Folkways
These migrations into the inland valleys of the Old South mark the first
great westward thrust of the American frontier. Thus the beginnings of
the westward movement disclose to us a feature characteristic also of
the later migrations which flung the frontier over the Appalachians,
across the Mississippi, and finally to the shores of the Pacific. The
pioneers, instead of moving westward by slow degrees, subduing the
wilderness as they went, overleaped great spaces and planted themselves
beyond, out of contact with the life they had left behind. Thus
separated by hundreds of miles of intervening wilderness from the more
civilized communities, the conquerors of the first American "West,"
prototypes of the conquerors of succeeding "Wests," inevitably struck
out their own ways of life and developed their own customs. It would be
difficult, indeed, to find anywhere a more remarkable contrast in
contemporary folkways than that presented by the two great community
groups of the South--the inland or piedmont settlements, called the Back
Country, and the lowland towns and plantations along the seaboard.
The older society of the seaboard towns, as events were soon to prove,
was not less independent in its ideals than the frontier society of the
Back Country; but it was aristocratic in tone and feeling. Its leaders
were the landed gentry--men of elegance, and not far behind their
European contemporaries in the culture of the day. They were rich,
without effort, both from their plantations, where black slaves and
indentured servants labored, and from their coastwise and overseas
trade. Their battles with forest and red man were long past. They had
leisure for diversions such as the chase, the breeding and racing of
thoroughbred horses, the dance, high play with dice and card,
cockfighting, the gallantry of love, and the skill of the rapier. Law
and politics drew their soberer minds.
Very different were the conditions which confronted the pioneers in the
first American "West." There every jewel of promise was ringed round
with hostility. The cheap land the pioneer had purchased at a nominal
price, or the free land he had taken by "tomahawk claim"--that is by
cutting his name into the bark of a deadened tree, usually beside a
spring--supported a forest of tall trunks and interlacing leafage. The
long grass and weeds which covered the ground in a wealth of natural
pasturage harbored the poisonous copperhead and the rattlesnake and,
being shaded by the overhead foliage, they held the heavy dews and bred
swarms of mosquitoes, gnats, and big flies which tortured both men and
cattle. To protect the cattle and horses from the attacks of these pests
the settlers were obliged to build large "smudges"--fires of green
timber--against the wind. The animals soon learned to back up into the
dense smoke and to move from one grazing spot to another as the wind
changed. But useful as were the green timber fires that rolled their
smoke on the wind to save the stock, they were at the same time a menace
to the pioneer, for they proclaimed to roving bands of Cherokees that a
further encroachment on their territory had been made by their most
hated enemies--the men who felled the hunter's forest. Many an outpost
pioneer who had made the long hard journey by sea and land from the old
world of persecution to this new country of freedom, dropped from the
red man's shot ere he had hewn the threshold of his home, leaving his
wife and children to the unrecorded mercy of his slayer.
Those more fortunate pioneers who settled in groups won the first heat
in the battle with the wilderness through massed effort under wariness.
They made their clearings in the forest, built their cabins and
stockades, and planted their cornfields, while lookouts kept watch and
rifles were stacked within easy reach. Every special task, such as a
"raising," as cabin building was called, was undertaken by the community
chiefly because the Indian danger necessitated swift building and made
group action imperative. But the stanch heart is ever the glad heart.
Nothing in this frontier history impresses us more than the joy of the
pioneer at his labors. His determined optimism turned danger's dictation
into an occasion for jollity. On the appointed day for the "raising,"
the neighbors would come, riding or afoot, to the newcomer's
holding--the men with their rifles and axes, the women with their pots
and kettles. Every child toddled along, too, helping to carry the wooden
dishes and spoons. These free givers of labor had something of the
Oriental's notion of the sacred ratification of friendship by a feast.
