Bluegrass Messengers

The Anglo-Saxons of the Kentucky Mountains

The Anglo-Saxons of the Kentucky Mountains: A Study in Anthropogeography
by Ellen Churchill Semple
The Geographical Journal, Vol. 17, No. 6 (Jun., 1901), pp. 588-623

THE ANGLO-SAXONS OF THE KENTUCKY MOUNTAINS: A STUDY IN ANTHROPOGEOGRAPHY.
By Miss ELLEN CHURCHILL SEMPLE

IN one of the most progressive and productive countries of the world, and in that section of the country which has had its civilization and its wealth longest, we find a large area where the people are still living the frontier life of the backwoods, where the civilization is that of the eighteenth century, where the people speak the English of Shakespeare's time, where the large majority of the inhabitants have never seen a steamboat or a railroad, where money is as scarce as in colonial days, and all trade is barter. It is the great upheaved mass of the Southern Appalachians which, with the conserving power of the mountains, has caused these conditions to survive, carrying a bit of the eighteenth century intact over into this strongly contrasted twentieth century, and presenting an anachronism all the more marked because found in the heart of the bustling, money-making, novelty-loving United States. These conditions are to be found throughout the broad belt of the Southern Appalachians, but nowhere in such purity or covering so large an area as in the mountain region of Kentucky.

A mountain system is usually marked by a central crest, but the Appalachians are distinguished by a central zone of depression, flanked on the east by the Appalachian mountains proper, and on the west by the Alleghany and the Cumberland plateaus. This central trough is generally designated as the Great Appalachian Valley. It is depressed several hundred feet below the highlands on either side, but its surface is relieved by intermittent series of even-crested ridges which rise
1000 feet or more above the general level, running parallel to each
other, and conforming at the same time to the structural axis of the
whole system. The valleys between them owe neither width nor form
to the streams which drain them. The Cumberland plateau forms the
western highland of the Great Valley in Eastern Kentucky, Tennessee,
and Northern Alabama. This plateau belt reaches its greatest height
in Kentucky, and slopes gradually from this section to the south and
west. Its eastern escarpment rises abruptly 800 to 1500 feet from the
Great Valley, and shows everywhere an almost perfectly straight skyline.
The western escarpment is very irregular, for the streams,
flowing westward from the plateau, have carved out their valleys far
back into the elevated district, leaving narrow spurs running out into
the low plains beyond. The surface is highly dissected, presenting a
maize of gorge-like valleys separating the steep, regular slopes of the
sharp or rounded hills. The level of the originally upheaved mass of
the plateau is now represented by the altitude of the existing summits,
which show a remarkable uniformity in the north-east-south-west line,
and a slight rise in elevation from the western margin towards the
interior.

About 10,000 square miles of the Cumberland plateau fall within
the confines of the state of Kentucky, and form the eastern section of
the state. A glance at the topographical map of the region shows the
country to be devoted by nature to isolation and poverty. The eastern
rim of the plateau is formed by Pine mountain, which raises its solid
wall with level top in silhouette against the sky, and shows only one
water-gap in a distance of 150 miles. And just beyond is the twin
range of the Cumberland. Hence no railroads have attempted to cross
this double border-barrier, except at the north-east and south-east
corners of the state, where the Big Sandy and Cumberland rivers have
carved their way through the mountains to the west. Railroads, therefore,
skirt this upland region, but nowhere penetrate it. The whole
area is a coalfield, the mineral being chiefly bituminous, with several
thousand square miles of superior cannel coal. The obstructions
growing out of the topography of the country, and the cheap river
transportation afforded by the Ohio for the Kanawha and Monogahela
river coal have tended to retard the construction of railroads within
the mountains, and even those on the margin of this upland region
have been built since 1880.
Man has done so little to render this district accessible because
nature has done so little. There are here no large streams penetrating
the heart of the mountains, as in Tennessee, where the Tennessee
river, drawing its tributaries from the easternmost ranges of the
Appalachians, cuts westward by flaring water-gaps through chain
after chain and opens a highway from the interior of the system to
the plains of the Mississippi. The Kentucky streams are navigable
only to the margin of the pleateau, and therefore leave this great area
without natural means of communication with the outside world to
No. VI.-JUNE, 1901.] 2 R
589
590 THE ANGLO-SAXONS OF THE KENTUCKY MOUNTAINS:
the west, while to the east the mountain wall has acted as an effective
barrier to communication with the Atlantic seaboard. Consequently,
all commerce has been kept at arms' length, and the lack of a market
has occasioned the poverty of the people, which, in turn, has prohibited
the construction of high-roads over the mountains of the Cumberland
plateau.
It is what the mountaineers themselves call a rough country. The
steep hills rise from 700 to 1200 feet above their valleys. The valleys
are nothing more than gorges. Level land there is none, and roads
there are almost none. Valley and road and mountain stream coincide.
In the summer the dry or half-dry beds of the streams serve as highways;
and in the winter, when the torrents are pouring a full tide
down the hollows, foot trails cut through the dense forest that mantles
the slopes are the only means of communication. Then intercourse
is practically cut off. Eiven in the best season transportation is in the
main limited to what a horse can carry on its back beside its rider. In
a trip of 350 miles through the mountains, we met only one wheel
vehicle and a few trucks for hauling railroad ties, which were being
gotten out of the forests. Our own camp waggons, though carrying
only light loads, had to double their teams in climbing the ridges.
All that had been done in most cases to make a road over a mountain
was to clear an avenue through the dense growth of timber, so that
it proved, as a rule, to be just short of impassable. For this reason
the public of the mountains prefer to keep to the valleys with their
streams, to which they have given many expressive and picturesque
names, while the knobs and mountains are rarely honoured with a
name. We have Cutshin creek, Hell-fer-Sartain, Bullskin creek, Poor
Fork, Stinking, Greasy, and Quicksand creek. One trail leads from the
waters of Kingdom-Come down Lost creek and Troublesome, across the
Upper Devil and Lower Devil to Hell creek. Facilis decensus Averno,
only no progress is easy in these mountains. The creek, therefore,
points the highway, and is used to designate geographical locations.
When we would inquire our way to a certain point, the answer was,
" Go ahead to the fork of the creek, and turn up the left branch," not
the fork of the road and the path to the left. A woman at whose cabin
we lunched one day said, " My man and me has been living here on
Quicksand only ten years. I was born up on Troublesome."
All passenger travel is on horseback. The important part which
the horse plays, therefore, in the economy of the mountain family recalls
pioneer days. Almost every cabin has its blacksmith's forge under an
open shed or in a low outhouse. The country stores at the forks or
fords of the creek keep bellows in stock. Every mountaineer is his
own blacksmith, and though he works with very simple implements,
he knows a few fundamental principles of the art, and does the work
well. Men and women are quite at home in the saddle. The men are
A STUDY IN ANTHROPOGEOGRAPHY.
superb horsemen, sit their animals firm and erect, even when mounted
on top of the meal-bag, which is the regular accompaniment of the
horseman. We saw one day a family on their way to the country store
to exchange their produce. The father, a girl, and a large bag of
Indian corn were mounted on one mule, and the mother, a younger
girl, and a black lamb suspended in a sack from the saddle-bow on the
other. It is no unusual thing to see a woman on horseback, with a
child behind her and a baby in her arms, while she holds an umbrella
above them.
MAP SHOWING THE CONTRAST BETWEEN THE VALLEY OF THE POOR FORK IN KENTUCKY
AND THE VALLEY OF POWELL'S RIVER IN VIRGINIA.
But such travel is not easy, and hence we find that these Kentucky
mountaineers are not only cut off from the outside world, but they are
separated from each other. Each is confined to his own locality, and
finds his little world within a radius of a few miles from his cabin.
There are many men in these mountains who have never seen a town,
or even the poor village that constitutes their county-seat. Those
who have obtained a glimpse of civilization have gone down the headwaters
of the streams on lumber rafts, or have been sent to the state
penitentiary at Frankfort for illicit distilling or feud murder. The
women, however, cannot enjoy either of these privileges; they are
almost as rooted as the trees. We met one woman who, during the
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591
THE ANGLO-SAXONS OF THE KENTUCKY MOUNTAINS:
twelve years of her married life, had lived only 10 miles across the
mountain from her old home, but had never in this time been back
home to visit her mother and father. Another back in Perry county
told us she had never been farther from home than Hazard, the countyseat,
which was only 6 miles distant. Another had never been to the
post-office, 4 miles away; and another had never seen the ford of the
Rockcastle river, only 2 miles from her,home, and marked, moreover, by
the country store of the district.
A result of this confinement to one locality is the absence of anything
like social life, and the close intermarriage of families inhabiting
one district. These two phenomena appear side by side here as in the
upland valleys of Switzerland and other mountain countries where
communication is difficult. One can travel for 40 miles along one of
the head streams of the Kentucky river and find the same names recurring
in all the cabins along both its shores. One woman in Perry
county told us she was related to everybody up and down the North
Fork of the Kentucky and along its tributary creeks. In Breathitt
county, an old judge, whose family had been among the early settlers
on Troublesome, stated that in the district school near by there were
ninety-six children, of whom all but five were related to himself or his
wife. This extensive intermarriage stimulates the clan instinct and
contributes to the strength of the feuds which rage here from time to
time.
