held in jail pending trial for this last offense, the sheriff permitted him to 'keep a gun in his cell, drink whiskey in the jail, and eat at table with the family of the sheriff.'" (1913, Kephart, p. 340)

Mountain Women

"The women as well as the men, generally smoke, and tobacco is grown for home use. They are more industrious than the men, often being seen at work in the fields, and at spinning-wheels and hand-looms in almost every house." (1860, Olmsted, p. 259)"

It is a patriarchal existence. The man of the house is lord. He takes no orders from anybody at home or abroad. Whether he shall work or visit or roam the woods with dog and gun is nobody's affair but his own. About family matters he consults with his wife, but in the end his word is law. If Madame be a bit shrewish he is likely to tolerate it as natural to the weaker vessel; but if she should go too far he checks he with a curt 'Shet up!' and the incident is closed.

"The woman", as every wife is called, has her kingdom within the house, and her man seldom meddles with its administration. Now and then he may grumble 'A woman's allers findin' somethin' to do that a man can't see no sense in'; but then, the Lord made women fussy over trifles--His ways are inscrutable--so why bother about it?

"The mountain farmer's wife is not only a household drudge, but a field-hand as well. She helps to plant, hoes corn, gathers fodder, sometimes even plows or splits rails. It is the commonest of sights for a woman to be awkwardly hacking up firewood with a dull axe. When her man leaves home on a journey he is not likely to have laid in wood for the stove or hearth: so she and the children must drag from the hillsides whatever dead timber they can find.

"Outside the towns no hat is lifted to maid or wife. A swain would consider it belittled his dignity. At table, if women be seated at all, the dishes are passed first to the men; but generally the wife stands by and serves. There is no conscious discourtesy in such customs; but they betoken an indifference to women's weakness, a disregard for her finer nature, a denial of her proper rank, that are real and deep-seated in the mountaineer. To him she is little more than a sort of superior domestic animal. The chivalric regard for women that characterized our pioneers of the Far West is altogether lacking in the habits of the backwoodsman of Appalachia.

"And yet it is seldom that a highland woman complains of her lot. She knows no other. From aboriginal times the men of her race have been warriors, hunters, herdsmen, clearers of forests, and their women have toiled in the fields. Indeed she would scarce respect her husband if he did not lord it over her and cast upon her the menial tasks. It is 'manners' for a woman to drudge and obey. All respectable wives do that. And they stay at home where they belong, never visiting or going anywhere without first asking the husband's consent.

"I am satisfied that there is less bickering in mountain households than in the most advanced society of Christendom. Certainly there are fewer divorces in proportion to the marriages. This is not by grace of any uncommon regard for the seventh commandment, but rather from a more tolerant attitude of mind.

"Mountain women marry early, many of them at fourteen or fifteen, and nearly all before they are twenty. Large families are the rule, seven to ten children being considered normal, and fifteen is not an uncommon number; but the infant mortality is high. (1913, Kephart, pp. 256-259)

"Many of the women are pretty in youth; but hard toil in house and field, early marriage, frequent child-bearing with shockingly poor attention, and ignorance or defiance of the plainest necessities of hygiene, soon warp and age them. At thirty or thirty-five a mountain woman is apt to have a worn and faded look, with form prematurely bent--and what wonder? Always bending over the hoe in the cornfield, or bending over the hearth as she cooks by an open fire, or bending over her baby, or bending to pick up, for the thousandth time, the wet duds that her lord flings on the floor as he enters from the woods--what wonder that she soon grows short-waisted and round- shouldered?

"The voices of the highland women, low toned by habit, often are singularly sweet, being pitched in a sad, musical, minor key. With strangers, the women are wont to be shy, but speculative rather than timid, as they glance betimes with 'a slow, long look of mild inquiry, or of general listlessness, or of unconscious and unaccountable melancholy'. Many, however, scrutinize a visitor calmly for minutes at a time or frankly measure him with the gipsy eye of Carmen. (1913, Kephart, pp.214- 215)

"One of our women known as 'Long Goody' (I measured her; six feet three inches she stood) walked eighteen miles across the Smokies into Tennessee, crossing at an elevation of 5,000 feet, merely to shop more advantageously than she could at home. The next day she shouldered fifty pounds of flour and some other groceries, and bore them home before nightfall. (1913, Kephart, p.216)

"The word woman has suffered some strange sea-changes. Most mountaineers pronounce it correctly, but some drop the w ('oman), others add an r (womern and wimmern), while in Michell (sic) County, North Carolina, we hear the extraordinary forms ummern and dummern ("La, look at all the dummerunses a-comin'!")." (1913, Kephart, pp. 278-279)

