grew wilder and grander. A terrific storm had swept over these heights,
and the great trees lay uptorn and prostrate in every direction, or
reeled and fell against each other like drunken giants--a scene of
fearful elemental violence. On the summits one sees the tan-bark oak;
lower down, the white oak; and lower yet, fine specimens of yellow
poplar; while from the valleys to the crests is a dense and varied
undergrowth, save where the ground has been burned over, year after
year, to kill it out and improve the grazing. Twenty miles to the
south-east we had seen through the pale-tinted air the waving line of
Jellico Mountains in Tennessee. Away to the north lay the Beaver Creek
and the lower Cumberland, while in front of us rose the craggy, scowling
face of Anvil Rock, commanding a view of Kentucky, Tennessee, and
Virginia. The utter silence and heart-oppressing repose of primeval
nature was around us. The stark white and gray trunks of the immemorial
forest dead linked us to an inviolable past. The air seemed to blow upon
us from over regions illimitable and unexplored, and to be fraught with
unutterable suggestions. The full-moon swung itself aloft over the sharp
touchings of the green with spectral pallor; and the evening-star stood
lustrous on the western horizon in depths of blue as cold as a sky of
Landseer, except where brushed by tremulous shadows of rose on the verge
of the sunlit world. A bat wheeled upward in fantastic curves out of his
undiscovered glade. And the soft tinkle of a single cow-bell far below
marked the invisible spot of some lonely human habitation. By-and-by we
lost sight of the heavens altogether, so dense and interlaced the
forest. The descent of the hack appeared to be into a steep abyss of
gloom; then all at once we broke from the edge of the woods into a
flood of moonlight; at our feet were the whirling, foaming rapids of the
river; in our ears was the roar of the cataract, where the bow-crowned
mist rose and floated upward and away in long trailing shapes of
ethereal lightness.
[Illustration: MOONRISE ON CUMBERLAND RIDGE.]
The Cumberland River throws itself over the rocks here with a fall of
seventy feet, or a perpendicular descent of sixty-two, making a mimic
but beautiful Niagara. Just below, at Eagle Falls, it drops over its
precipice in a lawny cascade. The roar of the cataract, under favorable
conditions, may be heard up and down stream a distance of ten or twelve
miles. You will not find in mountainous Kentucky a more picturesque
spot.
While here, we had occasion to extend our acquaintance with native
types. Two young men came to the hotel, bringing a bag of small, hard
peaches to sell. Slim, slab-sided, stomachless, and serene, mild, and
melancholy, they might have been lotos-eaters, only the suggestion of
poetry was wanting. Their unutterable content came not from the lotus,
but from their digestion. If they could sell their peaches, they would
be happy; if not, they would be happy. What they could not sell, they
could as well eat; and since no bargain was made on this occasion,
they took chairs on the hotel veranda, opened the bag, and fell to. I
talked with the Benjamin of his tribe:
"Is that a good 'coon dog?"
"A mighty good 'coon dog. I hain't never seed him whipped by a varmint
yit."
"Are there many 'coons in this country?"
"Several 'coons."
"Is this a good year for 'coons?"
"A mighty good year for 'coons. The woods is full o' varmints."
"Do 'coons eat corn?"
"'Coons is bad as hogs on corn, when they git tuk to it."
"Are there many wild turkeys in this country?"
"Several wild turkeys."
"Have you ever caught many 'coons?"
"I've cotched high as five 'coons out o' one tree."
"Are there many foxes in this country?"
"Several foxes."
"What's the best way to cook a 'coon?"
"Ketch him and parbile him, and then put him in cold water and soak
him, and then put him in and bake him."
"Are there many hounds in this country?"
"Several hounds."
Here, among other discoveries, was a linguistic one--the use of
"several" in the sense of a great many, probably an innumerable
multitude, as in the case of the 'coons.
They hung around the hotel for hours, as beings utterly exempt from
all the obligations and other phenomena of time.
"Why should we only toil, the roof and crown of things?"