It is a law of biology that an isolating environment operates for
the preservation of a type by excluding all intermixture which would
obliterate distinguishing characteristics. In these isolated communities,
therefore, we find the purest Anglo-Saxon stock in all the United
States. They are the direct descendants of the early Virginia and
North Carolina immigrants, and bear about them in their speech and
ideas the marks of their ancestry as plainly as if they had disembarked
from their eighteenth-century vessel but yesterday. The stock is
chiefly English and Scotch-Irish, with scarcely a trace of foreign
admixture. Occasionally one comes across a French name, which points
to a strain of Huguenot blood from over the mountains in North
Carolina; or names of the Germans who came down the pioneer
thoroughfare of the Great Appalachian Valley from the Pennsylvania
Dutch settlements generations ago. But the stock has been kept free
from the tide of foreign immigrants which has been pouring in recent
years into the States. In the border counties of the district where
the railroads run, and where English capital has bought up the mines
in the vicinity, the last census shows a few foreign-born, but these are
chiefly Italian labourers working on the road-bed, or British capitalists
and employees. Four of the interior counties have not a single foreignborn,
and eight others have only two or three.
Though these mountain people are the exponents of a retarded
.592
A STUDY IN ANTHROPOGEOGRAPHY.
civilization, and show the degenerate symptoms of an arrested development,
their stock is as good as any in the country. They formed a
part of the same tide of pioneers which crossed the mountains to people
the young states to the south-west, but they chanced to turn aside from
the main stream, and ever since have stagnated in these mountain
hollows. For example, over a hundred years ago eleven Combs brothers,
related to General Combs of the Revolutionary army, came over the
mountains from North Carolina. Nine of them settled along the North
LANDSCAPE IN A MARGINAL COU-NTY.
Fork of the Kentucky river in the mountains of Perry county, one
went further down the stream into the rough hill country of Breathitt
county, and the eleventh continued on his way till he came into the
smiling regions of the Bluegrass, and there became the progenitor of a
family which represents the blue blood of the state, with all the aristocratic
instincts of the old South; while their cousins in the mountain
go barefoot, herd in one-room cabins, and are ignorant of many of the
fundamental decencies of life,
593
THE ANGLO-SAXONS OF THE KENTUCKY MOUNTAINS:
If the mountains have kept out foreign elements, still more effectually
have they excluded the negroes. This region is as free from
them as northern Vermont. There is no place for the negro in the
mountain economy, and never has been. In the days of slavery this
fact had momentous results. The mountains did not offer conditions
for plantation cultivation, the only system of agriculture in which
slaves could be profitably employed. The absence of these conditions
and of the capital wherewith to purchase negroes made the whole
Appalachian region a non-slave-holding section. Hence, when the
rupture came between the North and South, this mountain region
declared for the Union, and thus raised a barrier of disaffection through
the centre of the Southern States. It had no sympathy with the industrial
system of the South; it shared the democratic spirit characteristic
of all mountain people, and likewise their conservatism, which
holds to the established order. Having, therefore, no intimate knowledge
of the negro, our Kentucky mountaineers do not show the deepseated
prejudice to the social equality of blacks and whites which
characterizes all other Kentuckians. We find to-day, on the western
margin of the Cumberland plateau, a flourishing college for the coeducation
of the Bluegrass blacks and mountain whites; and this is
probably the only geographical location south of the Mason and Dixon
line where such an institution could exist.
Though the mountaineer comes of such vigorous stock as the Anglo-
Saxons, he has retained little of the ruddy, vigorous appearance of his
forebears. The men are tall and lank, though sinewy, with thin bony
faces, sallow skins, and dull hair. They hold themselves in a loosejointed
way; their shoulders droop in walking and sitting. Their
faces are immobile, often inscrutable, but never stupid; for one is sure
that under this calm exterior the mountaineer is doing a deal of thinking,
which he does not see fit to share with the " furriner," as he calls
every one coming from the outside world. The faces of the women are
always delicately moulded and refined, with an expression of dumb
patience telling of the heavy burden which life has laid upon them.
They are absolutely simple, natural, and their child-like unconsciousness
of self points to their long residence away from the gaze of the
world. Their manners are gentle, gracious, and unembarrassed, so that
in talking with them one forgets their bare feet, ragged clothes, and
crass ignorance, and in his heart bows anew to the inextinguishable
excellence of the Anglo-Saxon race.
The lot of a mountain woman is a hard one. Only the lowest
peasantry of Europe can show anything to parallel it. She marries
between twelve and fifteen years a husband who is between seventeen
and twenty. The motive in marriage is very elemental, betrays little
of the romantic spirit. Husband and wife speak of each other as " my
man" and "my woman." A girl when she is twenty is put on the
A STUDY iN ANTHROPOGEOGRAPHY.
" cull list," that is, she is no longer marriageable. A man is included
in this undesirable category at twenty-eight; after that he can get no one
to take him "except some poor wider-woman," as one mountain matron
expressed it, adding, " gals on the cull-list spend their time jes' bummin'
around among their folks." During a ride of 350 miles, with visits at
a great many cabins, we met only one old maid; her lot was a sorry
one, living now with a relative, now with a friend, earning her board
by helping to nurse the sick or making herself useful in what way she
could. The mountain system of economy does not take into account the
unmarried woman, so she plunges into matrimony with the instinct of
A BIT OF LEVEL LAND.
self-preservation. Then come children; and the mountain families conform
to the standard of the patriarchs. A family of from ten to fifteen
offspring is no rarity, and this characterizes not only the mountains of
Kentucky, but the whole area of the Appalachian system. In addition
to much child-bearing, all the work of the pioneer home, the spinning
and weaving, knitting of stockings, sometimes even the making of shoes
and mocassins, falls on the woman. More than this, she feeds and milks
the cow, searches for it when it has wandered away "in the range," or
forest, hoes weeds in the corn, helps in the ploughing, carries water
from the spring, saws wood and lays "stake and ridered" fences. A
mountain woman who had a husband and two sons, and who had been
employed all day in making a fence, lifting the heavy rails above the
height of her own head, replied in a listless way to the question as to
595
596 THE ANGLO-SAXONS OF THE KENTUCKY MOUNTAINS:
what the men did, with, "the men folks they mostly sets on a fence
and chaw tobacco and talk politics."
The mountain woman, therefore, at twenty-five looks forty, and at
forty looks twenty years older than her husband. But none of the race
are stalwart and healthy. The lack of vigour in the men is due chiefly
to the inordinate use of moonshine whiskey, which contains 20 per cent.
more alcohol than the standard liquor. They begin drinking as mere
boys. We saw several youths of seventeen intoxicated, and some
women told us boys of fourteen or fifteen drank. Men, women, and
children looked underfed, ill nourished. This is due in part to their
scanty, unvaried diet, but more perhaps to the vile cooking. The bread
is either half-baked soda biscuits eaten hot, or corn-pone with lumps of
saleratus through it. The meat is always swimming in grease, and the
eggs are always fried. The effect of this shows, in the adults, in their
sallow complexions and spare forms; in the children, in pimples, boils,
and sores on their hands and faces. This western side of the mountains,
moreover, has not an abundant water-supply, the horizontal strata of
the rocks reducing the number of springs. Hence all the mountain
region of Kentucky, West Virginia, and Tennessee shows a high percentage
of diarrhoeal diseases, typhoid, and malarial fever.
The home of the mountaineer is primitive in the extreme, a survival
of pioneer architecture, and the only type distinctly American. It is
the blind or windowless one-room log cabin, with the rough stone
chimney on the outside. The logs are sometimes squared with the
hatchet, sometimes left in their original form with the bark on; the
interstices are chinked in with clay. The roofs are covered with boards
nearly an inch thick and 3 feet long, split from the wood by a wedge,
and laid on, one lapping over the other like shingles. The chimneys,
which are built on the outside of the houses, and project a few feet
above the roof, lend a picturesque effect to the whole. They are made
of native rock, roughly hewn and cemented with clay; but the very
poorest cabins have the low "stick chimney," made of laths daubed
with clay. In the broader valleys, where the conditions of life are
somewhat better, the double cabin prevails-two cabins side by side,
with a roofed space between, which serves as a dining-room during the
warmer months of the year. Sometimes, though rarely, there is a porch
in front, covered by an extension of the sloping roof. In some of the
marginal counties of the mountain region and in the sawmill districts,
one sees a few two-story frame dwellings. These are decorated with
ornamental trimming of scroll-saw work in wood, oftentimes coloured
a light blue, along the edges of the gables, and defining the line between
the two stories. The regulation balcony over the front door and extending
to the roof has a balustrade of the same woodwork in excellent,
chaste design, sometimes painted and sometimes in the natural colour.
