THE MOUNTAIN DIALECT
One day I handed a volume of John Fox's stories to a neighbor and asked
him to read it, being curious to learn how those vivid pictures of
mountain life would impress one who was born and bred in the same
atmosphere. He scanned a few lines of the dialogue, then suddenly stared
at me in amazement.
"What's the matter with it?" I asked, wondering what he could have found
to startle him at the very beginning of a story.
"Why, that feller _don't know how to spell_!"
Gravely I explained that dialect must be spelled as it is pronounced, so
far as possible, or the life and savor of it would be lost. But it was
of no use. My friend was outraged. "That tale-teller then is jest makin'
fun of the mountain people by misspellin' our talk. You educated folks
don't spell your own words the way you say them."
A most palpable hit; and it gave me a new point of view.
To the mountaineers themselves their speech is natural and proper, of
course, and when they see it bared to the spotlight, all eyes drawn
toward it by an orthography that is as odd to them as it is to us, they
are stirred to wrath, just as we would be if our conversation were
reported by some Josh Billings or Artemas Ward.
The curse of dialect writing is elision. Still, no one can write it
without using the apostrophe more than he likes to; for our highland
speech is excessively clipped. "I'm comin' d'reck'ly" has a quaintness
that should not be lost. We cannot visualize the shambling but eager
mountaineer with a sample of ore in his hand unless the writer reports
him faithfully: "Wisht you'd 'zamine this rock fer me--I heern tell you
was one o' them 'sperts."
Although the hillsmen save some breath in this way, they waste a good
deal by inserting sounds where they do not belong. Sometimes it is only
an added consonant: gyarden, acrost, corkus (caucus); sometimes a
syllable: loaferer, musicianer, suddenty. Occasionally a word is both
added to and clipped from, as cyarn (carrion). They are fond of grace
syllables: "I gotta me a deck o' cyards." "There ain't nary bitty sense
in it."
More interesting are substitutions of one sound for another. In mountain
dialect all vowels may be interchanged with others. Various sounds of
_a_ are confused with _e_, as hed (had), kem (came), keerful; or with
_i_, grit (grate), rifle (raffle); with _o_, pomper, toper (taper),
wrop; or with _u_, fur, ruther. So any other vowel may serve in place of
_e_: sarve, chist, upsot, tumble. Any other may displace _i_: arn
(iron), eetch, hender, whope or whup. The _o_ sounds are more stable,
but we have crap (crop), yan, clus, and many similar variants. Any other
vowel may do for _u_: braysh or bresh (brush), shet, sich, shore (sure).
Mountaineers have peculiar difficulty with diphthongs: haar (hair),
cheer (chair), brile, and a host of others. The word coil is variously
pronounced quile, querl or quorl.
Substitution of consonants is not so common as of vowels, but most
hillsmen say nabel (navel), ballet (ballad), Babtis', rench or rinch,
brickie (brittle), and many say atter or arter, jue (due), tejus,
vascinator (fascinator--a woman's scarf). They never drop _h_, nor
substitute anything for it.
The word woman has suffered some strange sea-changes. Most mountaineers
pronounce it correctly, but some drop the _w_ ('oman), others add an
_r_ (womern and wimmern), while in Michell County, North Carolina, we
hear the extraordinary forms ummern and dummern ("La, look at all the
dummerunses a-comin'!")
On the other hand, some words that most Americans mispronounce are
always sounded correctly in the southern highlands, as dew and new
(never doo, noo). Creek is always given its true _ee_ sound, never
crick. Nare (as we spell it in dialect stories) is simply the right
pronunciation of ne'er, and nary is ne'er a, with the _a_ turned into a
short _i_ sound.
It should be understood that the dialect varies a good deal from place
to place, and, even in the same neighborhood, we rarely hear all
families speaking it alike. Outlanders who essay to write it are prone
to err by making their characters speak it too consistently. It is only
in the backwoods, or among old people and the penned-at-home women, that
the dialect is used with any integrity. In railroad towns we hear little
of it, and farmers who trade in those towns adapt their speech somewhat
to the company they may be in. The same man, at different times, may say
can't and cain't, set and sot, jest and jes' and jist, atter and arter
or after, seed and seen, here and hyur and hyar, heerd and heern or
heard, sich and sech, took and tuk--there is no uniformity about it. An
unconscious sense of euphony seems to govern the choice of hit or it,
there or thar.
