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OUR SOUTHERN HIGHLANDERS
[Illustration: Photo by U. S. Forest Service
Big Tom Wilson, the bear hunter, who discovered the body of Prof. Elisha
Mitchell where he perished near the summit of the Peak that afterward
was named in his honor]
OUR SOUTHERN HIGHLANDERS
BY
HORACE KEPHART
AUTHOR OF "THE BOOK OF CAMPING AND WOODCRAFT," "CAMP
COOKERY," "SPORTING FIREARMS," ETC.
_Illustrated_
NEW YORK
OUTING PUBLISHING COMPANY
MCMXVI
COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY
OUTING PUBLISHING COMPANY
All rights reserved
First Printing, November 1913
Second Printing, December 1913
Third Printing, January 1914
Fourth Printing, April 1914
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. "SOMETHING HIDDEN; GO AND FIND IT" 11
II. "THE BACK OF BEYOND" 28
III. THE GREAT SMOKY MOUNTAINS 50
IV. A BEAR HUNT IN THE SMOKIES 75
V. MOONSHINE LAND 110
VI. WAYS THAT ARE DARK 126
VII. A LEAF FROM THE PAST 145
VIII. "BLOCKADERS" AND "THE REVENUE" 167
IX. THE OUTLANDER AND THE NATIVE 191
X. THE PEOPLE OF THE HILLS 212
XI. THE LAND OF DO WITHOUT 234
XII. HOME FOLKS AND NEIGHBOR PEOPLE 256
XIII. THE MOUNTAIN DIALECT 276
XIV. THE LAW OF THE WILDERNESS 305
XV. THE BLOOD-FEUD 327
XVI. WHO ARE THE MOUNTAINEERS? 354
XVII. "WHEN THE SLEEPER WAKES" 378
ILLUSTRATIONS
Big Tom Wilson, the bear hunter _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
Map of Appalachia 8
A family of pioneers in the twentieth century 16
"The very cliffs are sheathed with trees and shrubs" 24
At the Post-Office 32
The author in camp in the Big Smokies 40
"Bob" 48
"There are few jutting crags" 56
The bears' home--laurel and rhododendron 64
The old copper mine 72
"What soldiers these fellows would make under
leadership of some backwoods Napoleon" 80
"By and by up they came, carrying the bear on
the trimmed sapling" 88
Skinning a frozen bear 96
"... Powerful steep and laurely...." 104
Mountain still-house hidden in the laurel 112
Moonshine still, side view 120
Moonshine still in full operation 128
Corn mill and blacksmith forge 136
A tub-mill 152
Cabin on the Little Fork of Sugar Fork of Hazel
Creek in which the author lived alone for three years 160
A mountain home 176
Many of the homes have but one window 192
The schoolhouse 208
"At thirty a mountain woman is apt to have a
worn and faded look" 216
The misty veil of falling water 232
An average mountain cabin 240
A bee-gum 248
Let the women do the work 264
"Till the sky-line blends with the sky itself" 288
Whitewater Falls 312
The road follows the creek--there may be a dozen
fords in a mile 320
"Dense forest and luxuriant undergrowth" 336
[Illustration: APPALACHIA
The wavy black line shows the outer boundaries of Southern Appalachian
Region. The shaded portion shows the chief areas covered by high
mountains, 3,000 to 6,700 feet above sea-level.]
OUR SOUTHERN HIGHLANDERS
OUR SOUTHERN HIGHLANDERS
CHAPTER I
"SOMETHING HIDDEN; GO AND FIND IT"
In one of Poe's minor tales, written in 1845, there is a vague allusion
to wild mountains in western Virginia "tenanted by fierce and uncouth
races of men." This, so far as I know, was the first reference in
literature to our Southern mountaineers, and it stood as their only
characterization until Miss Murfree ("Charles Egbert Craddock") began
her stories of the Cumberland hills.
Time and retouching have done little to soften our Highlander's
portrait. Among reading people generally, South as well as North, to
name him is to conjure up a tall, slouching figure in homespun, who
carries a rifle as habitually as he does his hat, and who may tilt its
muzzle toward a stranger before addressing him, the form of salutation
being:
"Stop thar! Whut's you-unses name? Whar's you-uns a-goin' ter?"