These houses, both in their architecture and style of ornamentation,
A STUDY IN ANTHROPOGEOGRAPHY.
recall the village dwellings in Norway, though not so beautiful or so
richly decorated. But the usual home of the mountaineer is the oneroom
cabin. Near by is the barn, a small square log structure, with
the roof projecting from 8 to 10 feet, to afford shelter for the young
cattle or serve as a milking-shed. These vividly recall the mountain
architecture of some of the Alpine dwellings of Switzerland and Bavaria,
especially when, as in a few instances, the roofs are held down by
weight-rocks to economize hardware. Very few of them have hay-lofts
above, for the reason that only a few favoured districts in these mountains
produce hay.
The furnishings of the cabins are reduced to the merest necessaries
THE PROBLEM OF TRANSPORTATION.
of life, though in the vicinity of the railroads or along the main
streams where the valley roads make transportation a simpler problem,
a few luxuries like an occasional piece of shop-made furniture and lampchimneys
have crept in. One cabin which we visited near the foot of
Pine mountain, though of the better sort, may be taken as typical.
Almost everything it contained was home-made, and only one ironbound
bucket showed the use of hardware. Both rooms contained two
double beds. These were made of plain white wood, and were roped
across from side through auger-holes to support the mattresses. The
lower one of these was stuffed with corn-shucks, the upper one with
feathers from the geese raised by the housewife. The sheets, blankets,
and counterpanes had all been woven by her, as also the linsey-wolsey
from which her own and her children's clothes were made. Gourds,
597
THE ANGLO-SAXONS OF THE KENTUCKY MOUNTAINS:
hung on the walls, served as receptacles for salt, soda, and other kitchen
supplies. The meal-barrel was a section of log, hollowed out with
great nicety till the wood was not more than an inch thick. The flourbarrel
was a large firkin, the parts held in place by hoops, fastened by
an arrowhead at one end of the withe slipped into a slit in the other;
the churn was made in the same way, and in neither was there nail or
screw. The washtub was a trough hollowed out of a log. A large
basket was woven of hickory slips by the mountaineer himself, and two
smaller ones, made of the cane of the broom corn and bound at the
edges with coloured calico, were the handiwork of his wife. Only the
iron stove with its few utensils, and some table knives, testified to any
connection with the outside world. The old flint-lock gun and powderhorn
hanging from a rafter gave the finishing touch of local colour to
this typical pioneer home. Daniel Boone's first cabin in the Kentucky
wilderness could not have been more primitive.
Some or most of these features can be found in all mountain homes.
Some cabins are still provided with hand-mills for grinding their corn
when the water-mills cease to run in a dry summer. Clay lamps of
classic design, in which grease is burned with a floating wick, are still
to be met with; and the manufactured product from the country store
is guiltless of chimney. Every cabin has its spinning-wheel, and the
end of the " shed-room " is usually occupied by a hand-loom. Only in
rare cases is there any effort to beautify these mountain homes. Paper
flowers, made from old newspaper, a woodcut from some periodical, and
a gaudy advertisement distributed by an itinerant vendor of patent
medicines, make up the interior decoration of a cabin. Sometimes the
walls are entirely papered with newspapers, which are more eagerly
sought for this purpose than for their literary contents. Material for
exterior decoration is more accessible to the mountain housewife, and
hence we find, where her work-burdened life will permit, that she has
done all she can for her front yard. Poppies, phlox, hollyhock, altheas,
and dahlias lift their many-coloured blooms above the rail fence. Over
the porch, where there is one, climb morning-glory, sweet potato vines,
and wild mountain ivy; and from the edge of the roof are suspended
home-made hanging baskets, contrived from old tin cans, buckets, or
anything that will hold soil, and filled with the various ferns and
creepers which the forest furnish in great beauty and abundance.
A vegetable garden is always to be found at the side or rear of the
cabin. This is never large, even for a big family. It is ploughed in
the spring by the man of the household, and enriched by manure from
the barn, being the only part of the whole farm to receive any fertilizer.
Any subsequent ploughing and all weeding and cultivation of the
vegetables is done by the women. The average mountain garden will
yield potatoes, beets, cabbages, onions, pumpkins, and tomatoes of dwarf
size. Beans are raised in considerable quantities and dried for winter
598
A STUDY IN ANTHROPOGEOGRAPHY.
use. The provisions for the luxuries of life are few. Adjoining every
garden is a small patch of tobacco, which is raised only for home consumption.
It is consumed, moreover, by both sexes, old and young,
and particularly by the women, who both smoke and "dip" snuff,
making the brush for the dipping from the twig of the althea. In
a large gathering like a funeral, one can often see girls from twelve
to fourteen years old smoking their clay or corn-cob pipes. A young
woman who went through the mountains last summer to study the
conditions for a social settlement there, found the children at a district
school amusing themselves by trying to see who could spit tobaccojuice
nearest a certain mark on the school-house wall, the teacher
standing by and watching the proceeding with interest.
MOUNTAIN HOME WHERE THE BALLAD OF "BARBARA ALLEN" WAS PRESERVED BY
TRADITION.
Sugar is never seen in this district, but backwoods substitutes for
it abound. Almost every cabin has its beehives, and anywhere from
ten to twenty. The hives are made from hollowed-out sections of the
bee-gum tree, covered with a square board, which is kept in place by
a large stone. The bees feed in the early spring on the blossoms of
the yellow poplar, but in the western counties, where this tree is
rapidly being cut out of the forest for lumber, honey is no longer
so abundant. But the mountain region, as a whole, produces large
amounts of honey and wax. Pike county, on the Virginia border,
produced over 60,000 lbs. of honey in 1890. Maple sugar is gotten
in considerable quantities from the sugar maple, which abounds. As
one rides through the forests, he sees here and there the rough little
log troughs at the base of these trees, the bit of cane run into the hole
bored through the bark for the sap, and at long intervals a log sugarhouse
with its huge cauldron for reducing the syrup. Maple sugar
599
THE ANGLO-SAXONS OF THE KENTUCKY MOUNTAINS:
is used only as a sweetmeat. The mountaineer puts his main reliance
for sweetening on sorghum molasses, which he makes from the sorghum
cane. Two acres of this will provide an average mountain household
with sorghum molasses, or "long sweetening," for a year. They eat
it with their " pone" bread and beans; coffee thus sweetened they
drink with relish, though to the palate of the uninitiated it is a dose.
Sugar, or " short sweetening," is a rarity.
Conditions point to agriculture as the only means for the Kentucky
mountaineer to gain a livelihood. Mineral wealth exists in abundance
in this section, but the lack of transportation facilities prevents .its
exploitation; so the rough hillsides must be converted into field and
pasture. The mountaineer holds his land in fee simple, or by squatter
claim. This is based, not upon title, but merely on the right of
possession, which is regarded, moreover, as a thoroughly valid basis in
a country which still preserves its frontier character. Large tracts
of Kentucky mountain lands are owned by persons outside the state,
by purchase or inheritance of original pioneer patents, and these are
waiting for the railroads to come into the country, when they hope
to realize on the timber and mines. In the mean time the mountaineers
have been squatting on the territory for years, clearing the forests,
selling the timber, and this with conscious impunity, for interference
with them is dangerous in the extreme. Every lawyer from the outside
world who comes up here to a county courthouse to examine titles
to the land about, keeps his mission as secret as possible, and having
accomplished it, leaves the town immediately. If further investigation
is necessary, he does not find it safe to return himself, but sends a
substitute who will not be recognized.
The pioneer character of the region is still evident in the size of the
land-holdings. In the most mountainous parts near the eastern borderline
the farms average from 160 to 320 acres; in the western part of
the plateau, from 100 to 160 acres. Of the whole state, the mountain
counties show by far the largest proportion of farms of 1000 acres and
over. Pike county has sixty-six such. Mountaineers in two different
sections told us that the land on the small side creeks was better, and
there farms averaged about 200 acres; but that on main streams, like
the North Fork of the Kentucky river and Poor Fork of the Cumberland,
the farms were usually 600 acres, because the soil was poorer. The
cause for this was not apparent, unless it was due to exhaustion of soil
from long tilling, as the valleys of the main streams, being more
accessible, were probably the earliest settled.
Only from thirteen to thirty per cent. of the acreage of the farms is
improved; the rest is in forest or pasture. Land is cleared for cultivation
in the old Indian method by " girdling " or " deadening " the trees,
and the first crop is planted amidst the still standing skeletons of
ancient giants of the forests. Indian corn is the chief crop raised, and
600
A STUDY IN ANTHROPOGEOGRAPHY.
furnishes the main food-supply for man and beast. Great fields of it
cover the steep mountain sides to the very top, except where a farmer,
less energetic or more intelligent than his fellows, has left a crown of
timber on the summit to diminish the evil of washing. The soil on
the slopes is thin, and in the narrow V-shaped valleys there is almost
no opportunity for the accumulation of alluvial soil. Hence the yield
of corn is only from ten to twelve bushels to an acre, only one-third
that in the rich Bluegrass lands of Central Kentucky. But population
is so sparse that the harvest generally averages forty bushels per
capita. In these "upright" farms all ploughing is done horizontally
around the face of the mountain, but even then the damage from
AN "UPRIGHT" FARM; STICK-AND-CLAY CHIMNEY.
washing is very great, especially as the staple crop forms no network
of roots to hold the soil and requires repeated ploughing. In consequence,
after two successive crops of corn the hillside is often quite
denuded, the soil having been washed away from the underlying rocks.