Since the Appalachian people have a marked Scotch-Irish strain, we would
expect their speech to show a strong Scotch influence. So far as
vocabulary is concerned, there is really little of it. A few words,
caigy (cadgy), coggled, fernent, gin for if, needcessity, trollop,
almost exhaust the list of distinct Scotticisms. The Scotch-Irish, as we
call them, were mainly Ulstermen, and the Ulster dialect of to-day bears
little analogy to that of Appalachia.
Scotch influence does appear, however, in one vital characteristic of
the pronunciation: with few exceptions our highlanders sound _r_
distinctly wherever it occurs, though they never trill it. In the
British Isles this constant sounding of _r_ in all positions is
peculiar, I think, to Scotland, Ireland, and a few small districts in
the northern border counties of England. With us it is general practice
outside of New England and those parts of the southern lowlands that had
no flood of Celtic immigration in the eighteenth century. I have never
heard a Carolina mountaineer say niggah or No'th Ca'lina, though in the
last word the syllable _ro_ is often elided.
In some mountain districts we hear do' (door), flo', mo', yo', co'te,
sca'ce (long _a_), pusson; but such skipping of the _r_ is common only
where lowland influence has crept in. Much oftener the _r_ is dropped
from dare, first, girl, horse, nurse, parcel, worth (dast, fust, gal,
hoss, nuss, passel, wuth). By way of compensation the hillsmen sometimes
insert a euphonic _r_ where it has no business; just as many New
Englanders say, "The idear of it!"
Throughout Appalachia such words as last, past, advantage, are
pronounced with the same vowel sound as is heard in man. This helps to
delimit the people, classifying them with Pennsylvanians and Westerners:
a linguistic grouping that will prove significant when we come to study
the origin and history of this isolated race.
An editor who had made one or two short trips into the mountains once
wrote me that he thought the average mountaineer's vocabulary did not
exceed three hundred words. This may be a natural inference if one
spends but a few weeks among these people and sees them only under the
prosaic conditions of workaday life. But gain their intimacy and you
shall find that even the illiterates among them have a range of
expression that is truly remarkable. I have myself taken down from the
lips of Carolina mountaineers some eight hundred dialectical or
obsolete words, to say nothing of the much greater number of standard
English terms that they command.
Seldom is a "hill-billy" at a loss for a word. Lacking other means of
expression, there will come "spang" from his mouth a coinage of his own.
Instantly he will create (always from English roots, of course) new
words by combination, or by turning nouns into verbs or otherwise
interchanging the parts of speech.
Crudity or deficiency of the verb characterizes the speech of all
primitive peoples. In mountain vernacular many words that serve as verbs
are only nouns of action, or adjectives, or even adverbs. "That bear 'll
meat me a month." "They churched Pitt for tale-bearin'." "Granny kept
faultin' us all day." "Are ye fixin' to go squirrelin'?" "Sis blouses
her waist a-purpose to carry a pistol." "My boy Jesse book-kept for the
camp." "I disgust bad liquor." "This poke salat eats good." "I ain't
goin' to bed it no longer" (lie abed). "We can muscle this log up." "I
wouldn't pleasure them enough to say it." "Josh ain't much on
sweet-heartin'." "I don't confidence them dogs much." "The creek away up
thar turkey-tails out into numerous leetle forks."
A verb will be coined from an adverb: "We better git some wood, bettern
we?" Or from an adjective: "Much that dog and see won't he come along"
(pet him, make much of him). "I didn't do nary thing to contrary her."
"Baby, that onion 'll strong ye!" "Little Jimmy fell down and benastied
himself to beat the devil."
