[Footnote: Copyright by Clara Gahrilowitsch and Susan Lee Warner.
Harper & Bros., Publishers, N. Y. Permission is also granted by the
Estate of Samuel L. Clemens and the Mark Twain Co.]
conceded to be drawn from the life of his father, struggle to keep the
value or the land unknown to the "natives." Squire Hawkins confides to
his wife that the "black stuff that crops out on the bank of the branch"
was coal, and tells of his effort to keep a neighbor from building a
chimney out of it.
"Why it might have caught fire and told everything. I showed him it was
too crumbly. Then he was going to build it of copper ore--splendid
yellow forty per-cent ore. There's fortunes upon fortunes upon our land!
It scared me to death. The idea of this fool starting a smelting furnace
in his house without knowing it and getting his dull eyes opened. And
then he was going to build it out of iron ore! There's mountains of iron
here, Nancy, whole mountains of it. I wouldn't take any chance, I just
stuck by him--I haunted him--I never let him alone until he built it of
mud and sticks, like all the rest of the chimneys in this dismal
country."
Again "Squire Hawkins'" appreciation of the speculative value of his
lands is shown in a talk with his wife:
"The whole tract would not sell for even over a third of a cent an acre
now, but some day people will be glad to get it for twenty dollars,
fifty dollars, a hundred dollars an acre." (Here he dropped his voice to
a whisper and looked anxiously around to see there were no
eavesdroppers--"a thousand dollars an acre!")
To-day many of the acres owned by Coonrod Pile and John M. Clemens have
passed the hundred-dollar mark and are climbing toward that whispered
and seemingly fabulous figure. And this, too, before the coming of the
railroad for which "Squire Hawkins" could not wait.
Twain delighted to have "Squire Hawkins" sit upon "the pyramid of large
blocks called the stile, in front of his home, contemplating the
morning." But John M. Clemens had his practical side, and the
specifications for the first jail for Fentress county, drawn by Clemens
and in his own handwriting made part of the county's records in 1827,
show a very substantial strain:
"To wit, for a jail, a house of logs hewed a foot square, twelve feet in
the clear, two stories high, and this surrounded by another wall
precisely of the same description, with a space between the two walls of
about eight or ten inches, and that space filled completely with skinned
hickory poles, the ground floor to be formed of sills hewed about a foot
square and laid closely .... the logs to extend through the inner wall
of the building"--etc.
And that jail was standing serviceable and strong until a few years ago
when the prosperity of Fentress county called for an edifice of red
stone.
Clemens and Pile remained friends and competitive land owners until
"with an activity and a suddenness that bewildered Obedstown and almost
took away its breath, the Hawkinses hurried through their arrangements
in four short months and flitted out into the great mysterious blank
that lay beyond the Knobs of Tennessee"--to Missouri, where a few months
afterward "Mark Twain" was born.
Another friend of Coonrod Pile was David Crockett. The "Hero of the
Alamo" had many hunts in Fentress county, upon the "Knobs" and along the
upper waters of the Cumberland. The old Crockett home still stands a few
miles to the north of Jamestown beside the road that leads to Pall Mall.
It was in a house upon land owned by Coonrod Pile that "Deaf and Dumb
Jimmy Crockett" spent the last years of his life, and from which he made
so many journeys to locate the silver mine of the Indians who had held
him captive and who pinioned him to the ground while they dug their ore,
never allowing him to see where they worked, but using him to help carry
the mined product. David Crockett in his autobiography tells the story
of "Deaf and Dumb Jimmy" but he places the scene in Kentucky, making
probably the same mistake in the location of the state-line boundary
which Coonrod Pile had made.
Coonrod Pile lived to the age of eighty-three and at the time of his
death was the most powerful personality in Fentress county. His business
interests had grown to such proportions that he had economic problems to
solve and the simple practical methods he used are followed in the
valley to-day.
He dug only so much coal as he could use, the transportation problem
preventing its sale. He could only market the poplar, the cedar and such
woods as he could float on the rises of the Wolf to the Cumberland river
to be rafted. He raised cotton, but only the amount the women needed for
their looms. He grew wheat and corn, but no more than was necessary for
flour and meal for the neighborhood and to feed the stock he owned,
laying aside a portion for use in time of need for the improvident and
unfortunate.
He was ready at any time to trade with anybody for almost anything. In
the last score of the years of his life, the most successful
financially, he found that the money he could accumulate came only from
the sale of products that could move from the valley across the
mountains by their own motive power--something that could go on foot. So
he turned to stock-raising and with his own slaves cut the present
roadway from Pall Mall to Jamestown, there to join with the old Kentucky
Stock road which ran from Atlanta and Chattanooga, along the Cumberland
plateau by Jamestown on to the north through Frankfort and Cincinnati.
Old Coonrod was not a one-price man on the realty he owned. If the
purchase was for speculation he was a trader with his sights set high.
If the buyer wanted a home, he was generous. It meant the upbuilding of
his community. So the people of that day lived in comradeship. There
were few luxuries and no real want. If there was "a farming patch" to be
cleared, the neighbors came from miles around and there was a
"log-rolling." If it was a home or a crib to be built, it was a
"log-raising," and everyone worked and made fun from it.
The steeple of a church arose in the valley. It was built by those of
the Methodist faith. But before that and even afterward they held
"camp-meetings" and "basket-meetings" where a community lunch was
served under the trees and where the service lasted through the daylight
hours, allowing for a mountain journey home. And the religious fervor
was so sincere and intense at these meetings that they were called
"melting sessions."
Up the mountainside above the York spring, a space was cleared for
shooting matches, where the prizes were beeves and turkeys, and where
the men shot so accurately that the slender crossing of two knifeblade
marks was the bull's-eye of the target. And everyone went on hunts, long
hunts when crops were laid by or winter had checked farm work. And as
human nature is the same the world over, there was many an upright
resident of the "Valley of the Three Forks o' the Wolf" who left the
plow standing in the furrow because the yelp and baying of the hounds
grew warm upon the mountainside.
The families of mountain men are usually large in number, and the estate
of Old Coonrod has passed through a long division. He had eight
children, and his son Elijah Pile, the branch of the family to which
Sergeant York belongs, had eleven children. That portion of the estate
which Elijah inherited passed into good hands. He conserved his part,
handled well the talents left with him; but the second division by
eleven, together with the ravages of the Civil War and the years that
followed, left only seventy-five acres, and far from the best of it, to
Mary York, the truly wonderful little mountain mother who gave to Alvin
York those qualities of mind and heart which stood him in good stead in
the Forest of Argonne, who taught him to so live that he feared no man,
and to do thoroughly and always in the right way that which he had to
do. "Else," as she so frequently said to him, "you'll have to 'do hit
over, or hit'll cause you trouble."
III
The People of the Mountains
The log cabin of the pioneer influenced architecture and gave to us the
house of Colonial design, the first distinctively American type, for the
Colonial home grew around the pioneer's two rooms of logs separated by
an open passageway.
The muzzle-loading rifle--and it was the pioneer's gun--with its long
barrel and its fine sights, gave confidence to the American soldier who
carried it, for he trusted the weapon in his hands.
Progressive inventions finally displaced this rifle in military use, but
for the accuracy of the shot it has never been surpassed, and it is
to-day a loved relic and a valued hunting-piece. Men trained to shoot
with it, used to the slender line of its silver foresight and to the
delicate response of its hair-trigger, have made rare records in
marksmanship. The very difficulty of loading--the time it took--taught
its users to be accurate and not spend the shot.
This rifle stopped the British at Bunker Hill and Kings Mountain, and
over its long barrel Alvin York and some of the best shots of the
American army learned to bring their sights upward to the mark and tip
the hair-trigger when the bead first reached its object.
It was training acquired in the forest, the same manner of marksmanship,
the same self-reliance and individual resourcefulness as a soldier that
gave to Sergeant York the power to come back over the hill in Argonne
Forest, bringing one hundred and thirty-two prisoners, and to the army
under Andrew Jackson at New Orleans, more than a hundred years before,
the fighting resource to achieve victory with a loss of eight killed and
thirteen wounded, while England's records show that "about three
thousand of the British were struck with rifle bullets."
