THE PEOPLE OF THE HILLS
In delineating a strange race we are prone to disregard what is common
in our own experience and observe sharply what is odd. The oddities we
sketch and remember and tell about. But there is little danger of
misrepresenting the physical features and mental traits of the hill
people, because among them there is one definite type that greatly
predominates. This is not to be wondered at when we remember that fully
three-fourths of our highlanders are practically of the same descent,
have lived the same kind of life for generations, and have intermarried
to a degree unknown in other parts of America.
Our average mountaineer is lean, inquisitive, shrewd. If that be what
constitutes a Yankee, as is popularly supposed outside of New England,
then this Yankee of the South is as true to type as the conventional
Uncle Sam himself.
A fat mountaineer is a curiosity. The hill folk even seem to affect a
slender type of comeliness. In Alice MacGowan's _Judith of the
Cumberlands_, old Jepthah Turrentine says of one of his sons: "I named
that boy after the finest man that ever walked God's green earth--and
then the fool had to go and git fat on me! Think of me with a _fat_ son!
I allers did hold that a fat woman was bad enough, but a fat man ort
p'intedly to be led out and killed!"
Spartan diet does not put on flesh. Still, it should be noted that long
legs, baggy clothing, and scantiness or lack of underwear make people
seem thinner than they really are. Our highlanders are conspicuously a
tall race. Out of seventy-six men that I have listed just as they
occurred to me, but four are below average American height and only two
are fat. About two-thirds of them are brawny or sinewy fellows of great
endurance. The others generally are slab-sided, stoop-shouldered, but
withey. The townsfolk and the valley farmers, being better nourished and
more observant of the prime laws of wholesome living, are noticeably
superior in appearance but not in stamina.
Nearly all males of the back country have a grave and deliberate
bearing. They travel with the long, sure-footed stride of the born
woodsman, not graceful and lithe like a moccasined Indian (their coarse
brogans forbid it), but shambling as if every joint had too much play.
There is nothing about them to suggest the Swiss or Tyrolean
mountaineers; rather they resemble the gillies of the Scotch Highlands.
Generally they are lean-faced, sallow, level-browed, with rather high
cheek-bones. Gray eyes predominate, sometimes vacuous, but oftener hard,
searching, crafty--the feral eye of primitive man.
From infancy these people have been schooled to dissimulate and hide
emotion, and ordinarily their faces are as opaque as those of veteran
poker players. Many wear habitually a sullen scowl, hateful and
suspicious, which in men of combative age, and often in the old women,
is sinister and vindictive. The smile of comfortable assurance, the
frank eye of good-fellowship, are rare indeed. Nearly all of the young
people and many of the adults plant themselves before a stranger and
regard him with a fixed stare, peculiarly annoying until one realizes
that they have no thought of impertinence.
Many of the women are pretty in youth; but hard toil in house and field,
early marriage, frequent child-bearing with shockingly poor attention,
and ignorance or defiance of the plainest necessities of hygiene, soon
warp and age them. At thirty or thirty-five a mountain woman is apt to
have a worn and faded look, with form prematurely bent--and what wonder?
Always bending over the hoe in the cornfield, or bending over the hearth
as she cooks by an open fire, or bending over her baby, or bending to
pick up, for the thousandth time, the wet duds that her lord flings on
the floor as he enters from the woods--what wonder that she soon grows
short-waisted and round-shouldered?
The voices of the highland women, low toned by habit, often are
singularly sweet, being pitched in a sad, musical, minor key. With
strangers, the women are wont to be shy, but speculative rather than
timid, as they glance betimes with "a slow, long look of mild inquiry,
or of general listlessness, or of unconscious and unaccountable
melancholy." Many, however, scrutinize a visitor calmly for minutes at a
time or frankly measure him with the gipsy eye of Carmen.