Conversely, nouns are created from verbs. "Hit don't make no differ." "I
didn't hear no give-out at meetin'" (announcement). "You can git ye one
more gittin' o' wood up thar." "That Nantahala is a master shut-in, jest
a plumb gorge." Or from an adjective: "Them bugs--the little old
hatefuls!" "If anybody wanted a history of this county for fifty years
he'd git a lavish of it by reading that mine-suit testimony." Or from an
adverb: "Nance tuk the biggest through at meetin'!" (shouting spell). An
old lady quoted to me in a plaintive quaver:
"It matters not, so I've been told,
Where the body goes when the heart grows cold;
"But," she added, "a person has a rather about where he'd be put."
In mountain vernacular the Old English strong past tense still lives in
begun, drunk, holped, rung, shrunk, sprung, stunk, sung, sunk, swum.
Holp is used both as preterite and as infinitive: the _o_ is long, and
the _l_ distinctly sounded by most of the people, but elided by such as
drop it from almost, already, self (the _l_ is elided from help by many
who use that form of the verb).
Examples of a strong preterite with dialectical change of the vowel are
bruk, brung, drap or drapped, drug, friz, roke or ruck (raked), saunt
(sent), shet, shuck (shook), whoped (long _o_). The variant whupped is a
Scotticism. Whope is sometimes used in the present tense, but whup is
more common. By some the vowel of whup is sounded like _oo_ in book (Mr.
Fox writes "whoop," which, I presume, he intends for that sound).
In many cases a weak preterite supplants the proper strong one: div,
driv, fit, gi'n or give, rid, riv, riz, writ, done, run, seen or seed,
blowed, crowed, drawed, growed, knowed, throwed.
There are many corrupt forms of the verb, such as gwine for gone or
going, mought (mowt) for might, dim, het, ort or orter, wed (weeded),
war (was or were--the _a_ as in far), shun (shone), cotch (in all
tenses) or cotched, fotch or fotched, borned, hurted, dremp.
Peculiar adjectives are formed from verbs. "Chair-bottoming is easy
settin'-down work." "When my youngest was a leetle set-along child"
(interpreted as "settin' along the floor"). "That Thunderhead is the
torndowndest place!" "Them's the travellinest hosses ever I seed."
"She's the workinest woman!" "Jim is the disablest one o' the fam'ly."
"Damn this fotch-on kraut that comes in tin cans!"
A verb may serve as an adverb: "If I'd a-been thoughted enough." An
adverb may be used as an adjective: "I hope the folks with you is gaily"
(well). An adjective can serve as an adverb: "He laughed master."
Sometimes a conjunction is employed as a preposition: "We have oblige to
take care on him."
These are not mere blunders of individual illiterates, but usages common
throughout the mountains, and hence real dialect.
The ancient syllabic plural is preserved in beasties (horses), nesties,
posties, trousies (these are not diminutives), and in that strange word
dummerunses that I cited before.
Pleonasms are abundant. "I done done it" (have done it or did do it).
"Durin' the while." "In this day and time." "I thought it would surely,
undoubtedly turn cold." "A small, little bitty hole." "Jane's a
tol'able big, large, fleshy woman." "I ginerally, usually take a dram
mornin's." "These ridges is might' nigh straight up and down, and, as
the feller said, perpendic'lar."
Everywhere in the mountains we hear of biscuit-bread, ham-meat,
rifle-gun, rock-clift, ridin'-critter, cow-brute, man-person,
women-folks, preacher-man, granny-woman and neighbor-people. In this
category belong the famous double-barreled pronouns: we-all and you-all
in Kentucky, we-uns and you-uns in Carolina and Tennessee. (I have even
heard such locution as this: "Let's we-uns all go over to youerunses
house.") Such usages are regarded generally as mere barbarisms, and so
they are in English, but Miss Murfree cites correlatives in the Romance
languages: French _nous autres_, Italian _noi altri_, Spanish
_nosotros_.
The mountaineers have some queer ways of intensifying expression. "I'd
_tell_ a man," with the stress as here indicated, is simply a strong
affirmative. "We had one more _time_" means a rousing good time.