The guide bespoken the evening before had made arrangements for our
ride of some eighteen miles--was it not forty?--to Williamsburg; and
in the afternoon made his appearance with three horses. Of these one
was a mule, with a strong leaning towards his father's family. Of the
three saddles one was a side-saddle, and another was an army saddle
with refugee stirrups. The three beasts wore among them some seven
shoes. My own mincing jade had none. Her name must have been Helen of
Troy (all horses are named in Kentucky), so long ago had her great
beauty disappeared. She partook with me of the terror which her own
movements inspired; and if there ever was a well-defined case in which
the man should have carried the beast, this was the one. While on her
back I occasionally apologized for the injustice of riding her by
handing her some sour apples, the like of which she appeared never to
have tasted before, just as it was told me she had never known the
luxury of wearing shoes. It is often true that the owner of a horse in
this region is too poor or too mean to have it shod.
Our route from Cumberland Falls lay through what is called "Little
Texas," in Whitley County--a wilderness some twenty miles square. I
say route, because there was not always a road; but for the guide,
there would not always have been a direction. Rough as the country
appears to one riding through it on horseback, it is truly called
"flat woods country;" and viewed from Jellico Mountains, whence the
local elevations are of no account, it looks like one vast sweep of
sloping, densely-wooded land. Here one may see noble specimens of
yellow poplar in the deeper soil at the head of the ravines; pin-oak,
and gum and willow, and the rarely beautiful wild-cucumber. Along the
streams in the lowlands blooms the wild calacanthus, filling the air
with fragrance, and here in season the wild camellia throws open its
white and purple splendors.
It was not until we had passed out of "Little Texas" and reached
Williamsburg, had gone thence to Barbourville, the county-seat of the
adjoining county of Knox, and thence again into Bell County, that we
stopped at an old way-side inn on the Wilderness road from Kentucky
through Cumberland Gap. Around us were the mountains--around us the
mountaineers whom we wished to study.
[Illustration: CUMBERLAND FALLS.]
II
Straight, slim, angular, white bodies; average or even unusual stature,
without great muscular robustness; features regular and colorless;
unanimated but intelligent; in the men sometimes fierce; in the women
often sad; among the latter occasional beauty of a pure Greek type; a
manner shy and deferential, but kind and fearless; eyes with a slow,
long look of mild inquiry, or of general listlessness, or of unconscious
and unaccountable melancholy; the key of life a low minor strain, losing
itself in reverie; voices monotonous in intonation; movements uninformed
by nervousness--these are characteristics of the Kentucky mountaineers.
Living to-day as their forefathers lived a hundred years ago; hearing
little of the world, caring nothing for it; responding feebly to the
influences of civilization near the highways of travel in and around the
towns, and latterly along the lines of railway communication; but sure
to live here, if uninvaded and unaroused, in the same condition for a
hundred years to come; lacking the spirit of development from within;
devoid of sympathy with that boundless and ungovernable activity
which is carrying the Saxon race in America from one state to another,
whether better or worse. The origin of these people, the relation they
sustain to the different population of the central Kentucky region--in
fine, an account of them from the date of their settling in these
mountains to the present time, when, as it seems, they are on the point
of losing their isolation, and with it their distinctiveness--would
imprison phases of life and character valuable alike to the special
history of this country and to the general history of the human mind.
The land in these mountains is all claimed, but it is probably not all
covered by actual patent. As evidence, a company has been formed to
speculate in lands not secured by title. The old careless way of marking
off boundaries by going from tree to tree, by partly surveying and
partly guessing, explains the present uncertainty. Many own land by
right of occupancy, there being no other claim. The great body of the
people live on and cultivate little patches which they either own, or
hold free, or pay rent for with a third of the crop. These not
unfrequently get together and trade farms as they would horses, no deed
being executed. There is among them a mobile element--squatters--who
make a hill-side clearing and live on it as long as it remains
productive; then they move elsewhere. This accounts for the presence
throughout the country of abandoned cabins, around which a new forest
growth is springing up. Leaving out of consideration the few instances
of substantial prosperity, the most of the people are abjectly poor, and
they appear to have no sense of accumulation. The main crops raised are
corn and potatoes. In the scant gardens will be seen patches of cotton,
sorghum, and tobacco; flax also, though less than formerly. Many make
insufficient preparation for winter, laying up no meat, but buying a
piece of bacon now and then, and paying for it with work. In some
regions the great problem of life is to raise two dollars and a half
during the year for county taxes. Being pauper counties, they are exempt
from State taxation. Jury fees are highly esteemed and much sought
after. The manufacture of illicit mountain whiskey--"moonshine"--was
formerly, as it is now, a considerable source of revenue; and a
desperate sub-source of revenue from the same business has been the
betrayal of its hidden places. There is nothing harder or more dangerous
to find now in the mountains than a still.