The usual dimensions of a cabin were sixteen by twenty feet. The timber
for the building, having been already cut, lay at hand--logs of hickory,
oak, young pine, walnut, or persimmon. To make the foundations, the men
seized four of the thickest logs, laid them in place, and notched and
grooved and hammered them into as close a clinch as if they had grown
so. The wood must grip by its own substance alone to hold up the
pioneer's dwelling, for there was not an iron nail to be had in the
whole of the Back Country. Logs laid upon the foundation logs and
notched into each other at the four corners formed the walls; and, when
these stood at seven feet, the builders laid parallel timbers and
puncheons to make both flooring and ceiling. The ridgepole of the roof
was supported by two crotched trees and the roofing was made of logs and
wooden slabs. The crevices of the walls were packed close with red clay
and moss. Lastly, spaces for a door and windows were cut out. The door
was made thick and heavy to withstand the Indian's rush. And the
windowpanes? They were of paper treated with hog's fat or bear's grease.
When the sun stood overhead, the women would give the welcome call of
"Dinner!" Their morning had not been less busy than the men's. They had
baked corn cakes on hot stones, roasted bear or pork, or broiled venison
steaks; and--above all and first of all--they had concocted the great
"stew pie" without which a raising could hardly take place. This was a
disputatious mixture of deer, hog, and bear--animals which, in life,
would surely have companioned each other as ill! It was made in
sufficient quantity to last over for supper when the day's labor was
done. At supper the men took their ease on the ground, but with their
rifles always in reach. If the cabin just raised by their efforts stood
in the Yadkin, within sight of the great mountains the pioneers were one
day to cross, perhaps a sudden bird note warning from the lookout,
hidden in the brush, would bring the builders with a leap to their feet.
It might be only a hunting band of friendly Catawbas that passed, or a
lone Cherokee who knew that this was not his hour. If the latter, we
can, in imagination, see him look once at the new house on his hunting
pasture, slacken rein for a moment in front of the group of families,
lift his hand in sign of peace, and silently go his way hillward. As he
vanishes into the shadows, the crimson sun, sinking into the unknown
wilderness beyond the mountains, pours its last glow on the roof of the
cabin and on the group near its walls. With unfelt fingers, subtly, it
puts the red touch of the West in the faces of the men--who have just
declared, through the building of a cabin, that here is Journey's End
and their abiding place.
There were community holidays among these pioneers as well as labor
days, especially in the fruit season; and there were flower-picking
excursions in the warm spring days. Early in April the service berry
bush gleamed starrily along the watercourses, its hardy white blooms
defying winter's lingering look. This bush--or tree, indeed, since it is
not afraid to rear its slender trunk as high as cherry or crab
apple--might well be considered emblematic of the frontier spirit in
those regions where the white silence covers the earth for several
months and shuts the lonely homesteader in upon himself. From the
pioneer time of the Old Southwest to the last frontier of the Far North
today, the service berry is cherished alike by white men and Indians;
and the red men have woven about it some of their prettiest legends.
When June had ripened the tree's blue-black berries, the Back Country
folk went out in parties to gather them. Though the service berry was a
food staple on the frontier and its gathering a matter of household
economy, the folk made their berry-picking jaunt a gala occasion. The
women and children with pots and baskets--the young girls vying with
each other, under the eyes of the youths, as to who could strip boughs
the fastest--plucked gayly while the men, rifles in hand, kept guard.
For these happy summer days were also the red man's scalping days and,
at any moment, the chatter of the picnickers might be interrupted by the
chilling war whoop. When that sound was heard, the berry pickers raced
for the fort. The wild fruits--strawberries, service berries, cherries,
plums, crab apples--were, however, too necessary a part of the pioneer's
meager diet to be left unplucked out of fear of an Indian attack.
Another day would see the same group out again. The children would keep
closer to their mothers, no doubt; and the laughter of the young girls
would be more subdued, even if their coquetry lacked nothing of its
former effectiveness. Early marriages were the rule in the Back Country
and betrothals were frequently plighted at these berry pickings.
