The Southern Mountaineer in Fact and Fiction: Part I
by Cratis D. Williams and Martha H. Pipes
Appalachian Journal, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Autumn 1975), pp. 8-61
Appalachian Journal & Appalachian State University
PART I Edited by Martha H. Pipes
The Southern Mountaineer in Fact and Fiction by CRATIS D. WILLIAMS
EDITOR'S PREFACE: Editing Dr. Cratis Williams' 1600-page dissertation into approximately 500 pages which preserve the integrity of this vast ac- cumulation of knowledge place me in the odd position of making a molehill out of a mountain - a molehill which must feature all the absorbing interest of that mountain without all its details. My task has been made pleasant, at least, by the affable participation of Dr. Williams in the editing process; he occasionally guided my hand around major arteries, he calmly witnessed even major amputation, and he patiently approved my surgery. I have attempted to include in this reduced version at least one reference, adequately amplified, to every travelog, novel, and short story collection discussed by Dr. Williams. The most informative passages on the varied aspects of mountain life, from marriage to moonshining, also remain. Thus, the student of Appalachian culture can gain an overview of the facts and fiction written about the Southern mountaineer from the pre-Revolutionary War period to modern times. The abridged work is not intended to replace the original (heretofore available in xerox copies from University Microfilms). Rather, its compactness creates an accessible vantage point from which one may view the "mountain" and find the path he wishes to follow.
Martha H. Pipes
[Cratis Williams has been for more than 40 years a teacher, folklorist, performer, and a recognized leading authority on Appalachian literature, folkways, and speech. He has served for more than 30 years at Appalachian State University - variously as Professor, Graduate Dean, and Chancellor. In 1973 he was awarded the O. Max Gardner Award for outstanding humanitarian service. The Southern Mountaineer in Fact and Fiction, Dr. Williams' 1961 dissertation for NYU, is being published in abridged form in four successive issues of AJ.]
CHAPTER 1. Who Are Southern Mountaineers?
I. Geographical Limitations The Southern Mountaineer appears not to have set himself apart from the borderer or frontiersman until during the Civil War. John Fox, Jr., observed in 1901 that "it is odd to think that he was not discovered until the outbreak of the Civil War, although he was nearly a century old then."[1] When one considers the whole movement called the Westward Expansion and realizes that the mountain regions of the South were really settled permanently rather late, he does not find the fact that the mountaineer was discovered late so odd as Fox did, for permanent settlement did not average more than three generations deep in the whole mountain area at that time. True, the Valley of Virginia was being settled in the 1730's, the valley of East Tennessee (Watauga Settlements) a generation later, and favored spots in the Blue Ridge country of North Carolina by 1790, but such immense mountain areas as West Virginia, Eastern Kentucky, the Cumberland Plateau region in Tennessee, and the mountainous country of North Georgia were not settled in any kind of permanent way until after 1800. [2] One hardly expects a people to acquire a distinguishing individuality sooner than from grandfather to grandson.
To assume that there was any mystery attached to the settlement of Appalachia is to neglect the significant fact that once cleared of the threat of Indians, "its coves and creek valleys were admirably fitted for the domestic economy of hunter and frontier farmer."[3] A frontier farmer in the mountains was no more isolated in reference to markets than the settler in any other wilderness clearing. To expect the hill farmer to foresee that future industrialization, with its railroads, steamboat navigation, and macadamized roads, would pass his grandsons by is "to read history backward with a vengeance."[4] But retarded his descendants became. This "is an outstanding fact in American life. When men of the same type are found settled elsewhere this retardation has not been observed."[5]
Occasionally one finds references to mountain hamlets and villages of Civil War days. It would seem that such towns and pioneer homes had not attracted much notice, even from outsiders, until the industrial expansion that followed the Civil War afforded the economic conditions that enabled citizens of places that shared in that expansion to improve their own towns, after which they found an archaic flavor in the habitations of mountain people as well as in the speech and customs of the men and women their own age who were still speaking and viewing life much as they had remembered their own grandfathers doing. It was not until that time that we begin to see references to the residents of Appalachia as mountaineers. But they were not then called "hill-billies," a word used first in reference to the "poor-white" dwellers among the sand hills and piney woods of Alabama and Mississippi.[6] Only recently has "hill-billy" become a popular misnomer for mountaineer. Nor did they think of themselves as mountaineers. Today the cove-dwellers and ridge people do not think of themselves as mountaineers.
The Southern Highlands region, for strictly speaking much of the area is not mountainous in the usual geological sense, begins with the Mason and Dixon Line on the north, follows just east of the Blue Ridge a southwesterly direction into Georgia just north of Atlanta, turns westward to Birmingham to include northeastern Alabama, thence northward just west of the Cumberland Plateau through Tennessee and Kentucky to the Ohio River above Maysville, Kentucky. From that point it returns along the Ohio to the southwestern corner of Pennsylvania to complete a long ellipse which reaches like a finger for nearly eight hundred miles into the heart of the Old South. John C. Campbell said, "Our mountain region, of approximately 112,000 square miles, embraces an area nearly as large as the combined areas of New York and New England, and almost equal to that of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales."[7] Including all of West Virginia, the mountain region spreads over parts of eight other contiguous states, covering an area, as Horace Kephart observed, "about the same as that of the Alps."[8] It makes up about one-third of the total area of these states and includes approximately one- third of their total population.[9]
Campbell points out that more than half of the territory is included in the Allegheny-Cumberland Belt, somewhat more than one-fourth in the Blue Ridge Belt, and the remainder in the Greater Appalachian Valley.[10] The fact that the mountainous zone, one of the most populous areas in America, is parceled out among nine commonwealths obscures its significance. "Were this area thrown into one it would doubtless constitute America's one unique commonwealth."[11]
To obtain a fairly representative notion of the population and its resour- ces at a reasonably normal recent period in the mountains, one would probably do best to consider the decade from 1920 to 1930, a period marked by the boom following World War I and settled by the early years of the Great Depression. A study of maps furnished by the United States Depart- ment of Agriculture reveals the following picture of conditions in the mountain region for the decade under consideration: self-sufficient farms were more heavily concentrated here than in any other part of the United States. It was one of the heaviest producing areas of vegetables grown for home use and produced more potatoes than any other area in the South. The production of hogs and chickens compared favorably with that of surrounding areas. Approximately seventy per cent of all farm products were used on the farm. But the Cumberland-Allegheny region produced less milk than surrounding areas and marketed fewer than 50,000 beef cattle in 1930. Farming methods were still primitive, the value of implements and machinery per male worker being the least in the United States, less than $100. There were not over 300 farm trucks in the whole region. As would be expected, the acreage of cultivated land per male worker was under ten acres in an area of the heaviest part-time farms in the whole country. Outside the Valley of Virginia not over $200,000 was spent for fertilizer in the whole mountain region. The number of farms decreased less than five per cent and the value of farm property was less in the mountains than in surrounding areas. Although the area was one of the heaviest apple-producing sections of the country, the number of grapevines was negligible. Approximately twenty-five per cent of the population migrated from the mountain farms during that decade, but untold thousands returned to chink and repair abandoned cabins on the worn-out farms and to live off relief during the 1930's. A glance at production of money crops for the year of 1929 shows that for the entire area somewhat less than 3000 acres of field beans were harvested, less than 4000 acres of alfalfa hay, approximately 10,000 acres of sorghum, and less than 200,000 bushels of wheat.[12] It is not difficult to see that most of the mountain area was inhabited by a marginal economic group who made little money to spend and most of whose working efforts were exerted in merely subsisting from year to year.
II. Historical Evidence
Striking both to the sociologist and the novelist, the homogeneity of physical type found among the mountain people, with their traits of blond- ness,13 rangy frames, and spare flesh, "has proved a paradox when subjected to social interpretation."14 Much futile controversy has marked efforts to "explain" the biological stock of the mountaineer. Novelists, accepting the theory of origins of the highlander that best suited their fictional purposes, have sometimes presented him as Anglo-Saxon, sometimes Scotch-Irish, and sometimes Scotch. At times he is presented as disinherited gentry whose an- cestors were victimized in Merry England or compromised in Bonnie Scotland. Again, he is frequently represented as the descendant of shiftless poor whites and ne'er-do-wells who trailed the vanguard of the pioneers and took up miserable abodes in the less desirable lands passed over in the Westward Movement. Placed against these views is the more tenable one that he was part and parcel of the whole Westward Movement and settled in the mountains because he sought fertile soil for his crops, good range land for his cattle, delicious drinking water from permanent springs, and coverts for the wildlife that would afford him the pleasures and profits derived from hunting.15 The first region in the Southern Highlands to be settled permanently was the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. The settlements there were the points whence the southwesterly trek of the pioneering movement began. As pioneers moved southward beyond the Valley of Virginia, broader valleys were settled first, then desirable spots along the main routes of travel. Because land was opened to settlement after a series of treaties with the In- dians, "some mountain areas were available earlier than some valley areas, though it was true that with each cession the valleys were settled earlier than the ridges."16 By the time of the Revolution successive waves of pioneers had occupied upland Virginia east of the New River, Piedmont North Carolina to the foot of the mountains, and the Watauga Settlements along the Holston in Tennessee, while two hundred miles north of the Holston adventuring settlers from North Carolina and Virginia were in the act of carving out Kentucky.17 This new section that had been created in Appalachian Journal 11
America, populated as it was by a mixture of nationalities and less English than New England or the coastal South, was dominated by a deep response to the religious spirit of the Presbyterianism of the Scotch-Irish, the serious- minded German Protestants, indomitable English Quakers, and strong- willed Baptists from the Tidewater. The spiritual zeal of the Covenanters and the stubborn individualism of the other Separatist groups prepared the settlers to dare to find a new earth in politics as well as a new heaven in religion, responsive always to the emotional appeal of the preacher as well as to that of the political leader.18 But there is sufficient evidence to believe that by 1790 there was a preponderance of English among the migrants to the more desirable lands like the Bluegrass Region of Kentucky,19 although "the Scotch-Irish and Germans were numerous enough to give a strengthening fiber in this mingling of ethnic strains/'20 As desirable lands were occupied, swarniing groups from the older sec- tions, motivated by the same impulse that had sent out earlier pioneers, moved into the mountain valleys and uplands as the Indians retreated, "but they unconsciously stepped aside from the great avenues of commerce and of thought."21 However, the mountains themselves offered assets highly desirable to one possessed of the pioneering spirit: salt springs in the moun- tains of Kentucky and West Virginia yielded enough salt to pay com- mercially even toward the end of the nineteenth century; gold was discovered in the mountains of North Georgia in 1828 in quantities sufficient to induce a "rush" and to lead to the transportation of the Cherokee In- dians a few years later to the Indian Territory beyond the Mississippi River; bounties were awarded soldiers of the Revolution and the War of 1812; game abounded in excellent stands of the finest hardwood forest in the world; salubrious climate and good water invited settlement.22 Although "the retarded Anglo-Saxon of the highlands is no myth,. ..and if there be such thing as good stock, these highlanders have it,"23 his isolation has left him stranded in an outmoded culture. But, though "proud, sensitive, self-reliant, untaught in the schools, often unchurched, untraveled, he is not unlearned in the ways of the world, and when one chances to leave for the outside world before his personality has become set in the mold of his culture he is likely to climb far."24 Campbell found evidence of a falling away from culture among mountain people in the fact that many illiterate mountaineers possessed copies of Greek and Latin classics bearing the names of ancestors and that given names of mountain children reflected a knowledge of the classics on the part of the ancestors.25 One would think mountaineers themselves could help solve the problem of their origin. Such, however, is not the case. When questioned on the sub- ject of their racial stock and ancestry, they usually know nothing more than that certain ancestors came from North Car' liny or Ole Virginny or oc- casionally Pennsylvany and that they "reckon" they had come from the "old country across the waters" and were English, Scotch, Irish - any of which might mean Scotch-Irish - or Dutch, which usually means German.26 Much has been done in an effort to determine proportionate racial stocks in the mountains through a study of family names. Because so many names may be either English, Scottish, or Irish, because many names have become corrupted, and because translations of names from German or French have added to the confusion, the conclusions arrived at through such studies are 12 Autumn 1975
not sufficiently reliable to be of much help.27 A study of 1200 family names was made by Ruth Dame Coolidge for John C. Campbell when, under the sponsorship of the Russell Sage Foundation, he made a comprehensive study of the Southern Highlands in the early 1920's. The conclusions arrived at by the study are as follows: Of the 497 names on our list from North Carolina, the English and Scotch-Irish appear to have formed each about one-third; of the 228 from Tennessee the same proportion held; of the 360 from Kentucky, the English constituted four-tenths, and the Scotch-Irish three-tenths. The Germans showed their greatest strength in North Carolina, where they formed one-fifth of the entire number. In Tennessee they constituted one-seventh, in Kentucky but one-twelfth. There were a small number of Welsh in each state, chiefly in Kentucky, a few French, and a few strays from other countries. In Georgia, of 182 names, English and Scotch-Irish formed each about 40 per cent, German 19 per cent, and the remainder were Welsh or unidentified.[28] Hence, on the basis of a study of family names, 39 per cent of the moun- taineers are of English descent, 34 per cent Scotch-Irish, 15 per cent German, and the remainder Welsh, French, and unidentified. That the mountain stock is descended from families living in the frontier counties of Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina in 1790 is in a large measure sustained by Campbell's study of family names. The study in- dicates that nearly 70 per cent of the mountain families of Kentucky are descended from families living on the frontier in 1790; nearly 60 per cent of those in North Carolina; and over 50 per cent of those of Tennessee. Thus, it would seem that what the student is able to discern concerning origins of frontier families in Virginia and the Carolinas before 1790 would largely be true of the native mountain families of today. Further, the study indicates that, without doubt, the same pioneering stock that peopled the Midwestern states and the Southern states along the Mississippi also took possession of the Southern mountain regions where it multiplied itself many times but continued to live within the social and cultural framework of its founding parents. The insularity of the mountain region helped to preserve the static quality of its culture and society so that the whole region, asleep culturally since the Revolution, began to attract attention to its antiquarian qualities just after the Civil War, at which time, it might be safe to say, the Southern Mountaineer was really born. For until such time as his distinguishing qualities differentiated him from his cousins in Mississippi, Alabama, Texas, Missouri, Indiana, Illinois, and Ohio, he was not a mountaineer but simply a pioneer. Moreover, it is logical to assume that any fictional treatment made before the Civil War of his counterpart in any of the states mentioned would have applied to him as well, except, of course, for the presence of the mountains around him. An analysis of the whole pioneering movement into the Piedmont and upland region of Virginia and the Carolinas yields more conclusive proof in determining who the present-day mountaineer is racially than any other known approach to the problem. The Valley of Virginia, with few inhabitants in 1730, was well populated in 1750. [29] A study of the list of over four thousand names attached to the petitions of the early inhabitants of Kentucky to the General Assembly of Virginia from 1769 to 1792 shows "a decided preponderance of Scotch and Scotch-Irish names with a large number of English and a few German, Dutch, and French. The number of English names increases in the later petitions. The large number of religious names indicates the non-conformist character of much of the population."[30] That the Scotch-Irish predominated in the migrations westward to 1800 is to be inferred; that they were also more numerous than other groups in the settlements made to the same date in the mountain regions is logically assumed. Perhaps the main source of confusion in the minds of observers and novelists who have tended to see pure Anglo-Saxon heritage in the mountains has derived from an improper concept of who the Scotch-Irishman really was. That he was not, in the first place, a Gaelic-speaking Scottish Highlander is certain, for the British Government, in resettling Ulster after the expulsion of the native Irishmen, feared the ties of racial sympathy that existed between those peoples and forbade that Highland Scots be permitted to move. The settlers of Northern Ireland "were almost as English in social derivation as if they had come from the North of England. ...The Government had in mind the English-speaking districts of Scotland and not the Gaelic regions as the source from which settlers should be drawn."[31] The Ulster settlement, then, was made up of migrants from the Lowlands,[32] where the inhabitants were the product of generations of fusion of Scottish, English, and to a certain extent old Welsh strains.[33] So far as cultural advancement is concerned, they were far behind the people of the South of England when, beginning about the time of the settlement of Jamestown in Virginia, they emigrated from the Border country to Ulster. Significant is the fact that the Scotch-Irish were a mongrel stock when they arrived on our shores, for in the quality of their racial amalgamation really lies a complexity that has not yielded easily to the efforts of scholars and commentators at simplification. If largely Lowland Scottish in biological stock, they were certainly old-fashioned English in their speech habits and culture. Nonconformist in religion, they constituted the main ingredient that absorbed into themselves, without yielding their own archaic culture and nonconformist religious bent, other elements of population possessed of similar cultural and religious qualities. As the mountain regions settled down to a static and isolated culture, the basic qualities of the Scotch-Irish asserted themselves throughout the region. But their qualities of idiom,their folkways,their bent of mind, already outmoded when the Scotch-Irish ancestors had resettled Ulster, have seemed more like Anglo-Saxon or Elizabethan to many scholars than anything else. Actually, perhaps, they are in the main only more archaic than their Midwestern cousins and should be regarded as sub-eighteenth century rather than late Elizabethan. Except for the observations relative to a replacement of decaying cultural patterns of patrician origin with developing patterns of a native culture, most observers hold that the cultural patterns are largely derivative from the Old World rather than indigenous to the mountain environment. Ob- servers in Virginia have tended to emphasize the view first given currency by John Fiske in Old Virginia and Her Neighbors (1897) when he implied that at least a nucleus of the population of the mountain areas is descended from the poor whites whose origins he identified with the early criminals and indentured servants of the Old Dominion.[34] Many writers admit the probability that at least a part of the mountain population is descended from the mean whites who found their way into the mountains. Wilbur G. Ziegler and Ben S. Grosscup, writing in 1879, pointed out that criminals and refugees from justice in early times sought hiding places in the mountain wilderness, where a few remained to become hunters and thieves.35 That thieves and robbers infested secluded coves to prey upon passing wagon trains of migrants is well authenticated.36 That they were absorbed into the general population seems logical enough, since they must have gone somewhere.37 Campbell thought it undoubtedly true that some of the moun- tain people are sprung from the poor whites, but he placed the time of their infiltration as late as 1830 to 1850, a time when lands were cheap and pioneering was safe for "those who from poverty and debt as well as from natural ambition and the spirit of adventure, wished to improve their for- tunes."38 By this time more desirable lands were already taken, so the late- comer would naturally be expected to have patented ridge land or squatted on the holdings of others. Sometimes writers tend to see stronger ties of kinship between the moun- taineers and the Tidewater people than the evidence warrants. Margaret W. Morley, writing in 1913, stated categorically: "The truth is, the same people who occupied Virginia and the eastern part of the Carolinas peopled the western mountains, English predominating."39 But she admits in the next sentence that the Scotch-Irish and the Scotch (few of whom settled in the mountains, really) "have given the dominant note to the character of the mountaineers." Mary and Stanley Chapman (Maristan Chapman) as late as 1929 saw the Anglo-Saxon dominating the mountain character: "The mingled races that first inhabited the mountains have been merged into the dominant Saxon, who remains to-day fair-haired and blue-eyed and very much himself."40 John Preston Arthur wrote in 1914 that most of the early settlers in the western counties of North Carolina came from east of the Blue Ridge, though he believed that Ashe, Alleghany, and Watauga counties were settled principally by migrants from the Valley of Virginia. He was ob- viously in error when he stated "most who sought the mountains doubtless came from the mountainous regions of Scotland." But he took note of the claim of many mountain families that their ancestors moved out of Penn- sylvania as a result of the Whiskey Rebellion late in the eighteenth cen- tury.41 Most of the sociological and historical comment on the mountaineers of Kentucky accepts the opinion held by most writers of fiction that they are largely of English descent. Dr. William Goodell Frost, President of Berea College, in an article called "Our Contemporary Ancestors in the Southern Mountains" (1899), stated that "a majority of the families may be traced back to rural England, both by distinct English traits and by the common English names...."42 William Henry Haney, himself a Kentucky moun- taineer, wrote a book in 1906 in which he held that "English blood is predominant in the Mountain People," but added that their amalgamation with the Scotch-Irish was fortunate, for it "gave them greater courage, en- durance, and sturdiness to battle with the difficulties with which the pioneers of any country must contend."43 Observing that by 1796 the control of Kentucky had passed out of the hands of the pioneers into the hands of upper-class Virginians, he concluded, "Since the Scotch-Irish were the early Appalachian Journal 15