Let us admit that there is just enough truth in this caricature to give
it a point that will stick. Our typical mountaineer is lank, he is
always unkempt, he is fond of toting a gun on his shoulder, and his
curiosity about a stranger's name and business is promptly, though
politely, outspoken. For the rest, he is a man of mystery. The great
world outside his mountains knows almost as little about him as he does
of it; and that is little indeed. News in order to reach him must be of
such widespread interest as fairly to fall from heaven; correspondingly,
scarce any incidents of mountain life will leak out unless they be of
sensational nature, such as the shooting of a revenue officer in
Carolina, the massacre of a Virginia court, or the outbreak of another
feud in "bloody Breathitt." And so, from the grim sameness of such
reports, the world infers that battle, murder, and sudden death are
commonplaces in Appalachia.
To be sure, in Miss Murfree's novels, as in those of John Fox, Jr., and
of Alice MacGowan, we do meet characters more genial than feudists and
illicit distillers; none the less, when we have closed the book, who is
it that stands out clearest as type and pattern of the mountaineer? Is
it not he of the long rifle and peremptory challenge? And whether this
be because he gets most of the limelight, or because we have a furtive
liking for that sort of thing (on paper), or whether the armed outlaw be
indeed a genuine protagonist--in any case, the Appalachian people remain
in public estimation to-day, as Poe judged them, an uncouth and fierce
race of men, inhabiting a wild mountain region little known.
The Southern highlands themselves are a mysterious realm. When I
prepared, eight years ago, for my first sojourn in the Great Smoky
Mountains, which form the master chain of the Appalachian system, I
could find in no library a guide to that region. The most diligent
research failed to discover so much as a magazine article, written
within this generation, that described the land and its people. Nay,
there was not even a novel or a story that showed intimate local
knowledge. Had I been going to Teneriffe or Timbuctu, the libraries
would have furnished information a-plenty; but about this housetop of
eastern America they were strangely silent; it was _terra incognita_.
On the map I could see that the Southern Appalachians cover an area much
larger than New England, and that they are nearer the center of our
population than any other mountains that deserve the name. Why, then, so
little known? Quaintly there came to mind those lines familiar to my
boyhood: "Get you up this way southward, and go up into the mountain;
and see the land, what it is; and the people that dwelleth therein,
whether they be strong or weak, few or many; and what the land is that
they dwell in, whether it be good or bad; and what cities they be that
they dwell in, whether in tents, or in strongholds; and what the land
is, whether it be fat or lean, whether there be wood therein or not."
In that dustiest room of a great library where "pub. docs." are stored,
I unearthed a government report on forestry that gave, at last, a clear
idea of the lay of the land. And here was news. We are wont to think of
the South as a low country with sultry climate; yet its mountain chains
stretch uninterruptedly southwestward from Virginia to Alabama, 650
miles in an air line. They spread over parts of eight contiguous States,
and cover an area somewhat larger than England and Scotland, or about
the same as that of the Alps. In short, the greatest mountain system of
eastern America is massed in our Southland. In its upper zone one sleeps
under blankets the year round.
In all the region north of Virginia and east of the Black Hills of
Dakota there is but one summit (Mount Washington, in New Hampshire) that
reaches 6,000 feet above sea level, and there are only a dozen others
that exceed 5,000 feet. By contrast, south of the Potomac there are
forty-six peaks, and forty-one miles of dividing ridges, that rise above
6,000 feet, besides 288 mountains and some 300 miles of divide that
stand more than 5,000 feet above the sea. In North Carolina alone the
mountains cover 6,000 square miles, with an _average_ elevation of 2,700
feet, and with twenty-one peaks that overtop Mount Washington.
I repeated to myself: "Why, then, so little known?" The Alps and the
Rockies, the Pyrennees and the Harz are more familiar to the American
people, in print and picture, if not by actual visit, than are the
Black, the Balsam, and the Great Smoky Mountains. It is true that summer
tourists flock to Asheville and Toxaway, Linville and Highlands, passing
their time at modern hotels and motoring along a few macadamed roads,
but what do they see of the billowy wilderness that conceals most of the
native homes? Glimpses from afar. What do they learn of the real
mountaineer? Hearsay. For, mark you, nine-tenths of the Appalachian
population are a sequestered folk. The typical, the average mountain
man prefers his native hills and his primitive ancient ways.