The field then reverts to a state of nature, growing up in weeds and
briars, and furnishing a scanty pasturage for cattle. Level land is
very scarce, and is to be found only in the long serpentines of the
main streams; but even here, from long cultivation and lack of
fertilizers, a field is exhausted by two crops, and has to "rest" every
601
602 THE ANGLO-SAXONS OF THE KENTUCKY MOUNTAINS:
third year. Clover is almost never seen. The mountaineers maintain
it will not grow here, although on our circuit we did see two fields.
Of other cereals beside corn the yield is very small. Some oats are
raised; but rye, wheat, barley, and buckwheat are only occasionally
found. One or two rows of broom-corn provide each cabin with its
material for brooms. Sometimes a small quantity of hay, poor in
quality, is cut from a fallow-field for winter use. The yield in all
the crops is small, because the method of agriculture employed is
essentially extensive. The labour applied is small, limited to what
is possible for a man and his family, generally, too, the feminine part
of it, because his sons found their own families at an early age. It
is almost impossible to hire extra labourers, because this element of
the population, small at best, finds more profitable and steadier employment
in various forms of lumber industry. The agricultural implements
used are few, and in general very simple, except in the vicinity of the
railroad. In remote districts the "bull-tongue" plough is in vogue.
This primitive implement is hardly more than a sharpened stick with
a metal rim; but as the foot is very narrow, it slips between the
numerous rocks in the soil, and is therefore adapted to the conditions.
Natives in two different sections told us that "folks fur back in the
mountains" resort to something still simpler-a plough which is
nothing but a fork of a tree, the long arm forming the beam, and
the shorter one the foot.
The mountains of Kentucky, like other upland regions, are better
adapted to stock farming; but, as the native has not yet learned the
wisdom of putting his hillside in grass to prevent washing, and at
the same time to provide pasturage, the stock wanders at will in the
"range" or forest. There sheep thrive best. They feed on the peavine,
which grows wild in the dense woods, but will not grow on cultivated
land. One native explained that the sheep liked the "range,"
because they could take refuge from winter storms and the intense
noonday heat of summer in "the stone houses." In answer to the
inquiry whether he constructed such houses, he answered with the
characteristic reverence of the mountaineer, "No; God made 'em.
They're God's houses-just caves or shelter places under ledges of rock."
About half of the mountain sheep are Merino and English breeds, but
they have deteriorated under the rough conditions obtaining there.
While the average yield per fleece for the whole state of Kentucky is
over 4 lbs. of wool, for the mountain counties it is only 2 lbs., and
in some localities drops to 1- lb. These sheep are naturally a hardy
stock, and are often bought up by farmers from the lowlands, taken
down to the Bluegrass and fattened for a few months, and sold at a
profit.
Sheep are the only product of the mountain farm that can find their
way to an outside market and do not suffer from the prevailing lack of
A STUDY IN ANTHROPOGEOGRAPHY.
means of transportation. In regard to everything else, the effort of
the native farmer is paralyzed by the want of a market. If he fattens
his hogs with his superfluous corn, they are unfit to carry their own
weight over the 40 or 50 miles of rough roads to the nearest railroad,
or they arrive in an emaciated condition. So he contents himself with
his " razor-back " pigs, which climb the hills with the activity of goats
and feed with the turkeys on the abundant mast in the forests. Cattle
also are raised only for home use. Steers are used pretty generally for
ploughing, and especially for hauling logs. Every cabin has one cow,
occasionally more. These can be seen anywhere browsing along the
A CABIN OF THE BETTER SORT.
edge of the road, where the clearing has encouraged the grass. In the
late summer they feed greedily on " crap grass," or Japan clover (Lespedeza
striata), which springs up wherever there is a patch of sunlight
in the Iforest. Knowing that dairy products are natural staples in
almost all mountain countries of the world, as we penetrated into this
district we made constant inquiries in regard to cheese, but everywhere
found it conspicuous by its absence. However, on our returning
to civilization, the census reports on mountain industries revealed the
surprising fact that just one county, in the south-western part of the
district and on the railroad, was cheese-producing, and that it made
6374 lbs. in 1889. The mystery was explained on referring to the
603
THE ANGLO-SAXONS OF THE KENTUCKY MOUNTAINS:
statistics of population, which showed that this county harboured a
Swiss colony of 600 souls. In the state of West Virginia, also, where
the topography of the country is a repetition of that of eastern Kentucky,
no cheese is produced; but, on the other hand, considerable
quantities are made in all the mountain counties of Tennessee and
Virginia. These states, again, are alike in having, as their geographical
structure, the broader inter-montane valleys between the chain-like
linear ranges of the Great Appalachian depression. In 1889, Lee
County, Virgina, produced 8595 lbs. of cheese; while just over Cumberland
mountain, which forms its western border, Bell County, Kentucky,
produced not an ounce.
In spite of the hard conditions of life, the Kentucky mountaineer
is attached to this rough country of his. Comparatively few emigrate,
and many of them come back, either from love of the mountains or
because the seclusion of their previous environment has unfitted them
to cope with the rush and enterprise of life in the lowlands. One
mountaineer told us that, though it was a poor country, "the men
mostly stays here." Another who had travelled much through the
district in his occupation of selecting white oak timber for a lumber
company, estimated that about one man in five emigrated; such generally
go to Missouri, Arkansas, and Texas. We met several who had
been out West, but the mountains had drawn them back home again.
The large majority of the population, therefore, stay in their own
valley, or "cove," as they call it, divide up the farm, and live on
smaller and smaller estates, while the cornfields creep steadily up the
mountains. The population of these twenty-eight counties with their
10,000 square miles area was about 220,000 in 1880, or over twenty to
the square mile; that in 1890 was 270,000, showing an increase of 25
per cent. As the ratio in the past decade has risen, there is now a
population of 340,000, or thirty-four to the square mile, while for the
state at large the ratio is fifty-four. This growth of population is to be
attributed almost entirely to natural increase; and as the accessions
from the outside are practically limited to the foreign element, only two
or three thousand all told, employed in the coal-mines and on the railroads,
so large a percentage of increase precludes the possibility of
much emigration. Cities there are none, and the villages are few,
small, and wretched. This is true also of the county-seats, which, in
the interior counties, average only from 300 to 400 souls; while those
of the marginal counties and located on railroads encircling the mountain
districts sometimes rise to 1500, but this is rare.
In consequence of his remoteness from a market, the industries of
the mountaineer are limited. Nature holds him in a vice here. As we
have seen, a few of his sheep may find their way to the railroad, but
his hogs are debarred by the mountains from becoming articles of commerce.
The same is true of his corn, which is his only superabundant
604
A STUDY IN ANTHROPOGEOGRAPHY.
crop; and this, therefore, by a natural economic law, the mountaineer
is led to convert into a form having less bulk and greater value. He
makes moonshine whisky, and not all the revenue officers of the
country have succeeded in suppressing this industry. At our first
camping-place, only 15 miles from the railroad, we were told there
were twenty illicit stills within a radius of 5 miles. Two women,
moreover, were pointed out to us who carried on the forbidden industry;
their husbands had been killed in feuds, so they continued to
operate the stills to support their families. Living so far from the arm
of the law, the mountaineer assumes with characteristic independence
that he has a right to utilize his raw material as he finds expedient.
A MOUNTAIN FAMILY.
He thinks it laudable to evade the law-an opinion which is shared by
his fellows, who are ready to aid and abet him. He therefore sets up
his still in some remote gorge, overhung by trees and thickly grown
with underbrush, or in some cave whose entrance is effectually screened
by boulders or the dense growth of the forest, and makes his moonshine
whisky, while he leaves a brother or partner on guard outside to give
warning if revenue officers attempt a raid. It is a brave man who will
serve as deputy marshal in one of these mountain counties, for raiding
a still means a battle, and the mountaineers, like all backwoodsmen,
are fine marksmen. In Breathitt County, called "Bloody
Breathitt," four deputy marshals have been killed in the past six
months. The moonshiner fully understands the penalty for illicit distilling,
and if he is caught, he takes his punishment like a philosopher
-all the more as there is no opprobrium attached in his community to
a term in the penitentiary for this crime. The disgrace falls upon
the one who gave testimony against the illicit distiller; and often a
No. VI.-JUNE, 1901.] 2 s
605
THE ANGLO-SAXONS OF THE KENTUCKY MOUNTAINS:
mountaineer, if summoned as a witness in such a case, leaves his county
till the trial is over, rather than appear for the prosecution. Most of
the moonshine is sold within the mountains. The natives, physically
depressed by lack of nourishment and by the prevalent diseases of the
district, crave stimulants; so the demand for spirits is steady. Not
content with the already excessive strength of moonshine whisky,
they often add pepper or wood-ashes to make it more fiery. The result
is maddened brains when under its influence, and eventually ruined
constitutions.