pioneers and the eastern part of the state was not settled until after this high tide of English immigration, it is evident that English blood, and not Scotch-Irish, as some writers claim, is predominant in the veins of the Ken- tucky Highlanders/'44 The implication that the mountains of Kentucky were settled by upper-class Virginians is dubious, but even so cautious a scholar as John C. Campbell conceded a slight superiority of English names over Scotch-Irish in the Kentucky mountains and observed that "it does support the claims of some of those best acquainted with this region, who hold that it has a larger strain of English than of any other stock."45 The question of the origin of mountaineers from the indentured servants of colonial times is fraught with confusion. To many writers who have seen mountaineers as the descendants of the boundmen, the implications are that they are therefore of the depraved origin ascribed to the poor whites of the Tidewater country and the Deep South. Other writers, noting essential dif- ferences between the character of the two groups, hasten to deny that the mountain people descend from those wretched souls described by William Byrd in his History of the Dividing Line (1729) as lolling their days away in shiftless ease on the back fences of Lubberland. As a matter of fact, it would seem that even most of the Scotch-Irish came as indentured servants, first to the eastern counties of Pennsylvania, "but when their terms of service ex- pired, they found lands in Pennsylvania too expensive and some of them were settled by Lord Fairfax on his holdings between the Rappahannock and the Potomac."46 The traditions of some of the mountain families cer- tainly indicate that many of the ancestors were bound boys who earned money to pay for their passage before they became their own men. Writers who have heard these traditions and assumed that the people are descen- dants of those indentured servants originally herded into ships from the slums and jails of England and sent to Virginia certainly are ignoring the predominant Scotch-Irish character of the mountaineer. To say that he is descended from indentured servants is not the same thing as to say that he is descended from the indentured servants that were poured into the Tidewater country during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries - and it is these people and their descendants that Byrd describes. In general, efforts to link the rank and file of mountain families with the Tidewater poor whites have certainly failed, but that some of these people found their way into the mountains can hardly be doubted.47 And that much of the fiction portraying life among the mountaineers deals with a branch- water variety of mountaineer whose moral and cultural standards are equivalent to those of the poor whites who appear in the novels of Erskine Caldwell and William Faulkner is well known.48 Moreover, such books of fiction as Stuart's Trees of Heaven and Taps for Private Tussie, Arnow's Hunter's Horn, and McCoy's Swing the Big-Eyed Rabbit, which deal frankly with the mountain people who live in the economic fringe and who bear striking resemblances to Faulkner's Snopeses and Caldwell's sand- hillers, are much more interesting because of the characters than such carefully wrought novels as Harlan Hatcher's Patterns of Wolf pen, which portrays the life of a high-class river valley family deep in the mountains of Pike County, Kentucky; or the romantic novels of John Fox, Jr., and Charles Neville Buck, which point up fancied parallels between Kentucky moun- taineers and romantic characters in the novels of Sir Walter Scott. 16 Autumn 1975
Writers of fiction occasionally introduce characters who are of Indian ex- traction. Campbell reported that he found many families who claim Indian blood and added, "Undoubtedly there is some admixture in the Highlands, as in much American Pioneer stock; but it is doubtful whether it has been sufficient to cause marked characteristics."49 That there is a factual basis for such vicious characters as the wily, unscrupulous Doanes, descendants of an Indian half-breed, who were feudists in Charles Neville Buck's The Roof-Tree (1921), is at least authenticated, notwithstanding the over- simplified romantic presentation of such all-black villains as Bas Rowlett. The gypsy quality of Kit Brandon's father and the passive, un- communicative disposition of the slovenly mountain women who live on the ridges in East Tennessee in Sherwood Anderson's Kit Brandon (1936) suggest Indian ancestry. Historians have been generous in their praise of the mountaineers as soldiers. The Scotch-Irish disseminated among the older population at the time of the Revolution have been credited with holding the colonies together, for whereas the older population knew certain loyalties both to King and their own colony, the recently arrived Scotch-Irishmen, six hun- dred thousand strong, knew no loyalty to a colonial government yet and carried with them a grudge of long standing against the King. Henry Jones Ford said, "The active part which the Scotch-Irish took in the American Revolution was a continuation of the popular resistance to British policy that began in Ulster." so That mountaineers are in the main descended from soldiers of the Revolution is generally accepted. The thirty-five mountain counties of Ken- tucky with an area of slightly less than thirteen thousand square miles had a total population of less than ten thousand in 1800, but in 1834 there were still living nearly five hundred veterans of the Revolution listed on the pen- sion rolls of the Federal Government, most of whom had served from Virginia, although North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Kentucky itself were represented.51 But to enroll all mountain men in the lists of the Sons of the American Revolution would certainly be rash, for there is ex- cellent evidence that many of the early mountaineers were Tories. Too, many of the mountain families, especially those in the higher echelons socially and culturally, preserve traditions in their families of having descended from Tories who came to the mountains during the Revolution in order to escape the wrath of the revolutionists in their home communities. Ziegler and Grosscup stated in 1883: "The present generation of Highland- ers may be proud of the revolutionary record of their ancestors, though there were among them numerous Tories, the proportion being one King George man to four revolutionists."52 Even the Scotch-Irish in the Carolinas were not the unalloyed anti-British men that most writers have tended to make them. In his well documented book, The Loyalists in North Carolina During the Revolution (1940), Robert O. De Mond, writing of the activities of the Loyalists among the Scotch-Irish settlements bordering on the Yadkin, whence Daniel Boone (himself perhaps a Tory for a time) recruited his followers to Kentucky, states: "That great numbers were willing to enlist in the King's cause, [sic] is shown by the fact that the Loyalist Samuel Bryant was able on short notice to raise 800 men. ..so eager to enlist that one third of them began to serve without arms."53 Appalachian Journal 17
De Mond shows further that the only counties not represented in the first Provincial Congress of North Carolina at New Bern in 1774 were Edgecombe, Guilford, Hertford, Surry, and Wake, counties in which the Scotch-Irish and Germans were in the ascendency.54 As late as 1779 there were so many Tories in Burke County, one of the western counties of the state, that British officers recruited men there who were so numerous that they planned to kill all the patriots in that region. These Scotch-Irish moun- taineers pitched their support with the wealthy planters of the Tidewater section in acting against rebellion.55 When one considers that this whole area of North Carolina was a nursery for the advance phalanxes of the Westward Movement, he must make some reservations in regard to the patriotism of both the pioneer ancestors of the people of the Mississippi Valley and of the Appalachian mountaineers. The population of the Southern mountains, then, considered in the light of what historians have had to say on the subject, is prevailingly Scotch- Irish in descent. Ziegler and Grosscup, writing in 1879, though erring in at- tributing the ancestors of the Scotch-Irish to "pure Scotch blood," enun- ciated a view that has been accepted in the main by subsequent historians in their interpretation of the racial stock and the character of the moun- taineers. The first arrivals [among the Scotch-Irish] found homes near the eastern base of the Alleghanies in Pennsylvania, but being annually joined by new immigrants of their own blood and fatherland, the best lands were soon filled to overflowing. The tide of immigration still continued, but an outlet was found toward the south, through which it swept along the entire base of the mountains into the inviting valleys of Carolina, and eventually crossed them into Georgia. There is to the present day marked homogeneity of character within this belt, from Pennsylvania to Virginia southward. Scattered families of other nationalities followed into the wilderness, but so largely did the Scotch-Irish prevail over all other races that the amalgamation of blood which followed brought about no perceptible change.™ John Fiske, in 1897, saw the Scotch-Irish as the strongest element in the population of North Carolina as well as an influence in all of the thirteen colonies. Under the influence of the streams of Scotch-Irish immigration, "the character of the colony was gradually but effectively altered. Industry and thrift came to prevail in the wilderness, and various earnest Puritanic types of religion flourished side by side on friendly terms."57 John Preston Arthur, in his History of Western North Carolina (1914), called the Carolina mountaineers "the descendants of the sturdy, hard- fighting Scotch-Irish, who, to a man, were Whigs in the Revolution."58 Although Arthur's patriotic zeal leads him into error concerning the unqualified Whig affiliations of the Scotch-Irish, he is in the main stream in crediting the mountaineer with a Scotch-Irish ancestry. Frederick Jackson Turner is in agreement with earlier historians that the Scotch-Irish covered the province of North Carolina "more or less thickly, from Hillsboro and Fayetteville to the mountains" by 1753. 59 Evidence indicates, then, that the Southern mountaineer, though mainly of Scotch-Irish ancestry, of dissenting religious convictions, and of Whig descent, is not necessarily any of these things. He turns out to be a rather complex individual when we examine him closely. Hence, sweeping statements, stereotyped presentations, and generalizations as to his essential 18 Autumn 1975
character are not to be relied upon as adequate interpretations of mountain life and character. After John C. Campbell's exhaustive study of the moun- taineer was completed in 1920, he said the Highlands are "a land of promise, a land of romance, and a land about which, perhaps, more things are known that are not true than any part of our country."60 III. Sociological Opinion In arriving at a concept of the Southern mountaineer along sociological and economic lines, we should, first of all, consider what his ancestors were like before they moved into the hills from the Carolina Piedmont Reservoir. That they were, in the main, Scotch-Irish can hardly be controverted. But that there were among them a considerable number of English, who had worked their way from the Virginia Tidewater through the Virginia Pied- mont to the Carolina Piedmont, as well as a sprinkling of French Huguenot and Highland Scots, is fairly well authenticated.61 True, there were hunters and traders and cattle raisers already in the land when the tides of im- migration arrived, but they were soon amalgamated with the late-comers, and the new frontier settlements from about 1750 "were for some time distinct from the older settlements in race, religion, and democratic ten- dencies."62 In other words, the Piedmont pioneers were a peculiar people made up of like-minded groups from several nationalities rather than a distinct racial type.63 Because of the remarkable qualities they possessed before they became mountaineers, environment and isolation do not suf- ficiently account for much the s^me qualities found among them today, for their pioneer pecularities "have curiously survived, in spite of the weathering of time."64 That the mountain areas offered powerful inducements to pioneers is a fact hard to comprehend from our position in the middle of the twentieth century. Valleys and coves were fertile, drinking water was excellent and plentiful, game was abundant, and there was range land for flocks. Further, the consideration of roads and means of travel offered as much from a mountain environment as from any other in those days. Tools and farming implements were the same everywhere. With the removal of the Indian as a threat, there is no reason why pioneers to the mountain areas should have been exhibiting poor judgment from the point of view of the times. Why the mountain people remained in the mountains after the easy op- portunities of the earlier days had disappeared is perhaps answered best by Miss Morley, who stated: Those who remained were not those who came, but their descendants, born and raised in the wilderness, inured to its life of want and of freedom, and with no knowledge of any dif- ferent life. And then they were imprisoned in their mountain fastnesses because of lack of means of communication, in part the result of obstacles presented by the slave states that surrounded them like an unnavigable sea; by lack of communication and by the conditions of life in the lowlands where the black man was king as well as slave. As time went on, they were forgotten by the rest of the world, which they in turn forgot.(ir> Not only did the mountain people become isolated as a geographical unit after about 1850,66 but they also became more and more isolated from one Appalachian Journal 19
another. As William Goodell Frost observed in 1899, the double isolation resulted in "marked variations in social conditions." The moving out or death of leading families in one valley may mark a decline in the social state that leads to collapse and awful degradation, while in the adjoining valley heirlooms and traditions "witness a self-respect and character that are un- mistakable/'67 Because the better type of mountaineer was conscious, by 1900, of his stranded condition, and knew that he was "behind relatively as well as absolutely," his character became affected. His pride became vehement. He developed a shy, sensitive, and undemonstrative personality. Aware now of the scorn from the lowlands, he was led by his old predilec- tion toward Presbyterian fatalism to struggle but feebly with his destiny.68 A decade after President Frost observed the painful awareness of the mountaineer that he was "set apart" as a curious spectacle, Horace Kephart, writing of the mountains of North Carolina, observed a certain ur- bane quality about the well-to-do valley farmers, but stated that "one steps shortly from the railway into the primitive" among steep mountains that cover nine-tenths of the western part of the state and among which "dwell a majority of the native people."69 Progress was coming slowly to the moun- tains. Hand in hand with isolation had gone not only a subsistence (though static) culture but also a depleting subsistence economy. Thus, in the mid- year of our representative decade, we find the Southern mountaineer still, by and large, living to himself economically on land that gives him meager sup- port, that is overcrowded in population, but that he owns for himself despite the fact that it would fetch precious little on the market. Moreover, as a result of isolation, economic depravity, struggles, hard- ships, and common interests, the sons of the mountain pioneers of from five to eight generations back are by now blended into a somewhat homogeneous people70 who in eastern Kentucky have more in common with their kind in northern Georgia than they have with their fellow Kentuckians in the Bluegrass Region, or who in western North Carolina share more points of view with their neighbors across the state line in Tennessee than they share with their fellow North Carolinians and remote kinsmen in Charlotte and Greensboro. To assume that the first settlers in the mountains were of equal social and personal worth, be it high or low, is to simplify beyond the realm of the possible. Ziegler and Grosscup pointed out in 1883 that the migrants to the mountains were roughly of three types: those who traveled ahead of the main throngs to stake out holdings for which they had money to pay - men of middle age who had already made names for themselves in the political and economic annals of their states; those who followed in boat-shaped wagons with families, animals, and household furnishings and the money in their pockets to buy valley tracts from the landholders who had preceded them; a poorer sort who trudged through the wilderness on foot carrying their scanty equipment and herding along their poorly-clad and starving children until they came to a place that suited them, where, without running lines, bothering with titles, or inquiring about ownership, they squatted and built their cabins. The freehold settler and the squatter alike had as their main source of money the skins of the animals they killed in the chase. A writer in the Federal Writers' Project, discussing the origin of the mountaineers, offers a radically different theory. His contention is that, 20 Autumn 1975
because of the bad state of repair in which they found the Wilderness Road, "hundreds of families, worn out and discouraged, abandoned their plans for moving further west and settled in the most desirable cove they could find. From these are descended the mountain clans."71 According to this theory, the mountaineer was conceived in discouragement, born to disappointment, and raised in bitterness. Rupert B. Vance has noted that in the great Appalachian Valley "society has developed as a checkerboard in accordance with topography." A slow process of social differentiation took place, resulting in the plantation culture in the fertile limestone valleys and the marginal cabin culture among the less energetic who were pushed into the shale hills and chert ridges.72 But Professor Vance does not presume to ascribe a different an- cestry to the dwellers in the mansion and in the cabin. It is a matter of population pressure that results in the division of fertile fields among heirs until the time comes when fields are too small to offer subsistence and "young sons hoping to found families must push out. Ambitious sons have pushed out beyond the mountain rim; others have retreated back up the slopes to the shelter of a cabin and a cleared patch."73 John Fox, Jr., ob- served in 1901 that people, many of whom had been slaveholders, living along the river valleys in Eastern Kentucky dwelt in weatherboarded houses that had interior decorations, that the people were "better fed, better clothed, less lank in figure, more intelligent," wore less homespun, and used a purer, although still archaic, speech than the mountaineers up the creeks.74 But Fox came to see the Kentucky mountaineers as essentially the same people in ancestry without regard for economic and social position at any given time. In The Heart of the Hills (1913) the branchwater Hawns visit in the bend of the Cumberland River their grandfather's big white house that has weatherboarded up within it the original pioneer cabin of the first Hawn to settle there. But overcrowding, though the principal problem, is not the whole answer to the poverty that came to exist among most of the mountain people. As William Aspenwall Bradley pointed out in 1918, the extinction of game and the exhaustion of the soil contributed immeasurably. On Troublesome Creek in Kentucky it was discovered that "every creek at all capable of growing corn (the one staple crop) had a population far in excess of its power to sup- port, and that many of these people.. .were crowded into one and two room cabins, sometimes without windows." On one branch three miles long "thir- teen houses, with a total of ninety-six people, of whom sixty-seven were children," were found.75 It must be remembered that this heavily increasing population is of the original mountain stock. Only about two per cent of the mountain people are of foreign birth,76 and these are concentrated in the mining areas of the Cumberland-Allegheny Belt where they had exerted little influence on the native stock up to 1920. 77 With an increasing density in population and the consequent further division of family lands, for two-thirds of mountain men own land,78 it is easy to see that struggles and hardships would increase.79 Homes would necessarily become poorer in construction as timberlands are depleted; fewer and fewer acres could be devoted to bulky crops like corn, hay, and wheat; more and more vegetable growing would become necessary; fewer and fewer farm animals could be raised. With little wild game, little Appalachian Journal 21