Outsiders, judging from the fruits of labor in more favored lands, have
charged the mountaineers with indolence. It is the wrong word. Shiftless
many of them are--afflicted with that malady which Barrie calls "acute
disinclination to work"--but that is not so much in their physical
nature as in their economic outlook. Rarely do we find mountaineers who
loaf all day on the floor or the doorstep like so many of the poor
whites of the lowlands. If not laboring, they at least must be doing
something, be it no more than walking ten miles to shoot a squirrel or
visit a crony.
As a class, they have great and restless physical energy. Considering
the quantity and quality of what they eat there is no people who can
beat them in endurance of strain and privation. They are great walkers
and carriers of burdens. Before there was a tub-mill in our settlement
one of my neighbors used to go, every other week, thirteen miles to
mill, carrying a two-bushel sack of corn (112 pounds) and returning with
his meal on the following day. This was done without any pack-strap but
simply shifting the load from one shoulder to the other, betimes.
One of our women, known as "Long Goody" (I measured her; six feet three
inches she stood) walked eighteen miles across the Smokies into
Tennessee, crossing at an elevation of 5,000 feet, merely to shop more
advantageously than she could at home. The next day she shouldered fifty
pounds of flour and some other groceries, and bore them home before
nightfall. Uncle Jimmy Crawford, in his seventy-second year came to
join a party of us on a bear hunt. He walked twelve miles across the
mountain, carrying his equipment and four days' rations for himself _and
dogs_. Finding that we had gone on ahead of him he followed to our camp
on Siler's Bald, twelve more miles, climbing another 3,000 feet, much of
it by bad trail, finished the twenty-four-mile trip in seven hours--and
then wanted to turn in and help cut the night-wood. Young mountaineers
afoot easily outstrip a horse on a day's journey by road and trail.
[Illustration: "At thirty a mountain woman is apt to have a worn and
faded look"]
In a climate where it showers about two days out of three through spring
and summer the women go about, like the men, unshielded from the wet. If
you expostulate, one will laugh and reply: "I ain't sugar, nor salt, nor
nobody's honey." Slickers are worn only on horseback--and two-thirds of
our people had no horses. A man who was so eccentric as to carry an
umbrella is known to this day as "Umbrell'" John Walker.
In winter, one sometimes may see adults and children going barefoot in
snow that is ankle deep. It used to be customary in our settlement to do
the morning chores barefooted in the snow. "Then," said one, "our feet
'd tingle and burn, so 't they wouldn't git a bit cold all day when we
put our shoes on." I knew a family whose children had no shoes all one
winter, and occasionally we had zero weather.
It seems to have been common, in earlier times, to go barefooted all the
year. Frederick Law Olmsted, a noted writer of the Civil War period, was
told by a squire of the Tennessee hills that "a majority of the folks
went barefoot all winter, though they had snow much of the time four or
five inches deep; and the man said he didn't think most of the men about
here had more than one coat, and they never wore one in winter except on
holidays. 'That was the healthiest way,' he reckoned, 'just to toughen
yourself and not wear no coat.' No matter how cold it was, he 'didn't
wear no coat.'" One of my own neighbors in the Smokies never owned a
coat until after his marriage, when a friend of mine gave him one.
It is the usual thing for men and boys to wade cold trout streams all
day, come in at sunset, disrobe to shirt and trousers, and then sit in
the piercing drafts of an open cabin drying out before the fire, though
the night be so cool that a stranger beside them shivers in his dry
flannels. After supper, the women, if they have been wearing shoes, will
remove them to ease their feet, no matter if it be freezing cold--and
the cracks in the floor may be an inch wide.