"An editor who had made one or two short trips into the mountains once wrote me that he thought the average mountaineer's vocabulary did not exceed three hundred words. This may be a natural inference if one spends but a few weeks among these people and sees them only under the prosaic conditions of workaday life. But gain their intimacy and you shall find that even the illiterates among them have a range of expression that is truly remarkable. I have myself taken down from the lips of Carolina mountaineers some eight hundred dialectical or obsolete words, to say nothing of the much greater number of standard English terms that they command." (1913, Kephart, p.281-282)

"Many other old-fashioned terms are preserved in Appalachia that sound delightfully quaint to strangers who never met them outside of books. A married woman is not addressed as Missis by the mountain- eers, but as Mistress when they speak formally, and as Mis' or Miz' for a contraction." (1913, Kephart, p. 290)

"The average mountain woman is as combative in spirit as her menfolk. She would despise any man who took insult or injury without showing fight. In fact, the woman in many cases delibertly stirs up trouble out of vanity, or for the sheer excitement of it. Some of the older women display the ferocity of she-wolves. The mother of a large family said in my presence, with the calm earnestness of one fully experienced: 'If a feller'd treated me the way _____ did _____ I'd git me a forty-some-odd and shoot enough meat off o' his bones to feed a hound-dog a week.' Three of this woman's brothers had been shot dead in frays. One of them killed the first husband of her sister, who married again and whose second husband was killed by a man with whom she then tried a third matrimonial venture....

"The mountain women do not shrink from feuds, but on the contrary excite and cheer their men to desperate deeds, and sometimes fight by their side. In the French-Eversole feud, a woman, learning that her unarmed husband was besieged by his foes, seized his rifle, filled her apron with cartridges, rushed past the firing line, and stood by her 'old man' until he beat his assailants off. When men are 'hiding out' in the laurel, it is the women's part, which they never shirk, to carry them food and information." (1913, Kephart, pp. 343-345)

Mountaineer Moonshine, a history

"Moonshining proper was confined to the poorer class of people, especially in Ireland, who lived in wild and sparsely settled regions, who were governed by a clan feeling stronger than their loyalty to the central Government, and who either could not afford to share their profits with the gaugers, or disdained to do so. Such people hid their little pot-stills in inaccessible places, as in the savage mountains and glens of Connemara, where it was impossible, or at least hazardous, for the law to reach them. With arms in hand they defied the officers. "The hatred of the people toward the gauger was for a very long period intense. The very name invariably aroused the worst passions. To kill a gauger was considered anything but a crime; wherever it could be done with comparative safety, he was hunted to the death.

"Thus we see that the townsman's weapon against the government was graft, and the mountaineer's weapon was his gun--a hundred and fifty years ago, in Ireland, as they are in America today. Whether racial character had much to do with this is a debatable question. But, having spoken of race, a new factor, and a curious one, steps into our story. let it be noted closely, for it bears directly on a problem that has puzzled many of our own people, namely: What was the origin of our southern mountaineers?

"The north of Ireland, at the time of which we have been speaking, was not settled by Irishmen, but by Scotchmen, who had been imported by [King] James I to take the place of native Hibernians whom he had dispossessed from the three northern counties. These immigrants came to be known as the Scotch- Irish. They learned how to make poteen in little stills, after the Irish fashion, and to defend their stills from intrusive foreigners, also after the Irish fashion. By and by these Scotch-Irish fell out with the British government, and large bodies of them emigrated to America, settling, for the most part, in western Pennsylvania.

"They were a fighting race. Accustomed to plenty of hard knocks at home, they took to the rough fare and Indian wars of our border as naturally as ducks take to water. They brought with them, too, an undying hatred of excise laws, and a spirit of unhesitating resistance to any authority that sought to enforce such laws.

"It was these Scotchmen, in the main, assisted by a good sprinkling of native Irish, and by the wilder blades among the Pennsylvania-Dutch, who drove out the Indians from the Alleghany border, formed our rear-guard in the Revolution, won that rough mountain region for civilization, left it when the game became scarce and neighbors' houses too frequent, followed the mountains southward, settled western Virginia and Carolina, and formed the vanguard westward into Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri and so onward till there was no longer a West to conquer. Some of their descendants remained behind in the fastnesses of the Alleghanies, the blue Ridge, and the unakas, and became, in turn, the progenitors of that singular race which, by an absurd pleonasm, is now commonly known as the 'mountain whites', but properly southern highlanders." (1913, Kephart, Horace. Our Southern Highlanders, pp. 149-152)