"P'int-blank" is a superlative or an epithet: "We jist p'int-blank got
it to do." "Well, p'int-blank, if they ever come back again, I'll move!"
A double negative is so common that it may be crowded into a single
word: "I did it the unthoughtless of anything I ever done in my life."
Triple negatives are easy: "I ain't got nary none." A mountaineer can
accomplish the quadruple: "That boy ain't never done nothin' nohow."
Yea, even the quintuple: "I ain't never seen no men-folks of no kind do
no washin'."
On the other hand, the veriest illiterates often startle a stranger by
glib use of some word that most of us picked up in school or seldom use
informally. "I can make a hunderd pound o' pork outen that hog--tutor it
jist right." "Them clouds denote rain." "She's so dilitary!" "They stood
thar and caviled about it." "That exceeds the measure." "Old Tom is
blind, but he can discern when the sun is shinin'." "Jerry proffered to
fix the gun for me." I had supposed that the words cuckold and moon-calf
had none but literary usage in America, but we often hear them in the
mountains, cuckold being employed both as verb and as noun, and
moon-calf in its baldly literal sense that would make Prospero's taunt
to Caliban a superlative insult.
Our highlander often speaks in Elizabethan or Chaucerian or even
pre-Chaucerian terms. His pronoun hit antedates English itself, being
the Anglo-Saxon neuter of he. Ey God, a favorite expletive, is the
original of egad, and goes back of Chaucer. Ax for ask and kag for keg
were the primitive and legitimate forms, which we trace as far as the
time of Layamon. When the mountain boy challenges his mate: "I dar ye--I
ain't afeared!" his verb and participle are of the same ancient and
sterling rank. Afore, atwixt, awar, heap o' folks, peart, up and done
it, usen for used, all these everyday expressions of the backwoods were
contemporary with the _Canterbury Tales_.
A man said to me of three of our acquaintances: "There's been a fray on
the river--I don't know how the fraction begun, but Os feathered into
Dan and Phil, feedin' them lead." He meant fray in its original sense of
deadly combat, as was fitting where two men were killed. Fraction for
rupture is an archaic word, rare in literature, though we find it in
_Troilus and Cressida_. "Feathered into them!" Where else can we hear
to-day a phrase that passed out of standard English when "villainous
saltpetre" supplanted the long-bow? It means to bury an arrow up to the
feather, as when the old chronicler Harrison says, "An other arrow
should haue beene fethered in his bowels."
[Illustration: Photo by Arthur Keith
"Till the skyline blends with the sky itself."--Great Smokies. N. C.
from Mt. Collins.]
Our schoolmaster, composing a form of oath for the new mail-carrier,
remarked: "Let me study this thing over; then I can edzact it"--a verb
so rare and obsolete that we find it in no American dictionary, but only
in Murray.
A remarkable word, common in the Smokies, is dauncy, defined for me as
"mincy about eating," which is to say fastidious, over-nice. Dauncy
probably is a variant of daunch, of which the _Oxford New English
Dictionary_ cites but one example, from the _Townley Mysteries_ of
_circa_ 1460.
A queer term used by Carolina mountaineers, without the faintest notion
of its origin, is doney (long _o_) or doney-gal, meaning a sweetheart.
Its history is unique. British sailors of the olden time brought it to
England from Spanish or Italian ports. Doney is simply _dona_ or _donna_
a trifle anglicized in pronunciation. Odd, though, that it should be
preserved in America by none but backwoodsmen whose ancestors for two
centuries never saw the tides!
In the vocabulary of the mountaineers I have detected only three words
of directly foreign origin. Doney is one. Another is kraut, which is the
sole contribution to highland speech of those numerous Germans (mostly
Pennsylvania Dutch) who joined the first settlers in this region, and
whose descendants, under wondrously anglicized names, form to-day a
considerable element of the highland population. The third is sashiate
(French _chasse_), used in calling figures at the country dances.