We read more and talk more about the Filipinos, see more of the Chinese
and the Syrians, than of these three million next-door Americans who are
of colonial ancestry and mostly of British stock. New York, we say, is a
cosmopolitan city; more Irish than in Dublin, more Germans than in
Munich, more Italians than in Rome, more Jews than in nine Jerusalems;
but how many New Yorkers ever saw a Southern mountaineer? I am sure that
a party of hillsmen fresh from the back settlements of the Unakas, if
dropped on the streets of any large city in the Union, and left to their
own guidance, would stir up more comment (and probably more trouble)
than would a similar body of whites from any other quarter of the earth;
and yet this same odd people is more purely bred from old American stock
than any other element of our population that occupies, by itself, so
great a territory.
The mountaineers of the South are marked apart from all other folks by
dialect, by customs, by character, by self-conscious isolation. So true
is this that they call all outsiders "furriners." It matters not whether
your descent be from Puritan or Cavalier, whether you come from
Boston or Chicago, Savannah or New Orleans, in the mountains you are a
"furriner." A traveler, puzzled and scandalized at this, asked a native
of the Cumberlands what he would call a "Dutchman or a Dago." The fellow
studied a bit and then replied: "Them's the outlandish."
[Illustration: A Family of Pioneers in the Twentieth Century]
Foreigner, outlander, it is all one; we are "different," we are "quar,"
to the mountaineer. He knows he is an American; but his conception of
the metes and bounds of America is vague to the vanishing point. As for
countries over-sea--well, when a celebrated Nebraskan returned from his
trip around the globe, one of my backwoods neighbors proudly informed
me: "I see they give Bryan a lot of receptions when he kem back from the
other world."
No one can understand the attitude of our highlanders toward the rest of
the earth until he realizes their amazing isolation from all that lies
beyond the blue, hazy skyline of their mountains. Conceive a shipload of
emigrants cast away on some unknown island, far from the regular track
of vessels, and left there for five or six generations, unaided and
untroubled by the growth of civilization. Among the descendants of such
a company we would expect to find customs and ideas unaltered from the
time of their forefathers. And that is just what we do find to-day among
our castaways in the sea of mountains. Time has lingered in Appalachia.
The mountain folk still live in the eighteenth century. The progress of
mankind from that age to this is no heritage of theirs.
Our backwoodsmen of the Blue Ridge and the Unakas, of their connecting
chains, and of the outlying Cumberlands, are still thinking essentially
the same thoughts, still living in much the same fashion, as did their
ancestors in the days of Daniel Boone. Nor is this their fault. They are
a people of keen intelligence and strong initiative when they can see
anything to win. But, as President Frost says, they have been
"beleaguered by nature." They are belated--ghettoed in the midst of a
civilization that is as aloof from them as if it existed only on another
planet. And so, in order to be fair and just with these, our backward
kinsmen, we must, for the time, decivilize ourselves to the extent of
_going back_ and getting an eighteenth century point of view.
But, first, how comes it that the mountain folk have been so long
detached from the life and movement of their times? Why are they so
foreign to present-day Americanism that they innocently call all the
rest of us foreigners?
The answer lies on the map. They are creatures of environment, enmeshed
in a labyrinth that has deflected and repelled the march of our nation
for three hundred years.
In 1728, when Colonel William Byrd, of Westover, was running the
boundary line between Virginia and North Carolina, he finally was
repulsed by parallel chains of savage, unpeopled mountains that rose
tier beyond tier to the westward, everywhere densely forested, and
matted into jungle by laurel and other undergrowth. In his _Journal_,
writing in the quaint, old-fashioned way, he said: "Our country has now
been inhabited more than 130 years by the English, and still we hardly
know anything of the Appalachian Mountains, that are nowhere above 250
miles from the sea. Whereas the French, who are later comers, have
rang'd from Quebec Southward as far as the Mouth of Mississippi, in the
bay of Mexico, and to the West almost as far as California, which is
either way above 2,000 miles."
A hundred and thirty years later, the same thing could have been said of
these same mountains; for the "fierce and uncouth races of men" that Poe
faintly heard of remained practically undiscovered until they startled
the nation on the scene of our Civil War, by sending 180,000 of their
riflemen into the Union Army.
If a corps of surveyors to-day should be engaged to run a line due west
from eastern Virginia to the Blue Grass of Kentucky, they would have an
arduous task. Let us suppose that they start from near Richmond and
proceed along the line of 37 deg. 50'. The Blue Ridge is not especially
difficult: only eight transverse ridges to climb up and down in fourteen
miles, and none of them more than 2,000 feet high from bottom to top.