[Footnote: From "The True Andrew Jackson," by Cyrus Townsend Brady,
Chap. IV, p. 88; published by J. B. Lippincott Co., 1906. ]
The man trained behind the muzzle-loading rifle in all the wars America
has fought has been individually a fighter and "a shot," formerly but
little skilled in military training, who while obeying orders fought
along lines of personal initiative. In the earlier wars of the nation
this soldier was known as a "rifleman." It was with this class that
General Jackson fought his campaigns against the Indians and the
British, and at New Orleans "the bone and sinew of his force were the
riflemen of Tennessee and Kentucky."
Against Jackson, England had sent the flower of Wellington's army,
distinguished for famous campaigns on the Spanish peninsula against the
marshals of Napoleon. Wellington said of these men in his "Military
Memoirs": "It was an army that could go anywhere and do anything."
Late in life when General Jackson had grown old, had twice been
President, and was spending his declining days at the "Hermitage," his
home near Nashville, as calmly and peacefully as it was possible for the
fiery old warrior to live, he was shown this appreciation by Wellington.
"Well," he said, "I never pretended I had an army that 'could go
anywhere and do anything!' but at New Orleans I had a lot of fellows
that could fight more ways and kill more times than any other fellows on
the face of the earth."
Returning from the Indian wars and from the War of 1812, the
mountaineers and backwoodsmen, who were then rapidly settling up the
valley of the Mississippi, hung their rifles over their open fireplaces,
or between the rafters of their cabin homes and turned to the enjoyment
of the peace they had won.
In the "Valley of the Three Forks o' the Wolf" Old Coonrod Pile was
still the dominant figure.
Those who had settled in the valley were prospering on its fertile soil.
It was then, as it is to-day, remote from popular highways, but the
valley had grown into a community almost self-supporting. The owners of
the land had equipped their farms with such agricultural tools as were
in use in those days, and the Wolf river had been dammed and a
water-driven flour mill erected.
The houses tho built of logs and chinked with clay were comfortable
homes, where in winter wood-fires roared in wide chimney-places, where
there was no problem of the high cost of living--and few problems of any
kind relating to living.
The men of the valley farmed diversified crops, furnishing all that was
needed for food and clothing, and they even raised tobacco for the pipes
smoked at the general store run by Coonrod Pile in an end room of his
home.
It was the day when the weaving-loom was the piano in the home, and all
the women carded, spun and wove. The table-garden, the care of the
house, the preparation of the meals and the making of the covering and
the clothes were in the women's division of the labor. The families
usually were large and every member a producer. To the girls fell shares
of the mother's work. The boys helped in the fields, chopped the wood
and rounded up the stock, that at times wandered far into the mountains.
There were bells on the cows, on the sheep and even the hogs, and the
boys soon learned to distinguish ownerships by the delicate differences
in the browsing "tong" in the tone of the bells.
Residents of the valley sold to the outside world the live stock they
raised, and poultry and feathers and furs, and tar and resin from the
pines on the mountaintops. They purchased tea, coffee and sugar, a few
household and farm conveniences, and little else. The balance of the
trade was heavily in their favor and they were prosperous and happy.
They had no labor problems. They recognized without collective
bargaining the eight-hour shift--"eight hours agin dinner and eight
hours after hit; ef hit don't rain;" as one old mountaineer, living
there to-day, interpreted the phrase, "A day's work."
Even when the home of the mountaineer was a one- or two-room cabin,
accommodations for any stranger could be provided, and if he wished to
remain, work could be found for him. They observed without thought of
inconvenience the Colonial idea of "bundling."
When the stranger proved worthy there would be a log-rolling and a space
of ground cleared for him to till, and a log-raising in which the
community joined, and made a merry occasion of it, to give him a home.
The way was easy for his ownership of the land and the cabin. Prices for
cleared land, around the middle of the last century, ranged from
twenty-five cents to five dollars an acre.
In the valley the father never talked to the son of the dignity of
labor. Much was to be done and everyone labored and thought of it as but
the proper use of the sunlight of a day.
Their life was primitive, rugged, but contented. Deer and bears were in
the mountains, and wild turkeys were to be found in large flocks, while
the cry of wolves added zest to the whine of a winter wind.
A cook-stove was an unknown luxury, and the women prepared their meals
in the open fireplace. The men cut their small grain with a reap-hook
and threshed it beneath the hoofs of horses.
The mode of life made men of strong convictions and deep feelings. But
those feelings were seldom expressed except under the influence of
religious devotions.
The ministers were all circuit riders and venerated leaders of the
people of the mountainsides. They traveled the mountains on horseback,
constantly exposed to hardships, and they labored devoutly without
consideration of the personal cost. It was the custom for these
itinerant ministers to give free rein to their horses and read as they
rode the mountain-paths, stopping for a prayer at every home they
reached. Protracted meetings were held in almost every community they
visited, for many months would pass before they returned. Funeral
services would be held for all who had died during the absence of the
minister. The meetings lasted so long as there was hope of a single
conversion.
One of the preachers of those old days, who was born in the "Valley of
the Three Forks o' the Wolf" and preached at Pall Mall as part of his
circuit when ordained, has left a record of one year's work:
"During the conference year I preached 152 times, traveled 1,918 miles
on horseback, prayed with 424 families, witnessed 80 conversions to God,
and received 67 persons into the church. I sold about $40 worth of
books, baptized 40 adults and 18 infants ... and received less than $30
of salary for same, and raised for benevolence $36.25. To God be all the
glory! I have toiled and endured as seeing Him who is invisible.
However, when God has poured from clouds of mercy rich salvation upon
the people, and when in religious enjoyment, from the most excellent
glory, I have been lifted to Pisgah's top, and have seen by faith the
goodly land before me, I would not exchange this work for a city
station."
Against the worldliness of some of his people, the same old mountain
minister recorded a protest:
"I have known families who had three or four hundred dollars loaned out
on interest, and not less than five hundred dollars' worth of fat cattle
on the range, who did not own a Bible, or take any religious newspaper,
nor any other kind, and did not have any books in their homes, and yet
owned two or three fiddles and three or four rifle-guns."
The day of prosperity and religious contentment at Pall Mall lasted
until the coming of the Civil War.
Fentress county had contributed its pro rata of volunteers to the
conflict with Mexico, and Uriah York, the grandfather of Sergeant York,
was among those who stormed the heights at Chapultepec.
Tho this war was declared by a President who came from Tennessee, the
Mexican conflict did not reach to the firesides and into the hearts of
the people of the mountains of the state as other wars had done. So
years passed in which there was no outward evidence of the war spirit of
Fentress county that was soon to tear families asunder, leave farms
untenanted and to obliterate graveyards under the rush of horses' hoofs.
The Yorks had come to Fentress county from North Carolina and settled on
Indian Creek. Uriah York was the son of John York, and they came from
Buncombe county in that "Old North State," the county which had a
reputation like Nazareth so far as turning out any good thing was
concerned, and the path of the cant, derisive phrase, "All bunkum,"
leads directly back to the affairs of that good old county.
On Indian Creek the Yorks were farmers, but at his home Uriah started
one of the few schools then in Fentress county. His school began after
crops were laid by and ran for three months. He used but two text
books--the "blue-backed speller" and the Bible.
There are men living to-day on Indian Creek who went to school under
Uriah York, and they recall the uniqueness of his discipline as well as
his school curriculum. The hickory rod was the enforcer of school rules,
but full opportunity to contemplate the delicate distinction between
right and wrong was given to all. A three-inch circle was drawn upon the
schoolroom wall and the offending pupil was compelled to hold his nose
within the penal mark until penitent.
Young and active he took part in all the school sports in the long
recess periods, for his school lasted all day. Learning at the end of
one school term that the pupils had planned as part of the simple
commencement exercises to duck him in Indian Creek, he exposed their
plot, playfully defied them, left the schoolroom with a bound through an
open window and led them on a chase through the mountains. He circled in
his course so he could lead the run back to the schoolhouse. As evidence
of goodfellowship and as an example of the spirit of generosity in the
celebration of victory, he gave to each of the boys as they came in, a
drink of whisky, from a clay demijohn he had concealed in the
schoolroom.