milk, few or no eggs, the diet becomes increasingly poorer. With increasingly fewer things to sell, the mountaineer's family would have less and less to wear. In a land with impassable roads, few schools, political neglect from the state capitols (for the mountain people are Republican minorities in Democratic states), a general falling away from culture, and an anti- intellectual fundamentalist religion, hundreds of thousands of mountain people were wasted as human resources for decades. Certainly, if any group of people ever had cause to become degraded and to suffer complete loss of character, it would seem that the mountain people have. Yet, they have not done so. That they appeared ignorant, degenerate, vicious, and shiftless to outsiders at times, much evidence indicates. But those who have labored carefully with mountain people and come to know them well report their sterling qualities and record that they still have in the main the attributes of their Scotch-Irish ancestors who set out from Pied- mont Virginia and the Carolinas about the time of the Revolution to wrest America from the wilderness. In an evalution of the character of the Southern mountaineer, Maristan Chapman, denying the charge that the mountain people had become degraded, wrote in 1929: Stagnation at a worthy level is a very different thing from ignorance; and this is where the outlanders make their mistake. They fail to recognize that although the mountain man has a speech, a philosophy of life, and a culture that stopped in the eighteenth century - when first he came to the mountains - it is nevertheless a culture and he is a gentleman. They reckon also without his pride. There is a tough and sinewy forthrightness about the southern highlander that is part of his heritage. He is not put about by the jeers of those who count themselves his intellectual superiors on the grounds of more modern and material knowledge. If he holds a belief it is because it is his belief, and he means to defend his property. He never holds a belief as the moderns do simply because every one else holds it.80 But it must be remembered that although a homogeneity of the ethical and ethnical character of the mountain people may more or less exist, there is no homogeneity of social and economic status. Mountaineers, socially and economically, fall roughly into three groups: (1) Town and city dwellers. Nearly two million live in incorporated places of 1000 or over. Campbell pointed out that their "characteristics and problems are on the whole not different from those of groups living in similar places in other parts of the United States."81 They are mostly of the native stock, descended from the same people as their rural cousins, and either grew up with the town or have been dwellers in the town but a generation or so. Though close to their country cousins in the ethical aspects of their culture, they have modernized their manners, speech, dress, homes, and habits of life. Having risen but recently from what they regard as the more odious aspects of mountain life, they are sensitive on the score of labels and resent being called mountaineers. Along with the well-to-do valley farmers, they "do not regard themselves as mountain people."82 And since they cannot identify themselves with the mountaineer as he has appeared in fiction, there is justice in their repudiation of the label. (2) Valley farmers. These people are the largest of the three groups. They live along river valleys, near the mouths of creeks, or on main highways, and are more or less prosperous rural folk. But Campbell would class here also certain remote and inaccessible families "on the basis of their ownings and 22 Autumn 1975
their more generous manner of living/'83 These people, whom Fox, about 1900, found living in weatherboarded homes with interior decorations and often with evidences of plantation life around them, do not think of them- selves as mountaineers either and also resent the implications in fiction that all mountaineers are of the type portrayed in books. Their problems are likely to be more or less identical with those of people living anywhere in the country. But they, like their neighbors in the towns, reveal the ethical and ethnical homogeneity of the whole mountain population. Only in material things and social living with the consequent polish that comes from the en- joyment of their prerogatives are they different from the mountaineers of the third class. (3) Branchwater mountaineers. These, fewer in number than those belonging to the second class, live for the most part up the branches, in the coves, on the ridges, and in the inaccessible parts of the mountain region. They are small holders of usually poor land, or tenants, or squatters who move from abandoned tract to abandoned tract. But individuals properly belonging to this class "are found scattered through areas and communities occupied by the other two. In such cases they are less likely to be owners of land, and more likely to be renters or common laborers eking out a precarious existence."84 It is the mountaineer of the third type, closely akin to the "poor white" if not exactly the same, that became the mountaineer of fiction. The moun- taineer of this class has crystallized more and more in fiction as the moun- taineer since World War I. Since mountain people of the other two classes have become more and more like the people in small-town and farm U. S. A. everywhere else, they have ceased to have any special qualifications to recommend them to purveyors of fiction, although Jesse Stuart brought the wrath of his Kentucky county-seat town down upon his head when he used the aurora borealis of 1941 as a technical device for reducing all three classes of Kentucky mountaineers to the basic one they started out from - a superstition-ridden, fundamentalists, wily, but shrewd archetype - in A Foretaste of Glory (1946). Since Will N. Harben brought the North Georgia mountaineers of all three types together in his fictions at the turn of the cen- tury, writers in general have tended to interest themselves more and more in the third type, although it is true that Harlan Hatcher did a piece of good but uninteresting writing about the river valley folk of Pike County, Ken- tucky, in Patterns of Wolfpen (1934). Ironically, mountaineers of the third type do not think of themselves as mountaineers either: they are just people. Hence, no one admits to being a mountaineer. The resentment against fictional interpretation of mountain life and character arises largely from the town and valley folk, who rebel against "the exaggeration of the weaknesses and virtues of individuals in the third group, and from presenting as typical the picturesque, exceptional, or distressing conditions under which some of them live," for, "through lack of qualification they are, by inference, pictured as living under such con- ditions."8* By 1920 the mountaineer of fiction and propaganda, i.e., the third type or branchwater variety, though unspeakably poor, still possessed the basic vir- tues of his pioneer ancestors: self-respect, freedom, hospitality, pride, en- durance, and regard for standards of conduct and propriety. These things he Appalachian Journal 23
shared with his relatives, the valley farmers and the town dwellers. But he was sensitive and shy, taciturn, morose, and afraid of labels. He, as well as his valley and town cousins, resented the betrayal of his hospitality when he discovered that he had been written up in a bad light by former guests in his home.86 Sweeping statements that implied total ignorance and back- wardness of a total people were a gross injustice that outraged him. Equally irritating were the propaganda efforts of Northern and Southern church boards connected with their missions work in the mountain communities not adequately supplied with public schools.87 Mountain people did not care "to be regarded, even by implication, as a worthy object of betterment, uplift, or missionary effort/'88 Understandably, the general attitude of the mountain people is not one conducive to progress, for they have been victimized through exploitation of the natural resources around them and quaint jour- nalism "until they resent anything said about them or offered for them."89 Awakened to self-consciousness through caricatures of himself, labels of "hillbilly," and betrayals of his confidence and hospitality, the mountaineer resents nothing so much as "the thought that he is being laughed at, made fun of for his uncouthness and ignorance."90 It would seem that the political plight of the mountain people, parceled out as they are among nine commonwealths in the South, is the result basically of their suspicious nature which militates against them collectively because it does not fit them for cooperation. Their habit of managing for themselves, their confidence in their own self-sufficiency, their hesitancy to ask a neighbor to help do what one usually does for himself are back of their hesitancy to cooperate.91 The fact that they were at variance with the rest of their state during the Civil War accented in a political way an isolation that had hitherto been largely geographical and economic. In their proud with- drawal came the realization that they were a separate entity. Remote from state capitols, they developed the habit of running their own country in their own way with little interference from distant state governments.92 Because they had been non-slaveholding people, they had never been in the current of Southern culture anyway.93 Within twenty years after Appomattox their isolation had become well-nigh complete. James Lane Allen observed in 1886: "It is but a short distance from the blue-grass country to the eastern mountains; but in traveling it you detach yourself from all that you have ever experienced, and take up the history of English-speaking men and women at the point it had reached a hundred or a hundred and fifty years ago."94 Because of their geographical situation, they have constituted a political and economic minority whose interests have met the antagonism and opposition of the majorities in the several states except West Virginia.95 Political demagogues in the mountain areas have found it convenient to their purposes to fan the smoldering embers of resentment and sensitiveness that characterize mountaineers. Touchy over backwardness and poverty in the mountains, local politicians, county officials, and county-seat business men have exploited the proud but ignorant whose resentment at public revelation of the worst features of their communities knows no bounds.96 The importance of slavery and the Civil War as influences that crystallized the mountaineer as a social type during the 1860's cannot be overestimated. Slavery was not unknown in the mountain region. Society had developed in accordance with topography, and along the rich river 24 Autumn 1975
valleys and in the fertile limestone areas where slavery was profitable varying degrees of plantation culture developed, while those who had oc- cupied the poorer lands of the shale hills and the chert ridges and the thin Cumberland Plateau did not own slaves.97 By the time the Civil War came, a social differentiation had taken place that pitted neighborhood against neighborhood in the struggle, or, particularly in the Cumberland Belt, where slavery was practically unknown, family against family along the lines of family ties and neighborhood grudges.98 But generally the mountain people, having become during the preceding century the new type of pioneer with the stamp of frontier life upon their personality, differed essentially from their Tidewater neighbors. Their economy, based mainly upon the small farm, did not permit slavery and the consequent organization of an aristocratic society. The mountaineers, by 1860 grandsons of the original pioneers in the area, were doing well in their subsistence type of small-farm living. Travelers through the mountains reported a higher cultural development among the farmers of East Tennessee and southwestern Virginia than they had found on the average plantation in Alabama and Mississippl.99 But they were crowded. Large families had been the rule on the frontier. There had not been a migration to the west since 1840. A generation of young men were now occupying the last subdivision of lands that would support a family, and the game, so plentiful a few years earlier, was now gone. In some of the older mountain communities, notably in East Tennessee, where the land had been occupied for five generations, the subdivision of family lands had left many tenant farmers. Time was ripe for a second migration; but the mountaineers were "pen- ned up in their mountains because slavery had left them no market for their skill and strength." Slavery and King Cotton "denied them a chance to ex- pand, circulate, and mingle with the progressive elements at work elsewhere in the republic."100 The mountain people had spoken out against slavery from the beginning. But on the eve of the Civil War attitudes toward slavery among the poor fringe and tenant farmers had changed. They feared that freed slaves would become successful competitors for their jobs. Hence, many of the very poorest mountain people took up their squirrel rifles and marched off to fight for the South in 1861. 101 After the Civil War was over much fighting continued in neighborhoods throughout the mountains. But perhaps the empty poverty and desolation to which the soldiers returned was worse than the domestic struggle and mur- der that awaited many of them.102 East Tennessee was perhaps dealt the worst blow of any of the mountain country. There public buildings and roads had been destroyed and real estate had dropped to a fraction of its former value. But all over the mountains, "neighbors who had lived in peaceful happiness now, because of sectional differences, were at each other's throats. A great collective family had been split asunder."103 By 1870 the mountains had fallen into the deep sleep from which they were not to stir until the turn of the century. They never recovered from the Civil War. By 1890 they had begun to suffer further depredation from ruthless exploitation of their forests and mineral resources by outsiders. Population had increased; feuds, poverty, and ignorance had caught the sons of Boone's fellow travelers in a tangle from which they were unable to Appalachian Journal 25
extricate themselves, for "utterly impoverished and cut off from all contact with the currents of modern progress, they had become socially and economically disorganized."104 ' The feuds of Kentucky, unknown before the Civil War, are probably the result of the war. Certainly many of the feuds that have raged in recent times had no direct connection with the war, but they had as precedents those that did. Unlike the mountains of Tennessee, Eastern Kentucky saw few major engagements in the war. Instead, the war "consisted principally of raids by bands of Union men and retaliatory raids by bands of Con- federates. Some of these bushwhacking groups were not recognized officially by either army. Like the official detachments, however, they looted, burned, pillaged, raped, and incited hatreds that led to many private wars long after the national war was over."105 The political plight of the mountain people, brought about by their geographical partitions among several states, their acceptance of political affiliation along the divisions created by the Civil War and their suscep- tibility to leadership of the demagogue, and the lack of adequate means of communication with the outside world, has been consolidated through ignorance and poverty into what might be regarded as a manipulatory fac- tor in the hands of political bosses who were until quite recently so certain of election results in mountain counties that it was not necessary to promise for performance at the polls such tangible rewards as roads, schools, better paid teachers, and county health and agricultural agents. This situation came about primarily as the result of conditions in education that appear to have spiraled downward until about the turn of the nineteenth century and to have taken a painfully slow turn upward since that time. With the coming of the church-supported academy and the improved public school, the young people of the mountains soon had their eyes opened to the limitations of their environments. The church-related schools, especially, seem to have maintained school faculties of well-prepared people from outside the mountains. Their curricular offerings subjected the best minds of the mountain youth to the humanities at the same time they were being taught skills with their hands. With new skills and improved minds, ambitious youths from the creekways and the hollows began to look "beyond dark hills" to the big world where interesting things were always happening. Thus, as far back as 1910, the most destructive to mountain character of all its migrations began: that of its youth who had outgrown their en- vironment.106 Down to 1920 there is evidence that many of the young women of promise, enrolled in the schools and academies, dropped out because of inhibitions brought about through the realization that education was leading them to want things they knew they could not have. They saw promising young men graduating from the schools, going out of the moun- tains, and never returning. Conditioned by the patriarchal society in which they had grown up, they knew that their husbands would come from among the less ambitious who had remained at home, and that they would therefore be happier left in their ignorance.107 Although the situation was tragic for the young women involved, they were at least retained to become mothers of promising sons. Since Campbell observed that situation, at- titudes toward woman and her place in society and the home have changed, 26 Autumn 1975
even in the hills, and now the old mountain stock suffers an annual drain on its vitality through the loss of its intelligent and promising young women. By 1930 the state had assumed more responsibility in regard to education of mountain children. The depression years brought the collapse of the charity-supported mission schools and academies, which had spent millions for what had really been a state function. The mountain people in general appear not to have been unhappy about the closing of the mission schools, for the growing enlightenment had led to resentment of many of the schools' practices, particularly those that led them to feel daily that they were depen- dent upon charity for their education, and those that made them and their situation the subjects of fund-seeking literature.108 Although many of the county schools were housed in primitive structures like the "old log building of one room with a tiny belfry thrust through its decaying clapboard roof that Miss Murray (pseudonym for Ella Enslow) found when she went to teach the Shady Cove school in the mountains of Tennessee,109 the teachers, because the depression years brought keen competition for the low-paying positions, were better prepared to do their work than they had ever been. Further overpopulation of the mountain districts with families who had returned from centers of industry, which had been crippled by the collapse of our national economy, swelled enrollments. In some mountain com- munities as much as fifty per cent of the population was of school age. In 1940 it was estimated that at least 42 per cent of the population in every county in Eastern Kentucky was under fourteen years of age. In two of the counties over 70 per cent of the people were under twenty-five years of age.110 These children attended the 1,840 one-room schools and 330 of all other types in the mountain country.111 Although the children were poorly clad and came without lunches, books, and supplies, attendance was better than it had been in the old days when public education had either collapsed following the Civil War or had not yet been successfully established in the mountain country. The man of the hills takes education seriously, partly, as Muriel Sheppard has pointed out, because "he has had to work for it if he got it,"112 and partly because he shared the old Scotch-Irish concern for education, "a deeply implanted race instinct, abundantly manifested in history,' ' to which Henry Jones Ford at- tributes "the remarkably prompt and rapid spread of popular education throughout America."113 His reverence for book learning is very high, despite his own illiteracy and lore of superstitions, remedies, and prognostications. He is eager to see his child educated. The political plight of the mountaineer, then, is basically identified with his economic plight, a fact that was not recognized in its proper light until the Depression Era focused the attention of the national economists upon the nation's impoverished rural areas. Now the mountain region is recognized as a serious "problem area," a region presenting at the same time the lowest economic opportunities and the highest population pressures in the nation.114 The students of sociology sent into the area by the U.S. Government and by foundations began to uncover realistically what the life in the mountain cabin, previously portrayed by nostalgic popular writers as quaint and pretty, was really like. No part of the mountain country seems to have been spared the cold, critical scrutiny of the social and political Appalachian Journal 27
