The Southern Mountaineer in Fact and Fiction
[The 1972 article below, "Who Are the Southern Mountaineers?" by Cratis Williams was extracted from an unpublished dissertation, The Southern Mountaineer in Fact and Fiction, New York University, 1961.
The Appalachian Journal published Cratis Williams' in The Southern Mountaineer Fact and Fiction as edited by Matha Pipes in four installments. The four installments are attached to this page, currently scanned with raw OCR but unedited.]
Who Are the Southern Mountaineers?
by CRATIS D. WILLIAMS
Appalachian Journal, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Autumn 1972), pp. 48-55
Appalachian Journal & Appalachian State UniversityStable
[Cratis Williams has been a life-long student of Appalachian heritage and folklore. His scholarship includes Ballads and Songs of Eastern Kentucky and The Southern Mountaineer in Fact and Fiction. "The more I learn about my own mountain folk the more comfortable I feel about who I am."]
Who Are the Southern Mountaineers?
BY CRATIS D. WILLIAMS
Southern Mountaineer appears not to have set himself apart from the borderer or frontiersman until during the Civil War. When one considers the whole move- ment 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, 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 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. [1] 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 farms."[2]
A frontier farmer in the mountains was no more isolated in reference to markets than the settler in any other wilderness clear- ing. To expect the hill farmer to foresee that future industrialization, with its railroads, steamboat navigation, and macadamized roads, would pass his grandson by is "to read history backward with a vengeance."3 But retarded his descendants became. This "is an outstanding fact in American life. When men of the same type . . . settled elsewhere this retardation has not been observed."[4] one finds references Occasionally to mountain hamlets and villages of Civil War days. In 1860, Jackson, the seat of Breathitt County, Kentucky, "still had only a few houses. Its two stores, houses, jail, courthouse, and post office were all of logs."[5] This picture of a mountain county seat compares favorably with that of Jamestown, Tennessee, a generation earlier in The Gilded Age,[6] or of Chestatee, Georgia, about 1830. It would seem that such towns and pioneer homes had not attracted much notice, even by 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 find 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.[7] Only recently has "hill-billy" become a popular misnomer for mountaineer. Nor did they think of themselves as mountaineers. Today the cove-dwell- ers 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 geo- logical sense, begins with the Mason- Dixon Line on the north, follows just east of the Blue Ridge in a south- westerly 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. Including all of West Virginia, the mountain reg- ion 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 ap- proximately one-third of their total population.9 obtain a fairly representative notion of the population and its resources 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 Unit- ed States Department of Agriculture reveals the following picture of con- ditions in the mountain region for the decade under consideration: self-suf- ficient farms were more heavily con- centrated here than in any other part of the United States. But the Cum- berland-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 imple- ments and machinery per male work- er being the least in the United States: less than $100. As would be expected, the acreage of cultivated land per male worker was under ten acres in an area of the heaviest con- centration of 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 de- creased less than five per cent and the value of farm property was less in the mountains than in surrounding areas. Approximately twenty-five per cent of the population migrated from the mountain farms during that dec- ade, but untold thousands returned to chink and repair abandoned cabins on the worn-out farms and to live off AUTUMN 1972 49
relief during the 1930's. It is not dif- ficult to see that most of the moun- tain area was inhabited by a marginal economic group who made little money to spend and most of whose working efforts were exerted in mere- ly subsisting from year to year. both to the sociologist Striking and the novelist, the homoge- neity of physical type found a- mong the mountain people with their traits of blondness, rangy frame and spare flesh, "has proved a paradox when subjected to social interpreta- tion."10 Much futile controversy has marked the 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 as Scotch-Irish, and sometimes as Scotch. At times he is presented as disinherited gentry whose ancestors were victimized in Merry England or compromised in Bonnie Scotland. Again, he is fre- quently represented as the descend- ant 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 Move- ment. Placed against these views is the more tenable one that he was part and parcel of the whole Westward Movement and settled in the moun- tains 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. Although "the retarded Anglo- Saxon of the highlands is no myth . . . and if there be such a thing as good stock, these