But in those days whisky and apple brandy were considered a necessary
part of household supplies, and there was but little drunkenness. Whisky
and brandy were medicine, used as first aid, regardless of the ailment,
while awaiting the arrival of the doctor with his saddlebags of pills
and powders. Their social value, too, was recognized, and the gourd and
demijohn appeared almost simultaneously with the arrival of any guest.
But it was bad form--evidence of a weak will--for anyone, save the old
men, to show the influence of what they drank. This was, however, a
perquisite and one of the tolerated pleasures of old age.
In the records of a lawsuit tried in Fentress county in 1841 the
price-list of some necessaries and luxuries are shown:
"To two gallons of liquor, $1; one quart of whisky and six pounds of
pork, 80 cents; one deer-skin, 75 cents; two kegs of tar, $2; two ounces
of indigo, 40 cents; one gallon of whisky, 50 cents; five and one-half
pints of apply brandy, 31-1/4 cents."
They were almost uneventful years at Pall Mall from the days of Coonrod
Pile until the Civil War. Less than a score of years lapsed from the
death of the pioneer in 1849 until over the mountains broke the warstorm
in a fury that has no parallel except in wars where father has fought
son, and brother fought brother; where the cause of war and the
principles for which it is fought are lost in the presence of cruelties
created in personal hatred and deeds of treachery perpetrated for
revenge. A third generation had grown to manhood at Pall Mall.
In Fentress county, the polling of the vote upon secession was marked
with bloodshed. The county was on the military border between the free
and the slaveholding states. Coonrod Pile had been a slaveholder, but
few of the mountaineers were owners. Slavery as an institution did not
appeal to their Anglo-Saxon principles; poverty had prevented slavery's
advance into the mountains as a custom, and as racial distinction was
not to be clearly defined into master and worker, the negro's presence
in the mountains was unwelcomed. A war to uphold a custom they did not
practise did not appeal to them; so as a great wedge the Alleghany
mountains, extending far into the slaveholding states, was peopled with
Union sympathizers.
Fentress county on the slope of the great mountain range and on the
border between the territory firmly held by the North and by the South
became a no-man's land, subjected successively to marauding bands from
each side, a land for plunder and revenge.
Before the war the county had been sharply divided politically, and with
few exceptions that alignment held. Those who were Union sympathizers
went north into Kentucky and joined the Federal forces, and those on the
side of the South went for enlistment in the armies of the Confederacy.
The men who remained at home were compelled by public sentiment to take
sides, and the bitterest of feeling was engendered. The raids of passing
soldiers was the excuse for the organization, by both sides, of bands
who claimed they were "Home Guards"--the Federals under "Tinker" Beaty,
and the Confederates under Champ Ferguson. These bands, each striving
for the mastery, soon developed into guerrillas of the worst type the
war produced, and anarchy prevailed.
Churches were closed, for religious services were invaded that the
bushwackers could get the men they sought. Homes were burned. Civil
courts suspended. Post-offices and post-roads were abandoned. No stores
were kept open and the merchandise they formerly held was concealed, and
there became a great scarcity of the necessaries of life. Many homes
were deserted by entire families and their land turned out as common
ground. There was waste and ruin on every hand, and no man's life was
safe.
Each deed of cruelty was met with an act of revenge, until men were
killed in retaliation, the only charge brought against them being, "a
Northern sympathizer," or "a Southern sympathizer." There is not a road
in the county not marked with the blood of some soldier or
non-combatant.
No section of the great Civil War suffered so enduringly as that which
was the boundary line between the sections, and no part of the boundary
suffered more from devastations of war in the passing to and fro of
armed forces and from the raids of marauding bands, steel-heartened in
quest of revenge, than did Fentress county.
At the outbreak of the war, Uriah York went north into Kentucky and
joined the Federal forces. Ill, he had returned to the home of his
wife's father at Jamestown, and while in bed learned of the approach of
a band of Confederates. He arose and fled for safety to a refuge-shack
his father-in-law had built in the forest of "Rock Castle." His flight
was made in a storm that was half rain and half sleet, and from the
exposure he died in the lonely hut three days afterward. Only forty
years of age, he had served his country in two wars.
The "Valley of the Three Forks o' the Wolf" paid its tribute of blood
and money. Elijah Pile had grown old and years before had succeeded his
father, Coonrod Pile, as head of the family. All his sons had grown to
manhood. He was a non-combatant, but a Union sympathizer. His four sons
were divided in their allegiance--two upon each side. And two of them
paid the supreme price, and they paid for their convictions as they rode
along public highways.
Conrad Pile, Jr., "Rod" as he was known, like his father, Elijah Pile,
was a non-combatant, but sympathized with the North. In the autumn of
1863 for some cause, unknown to his relatives, he was taken prisoner by
Confederate troops, members of Champ Ferguson's band. As they rode along
the road with him, some shots were fired. They left him there.
In June of the following year, Jeff Pile, a brother of "Rod," was riding
along the road beyond the mill that creaks in the waters of Wolf River.
He was going to visit a brother. He had taken no active part in the war,
but was a Southern sympathizer. Some of "Tinker" Beaty's men galloped
into sight, fired, galloped on. Mountain men fire but once.
But the murder of Jeff Pile threw a red shadow across the years that
were to come after the war was ended.
The war-feuds of Fentress county did not end with the ending of the war.
There was lawlessness for years. Some of the Union men and Union
sympathizers, in the majority in the county during hostilities, assumed
to the full the new power that came to them by the war's outcome.
Conservative civic leaders sought to reestablish a condition of peace,
but the lawless and desperate element prepared personally to profit from
the situation.
Farms had been deserted and many of the owners of these lands who had
fought on the side of the Confederacy were kept away through the threats
of death should they return, and some who had remained throughout the
war were forced to flee to protect their lives from those who coveted
their property.
A series of land-frauds sprang up under the cloak of the law. Upon
vacant farms false debts were levied; fake administrators took charge of
lands whose owners had died during the conflict; other property was
hastily forced under sale for taxes.
That the proceedings should appear legal, the foreclosures were by due
process of law. But if quietly circulated warnings against a general
bidding for property when offered at court sale were not effective, some
well-known desperate character would appear at the sale and threaten
anyone who dared bid against him.
The bitterness of the feeling of the two sides subsided slowly, but
there was ever present the realization that old alinements could be
quickly and bloodily revived. Champ Ferguson, sought by the Federal
authorities, appeared suddenly upon the streets of Jamestown. That day
his old rival, "Tinker," was there. It was a personal battle the two
leaders fought, while Jamestown looked on silently, fearful of the
outcome. Beaty received three wounds, but escaped on horseback.
A short time afterward Ferguson was hanged at Nashville by order of
court martial. The charge against him was that he had entered the
hospital at Emery and Henry College and shot to death a wounded Federal
lieutenant. Ferguson claimed justification as the Federal lieutenant,
under orders to escort a war-prisoner--a Confederate officer and
personal friend of Ferguson's--to headquarters, had, instead, stood his
prisoner against a tree by a roadside and ordered a firing-squad to kill
him. And the court-martial indictment of Ferguson read--"and for other
crimes."
One of "Tinker" Beaty's men was Pres Huff, who lived in the "Valley of
the Three Forks o' the Wolf." It was generally believed that he was the
leader of the band who had ridden out of the woods and killed Jeff Pile,
as he traveled unarmed along the Byrdstown road.
Huff's father had been shot. The scene of his death was where the branch
from the York Spring crosses the public road at the Pile home. The deed
was done by a band of Confederates who had taken the elder Huff
prisoner, and neither Jeff Pile, nor his brothers, were to be connected
with it, except in the quickly prejudiced mind of the victim's son.