analyst. From northern Virginia, less than two hours by automobile from the nation's capital, came reports of what would be considered branchwater mountain communities in the Cumberland Plateau country. There had been a time when it looked as if the economic problem of the mountain man had been solved through the imposition of the twentieth cen- tury industrialism upon his barter economy.115 It was thought that the mines, the lumber mills, the railroads, the brick yards, the gas and oil fields, and the concomitant service occupations would supply the supplementary income that was needed to ease his economic pains. Furthermore, thousands of the mountain people had migrated to industrial centers outside the moun- tains. Actually, however, the mountain people who moved into the camps continued a subsistence living, the loss in farm revenues was not offset by the income of those who farmed but mined "on the side," and the migrations did not offset the increase in birth rate. When the depression came, income from industries within the area ceased or declined sharply. Those who still owned their decaying cabins back in the hills moved to them; those who did not were forced into accepting relief. To aggravate the situation, migrants to industrial centers beyond the mountains returned with increased families to try once again to eke a living from the smaller and smaller and more and more eroded farms. Many a mountain man might have been able to "manage in some way" had not two years of the worst drought the mountains had ever known followed in the wake of the collapse of the national economy.116 But the families kept increasing in size and the hollows and coves kept filling up with returned migrants. In the meantime, mining, the backbone of the economy through the coal- bearing plateaus, continues to suffer as an industry. Many mines closed never to open again. Those that operated part-time served to perpetuate the deadening monotony of coal-camp life. The miner and his family had remained on the level of subsistence-living down to 1940. 117 Opportunities for worthwhile leisure activities are not present in the average mining com- munity. When the miner has leisure he has nothing to do but "spit tobacco juice, chew the rag, get drunk, and shoot craps - or somebody else. When he is unemployed he has plenty of time to do a little thieving, a little moon- shining."118 But the size of his family keeps increasing, for he has time to sport with his wife.119 His essential isolation, his dismal ignorance, his truculence and inflexibility of character are perpetuated in the conditions of coal-camp life. His reluctance to unionize has made him the victim in the highly competitive coal mining industry, bloody echoes of which have soun- ded down from Harlan County, Kentucky, and earlier, Logan County, West Virginia. But there can be no real relief of the economic distress of the population in the mining country for the simple reason that there are ten times as many people there as a struggling industry like mining can em- ploy.1^ The mountain churches had done nothing to alleviate the suffering of the people. Poor themselves and presided over by narrow ministers who worked the mines or farmed through the week and sought nothing for their services as ministers, they could not help. The minister, a Calvinistic fundamentalist of some sort, was an emotional, irrational man of ranting zeal who always clung literally to the Bible. "Religion pure and simple is, in his opinion, the only commodity that should be vended from the church house."121 28 Autumn 1975
The initiative of the people of the mountains had really been destroyed already when the New Deal relief programs came along. That the programs actually saved the lives of thousands of mountain people can hardly be doubted, for they provided food at a time when the law of claw and tooth was about to go into action, and in addition, especially through the public works programs that constructed roads and schools, the National Youth Ad- ministration, and the special training schools that enabled young people to learn skills and trades, conserved human resources that were especially valuable when the nation went to war in 1942. From 1933 to 1941 the relief and work programs spent an average of a million and a half dollars in each of the counties of eastern Kentucky.122 Except for homicide, moonshining and its attendant violations, and an occasional sexual aberration, the mountaineer has traditionally been ab- solved of crime and immorality. Most writers have been unstinting in their laudations of his virtues. However, that he does have a criminal record and that his crimes and vices are growing in number and variety are known facts. From the mountaineer's own point of view, his criminal record on court dockets is negligible. The murderer kills his assailant either for insulting him or in self-defense. If he succeeds in proving that the assailant, deceased, has called him a son-of-a-bitch or a bastard, the jury will consider the epithet the first blow struck in an assault and acquit the accused. If the murderer shows the jury that the deceased brushed his coat-tail as if he were making for a pistol about his middle or lifted his hand as if he were preparing to whip a weapon from an under-arm holster, the jury will acquit him on the ground that he slew in self-defense. The moonshiner still clings to the traditional Scotch-Irish views of taxation that go as far back as the British embargoes on wool and linen in Ulster but have American coun- terparts in the Regulator Movement and the Whiskey Rebellion. The other charges are not serious, for obviously they are nothing but restraints of the gay young blades engaged in sowing their wild oats and declaring their maturity and eligibility, and one doesn't sow his crops all summer. And there is plenty of evidence to indicate that mountain communities even through the depression years were on the whole peaceful and that crime was at a minimum. Of Shady Cove, a Tennessee mountain community in which she taught school for four years at the beginning of the depression years, Miss Murray said: The people of the average mountain community like this are far more peaceful than fiction writers and popular tradition would have you believe. Once in a while there is a flare-up, perhaps even a killing; but such things occur mostly in the towns.... The average household in Shady Cove was a happy one, and there was comparatively little bickering among neigh- bors. 123 As to the morality of the mountain people when considered apart from vices that might be pronounced criminal, students have reported that they have a high regard for proper conduct as they see it and that they exhibit admirable traits of honor and honesty. Day refers to their "frankness" in conjunction with their animalism and gross materialism, but it is, of course, their literal adherence to factual truths that would require finesse and Appalachian Journal 29
suggestion in more conventional society. Although it is not our purpose to analyze the virtues of the mountain people at this point in our thesis, we should point out that their immorality, like their crime, has been assessed in terms of general orthodox and conventional American standards, when, in all justice to the mountain people, they should have been assessed in terms of their own standards. But by conventional standards their morals have not been unduly shocking, perhaps. More attention has been focused upon the sexual immorality of mountain folk than on any other phase of their private living. Actually all of the emphasis upon this phase of the moun- taineer's behavior fails to differentiate him as a type from other groups in the final analysis. But since it is of perennial interest to students of moun- tain life, it should be evaluated for purposes of this study. As to orthodox morality of the people in the average rural mountain com- munity, perhaps Miss Murray's estimate of Shady Cove is representative: The cove scored about as high as the average rustic community, including some in more fortunate areas; undoubtedly higher than some. We had our occasional instances of illegitimacy and harlotry, and even one of suspected incest. Such things were properly frowned upon by the better-behaved folk, but the sinners were not wholly outcast.124 Significant is Miss Murray's observation that "the sinners were not wholly outcast," for here lies the essential attitude held by his family and neighbors toward personal transgressions of the mountaineer. Tolerant views of sexual transgressions belong historically to the mountain people. In Mandel Sherman and Thomas Henry's efforts to differentiate at- titudes of the five social groupings they studied in the mountain country of Virginia, they concluded that no discriminations were made between legitimate and illegitimate children in Colvin Hollow among mountaineers of the lowest grouping,125 but discrimination increased as their studies carried them toward the highest grouping. "Only at the culture level of Briarsville [a farm and mill town at the foot of the mountains] do im- morality [again, sexual freedom] and illegitimacy become serious offenses. There the illegitimate child is an outcast. Other children will not play with him. The birth of an illegitimate child in this community is rare."126 The mountain people are differentiated in general from other American groups, except Catholic working class people, in their attitudes both toward marriage and separation and divorce.127 Even the highlanders in the lowest social groupings have adhered to marriage. Not only do they marry, and early too, but they continue to live together. There is strong prejudice against divorce and separation throughout the mountains from the highest social groupings through the lowest. Perhaps no American group places a greater emphasis upon the integrity of the family than the mountain people. Among lower social groupings of mountain folk, divorce and separation are never discussed, though "there is apparently no deep feeling between husband and wife." The apparent loyalty of the mountain woman to her husband and family probably grows out of economic and social conditions. She cannot leave her husband, for she would then have no place to go. Her parents would not have room for her and her children, and she could not "manage" outside the mountains because she cannot adjust to life there. Her function is basic and simple: she bears children, takes care of her house, and raises the garden. In higher rural mountain communities and in the 30 Autumn 1975
towns, separation and divorce are considered immoral and are to be avoided. Separation and divorce are not so common in any of the mountain communities as they are in the larger rural towns and the cities of America.128 The growing influence of the Catholic and Holiness churches throughout the mountains indicates that the views of the mountain people are not likely to change radically on this phase of social living. As to the mountaineer's "moral" behavior, then, we may conclude by summarizing what is known of his extramarital sex life. His society has carried along a tradition of polygamy and an attitude of full acceptance of his illegitimate offspring. He is occasionally incestuous but may suffer social punishment from his own people if incest is discovered. Both he and his wife may indulge in extramarital sexual relations without destroying the family organization. Because natural sexual behavior is so easily possible and because of the primitiveness of his life, he is rarely guilty of sexual per- version. Inasmuch as sexual conquest brings him prestige among his fellows, he does not hold himself responsible for restraints that would protect the "frail" virtue of the woman he is to marry, who, too, is impelled by sex. Con- sequently, premarital sexual relations are quite generally practiced. Neither does he hold himself responsible for protecting the unwilling virtue of his neighbor's wife or daughter. But he and his wife cling to marriage, either as a matter of economic necessity or because they think divorce and separation are morally wrong. As the mountain country has "grown up," crimes new to the moun- taineers have appeared. Larceny, unknown since the early days of thieves and outlaws in mountain hide-outs, has appeared with increasing frequency since the beginning of the Depression.129 Counterfeiters and forgers once operated from mountain bases.130 But forgeries and dishonesty were unknown from those early days until the Depression, when the mountain people, especially in Kentucky, began to distinguish themselves in this area. An investigation on behalf of Sears, Roebuck and Company and Mont- gomery Ward and Company revealed that in three Depression years more than two hundred mountain people, mostly women, had written checks, "without sufficient funds" or forged, for over a million dollars' worth of merchandise.131 Burglary, storehouse breaking, and armed robberies have been on the increase. During the Depression many a returned migrant was sought for the theft of the automobile that he returned in. Farmers in some communities had to put locks on the doors of their meathouses and corn- cribs for the first time in the history of the community. Chicken-stealing, traditionally an inconsequential offense of teen-agers bent on an all-night "chicken-cookin' " party in some wooded cove or abandoned cabin, became so serious that farmers had to begin locking their chicken houses. But in connection with these new crimes we should remember the overpopulated, hungry, poorly-clad, demoralized mountaineer of the Depression days and continue to admire his honor and honesty, for the per capita incidence of such crimes, as Day observed in 1941, was surprisingly low for people who needed things so badly. In 1868 Calvin H. Wiley, Superintendent of Public Instruction in North Carolina, wrote in the North Carolina Third Reader the following passage for the children of the state to use in improving their reading skill at the same time they were learning about their state: Appalachian Journal 31
Some of you will be surprised to find Asheville a place of much intelligence and refinement; and, indeed, the inhabitants of the whole mountain region are different from what you had supposed. Hardy and active they all are; but there is no gross ignorance, no outlandishness nor clownishness among them. They are a hale, hearty, vigorous race; the average intelligence can be favorably compared with that of other sections, while we are not unfrequently met with the evidences of cultivated taste and elegant accomplishments. A striking feature of mountaineer character is its patriotism, or love of country; nor do we wonder at this considering what a beautiful country they have to love.1'*2 Certainly Wiley was struggling hard to be objective. We must remember that the Civil War had just been fought, that North Carolina was in the grasp of a carpetbag government almost to the time that Wiley was preparing his reader, and that the population of the state was seething with indignation at the presence of occupying Union troops. One can understand why children might be "surprised" to learn that mountaineers have "much intelligence and refinement" that "can be compared favorably with that of other sections." For purposes of our study we need to know what Wiley did not say: why would children have been surprised at the characteristics Wiley almost ascribed to the mountaineers? But we do see that the moun- tain people were being regarded by both the writer and the children, whom he would have accept them, as foreigners in their midst. A generation of North Carolinians was being prepared to see the mountaineer as quaint, dif- ferent, but an honorable and likable person when properly understood. That this idea of the mountaineer was fairly general can be discerned by reading Beverly Tucker's The Partisan Leader (1836), John Esten Cooke's Leather- stocking and Silk (1854), George Washington Harris's Sut Lovingood's Yarns (1867), William Gilmore Simms' The Cub of the Panther (serialized in Old Guard, 1869) and Voltmeier, or the Mountain Man (serialized in the Western World, 1869), Sidney Lanier' s Tiger Lilies (1869), and fugitive short fiction that had begun to appear in magazines. It is easy to see how half-fearful and patronizing visitors to the mountains, quick to seize upon and exploit as interesting and unusual everyday things in the mountaineer's way of life, should have been regarded as "furriners." They were regarding the sensitive mountaineer as a foreigner themselves. When Miss Murfree began writing about the Tennessee mountaineers in 1884 her audience had been prepared for her fictional interpretations of the quaint arrested frontier. But it remained for President William Goodell Frost of Berea College to supply the label that the world had been waiting for in the name of his article on mountain life in the Atlantic Monthly in 1899: "Our Contemporary Ancestors in the Southern Appalachians." Here he pronounced the mountain people "an anachronism," "beleaguered by nature" and warned outlanders that "it will require a scientific spirit and some historic sense to enable us to appreciate their situation and their character."133 A plethora of journalistic writers were willing to answer the challenge. Since railroads had begun to enter the region, "on-horseback" journeys from railroad stations became prevalent and much observation conditioned by the fixation that this is the land of "our contemporary an- cestors" was printed, but always with heavy emphasis upon traits of charac- ter of the mountaineers, their Elizabethan speech, their social customs, their moonshining, their feuding, and their homes. The first writer actually to live among them for a number of years and to follow President Frost's advice to 32 Autumn 1975
acquire a historic sense and proceed in a scientific spirit was Horace Kephart, whose book Our Southern Highlanders (1913) remains the first and possibly the greatest carefully considered analysis of the mountaineer and his way of life. James Lane Allen, John Fox, Jr., and President Frost had been worthy forerunners who had reported on their excursions to the mountain regions in Harper's and Scribner's, but it remained for Kephart to do the monumental task. Once President Frost found the felicitous label, the writers agreed that the mountaineers were contemporary ancestors living in a land that had stood still in time for a hundred years.134 Miss Murfree had supplied a check list of things to look for in her excellent local color novels and stories about East Tennessee - stories that were in general not to be equaled in quality by her many followers. But Miss Murfree' s guide to writers who would labor in the field, adequate for her own time, true, was not adequate for in- terpretation of the waking and stirring leviathan that the mountaineer proved to be from shortly before the first World War to the time that he awkwardly took his place alongside his "contemporary children' ' at the beginning of World War II. He has not lacked interpreters - Will Harben, John Fox, Charles Neville Buck, Maristan Chapman, Jesse Stuart, James Still, Harriette Arnow, and a host of writers who have gleaned lighter har- vests - but they have in general annoyed him by pretending to believe that he is still asleep. They have too often looked so hard for his log cabin, his moonshine still, his "hawg" rifle, his spittled whiskers that they could not see him; they have been so entranced by his archaic English, his proverbial lore, his superstitions, and his old-world ballads that they could not hear what he had to say; they have been so thrilled with the Alps-like mountains shimmering in autumn colors in the mellow light of a westering sun that they failed to notice, too often, that the colors were from the leaves of scrub oak, blackjack, persimmon, and sassafras growing from quite ordinary hillsides that had yielded up their fertility long since. They were so im- pressed with the theory of his origin that they plucked the "purest Anglo- Saxon" string so frequently and droned on about "archaic flavor" and "un- stinted hospitality" so constantly that they fetched forth a monotonously dreary tune from their mountain dulcimers. But this does not mean that all fiction has failed to see the mountaineer. Occasionally, writers of fiction have penetrated searchingly beneath surfaces and brought forth revealing interpretations of the mountain man against the background of his economic, social, and cultural dilemma - a dilemma that has faced him since his acres had to be divided and subdivided until they would no longer support him and his ever-growing family even before the demands of trade and commerce imposed upon his primitive barter economy an industrial system that enslaved him and increased the measure of his poverty. Elizabeth Madox Roberts did it in The Time of Man (1926), Sherwood An- derson did it in Kit Brandon (1936), James Still did it in River of Earth (1940), Jesse Stuart almost achieved it in Trees of Heaven (1940), and Harriette Arnow did it but spoiled it with the Melville-like symbolism of the fox in Hunter's Horn (1949). In general, the rest of the fiction about moun- tain people has been stereotyped for popular consumption as the western "thrillers" have been. The recipe is different, of course, as the recipes are different for angel's food cake and devil's food cake. Appalachian Journal 33
In 1945 Julia Davis sounded the death knell of the "contemporary an- cestor" in her discussion of the mountaineers, whom Sherman and Henry had studied, who were moved out of an area along the Blue Ridge in order to make room for the Blue Ridge Parkway: Willingly or unwillingly, the mountaineers sold their homes - their crooked cabins, the clearings, the steep patches, where (as they say) a man has to hang on to a root with one hand while he hoes with the other and has to plant his corn by shooting it into the hill. Like their compatriots in Kentucky and Tennessee, these were real mountain stock, whose forebears, early settlers from the British Isles, had reached the mountains and holed in as bears do, either from' a lack of initiative or from a love of solitude and independence. Isolationists par excellence, they had preserved until the era of the automobile their quaint speech, their old ballads, their dulcimers, their weaving, their tribal jealousies, their fierce and tribal code. Now the hard-surfaced roads brought civilization to them whether they liked it or not, and most of them welcomed the change. Some moved when they had sold their homes, others stayed on by a lifetime agreement with the government, but the old mountain ways were broken and in a decade or two the people will be standardized to the movie pattern. The old handicrafts will vanish, the pic- turesque speech, the old songs and dances, along with their poverty, malnutrition, and ignorance in which they thrived. As the highways go through, the mountain people outside the park are selling solid log houses and good land to move into plywood shacks near the big road. There they have no room even for gardens, but they can watch the cars go by, and can walk or hitchhike down to town on Saturday night. 1;ir> The quaint, the archaic, the unusual, the flavorsome, then, do not get at the essence of the mountaineer any more, and have not since before World War I. Our "contemporary ancestor" must now be estimated in more realistic terms. But there are quite vital facets of his character that have been there all the time and still are. These we shall consider, both historically and in terms of the present. That he has always been and still is a man who has believed in the in- tegrity of the family as a basis for social organization has been shown. He has shared and continues to share this belief with an agrarian America, an America that became urban and began to abandon its faith in the old agrarian belief about the turn of the century. The continued belief of moun- tain people in the integrity of the family, despite aberrations of the father and mother, has been shown earlier. He believes in marriage and has always believed in marriage, apparently in plural marriages, judging from the records of his ancestors. Further, he believes in early marriage. Here he is differentiated from the mores of this century, but was not so differentiated throughout the nineteenth century. But there is some evidence that he is "growing up" in this regard. In his family organization the mountain man is a patriarch, the lord of the household. When he gives orders they are obeyed. He may be gentle if he represents the higher social groupings, or he may yell "Shet up!" if he belongs to the lower social groupings.136 There is a traditional division of work in his household. "There is nothing at which a mountain man or boy balks so positively as doing woman's work. To milk a cow or wash dishes or make up a bed is a humiliation not to be borne by the noble male."137 The women do all of the work in the home and the garden and assist with the crops except for plowing and harvesting. The men do the "hard work" on the farm, plowing and harvesting, and then loaf about "along the roads, visiting their neighbors, the store, and the nearest village, and have as good 34 Autumn 1975