Forests of magnificent timber cover the Kentucky mountains, and
supply the only industry which brings any considerable money from
the outside world, because the only one which can utilize the small,
rapid streams for transportation. The steep-sided valleys are productive
of valuable hardwood timber. Many varieties of oak, walnut,
poplar, chestnut, maple, ash, and tulip trees grow to magnificent size.
Log-rolling begins in the fall after the Indian corn harvest, and continues
through the winter till March. The logs are deposited along the
banks of the streams to wait till a "tide" or sudden rise supplies
enough water to move them. Sometimes, where a creek or "branch " is
too small to carry its prospective burden, the loggers build across it
a "splash dam," behind which logs and water accumulate to the
requisite point, and then the barrier is knocked loose, when tide and
timber go rushing down the channel. On the main streams of the Kentucky,
Big Sandy, Licking, and Cumberland, the logs are rafted and
floated down to the saw-mills in the lowlands. All the headwaters of
these rivers are marked out to the traveller through the mountains by
the lumber stranded from the last "tide" and strewn along their
banks.
Some of the wood within a day's hauling of the railway is worked
up in a form ready for commerce, but generally with great waste of
good material. The fine chestnut oaks are cut down in large quantities
simply to peel off tan-bark, while the lumber is left to rot. Railroad
ties are cut and shaped in the mountains from the oak and hauled to
the railroad. The making of staves of white oak for whisky-barrels is
also a considerable industry. The trees are sawed across the length of
the stave, and split by wedges into billets, which are then hollowed out
and trimmed into shape. This last process is performed by an implement
run sometimes by steam, generally by horse-power, for in the
latter form it is more readily transported over the rough mountain
roads from place to place, as the supply of white oak is exhausted.
These staves bring $32.00 a thousand delivered at the railroad. The
mountain labourer working at stave-making or at the portable saw-mills
earns 75 cents a day, while the usual wages for fari, hands in this
district are only 50 cents.
The trades in the mountains are the primitive 1 es of a pioneer
606
A STUDY IN ANTHROPOGEOGRAPHY.
community-cobbler, blacksmith, and miller; but even these elemental
industries have not been everywhere differentiated. Many a cabin has
its own hand-mill for grinding corn when the water-mill is too remote.
Many a native still makes moccasins of calf or raccoon skin for himself
and his family to spare the more expensive shoes; and it is a poor sort
of mountaineer who cannot and does not shoe his own horses and
steers. Here is reproduced the independence of the pioneer home.
Spinning and weaving survives as an industry of the women. In some
~~~~~~ ~~~~~\~, ~~~~ ~~~~ ~~::~: ~~~'K
4~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~.:
A MOUNTAIN CHURCH.
few localities one can still see the flax in every stage, from the green
growth in the field to the finished homespun in 100-yard pieces; or,
again, one sees a cotton patch in the garden, a simple primitive gin of
home invention for separating the fibre, and understands the origin of
the cotton thread in the linsey-woolsey cloth of domestic manufacture
which furnishes the dresses for women and children. Cotton and flax
spinning, however, have died out greatly during the past few years,
since the introduction of cheap cotton goods into the mountain districts.
2 s2
607
608 THE ANGLO-SAXONS OF THE KENTUCKY MOUNTAINS:
Spinning of woollen yarn for stockings is still universal, with the concomitant
arts of carding and dyeing; while the weaving of linsey-woolsey
for clothes or blankets is an accomplishment of almost every mountain
woman. One native housewife showed us her store of blankets, woven
by her mother and herself. They were made in intricate plaids of
original design and combination of colour, and the owner told us she
worked without a pattern and without counting the threads, trusting
to her eye for accuracy. Many of the dyes, too, she made herself from
certain trees, though a few she bought at the country store. The homewoven
counterpanes are very interesting, because the designs for these
have been handed down from generation to generation, and are the
same that the Pilgrim Fathers brought over to New England. But the
mountain woman puts forth her best taste and greatest energy in
making quilts. In travelling through this section one looks out for
some expression of the aesthetic feeling as one finds it in the woodcarving
of the Alps and Scandinavian mountains, the metal-work of the
Caucasus, the Cashmere shawls of the Himalayas, and the beautiful
blankets of the Chilcat Indians. Gradually it is borne in upon him
that quilt-making amounts to a passion among the women of the Kentucky
mountains; that it does not merely answer a physical need, but
is a mode of expression for their artistic sense; and there is something
pathetic in the thought. They buy the calico for the purpose, and
make their patchwork in very intricate designs, apparently getting
their hints from their own flower-gardens; at any rate, the colours in
certain common garden flowers were reproduced in some quilts we saw,
and the effect was daring but artistic. Quilt-making fills the long
leisure hours of the winter, and the result shows on the open shelves or
cupboard which occupies a corner in every house. Passing a one-room
cabin on the headwaters of the Kentucky river, we counted seventeen
quilts sunning out on the fence.
The only work of the women which brings money into the family
treasury is searching for ginseng, or " sang-pickin'," as the mountaineer
calls it. This root is found now only in the wildest, most inaccessible
ravines; but the women go out on their search barefoot amid the thick
brush and briars, taking their dogs along to keep off the rattlesnakes.
They also gather "yellow root" (Hydrastis canadensis), which with the
ginseng (Panax quinquefolium) they dry and then barter for produce at
the nearest store, the former at the rate of 40 cents per pound, the
latter at 3 dollars. Most of the trade in the mountains is barter, for
money is as scarce as in genuine pioneer countries, and the people are
accordingly unfamiliar with it. A native who came over the mountains
from some remote cove to sell eggs to a camping party this past summer,
was offered a dollar bill for his produce, but refused to accept it, as he
had never seen one before, his experience having been limited to silver
dollars and small change. At another place we found that the people
A STUDY IN ANTHROPOGEOGRAPHY.
were reluctant to take the paper currency of the issue of 1892, anything
so recent having not yet penetrated into their fastnesses. But the lack
of money does not prevent them from being eager traders, especially in
horseflesh. One of the attractions of Sunday church-going to the men
is the opportunity it offers for this purpose. A glance at one of these
little mountain churches when meeting is going on reveals the fitness
of the occasion. The people have gathered from every direction for
miles around; they have come on their best horse, and now every tree
on the edge of the clearing has become a hitching-post. Groups form
outside before and after the service, satisfying their social craving, and,
with the few topics of conversation
at their command,
talk naturally drifts upon
the subject of their " beasties,"
with the inevitable
result of sometrading. Their
ttading propensity carries
them so far that they often
trade farms as they would
horses, no deeds being executed.
As the isolation of his environment
has left its stamp
upon every phase of the
outer life of the mountaineer,
so it has laid its impress
deep upon his inner nature.
The remoteness of their
scattered dwellings from each
other and from the big world
beyond the natural barriers,
and the necessary self-reliance
of their pioneer-like MOUNTAIN TYPES.
existence, has bred in them
an intense spirit of independence which shows itself in many ways.
It shows itself in their calm ignoring of the revenue laws, and in
their adhering to the principle of the blood-feuds which inculcates
the duty of personal vengeance for a wrong. In consequence of this
spirit of independence, and of its antecedent cause in their slight
dealings with men, our Kentucky mountaineers have only a semideveloped
commercial conscience. They do not appreciate the full
moral force of a contract; on this point they have the same vague
ideas that most women have, and from the same cause. At all times
very restive under orders, when they have taken employment under a
superior, their service must be politely requested, not demanded. If
609
610 THE ANGLO-SAXONS OF THE KENTUCKY MOUNTAINS:
offended, they throw up their job in a moment, and go off regardless of
their contract and of the inconvenience they may occasion their employer.
Every man is accustomed to be his own master, to do his own work in
his own way and his own time. And this brings us to another curious
characteristic of the mountaineer, also an effect of his isolation. He has
little sense of the value of time. If he promises to do a certain thing
on a certain date, his conscience is quite satisfied if he does it within
three or four days after the appointed time. For instance, some
mountaineers had promised to furnish horses for our camping party,
which was to start from a certain village on July 15; when that day
came half a dozen horses had failed to appear, but their places were
supplied and the party moved off. During the succeeding week, delinquent
mountaineers dribbled into town with their horses, and were surprised
to find they were too late, explaining that they did not think
a few days would make any difference.
Living so far from the rush of the world, these highlanders have in
their manner the repose of the eternal hills. In the presence of strangers
they are quite free from self-consciousness, and never lose their simplicity
or directness. There is no veneer about these men; they say
exactly what they think, and they think vigorously and shrewdly.
Endowed with the keen powers of observation of the woodsman, and
cut off from books, they are led to search themselves for the explanation
of phenomena or the solution of problems. Though hampered by
ignorance, their intellects are natively strong and acute. Conscious of
their natural ability, conscious too that they are behind the times, these
people are painfully sensitive to criticism. Cut off so long and so completely,
they have never been able to compare themselves with others,
and now they find comparison odious. They resent the coming of " furriners"
among them, on the ground that outsiders come to spy upon
them and criticize, and " tell-tale," as they put it, unless they are convinced
that it is some commercial mission or a political campaign that
brings the stranger. His suspicions allayed, the mountaineer is the
most generous host in the world. " Strangers, won't you light and set?