In bear hunting, our parties usually camped at about 5,000 feet above
sea level. At this elevation, in the long nights before Christmas, the
cold often was bitter and the wind might blow a gale. Sometimes the
native hunters would lie out in the open all night without a sign of a
blanket or an axe. They would say: "La! many's the night I've been out
when the frost was spewed up so high [measuring three or four inches
with the hand], and that right around the fire, too." Cattle hunters in
the mountains never carry a blanket or a shelter-cloth, and they sleep
out wherever night finds them, often in pouring rain or flying snow. On
their arduous trips they find it burden enough to carry the salt for
their cattle, with a frying-pan, cup, corn pone, coffee, and
"sow-belly," all in a grain sack strapped to the man's back.
Such nurture, from childhood, makes white men as indifferent to the
elements as Fuegians. And it makes them anything but comfortable
companions for one who has been differently reared. During "court week"
when the hotels at the county-seat are overcrowded with countrymen, the
luckless drummers who happen to be there have continuous exercise in
closing doors. No mountaineer closes a door behind him. Winter or
summer, doors are to be shut only when folks go to bed. That is what
they are for. After close study of mountain speech I have failed to
discern that the word draft is understood, except in parts of the
Virginia and Kentucky mountains, where it means a brook. One is reminded
of the colonial, who, visiting England, remarked of the British people:
"It is a survival of the fittest--the fittest to exist in fog." Here, it
is the fittest to survive cold, and wet, and drafts.
Running barefooted in the snow is exceptional nowadays; but it is by no
means the limit of hardiness or callosity that some of these people
display. It is not so long ago that I passed an open lean-to of chestnut
bark far back in the wilderness, wherein a family of Tennesseans was
spending the year. There were three children, the eldest a lad of
twelve. The entire worldly possessions of this family could easily be
packed around on their backs. Poverty, however, does not account for
such manner of living. There is none so poor in the mountains that he
need rear his children in a bark shed. It is all a matter of taste.
There is a wealthy man known to everyone around Waynesville, who, being
asked where he resided, as a witness in court, answered: "Three, four
miles up and down Jonathan Creek." The judge was about to fine him for
contempt, when it developed that the witness spoke literal truth. He
lives neither in house nor camp, but perambulates his large estate and
when night comes lies down wherever he may happen to be. In winter he
has been known to go where some of his pigs bedded in the woods, usurp
the middle for himself, and borrow comfort from their bodily heat.
This man is worth over a hundred thousand dollars. He visited the
world's fairs at Chicago and St. Louis, wearing the old long coat that
serves him also as blanket, and carrying his rations in a sack. Far from
being demented, he is notoriously so shrewd on the stand and so learned
in the law that he is formidable to every attorney who cross-questions
him.
I cite these last two instances not merely as eccentricities of
character, but as really typical of the bodily stamina that most of the
mountaineers can display if they want to. Their smiling endurance of
cold and wet and privation would have endeared them to the first
Napoleon, who declared that those soldiers were the best who bivouacked
shelterless throughout the year.
In spite of such apparent "toughness," the mountaineers are not a
notably healthy people. The man who exposes himself wantonly year after
year must pay the piper. Sooner or later he "adopts a rheumatiz," and
the adoption lasts till he dies. So also in dietary matters. The
backwoodsmen through ruthless weeding-out of the normally sensitive have
acquired a wonderful tolerance of swimming grease, doughy bread and
half-fried cabbage; but, even so, they are gnawed by dyspepsia. This
accounts in great measure for the "glunch o' sour disdain" that mars so
many countenances. A neighbor said to me of another: "He has a gredge
agin all creation, and glories in human misery." So would anyone else
who ate at the same table. Many a homicide in the mountains can be
traced directly to bad food and the raw whiskey taken to appease a
soured stomach.
Every stranger in Appalachia is quick to note the high percentage of
defectives among the people. However, we should bear in mind that in the
mountains proper there are few, if any, public refuges for this class,
and that home ties are so powerful that mountaineers never send their
"fitified folks" or "half-wits," or other unfortunates, to any
institution in the lowlands, so long as it is bearable to have them
around. Such poor creatures as would be segregated in more advanced
communities, far from the public eye, here go at large and reproduce
their kind.