The desperate character of Pres Huff is evidenced by the records of the
United States Circuit Court for the Middle District of Tennessee in the
suit of the McGinnis heirs for land in Fentress county. Their bill
recites:
"Armed men who were led and controlled by one Preston Huff, who was a
brigand of the most desperate character, forced complainants' father and
themselves to leave the county to secure their lives and kept them from
the county by threats of most brutal violence. The history of these men
and the times prove clearly that these threats were not idle, nor those
who opposed them survived their vengeance."
At the foreclosure on the McGinnis property, Pres Huff rode his horse
between the court officers and those attending the sale, and pistol in
hand declared the land his by right of possession. The bill continues as
follows:
"Preston Huff, who was the desperado heretofore referred to, publicly
proclaimed that he had fought for the land, had run the McGinnises from
the county, and if anyone bid for the land against him he would kill him
on sight. Even his co-conspirators would not brook his displeasure. The
land was sold on his bid, no one dared oppose him. The history of his
career shows it was wisdom to shun him. Many have been killed by him in
the most cold and brutal manner."
There came to Pall Mall, when General Burnside was moving his Federal
forces southward, a young man by the name of William Brooks. He had
joined the Union Army at his home in Michigan. He was a daring horseman,
handsome, fair and his hair was red-a rich copperesque red. The army
moved on, but young Brooks remained in the valley. He claimed that as a
private soldier he had done more than his share in the conquest of the
South--and that the conquest that should ever go to his credit was the
conquest of Nancy Pile.
When they were married, his father-in-law, Elijah Pile, gave him a farm
and he tilled it, and he smiled his way into the favor of the community.
He lived in the valley about two years, and a baby had been born to
them. The feeling between the children of Elijah Pile and Pres Huff was
silent but tense; over it there fell constantly the shadow of the murder
of Jeff Pile.
Meeting down at the old mill one day, Pres Huff and "Willie" Brooks
engaged in an excited argument. Between the dark-browed, sullen
mountaineer and the slender, gay young man a contest seemed uneven, and
was prevented. Huff told Brooks that the next time they met he would
kill him.
They met next day, on the mountainside, on the road that leads by the
Brooks home, on across the spring-branch, up beside the York home and
then up the mountain. Huff's riderless horse galloped on and stopped in
front of a mountain cabin; his body lay dead in the road.
There was a hurried consultation at the home of Elijah Pile. Huff's
friends, it was realized, would not be long in coming. Young Brooks went
out of the house, down by the spring, and up the mountain back of it. He
was never seen in the valley again.
Huff's friends waited.
Weeks afterward, Nancy Brooks, carrying her baby, went to visit a
friend. She evaded the watchfulness of her husband's enemies, succeeded
in crossing the Kentucky line and disappeared in the mountains to the
north of it.
The friends of Pres Huff knew she would write home. Months elapsed, but
finally a letter came, and was intercepted. She and her husband were at
a logging-camp in the northern woods of Michigan.
Secretly, extradition papers for Brooks were secured, and Huff's former
partner in a mercantile business, fully equipped with warrant appeared
with a sheriff before the door of the cabin in the Michigan woods,
Brooks was brought back to Jamestown, and put into the log-ribbed jail
that John M. Clemens, "Mark Twain's" father, had built.
But there was no trial by law. The next night, through the moonlight and
the pines, a little body of men rode. Up the valley, across the plateau,
they went, and Jamestown was sleeping.
Taking Brooks from the jail they carried him three miles down the road
toward Pall Mall. Here they bound a rope around his feet, unbridled a
horse and tied the other end of the rope to the horse's tail. They
taunted Brooks. But they could not make him break his silence, until he
asked to be allowed to see his wife and baby. Rough men laughed, and
there was the report of a gun. The horse, frightened, galloped down the
road, and bullets were fired into the squirming body as it was dragged
over the rocks.
The war had steeled men for the coming of death and crime, but at the
manner of the death of "Willie" Brooks a shudder passed over the
mountainsides. To Nancy Brooks was born a son a short time afterward,
and he was named after his father.
A silent, broken-hearted woman, Nancy Brooks took up again her life at
her father's home. To the little girl she had carried on her flight to
Michigan and to the boy whose hair had the copper-red of the father, she
devoted herself. The girl had been named Mary, and she inherited the
piquancy and wit that had made her mother the belle of the valley, and
as she grew to womanhood the mountaineers saw again the Nancy Brooks
they had loved before war had come with its cold blighting fingers of
death.
At the age of fifteen Mary Brooks met William York, the son of Uriah
York, and they were married. A home was built for them, beyond the
branch, beside the spring. And Alvin York was their third son.
IV
The Molding of a Man
The first year after the marriage of William York and Mary Brooks, they
lived at the Old Coonrod Pile home, and William York worked as a
"cropper." Securing the farm that had been given the bride, they modeled
into a one-room home the corn-crib of Elijah Pile, that stood across the
spring-branch and up the mountainside. It was a log crib, and they
chinked it with clay, and using split logs from the walls of the old
shed, a puncheon floor was made. The coming of spring brought the
blossoms of flowers the girl-wife had planted.
Honeysuckle and roses have bloomed around that cabin each succeeding
summer, and it proved the foundation of a home that was to withstand the
troubles of poverty in many winters. It was a home so rare and real that
it pulled back to the mountains a son who had gone out into the world
and won fame and the offers of fortunes for the deeds he had done as a
soldier.
William York, in his simple philosophy of life, disciplined himself, and
later his boys, to the theory that contentment was to be found in the
square deal and honest labor. He was so fair and just in all relations
with his neighbors that the people of the valley called him "Judge"
York; and his honesty was so rugged and impartial that not infrequently
was he left as sole arbiter even when his own interests were involved.
In talks by the roadside, at the gate of his humble home, seated on the
rocks that surround the spring, many a neighborhood dispute has been
settled that prejudice could have fanned into a lawsuit.
Yet William York never prospered, as prosperity is measured by the
accumulation of property, and it has been said of him that he "just
about succeeded in making a hard living."
He was farmer, blacksmith, hunter--a man of the mountains who found
pleasure in his skill with his rifle. But the memories of him that
linger in the valley, or those that are revived at the mention of his
name, are of him in the role of husband, father and friend.
The Civil War had scattered much of the wealth that Old Coonrod Pile had
accumulated and Elijah Pile had conserved. The number of heirs brought
long division to the realty and most of those who had benefited by the
inheritance were all left "land poor."
To Nancy Brooks, as her part, came the home the old "Long Hunter" had
built with such thoroughness and care, together with seventy-five acres
of land. This she left to her boy who had been named after his ill--
fated father--and he lives there to-day. To Mrs. York had been given
seventy-five acres, "part level and part hilly," that was the share of
her aunt, Polly Pile.
In the cave above the spring, which was Coonrod Pile's first home,
William York built a blacksmith's shop, where he mended log-wagons and
did the work in wood and metal the neighborhood required. He farmed, and
worked in the shop--but in his heart, always, was the call of the
forests that surrounded him, and it was his one great weakness. A blast
from his horn would bring his hounds yelping around him; and often,
unexpectedly, he would go on a hunt that at times stretched into weeks
of absence.
His hounds were the master pack of those hills. On his hunts when he
built his campfire at night he gathered the dogs around him and singled
out for especial favors those whose achievements had merited distinction
during the day. Following a custom that in those days prevailed among
owners of hunting-hounds, the dog that proved himself the leader of the
pack while on a hunt was decorated with a ribbon or some emblem upon the
collar. Small game was abundant in the mountains that made the "Valley
of the Three Forks o' the Wolf," but the deer and bear had withdrawn to
the less frequented hills. The hunts were for sport; there was no real
recompense in the value of the pelts.
Alvin was born in the one-room cabin on December 13, 1887. There were
two older children--Henry and Joe. Alvin's early life was different in
no way from that of other children of the mountains. He lived in touch
with nature, and without ever knowing when or how the information came
to him, he could call the birds by their names and knew the nests and
eggs of each of them, knew the trees by their leaves and their bark, and
was familiar with the haunts of the rabbit and the squirrel, the
land- and the water-turtle. While still too small for the rough run of the
mountains, he has stood, red-eyed, by the gate of his home and watched
his father and the hounds go off to the hunt. And as he grew, his hair
took on that color that trace of him while at play could be lost in the
red-brush that grew upon the mountainside.