Hitch your beasties. This is a rough country, and I'm a poor man, but
you can have all I've got." This is the usual greeting. If it is
a question of spending the night, the host and his wife sleep on the
floor and give the guests the bed. In a one-room cabin, the entertainment
of strangers involves inconvenience, but this discomfort is never
considered by the Kentucky highlander. When he says, "You can
have everything I've got," this is no lip-service. At one cabin where
we spent the night, when we were making our toilettes in the morning,
the daughter of the house, with infinite grace and simplicity, offered us
the family comb and her own tooth-brush. Hospitality can go no
further. This quality the Kentucky mountaineer has in common with
the inhabitants of all remote, untrodden regions where inns are rare.
A STUDY IN ANTHROPOGEOGRAPHY.
But if he refuses to be reimbursed for his outlay and trouble, he is
repaid in part by the news which the stranger brings, and the guest is
expected to be very communicative. He must tell everything he has
seen or heard on his journey through the mountains, and must meet a
whole volley of questions of a strictly personal nature. Inquiries come
as to his age, married or unmarried condition and the wherefore, his
health, ailments, symptoms, and remedies.
The mountaineer has a circumscribed horizon of interests; he is
little stirred by the great issues of the day, except those of a political
nature, and for politics he has a passion. A discussion of party
platforms or rival candidates for office will at any time enthrall him,
HAND-LOOM AND SPINNING-WHEEL FQR FLAX.
keep him away for a whole day from the spring ploughing or sowing.
As we have explained, since the mountains presented conditions for
agriculture as little adapted for a slave industrial system as did those
of New England, when the conflict of the systems of the North and of
the South came to an issue in the Civil War, the mountain sections
of the southern states took the side of New England, and went over
almost bodily into the Republican party. Such was their zeal for the
Union, that some of the mountain counties of Kentucky contributed a
larger quota of troops, in proportion to their population, for the Federal
army than any other counties in the Union. The enthusiasm of those
days survives in that section to-day in their staunch adherence to the
611
612 THE ANGLO-SAXONS OF THE KENTUCKY MOUNTAINS:
Republican party. The spirit has been encouraged also by the fact
that topography has defined the mountain section as one of the political
divisions of the State by a kind of common law of both political parties
in their conventions and in common parlance. Although more sparsely
populated than any of the others, the mountain division, from its
greater local unity, is relatively much stronger in party conventions,
since its delegate vote is more likely to be a unit. In consequence
of this fact, it is sure to get a fair proportion of its men as candidates
upon the State ticket, and its party vote can be counted upon with
considerable accuracy. Knowing, therefore, that they are a strong
factor in the politics of the State, it is not surprising that the Kentucky
mountaineers should find therein a great interest.
Men who, from the isolation of their environment, receive few
impressions, are likely to retain these impressions in indelible outline;
time neither modifies nor obliterates them. Thus it is with
the Kentucky mountaineer. He never forgets either a slight or a
kindness. He is a good lover and a good hater; his emotions are
strong, his passions few but irresistible; because his feelings lack a
variety of objects on which to expend themselves, they pour their full
tide into one or two channels and cut these channels deep. Like all
mountain-dwellers, they love their home. They love the established
order of things. Their remoteness from the world's great current of
new ideas ass bred in them an intense conservatism, often amounting
to bitter intolerance. For instance, they were so outraged by the
divided skirts and cross-saddle riding of some of the women of our
party, that in one county they were on the point of blocking our way;
in another, they were only dissuaded from a raid on the camp by a
plea from a leading man of the town for the two Kentucky women of
the party who used side-saddles, and everywhere they gave scowling
evidence of disapproval. There were no jeers; the matter was to
them too serious for banter or ridicule. Nor was their feeling, as we
shall see later, an outgrowth of a particularly high and delicate
standard of womanhood; it was more a deep-seated dislike of the
unusual. Painfully lax in many questions of morals, they hold
tenaciously to matters of form. The women who came into our
camp at different times to visit us, in spite of a temperature of 90?
Fahr., wore red woollen mitts, their tribute to the conventions.
The upland regions of all countries are the stronghold of religious
faiths, because the conservatism there bred holds to the orthodox,
while the impressive beauty and grandeur of the natural surroundings
appeals to the spiritual in man. Such a religion, however, is likely
to be elemental in character-intense as to feeling, tenacious of dogma,
but exercising little or no influence on the morals of everyday life.
This is the religion of the Kentucky mountaineer. By nature he is
reverential. Caves are "God's houses," sun time is " God's time,"
A STUDY IN ANTHROPOGEOGRAPHY.
indicated by the noon-mark traced with charcoal on the cabin door.
A God-fearing man has the unlimited respect of every one in the
mountains. A preacher is a privileged person. Wherever he goes
he finds free board and lodging for himself and his horse, and his horse
is always shod free. In that lawless country, a man who shoots a
preacher is ever after an object of aversion, and there is a general
assumption that the murderer will not live long-either a superstition
or a generalization from the experience that often some individual
constitutes himself an arm of the Almighty to punish the offender.
One who is a preacher must be " called" to the work, and must serve
without pay. The "call" does not presuppose any previous preparation
for the profession, and naturally involves some modern substitute
MOUNTAIN TEXTILES.
for Paul's tent-making to earn a livelihood. The result in the Kentucky
mountains is sometimes amazing. Preachers there have been known
to be whisky distillers. Some have been seen to take one or two
drinks of liquor while delivering a sermon. We attended an outdoor
" meetin'" conducted by one whose widowed sister ran a moonshine
still. The best are farmers or country storekeepers. All are more or
less ignorant, some densely so. We heard one man preach who could
neither read nor write. At a meeting of some sectarian association in
the fall of 1898, a mountain preacher advanced the opinion that the old
blueback spelling-book gave all the education that a preacher needed.
The style of preaching that appeals to the mountaineer is purely
hortatory. It begins in a natural tone of voice, but, like all highly
emotional speech, soon rises to rhythmical cadences, and then settles
to a sustained chant for an hour or more. Any explanatory remarks
613
(i 14 THE ANGLO-SAXONS OF THE KENTUCKY MOUNTAINS:
are inserted parenthetically in a natural voice. This, and only this,
stirs the religious fervour of the mountaineer. A clergyman from one
of our cities who was doing missionary work among these people was
met with the criticism after his service, "Stranger, I 'lowed to hear
ye preach, and ye jest talked."
Though his religion is emotional and little suggestive of a basis
in rationalism, yet the mountaineer takes his mental gymnastics in
vigorous discussion of dogma. This seems to be the one form of
abstract reasoning open to him-an exercise natural to the Teutonic
mind. He is ignorant, remember, therefore positive and prone to
distinguish many shades of belief. Sects are numerous. There are
four recognized kinds of Baptists in the mountains. Denominational
prejudice is so strong that each denomination refuses to have anything
to do with another. A Methodist refuses to send his children to the
Presbyterian mission school in his neighbourhood, though it is far
superior to anything else at his command, and costs him nothing.
For this reason the work of the various Home Mission boards in the
mountains has achieved only limited results as to number. Only
undenominational work, like that of a social settlement, can reach
all the people of one locality; and in view of the sparsity of the
population, this is a vital matter.
In spite of the intensity of religious feeling, the number of communicants
of all denominations forms only from five to fifteen per cent.
of the total population. The mountains of Eastern Kentucky show
the largest area of this low percentage in the United States, east of
the Missouri river and the Indian territory. It may be due to the
lack of churches and of any church organization where the preachers
are " called " and do not form a distinct profession. Baptists, Disciples
of Christ, and Methodists are most profusely represented. The sparsity
of population with the diversity of sects permits religious service only
once a month, when the circuit rider comes. This devoted man leaves
his farm or store on Friday, and goes " creeter-back" over the
mountains to each of his distant charges in turn. The district school
building, in lieu of a church, answers for the meeting. Service is held
on Saturday morning, and again on Sunday, for many of the congregation
have come such a distance they feel entitled to a double feast of religion.
They stay at the nearest cabin, which takes them in with their horses.
After the Saturday sermon, the secular affairs of the church are attended
to, as the mountaineer considers it unseemly to transact any business,
even the disciplining of a delinquent member, on Sunday, although
outside the sacred precincts he trades horses and indulges his taste for
conviviality. Religion is something to be kept assiduously apart from
common everyday living.
The fact that the profession of a mountain preacher is only an
avocation with its consequent secondary claim upon his time, the fact
A STUDY IN ANTHROPOGEOGRAPHY.
of the severity of winter weather for horseback travel, and of the
impassability of the roads at this season both for pastor and people,
render church worship intermittent in this upland region, and at the
same time explain the curious custom of the mountain funeral. This
never takes place at the time of interment, but is postponed for months
or years. It is desirable to have the ceremony at a time when the
roads are passable, when the preacher will not be detained by the
harvesting of his corn crop, and when there can be a great gathering
of kinfolk, for the clan instinct is strong among these people, and a
funeral has its cheerful side in the opportunity of social intercourse
it affords. Sometimes a long
arrear of funerals has to be
observed, if adverse circum- OT A
stances for several years have i
prevented a family gathering.