There is something intrinsically, stubbornly English in the nature of
the mountaineer: he will assimilate nothing foreign. In the Smokies the
Eastern Band of Cherokees still holds its ancient capital on the Okona
Lufty River, and the whites mingle freely with these redskins, bearing
them no such despite as they do negroes, but eating at the same table
and admitting Indians to the white compartment of a Jim Crow car. Yet
the mountain dialect contains not one word of Cherokee origin, albeit
many of the whites can speak a little Cherokee.
In our county some Indians always appear at each term of court, and an
interpreter must be engaged. He never goes by that name, but by the
obsolete title linkister or link'ster, by some lin-gis-ter.
Many other old-fashioned terms are preserved in Appalachia that sound
delightfully quaint to strangers who never met them outside of books. A
married woman is not addressed as Missis by the mountaineers, but as
Mistress when they speak formally, and as Mis' or Miz' for a
contraction. We will hear an aged man referred to as "old Grandsir'"
So-and-So. "Back this letter for me" is a phrase unchanged from the days
before envelopes, when an address had to be written on the back of the
letter itself. "Can I borry a race of ginger?" means the unground
root--you will find the word in _A Winter's Tale_. "Them sorry fellers"
denotes scabby knaves, good-for-nothings. Sorry has no etymological
connection with sorrow, but literally means sore-y, covered with sores,
and the highlander sticks to its original import.
We have in the mountains many home-born words to fit the circumstances
of backwoods life. When maize has passed from the soft and milky stage
of roasting-ears, but is not yet hard enough for grinding, the ears are
grated into a soft meal and baked into delectable pones called
gritted-bread.
In some places to-day we still find the ancient quern or hand-mill,
jocularly called an armstrong-machine. Someone who irked from turning it
invented the extraordinary improvement that goes by the name of
pounding-mill. This consists of a pole pivoted horizontally on top of a
post and free to move up and down like the walking-beam of an
old-fashioned engine. To one end of this pole is attached a heavy
pestle that works in a mortar underneath. At the other end is a box
from which water flows from an elevated spout. When the box fills it
will go down, lifting the pestle; then the water spills out and the
pestle's weight lifts the box back again.
Who knows what a toddick or taddle is? I did not until my friend Dargan
reported it from the Nantahala. "Ben didn't git a full turn o' meal, but
jest a toddick." When a farmer goes to one of our little tub-mills,
mentioned in previous chapters, he leaves a portion of the meal as toll.
This he measures out in a toll-dish or toddick or taddle (the name
varies with the locality) which the mill-owner left for that purpose.
Toddick, then, is a small measure. A turn of meal is so called because
"each man's corn is ground in turn--he waits his turn."
When one dines in a cabin back in the hills he will taste some strange
dishes that go by still stranger names. Beans dried in the pod, then
boiled "hull and all," are called leather-breeches (this is not slang,
but the regular name). Green beans in the pod are called snaps; when
shelled they are shuck-beans. The old Germans taught their Scotch and
English neighbors the merits of scrapple, but here it is known as
poor-do. Lath-open bread is made from biscuit dough, with soda and
buttermilk, in the usual way, except that the shortening is worked in
last. It is then baked in flat cakes, and has the peculiar property of
parting readily into thin flakes when broken edgewise. I suppose that
poor-do was originally poor-doin's, and lath-open bread denotes that it
opens into lath-like strips. But etymology cannot be pushed recklessly
in the mountains, and I offer these clews as a mere surmise.
Your hostess, proffering apple sauce, will ask, "Do you love sass?" I
had to kick my chum Andy's shins the first time he faced this question.
It is well for a traveler to be forewarned that the word love is
commonly used here in the sense of like or relish.
If one is especially fond of a certain dish he declares that he is a
fool about it. "I'm a plumb fool about pickle-beans." Conversely, "I
ain't much of a fool about liver" is rather more than a hint of
distaste. "I et me a bait" literally means a mere snack, but jocosely it
may admit a hearty meal. If the provender be scant the hostess may say,
"That's right at a smidgen," meaning little more than a mite; but if
plenteous, then there are rimptions.