There was one part of the routine of the week at Pall Mall that has
interested Alvin York from early boyhood. It was the shooting-matches,
held on Saturday, on the mountainside, above the spring, just where a
swell of the slope made a "table-land," and where a space had been
cleared for these tests of skill. The clearing was long and slender,
such a glade through the trees as the alley of the mountain bowlers
which Rip Van Winkle found in the Catskills--only the shooting-range was
longer. A hundred and fifty yards were needed for one of the contests.
This aisle had been cut through a forest of gray beech and brown oaks.
At the points where the targets were to be set the clearing widened so
that the sunlight, filtering through the leaves and flickering upon the
slender carpet of green, could fall full and clear.
Each Saturday the mountaineers were there--and William York and Alvin
were among the "regulars." Often there were fifty or more men, and they
came bringing their long rifles, horns of powder, pouches made of skin
in which were lead and bullet molds, cups of caps, cotton gun-wadding,
carrying turkeys, driving beeves and sheep, which were to be the prizes.
And when the prizes gave out, some of the men remained and shot for
money--"pony purses," they were called.
The turkey-shoots were over two ranges--some forty yards and one a
hundred and fifty yards. At the latter range the turkey was tied to a
stake driven in the center of the opening at the further end of the
glade. A cord, about two feet in length, was fastened to the stake and
to one leg of the gobbling, moving target. It was ten cents a shot,
tossed to the man who offered the prize.
Often the bird fell at the first trial, and a hit was any strike above
the turkey's knee. But the long-distance turkey-shoots were the opening
events, and the marksman had his gun to warm up, his eye to test and his
shooting nerve to be brought to calmness. So frequently it would happen
that the entrance money ran into a sum that gave a prize value to the
turkey, as prices ran for turkeys in those days. There was the element
of chance for the man offering the prize that was always alluring.
The second turkey-shoot was held at the forty-yard range. But the bird
was now tethered behind a log, so that only his head and red wattles
could appear. Here, too, the turkey was given freedom of motion and
granted self-determination as to how he should turn his head in wonder
at the assemblage of men before him; or, if he should elect, he could
disappear entirely behind the log if he found something that interested
him upon the ground nearby, and the marksman must wait for the untimed
appearance of the bobbing head. It took prompt action and a quick bead
to score a hit.
And it was years afterward, after Alvin York had become the most expert
rifle-shot that those mountains had ever held, that he sat in the brush
on the slope of a hill in the Forest of Argonne and watched for German
helmets and German heads to bob above their pits and around trees--just
forty yards away.
The event in which centered the interest of all gathered at those
Saturday matches, was the shooting for the beef.
Each man prepared his own target--a small board, which was charred over
a fire built of twigs and leaves. On this black surface was tacked a
piece of white paper, about two by three inches in size, and in the
center of the bottom margin of the white paper was cut a notch-an
inverted "V," not over a half-inch in height. This permitted the
marksman to raise the silver foresight of his rifle over a black,
charred surface until the hairline of the sight fit into the tip of the
triangle cut into white paper. It was a pinpoint target that left to the
ability of the marksman the exactness of his bead.
The tip of the triangle in the paper was not the bull's-eye. It was
simply the most delicate point that could be devised upon which to draw
a bead.
The bull's-eye was a point at which two knife-blade marks crossed. When
the target was in position this delicately marked bull's-eye could not
be seen by the shooter.
With practice shots they established how the gun was carrying and the
direction in which the nerves of the marksman's eye were at the time
deflecting the ball. Finally the marksman drew his bead on the tip of
the triangle and where the shot punctured the white paper the bull's-eye
would be located.
This was done by moving the white paper until the knife-blade cross
showed through the center of the hole the bullet had made in it. The
paper in this position was retacked upon the board, and underneath was
slipped a second piece of paper making the paper target appear as if no
hole had been torn through it. The bull's-eye so located was usually
within a half-inch radius of the triangle tip.
So exact was the marksmanship of these men that they recognized that
neither gun nor man shot the same, day after day. They knew a man's
physical condition changed as these contests progressed, and that the
gun varied in its register when it was hot and when cool.
The range for the beef-shoot was forty yards "ef ye shot from a chunk."
Twenty-seven yards, or about two-thirds the distance, if the shot was
offhand. "A chunk" was any rest for the rifle--a bowed limb cut from a
tree, the fork of a limb driven firmly into the ground, a part of a
log--anything that was the height to give the needed low level to the
rifle-barrel when the shooter lay sprawled behind the gun. The
permission to shoot from the rest was a concession to poorer
marksmanship. Shooting offhand required nerve, and steadiness of nerve,
to "put it there, and hold it."
The science of marksmanship they learned through experience. The
rifle-ball, forced down through the muzzle, was firmly packed and the
cap carefully primed to prevent a "long fire." In taking aim in the
offhand shots the gun's barrel was brought upward so the target was
always in full view, and as the bead was drawn the body was tilted
backward until an easy balance for the long barrel was found. The elbow
of the arm against which the butt of the rifle rested was lifted high,
awkwardly high, but this position prevented any nervous backward jerk or
muscular movement of the arm that might sway the barrel. Only the weight
of the forefinger was needed to spring the hair-trigger. When the
gun-sights were nearing the tip of the black triangle, the marksman
ceased breathing until the shot was fired.
So accurate were they, that when the bullet tore out the point where the
two knife-blade marks crossed, it was simply considered a good shot. It
was called "cutting center." But to decide the winning shot from among
those who cut center it was necessary to ascertain how much of the ball
lay across center.
Each contestant who claimed a chance to win brought his board to the
judges for award. For each one of them a bullet was cut in half, and the
half, with the flat side up, was forced into the bullet hole in the
target until level with the board's surface. With a compass the exact
center of the face of the half bullet was marked--a dent, as if made by
a pin-point. Then across the surface of the bright, newly-cut lead, the
knife-blade marks of the original bull's-eye, partly torn away by the
shot, were retraced. The distance between the pin-dent center and the
point where the knife-marks crossed could then be exactly measured.
When the cross passed directly over the dented center, the shot was
perfect and the mountaineers called it "laying the seam of the ball on
center."
In the beef-shoots it was a dollar a shot. Each man could purchase any
number of shots. When the pot contained the number of dollars asked for
the beef the contest began. The prize was divided into five parts. The
two best shots got, each, a hindquarter of the beef. The third and
fourth, the forequarters; the fifth of the winners, the hide and tallow.
The beef was slain at the scene of the shoot, each winner carrying home
his part.
William York has been known to carry the prize home on hoof--having made
the five best shots. But this was unusual, for all the mountaineers grew
up with a rifle in their hands and they knew how to use it.
At the shooting-matches it was again "Judge" York. He always handled the
compass in making the awards. To the shooting-matches, still held at
Pall Mall, Sam York, Alvin's brother, brings the compass and the rifle
which his father had used.
The contest for the sheep was under the same conditions that surrounded
the beef-matches; only the entrance fee was smaller. Usually it was six
shots for a dollar. This odd division of the dollar, made to fit their
term, "a shilling a shot," shows the people of the valley clinging to
their English customs and still influenced by the Colonial period in
America. In Colonial days in many parts of the country the shilling's
value was placed at sixteen and two-thirds cents.
Contests for the "pony purses" were consolation-shoots for those who had
made no winning, and to gratify that element who for the love of the
sport would keep the matches going until in the day's dimming light the
sights of the gun could not be used.
One day at one of these shooting-matches at Pall Mall I witnessed a
demonstration of the imperturbability of these mountain men. One of the
contestants had cut center and about a third of the ball lay across it,
when Ike Hatfield, a cousin of Alvin's, took "his place at the line."
He was young, over six feet in height, slender and erect as a reed, and
only his head drooped as his rifle came into position. Some one said to
the man whose shot, so far, was the winning one:
"Git his nerve; else he'll beat you!"'