highlanders have it,"11 his isolation has left him strand- ed in an outmoded culture. But, though "proud, sensitive, self-reliant, untaught in the schools, often un- churched, untraveled, he is not un- learned 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."12 John C. Campbell found evidence of a falling away from culture among mountain people in the fact that many illiterate mountaineers possess copies of Greek and Latin classics bearing the names of ancestors and that given names of mountain chil- dren reflect a knowledge of the clas- sics on the part of the ancestors.13 One would think mountaineers themselves could help solve the prob- lem of their origin. Such, however, is not the case. When questioned on the subject of their racial stock and an- cestry, they usually know nothing more than that certain ancestors came from North Car'liny or Ole Virginny or occasionally 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 usu- ally means German. 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 not suf- ficiently reliable to be of much help. analysis of the whole pioneer- ing movement into the Pied- mont and upland region of Vir- ginia and the Carolinas yields more conclusive proof in determining who the present day mountaineer is racial- 50 ly than any other known approach to the problem. The Valley of Virginia, with few inhabitants in 1730, was well-populated in 1750. 14 By 1765 Governor Tryon could report that over a thousand immigrant wagons had passed through Salisbury, North Carolina, in one year.15 That the Scotch-Irish outnumbered by far any other racial group can hardly be doubted. "From the year 1720 to 1776 this people came on the average of 12,000 a year, or 600,000 people be- fore the Revolution."16 A study of the list of over four thousand names attached to the peti- tions of the early inhabitants of Ken- tucky 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 Ger- man, Dutch, and French. The number of English increases in the later peti- tions. The large number of religious names indicates the non-conformist character of much of the popula- tion."17 That the Scotch-Irish predomi- nated in the migrations westward to 1800 is to be inferred; that they were also more numerous than any other groups in the settlements made to the same date in the mountain regions is logically assumed. The most significant single trait to mark all mountain communities is the essential non-conformist quality of their religious views. In the very be- ginning of the settling of the moun- tains, the Valley of Virginia afforded homes for Lutheran, German Re- formed, Quaker, Mennonite, Dunk- ard, and Presbyterian. "Between the ramparts of the mountains, these descendants of persecution dwelt in peace with one another."18 With the flooding migration of the Scotch-Irish, even the Great Valley became a stronghold of Presbyterianism that stood out in sharp contrast, frequent- ly in sharp antagonism, to the Angli- canism of Tidewater Virginia.19 The mountaineers, a pious people, were largely Presbyterian to begin with, but they "lost their pastors and took up with Baptists of three sects and with Campbellite leaders."20 Since no schools were provided for them dur- ing the early days and they found themselves unable to provide their own until recently, "they came to think education a superfluity, if not an evil."21 The most permeating in- fluence in their lives remained an es- sentially unintellectual and basically Calvinistic religion kept alive by the energy of fire-eating and untrained ministers. question of the origin of mountaineers from the inden- tured 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 differences 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 mat- ter of fact, it would seem that even most of the Scotch-Irish came as in- dentured servants, first to the eastern counties of Pennsylvania, "but when their terms of service expired, they found lands in Pennsylvania too ex- pensive and some of them were settled by Lord Fairfax on his hold- ings between the Rappahannock and the Potomac."22 The traditions of some of the mountain families cer- tainly indicate that many of the an- cestors were bound boys who earned money to pay for their passage before they became their own men. 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 doubt- ed. And that much of the fiction por- traying life among the mountaineers deals with a branchwater variety of mountaineer whose moral and cul- tural standards are equivalent to those of the poor whites who appear in the novels of Erskine Caldwell and William Faulkner is well known. Historians have been generous in their praise of mountaineers as sol- diers. The Scotch-Irish disseminated among the older population at the time of Revolution have been credited with holding the colonies to- gether, for whereas the older popula- tion knew certain loyalties both to King and their own colony, the re- cently arrived Scotch-Irishmen, 600,- 000 strong, knew no loyalty to a colonial government yet and carried with them a grudge of long standing against the King. Their resistance to the injustices of British policy ex- hibited itself in strong measures even before the Revolution began. But to enroll all mountain men in the lists of the Sons of the American Revolution would certainly be rash, for there is excellent evidence that many of the early mountaineers were Tories. Too, many of the mountain families, especially those in the high- er echelons socially and culturally, preserve traditions in their families of having descended from Tories who came to the mountains during the Revolution to escape the wrath of the revolutionists in their home com- munities. Even the Scotch-Irish in the Carolinas were not the unalloyed anti-British men that most writers have tended to make them. As late as 1779 there were so many Tories in Burke County, one of the western counties of the state, that British of- ficers recruited men there who were so numerous that they planned to kill all the patriots in that region. These Scotch-Irish mountaineers pitched their support with the wealthy planters of the Tidewater section in acting against rebellion. 