To "grabble 'taters" is to pick from a hill of new potatoes a few of
the best, then smooth back the soil without disturbing the immature
ones.
If the house be in disorder it is said to be all gormed or gaumed up, or
things are just in a mommick.
When a man is tired he likely will call it worried; if in a hurry, he is
in a swivvet; if nervous, he has the all-overs; if declining in health,
he is on the down-go. If he and his neighbor dislike each other, there
is a hardness between them; if they quarrel, it is a ruction, a rippit,
a jower, or an upscuddle--so be it there are no fatalities which would
amount to a real fray.
A choleric or fretful person is tetchious. Survigrous (ser-_vi_-grus) is
a superlative of vigorous (here pronounced _vi_-grus, with long _i_): as
"a survigrous baby," "a most survigrous cusser." Bodaciously means
bodily or entirely: "I'm bodaciously ruint" (seriously injured). "Sim
greened him out bodaciously" (to green out or sap is to outwit in
trade). To disfurnish or discon_fit_ means to incommode: "I hope it has
not disconfit you very bad."
To shamp means to shingle or trim one's hair. A bastard is a woods-colt
or an outsider. Slaunchways denotes slanting, and si-godlin or
si-antigodlin is out of plumb or out of square (factitious words, of
course--mere nonsense terms, like catawampus).
Critter and beast are usually restricted to horse and mule, and brute to
a bovine. A bull or boar is not to be mentioned as such in mixed
company, but male-brute and male-hog are used as euphemisms.[9]
A female shoat is called a gilt. A spotted animal is said to be pieded
(pied), and a striped one is listed. In the Smokies a toad is called a
frog or a toad-frog, and a toadstool is a frog-stool. The woodpecker is
turned around into a peckerwood, except that the giant woodpecker (here
still a common bird) is known as a woodcock or woodhen.
What the mountaineers call hemlock is the shrub leucothoe. The hemlock
tree is named spruce-pine, while spruce is he-balsam, balsam itself is
she-balsam, laurel is ivy, and rhododendron is laurel. In some places
pine needles are called twinkles, and the locust insect is known as a
ferro (Pharaoh?). A treetop left on the ground after logging is called
the lap. Sobby wood means soggy or sodden, and the verb is to sob.
Evening, in the mountains, begins at noon instead of at sunset. Spell is
used in the sense of while ("a good spell atterward") and soon for early
("a soon start in the morning"). The hillsmen say "a year come June,"
"Thursday 'twas a week ago," and "the year nineteen and eight."
Many common English words are used in peculiar senses by the mountain
folk, as call for name or mention or occasion, clever for obliging,
mimic or mock for resemble, a power or a sight for much, risin' for
exceeding (also for inflammation), ruin for injure, scout for elude,
stove for jabbed, surround for go around, word for phrase, take off for
help yourself. Tale always means an idle or malicious report.
Some highland usages that sound odd to us are really no more than the
original and literal meanings, as budget for bag or parcel, hampered for
shackled or jailed. When a mountain swain "carries his gal to meetin'"
he is not performing so great an athletic feat as was reported by
Benjamin Franklin, who said, "My father carried his wife with three
children to New England" (from Pennsylvania).
A mountaineer does not throw a stone; he "flings a rock." He sharpens
tools on a grindin'-rock or whet-rock. Tomato, cabbage, molasses and
baking powder are used always as plural nouns. "Pass me them molasses."
"I'll have a few more of them cabbage." "How many bakin'-powders has you
got?"
Many other peculiar words and phrases are explained in their proper
place elsewhere in this volume.
The speech of the southern highlanders is alive with quaint idioms. "I
swapped hosses, and I'll tell you fer why." "Your name ain't much
common." "Who got to beat?" "You think me of it in the mornin'." "I 'low
to go to town to-morrow." "The woman's aimin' to go to meetin'." "I had
in head to plow to-day, but hit's come on to rain." "I've laid off and
laid off to fix that fence." "Reckon Pete was knowin' to the
sarcumstance?" "I'll name it to Newt, if so be he's thar." "I knowed in
reason she'd have the mullygrubs over them doin's." "You cain't handily
blame her."