There are no restrictive rules on the comments or actions of contestants
or spectators--there is usually a steady flow of raillery toward the
one at the shooting-post. To get Hatfield's nerve, the man ran forward
waving his hat, offering his services to get a fly off Hatfield's gun.
The rifle-barrel continued slowly to rise. There was no recognition of
the incident, no movement seen in the tall figure. Then his opponent
talked and sang; and as this produced no noticeable effect, he danced,
and stooping, began "to cut the pigeonwing" directly under the
rifle-barrel.
At this a soundless chuckle swept over Hatfield's shoulders. With a face
motionless he drew backward his gun and turning quietly, spat out a quid
of tobacco as if it were all that interfered with his aim. He again
slowly raised his rifle and fired, despite continued efforts to
disconcert him.
He walked leisurely back to the crowd, rested his gun against a tree and
took his seat on the ground. His only comment was:
"I think I pestered him."
The judges found that Hatfield had laid "the seam of the ball on
center," and won.
In these contests a mountain marksman will shoot eight or ten times and
often so closely will each shot fall to the knife-blade cross that the
hole cut by all of them in the white paper-target would be no larger
than a man's thumb-nail. One of the favorite methods of "warming up"
used by John Sowders, the closest competitor that Alvin York had in
hundreds of matches, was to drive fifteen carpet-tacks halfway into a
board, then step off until the heads of the tacks could just be seen,
and with his rifle Sowders would finish driving twelve or thirteen out
of the fifteen.
It was not astuteness on the part of the German major, as he lay flat
upon the ground in that Argonne Forest under the swaying radius of Alvin
York's rifle, that caused the major to propose, when he found his men
were given no time to get a clear shot at the American sergeant, that if
Alvin York would stop killing them he would make the Germans surrender.
In the shooting-matches back in the mountains of Tennessee that American
soldier had been trained to the minute for the mission then before him.
But there were more powerful influences than his marksmanship that gave
to Sergeant York the steadiness of nerve, the coolness of brain and the
courage to fight to victory against such overwhelming odds.
Back in the mountains in the days of William York, there were other
forms of amusement than the shooting-matches. The "log-rollings," the
"house-raisings," which always ended in a feast or barbecue, continued
popular with the people. And they had "corn-huskings," to which all the
neighbors came.
The "corn-husking" was a winter sport. These, at times, were held at
night under the light of hand-lanterns the mountaineers used to guide
themselves with over the rough roads and along mountain-paths. But day
or night, the husking ended with a feast. The ears to be husked were
piled in a cone on the corn-crib floor, and usually at the bottom and in
the very center of the cone a jug of whisky, plugged with a corn-cob
stopper, was hidden. With songs and jokes they made sport of the work,
each trying to be first to reach the jug. Once the jug was secured, the
huskings ceased, and it was a fair contest between the corn's owner and
his guests to see how much or how little could be done before the
jug-shaped goal was reached.
Seated on the floor around the pile each of the huskers sought to make a
narrow cut in the corn before him to reach the prize more quickly. It
was the farmer's part to have the corn piled in such a toppling cone
that the ears above would roll down as fast as the inroads could be
made, and often the sliding ears entirely buried a husker. He must then
draw back to the edge of the pile and start again. The shout of victory
that went up when the prize was pulled forth warned the women folk at
the house that they must make ready for the coming of hungry men with
appetites well whetted on a product of corn. The next day, the
farmer-host, without help, shucked the ears that were left upon his
corn-crib floor.
Alvin with the mountainsides as his playground grew sturdy and resolute.
He had been put to work by his father when first old enough to hold a
hoe, to help about the house, pack water and bring in wood. The sparks
that bounced from the anvil in the shadow of the cave fascinated him and
he hung around the blacksmith's shop and learned to blow the bellows for
his father and keep the fire hot. He soon grew large enough to swing the
sledge, and he turned the shoes and made them ready. All of this wrapped
hard muscles over a body that was unusually large for his age. His
companions began to call him "The Big-un" and the by-name still clings
to him. This, together with a calmness and an unmatched reserve, gave
him the prestige of leader among his boy associates. At the age of
fifteen he swung the sledge with either hand and was a man's match in
wrestling bouts. One of his neighbors gave this view of him:
"Alvin wuz a quiet, straight-going boy. When he started to shoe a mule
he always did hit no matter how troublesome the mule. He wuz so quiet
about what he wuz doing that we never noticed much o' that side of his
character before he went away. But now we see hit."
In a season of prosperity William York moved from the cave and built a
blacksmith's shop beside the road where it forks, where one of the forks
turns down the middle of the spring-branch bed, on its way to the mill
and to Byrdstown.
And he and Mary remodeled their home, making a two-room cabin of it.
Eleven children were born to them--eight boys and three girls.
Most of the winters of the thirty years of married life pressed
privations upon them. Much of the seventy-five acres was poor soil, and
the earnings from the shop were small. The charge of William York for
blacksmith's work was always made in full realization that it was
something done for a friend and neighbor. Seldom was a job done for
cash. Instead, at some time that was convenient to the customer, he
would call and ask the amount he owed, and usually from William York's
book of memory the account was made out. And not in thirty years was it
disputed, or held to be exorbitant.
There have been winters of privation in the valley for all of those
dependent upon small acreage and uncertain crops, but there was no real
want or suffering from the lack of the necessaries of life. Then, as it
is today, the community spirit in the "Valley of the Three Forks o' the
Wolf" stood guard at the mountain passes and no real poverty could
enter. The farmers' bins were open to any neighbor in need. The
storekeeper willingly waited until some livestock were sold, or even
until the next crop came in. For the wants of his family there was
credit for the man who lived in the valley and worked. He could not
speculate on the wealth of his neighbor, but there was never the need of
a real need. Old Coonrod Pile's theory of the distinctive difference in
the location of trouser patches is still regarded as a sound basis for
business transactions. Those who have tried to live there upon as little
work as they could do have sooner or later followed the path of the
setting sun, and from the valley that indents the western slope of the
great mountain range, that path leads downward.
A visitor from the city once asked Mrs. York if she did her own work:
"Sure enough," the little lady said, "and part of other people's. We had
to. To raise so many children and keep them right is a great big job."
A number of years went by in the period of Alvin's boyhood when no
school was held that he could attend. The school term was only for three
months, beginning early in July. It was found impractical to hold
sessions in the winter, for many of the children lived long distances
away and the branches from the mountain springs that crossed the
roadways and fed the River Wolf, would go on rampages that could hold
the pupils water-bound over night. The schools in the mountains received
no aid from the state and in the remote districts it was difficult to
secure teachers except in the pleasant summer months. The school term
could not begin earlier than July, for it must wait until crops were
laid by, for the students ranged in ages from six to twenty years, and
the larger boys were needed on the farms. Then it was the time for the
potatoes to be gathered, and tomatoes hung red upon the vine and were
ready for pulling. The fall period of the farm was on.
The progress which Sergeant York was able to make in all the years of
his school life would be about equal to the completion of the third
grade of a public school. He was not sufficiently advanced to become
interested in reading and self-instruction before he was called to the
army. He had been but a few miles away from the valley, where the men,
as do other men of the mountains, live in the open of the farm and
forest and think in terms of their environments. The need of an
education had not come home to him.
It was thus equipped that Sergeant York came into the presence of the
generals of the Allied armies and sat at banquet boards with the leading
men of this country in politics and business.
But never in the experiences that have been crowded into the past two
years of his life has he met a situation he could not command, or one
that broke his calmness and reserve.
Clearly and quickly he thinks, but those thoughts flow slowly into
words. He is keenly appreciative of his own limitations and quietly he
observes everything around him. From early childhood he had been taught
to be swift and keen in observation--the rustling of a leaf might be
related to a squirrel's presence, and behind each moving shadow there is
a cause and a meaning.