and easy a time as they know how/'138 But they are not lazy in the sense that the "poor white" and the Negro are reputed to be lazy, for they have energy that they spend walking over the hills. Mountain parents are loving and generous with their children and seldom inflict corporal punishment unless they are in a "passion" and smite a child for no particular reason. The observers of mountain life have noted what amounts to absurd indulgence of children's whims, a trait that motivated much of Miss Murfree's fiction. It is as true today, especially among the lower social groupings, as it was in 1880. 139 Despite his poverty and his diminishing patrimony the mountain man has maintained historically an independence and a self-respect which have become the heritage of his children through his emphasis upon the integrity of the family. Although there is evidence that this independence and self- respect became increasingly more circumscribed as the outside world moved in on him, he still retained a good portion of it at the beginning of World War II. In this regard he is differentiated from other groups in America who occupy a similar social and economic status. The migrations have exerted inestimable influence on shaping the moun- taineer that we find today. Undifferentiated from the rest of rural America at the time, mountain people intermarried extensively after they arrived in the mountains, and perhaps, in many instances, before.140 That the original stock was unusually good has been generally accepted. Those who possess only a layman's knowledge of genetics know that nothing improves good stock like inbreeding, and, conversely, nothing degenerates poor stock like inbreeding. Since the mountain people were widely practicing inbreeding down to the time of World War II, the character of the migrants, those whose blood would have been passed on had they remained in the moun- tains, is important in our consideration of the mountaineer as we have found him in recent years. It appears that four major migrations from the mountains of Kentucky had occurred before the Depression. The first, around 1840, occurred after the depletion of game and fish, and agriculture became the basis of living, the migrants moving on to the Bluegrass, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, and Arkansas. It is thought that the first migration carried away intelligent and ambitious pioneering people. A generation later the Civil War took a heavy toll of the finest young men in the mountains, and, following the war, in- telligent and venturesome young men went to the West never to return. During the 1880's another migration, including undesirable families as well as many of the ambitious, occurred. Shortly after 1900 began a fourth migration, which carried away thousands of young men and women to in- dustrial centers each year down to 1929. Included in this migration were also thousands of families, desirable and undesirable, who moved to the Midwestern states as farm tenants.141 That the migrations consisted of energetic and intelligent individuals is the consensus of those who have studied them. Dr. Hirsch had studied the work of Arthur H. Estabrook, who had devoted careful research to the problem and reported his conclusions in Eugenical News in 1926 and 1927, before he completed his own studies of the Kentucky mountaineers. What Dr. Hirsch found in regard to migration of the intelligent corroborated Appalachian Journal 35
Estabrook. At the time of Dr. Hirsch' s study, he found in one county that 66 per cent of all the high school graduates then living had moved outside the mountains, that 73 per cent of the people then living who had ever attended the county-seat grammar school were living outside the county, that 77 per cent of all the graduates of. the high school department of one of the set- tlement schools had left the mountains, and that 75 per cent of those who had graduated from the schools twenty years or more previous to 1928 had left the mountains.142 Inasmuch as a much smaller per cent of the population in general had left the mountains, the loss of those who had demonstrated their intelligence, energy, and ambition in the schools is an important factor when one considers what such drains from an ethnic group will do to its general level of intelligence over a considerable length of time. In explaining why those who were becoming educated left the mountains, Hirsch was of the opinion that "education, becoming better and permitting a larger per cent to reach High Schools, forms a state of mind and attitude that is not conducive to producing miners and timber workers. Their minds and ambitions are aroused and they are leaving to seek their fortunes elsewhere/'143 Estabrook had found that, whereas the family histories of those people who had traditionally been prominent and active in the affairs of the county revealed that large numbers of them had migrated, the histories of those families that were socially and mentally of low grade revealed that very few of them had left the immediate neighborhood.144 Concerning the influence of the migrations on the native stock, Dr. Hirsch concluded: "Thus the East Kentucky Mountain people, without the dilution or pollution of their blood through outside stocks, and probably without a differential birthrate among the various social and mental grades, have suf- fered a continuous diminution of average intelligence and energy through the successive selective migrations of 1820-1840, of 1865-1870, of 1880, and of 1903-1926." 145 But replacing the intelligent and ambitious who were leaving the mountains after the industrialization of the area were thousands of foreign day-laborers, principally Hungarians and Italians. Despite the fact that the native population had intermarried infrequently with the economic invaders, the intermingling of their blood was foreseen as the final destruction of "the unique but simple civilization of the Scotch-Irish, English, and German settlers of 1800." 14<* But that the mountain stock has degenerated is the claim of those who have carried on investigations among the highlanders. Day epitomizes their conclusions as follows: Intermarriage has resulted in the development of racial weaknesses - low intelligence, bad eyes, epilepsy, and so on. This together with economic poverty and isolation have [sic] brought about a sad decadence of the proud mountain stock. Those who stay in the hills are barely able to exist and those who migrate cannot cope with the competition of the outside world. Thousands came back during the depression and have made no effort to leave.147 But lower social groupings among the mountain people have been found relatively free from the worries and conflicts that develop neurotic per- sonalities among people living in more complex social organizations. Sher- man and Henry found that children in Colvin and Needles Hollows did not develop frustrations because they were not subjected to rigid requirements, 36 Autumn 1975
the meeting of which could have led some of them to a conviction that they were failures.148 Adults do not worry either. Such considerations as usually induce worry, anxieties, and frustrations, like fear of losing a job, paying the rent, paying the bills, remorse of conscience, do not exist among the squatter people who repose their destinies completely in nature, their fatalism exonerating them from all responsibility.149 Among the lowest groupings there were found no evidences of neurotic tendencies. Nothing in the lives of the lowest groups indicates the fear of failure following a period of in- security and anxiety that would motivate them to seek escape as is customary with the neurotic personality. At the middle level of social life in the mountains, however, adults, who are more conscious of hardship and poverty and display increased ambition and energy, develop anxiety and doubts, and their children begin to suffer from conflicts of insecurity and in- feriority. The personalities of children among the lowest social groupings could not be easily classified into different types, but beginning at the Oakton Hollow or middle grouping level, personalities begin to differ as much as those of children in any ordinary community, for the conflicts of their surroundings have "modified their personalities by demands upon their social adaptabilities."150 From the point of view of the social observer, the mountaineer historically conceived has fallen ignominously from the proud position he occupied as a type of the intelligent and resourceful Scotch-Irish pioneer, disdainful of servitude, jealous of his freedom and individuality, generous and leisurely but thrifty down to about 1840 through a century marked by growing poverty, increasing ignorance, physical and mental degeneration, and decay of self-respect until at about the time of World War II he is hardly identifiable as the mountaineer of old but is, in the main, un- differentiated from such socio-economic groups as poor whites and Okies. The much-vaunted traits of character attributed to him in the past are either no longer identifiable or have ceased to have significance. At last "hill-billy," which was originally the name given to a poor white from the sand hills of Alabama, is applicable to him too. NOTES Chapter 1 Uohn Fox, Jr., "The Southern Mountaineers," Scribner's, 29 (April, 1901), 388. ^John C. Campbell, The Southern Highlander and His Homeland (New York, 1921). dd. 39-40. JRupert B. Vance, Human Geography of the South (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1935), p. 244. 4lbid. r>John P. McConnell, "Retardation of the Appalachian Region," Mountain Life and Work (April, 1922), pp. 21-22. "Shields Mcllwaine, The Southern Poor White from Lubberland to Tobacco Road (Norman, Oklahoma, 1939), p. xv. 7Campbell, pp. 10-11. 8Horace Kephart, Our Southern Highlanders (New York, 1913), d. 14. «Campbell, p. 19. »»Ibid., p. 13. 1 »Vance, p. 241. •-Maps and graphs reprinted from the U. S. Department of Agriculture appear in J. Russell Smith's Men and Resources (New York, 1939). See pages 27, 30, 41, 98, 101, 110, 111, 126, 147, 160-161, 229, 235, 280, and 353. Appalachian Journal 37
»;íNathaniel D. M. Hirsch in his study of Kentucky mountain school children in three selected counties in the 1920' s arrived at the following percentages relative to the coloring of the mountain people: Of children from seven to ten years old, 32.8 per cent of girls were blond and 35.7 per cent of the boys. Of the older children, 30 per cent of the males and 26 per cent of the females were blond; 57 per cent of the males and 64 per cent of the females were mixed; 13 per cent of the males and 10 per cent of the females were brunette. Hirsch pointed out that the mountain people are considerably less blond than the most blond people known, the residents of northern Europe where one-third of the people have light hair and blue eyes ("An Experimental Study of East Kentucky Mountaineers," Genetic Psychology Monographs, 3 [March, 1928], 233). Whether Hirsch' s findings differentiate mountain people from other Southern white people in blond- ness is not known. But he found no significant correlation between coloring and intelligence among the mountain children. »4Vante, P- 244. »5Marian Y. Rambo, "The Submerged Tenth Among the Southern Mountaineers," Methodist Review (July, 1905), p. 265. (Quoted in Vance, p. 244.) »^Campbell, p. 38. 17Ibid., p. 30. See also Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York, 1920), p. 164. »«Turner, pp. 164-165. »»Campbell, p. 61. 20Justin Winsor, The Westward Movement (Boston, 1897), p. 400. 2 »William Goodell Frost, "Our Contemporary Ancestors in the Southern Mountains," Atlantic, 83 (March, 1899), 311. 22CaniDbell, dd. 41-43. 2»Vance, p. 35. •"Ibid. '^'Campbell, p. 50. Ella Enslow {pseud, for Murray) and Alvin F. Harlow point out that the petition of the Watauga Settlement to North Carolina in 1776 was signed by one hundred and thirteen men, perhaps all in the colony, but only two had to make their marks (Schoolhouse in the Foothills [New York, 1935], pp. 9-10). ^Campbell, p. 51. 27Ibid., pp. 54-55. 2«Ibid., p. 65. 2«Ibid., p. 25. ¡"Petitions of the Early Inhabitants of Kentucky to the General Assembly of Virginia, 1769 to 1792, Filson Club Publication No. 27 (Louisville, n.d.), pp. 31-32. (Quoted by Campbell, pp. 60-61.) 1 »Henry Jones Ford, The Scotch-Irish in America (Princeton, New Jersey, 1915), p. 82. *2Ibid., p. 90.""Ibid., pp. 572-574. *4John Fiske, Old Virginia and Her Neighbors (Boston, 1897), I, 319-322. ;}r»Wilbur G. Ziegler and Ben S. Grosscup, The Heart of the Alleghanies (Raleigh, North Carolina, 1883), pp. 224-225. }fiSee Records of the Moravians in North Carolina, ed. Adelaide L. Fries (Raleigh, North Carolina, 1926), I, 251-252, 337, 377; III, 1310. See also excerpts from Bishop Asbury' s Jo urnal in Samuel Cole Williams, Early Travels in the Tennessee Country (Johnson City, Tennessee, 1928), p. 295. *7Ziegler and Grosscup, pp. 224-225. «Campbell, pp. 68-69. ;}9Morley, The Carolina Mountains (Boston, 1913), p. 140. 4()Chapman, "The Mountain Man," Century, 117 (February, 1929), 509. 4 »Arthur, Western North Carolina, A History (Asheville, North Carolina, 1914), p. 248. 42Frost, Atlantic, 83 (March, 1899), 315. 4*Haney, The Mountain People of Kentucky (Cincinnati, Ohio, 1906), p. 25. 44Ibid., p. 30. Nathaniel Shaler thought that perhaps more than half of the blood of the settlers in Ken- tucky down to 1860 was "of Scotch and North English extraction; practically the whole of it was of English stock. The larger part of it was from the frontier region of Virginia" {Kentucky: A Pioneer Com- monwealth [Boston, 1885], p. 221). 45Campbell, p. 65. Nathaniel D. M. Hirsch found Scotch-Irish predominating in the ancestry of the families of school children he studied in three selected southeastern Kentucky mountain counties. "In suc- cessively smaller proportions there were families of English, German, and French Huguenot blood. ...The mountain people of today are a blend of these several strains." Hirsch's anthropométrie measures of the heads of school children indicate that the mountain people have the skull types of the Scotch-Irish and the English. He concludes: "Although the East Kentucky Mountaineer of today is descended from these several Natio-Racial groups, he can hardly be said to be representative of them" ("An Experimental Study of the East Kentucky Mountaineers," Genetic Psychology Monographs, 3 [March, 1928], 189). 4«Thomas Perkins Abernethy, Three Virginia Frontiers (Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1940), pp. 38-39. 38 Autumn 1975
47Writing of the westward march of the "poor whites," Nathaniel Shaler said: "Tennessee has been so unfortunate as to receive a large amount of blood derived from the settlements made in the seventeenth century on the waters of Pamlico and Albemarle sounds. These people were imported from various parts of Europe by a land company. A portion of the population was excellent, but the mass of it was by far the worst of any brought to America under English auspices. From these settlements has come the greater part of the 'sand-hillers,' 'crackers,' 'dirt-eaters,' 'red necks,' and other opprobriously named varieties of 'poor whites' in the South. Kentucky has been so fortunate as to escape any large share of this population. Still, any one, [sic] whose eye is trained to recognize this streak of blood can occasionally identify families derived from it, especially along the southern border of the state. The western march of this unhappy people passed south of Kentucky. They may be traced across the country from the Carolina coast to Cen- tral Arkansas and Southern Missouri" {Kentucky: A Pioneer Commonwealth, note, p. 373). 4HFor example, the Tussie family that Jesse Stuart portrays in Trees of Heaven (1940) and Taps for Private Tussie (1943) are the same shiftless, immoral, sexually impelled n'er-do-wells that one finds in Caldwell and Faulkner. Stuart is aware of the similarity and finds many such people squatting in shacks located on fringe lands in northeastern Kentucky - families who have never owned land and who have shifted from shack to shack ever since the country was opened up. It is significant that Hark Short, the poor white in Harpe's Head, escapes in the direction of Eastern Kentucky. Harry Toulmin, in the 1790's, described this part of Kentucky as one of the least-favored for settlement that he had seen in America. That it did attract much of the poor-white element is certain - a fact that might possibly account for the slight superiority of the number of English names over Scotch-Irish in Eastern Kentucky. 49Campbell, p. 71. "In a number of localities there are Indians, mostly half-breeds, who settled here at an early day. In 1900, according to the U. S. census, of one hundred and two Indians in Kentucky ninety- nine were in the mountain counties, chiefly Magoffin, where there were eighty-five..." (Mary Verhoeff, The Kentucky Mountaineers [Louisville, Kentucky, 1911], p. 26). Miss Verhoeff pronounces the population of the mountains a "genetic" one of pure ethnic type and "one of the most homogeneous in the United States." r»°Ford, p. 458. 51Haney, p. 34. r»-Ziegler and Grosscup, p. 217. > *De Mond, The Loyalists in North Carolina During the Revolution (Durham, North Carolina, 1940), p. 61. r>4lbid., p. 62. "Ibid., p. 60. r>«Ziegler and Grosscup, pp. 213-214. "Fiske, II, 319. '»«Arthur, p. 637. ^Turner, p. 106. «••Campbell, p. xxi. «ilbid., p. 56. «^Ibid. «*Raine, The Land of Saddle-Bags (New York, 1924), p. 67. «4Ibid. «•»Morley, p. 149. ««Campbell, p. 49. «"Frost, p. 315. ««Ibid., p. 317. «»Kephart, pp. 28-29. 7()Arthur H. Estabrook in Eugenical News (September, 1927) announced the results of a painstaking study which concluded that the southern Appalachian area does not contain a truly homogeneous population. Nathaniel D. M. Hirsch, a professor of psychology at Duke University, studied school children in three eastern Kentucky counties in the 1920' s and came to the conclusion that the Kentucky moun- taineers are "one of the purest strains in the world, yet they possess physical traits which reveal that the compounding and intermixture of racial strains has not yet after six generations of intermarriage proceeded to the extent of blending the component elements" ("An Experimental Study of East Kentucky Mountaineers," Genetic Psychology Monographs, 3 [March, 1928], 229). John F. Day said in 1941, "During the 100 years and more between settlement and arrival of the machine age the hills bred a distinctive people. It is an exaggeration to say, 'Mountaineers look like this - Their traits of character are thus and so - Under certain conditions they will react in this man- ner - .' Even so, similar ancestry, inbreeding, a common fight against poverty, and a century and a half of isolation in an unusual environment have given Kentucky mountaineers characteristics common to the majority" (Bloody Ground [Garden City, New York, 1941], p. 21). '^Tennessee: A Guide to the State, p. 326. See also Arthur W. Spaulding, Men of the Mountains (Nash- ville, Tennessee, 1915), p. 30." 72Vance, p. 35. "Ibid., p. 243. Appalachian Journal 39
74"The Southern Mountaineers," Scribner's, 29 (May, 1901), 556. 7r>"The Women on Troublesome," Scribner's, 63 (March, 1918), 320. ^Campbell, p. 363. 77Ibid., p. 75. 7«Raine. p. 226. 79"Always to be met with at every turn is the major factor of an ever-increasing population. The problem would be difficult enough if there were just too many people, but when that too many people keeps increasing, it is insolvable. The percentage of population increase for Kentucky from 1930 to 1940 was 8.8. Among the mountain counties the increase ran as high as 56.1 per cent" (Day, p. 323). ««"The Mountain Man," Century, 117 (February, 1929), 509. »»Campbell, p. 81. «2Ibid., p. 18. Mandel Sherman and Thomas R. Henry studied five mountain communities in northern Virginia in an effort to present a picture of a cross section of mountain life. "Briarsville," a farm and sawmill town in a valley at the edge of the Blue Ridge, is a type of what might be regarded mountain life at its highest social, economic, and cultural level. "Although many of the people are originally from the mountains, they do not wish to be thought of as mountaineers, whom they generally dislike" (Hollow Folk [New York, 1933], p. 8). «Campbell, p. 82. ««Ibid. «r>Ibid., p. 89. ««Ibid., p. 20. «7Vance, p. 244. ««Campbell, p. 20. «»Day, p. 323. 9<>Enslow and Harlow, Schoolhouse in the Foothills (New York, 1935), p. 233. 91Raine, p. 70. 92Muriel Earley Sheppard, Cabins in the Laurel (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1935), p. 69. »•Wance. p. 56. 94"Through Cumberland Gap on Horseback." Harper's New Monthly Masazine. 72 (June. 1886). 50. 9r>Raine, p. 30. 9«Enslow and Harlow, p. 232. 97In the mountain region of Tennessee, the ratio of slaves was 1 to 12; for the rest of the state, 1 to 2 (North Callahan, Smoky Mountain Country [New York, 1952], p. 37). In the Kentucky mountains the total population in 1860 was 167,089, of which 7,016, or a ratio of 1 to 24, were slaves (Verhoeff, pp. 24- 27). 9«Vance, p. 35. "Charles Lanman, Letters from the A I legany Mountains in Adventures in the Wilds of the United States (New York, 1856), I, 456-458. Letters had first appeared as a separate volume in 1849. See also Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey in the Back Country (New York, 1860), III, 231-232. 100Julian Ralph, "Our Appalachian Americans," Harper's, 107 (June, 1903), 36. 1()1Callahan, p. 38. 102Because farms were so small in the Kentucky mountains, a foraging army found short commons, as General Gallup learned in his two-hundred-mile retreat from Cumberland Gap to the Ohio River at Greenupsburg, at the end of which his men were half-starved and tattered specters. By the end of the Civil War eastern Kentucky was a barren land, but the raiding bands of outlaws, deserters, and "home guards" who dashed about the country pillaging, murdering, raping, and burning brought further devastation to part of the area for three years after the war was over (Lewis and Richard H. Collins, Historical Collections of Kentucky [Covington, Kentucky, 1874], I, 94-152). KWCallahan, P- 51. ^Bradley, "The Women on Troublesome," Scribner's, 63 (March, 1918), 320. K^Day, p. 119. 106Hirsch, "An Experimental Study of the East Kentucky Mountaineers," Genetic Psychology Monographs, 3 (March, 1928), 242. »«"Campbell, P- 6- io«Day, p. 72. i(>9Enslow and Harlow, p. 19. 110Day, p. 52. The mountain country has been literally a "land of youth." Miss Verhoeff has pointed out that in 1900 over 41 per cent of the population of the Kentucky mountains was between five and twenty years old, males predominating in all counties (The Mountains of Kentucky, p. 32). h »Day, P- 47. u2Cabins in the Laurel, p. 164. UiThe Scotch-Irish in America, p. 535. 114Gilbert Wheeler Beebe, Contraception and Fertility in the Southern Appalachians (Baltimore, 1942), pp. 4-5. 40 Autumn 1975
