Difficulties of communication are enough to explain the isolation of
mountaineers. For long years, even until yesterday, the only roads were
the beds of tortuous and rockstrewn watercourses that were dry when you
started at sunup and were suddenly transformed by a downpour to swollen,
turbulent streams, perilous even to ford.
But for all that, in 1803 there were a million settlers in the southern
highlands. Hardships of life there might have shaken a man's faith but
not his love of the country. In Kentucky alone in 1834 there were 500
pensioners of the Revolution. And when the guns roared at the opening of
the Civil War, the southern highlanders sent 180,000 riflemen to the
Union Army.
An isolated people drops easily into illiteracy. Cut off as the mountain
men were from the outside world, they knew little of what was going on
beyond their mountain walls. Even if newspapers had found their way to
the mountaineer's cabin they would have been of little use to men who
could not read. On the other hand, had the mountain men known of the
great westward movement toward the plains few of them could have joined
the caravans. The mountaineer had no money because he had no way to
produce money. For that reason he could not even reach the nearest
lowlands. Even if he had moved down into the lowlands he could not hope
to own land but would only have fallen once more into the unbearable
state of his forbears in Ulster--that of tenant, or menial, with
proprietors and bosses to harass his life. This peril alone was enough,
aside from the lack of money, to make the highlander shrink from the
society of the lowlands. The few who straggled down were glad enough to
return to the cloister of the mountains. Besides the mountaineer didn't
like the climate or the water down there. The sparkling, cool mountain
brook, the constant breeze and bracing air were much more to his liking.
Indeed the climate has had its effect upon the mountaineer, not only
upon his physical being--he is tall and stalwart; few mountain men are
dwarfed--but the bracing air enables him to toil for long days in the
open. He can walk--or hoe corn on an almost perpendicular corn
patch--from daylight till dark. He is patient and is never in a hurry.
Time means nothing to him. Down in the Unakas a mountaineer once had a
cataract removed from the right eye. The surgeon told him to return in a
couple months when it would be safe to operate upon the other eye.
Twenty years elapsed before the fellow returned to the doctor's office;
when he was chided for the delay he answered unconcernedly, "I 'lowed
'twas no use to be in a hurry about it."
Yet for all their seeming indifference the people of the Blue Ridge, who
locked their offspring generation after generation in mountain
fastnesses that have barred the world, have kept alive and fresh in
memory the unwritten song, the speech, the tradition of their
Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Celtic ancestors.
Down through the centuries the blood and traditions of the pioneers have
carried, creating a stalwart, a fearless people. Hidden away in the high
crannies of the Blue Ridge they have come to be known as Mountaineers,
Southern Highlanders, Appalachian Mountaineers, and Southern
Mountaineers. But if you should ask a name of any of the old folk of the
Blue Ridge country they doubtless will tell you, "We are mountain
people." Never hill-billies! A hill-billy, the true mountain man or
woman would have you know, is one born of the mountains who has got
above his raising, ashamed to own his origin, one who holds his own
mountain people up for scorn and ridicule. To mountain folk the word
hill-billy is a slur of the worst sort. A slur that has caused murder.
They recognize no caste in the Blue Ridge Country. They are hospitable
beyond measure, I have come to know in my long years of roaming through
the mountains, first as court stenographer in isolated courts, then as
ballad collector. I have never entered a mountain home throughout the
Blue Ridge, no matter how humble the fare, where man, woman, or child
offered apology for anything, their surroundings or the food and
hospitality given to the stranger under their roof. "You're welcome to
what we've got," is the invariable greeting--though the bed be a crude
shuck tick shared with the children of the family, the fare cornbread
and sorghum.
As a child I used to go to the cabin home of one of my father's kinsmen,
a man who could neither read nor write, though he knew his Bible from
cover to cover and could cite accurately chapter and verse of any text
from which he chose to preach. There was but one room in his house of
logs with its lean-to kitchen of rough planks, but never did I hear
father's kinsman or his wife offer any word of excuse for anything. When
it was time for victuals his wife, with all the graciousness of
nobility, would stand behind her guests, while her man, seated at the
head of the table, head bowed reverently, offered thanks. Then, lifting
his head, he would fling wide his open palms in hospitality, "Thar hit
is afore you. Take holt and eat all you're a-mind to!" And turning to
his wife, "Marthie! watch their plates!" My great-aunt kept a vigilant
eye on us as she walked around the table inviting us to partake, "Hure,
have more of the snaps. Holp yourself to the ham meat. Take another
piece of cornbread. 'Pon my word, you're pickin' like a wren. Eat
hearty!" she urged, while above our heads she swished the fly-brush, a
branch from the lilac bush in summer, otherwise a fringed paper attached
to a stick.