When he came to Prauthoy, France, the soldiers sought to honor him by
having him carry the Division flag in the horse show. All was new to him
and he was told but little of the routine expected of him. He had become
the man whom all the American soldiers wished to see, and his presence
was the feature of the occasion. The officers of his own regiment
watched him closely, and not a mistake did he make in all the day's
maneuvers. A comment of one of the officers was; "He seems always
instinctively to know the right thing to do."
He came from a cabin in the backwoods of Tennessee but he was raised
under influences that make real men. A boy's ideal, in his early life,
is the father who guides him, and Sergeant York had before him a
character that was picturesque in its rugged manhood and honesty, and
inspiring in its devotion to right and justice. The very privations he
endured and that he saw influencing his home throughout his childhood
were due to principle, for William York would owe no man beyond the
period of his promise to pay. In the light of the sparks from the anvil
in the shop in the cave, sparks that burned brighter even than the light
of day, a comradeship between father and son was formed, and they were
companions until the boy reached manhood when the death of the father
separated them.
There was nothing pretentious about the home in which he was raised. It
was but a cabin, yet the chairs, the tables were of seasoned oak,
hand-made, solid. The puncheon floor was worn smooth with use and over
it was a polished glow from the care of cleanliness, showing purity was
there. The walls were papered with newspapers. That was to keep out the
winter's wind, but over the windows were curtains of white muslin, and a
scarf of it ran the length of the simple board mantel-shelf, and in
season the blossom of some flower swayed there. Within the home, no
angry words were heard, but often there was laughter and song, and when
the formulas for conduct were not followed, even the words of correction
were affectionately spoken.
As the boy's first steps were guided by tender hands, so the proper way
to walk through life was pointed out with gentle words and simple
truths. The mother's teachings were the products of an untrained mind,
but her philosophies came from a brain that has the power to think
clearly and quickly and is never influenced by either anger or
excitement--qualities transmitted eminently to her son. This little
mother in the mountains, unread and untutored, with only the dictates of
her own heart to guide her, had early adopted as her guiding philosophy
the belief that the greatest thing in life is love.
So the impressionable, observant boy realized that life in the rugged
mountains around him called for strength and endurance, but in his home,
or wherever his mother was concerned there must be gentleness and love.
And she has been the greatest influence in his life. He has always
listened to her counsels, except in a brief period of wildness in young
manhood. As his standard of life was formed under her teachings, it may
be again said of him--but this time from the moral standpoint: "He seems
always instinctively to know the right thing to do."
It was the love for his mother, his love of his homelife in Pall
Mall--and the sweetheart who was waiting for him there--that called him
back to the "Valley of the Three Forks o' the Wolf" after he had gone
out into the world and won fame among men.
The very sunlight falls gently on the verdant beauty of that valley, and
the seven mountains rise around it as tho they would shield it from the
contending currents of the world.
Over the valley there comes a long gray dawn, for the sun is high in the
heavens when its slanting rays first fall on the silver waters of the
Wolf. And through this dawn the men are moving, feeding stock,
harnessing their teams, and many of them sing as they ride to their work
in the fields, for they are content. The tinkling of the bells on the
cows grow fainter as the cows browse along the paths that lead to their
mountain pastures. Up and down the road in companionable groups the pigs
are moving, audibly condoling with each other over the lack of business
methods that caused the loss of the location of the entrance to the
field of corn. A crow flaps lazily across the valley, and over the crest
of the mountain the sun comes up.
And the summer twilight there is long, and as it dips into night a
drowsiness rises fog-like over the valley. When a half-moon hangs
between the mountains its light is that of drooping drowsy lids. The
lamps in the cabins on the mountainsides gleam but a brief time and go
out. The descending of the shade of night is the universal bedtime of
the mountain people.
An occasional swinging light may still be seen, but it is the
mountaineer giving attention to some trouble among his stock. Then,
there is silence over the valley, except for the chorus of katydids and
the whistle of the gray owl to his mate in the woods. Now and then there
comes the soft, faint clank of a cow-bell, different from its sound as
the cows run the road or feed in the pasture. It is a slow and sleepy
tang that soothes the ear.
But the mountain curfew is the bark of a dog. Somewhere up on the range
a hound will call to another that all is well with him in his watch of
the night, and the family he guards are all abed. The aroused neighbor
calls to the dog at the cabin next to him, and the message that "all's
well" sweeps on the voices of the hounds on down the valley until it
ends in an echo in the crags.
V
The People of Pall Mall
They are a tranquil people who pass their days as do those who now live
in the "Valley of the Three Forks o' the Wolf." They are free from
invidious jealousies and the blight of avarice toward each other, free
from doubt of the rectitude of their daughters and relieved from
solicitude that the future of their sons, if they remain in the valley,
will be influenced by dissipation or dishonesty--a people who find in
the changes of the weather and its effect upon crops their chief cause
for worry.
Through the gray dawn the farmer looks up to the skies for his weather
report for the day. As he works he watches the clouds scurrying across
the mountaintops, and when he notes they are banking against the unseen
summit of the Blue Mountains that rises to the east, he knows that rain
is soon to come. Some local unknown bard, watching those banking clouds,
has left a lyric to his people, and I heard a gray-bearded mountaineer
singing it as he predicted the break of a summer drought:
"The sun rose bright
But hid its head soon,
'Twill rain a-fore night
Ef hit don't rain a-fore noon."
With their homes back in the mountains nearly fifty miles from the
railway, with a journey before them over rocky roads and up
mountainsides to the other communities of Fentress county, the people of
Pall Mall live in the communion and democracy of one great family.
Children call old men by their Christian names. In it is not the
slightest element of disrespect, and it is instead an appreciated
propriety which the old men recall as the custom of their boyhood. Rev.
R. C. Pile, pastor of the Church of Christ in Christian Union, the
church of the valley, is "Rosier" to everyone. All worship together in
the same church; all toil alike in the fields. In the predial, peaceful
routine of their days there is a positive similarity. A farmer will ride
direct to the cornfield or the meadow of a neighbor, knowing the
neighbor will be found at work there. And, as through the gray dawn of
the day they look up to the skies, the wish of one for rain will be
found to be the community desire.
The social meeting-point of the people of the valley is the general
store of John Marion Rains. The storehouse sits by the roadside at the
foot of a mountain in the western end of the valley, just where the road
tumbles down to the solid log cabin old Coonrod Pile had built, to the
spring and the York home.
One end of the long porch of the store-house, as it runs with the road,
is but a step from the ground, and the mountain falls away until the
floor is conveniently up to the height of a wagon's bed; then the road
dips again until the porch is on a level with the saddle-stirrups and
the women dismount with ease from their high-backed, tasseled
side-saddles as they come in sunbonnets and ginghams.
The men of the mountains seldom hurry on any mission. Their walk is a
slow and foot-sure tread. When they come to the store, if only for a
plug of tobacco, they remain with John Marion for a social hour or more.
Their purchase is an incident, the last act before they depart.
It is rare during the daylight hours that someone is not sitting on the
porch, or in one of the chairs of the row that skirts the show-cased
counter just within the door, or somewhere upon the open horseshoe kegs
that border the floor of the counter opposite. They are waiting to hear
if anything new has happened, for all the news of the neighborhood comes
to the store. The storekeeper is sure to know whether the stranger seen
passing along the road in the morning stopped at the York's, or went on
to Possum Trot or to Byrdstown.
The very commodities upon the shelves and counters of that store are in
friendly confusion. Canned meats, pepper, candy, soap and
chewing-tobacco may be found in one partition; while next to them,
groceries, shotgun-shells, powder and chinaware are in a position of
prominence according to the needs of the past purchaser. In the rear,
piled high, are overalls and "store clothes," hats and shoes.
But the counter, facing the shelves of dress-goods for the women, is
free of obstructions, and its surface is worn smooth and polished by the
years of unrolling of bolts of cloth, while at every quarter-yard along
the counter's rear edge is a shining brass tack-head--the yardstick of
the department. A pair of large shears swing prominently from an upright
partition. The department is orderly and neat, a mute tribute to those
who patronize it.
Into the show-cases has crept every article of small dimension that had
no habitat or kind upon the shelves around--from laces to lead pencils.