At one cabin we visited, the
woman of the house told us
she was getting ready for a
big gathering at her place
on the first of October, when 'be o t
the funerals of five of her
relatives were to be preached.t c
A university man, travelling - mi
through the mountains to
make some scientific research,
who had departed this life in
1868. The prominence given
to funeral sermons in the
season of good roads lends a
sombre cast to the religion of
the mountaineer, and strengthens in him a fatalistic tendency which
is already one of his prominent characteristics, born doubtless of the
hopelessness of his struggle with natural conditions. This feeling is
so strong that it goes to astonishing lengths. It frankly condemns
missions and Sunday schools as gratuitous meddling with the affairs
of Providence. An Episcopal bishop recently, on arriving in a mountain
village, heard that one of the families there was in great distress, and
went immediately to make a visit of condolence. Vhen he inquired
as to the cause of their grief, he learned that a ten-year-old son had
disappeared the evening before, and they had reason to suppose he
had been lost in a large limestone cave which ran back 2 miles under
615
616 THE ANGLO-SAXONS OF THE KENTUCKY MOUNTAINS:
the mountain not far away. In answer to his question if their search
had been fruitless, he learned they had made no attempt at search,
but " if he's to die, he's to die " came the wail, with pious ejaculations
as to the will of God. In a few moments the man of God was striding
along the trail to the cave, a posse of men and boys armed with
candles and lanterns pressing close upon his heels, and in two hours
the lost child was restored to the bosom of its family.
The morals of the mountain people lend strong evidence for the
development theory of ethics. Their moral principles are a direct product
of their environment, and are quite divorced from their religion,
which is an imported product. The same conditions that have kept the
ethnic type pure have kept the social phenomena primitive, with their
natural concomitants of primitive ethics and primitive methods of social
control. Such conditions have fostered the survival of the blood-feud
among the Kentucky mountaineers. As an institution, it can be traced
back to the idea of clan responsibility which held among their Anglo-
Saxon forefathers; and it is this Old World spirit which animates them
when the eldest man of a family considers it a point of honour to avenge
a wrong done to one of his kindred, or when a woman lays upon her
sons the sacred obligation of killing the murderer of their father. In a
community that grows from within by natural increase, hereditary
instincts are strong, and clan traditions hold sway. But if the bloodfeud
was decadent among the colonial ancestors of our Kentucky
mountaineers, the isolation of this wild upland region was all-sufficient
to effect its renascence, and to-day in some counties it is a more powerful
factor of social control than the courts of law. The mountains, by
reason of their inaccessibility and the sparsity of their populations, saw
a great prolongation of pioneer days and pioneer organization of society,
where every man depended on his own strong arm or rifle to guard his
interests and right his wrongs. When the law invaded this remote
region, it found the feud established and the individual loath to subordinate
himself to the body politic. This individual was justified to
himself by the almost universal miscarriage of justice. For the
administration of the law is almost impossible in a feud case. It is
next to impossible to convict a murderer in his own county, because
the jury, and often the witnesses, are intimidated by the party of the
defendant, and will fail to render a verdict of guilty; or, if the murder
was committed to avenge some real wrong, the mountain jury, trained
by tradition in their peculiar ideas of family honour, feels itself in
sympathy with the criminal and acquits him. This they do without
compunction, for they have as yet only a rudimentary conception of the
sacredness of the law. The court often tries a change of venue, but the
cost of this is particularly burdensome in a poor community, and the
change is made to an adjoining county, where sympathy with mountain
methods still holds. As a last resort, a rescue party of the defendant's
A STUDY IN ANTHROPOGEOGRAPHY.
relatives will make its attempt to defeat justice. An episode of the
Howard and Baker feud, which raged during the summer of 1899 in
Clay County, was the trial in Knox County of a Baker lad who had
killed one of the opposing faction. Forty-two Bakers, armed with
rifles and smokeless powder, came over the mountains to attend the trial,
and openly established their "fort," or headquarters, in the countyseat.
The boy, though clearly guilty, was acquitted, received his gun
from the sheriff, and started off that night to the scene of hostilities,
attended by his kindred as a guard of honour, not as a rescue party.
The consequence is, if a man is killed in a quarrel, his relatives,
knowing from long experience the helplessness of the law, take the
HAND-MILL FOR GRINDING MAIZE.
matter of punishment into their own hands, and at their first chance
shoot the murderer. But the desire for personal vengeance is always
present. In this same Howard and Baker feud, Tom Baker shot to
death William White, an ally of the Howards and brother of the sheriff,
as likewise kinsman of the county clerk, jailer, and judge. Naturally
reluctant to give himself up to officials who were his personal enemies,
Baker took to the hills until State troops were sent to the county, when
he gave himself up to them. They pitched tent in the court-house
yard, with a Gatling gun in position for action, and Tom Baker was
placed in a tent in the centre, while no one was allowed to enter the
military lines. But one day his guards brought Tom Baker for a
617
618 THE ANGLO-SAXONS OF THE KENTUCKY MOUNTAINS:
moment to the door of his tent for a breath of air, and in that instant a
shot, fired from the house of the sheriff, found its way to his heart. And
the mountaineers openly exulted that a hundred trained soldiers could
not protect a man who had been marked out as a victim.
The exciting causes of these feuds are manifold and often of a
trifling nature. A misunderstanding in a horse trade, a gate left open
and trespassing cattle, the shooting of a dog, political rivalry, or a
difficulty over a boundary fence may start the trouble. The first
shooting is sometimes done in the madness of moonshine intoxication.
These mountaineers are men who hold life as light as a laugh, and to
such anything is sufficient provocation to shoot; so the first blood is
easily shed. The feud once started, a long and bloody war ensues, often
for several years, in which waylaying, shooting from ambush, and
arson are regular features. Sometimes pitched battles, engaging a
hundred men or more, or a protracted siege of a factionist stronghold
varies the programme. In the recent Howard and Baker feud, the
principals were men of prominence, influence, and means, so they were
able to command a number of followers. The main allies of the
Howards were the White family, who have furnished members of the
United States Congress, State Senate, and House of Representatives, and
have controlled the offices of the county for fifty years. In the French
and Eversole feud, which raged at intervals for many years in Perry
County, the best people of the county were drawn into one or the other
faction. And yet throughout this section there are those who deplore
the reigning lawlessness.
In all mountain regions of the world crimes against persons are far
more frequent than crimes against property. So in the Kentucky
uplands the former are frequent, the latter rare. There is no real disgrace
attached to killing an enemy or a government officer who attempts
to raid a moonshine still. There is little regard for the law as
such, little regard for human life; but property is sacred. If a
mountaineer is asked what, in the eyes of the mountain people, is the
worst crime a man can commit, the answer comes, "Horse-stealing. If
a man up here steals a horse, his best friend would not trust him again
with fifty cents." Here speaks the utilitarian basis of his ethics in the
almost impassable roads and trails of a pioneer country. To further
inquiry he replies, " And the next worst thing is to steal logs out of a
stream-indeed, to steal anything." The mountaineer is honest,
scrupulously so. If a log from a lumber-camp is stranded on his field
from a subsiding flood in the river, he rolls it into the water at the
next rise; or if this is impossible on account of its weight, he lets it lie
and rot as a matter of course, for it never occurs to him to cut it up
for his own use. He never locks his door. If a robbery occurs,
the punishment is swift and sure, for the hue-and-cry is raised up
and down the valley or cove, and the escape of the culprit is almost
A STUDY IN ANTHROPOGEOGRAPHY.
impossible. Primitive in their shortcomings, these mountain people are
primitive also in their virtues. The survival of the clan instinct has
bred in them a high degree of loyalty; and their free, wild life, together
with the remoteness of the law, has made them personally brave. They
carry themselves with a certain conscious dignity which peremptorily
forbids all condescension. Every man recognizes man's equality; there
are no different classes. The consequence is the prevalence of that
democratic spirit which characterizes the mountains of Switzerland and
Norway.
In only one respect do the mountain people show marked moral
degradation. There seems to be no higher standard of morality for the
women than for the men, and for both it is low. This is true throughout
the Southern Appalachians. The women are modest, gentle, and
refined in their manners, but their virtue is frail. The idealism of
youth keeps the girls pure, but when they marry and take up the heavy
burdens that mountain life imposes upon them, their existence is sunk
in a gross materialism, to which their environment offers no counteracting
influence. Furthermore, the one-room cabin harbours old and
young, married and single, of both sexes.
The Kentucky mountaineers are shut off from the inspiration to
higher living that is found in the world of books. Isolation, poverty,
sparsity of population, and impassability of roads make an education
difficult, if not impossible; the effect of these conditions is to be seen in
the large percentage of illiterates in this section. Of the women over
twenty-five years old and men over forty, 80 per cent. can neither read
nor write. It is quite the usual thing to meet men of clear, vigorous
intellects and marked capacity in practical affairs who cannot sign
their own names. One mountaineer gave it as his observation that
only one-half of the men over twenty years in his county could read.