They learned through necessity to put to use the things at hand, made
their own crude implements to clear and break the stubborn soil; they
learned to do without.
Their poteen (whiskey) craft, handed down by their Scotch-Irish
ancestors, survives today in what outlanders term moonshining.
Resentment against taxation of homemade whiskey survives too. The
mountaineer reasons--I've heard them frequently in court--that the land
is his, that he "heired it from his Pa, same as him from hisn," that he
plants him some bread without no tax. Why can't he make whiskey from his
corn without paying tax?
As for killing in the Blue Ridge Country. In my profession of court
stenographer I have reported many trials for killing and almost
invariably my sympathy has been with the slayer. Usually he admits that
he had it to do either for a real or fancied wrong, or for a slur to his
womenfolks. I've never known of gangsters, fingermen, or paid killers in
the Blue Ridge Country.
With an inherent love of music, handed down from the wandering minstrels
of Shakespeare's time, and with a wealth of ballads stored up in their
heads and hearts, they found in these a joyful expression. Even the
children, like their elders, can turn a hand to fashion a make-believe
whistle of beech or maple, although they may never know that in so doing
they are making an imitation of the Recorder upon which Queen Elizabeth
herself was a skilled performer. Little Chad at the head of Raccoon
Hollow will cut two corn stalks about the length of his small arms and
earnestly proceed to make music by sawing one across the other, singing
happily:
Corn stalk fiddle and shoe-string bow,
Best old fiddle in the country, oh!
not knowing that Haydn, the child, likewise sawed one stick upon another
in imitation of playing the fiddle. And there's Little Babe of Lonesome
Creek who delights in a gourd banjo. His grandsir, finding a straight,
long-necked gourd among those clustered on the vine over kitchen-house
door, fashioned it into a banjo for the least one. Cut it flat on one
side, did the old man, scooped out the seed, then covered the opening
with a bit of brown paper made fast with flour paste, strung it with cat
gut. And there, bless you, as fine a banjo as ever a body would want to
pick.
They are neighborly in the Blue Ridge Country. They ask no favor of any
man. Yet the road is never too rough, the way too far, for one neighbor
to go to the aid of another in time of sickness or death. I knew a
little boy who was dangerously sick with a strange ailment that
primitive home remedies could not heal. Neighbor boys made a slide, a
quilt tied to two strong saplings, and carried their little friend some
ten miles over a rough mountain footpath to the nearest wagon road.
There, placing him in a jolt wagon, the bed of which had been filled
with hay to ease his suffering in jolting over the rough creek-bed road,
they continued the journey on for thirty miles to the wayside railroad
station where the cars bore the afflicted child on to town and the
hospital.
A feud is the name given to their family quarrels by the level-landers.
Mountain people never use the word. They say war or troubles. Their
clannishness was inherited from their Scotch ancestors, and the wild,
rugged mountains lent themselves perfectly to warfare among the clans.
They had lived apart so long, protected from invasion and interference
by their high mountain walls, that they learned to settle their own
differences in their own way. They knew no law but the gun. If John
warned his neighbor Mark that Mark's dog was killing his sheep and the
neighbor did nothing about it, John settled the matter forthwith by
shooting the dog. Families took sides. The flame was fanned. The feud
grew.
However, in time of disaster, with grim faces and willing hands, they
come to the aid of an unfortunate neighbor. Once when a terrible flood
caused Troublesome to overflow its banks, carrying everything in its
raging course, I saw a team of mules, the only means of support of a
widowed mother of a dozen children, swept away. She hired the team to
neighbors and thus earned a meager living. I remember the despair of
that white, drawn face as the widow looked on helplessly at the
destruction. Not a word did she speak. But before darkness the next day
neighbor men far and wide, and none of them were prosperous, chipped in
from their small hoards and got another team for the woman.