Extremely early marriages are tolerated, as among all primitive people.
I knew a hobbledehoy of sixteen who married a frail, tuberculous girl of
twelve, and in the same small settlement another lad of sixteen who
wedded a girl of thirteen. In both cases the result was wretched beyond
description.
The evil consequences of inbreeding of persons closely akin are well
known to the mountaineers; but here knowledge is no deterrent, since
whole districts are interrelated to start with. Owing to the isolation
of the clans, and their extremely limited travels, there are abundant
cases like those caustically mentioned in _King Spruce_: "All Skeets and
Bushees, and married back and forth and crossways and upside down till
ev'ry man is his own grandmother, if he only knew enough to figger
relationship."
The mountaineers are touchy on these topics and it is but natural that
they should be so. Nevertheless it is the plain duty of society to study
such conditions and apply the remedy. There was a time when the Scotch
people (to cite only one instance out of many) were in still worse
case, threatened with race degeneration; but improved economic
conditions, followed by education, made them over into one of the most
vigorous of modern peoples.
When I lived up in the Smokies there was no doctor within sixteen miles
(and then, none who ever had attended a medical school). It was
inevitable that my first-aid kit and limited knowledge of medicine
should be requisitioned until I became a sort of "doctor to the
settle_ment_."[8] My services, being free, at once became popular, and
there was no escape; for, if I treated the Smiths, let us say, and
ignored a call from the Robinsons, the slight would be resented by all
Robinson connections throughout the land. So my normal occupations often
were interrupted by such calls as these:
"John's Lize Ann she ain't much; cain't you-uns give her some
easin'-powder for that hurtin' in her chist?"
"Old Uncle Bobby Tuttle's got a pone come up on his side; looks like he
mought drap off, him bein' weak and right narvish and sick with a
head-swimmin'."
"Ike Morgan Pringle's a-been horse-throwed down the clift, and he's in a
manner stone dead."
"Right sensibly atween the shoulders I've got a pain; somethin' 's gone
wrong with my stummick; I don't 'pear to have no stren'th left; and
sometimes I'm nigh sifflicated. Whut you reckon ails me?"
"Come right over to Mis' Fullwiler's, quick; she's fell down and busted
a rib inside o' her!"
On these errands of mercy I soon picked up some rules of practice that
are not laid down in the books. I learned to carry not only my own
bandages but my own towels and utensils for washing and sterilizing. I
kept my mouth shut about germ theories of disease, having no troops to
enforce orders and finding that mere advice incited downright
perversity. I administered potent drugs in person and left nothing to be
taken according to direction except placebos.
Once, in forgetfulness, I left a tablet of corrosive sublimate on the
mantel after dressing a wound, and the man of the house told me next day
that he had "'lowed to swaller it' and see if it wouldn't ease his
headache!" A geologist and I, exploring the hills with a mountaineer,
fell into discussion of filth diseases and germs, not realizing that we
were overheard. Happening to pass an ant-hill, Frank remarked to me
that formic acid was supposed to be antagonistic to the germ of
laziness. Instantly we heard a growl from our woodsman: "By God, I was
_expectin'_ to hear the like o' that!"
Ordinarily wounds are stanched with dusty cobwebs and bound up in any
old rag. If infection ensues, Providence has to take the blame. A woman
gashed her foot badly with an axe; I asked her what she did for it;
disdainfully she answered, "Tied it up in sut and a rag, and went to
hoein' corn."
An injured person gets scant sympathy, if any. So far as outward
demeanor goes, and public comment, the witnesses are utterly callous.
The same indifference is shown in the face of impending death. People
crowd around with no other motive, seemingly, than morbid curiosity to
see a person die. I asked our local preacher what the folks would do if
a man broke his thigh so that the bone protruded. He merely elevated his
eyebrows and replied: "We'd set around and sing until he died."