Then, thirteen miles across the lower end of The Valley, a curious
formation begins.
As a foretaste, in the three and a half miles crossing Little House and
Big House mountains, one ascends 2,200 feet, descends 1,400, climbs
again 1,600, and goes down 2,000 feet on the far side. Beyond lie steep
and narrow ridges athwart the way, paralleling each other like waves at
sea. Ten distinct mountain chains are scaled and descended in the next
forty miles. There are few "leads" rising gradually to their crests.
Each and every one of these ridges is a Chinese wall magnified to
altitudes of from a thousand to two thousand feet, and covered with
thicket. The hollows between them are merely deep troughs.
In the next thirty miles we come upon novel topography. Instead of wave
following wave in orderly procession, we find here a choppy sea of small
mountains, with hollows running toward all points of the compass.
Instead of Chinese walls, we now have Chinese puzzles. The innate
perversity of such configuration grows more and more exasperating as we
toil westward. In the two hundred miles from the Greenbrier to the
Kentucky River, the ridges are all but unscalable, and the streams
sprangle in every direction like branches of mountain laurel.
The only roads follow the beds of tortuous and rock-strewn water
courses, which may be nearly dry when you start out in the morning, but
within an hour may be raging torrents. There are no bridges. One may
ford a dozen times in a mile. A spring "tide" will stop all travel, even
from neighbor to neighbor, for a day or two at a time. Buggies and
carriages are unheard of. In many districts the only means of
transportation is with saddlebags on horseback, or with a "tow sack"
afoot. If the pedestrian tries a short-cut he will learn what the
natives mean when they say: "Goin' up, you can might' nigh stand up
straight and bite the ground; goin' down, a man wants hobnails in the
seat of his pants."
James Lane Allen was not writing fiction when he said of the far-famed
Wilderness Road into Kentucky: "Despite all that has been done to
civilize it since Boone traced its course in 1790, this honored historic
thoroughfare remains to-day as it was in the beginning, with all its
sloughs and sands, its mud and holes, and jutting ledges of rock and
loose boulders, and twists and turns, and general total depravity....
One such road was enough. They are said to have been notorious for
profanity, those who came into Kentucky from this side. Naturally. Many
were infidels--there are roads that make a man lose faith. It is known
that the more pious companies of them, as they traveled along, would now
and then give up in despair, sit down, raise a hymn, and have prayers
before they could go further. Perhaps one of the provocations to
homicide among the mountain people should be reckoned this road. I have
seen two of the mildest of men, after riding over it for a few hours,
lose their temper and begin to fight--fight their horses, fight the
flies, fight the cobwebs on their noses."
Such difficulties of intercommunication are enough to explain the
isolation of the mountaineers. In the more remote regions this
loneliness reaches a degree almost unbelievable. Miss Ellen Semple, in a
fine monograph published in the _Geographical Journal_, of London, in
1901, gave us some examples:
"These Kentucky mountaineers are not only cut off from the outside
world, but they are separated from each other. Each is confined to
his own locality, and finds his little world within a radius of a
few miles from his cabin. There are many men in these mountains who
have never seen a town, or even the poor village that constitutes
their county-seat.... The women ... are almost as rooted as the
trees. We met one woman who, during the twelve years of her married
life, had lived only ten miles across the mountain from her own
home, but had never in this time been back home to visit her father
and mother. Another back in Perry county told me she had never been
farther from home than Hazard, the county-seat, which is only six
miles distant. Another had never been to the post-office, four
miles away; and another had never seen the ford of the Rockcastle
River, only two miles from her home, and marked, moreover, by the
country store of the district."
When I first went into the Smokies, I stopped one night in a single-room
log cabin, and soon had the good people absorbed in my tales of travel
beyond the seas. Finally the housewife said to me, with pathetic
resignation: "Bushnell's the furdest ever I've been." Bushnell, at that
time, was a hamlet of thirty people, only seven miles from where we sat.
When I lived alone on "the Little Fork of Sugar Fork of Hazel Creek,"
there were women in the neighborhood, young and old, who had never seen
a railroad, and men who had never boarded a train, although the Murphy
branch ran within sixteen miles of our post-office. The first time that
a party of these people went to the railroad, they were uneasy and
suspicious. Nearing the way-station, a girl in advance came upon the
first negro she ever saw in her life, and ran screaming back: "My
goddamighty, Mam, thar's the boogerman--I done seed him!"