"Air ye plumb bereft?" "How come it was this: he done me dirt." "I ain't
carin' which nor whether about it." "Sam went to Andrews or to Murphy,
one." "I tuk my fut in my hand and lit out." "He lit a rag fer home."
"Don't much believe the wagon 'll come to-day." "Tain't powerful long
to dinner, I don't reckon." "Phil's Ann give it out to each and every
that Walt and Layunie 'd orter wed."
"Howdy, Tom: light and hitch."
"Reckon I'd better git on."
"Come in and set."
"Cain't stop long."
"Oh, set down and eat you some supper!"
"I've been."
"Won't ye stay the night? Looks like to me we'll have a rainin', windin'
spell."
"No: I'll haffter go down."
"Well, come agin, and fix to stay a week."
"You-uns come down with me."
"Won't go now, I guess, Tom."
"Giddep! I'll be back by in the mornin'."
"Farwell!"
Rather laconic. Yet, on occasion, when the mountaineer is drawn out of
his natural reserve and allows his emotions free rein, there are few
educated people who can match his picturesque and pungent diction. His
trick of apt phrasing is intuitive. Like an artist striking off a
portrait or a caricature with a few swift strokes his characterization
is quick and vivid. Whether he use quaint obsolete English or equally
delightful perversions, what he says will go straight to the mark with
epigrammatic force.
I cannot quit this topic without reference to the bizarre and original
place-names that sprinkle the map of Appalachia.
Many readers of John Fox's novels take for granted that the author
coined such piquant titles as Lonesome, Troublesome, Hell fer Sartin,
and Kingdom Come. But all of these are real names in the Kentucky
mountains. They denote rough country, and the country _is_ rough, so
that to a traveler it is plain enough why travel and travail were used
interchangeably in old editions of Shakespeare. There is nothing like
first-hand knowledge of mountain roads to revive sixteenth-century
habits of thought and speech. The most scrupulous visitor will fain
admit the aptness of mountain nomenclature.
Kentucky has no monopoly of grotesque and whimsical local names. The
whole Appalachian region, from the Virginias to Alabama, is peppered
with them. Whatever else the southern mountaineer may be, he is
original. Elsewhere throughout America we have place-names imported from
the Old World as thick as weeds; but the pioneers of the southern hills
either forgot that there was an Old World or they disdained to borrow
from it.
Personal names applied to localities are common enough, but they are
those of actual settlers, not of notables honored from afar (Mitchell,
LeConte, Guyot, were not the highlanders' names for those peaks). Often
a surname is put to such use, as Jake's Creek, Old Nell Knob, and Big
Jonathan Run. We even have Granny's Branch, and Daddy and Mammy creeks.
In the main it is characteristic of our Appalachian place-names that
they are descriptive or commemorate some incident. The Shut-in is a
gorge; the Suck is a whirlpool; Pinch-gut is a narrow passage between
the cliffs. Calf-killer Run is "whar a meat-eatin' bear was usin'," and
Barren She Mountain was the death-ground of a she-bear that had no cubs.
Kemmer's Old Stand was a certain hunter's favorite ambush on a runway.
Meat-scaffold Branch is where venison was hung up for "jerking."
Graining-block Creek was a trappers' rendezvous, and Honey Camp Run is
where the bee hunters stayed. Lick-log denotes a notched log used for
salting cattle. Still-house Branch was a moonshiners' retreat. Skin-linn
Fork is where the bast was peeled from young lindens. Big Butt is what
Westerners call a butte. Ball-play Bottom was a lacrosse field of the
Indians. Pizen Gulch was infested with poison ivy or sumach. Keerless
Knob is "a joyful place for wild salat" (_amaranthus_). A "hell" or
"slick" or "woolly-head" or "yaller patch" is a thicket of laurel or
rhododendron, impassable save where the bears have bored out trails.