The mountaineers' fortitude under severe pain is heroic, though often
needless. For all minor operations and frequently for major ones they
obstinately refuse to take an anesthetic, being perversely suspicious
of everything that they do not understand. Their own minor surgery and
obstetric practice is barbarous. A large proportion of the mountain
doctors know less about human anatomy than a butcher does about a pig's.
Sometimes this ignorance passes below ordinary common sense. There is a
"doctor" still practicing who, after a case of confinement, sits beside
the patient and presses hard upon the hips for half an hour, explaining
that it is to "push the bones back into place; don't you know they
allers comes uncoupled in the socket?" This, I suppose, is the limit;
but there are very many practicing physicians in the back country who
could not name or locate the arteries of either foot or hand to save
their lives.
It was here I first heard of "tooth-jumping." Let one of my old
neighbors tell it in his own way:
"You take a cut nail (not one o' those round wire nails) and place its
squar p'int agin the ridge of the tooth, jest under the edge of the gum.
Then jump the tooth out with a hammer. A man who knows how can jump a
tooth without it hurtin' half as bad as pullin'. But old Uncle Neddy
Cyarter went to jump one of his own teeth out, one time, and missed the
nail and mashed his nose with the hammer. He had the weak trembles."
"I have heard of tooth-jumping," said I, "and reported it to dentists
back home, but they laughed at me."
"Well, they needn't laugh; for it's so. Some men git to be as
experienced at it as tooth-dentists are at pullin'. They cut around the
gum, and then put the nail at jest sich an angle, slantin' downward for
an upper tooth, or upwards for a lower one, and hit one lick."
"Will the tooth come at the first lick?"
"Ginerally. If it didn't, you might as well stick your head in a swarm
o' bees and fergit who you are."
"Are back teeth extracted in that way?"
"Yes, sir; any kind of a tooth. I've burnt my holler teeth out with a
red-hot wire."
"Good God!"
"Hit's so. The wire'd sizzle like fryin'."
"Kill the nerve?"
"No; but it'd sear the mar so it wouldn't be so sensitive."
"Didn't hurt, eh?"
"Hurt like hell for a moment. I held the wire one time for Jim Bob
Jimwright, who couldn't reach the spot for hisself. I _told_ him to hold
his tongue back; but when I touched the holler he jumped and wropped
his tongue agin the wire. The words that man used ain't fitty to tell."
Some of the ailments common in the mountains were new to me. For
instance, "dew pizen," presumably the poison of some weed, which,
dissolved in dew, enters the blood through a scratch or abrasion. As a
woman described it, "Dew pizen comes like a risin', and laws-a-marcy how
it does hurt! I stove a brier in my heel wunst, and then had to hunt
cows every morning in the dew. My leg swelled up black to clar above the
knee, and Dr. Stinchcomb lanced the place seven times. I lay on a pallet
on the floor for over a month. My leg like to killed me. I've seed
persons jest a lot o' sores all over, as big as my hand, from dew
pizen."
A more mysterious disease is "milk-sick," which prevails in certain
restricted districts, chiefly where the cattle graze in rich and deeply
shaded coves. If not properly treated it is fatal both to the cow and to
any human being who drinks her fresh milk or eats her butter. It is not
transmitted by sour milk or by buttermilk. There is a characteristic
fetor of the breath. It is said that milk from an infected cow will not
foam and that silver is turned black by it. Mountaineers are divided in
opinion as to whether this disease is of vegetable or of mineral origin;
some think it is an efflorescence from gas that settles on plants. This
much is certain: that it disappears from "milk-sick coves" when they are
cleared of timber and the sunlight let in. The prevalent treatment is an
emetic, followed by large doses of apple brandy and honey; then oil to
open the bowels. Perhaps the extraordinary distaste for fresh milk and
butter, or the universal suspicion of these foods that mountaineers
evince in so many localities, may have sprung up from experience with
"milk-sick" cows. I have not found this malady mentioned in any treatise
on medicine; yet it has been known from our earliest frontier times.