ii5"Barter existed in the Smoky Mountains almost up to the time of the Second World War" (Callahan, p. 77). 116In describing the drought in East Tennessee, which would be equally valid for Kentucky, West Virginia, Alabama, and Georgia and almost as accurate for the Great Valley and the Blue Ridge, Miss Ella Murray said: "But drought - hot, searing drought, an unusual scourge in Southern Ap- palachia - added its horrors, for two summers in succession, to the industrial collapse. Crops and pasturage on the stony hillsides were burned to a crisp under a white hot sun. Farmers had little or nothing to sell, and the distressed country storekeepers could not buy produce when it was offered. Some of them even shut up shop" (Enslow and Harlow, p. 88). n7Beebe, p. 17. h «Day, p. 320. i ^Frequency of sexual intercourse among the people of Eastern Kentucky, surpassed only by that of Negroes and Puerto Ricans, is higher than for any other known group of white people. The average for persons from fifteen to forty-five years of age is slightly more than two times a week, but an average of four to seven is not uncommon (Beebe, p. 63). i20The density of population in 1940 in the coal-mining counties of southeastern Kentucky and south- western West Virginia was over 90 per square mile, one of the heaviest in the United States (Rupert B. Vance, All These People [Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1945], p. 21). i2iEnslow and Harlow, p. 173. i22Day, p. 173. i23Enslow and Harlow, pp. 86-87. i24lbid., pp. 132-133. ^Hollow Folk, p. 159. i26Ibid., p. 167. i27Sherman and Henry, p. 160. i2«Ibid., pp. 166-167. i29Day, p. 25. i;}()ln Carter County, Kentucky, there is a saltpeter cave named Swindle Cave "from the counterfeiters who carried on their nefarious trade within the security of the dark cavern." Jean Thomas, Blue Ridge Country (New York, 1942), p. 186. iJiDav, P. 26. MTke North Carolina Reader: No. 3 (New York, 1868), pp. 80-81. ™*The Atlantic Monthly, 83 (March, 1899), 311. ""John Fox, Jr., "The Southern Mountaineers," Scribner's, 29 (May, 1901), 568-569; Kephart, pp. 18- 19, 211; Morley, p. 144; Raine, p. 224. i ^Julia Davis, The Shenandoah (New York, 1945), pp. 319-320. i ™Day, p. 23. i*7Enslow and Harlow, p. 93. » «»Ralph, "Our Appalachian Americans," Harper's, 107 (June, 1903), 41. The position of the woman in the mountain home is discussed by Olmsted, p. 231; Morley, pp. 190-191; Campbell, pp. 124, 135; Raine, p. 11; Harriette Wood, "The Kentucky Mountains" (unpublished M.A. thesis, University of North Carolina, 1930), pp. 54-55; Sheppard, pp. 180-181; Day, p. 24. All of these writers agree on essentials. i }9Parental love for and indulgence of children is discussed by Frost, Our Contemporary Ancestors m the Southern Mountains," Atlantic, 83 (March, 1899), 316; Kephart, pp. 259-260; Raine, pp. 14-15, 92. i40Kephart said in 1913, "The evil consequences of inbreeding of persons closely akin are well known to the mountaineers; but here knowledge is no deterrent, since whole districts are interrelated to start with" (Our Southern Highlanders, p. 223). i4iSee Hirsch, "An Experimental Study of the East Kentucky Mountaineers, Genetic Psychology Monographs, 3 (March, 1928), 234-235. i42lbid., pp. 236-237. i43Ibid., p. 242. i44Hirsch quoted Estabrook's conclusions in an article called "Blood Seeks Environment in Eugenical News for August, 1926 (Ibid., pp. 235-237). i45Ibid., p. 237. i46Ibid., p. 243. ^Bloody Ground, p. 65. ^Hollow Folk, pp. 203-204. i49Ibid., p. 106. woibid., pp. 204-206. Appalachian Journal 41
CHAPTER 2. Dead Time and the Lost Frontier: The Mountaineer as Reported by Travelers In arriving at the ultimate differentiation of the Southern mountaineer as a type we find the reports of travelers in the backwoods, along the moving frontier, and in the highlands of the South of particular value. Certain pioneer modes and manners of people engaged in carrying the march of English civilization westward were emphasized in the reports of the earliest travelers. That those same modes and manners continued to be isolated and described down to the time Mary Noialles Murfree made them a part of her stock in portraying the mountain people on the eve of the invasion of their homeland by industrialists and philanthropists is in itself sufficient evidence that a mountaineer with the characteristics attributed to him by writers of fiction did in fact exist. His racial stock, his resourcefulness, his con- servatism that kept him close to the political idealism current among his an- cestors at the time of the Revolution, and his religious attitudes that clung narrowly to a colonial brand of Calvinism all combined to sustain him in his old-fashioned cultural pattern that based itself largely upon a continuing subsistence economy following the Civil War, which by necessity emphasized his provincialism and, because of increasingly poor roads and schools at a time when the nation generally was building better roads and schools, con- centrated into what many writers have called homogeneity the general aspects of his cultural heritage, his modes, and his manners. That his growing poverty was spread more thinly through a phenomenal growth in population, supplemented by a considerable immigration to the mountains of poor whites from 1840 onward and a migration from the mountains of more enterprising younger people of the older stock from about the same time, is sufficiently authenticated and accounts in a large measure for the dismal ignorance and poverty travelers reported toward the close of his period of isolation. Forerunners of Murfree in the field of fiction began to catch fleeting glimpses of the highlander as early as 1824. That he was not defined and brought into focus until after the Civil War, however, is not surprising, for he had not crystallized as a regional type distinguishable from the old hun- ter, the frontiersman, the ruffian on the border, or the poor white until he 42 Autumn 1975
had been subjected to a generation of debilitating poverty and cultural despair that turned him backward in time. But had the mountaineer never been a subject of fiction there is still available sufficient evidence from history, sociology, and travelers' reports to construct in broad outline, at least, the stereotype that writers of fiction have cast him in. But beginning with World War I that stereotype began to corrode noticeably; the acid test of the Depression dissolved it to the heart, and World War II and the subsequent boom in the national economy reduced it to a heap of rubble, with only fragments here and there to remind us of a figure that has all but passed from the scene. I During the Revolutionary War an English spy, J.F.D. Smyth, touring the colonies in the interest of the British cause, covered the back country of Virginia and the Carolinas. In an American prison in Philadelphia he wrote an account of his travel experiences. His impressions of the Americans, against whom he was prejudiced, are far from flattering, but what he says of the backwoodsmen at the time of their first migrations to the mountains and beyond expresses in miniature a view that has been held traditionally by many commentators on life in the Southern mountains, including recently Arnold J. Toynbee's pronouncement that the "Appalachian 'mountain people' to-day are no better than barbarians."1 Because Smyth had been dangerously ill with a bilious fever called seasoning (malaria), he spent five weeks among the backwoods people in one community on Tar River in North Carolina. During this time he had the op- portunity to become intimately acquainted with the type of jnind and the character of the people around him. The women were "little better than beautiful savages."2 He saw during his convalescence many instances of "extreme rudeness and brutality" that scarcely appeared "credible to the civilized part of the species." He found the population there entertaining "little or no sense of religion, and as little knowledge, or fear, of a future state, God, or Devil."3 Their sense of humor he found savage in the extreme. He related: "They cut off the ears and tail of a favorite cat of mine and called it fun. She had young ones, and the barbarians cut off the ears and tails of all the kittens; this they called high fun; and were excessively delighted at beholding the poor animals [sic] agonies and contortions in death." 4 His observations on what sympathetic observers would have pronounced the love of freedom and the democratic spirit take the turn that "there seems to be no such thing as any idea of subordination, or difference of ranks in life; except from the weaker to the stronger; and from the slaves to the whites."5 Because of anarchy and confusion, he found it difficult to ascer- tain who commanded in the forts, "for in fact no person did actually com- mand entirely." The want of subordination throughout America he found disagreeable, but "in the back-woods and frontiers especially" he discovered "no degree of insolence, impertinence and rudeness but they think them- selves justifiable in practicing, either toward one another, or toward such as may come among them."6 Of the character of the inhabitants in Henderson's new settlment at the Appalachian Journal 43
mouth of the Kentucky River, Smyth reported what was to become a stan- dard view of the frontiersmen: Although the inhabitants are in reality a rude, barbarous and unpolished set of men, yet you will frequently find pleasure in their conversation; their ideas are bold and spirited, but their sentiments are not liberal. However, they are certainly a sensible, enterprising, hardy, unpolished race, yet open, free and hospitable.7 The "pusillanimousness, cowardice and mean spirit" that he had observed east of the mountains had not appeared in Kentucky yet.8 Bishop Francis Asbury9 of the Methodist Episcopal Church rode on horseback over America from 1788 to 1803 supervising the affairs of a growing Methodism. His itinerary carried him into the mountains of North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. Frequently in his Journal he recorded his impressions of the mountain folk and their lives in the wilderness. On April 8, 1790, while traveling on the Holston River, he found it expedient to rest his life in the hands of God while thousands prayed for him, for he was lodging in a house in which a man had been killed by the savages. But his fear was of the settlers themselves. He entered in his diary, "O, poor creatures; they are but one remove from savages themselves. I consider myself in danger...." io Three years later, near the head of the Watauga River not far from the present town of Boone in North Carolina, he recorded that his soul felt for the neglected people he found living there in a section dangerous for travelers to pass through, especially at night when they might be robbed of their horses.11 Occasionally he found comfortable quarters. By 1800 he was able to report that he rested comfortably after a good dinner at Clarke's Ferry in the Cumberland Mountains in a house which had blazing fires upstairs and down on that late October day. 1 2 In 1803 he spent the night in a crowded log cabin only twelve feet by ten with a mountaineer whose hospitality did not render his accommodations agreeable.13 The sturdy old Bishop saw growing differences among the people in the mountain region over his fifteen-year period of acquaintanceship with them. There was considerable poverty >cpupled with ignorance and felonious crime. The spiritual and material welfare of the people gave him concern in his prayers. That Asbury's labors among the people of the area bore fruit may be deduced from the ob- servations of two other religious travelers, Abraham Steiner and Frederick C. de Schweinich,14 who reported from Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1799 that there was not a single house there for religious services and that only an oc- casional sermon was heard in the courthouse by ministers who passed through. But they were informed that the moral character of the people had improved "during the last few years, since bad people have moved more to the border."1* Gilbert Imlay16 in his report on the topography of the Cumberland Plateau in 1793 described the land between the Holston River and the Ohio across what is now Eastern Kentucky and West Virginia as "broken into high, rugged, and barren hills, the bottoms excepted, and, in all probability will not be inhabited for centuries to come, by reason of the immense tracts of good lands lying west of the Ohio and the Mississippl."17 44 Autumn 1975
At the time Imlay was making his report, Harry Toulmin18 was studying the people and the prospects of the hilly country of Eastern Kentucky. He declared "some of the poorest land upon the face of the earth" was in the Big Sandy Valley, along Tygarts Creek, and in the Licking River country, "none of which are worth a pinch of snuff, though (being taken up to speculate upon) many have made and many have ruined their fortunes by them."19 Toulmin believed the poverty he found in that part of Kentucky was due to the fact that "it was first settled by a lazy set of people" who had a "good vent for their superfluous produce"; that there was a greater num- ber of immigrants in proportion to the population here than elsewhere in Kentucky; that the presence of the Indians had required the people to cultivate the land closest to their homes; and that the tenants were numerous compared with the landowners.20 In 1802 Francois Andre Michaux21 in his Travels to the Westward of the Allegany Mountains recorded his observations of the people and their customs both on the frontier and through the mountains. He observed essen- tial differences between the German settlers and those of English and Scotch-Irish descent in Pennsylvania, the reservoir from which the migrations down the Great Valley of Virginia flowed. The Germans lived better; they were "less addicted to the use of spirituous liquors," and did not possess their neighbors' unsettled disposition, which, from the slightest motives, induced them "to wander hundreds of miles in hope of meeting with a more fertile soil."22 He found that the people in Kentucky had come almost all from the western counties of Virginia and retained the manners of Virginians except for the professional people who had been educated in the towns along the Atlantic coast. They drank liquor to excess, and frequently indulged in "sanguinary quarrels" as a result; they loafed in taverns and spent many days at the courts in session, where they talked about horses and lawsuits; they evaluated a traveler in terms of the horse he rode; and they offered him whiskey when he stopped, after which they plied him with such questions as "Where did you come from? Where are you going? What is your name? Where do you reside? Your profession?" Michaux found the thousands of times he was asked these questions an- noying, but he excused the backwoodsmen on the grounds that they were isolated and hardly ever saw a stranger. In those days, before taxes on whiskey made moonshiners of them, people in the back country were not suspicious of strangers.23 The people of Kentucky, certain that their state was "the best part of the United States," its soil the most fertile, and its climate most salubrious, pronounced themselves lovers of liberty and independence and kept "decent and hospitable" houses which Michaux preferred to taverns as lodging places.24 Except in the Barrens of Kentucky, where settlement was thin, he found that schools had been established at the expense of the inhabitants as soon as the population was dense enough to warrant them. Children were sent punctually to school throughout Kentucky and Tennessee to learn reading, writing, and arithmetic. He recorded that "it is therefore very un- common to meet with an American who is unable to read and write."25 Ex- cept that they were poorer and less religious, although very strict in their ob- servance of the Sabbath, the people of Tennessee were like the Kentuckians in their manners.26 Appalachian Journal 45
Religious revivals along the frontier were in full force at the time Michaux made his tour. He found the Methodists and the Anabaptists most numerous. Attending their camp meetings, he reported that thousands, bringing their own provisions, would assemble in the woods for days of preaching by ministers who were "very vehement in their discourses." He described the strange behavior of converts and zealots who would "become frantic, and fall down, inspired, exclaiming Glory! Glory!" Often as many as two hundred, chiefly women, were seized by this strange power and were carried from among the crowd and placed under trees where they lay "supine for a long time, uttering deep groans." The better-informed people, he observed, "differed from the opinion of the multitude with respect to this species of extacy [sic]." Except that they were referred to as "6ad folks," the multitudes did not practice intolerance toward them. Religion was seldom discussed and differences in religion did not "cause any impediment" in marriages.27 What Michaux had to say of the frontier people is characteristic in general of what observers were to report later of the mountaineers. Except for the hunters in the mountains, he does not differentiate mountaineers from frontiersmen. The two families of poor whites he saw in East Ten- nessee suggest the rather late migrations of that class described by Nathaniel Shaler in his history of Kentucky. The fact that the mountain area was just then being settled indicates the possibility of considerable in- filtration of the poor whites during the settlement of the mountain country later, particularly of the less desirable ridge land. II In 1819-1820, Adam Hodgson, a Liverpool merchant who had been engaged in American trade for some years,28 made a tour of eight thousand miles through the United States and Canada,29 during which he wrote let- ters recounting what he had observed to members of his family.30 Four years later he collected and published the letters. Writing from Knoxville in June, 1820, he recounted his observations of life and prospects in the Cumberland mountain area that he had covered since moving up from Huntsville, Alabama, across the northern counties of Georgia. The country, only recently settled, looked promising. Along the road he had seen mountain types, among them, living at the foot of a moun- tain in a solitary log hut, a "very neat old woman, upwards of seventy years old, ...busily engaged in spinning," who gave him a "polite reception" and whose "manners and conversation would really have surprised you." In her chimney corner sat a young clergyman from New York, who, the hostess ex- plained, was taking a long tour "through the wilder parts of America to har- den himself' before he accepted the charge of a regular congregation.31 In Georgia he had eaten breakfast at the home of an intelligent farmer, "whose wife was a half-breed Cherokee, and whose children were well behaved, and better educated than those of many of our respectable far- mers." Among the books on the shelves in the home were The Spectator, a Bible, a hymn-book, and periodical publications.32 He spent that night at the foot of Lookout Mountain in the home of a Highlander who lived "very much like a gentleman" with his full-blooded Cherokee wife. In the home 46 Autumn 1975
Hodgson found a good library, maps, and newspapers, both American and English. The daughters, who had been sent to a distant boarding school, were "pleasing well-behaved girls" who drank tea and had breakfast with the family.33 Near the present city of Knoxville he spent a night in the home of a respectable farmer whose children were sent to a boarding school eight miles distant. Impressed with the manners of a daughter who served coffee, Hodgson made the general observation: "You would be surprised at the respectable manners and appearance of those we met with in this capacity, even in log-cabins."34 In the same neighborhood, the traveler spent a night in the miserable cabin of Squire David where he was obliged to lie in the same room "where the whole family, of six, or seven, cooked, supped, and slept."35 He would have preferred to sleep under a tree, but was "unwilling to hurt their feelings."36 What Hodgson does not say of people living in the mountains is perhaps of more importance in considering what the Southern mountaineer was to become at the end of the Civil War. There is no indication of a poor-white class. The meanest habitation referred to is that of Squire David near Knox- ville. There are no lean, lank mountaineers. There is no comment upon peculiarities of diction. Negroes are mentioned from time to time, but there is no reference to attitudes of the mountain people toward slavery. The country is "new," the people are as industrious as they need to be in a land that has no markets for its produce, the women are industrious, courteous, and charming, there are schools throughout the region, and there is a democratic spirit among the citizens of the area. There is an indication that the people saunter easily to their work, that time does not count for much, and that families are large. In these respects one observes tendencies in a part of the area toward the idleness, thriftlessness, and overpopulation that will be made much of by subsequent visitors. James Kirke Paulding,37 who toured the South in the early 1830's, took an excursion into the mountains of Virginia and what was to become southeastern West Virginia, a region that Hodgson had gone through a decade previously. Not so penetrating in his analysis of the character of the people as his predecessor, he nevertheless made some observations that reveal much of what the people and their way of life were like. Paulding offered one of the first detailed descriptions of what the moun- taineer's cabin was like inside. It is the archetype of what a cabin was to become in fiction, and no doubt represents what other travelers may have noted had their interests lain in recording details of cabin life. The inside of the ignorant man's house was furnished with two beds below, and the Lord knows how many above - a cradle - plenty of straw-bottomed chairs - a rifle hanging against the wall - good store of bacon - plenty of children- a staunch hound, and notable pussy, both acknowledged members of the family. The poor soul was content, for he did not know any better.58 The industrious wife busied herself about the spinning wheel taking time to keep the cradle rocking as she passed it. The older children were at work in various ways, except the oldest daughter, who was gone to fetch two children of intermediate age from a school not far away. Appalachian Journal 47