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 re- servations in regard to the patriotism of both the pioneer ancestors of the people of the Mississippi Valley and of the Appalachian mountaineers. Evidence indicates, then, that the Southern mountaineer, though main- ly of Scotch-Irish ancestry, of dissent- ing 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, sweep- ing statements, stereotyped presen- tations, and generalizations as to his essential character are not to be re- lied upon as adequate interpretation of mountain life and character. arriving at a concept of the Southern mountaineer along sociological and economic lines, it is important that we consider what his ancestors were like before they moved into the hills from the Carolina Piedmont Reservoir. The Piedmont pioneers were a peculiar people made up of like-minded groups from several nationalities rather than a distinct racial type. Because of the remark- able qualities they possessed before they became mountaineers, environ- ment and isolation do not sufficiently account for much of the same quali- ties found among them today, for their pioneer peculiarities "have curiously survived, in spite of the weathering of time."23 »2 APPALACHIAN JOURNAL
Not only did the mountain people become isolated as a geographical unit after about 1850,24 but they be- came more and more isolated from one another. As William Goodell Frost observed in 1899, the double isolation resulted in "marked varia- tions in social conditions." The mov- ing 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 tradi- tion "witness a self-respect and character that are unmistakable/25 Because the better type of mountain- eer was conscious, by 1900, of his stranded condition, and knew that he was "behind relatively as well as ab- solutely," his character was affected. His pride became vehement. He de- veloped a shy, sensitive, and un- demonstrative personality. Aware now of the scorn from the lowlands, his old predilection toward Presby- terian fatalism led him to struggle but feebly with his destiny. As a result of isolation, economic depravity, struggles, hardships and common interests, the sons of the mountain pioneers of from five to eight generations back are by now blended into a somewhat homogene- ous people26 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 Caro- linians and remote kinsmen in Char- lotte and Greensboro. 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 cul- ture in the fertile limestone valleys and the marginal cabin culture a- mong the less energetic who were pushed into the shale hills and chert ridges. But Professor Vance does not presume to ascribe a different ances- try to the dwellers in the mansion and in the cabin. It is a matter of popu- lation pressure that results in the di- vision of fertile fields among heirs until the time comes when fields are too small to offer subsistence and "young sons have pushed out beyond the mountain rim; others have re- treated back up the slopes to the shelter of a cabin and a cleared patch."27 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 Bradley pointed out in 1918, the extinction of game and the exhaustion of the soil contri- buted immeasurably. On Trouble- some Creek in Kentucky it was dis- covered that "every creek at all cap- able of growing corn (the one staple crop) had a population far in excess of its power to support, and that many of these people . . . were crowded into one and two room cab- ins, sometimes without windows." On one branch three miles long "thirteen houses, with a total of ninety-six people, of whom sixty-seven were children," were found.28 It must be remembered that this heavily increasing population is of the original mountain stock. Only a- bout two per cent of the mountain people are of foreign birth,29 and these are concentrated in the mining areas of the Cumberland- Allegheny Belt where they had exert- ed little influence on the native stock up to 1920.30 With an increasing den- sity in population and the consequent further division of family lands (for two-thirds of mountain men own land), it is easy to see that struggles and hardships would increase. AUTUMN 1972 53
it must be remembered that although a homogeneity of the ethical and ethnic character of the mountain people may more or less exist, there is no homogeneity of social and economic status. Moun- taineers, socially and economically, fall roughly into three groups:
(1) Town and city dwellers. Near- ly two million live in incorporated places of 1000 or more. They are mostly of 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. 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.