As we consider the descriptions of the frontiersman left for us by
travelers of his own day, we are not more interested in his battles with
wilderness and Indian than in the visible effects of both wilderness and
Indian upon him. His countenance and bearing still show the European,
but the European greatly altered by savage contact. The red peril,
indeed, influenced every side of frontier life. The bands of women and
children at the harvestings, the log rollings, and the house raisings,
were not there merely to lighten the men's work by their laughter and
love-making. It was not safe for them to remain in the cabins, for, to
the Indian, the cabin thus boldly thrust upon his immemorial hunting
grounds was only a secondary evil; the greater evil was the white man's
family, bespeaking the increase of the dreaded palefaces. The Indian
peril trained the pioneers to alertness, shaped them as warriors and
hunters, suggested the fashion of their dress, knit their families into
clans and the clans into a tribe wherein all were of one spirit in the
protection of each and all and a unit of hate against their common
enemy.
Too often the fields which the pioneer planted with corn were harvested
by the Indian with fire. The hardest privations suffered by farmers and
stock were due to the settlers having to flee to the forts, leaving to
Indian devastation the crops on which their sustenance mainly depended.
Sometimes, fortunately, the warning came in time for the frontiersman to
collect his goods and chattels in his wagon and to round up his live
stock and drive them safely into the common fortified enclosure. At
others, the tap of the "express"--as the herald of Indian danger was
called--at night on the windowpane and the low word whispered hastily,
ere the "express" ran on to the next abode, meant that the Indians had
surprised the outlying cabins of the settlement.
The forts were built as centrally as possible in the scattered
settlements. They consisted of cabins, blockhouses, and stockades. A
range of cabins often formed one side of a fort. The walls on the
outside were ten or twelve feet high with roofs sloping inward. The
blockhouses built at the angles of the fort projected two feet or so
beyond the outer walls of the cabins and stockades, and were fitted with
portholes for the watchers and the marksmen. The entrance to the fort
was a large folding gate of thick slabs. It was always on the side
nearest the spring. The whole structure of the fort was bullet-proof and
was erected without an iron nail or spike. In the border wars these
forts withstood all attacks. The savages, having proved that they could
not storm them, generally laid siege and waited for thirst to compel a
sortie. But the crafty besieger was as often outwitted by the equally
cunning defender. Some daring soul, with silent feet and perhaps with
naked body painted in Indian fashion, would drop from the wall under
cover of the night, pass among the foemen to the spring, and return to
the fort with water.
Into the pioneer's phrase-making the Indian influence penetrated so that
he named seasons for his foe. So thoroughly has the term "Indian
Summer," now to us redolent of charm, become disassociated from its
origins that it gives us a shock to be reminded that to these Back
Country folk the balmy days following on the cold snap meant the season
when the red men would come back for a last murderous raid on the
settlements before winter should seal up the land. The "Powwowing Days"
were the mellow days in the latter part of February, when the red men in
council made their medicine and learned of their redder gods whether or
no they should take the warpath when the sap pulsed the trees into leaf.
Even the children at their play acknowledged the red-skinned
schoolmaster, for their chief games were a training in his woodcraft and
in the use of his weapons. Tomahawk-throwing was a favorite sport
because of its gruesome practical purposes. The boys must learn to gauge
the tomahawk's revolutions by the distance of the throw so as to bury
the blade in its objective. Swift running and high jumping through the
brush and fallen timber were sports that taught agility in escape. The
boys learned to shoot accurately the long rifles of their time, with a
log or a forked stick for a rest, and a moss pad under the barrel to
keep it from jerking and spoiling the aim. They wrestled with each
other, mastered the tricks of throwing an opponent, and learned the
scalp hold instead of the toe hold. It was part of their education to
imitate the noises of every bird and beast of the forest. So they
learned to lure the turkey within range, or by the bleat of a fawn to
bring her dam to the rifle. A well-simulated wolf's howl would call
forth a response and so inform the lone hunter of the vicinity of the
pack. This forest speech was not only the language of diplomacy in the
hunting season; it was the borderer's secret code in war. Stray Indians
put themselves in touch again with the band by turkey calls in the
daytime and by owl or wolf notes at night. The frontiersmen used the
same means to trick the Indian band into betraying the place of its
ambuscade, or to lure the strays, unwitting, within reach of the knife.