Everywhere about him Paulding was gratified by the "liberal hospitality" which he found more general than in the East and which he declared was "owing to the people being 'a century behindhand with us.' " He felt that they were not yet "so debauched with the sordid money-making spirit" as the inhabitants of the East.39 In his romantic fervor for the scenery of the Blue Ridge he contributed his influence to the shaping of another stereotype that runs through the fictional account of the moun- taineer and his home land, the "Alps-like Appalachians." The Blue Ridge he referred to as "these lofty regions."40 Although Paulding found the mountaineers who stopped by White Sulphur Springs for water "much like the country people in all the remote parts of the United States," he admired their "striking air of conscious independence," the fact that they com- mingled with "the fashionable ladies and gentlemen without the least em- barrassment," and their sturdy character.41 In 1834-1835 George W. Featherstonhaugh, a Fellow of the Royal Society, on a tour of the South from the city of Washington to Mexico, crossed the Appalachian Mountains and visited the Ozark Mountains in Arkansas. Although Featherstonhaugh' s chief interest was in the flora and the fauna and in the geological structure of the mountains, he recorded also much of interest about the mountain people and their manners and customs. On one outing in the Clinch Mountains north of Abingdon, Feather- stonhaugh became acquainted with a Charley Talbot, a dialect-speaking mountain outlaw, counterfeiter, and master hunter, whose hide-out in a mountain cove near the juncture of four Virginia counties enabled him to escape easily on his white stallion from any sheriffs posse bent on surprising him.42 Charley told many a fabulous hunting tale and detailed much of the habits of the "varmints" to be found in the mountains. Featherstonhaugh did not become well enough acquainted with the natives of the mountains to report authoritatively on their character. What he saw from the carriage window and in the shabby little taverns indicated that there was a considerable span between the economic well-being of such mountain folk as those living in the huts along the road from Kingsport to Rogersville and the German farmers in the Valley of Virginia, but such evidence as was reported indicated that all the mountain people with whom he became acquainted were dirty and ignorant. His old hunters, outlaws, innkeepers, and squires were stereotypes. Like so many of the English travelers in America, Featherstonhaugh emphasized the miserable ac- commodations provided for travelers in inns and taverns and the unap- petizing and wretchedly prepared food served in eating places. However, he did not differentiate the mountain people from other Southerners in any of these respects, nor, except for Charley Talbot, did he identify character types. Ill James Silk Buckingham, an English world traveler who had already visited America and written an account of what he had seen of the new republic, returned in the late 1830' s with his family and a personal servant to tour the South. From time to time Buckingham delivered well-attended lectures on Palestine, presumably to help defray the expenses of his travel. 48 Autumn 1975
The main objective of his tour, like that of Olmsted a few years later, was to study society in the South in its particular relationship to the institution of slavery. Certain moral biases in the traveler precluded a completely ob- jective report, perhaps, and difficulties of travel for a family entourage af- forded him many opportunities to complain about the quality of service at hotels and inns, the unhealthy and unwholesome diet of Southern people generally, and particularly of the cupidity and extortionism of Southerners who rented coaches or were willing themselves to carry the travelers inland from the railroad stations or the stage routes. Many of the characteristics of Southerners that he recorded have since been associated with mountaineers, but on his journey from Athens, Georgia, through the mountains of North Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and what later became West Virginia, he observed and reported the primitive con- ditions of life among the natives of the villages and what he saw from his carriage windows as the vehicles in which he rode jolted perilously over the rough mountain trails past the miserable log huts of the natives, whom he identified as poor whites but never called mountaineers. In describing the customs and manners of the "dwellers in the woods/' the name he assigned to mountaineers, he mistook their spirit of personal independence and social equality for rudeness, "unpleasant to those accustomed to receive courtesy and respect from their attendants." The speech of the mountain folk was "peculiar" to the traveler. He noted that farmers talked of growing enough "to bread" their families and that traveling rapidly was called "moving peert." But mountain folk appeared healthy to him, though they "were all slender, and the growing youths of both sexes were peculiarly tall and thin, with long features, light hair, and wholly without the fine ruddy complexions of the English peasantry."43 While the Buckinghams were passing through the Great Valley of East Tennessee, they were able to observe American political campaigns in ac- tion, for both candidates for the governorship of Tennessee were "in the field" at the time. At Jonesborough the travelers found "the streets full of horses, saddled and bridled, belonging to the farmers of the neighborhood, who had come to attend 'the speaking' " in progress that day. Over 3000 persons, including women and children "as numerous as gentlemen," were gathered in a field above the town to hear the rival candidates, who had been "at it" since breakfast time, although it was nearly five o'clock in the afternoon when the Buckinghams arrived.44 Attending a similar speaking in Blountsville a few days later, Buckingham observed with approbation the quiet behavior of the farmers who had come to hear the political orators. There was no stamping of feet, no applause, no nodding of the head, no smiling, no animation of countenance in any way, nor "any indication whatever by which anyone could ascertain whether the sentiments of the orator were in unison with those whom he addressed, or otherwise."45 Except for the people living in the Valley of Tennessee, Buckingham's report of the mountain folk is perhaps more uncomplimentary to them than that of any other traveler through the mountains before the Civil War. Ap- parently unaware of the Scotch-Irish lineage of mountaineers, he thought of them as poor whites who had moved up from the low country to the east. Although he observed many qualities of the personal character of mountain Appalachian Journal 49
folk, he did not perceive that they were essentially different from other rural Americans. Charles Lanman, author and explorer of American back-country scenery and life, wrote reports of what he saw in the Southern mountains on an ex- tensive tour on foot, horseback, and by canoe that covered the length of the Appalachian system "from the Bay of Fundy to the Gulf states."46 His ac- count of the mountain people and their economic and cultural status during the decade following Paulding' s reports from the mountains of Virginia in- dicated that increases in population and continued exploitation of available farm land had accented the poverty of the poorer mountaineers as well as the wealth and social position of the better-to-do sort. For the first time the student engaged in a study of the mountain people finds among them evidences of poverty and starvation that make them seem like the poor whites of the lowland South. Illiteracy had increased, although Lanman declared that he had not entered more than three or four cabins throughout the mountain region that did not have a copy of the Bible.47 A sense of isolation and discouragement among many of the mountain folk was becoming evident during this decade. Poorer mountaineers, with their large and ragged families, their half-starved animals, and their shabby household equipment, were migrating to "the next county" or to the Midwest.48 Lanman reported without interpreting. Hodgson had discovered a generation before that the mountaineers were learning the futility of working more than enough to keep food on the table in a land in which there were no markets for the products of their labor. By the late 1840's the easygoing work habits of the fathers had betrayed the sons and the traveler was impressed by the run-down homes and idleness of the population. Lack of pride in surroundings he found common among even those who were ac- counted well-to-do by their neighbors. One fertile valley with wide bottom lands he found neglected by the farmers rich in acres who owned it. One, the proprietor of a valuable farm of twenty-five hundred acres, resided in a decayed and windowless log hovel "which a respectable member of the swine family would hardly deign to occupy."49 The general impression of the mountaineer that Lanman conveys to his reader is that he is poor as a matter of course, that his cabin is indeed a cheerless place, but that he is distinguished for his hospitality, and places before the stranger the best that he has to offer.50 The traveler found bacon, wild game, and milk the staple foods, with honey offered as the principal luxury.51 He found a gun in every cabin he visited and estimated that more than half of the inhabitants were hounds.52 In fact, he thought he discovered an index to the relative wealth of a mountaineer in the number of dogs and children he saw about the premises.53 Coupled with the poverty and growing bitterness of the highlander is a facet of character, hitherto unreported, that was to become a part of the legend of the mountaineer: chronic drunkenness. Paulding had mentioned that the hunters in the mountains of Virginia carried whiskey with them but he did not indicate that they drank to excess. Having been driven by a thun- derstorm into a cheerless cabin on the Tennessee-North Carolina border near Quallatown, Lanman had the opportunity to observe poverty and misery heightened by the evil effects of drunkenness on the part of the head of the household.54 50 Autumn 1975
On the subject of slavery in the mountain country Lanman was reluctant to speak with confidence. He observed, however, that not more than one white man in ten or twenty was sufficiently wealthy to support a slave. Mountain slave owners impressed the traveler with their kindness toward their slaves, whom he pronounced "the happiest and most independent por- tion of the population/' He had been piloted over mountains by many a slave "who would not have exchanged places with his master."55 Occasionally Lanman found plantations in the mountain valleys that compared favorably with the finest in the whole South in the comforts of the home and in the order and prosperity apparent in the establishment. Added security he discerned in the diversified farming and gardening that the mountain plantation owners were practicing.56 Indeed, he was impressed favorably with what he called the mountain aristocracy or gentry. He found them descended from the best families and moderately wealthy, fond of good living, esteeming solid enjoyment, and "far more intelligent (so far as books and the world are concerned) than the same class of people at the North."57 Frederick Law Olmsted, who had been commissioned by the New York Times to make a tour of the South, beginning in 1853, and write letters reporting his observations, returned on horseback from Texas through the back country. On his journey he made it a point to become intimately acquainted with the life of the inhabitants, both high and low, of the remote areas in the South. His itinerary included a visit to the mountains, which he described in A Journey in the Back Country, the third volume of his series called Our Slave States, the first two of which had appeared as articles in the Times.08 Olmsted, an objective observer, reported what he saw of the economy, social structure, and culture among the plantation owners, the small farmers, the poor whites, and all degrees of mountain people during the decade preceding the Civil War. Covering roughly the route through the mountain country that had been followed by Adam Hodgson in 1819, and partly by James Kirke Paulding in the 1830's, Olmsted was in a better position than his predecessors to differentiate between the mountaineers and other Southerners, for his main concern was to articulate his reports upon the presence of slavery as a social institution in the South. It therefore follows that his observations give the student of mountain life one of his most valuable sources for arriving at what the mountain people were like in comparison with other Southern groups on the eve of the Civil War and just previous to the appearance in fiction of the mountaineer as a type distinguished from the frontiersman or the backwoods hunter, though not always from the poor whites. What Olmsted had to say of life in the back country outside the moun- tains gives a dimension to what he had to say of the mountain people that we are unable to find in the eyewitness account of any other observer before the Civil War. That the mountaineers were generally superior in economic, social, and cultural advantages even to the planters of Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia cannot be easily controverted. Olmsted appears to have measured social progress of a region in terms of the domestic comforts its' inhabitants were enjoying. He recorded that from Mississippi to the James River he slept "nine times out of ten at least.. .in a room with others, in a bed which stank, supplied with but one sheet, if with any."59 He washed in basins common to the whole family; he found "no garden, no flowers, no Appalachian Journal 51
fruit, no tea, no cream, no sugar, no bread" (except corn pone, which he pronounced "a very good thing of its kind for ostriches"); three times out of four he slept in rooms that had no windows, and if they did the windows did not lift and were without curtains; he found no couches in the living rooms, no rugs or mats on the floor, and was often constrained to sleep on the bare floors of living rooms in homes that "swarmed with vermin."60 And these were not the homes of the lower social groupings. "Most of these houses were. ..the mansions of 'planters,' 'slave owners,' 'cotton lords' of the 'southern aristocracy.' "61 As soon as his journey through the back country carried him into the thickly populated hills of northern Alabama, where the soil was thin, the farms small, and slaves few in number, Olmsted noticed striking differences in favor of the hill people between the planters and the highlanders. Oc- casionally he saw "neat, new houses with other improvements," which showed an increasing prosperity in the district, but most of the dwellings were "small log cabins of one room, with another separate cabin for the kit- chen." Each house had a well and a vegetable garden enclosed with palings. He saw an abundance of cows, goats, pigs, chickens, and mules. The hill people, more social than the planters of the lower country, fell "readily into friendly conversation with a traveler." They were ignorant, but then so were the planters; their methods of farming were wretched, as were those of the planters; they worked hard and even the white women helped to hoe in the fields. He observed that everyone wore homespun: "A spinning-wheel is heard in every house, and frequently a loom is clanging in the gallery, always worked by women." Among the hill farms, the few Negroes he saw, enjoying more individual freedom than those on the plantations, frequently sang or whistled as they worked.62 As Olmsted proceeded into the mountain country he observed on every hand a prosperity that he had failed to see elsewhere in the South, although he deplored the crude tools, the ignorance of farming methods, the ex- ploitation of the soil, and the poor quality of farm animals that he saw in the mountains.63 But the people were industrious and nowhere in the region suffered from the poverty that he had seen among the poor whites in the lowlands.64 The mountaineers were fortunate in one respect, however. The wild mast of the extensive forest lands afforded excellent foraging for the thousands of half-wild hogs that ran at large throughout the area. He pronounced the hogs the finest he had seen in the South and bemoaned the fact that they were destroyed in such numbers by the wild animals in some sections, one community in North Carolina having lost three hundred pigs killed by bears and other animals in two months.65 On every hand Olmsted asked the mountaineers what they thought of slavery. There was marked prejudice against Negroes by the vast majority. Well-to-do mountain people preferred not to own slaves, although a few raised them for the markets. The poor mountaineers saw in the Negro slave competition for work they were able to do. They felt that slaveholders had a monopoly of the opportunities to make money, but they dimly comprehended it.66 Olmsted recorded samples of the dialect of the mountain people in North Carolina, including many of the commonplace civilities they exchanged when meeting on the roads, departing, entertaining strangers, and presiding 52 Autumn 1975
at their tables.67 Not exaggerated, his samples do not offend the eye without enlightening the ear as does much of the dialect of such writers of fiction as George Washington Harris and Miss Murfree, who succeeded in establishing the mountaineer as a regional character in American literature, and of the Chapmans in recent times, who strain to see the dubious Chaucerian quality of mountain speech. Olmsted perceived in the speech of the mountain people what the careful students of speech have subsequently reported: the distinguishing quality of the speech lies not so much in the vocabulary and the grammar used as it does in rhythms, figures of speech, and archaic elegances that reflect manners and customs that were generally current in the eighteenth century.68 Spending two nights in log homes of farmers in the Virginia Blue Ridge, Olmsted found a kind of lethargy and dense ignorance that he was unable to counter with any sort of palliating circumstances as he had done when dealing with mountaineers in Alabama, Tennessee, and North Carolina. In one, that of a family which owned four Negroes and retained an ugly and slovenly white servant - possibly a mulatto - the traveler was annoyed by the impertinent questions his fat old hostess and her stupid son plied him with in regard to the content of his leather haversack. He found that they lived fairly comfortably in their log house and displayed religious books and a North Carolina Almanac of the previous year on a small table in their best room as evidence of their culture.69 In the other home, a boarded four-room log house, Olmsted found a family of coarse, ignorant people presided over by a pipe-smoking mother who rested her red scaly arms on the table while she asked him good- naturedly about the particulars of his life. He slept on a featherbed without sheets of any kind on it in a tight room with five other people, including a girl of fifteen and a baby that cried until after midnight. Although it was then in the middle of the harvest season and rust had struck the oats, that farmer, his sons, and the two hired men had not so much as whetted their scythes when Olmsted, who, after much prodding of the creeping hostess and her lazy helpers, had eaten a breakfast three hours late, took his departure about the middle of the forenoon.70 His most uncomplimentary picture of the mountaineers is presented in his report of life in this family. The fact that the Virginia mountaineer, whose lack of get-up-and-go suggested what William Byrd had reported of the Lubberlanders in Edenton, North Carolina, in 1728, was living in a part of the mountain country that had been settled first indicates that the migrations had carried off venturesome people of vitality in previous generations, as indeed, the hostess reported that many in that community who had gone to Texas the preceding year had returned after a season to the easygoing ways of their native mountains. Olmsted found in this family a harbinger of what was to become a "typical" mountain family for those interpreters who have seen in the mountaineer a variation of the poor white. Olmsted's report offers conclusive evidence that the mountain people during the decade previous to the Civil War were in almost every respect superior to back-country people of the South from Texas to Richmond, Virginia. Even the poorest of the mountain folk were not so poor as the average poor white of the Deep South. The average mountain family could boast more achievement in manners, culture, and domestic comforts than Appalachian Journal 53
the back-country plantation owners and cotton lords of the South. Here, in- deed, is an on-the-scene account of how the highlander was living in com- parison with other Southerners of a similar remoteness from the centers of polite culture before, as John Fox pointed out, we ever heard of him in fic- tion. That he possessed the virtues in the main of the frontier types that had moved westward from the time of the Revolution is a matter of record. In August of 1860 the Southern Literary Messenger carried an article called "A Week in the Great Smoky Mountains" by R., of Tennessee. Who R., of Tennessee, was I have been unable to learn. His (or her?) article, however, is a significant piece of writing in that it reveals an indulgent and sympathetic attitude toward mountain people who are viewed on the eve of the Civil War as different from the lowland Southerners on the one hand and the frontier hunters on the other. Mr. R.'s human interest story of his visit to the mountains is the first ac- count in print of life among the mountain people that enables us to become familiar with them during that brief period in which they were no longer frontiersmen but had not yet become fixed in the rigid frame of isolation and poverty that was to distinguish them as mountaineers in the generations following the Civil War. The overnight stops of other travelers in the highlands enabled them to see and report, but only Mr. R. remained long enough to become intimately acquainted with a mountain family and its neighbors. IV In the autumn of 1867 John Muir, the naturalist, crossed the Cum- berland and Appalachian Mountains on his walk from Indiana to the Gulf of Mexico. The people with whom Muir became acquainted in the mountain country appear to have impressed him more as extremely primitive back- woodsmen than they did as mountaineers, since he used mountaineer only twice in that portion of his diary that covered his trip through the highlands.71 It is probable that he did not think of the mountaineer as a specific, clearly identifiable type of backwoodsman, but rather simply a per- son found living in the mountain country, for the stereotyped concept of the mountaineer had not yet formed. Conditions contributing toward the for- mation of that concept were present, and Muir reported them. His account of life in the Southern Highlands pictures factually the poverty and privation of the mountain people during the years immediately following the Civil War. Significant are his observations concerning the wandering bands of guerillas that were still pillaging and stealing, although the war had been over for two years. The poor fare that mountain people were living on, the desolation of immense stretches of abandoned land, the shabby character of the villages, the suspicion with which he was met, and the strange tales of half-savage robbers that hid in the wilds to prey upon travelers all indicate that in general the awful poverty and ignorance of mountain folk appearing in the first fiction of the region to appeal widely to the American reading public were largely a result of the Civil War. The in- teresting self-sufficient establishments composed of weathered old log houses and utilitarian outbuildings of all kinds, turning grey in a setting of rich orchards, fields, and pastures in which fat cows and sheep grazed, were 54 Autumn 1975