(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 high- ways, and are more or less prosperous rural folk. 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 ethnic homogeneity of the whole mountain population. Only in material things and social living with the consequent polish that comes from the enjoyment of their prerogatives are they different from the moun- taineers 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 the small holders of usually poor land, or tenants, or squatters who move from abandoned tract to abandoned tract. It is the mountaineer of this third type, closely akin to the "poor white" if not exactly the same, that became the mountain- eer of fiction. Ironically, mountaineers of the third type do not think of themselves as mountaineers either: they are just people. Hence, no one admits to be- ing a mountaineer. The resentment against fictional interpretations of mountain life and character arises largely from the town and valley folk, who rebel against "the exaggeration of the weaknesses and the virtues of individuals in the third group, and from presenting as typical the pictur- esque, exceptional, or distressing con- ditions under which some of them live," for, "through lack of qualifica- tions they are, by inference, pictured as living under such conditions."31 Understandably, the general at- titude of the mountain people is not one conducive to progress, for they have been victimized through ex- ploitation of the natural resources a- round them and quaint journalism "until they resent anything said about them or offered for them."32 of writers that ex- Unforgiving posed their peculiarities, the mountaineers of Clay County, Kentucky, escorted the reporters who came to cover the Howard-Baker feuds at the beginning of this century out of the county and warned them not to return.33 Horace Kephart dis- covered that the mountain people are provoked at being called mountain- eers. He thought the provocation stems from the fact that the word is not in their vocabulary, a "furrin" word, which they take as a term of reproach. Anything strange is regard- ed with suspicion; hence, anyone writing about these people runs the risk of offending them.34
NOTES This article is extracted from an unpublished dissertation, The Southern Mountaineer in Fact and Fiction, New York University, 1961.
1. John C. Campbell, The Southern High- lander and His Homeland (New York, 1921), pp. 39-40.
2 Rupert B. Vance, Human Geography of the South (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1935), p. 244.
3. lbid.
4. John P. Connell, "Retardation of the Ap- palachian Region," Mountain Life and Work (April, 1922), 21-22.
5. Federal Writers' Project, Breathitt: A Guide to the Feud Country (Northport, New York, 1941), p. 86.
6. Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, The Gilded Age, Harper and Brothers edition (New York, originally published in 1873), pp. 1-2. Jamestown is called Obedstown in the book.
7 Shields Mcllwaine, The Southern Poor White from Lubberland to Tobacco Road (Norman, Oklahoma, 1939), p. xv.
8. Horace Kephart, Our Southern High- landers (New York, 1913), p. 14.
9. Campbell, p. 19.
10. Vance, p. 244. "Vance, p. 35.
11. Ibid. "Campbell, p. 50. Ella Enslow (pseud, for Murray) and Alvin F. Harlow point out that the petition of the Watauga Settle- ments 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.) 12. lbid., p. 25.
13. lbid.
14 See footnote, Campbell, p. 23.
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.
18 Julia Davis, The Shenandoah (New York, 1945), p. 36.
19 Evarts Boutell Greene, Provincial A- merica (New York and London, 1905), p. 236.
20 julian Ralph, "Our Appalachian Ameri- cans," Harpers, CVII (Tune, 1903), 236.
21 lbid.
22Thomas Perkins Abernethy, Three Virginia Frontiers (Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1940), pp. 38-39.
23 James Watt Raine, The Land of Saddle- Bags (New York, 1924), p. 39.
24Campbell, p. 49.
25 William Goodell Frost, "Our Contem- porary Ancestors in the Southern Moun- tains," Atlantic, LXXXIII (March, 1899), 315.
26 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 popula- tion. 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 con- clusion that the Kentucky mountaineers are "one of the purest strains in the world, yet they possess physical traits which reveal that the compounding and inter-mixture of racial strains has not yet after six genera- tions of intermarriage proceeded to the ex- tent of blending the component elements." ("An Experimental Study of East Kentucky Mountaineers," Genetic Psychology Mono- graphs, III, 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 manner-/ Even so, similar ancestry, inbreeding, a common fight against poverty, and a century and a half of isola- tion in an unusual environment have given Kentucky mountaineers characteristics common to the majority." (Bloody Ground [Garden City, New York, 1941], p. 21.)
27 Vance, p. 243.
28 "The Women on Troublesome," Scribnerys, LXIII (March, 1918), 320.
29 Campbell, p. 363. wlbid., p. 75.
31 Ibid., p. 89.
32 Day, p. 323.
33 Ralph, "Our Appalachian Americans," Harpers, CVII (June, 1903), 33.
34 Kephart, pp. 206-207.