Abraham Lincoln's mother died of it.
That the hill folk remain a rugged and hardy people in spite of
unsanitary conditions so gross that I can barely hint at them, is due
chiefly to their love of pure air and pure water. No mountain cabin
needs a window to ventilate it: there are cracks and cat-holes
everywhere, and, as I have said, the doors are always open except at
night. "Tight houses," sheathed or plastered, are universally despised,
partly from inherited shiftlessness, partly for less obvious reasons.
One of Miss MacGowan's characters fairly insulted the neighborhood by
building a modern house. "Why lordy! Lookee hyer, Creed," remonstrated
Doss Provine over a question of matching boards and battening joints,
"ef you git yo' pen so almighty tight as that you won't git no fresh
air. Man's bound to have ventilation. Course you can leave the do' open
all the time like we-all do; but when you're a-holdin' co't and
sech-like maybe you'll want to shet the do' sometimes--and then whar'll
ye git breath to breathe?... All these here glass winders is blame
foolishness to _me_. Ef ye need light, open the do'. Ef somebody comes
that ye don't want in, you can shet it and put up a bar. But saw the
walls full o' holes an' set in glass winders, an' any feller that's got
a mind to can pick ye off with a rifle ball as easy as not whilst ye set
by the fire of an evenin'."
When mountain people move to the lowlands and go to living in
tight-framed houses, they soon deteriorate like Indians. It is of no use
to teach them to ventilate by lowering windows from the top. That is
some more "blame foolishness"--their adherence to old ways is stubborn,
sullen, and perverse to a degree that others cannot comprehend. Then,
too, in the lowlands, they simply cannot stand the water. As Emma Miles
says: "No other advantages will ever make up for the lack of good water.
There is a strong prejudice against pumps; if a well must be dug, it is
usually left open to the air, and the water is reached by means of a
hooked pole which requires some skillful manipulation to prevent losing
the bucket. Cisterns are considered filthy; water that has stood
overnight is 'dead water,' hardly fit to wash one's face in. The
mountaineer takes the same pride in his water supply as the rich man in
his wine cellar, and is in this respect a connoisseur. None but the
purest and coldest of freestone will satisfy him."
Once when I was staying in a lumber camp on the Tennessee side, near the
top of Smoky, my friend Bob and I tramped down to the nearest town, ten
miles, for supplies. We did not start until after dinner and intended to
spend the night at a hotel. It was a sultry day and we arrived very
thirsty. Bob took some ice-water into his mouth, and instantly spat it
out, exclaiming: "Be damned if I'll stay here; that ain't fit to drink;
I'm goin' back." And back he would have gone, ten miles up a hard grade,
at night, if someone had not shown us a spring.
[Illustration: Photo by Arthur Keith
A misty veil of falling water]
A little colony of our Hazel Creek people took a notion to try the
Georgia cotton mills. They nearly died there from homesickness, tight
houses, and "bad water." All but one family returned as soon as they
possibly could. While trying to save enough money to get away one old
man said; "I lied to my God when I left the mountains and kem to these
devilish cotton mills. Ef only He'd turn me into a varmint I'd run back
to-night! Boys, I dream I'm in torment; an' when I wake up I lay thar
an' think o' the spring branch runnin' over the root o' that thar
poplar; an' I say, could I git me one drink o' that water I'd be content
to lay me down and die!"
Poor old John! In his country there are a hundred spring branches
running over poplar roots; but "_that thar_ poplar": we knew the very
one he meant. It was by the roadside. The brooklet came from a disused
still-house hidden in laurel and hemlock so dense that direct sunlight
never penetrated the glen. Cold and sparkling and crystal clear, the
gushing water enticed every wayfarer to bend and drink, whether he was
thirsty or no. John is back in his own land now, and doubtless often
goes to drink of that veritable fountain of youth.