[Illustration: NATIVE TYPES.]
Formerly digging "sang," as they call ginseng, was a general occupation.
For this China was a great market. It has nearly all been dug out except
in the wildest parts of the country, where entire families may still be
seen "out sangin'." They took it into the towns in bags, selling it at a
dollar and ten cents--perhaps a dollar and a half--a pound. This was
mainly the labor of the women and the children, who went to work
barefooted, amid briers and chestnut burs, copperheads and rattlesnakes.
Indeed, the women prefer to go barefooted, finding shoes a trouble and
constraint. It was a sad day for the people when the "sang" grew scarce.
A few years ago one of the counties was nearly depopulated in
consequence of a great exodus into Arkansas, whence had come the news
that "sang" was plentiful. Not long since, during a season of scarcity
in corn, a local store-keeper told the people of a county to go out and
gather all the mandrake or "May-apple" root they could find. At first
only the women and children went to work, the men holding back with
ridicule. By-and-by they also took part, and that year some fifteen tons
were gathered, at three cents a pound, and the whole country thus got
its seed-corn. Wild ginger was another root formerly much dug; also to
less extent "golden-seal" and "bloodroot." The sale of feathers from a
few precarious geese helps to eke out subsistence. Their methods of
agriculture--if methods they may be styled--are the most primitive.
Ploughing is commonly done with a "bull-tongue," an implement hardly
more than a sharpened stick with a metal rim; this is often drawn by an
ox, or a half-yoke. But one may see women ploughing with two oxen.
Traces are made of hickory or papaw, as also are bed-cords. Ropes are
made of lynn bark. In some counties there is not so much as a
fanning-mill, grain being winnowed by pouring it from basket to basket,
after having been threshed with a flail, which is a hickory withe some
seven feet long. Their threshing-floor is a clean place on the ground,
and they take up grain, gravel, and dirt together, not knowing, or not
caring for, the use of a sieve.
[Illustration: INTERIOR OF A MOUNTAINEER'S HOME.]
The grain is ground at their homes in a hand tub-mill, or one made by
setting the nether millstone in a bee-gum, or by cutting a hole in a
puncheon-log and sinking the stone into it. There are, however, other
kinds of mills: the primitive little water-mill, which may be
considered almost characteristic of this region; in a few places
improved water-mills, and small steam-mills. It is the country
of mills, farm-houses being furnished with one as with coffee-pot or
spinning-wheel. A simpler way of preparing corn for bread than by even
the hand-mill is used in the late summer and early autumn, while the
grain is too hard for eating as roasting-ears, and too soft to be ground
in a mill. On a board is tacked a piece of tin through which holes have
been punched from the under side, and over this tin the ears are rubbed,
producing a coarse meal, of which "gritted bread" is made. Much pleasure
and much health they get from their "gritted bread," which is sweet and
wholesome for a hungry man.
Where civilization has touched on the highways and the few improved
mills have been erected, one may see women going to mill with their
scant sacks of grain, riding on a jack, a jennet, or a bridled ox. But
this is not so bad as in North Carolina, where, Europa like, they ride
on bulls.
Aside from such occupations, the men have nothing to do--a little work
in the spring, and nine months' rest. They love to meet at the country
groceries and cross-roads, to shoot matches for beef, turkeys, or
liquor, and to gamble. There is with them a sort of annual succession
of amusements. In its season they have the rage for pitching horseshoes,
the richer ones using dollar pieces. In consequence of their abundant
leisure, the loneliness of the mountains, and their bravery and vigor,
quarrels are frequent and feuds deadly. Personal enmities soon serve to
array entire families in an attitude of implacable hostility; and in the
course of time relatives and friends take sides, and a war of
extermination ensues. The special origins of these feuds are various:
blood heated and temper lost under the influence of "moonshine;"
reporting the places and manufacturers of this; local politics; the
survival of resentments engendered during the Civil War. These, together
with all causes that lie in the passions of the human heart and spring
from the constitution of all human society, often make the remote and
insulated life of these people turbulent, reckless, and distressing.