But before discussing the mountain people and their problems, let us
take an imaginary balloon voyage over their vast domain. South of the
Potomac the Blue Ridge is a narrow rampart rising abruptly from the
east, one or two thousand feet above its base, and descending sharply to
the Shenandoah Valley on the west. Across the Valley begin the
Alleghanies. These mountains, from the Potomac through to the northern
Tennessee border, consist of a multitude of narrow ridges with steep
escarpment on both sides, running southwesterly in parallel chains, and
each chain separated from its neighbors by deep, slender dales. Wherever
one goes westward from the Valley he will encounter tier after tier of
these ridges, as I have already described.
[Illustration: Photo by U. S. Forest Service
"The very cliffs are sheathed with trees and shrubs"--Linville River and
Falls, N. C. The walls of one gorge are from 500 to 2,000 feet high.]
As a rule, the links in each chain can be passed by following small
gaps; but often one must make very wide detours. For example, Pine
Mountain (every link has its own distinct name) is practically
impassable for nearly 150 miles, except for two water gaps and five
difficult crossings. Although it averages only a mile thick, the people
on its north side, generally, know less about those on the south than a
Maine Yankee does about Pennsylvania Dutchmen.
The Alleghanies together have a width of from forty to sixty miles.
Westward of them, for a couple of hundred miles, are the labyrinthine
roughs of West Virginia and eastern Kentucky.
In southwestern Virginia the Blue Ridge and the Alleghanies coalesce,
but soon spread apart again, the Blue Ridge retaining its name, as well
as its general character, although much loftier and more massive than in
the north. The southeast front of the Blue Ridge is a steep escarpment,
rising abruptly from the Piedmont Plateau of Carolina. Not one river
cuts through the Ridge, notwithstanding that the mountains to the
westward are higher and much more massive. It is the watershed of this
whole mountain region. The streams rising on its northwestern front flow
down into central plateaus, and thence cut their way through the Unakas
in deep and precipitous gorges, draining finally into the Gulf of
Mexico, through the Tennessee, Ohio and Mississippi rivers.
The northwestern range, which corresponds to the Alleghanies of
Virginia, now assumes a character entirely different from them. Instead
of parallel chains of low ridges, we have here, on the border of North
Carolina and Tennessee, a single chain that dwarfs all others in the
Appalachian system. It is cut into segments by the rivers (Nolichucky,
French Broad, Pigeon, Little Tennessee, Hiwassee) that drain the
interior plateaus, and each segment has a distinct name of its own
(Iron, Northern Unaka, Bald, Great Smoky, Southern Unaka or Unicoi
mountains). The Carolina mountaineers still call this system
collectively the Alleghanies, but the U. S. Geological Survey has given
it a more distinctive name, the Unakas. While the Blue Ridge has only
seven peaks that rise above 5,000 feet, the Unakas have 125 summits
exceeding 5,000, and ten that are over 6,000 feet.
Connecting the Unaka chain with the Blue Ridge are several transverse
ranges, the Stone, Beech, Roan, Yellow, Black, Newfound, Pisgah, Balsam,
Cowee, Nantahala, Tusquitee, and a few minor mountains, which as a whole
are much higher than the Blue Ridge, 156 summits rising over 5,000
feet, and thirty-six over 6,000 feet above sea-level.
In northern Georgia the Unakas and the Blue Ridge gradually fade away
into straggling ridges and foothills, which extend into small parts of
South Carolina and Alabama.
The Cumberland Plateau is not attached to either of these mountain
systems, but is rather a prolongation of the roughs of eastern Kentucky.
It is separated from the Unakas by the broad valley of the Tennessee
River. The Plateau rises very abruptly from the surrounding plains. It
consists mainly of tableland gashed by streams that have cut their way
down in deep narrow gulches with precipitous sides.
Most of the literature about our Southern mountaineers refers only to
the inhabitants of the comparatively meagre hills of eastern Kentucky,
or to the Cumberlands of Tennessee. Little has been written about the
real mountaineers of southwestern Virginia, western North Carolina, and
the extreme north of Georgia. The great mountain masses still await
their annalist, their artist, and, in some places, even their explorer.