In that age, before the forests had given place to farms and cities and
when the sun had but slight acquaintance with the sod, the summers were
cool and the winters long and cold in the Back Country. Sometimes in
September severe frosts destroyed the corn. The first light powdering
called "hunting snows" fell in October, and then the men of the Back
Country set out on the chase. Their object was meat--buffalo, deer, elk,
bear--for the winter larder, and skins to send out in the spring by
pack-horses to the coast in trade for iron, steel, and salt. The
rainfall in North Carolina was much heavier than in Virginia and, from
autumn into early winter, the Yadkin forests were sheeted with rain; but
wet weather, so far from deterring the hunter, aided him to the kill. In
blowing rain, he knew he would find the deer herding in the sheltered
places on the hillsides. In windless rain, he knew that his quarry
ranged the open woods and the high places. The fair play of the pioneer
held it a great disgrace to kill a deer in winter when the heavy frost
had crusted the deep snow. On the crust men and wolves could travel with
ease, but the deer's sharp hoofs pierced through and made him
defenseless. Wolves and dogs destroyed great quantities of deer caught
in this way; and men who shot deer under these conditions were
considered no huntsmen. There was, indeed, a practical side to this
chivalry of the chase, for meat and pelt were both poor at this season;
but the true hunter also obeyed the finer tenet of his code, for he
would go to the rescue of deer caught in the crusts--and he killed many
a wolf sliding over the ice to an easy meal.
The community moral code of the frontier was brief and rigorous. What it
lacked of the "whereas" and "inasmuch" of legal ink it made up in sound
hickory. In fact, when we review the activities of this solid yet
elastic wood in the moral, social, and economic phases of Back Country
life, we are moved to wonder if the pioneers would have been the same
race of men had they been nurtured beneath a less strenuous and
adaptable vegetation! The hickory gave the frontiersman wood for all
implements and furnishings where the demand was equally for lightness,
strength, and elasticity. It provided his straight logs for building,
his block mortars--hollowed by fire and stone--for corn-grinding, his
solid plain furniture, his axles, rifle butts, ax handles, and so forth.
It supplied his magic wand for the searching out of iniquity in the
junior members of his household, and his most cogent argument, as a
citizen, in convincing the slothful, the blasphemous, or the dishonest
adult whose errors disturbed communal harmony. Its nuts fed his hogs.
Before he raised stock, the unripe hickory nuts, crushed for their white
liquid, supplied him with butter for his corn bread and helped out his
store of bear's fat. Both the name and the knowledge of the uses of this
tree came to the earliest pioneers through contact with the red man,
whose hunting bow and fishing spear and the hobbles for his horses were
fashioned of the "pohickory" tree. The Indian women first made pohickory
butter, and the wise old men of the Cherokee towns, so we are told,
first applied the pohickory rod to the vanity of youth!
A glance at the interior of a log cabin in the Back Country of Virginia
or North Carolina would show, in primitive design, what is, perhaps,
after all the perfect home--a place where the personal life and the work
life are united and where nothing futile finds space. Every object in
the cabin was practical and had been made by hand on the spot to answer
a need. Besides the chairs hewn from hickory blocks, there were others
made of slabs set on three legs. A large slab or two with four legs
served as a movable table; the permanent table was built against the
wall, its outer edge held up by two sticks. The low bed was built into
the wall in the same way and softened for slumber by a mattress of pine
needles, chaff, or dried moss. In the best light from the greased paper
windowpanes stood the spinning wheel and loom, on which the housewife
made cloth for the family's garments. Over the fireplace or beside the
doorway, and suspended usually on stags' antlers, hung the firearms and
the yellow powderhorns, the latter often carved in Indian fashion with
scenes of the hunt or war. On a shelf or on pegs were the wooden spoons,
plates, bowls, and noggins. Also near the fireplace, which was made of
large flat stones with a mud-plastered log chimney, stood the grinding
block for making hominy. If it were an evening in early spring, the men
of the household would be tanning and dressing deerskins to be sent out
with the trade caravan, while the women sewed, made moccasins or mended
them, in the light of pine knots or candles of bear's grease. The larger
children might be weaving cradles for the babies, Indian fashion, out of
hickory twigs; and there would surely be a sound of whetting steel, for
scalping knives and tomahawks must be kept keen-tempered now that the
days have come when the red gods whisper their chant of war through the
young leafage.