Upon nails in the rafters of the ceiling swing buckets and dippers and
lamps, currycombs and brushes.
Off in an L that runs at a right angle from the main store are bacon and
tires for wagon wheels, country-cured hams and brooms, flour, kerosene
and plows.
Under the counter by the door is an open wooden box of crackers, and its
exact location and the volume of the supply are known to every child in
the mountains around. Out of it comes their lagnappe for making a
journey to the store.
Beside the door upon a shelf sits the water-bucket, kept cool by
frequent replenishing from the York spring. Here every man who enters
stops; and, after he has shifted his quid of tobacco, looked around, and
made his cheerful greeting a hearty one with, "Howdy people!" he lifts
the dipper filled with its pleasing refreshment--and the surplus goes
accurately, in a crystal curve, to the back of some venturesome chicken
that has come upon the store porch.
Above the door as you enter hangs a stenciled, uneven, unpunctuated
sign, "NO CREDIT CASH OR BARTER." But that sign has lost its potency. It
is yellow with age and no longer is there anyone who believes in it. It
was hung when John Marion first opened his store, and before he knew his
people and wanted cash or barter for his wares.
There is trading every day that is barter. But it is the women bringing
chickens under their arms, or it basket of eggs. The eggs are deposited
in a box, the storekeeper counting them aloud as he packs them for
shipment; or one of the eleven Rains' "kids" is bestirred to the barn
with the chickens, where they remain in semi-captivity until the egg and
poultry man, in an old canvas covered schooner, comes on his weekly
rounds. And the cash value to the barter is traded to a cent. A "poke"
of flour or of sugar or a cut of tobacco usually evens the transaction.
It is many a journey around the store that John Marion makes in a day.
The decision to purchase each article is announced slowly and as tho it
were the only thing desired. The plump and genial storekeeper goes
leisurely for it, and with a smile of satisfaction places it before the
customer. There is a moment of silence, then a journey for the next
need, and it is only in balancing the barter that the merchant makes a
suggestion.
In a small glass show-case is refuting testimony that the sign over the
door of NO CREDIT had been discredited long ago. The charge account is
open to everyone. A memorandum of the purchase is made upon a strip torn
from a writing-tablet or upon a piece of wrapping-paper and tossed into
the show-case, among many others of its kind, until the customer "comes
around to settle up." Then, with an unerring instinct, John Marion can
pull from the tumbled pile of memoranda the records of the charges he
seeks. If the charge account is to remain open until the next crop comes
in, on some rainy day he will transcribe the charge to his day-book.
The clocks of the valley are not controlled by the government's or the
railroads' standard of time. They go by "sun time" and are regulated by
the hour the almanacs say the sun should rise. John Marion winds the
store clock after it has run down and he sets it by no consultation with
anything but his feeling as to what hour of the day it should be.
At least once a week every man who lives in the valley is at the store,
but Saturday is the popular meeting-time. When the chairs and the row of
horseshoe kegs are occupied, the men rest their hands behind them on the
counter and swing to a place of comfort upon it, or they sit upon the
window-sills, keeping well within the range of raillery that welcomes
the coming and speeds the parting guest. It is a good-natured humor that
these mountaineers love, quick as the crack of a rifle and as direct as
its speeding ball. There is never an effort to wound. But always there
is the open challenge to measure resource and wit.
Many a trade in mules that owners have ridden to the store has resulted
from the defense against the mule-wise critics who several times
outnumber the man who rode the mule. If the mount is a newly acquired
one, especial pleasure is found in a seemingly serious pointing out why
any sort of trade was a bad one for that particular animal.
A mule trade is a measure of business capability. No lie is ever told in
answer to a direct question, but no information is relinquished unless a
question is asked. If no hand is passed over the mule's eyes, and there
is no specific inquiry about the eyes before the trade is consummated,
and the animal proves blind in one of them, the fault lies in the
mule-swapping ability of the new owner. Over no question could two men
be seemingly so widely apart as the two when both are anxious to trade.
They are jockeying for that "something to boot" which always makes at
least one participant satisfied in a mountain mule trade.
There are pitfalls for the unwary in the conversations that pass across
the store aisle. Bill Sharpe, who has spent eighty-two summers in the
valley--and the winters, as well--with seeming innocence started a
discussion as to how far a cow-bell could be heard. He sat quietly as
several compared their experiences while hunting cattle in the
mountains. Finally the old man said his hearing was not so good as it
used to be, but he remembered once "hearing a cow-bell all the way from
Overton county." Down the line a rural statistician figured it must be
seventy miles from Pall Mall to the nearest point in Overton county, and
the jests began to explode in the old man's vicinity. He conceded many
changes since he was young, but so far as he could see there was
evidently no improvement in man's hearing powers. When all his efforts
to secure a side bet that he could prove his assertion were futile, he
explained:
"Wall, boys, ye got away. En once I won two gallons o' whisky on hit. I
was in Overton county. I bought a cow. As she had a bell on her, and I
drove her home, I heard that cow-bell all the way from Overton county."
On Saturday afternoon, or a rainy afternoon, when Alvin York and the
"Wright boys," and one of them, "Will" Wright, is president of the bank
at Jamestown; Ab Williams, gray of hair and bent, but vigorous of
tongue; his son, Sam Williams, tall and straight as an Indian and
equally upstanding for his opinions; John Evans, a local justice of the
peace; Bill Sharpe, who lives in the shadow of "Old Crow"; T. C. Frogge,
of Frogge's Chapel, who farms, preaches or teaches school as the demand
arises; "Paster" Pile and his brother, Virgil Pile, who has been County
Trustee; when any of these are among those gathered at the store, there
is a tournament of wit, with a constant change of program.
Many a time John Marion is compelled to retreat behind a grin when in a
lull "a shot" is taken at him, and his smile is his acknowledgment that
he cannot be expected to add up a charge-slip and at the same time
defend himself against a care-free man upon a keg of horseshoes.
But the storekeeper is never taken by surprize at the badinage of his
patrons. One afternoon after a long wait and another day in the valley
seemed sure to pass with no unusual incident, an old fellow arose from
one of the chairs, stretched himself, and said:
"John Marion, I want a shift o' shirts. Else, I got to go to bed to git
this-un washed."
The storekeeper laid out several of dark color:
"Here's some you can wear without change till the shirt falls off."
"That's right, John; gimme one thet won't advertise thet the ole woman's
neglectin' me."
Another was uncertain about the size of a pair of overalls for his boy:
"Dunknow, John Marion! One tight enough to keep the bees out--a kid
shore wastes energy when a bee gits in 'em."
When it is "good dusk" the storekeeper closes the wooden shutters and
fastens them by looping a small cotton string over a nail. All the
mountaineers are on their way home, but they had not parted without an
interchange of invitation:
"Home with me, boys; home! Ef I can't feed ye well, I'll be friendly."
Or, maybe, the invitation is not so sweeping, and holds a reservation:
"Spend the night with me! I'll not stop you; I'll let you leave afore
breakfast."
Over any gathering at the store a pall of silence descends when a
stranger rides up. If the newcomer is a new drummer unfamiliar with the
ways of the mountains, if he comes imbued with the belief that the voice
with the smile wins, and talkatively radiates his individual idea of
fellowship and democracy, one by one his auditors silently drop away. To
them, an insincere, a false note of democracy has been struck. Perhaps
around the door there will linger some of the mountain boys waiting to
satisfy their curiosity over the contents of the drummer's cases.
John Marion Rains always listens to the story of prices, but his shelves
are really replenished by the drummers who drive to the barn instead of
the store, who unhitch their own horses and feed them from the
storekeeper's supply of corn, who come into the center of the crowd only
after they have unobtrusively lingered awhile in the fringe of it.
One afternoon one of these mountaineers who had withdrawn to the porch,
unhitched, without being solicited, a drummer's horse, and he had
trouble in pulling off a loose shoe and renailing it. The drummer wanted
to pay for the work, but the mountaineer shook his head. The deed had
been done for the horse. The visitor insisted, and finally the price was
fixed:
"Bout a nickel!"