With the children it is somewhat better, because with the natural
increase of population more district schools are established, and distances
are therefore shortened for the tramp from cabin to school-house.
To children who must go barefoot, or wear home-made moccasins, or
who can afford not more than one pair of store shoes a year, the question
of distances is a vital one, especially in the winter. The district
schools are in session for five months, from August 1 till Christmas.
The number of pupils at a school ranges from fifty to a hundred of
all ages from six years to twenty, and all are in charge of one ignorant,
often inexperienced teacher. All start in at their work in August, but
it is soon interrupted for a week, because the instructor has to leave to
attend the Teachers' Institute at the county-seat. On October 1 the
older boys and girls are withdrawn from school for two weeks to help
get in the harvest. Then November comes, and with it in alternative
years certain important state and county elections. If the teacher
is a man, being one of the few educated men of the section, he is
619
620 THE ANGLO-SAXONS OF THE KENTUCKY MOUNTAINS:
probably a candidate for one of the county offices, or a member of his
always numerous family connection aspires to the State legislature.
In either event the teacher, with a mountaineer's sense of the importance
of politics, closes school for ten days before the election in order
to take part in the campaign. The middle of November the little
flock reassembles, and the work of education goes on. But soon the
fall rains come, and then the cold and snows of December. First the
youngest and frailest are kept at home, but the older and sturdier ones
continue, all the more eagerly now because they have the undivided
attention of their instructor. The day comes, however, when the
intense cold, combined with their own sad want of stout shoes and
warm clothes, keeps even the most ambitious at home, and the teacher,
with a sigh of relief or regret, locks the school-house door two weeks
before the term is over. And the children, with no books at home on
which to exercise their attainments, lose almost all that they have
gained. And that all is little at best.
The district school of the Kentucky mountains is, in general, a
rough log-cabin more or less crudely equipped according to the sparsity
or density of the surrounding population. Some are entirely without
desks, rude, uncomfortable benches of rough mountain manufacture
taking their places. We saw no maps, and instead of blackboards, the
unplaned planks of the inside of the walls had been stained a dark
colour for a space of 12 feet. In some of the back districts, where
hardware is at a premium, the children are summoned from recess by
a big wooden rattle. If the physical equipment of the school is primitive,
the mental is almost as crude. The standard of education for
the teachers is not high. Some of them have not progressed farther
than the multiplication table in arithmetic, and all use ungrammatical
English. Their preparation for teaching in general consists of the
course of instruction at the district school and a few months' training
at the so-called normal school of the county-seat. At a recent meeting
of the Teachers' Institute in one of the mountain counties, when the
subject up for discussion was "Devotional exercises in schools," it
transpired that, of the fifty-six public school teachers present, only one
in eight knew the Lord's prayer, a majority did not know what it was
or where it came from, a majority did not own a Testament, and only
two or three were the proud possessors of a Bible. Such ignorance is
pitiable, but pitiable chiefly because it means lack of opportunity.
Many of such teachers are half-grown boys and girls, who are in this
way trying to earn the money, always so scarce in the mountains, " to
go down to the settlements " and get an education. When their desire
for knowledge is once aroused, they are strong, persistent, and ready
to face any obstacle to get an education. Their vigorous minds, unjaded
nerves, and hardened bodies combine to make them victors in
the struggle. One boy of fourteen started out from his hillside home
A STUDY IN ANTHROPOGEOGRAPHY.
with his little bundle of clothes slung over his shoulder and 75 cents.
in his pocket, and tramped 25 miles over rough mountain trails to
Berea, where the nearest school and college were. While taking the
course there, he supported himself by regular jobs of various kinds, and
maintained an excellent standing in his classes. When a mountain lad
comes down to the State University at Lexington, it is a foregone conclusion
that he is going to carry off the honours. We find at work in
him the same forces that give success to the youth from the Swiss Alps
and the glens of the Scotch Highlands, when these too come down
into the plains to enter the fierce struggle for existence there. For the
Kentucky lad, the change has meant a stride over an intervening
hundred and fifty years.
The life of the Kentucky mountaineer bears the stamp of the
eighteenth century. His cabin home is rich in the local colour of an
age long past. The spinning-wheels for flax and wool, the bulky loom
in the shed-room outside, the quaint coverlet on the beds within, the
noon-mark on the door, and, more than all, the speech of the people,
show how the current of time has swept by and left them in an eddy.
The English they speak is that of the Elizabethan age. They say
"buss " for kiss, "gorm" for muss, "pack" for carry, and "poke" for
a small bag. Strong past tenses and perfect participles, like "holp"
and "holpen," and the syllabic plural of words ending in st, like
"beasties," are constantly heard. The Saxon pronoun "hit" survives
not only in the upland regions of Kentucky, but also of the Virginias,
Carolinas, and Tennessee. With the conserving power of the mountains
has come into operation also their differentiating influence within
their boundaries. Every valley has some peculiarity of vocabulary
or speech which distinguishes it from the community across the
adjoining range. The mountaineers have, therefore, criticized the
dialect in John Fox's stories of this region, because they are not judges
of the dialect of any locality but their own.
Survivals of speech are accompanied also by survivals of customs.
In the mountains, the " rule of the road " when two horsemen or waggons
meet is to turn to the left, as in England. Another relic of old Scotch
or English custom we find in the " infare " or " infair," after a mountain
wedding. This is the dinner given at the home of the groom's parents
the day after the ceremony. It was observed in the rural districts
of all Kentucky and Indiana up till fifty years ago, but now is adhered
to only in the mountains. A more remarkable case of survival was
discovered in 1878 by Prof. Nathaniel S. Shaler, of Havard, on the
borders of Virginia and Kentucky. There in a secluded valley he
found men hunting squirrels and rabbits with old English short-bows.
"These were not the contrivance of boys or of to-day, but were made
and strung, and the arrows hefted in the ancient manner. The men,
some of them old, were admirably skilled in their use; they assured
No. VI. -JUNE, 1901.] 2 T
621
THE ANGLO-SAXONS OF THE KENTUCKY MOUNTAINS.
me that, like their fathers before them, they had ever used the bow
and arrow for small game, reserving the costly ammunition of the rifle
for deer and bear."
Though these people came into the mountains with eighteenthcentury
civilization, their isolation and poverty not only prevented
them from progressing, but also forced them to revert to earlier usages
which at the time of their coming were obsolescent. This is the
explanation of the feud, as has been shown above, of the use of the
hand-mill and short-bow, and especially of the old English ballad
poetry which constitutes the literature of these mountain folk to-day.
This has survived, or, more properly, flourished in its mediaeval vigour
because it has not felt the competition of books. The scant baggage
of the pioneer immigrants from colonial Virginia and Carolina could
not allow much space for books, and the few that did make the trip
across the Appalachian mountains were used up, from much reading and
handling, by one generation. Poverty and inaccessibility prevented
an invasion of new books from without, and from within there was no
competition from newspapers. There are to-day twenty contiguous
mountain counties, covering altogether an area of 6000 square miles,
not one of which can boast a printing-press. Under these circumstances,
the Kentucky mountaineer reverted to his ancestral type of literature
and revived ballad poetry. This has now been handed down from lip
to lip through generations, the slightly variant form and phrase only
testifying to its genuineness. The ballad of " Barbara Allen," popular
in Great Britain three hundred years ago, and known now in America
only to the musical antiquarian, is a stand-by in several of the mountain
counties. The tragic ballad of " Little Sir Hugh," or " The Jewish
Lady," as it is variously called, traces back to the Prior's Tale of Chaucer.
The lengthy ballad of "Lord Bateman," or "The Turkish Lady,"
shows unmistakable identity with the poem of the same name in
Kurlock's 'Ancient Scottish Ballads,' though the Scotch version is
longer.
Animated by the spirit of minstrelsy, the mountaineers have composed
ballads on the analogy of the ancient. These are romantic or
heroic and of narrative length. We heard a woman sing a native
ballad of fifty-two stanzas, entitled " Beauregard and Zollicoffer," which
recounted the deeds of these two generals of the Civil War. The
music for all these ballads is in a weird minor key, and is sung in a
nasal tone. As far as we were able to judge, the women are the chief
exponents of mountain minstrelsy, and the accuracy of their memories
for these long poems is suggestive of Homeric days. Spain and Sicily
are perhaps the only other parts of the civilized world, at least in
Europe and America, where modern folk-songs are still composed in
the form of ballad poetry.
The whole civilization of the Kentucky mountains is eloquent to
622
JORIS CAROLUS, DISCOVERERO F EDGE ISLAND.
the anthropogeographer of the influence of physical environment, for
nowhere else in modern times has that progressive Anglo-Saxon race
been so long and so completely subjected to retarding conditions; and
at no other time could the ensuing result present so startling a contrast
to the achievement of the same race elsewhere as in this progressive
twentieth century.

* See p. 572. 2