But while thus bitter and cruel towards each other, they present to
strangers the aspect of a polite, kind, unoffending, and most hospitable
race. They will divide with you shelter and warmth and food, however
scant, and will put themselves to trouble for your convenience with an
unreckoning, earnest friendliness and good-nature that is touching to
the last degree. No sham, no pretence; a true friend, or an open enemy.
Of late they have had much occasion to regard new-comers with distrust,
which, once aroused, is difficult to dispel; and now they will wish to
know you and your business before treating you with that warmth which
they are only too glad to show.
The women do most of the work. From the few sheep, running wild, which
the farm may own, they take the wool, which is carded, reeled, spun, and
woven into fabrics by their own hands and on their rude implements. One
or two spinning-wheels will be found in every house. Cotton from their
little patches they clean by using a primitive hand cotton-gin. Flax,
much spun formerly, is now less used. It is surprising to see from what
appliances they will bring forth exquisite fabrics: garments for
personal wear, bedclothes, and the like. When they can afford it they
make carpets.
They have, as a rule, luxuriant hair. In some counties one is struck by
the purity of the Saxon type, and their faces in early life are often
handsome. But one hears that in certain localities they are prone to
lose their teeth, and that after the age of thirty-five it is a rare
thing to see a woman whose teeth are not partly or wholly wanting. The
reason is not apparent. They appear passionately fond of dress, and
array themselves in gay colors and in jewelry (pinchbeck), if their
worldly estate justifies the extravagance. Oftener, if young, they have
a modest, shy air, as if conscious that their garb is not decorous.
Whether married or unmarried, they show much natural diffidence. It
is told that in remoter districts of the mountains they are not allowed
to sit at the table with the male members of the household, but serve
them as in ancient societies. Commonly, in going to church, the men ride
and carry the children, while the women walk. Dancing in some regions is
hardly known, but in others is a favorite amusement, and in its
movements men and women show grace. The mountain preachers oppose it as
a sin.
[Illustration: MOUNTAIN COURTSHIP.]
Marriages take place early. They are a fecund race. I asked them time
and again to fix upon the average number of children to a family, and
they gave as the result seven. In case of parental opposition to
wedlock, the lovers run off. There is among the people a low standard of
morality in their domestic relations, the delicate privacies of home
life having little appreciation where so many persons, without regard to
age or sex, are crowded together within very limited quarters.
The dwellings--often mere cabins with a single room--are built of
rough-hewn logs, chinked or daubed, though not always. Often there is a
puncheon floor and no chamber roof. One of these mountaineers, called
into court to testify as to the household goods of a defendant neighbor,
gave in as the inventory, a string of pumpkins, a skillet without a
handle, and "a wild Bill." "A wild Bill" is a bed made by boring
auger-holes into a log, driving sticks into these, and overlaying them
with hickory bark and sedge-grass--a favorite couch. The low chimneys,
made usually of laths daubed, are so low that the saying, inelegant
though true, is current, that you may sit by the fire inside and spit
out over the top. The cracks in the walls are often large enough to give
ingress and egress to child or dog. Even cellars are little known,
potatoes sometimes being kept during winter in a hole dug under the
hearthstone. More frequently a trap-door is made through the plank
flooring in the middle of the room, and in a hole beneath are put
potatoes, and, in case of wealth, jellies and preserves. Despite the
wretchedness of their habitations and the rigors of mountain climate,
they do not suffer with cold, and one may see them out in snow knee-deep
clad in low brogans, and nothing heavier than a jeans coat and
hunting-shirt.
The customary beverage is coffee, bitter and black, not having been
roasted but burnt. All drink it, from the youngest up. Another beverage
is "mountain tea," which is made from the sweet-scented golden-rod and
from winter-green--the New England checkerberry. These decoctions they
mollify with home-made sorghum molasses, which they call "long
sweetening," or with sugar, which by contrast is known as "short
sweetening."
Of home government there is little or none, boys especially setting
aside at will parental authority; but a sort of traditional sense of
duty and decorum restrains them by its silent power, and moulds them
into respect. Children while quite young are often plump to roundness,
but soon grow thin and white and meagre like the parents. There is
little desire for knowledge or education. The mountain schools have
sometimes less than half a dozen pupils during the few months they are
in session. A gentleman who wanted a coal bank opened, engaged for the
work a man passing along the road. Some days later he learned that his
workman was a schoolteacher, who, in consideration of the seventy-five
cents a day, had dismissed his academy.