The qualities of the raw backwoodsmen are printed from untouched
negatives in the names he has left upon the map. His literalness shows
in Black Rock, Standing Stone, Sharp Top, Twenty Mile, Naked Place, The
Pocket, Tumbling Creek, and in the endless designations taken from
trees, plants, minerals, or animals noted on the spot. Incidents of his
lonely life are signalized in Dusk Camp Run, Mad Sheep Mountain, Dog
Slaughter Creek, Drowning Creek, Burnt Cabin Branch, Broken Leg, Raw
Dough, Burnt Pone, Sandy Mush, and a hundred others. His contentious
spirit blazes forth in Fighting Creek, Shooting Creek, Gouge-eye,
Vengeance, Four Killer, and Disputanta.
Sometimes even his superstitions are commemorated. In Owesley County,
Kentucky, is a range of hills bearing the singular name of Whoop fer
Larrie. A party of hunters, so the legend goes, had encamped for the
night in the shelter of a bluff. They were startled from sleep by a
loud rumble, as of some wagon hurrying along the pathless ridge, and
they heard a voice shouting "Whoop fer Larrie! Whoop fer Larrie!" The
hills would return no echo, for the cry came from a riotous "ha'nt."
A sardonic humor, sometimes smudged with "that touch of grossness in our
English race," characterizes many of the backwoods place-names. In the
mountains of Old Virginia we have Dry Tripe settlement and Jerk 'em
Tight. In West Virginia are Take In Creek, Get In Run, Seldom Seen
Hollow, Odd, Buster Knob, Shabby Room, and Stretch Yer Neck. North
Carolina has its Shoo Bird Mountain, Big Bugaboo Creek, Weary Hut, Frog
Level, Shake a Rag, and the Chunky Gal. In eastern Tennessee are No Time
settlement and No Business Knob, with creeks known as Big Soak, Suee, Go
Forth, and How Come You. Georgia has produced Scataway, Too Nigh, Long
Nose, Dug Down, Silly Cook, Turkey Trot, Broke Jug Creek, and Tear
Breeches Ridge.
Allowing some license for the mountaineer's irreverence, his whimsical
fancies, and his scorn of sentimentalism, it must be said that his
descriptive terms are usually apposite and sometimes felicitous. Often
he is poetically imaginative, occasionally romantic, and generally
picturesque. Roan Mountain, Grandfather, the Lone Bald, Craggy Dome,
the Black Brothers, Hairy Bear, the Balsam Cone, Sunset Mountain, the
Little Snowbird, are names that linger lovingly in one's memory.
The writer recalls with pleasure not only the features but the mere
titles of that superb landscape that he shared with the wild creatures
and a few woodsmen when living far up on the divide of the Great Smoky
Mountains. Immediately below his cabin were the Defeat and Desolation
branches of Bone Valley, with Hazel Creek meandering to the Little
Tennessee. Cheoah, Tululah, Santeetlah, the Tuckaseegee, and the
Nantahala (Valley of the Noonday Sun) flowed through gorges overlooked
by the Wauchecha, the Yalaka and the Cowee ranges, Tellico, Wahyah, the
Standing Indian and the Tusquitee.[10] Sonorous names, these, which our
pioneers had the good sense to adopt from the aborigines.
To the east were Cold Spring Knob, the Miry Ridge, Siler's Bald,
Clingman's Dome, and the great peaks at the head of Okona Lufty. On the
west rose Brier Knob, Laurel Top, Thunderhead, Blockhouse, the
Fodder-stack, and various "balds" of the Unakas guarding Hiwassee. To
the northward were Cade's Cove and the vale of Tuckaleechee, with
Chilhowee in the near distance, and the Appalachian Valley stretching
beyond our ramparts to where the far Cumberlands marked an ever-blue
horizon.
What matter that the plenteous roughs about us were branded with rude or
opprobrious names? Rip Shin Thicket, Dog-hobble Ridge, the Rough Arm,
Bear-wallow, Woolly Ridge, Roaring Fork, Huggins's Hell, the Devil's
Racepath, his Den, his Courthouse, and other playgrounds of Old
Nick--they, too, were well and fitly named.