The Back Country folk, as they came from several countries, generally
settled in national groups, each preserving its own speech and its own
religion, each approaching frontier life through its own native
temperament. And the frontier met each and all alike, with the same need
and the same menace, and molded them after one general pattern. If the
cabin stood in a typical Virginian settlement where the folk were of
English stock, it may be that the dulcimer and some old love song of the
homeland enlivened the work--or perhaps chairs were pushed back and
young people danced the country dances of the homeland and the Virginia
Reel, for these Virginian English were merry folk, and their religion
did not frown upon the dance. In a cabin on the Shenandoah or the upper
Yadkin the German tongue clicked away over the evening dish of kraut or
sounded more sedately in a Lutheran hymn; while from some herder's hut
on the lower Yadkin the wild note of the bagpipes or of the ancient
four-stringed harp mingled with the Gaelic speech.
Among the homes in the Shenandoah where old England's ways prevailed,
none was gayer than the tavern kept by the man whom the good Moravian
Brother called "Severe." There perhaps the feasting celebrated the
nuptials of John Sevier, who was barely past his seventeenth birthday
when he took to himself a wife. Or perhaps the dancing, in moccasined
feet on the puncheon flooring, was a ceremonial to usher into Back
Country life the new municipality John had just organized, for John at
nineteen had taken his earliest step towards his larger career, which we
shall follow later on, as the architect of the first little governments
beyond the mountains.
In the Boone home on the Yadkin, we may guess that the talk was solely
of the hunt, unless young Daniel had already become possessed of his
first compass and was studying its ways. On such an evening, while the
red afterglow lingered, he might be mending a passing trader's firearms
by the fires of the primitive forge his father had set up near the
trading path running from Hillsborough to the Catawba towns. It was said
by the local nimrods that none could doctor a sick rifle better than
young Daniel Boone, already the master huntsman of them all. And perhaps
some trader's tale, told when the caravan halted for the night, kindled
the youth's first desire to penetrate the mountain-guarded wilderness,
for the tales of these Romanies of commerce were as the very badge of
their free-masonry, and entry money at the doors of strangers.
Out on the border's edge, heedless of the shadow of the mountains
looming between the newly built cabin and that western land where they
and their kind were to write the fame of the Ulster Scot in a shining
script that time cannot dull, there might sit a group of stern-faced
men, all deep in discussion of some point of spiritual doctrine or of
the temporal rights of men. Yet, in every cabin, whatever the national
differences, the setting was the same. The spirit of the frontier was
modeling out of old clay a new Adam to answer the needs of a new earth.
It would be far less than just to leave the Back Country folk without
further reference to the devoted labors of their clergy. In the earliest
days the settlers were cut off from their church systems; the pious had
to maintain their piety unaided, except in the rare cases where a pastor
accompanied a group of settlers of his denomination into the wilds. One
of the first ministers who fared into the Back Country to remind the
Ulster Presbyterians of their spiritual duties was the Reverend Hugh
McAden of Philadelphia. He made long itineraries under the greatest
hardships, in constant danger from Indians and wild beasts, carrying the
counsel of godliness to the far scattered flock. Among the Highland
settlements the Reverend James Campbell for thirty years traveled about,
preaching each Sunday at some gathering point a sermon in both English
and Gaelic. A little later, in the Yadkin Valley, after Craighead's day
there arose a small school of Presbyterian ministers whose zeal and
fearlessness in the cause of religion and of just government had an
influence on the frontiersmen that can hardly be overestimated.
But, in the beginning, the pioneer encountered the savagery of border
life, grappled with it, and reacted to it without guidance from other
mentor than his own instincts. His need was still the primal threefold
need--family, sustenance, and safe sleep when the day's work was done.
We who look back with thoughtful eyes upon the frontiersman--all links
of contact with his racial past severed, at grips with destruction in
the contenting of his needs--see something more, something larger, than
he saw in the log cabin raised by his hands, its structure held together
solely by his close grooving and fitting of its own strength. Though the
walls he built for himself have gone with his own dust back to the
earth, the symbol he erected for us stands.