[Illustration: A FAMILY BURYING-GROUND.]
Many, allured by rumors from the West, have migrated thither, but nearly
all come back, from love of the mountains, from indisposition to cope
with the rush and vigor and enterprise of frontier life. Theirs, they
say, is a good lazy man's home.
Their customs respecting the dead are interesting. When a husband dies
his funeral sermon is not preached, but the death of the wife is
awaited, and vice versa. Then a preacher is sent for, friend and
neighbor called in, and the respect is paid both together. Often two or
three preachers are summoned, and each delivers a sermon. More peculiar
is the custom of having the services for one person repeated; so that
the dead get their funerals preached several times, months and years
after their burial. I heard of the pitiful story of two sisters who had
their mother's funeral preached once every summer as long as they lived.
You may engage the women in mournful conversation respecting the dead,
but hardly the men. In strange contrast with this regard for ceremonial
observances is their neglect of the graves of their beloved, which they
do not seem at all to visit when once closed, or to decorate with those
symbols of affection which are the common indications of bereavement.
Nothing that I have ever seen is so lonely, so touching in its neglect
and wild, irreparable solitude, as one of these mountain graveyards. On
some knoll under a clump of trees, or along some hill-side where
dense oak-trees make a mid-day gloom, you walk amid the unknown,
undistinguishable dead. Which was father and which mother, where are
lover and stricken sweetheart, whether this is the dust of laughing babe
or crooning grandam, you will never know: no foot-stones, no
head-stones; sometimes a few rough rails laid around, as you would make
a little pen for swine. In places, however, one sees a picket-fence put
up, or a sort of shed built over.
[Illustration: A MOUNTAINEER DAME.]
Traditions and folk-lore among them are evanescent, and vary widely in
different localities. It appears that in part they are sprung from the
early hunters who came into the mountains when game was abundant, sport
unfailing, living cheap. Among them now are still-hunters, who know the
haunts of bear and deer, needing no dogs. They even now prefer wild
meat--even "'possum" and "'coon" and ground-hog--to any other. In Bell
County I spent the day in the house of a woman eighty years old, who was
a lingering representative of a nearly extinct type. She had never been
out of the neighborhood of her birth, knew the mountains like a garden,
had whipped men in single-handed encounter, brought down many a deer and
wild turkey with her own rifle, and now, infirm, had but to sit in her
cabin door and send her trained dogs into the depths of the forests to
discover the wished-for game. A fiercer woman I never looked on.
III
Our course now lay direct towards Cumberland Gap, some twenty miles
southward. Our road ran along the bank of the Cumberland River to the
ford, the immemorial crossing-place of early travel--and a beautiful
spot--thence to Pineville, situated in that narrow opening in Pine
Mountain where the river cuts it, and thence through the valley of
Yellow Creek to the wonderful pass. The scenery in this region is one
succession of densely wooded mountains, blue-tinted air, small
cultivated tracts in the fertile valleys, and lovely watercourses.
Along the first part of our route the river slips crystal-clear over its
rocky bed, and beneath the lone green pendent branches of the trees that
crowd the banks. At the famous ford it was only two or three feet deep
at the time of our crossing. This is a historic point. Here was one of
the oldest settlements in the country; here the Federal army destroyed
the houses and fences during the Civil War; and here Zollikoffer came to
protect the Kentucky gate that opens into East Tennessee. At Pineville,
just beyond, we did not remain long. For some reasons not clearly
understood by travellers, a dead-line had been drawn through the midst
of the town, and not knowing on which side we were entitled to stand,
we hastened on to a place where we might occupy neutral ground.
The situation is strikingly picturesque: the mountain looks as if cleft
sheer and fallen apart, the peaks on each side rising almost
perpendicularly, with massive overhanging crests wooded to the summits,
but showing gray rifts of the inexhaustible limestone. The river when
lowest is here at an elevation of nine hundred and sixty feet, and the
peaks leap to the height of twenty-two hundred. Here in the future will
most probably pass a railroad, and be a populous town, for here is the
only opening through Pine Mountain from "the brakes" of Sandy to the
Tennessee line, and tributary to the watercourses that centre here are
some five hundred thousand acres of timber land.