already scarce by 1867. The old-fashioned character of the people, although they lacked the bounding hospitality travelers before the war had in general met with, had not altered much as a result of the war. Poverty, in a land diminishing in fertility and increasing in population, subsequently ac- centuated characteristics that were to become identified with the moun- taineer to the exclusion of other Southern types. During the whole of 1873 and the spring of 1874 Edward King traveled 25,000 miles through the fifteen southern states and the Indian Territory, reporting what he observed in articles published in Scribner's Monthly,12 His tour carried him into the mountains of Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia. Along the Ohio River he was able to observe the mountain people of northeastern Kentucky, the locale for the fiction of Jesse Stuart a half century later. Because he was a painstaking recorder of his careful observations and studious in his research into statistical reports, he reported objectively the economic, social, and cultural situation of two groups of Southerners of interest to us: the poor whites and the Southern mountaineers. This work is of particular value to the student of mountain life because it is a dependable account of the mountaineer and his fellow victim, the poor white, previous to the decade in which the mountaineer became differentiated in fiction. At times King thought of the poor white and the mountaineer synonymously, but when he did so he was considering them together as economic victims of the institution of slavery in the South and of the Civil War. Otherwise, there can be little doubt that he saw them as groups far apart in other aspects of their existence. His picture of the poor whites agrees in its essential points with that presented by Augustus Longstreet forty years before.73 His picture of the mountaineer brings into focus features that we recall from Olmsted, Lan- man, and R., of Tennessee. The mountaineer in King's reports at last achieves a recognizable individuality that definitely sets him apart from all other Southern types. The Civil War and Reconstruction have crystallized the stranded frontiersman into the mountaineer plainly identifiable as such. In the first place, King deliberately set about to make the Appalachians real mountains. Earlier travelers had been impressed by the mountains and had taken the license to raise their height here and there, but King was the first to make them Alps-like in the sense that Miss Murfree and her followers in the field of fiction were to do. He found the mountains of Ten- nessee and North Carolina "dizzy." "Height after height towered in solemn magnificence, and the very valleys were higher up than the gaps in the White mountain range!"74 King found the primitive barter economy abounding throughout the region. There was little money to be seen. "Farmers rarely saw fifty dollars in cash from year to year; the few things which they needed from the outside world they got by barter."75 But even the poorest of the mountaineers were not destitute in the sense that the poor whites in the Deep South were. The state of public schools was deplorable in the South at the time of King's visit. He found that East Tennessee, though poor, was making "as much progress in education as other sections of the State in proportion to its population." Tennessee, which then ranked third in the nation in illiteracy, had a school law which permitted each county to levy taxes as it saw fit for the support of schools. No marked progress had been made in the state. Appalachian Journal 55
Some of the eastern counties had refused to have public schools at all, while others had levied small taxes to support short winter schools.76 He observed that the citizens of mountain counties of Tennessee were little interested in general politics but that they were engrossed with local affairs.77 Considering that earlier travelers had emphasized the differences be- tween the well-to-do mountaineers and the extremely poor variety, and that King reported a general average, we speculate that King, not interested in finding mountain men who had owned slaves to compare with well-to-do highlanders who had not owned them, actually acquainted himself with a general average for purposes of his report. The fact that King did not accent unduly the poorer sort of mountaineer that had been included in earlier reports suggests that the mountaineer as he found him was typical. That he found average mountain people relatively well off near the close of the decade following the Civil War might possibly be due to the fact that he had seen and reported the much worse conditions among the poor whites before he moved into the mountains. The poor-white class he found in hopeless despair, "their destiny.. .somewhat uncertain/'78 He was amazed at the im- mensity of the migrations of this class from the old cotton states to the ex- treme southwest. "That Texas will speedily have a vast population, drawn from these Cotton States, and bitterly necessitous in matters of education and elevation, there is no doubt."79 He found the condition of the poor whites degraded and felt that they needed to "acquire habits of solid in- dustry, and learn to accumulate in their rough way some little surplus means" before they could be redeemed.80 Texas, he was sure, had much to offer in the way of easy means of making a living, but he feared "that the mass of the poor white race will be improved in little except its material con- dition."8! Willing to affirm the best that was in his subjects wherever he went, he found it difficult to say much on behalf of the poor whites. The poor-white girls, often pretty, and invariably soft-voiced, were "slouching, unkempt, and gawky" snuff-dippers.82 Poor-white men entering the cars for Texas wore neatly-made garments of homespun, blue or butternut, and the invariable slouch hat. Their wives were gracious but exceedingly timid. "Of ten thousand people of this class, not one had in his face a particle of color; all had the same dead, pallid complexion."83 The families were as large as those in the mountains. "Lean fathers and lank and scrawny mothers en- tering the cars, followed by a brood of ten or more children of all sizes." In his talks with them he found them completely illiterate.84 That there were very poor mountain families whose prospects were no more promising than those of the poor whites King was aware. Although he had not reported their situation, he was prepared to include them among the "sand-hillers" of South Carolina, the "crackers" of Georgia and Florida, and the "wretched masses along the lowlands of the Atlantic coast" as those who "present many discouraging signs" and for whom he saw but lit- tle hope of improvement.85 By including the mountaineers in his listing of the poor-white types King's reports suggest that he thought of the moun- taineer as a poor white too. The implication, however, is plainly one of economic situation rather than ethnic classification - a sound approach too, for who has ever seen anybody who announced himself a "poor white"? Subsequent history of the South has sustained King. When a favorable 56 Autumn 1975
change in economy for the class is maintained through long periods of time it ceases to be poor white. V The last traveler of note to report the Southern mountain scene before it loomed in fictional importance with characters labeled and differentiated as to types beginning with Miss Murfree's first book, In the Tennessee Moun- tains (1884), was Charles Dudley Warner, who took a horseback journey from Abingdon, Virginia, down the mountains to Hickory Nut Gap below Asheville, across the mountains to the Valley of Tennessee, and back to Abingdon, in the summer of 1884. The account of his journey was published in the Atlantic Monthly shortly afterward and later appeared in book form in 1889 as On Horseback, A Tour in Virginia, North Carolina, and Ten- nessee. Warner's account, a tired and padded one, sacrificed much of its ef- fectiveness to the attention he gave to a verse-spouting, blasé professor who accompanied him. Warner had little sympathy for the mountain people and devoted more of his writing to complaining about poor roads, food, over- night accommodations, and discomforts of the journey than he did to analysis of the mountaineer as a type. But much of what he reported is significant because, though usually uncomplimentary and only a part of the picture, it was no doubt based upon factual knowledge. One wishes that Warner's report were focused more upon the mountain people who lived in the cabins. Actually, he reported only hearsay about them, but he did give a general sweep of what the country looked like. His first-hand acquaintance with mountain people, however, was limited. Most of his knowledge of the natives was confined to what he learned from tavern keepers, merchants, and boarding-house proprietors. But he made several observations that are of value to the scholar, the most important being that he found nothing particularly unusual about the speech of the moun- taineers. He noted that the mountaineer's food, generally poor, was especially poorly cooked. The mountain people were ignorant and most of them were living in rough log homes. In certain areas drinking and carousing were common; in others, alcoholic beverages were not available at all. Mountain people were fond of quarrels and lawsuits. Murders were committed frequently and courts were lax in dealing with murderers. Moun- taineers loafed at country stores, mills, and taverns much of the time and turned out in large numbers to attend court sessions. Their crops did not ap- pear to be well looked after. In matters of costume, social affairs, religious beliefs, music, handcrafts, tradition, general character traits, etc., Warner learned little to communicate, for he did not stop long enough to become acquainted with them nor did he appear to think that the mountain people of the lower social groupings were worth the time and effort that would be required to learn about them. In the summer of 1885 James Lane Allen, the Kentucky novelist, made a horseback tour of the Kentucky mountains from Burnside, the terminal of the railroad and at the head of navigation on the Cumberland River, through Cumberland Gap. Allen's tour touched Cumberland Falls, Williamsburg, and Barbourville. He reported his observations and what he Appalachian Journal 57
was able to learn concerning life among the Kentucky mountaineers in an article published in Harper's New Monthly Magazine for June, 1886. His report of his tour departs considerably in method from those of similar tours of earlier mountain travelers, for most of what it says is sociological speculation rather than on-the-scene observation. It is an important sociological report because it gives a rather comprehensive view of the Ken- tucky mountaineers and their problems on the eve of the industrial develop- ment of southeastern Kentucky and because it became a handbook for John Fox, Jr., the first important interpreter of Kentucky mountain life in fiction. Because it is more of a sociological report than it is a travelogue, it marks the close of the era of horseback tours and ushers in the era of sociological study. What he reported appears to have been what he saw as he rode through the country and what he heard in his talks with innkeepers, guides, and such people as he fell into conversation with along the way. Yet, it is a sym- pathetic and honest report, completely lacking in the condescension that had marked Warner's account of his horseback journey into Carolina. Allen saw with unerring eye the immense industrial potential of the area. He described the hundreds of thousands of acres of fine timber, the coal beds, and the iron ore. He foresaw that the extension of the railroads would bring a new order and he wondered if the mountaineers were "to be swept out of these mountains by the in-rushing spirit of contending industries, or to be aroused, civilized and developed."86 Most of all, his articles focused at- tention upon the problems and possibilities of Kentucky mountaineers and the land in which they lived. A survey of the reports of travelers from the highlands of the South over a century reveals much in regard to the development of a distinct type known as the Southern mountaineer. To begin with, he was the Scotch-Irish, German, or English borderer fighting the Indian and the British. A generation later he was living comfortably on his mountain farm and showing as much evidence of culture and progress as his neighbors to the south. Within another generation he presented evidence of growing poverty if he lived in out-of-the-way places, but was doing as well as, and sometimes better than, other Southerners if he lived on rich acres. But with his poverty he was better off in every way than the backwoods planters and the poor whites were on the eve of the Civil War. Following the war, his numbers in- creased, his poverty grew, and his ignorance waxed, but he retained his old independence and Scotch-Irish resourcefulness. At the close of his first cen- tury in the mountain fastnesses his general character had deteriorated as his poverty, culture, and general level of intelligence had become thinner with his increased numbers, his realization that he was "different," and his lack of opportunity for improving his condition. NOTES Chapter 2 'See David C. Somervell's abridgement of the first six volumes of A Study of History (New York and London, 1947), p. 149. *A Tour in the United States of America (Dublin, 1784), I, 81. 'Ibid., p. 82. 58 Autumn 1975
4Ibid. r>Ibid., p. 217. «Ibid., pp. 217-218. ?Ibid., p. 218. «Ibid. «Francis Asbury (1745-1816), first bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church in America (1785-1816), crossed the Appalachian Mountains twenty times during his career. See Samuel Cole Williams, Early Travels in the Tennessee Country (Johnson City, Tennessee, 1928), pp. 289-290. 10Quoted by Williams, p. 295. "Ibid., p. 301. i¿See Ezra Squier Tipple, The Heart of Asbury's Journal (New York, 1904), p. 481. i;*lbid., p. 538. 14Abraham Steiner (1758-1833), who had accompanied John Heckewelder on his tour to the Indians, later became principal of Salem Academy, now Salem College, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Christian Frederic de Schweinich (1774-?) is believed to have been the journalist for Brother Steiner. See Williams, Travels in the Tennessee Country, pp. 445-447. ir>Ibid., p. 455. 16Gilbert Imlay (1754-1828?), travel writer and novelist who was deputy surveyor of the Kentucky territory about 1784, is better known for his The Emigrants: or, The History of an Exiled Family (1793). See Stanley J. Kunitz, American Authors, 1600-1900 (New York, 1938). 17i4 Topographic Description of the Western Territory of North America (New York, 1793), p. 239. 18Harry Toulmin (1766-1823), clergyman, educator, and territorial judge, was president of Tran- sylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky. He served eight years as secretary to the Commonwealth of Kentucky. See Isaac J. Cox's article in the Dictionary of American Biography. i^Harry Toulmin, The Western Country in 1793 (San Merino, California, 1948), p. 73. ¿«Ibid., p. 62. 21Francois Andre Michaux (1770-1855), traveler and botanist, managed the botanical gardens of his father. Andre Michaux. ¿¿Francois Andre Michaux, Travels to the Westward of the Allegany Mountains in Early Western Travels, ed. Reuben Gold Thwaites (Cleveland, Ohio, 1904), III, 27. '¿•''Ibid.. p. 79. ¿4Ibid. "Ibid., p. 80. ¿«Ibid., p. 95. ¿?Ibid., p. 80. ¿»Letters from North America (London and Edinburgh, 1824), I, Preface, iii. ¿»Ibid. *°Ibid., p. iv. "Ibid., pp. 274-275. >¿Ibid., p. 275. >>Ibid., p. 276. "Ibid., p. 286. »•"»Ibid. *«Ibid. •{7James Kirke Paulding (1778-1860), author and naval officer, is best known for his associations with Washington Irving. Three of his novels, The Dutchman's Fireside (1831), Westward Ho! (1832), and The Old Continental (1846), are historical novels based upon the American Revolution {DAB). "«James Kirke Paulding, Letters from the South (New York, 1835), II, 8. ™Ibid., p. 97. 40Ibid., p. 114. Perhaps the hills of lowest elevation that serve as settings for mountaineer fiction are those in northeastern Kentucky described by Jesse Stuart. Actually not over eight hundred feet above sea level, they are presented as Alps-like, "too high to grow anything but a few briars and sprouts," so high that a boy's bare feet don't get so hot and the high wind cools his face, "making the sweat dry up" (Taps for Private Tussie [New York, 1943], p. 24). 4iPaulding, II, 156-157. 4 ¿Feather stonhaugh, Excursion Through the Slave States (London, 1844), I, 142 ff. 4--ÍJ. S. Buckingham, The Slave States of America (London and Paris, 1842), II, 166-167. 44Ibid., pp. 245-246. 4r'Ibid., p. 261. The hard, pan-faced taciturnity of mountaineers at public gatherings such as Buckingham described became a "personality trait" of the mountaineer of fiction. Mountain people remained fond of speakings, public debates, and court trials far into the twentieth century. The famous Scopes trial, in 1925, at the mountain town of Dayton, Tennessee, attracted thousands of mountain folk eager to enjoy the polemical battle waged between William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow. 4öLanman (1819-1895), whose travels also carried him through the Mississippi Valley and the Great Lakes region during the 1840' s, published his observations and reports in four fat volumes. Letters from Appalachian Journal 59
the Allegany Mountains, published first in The National Intelligencer in 1848, appeared in book form in 1849 (See Herman H. B. Meyer, "Charles Lanman," DAB). ^Letters from the Allegany Mountains included in Adventures in the Wilds of the United States (New York, 1856), I, 457. 4H" Among the characteristic travelling establishments that I met.. .was the following: a very small covered wagon, (drawn by one mule and one deformed horse,) [sic] which was laden with corn-husk, a few bedclothes, and several rude cooking utensils. Behind this team marched a man and his wife, five boys, and eight girls, and in their rear the skeleton of a cow and four hungry-looking dogs. They had been farming in Union county [Georgia], but were now on their way into Habersham county in search of a new location" (Ibid., p. 381). 49Ibid., pp. 384-385. )()Ibid., p. 457. >»Ibid. •'»•¿Ibid. 5 {Ibid., pp. 400-401. "A rich man seldom has more than one dog, while a very poor man will keep from ten to a dozen. And this remark with regard to dogs, strange as it may seem, is equally applicable to the children of the mountaineers. The poorest man without any exception, whom I have seen in this region, lives in a log cabin with two rooms, and is the father of nineteen children, and the keeper of six hounds." r»4Ibid., p. 400 "...I found shelter in a rude and comfortless cabin, which was occupied by a man and his wife and eight children. Every member of the family was barefooted, and the children almost destitute of clothing; not one of them, though several were full-grown girls, could read a single word; the mother was sickly and haggard in her appearance, and one of the little boys told me that he had not eaten a hearty meal for ten days." "»»Ibid., p. 458. ™Ibid., p. 396. r»7Ibid., p. 458. ™A Journey in the Back Country (New York, 1860) was written from notes Olmsted kept while he was traveling in 1854. The materials in this book had not appeared in the New York Times. He wrote the book while he was superintendent of Central Park, New York, overseeing the construction work and the planting (See Broadus Mitchell, Frederick Law Olmsted, A Critic of the Old South [Baltimore, 1924], pp. 52-54). r*lJA Journey in the Back Country, p. 394. «»Ibid. eilbid., p. 395. 62Ibid., p. 220. 63Ibid., pp. 221-225. 64Ibid., p. 230. 65Ibid., p. 225. (i«Ibid., p. 265. But few mountaineers owned Negroes. Yet the presence of slavery in the South affected the economic life of the mountain people to the extent that they were forced to retain the frontier barter economy until well into the twentieth century, for there was no market available for the products of their labor except for their cattle, which drovers bought at ridiculously low prices. During the period of Recon- struction and of economic paralysis suffered by the South for the next half century, the mountain regions became poorer and poorer because of the enormous increases in population and the continued ex- ploitation of the soil and timber resources. Slavery, the Civil War, and the long period of economic failure in the whole South probably account for the emergence of the mountaineer as a shiftless, ignorant, but proud man who spends only sufficient time with his thin acres to make enough to eat and no more from year to year. «7Ibid., pp. 265-266. «8See particularly ibid., p. 266. «»Ibid., pp. 276-277. ™Ibid., pp. 278-279. 7iJohn Muir, A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, ed. William Frederic Bade (New York, 1916), pp. 34- 44. He called a hunter-farmer who showed him the gold mines a mountaineer and referred to a company riding a wagon down the Blue Ridge as mountaineers. 72Edward Smith King (1848-1896), editor, traveler, author, was invited by Josiah G. Holland, editor of Scribner's Monthly, to travel through the southern states and report on the effects of the Civil War, the economic conditions of the South, its scenery, and its social life. Articles growing out of the tour were published in Scribner's but appeared in book form as The Great South in 1875 (See Robert W. Bolwell, "Edward Smith King," DAB). 7 'King found the poor whites of Georgia quarrelsome, vengeful, too ready to take the law into their own hands, and with a "thirst for negro gore" {The Great South [Hartford, 1875], p. 372). In characterizing the "crackers" he stated: "These are the sallow and lean people who always feel 'tollable,' but never feel well; a people of dry fibre and coarse existence, yet not devoid of wit and good sense. 60 Autumn 1975
"The Georgia 'cracker' is eminently shiftless; he seems to fancy that he was born with his hands in his pockets, his back curved, and his slouch hat crowded over his eyes, and does his best to maintain this at- titude forever" (Ibid.). The diet of the "sand-hillers" in the Aiken, South Carolina, and Augusta, Georgia, area (the locale of Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road, God's Little Acre, and other novels and stories a half century later), King pronounced "barbarous as elsewhere among the agricultural classes in the South - corn-bread, pork and 'chick' n;' [sic] farmers rarely killing a cow for beef, or a sheep for mutton. Hot and bitter coffee smokes morning and night on the tables where the purest spring water, or the best of Scuppernong wine, might be daily placed..." (Ibid., p. 346). 74lbid., p. 475. 7r'Ibid., p. 503. ™Ibid., p. 547. cibici. 7«Ibid., p. 775. ™Ibid. ««Ibid. «ilbid. «sibid., p. 774. «ilbid. «4lbid. «r>Ibid., pp. 775-776. »^"Through Cumberland Gap on Horseback," Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 73 (June, 1886), 68.