Many of the homes have but one window
And here is another significant fact: as regards personal property I do not know any race in the world that is more honest than our backwoodsmen of the southern mountains. As soon as you leave the railroad you enter a land where sneak-thieves are rare and burglars almost unheard of. In my own county and all those adjoining it there has been only one case of highway robbery and only one of murder for money, so far as I can learn, in the pastfortyyears.
The mountain code of conduct is a curious mixture of savagery and civility. One man will kill another over a pig or a panel of fence (not for the property’s sake, but because of hot words ensuing) and he will “come clear” in court because every fellow on the jury feels he would have done the same thing himself under similar provocation; yet these very men, vengeful and cruel though they are, regard hospitality as a sacred duty toward wayfarers of any degree, and the bare idea of stealing from a stranger would excite their instant loathing or white-hot scorn.
Anyone of tact and common sense can go as he pleases through the darkest corner ofAppalachia without being molested. Tact, however, implies the will and the insight to put yourself truly in the other man’s place. Imagine yourself born, bred, circumstanced like him. It implies, also, the courtesy of doing as you would be done by if you were in that fellow’s shoes. No arrogance, no condescension, but man to man on a footing of equal manliness.
And there are “manners” in the rudest community: customs and rules of conduct that it is well to learn before one goes far afield. For example, when you stop at a mountain cabin, if no dogs sound an alarm, do not walk up to the door and knock. You are expected to call outHello!until someone comes to inspect you. None but the most intimate neighbors neglect this usage and there is mighty good reason back of it in a land where the path to one’s door may be a warpath.
If you are armed, as a hunter, do not fail to remove the cartridges from the gun, in your host’s presence, before you set foot on his porch. Then give him the weapon or stand it in a corner or hang it up in plain view. Even our sheriff, when he stopped with us, would lay his revolver on the mantel-shelf and leave it there until he went his way. If you think a moment you can see the courtesy of such an act. Itproves that the guest puts implicit trust in the honor of his host and in his ability to protect all within his house. There never has been a case in which such trust was violated.
I knew a traveler who, spending the night in a one-room cabin, was fool enough (I can use no milder term) to thrust a loaded revolver under his pillow when he went to bed. In the morning his weapon was still there, but empty, and its cartridges lay conspicuously on a table across the room. Nobody said a word about the incident: the hint was left to soak in.
The only real danger that one may encounter from the native people, so long as he behaves himself, is when he comes upon a man who is wild with liquor and cannot sidestep him. In such case, give him the glad word and move on at once. I have had a drunken “ball-hooter” (log-roller) from the lumber camps fire five shots around my head as afeu-de-joie, and then stand tantalizingly, with hammer cocked over the sixth cartridge, to see what I would do about it. As it chanced, I did not mind his fireworks, for my head was a-swim with the rising fever of erysipelas and I had come dragging my heels many an irk mile down from the mountains to find a doctor. So I merely smiled at the fellow and asked if he was having a goodtime. He grinned sheepishly and let me pass unharmed.
The chief drawback to travel in this region, aside from the roads, is not the character of the people, but the quality of bed and board. Of course there are good hotels at most of the summer resorts, but these are few and scattering, at present, for a territory so immense. In most regions where there is noble scenery, unspoiled forest, and good fishing, the accommodations are extremely rude. Many of the village inns are dirty, and their tables a shock and a despair to the hungry pilgrim. There are blessed exceptions, to be sure, but on the other hand the traveler sometimes will encounter a cuisine that is neither edible nor speakable, and will be shown to a bed wherein it needs no Sherlock Holmes to detect that the previous biped retired with his boots on, or at least with much realty attached to his person. Such places often are like that unpronounceable town in Russia of which Paragot said: “The bugs are the most companionable creatures in it, and they are the cleanest.”
If one be of the same mind as the plain-spoken Dr. Samuel Johnson, that “the finest landscape in the world is not worth a damn without a cozy inn in the foreground,” he should keep tothe stock show-places of our highlands or seek other playgrounds.
By far the most comfortable way to stay in the back country at present is in a camp of one’s own where he can keep things tidy and have food to suit him. If you be, though, of stout stomach and wishful to get true insight into mountain ways and character you can find some sort of boarding-place almost anywhere. In such case go first to the sheriff of the county (in person, not by letter). This officer is a walking bureau of information and dispenses it freely to any stranger. He knows almost every man in the county, his character and his circumstances. He may be depended upon to direct you to the best stopping-places, will tell you how to get hunting and fishing privileges, and will recommend a good packer or teamster if such help is wanted.
Along the railways and main county roads the farmers show a well-justified mistrust about admitting company for the night. But in the back districts the latch-string generally is out to all comers. “If you-uns can stand what we-uns has ter, w’y come right in and set you a cheer.”
If the man of the house has misgivings as to the state of the larder, he will say: “I’ll axthe woman gin she can git ye a bite.” Seldom does the wife demur, though sometimes her patience is sorely tried.
A stranger whose calked boots betrayed his calling stopped at Uncle Mark’s to inquire, “Can I git to stay all night?” Aunt Nance, peeping through a crack, warned her man in a whisper: “Them loggers jest louzes up folkses houses.” Whereat Mark answered the lumberjack: “We don’t ginerally foller takin’ in strangers.”
Jack glanced significantly at the lowering clouds, and grunted: “Uh—looks like I could stand hitched all night!”
This was too much for Mark. “Well!” he exclaimed, “mebbe we-uns can find ye a pallet—I’ll try to enjoy ye somehow.” Which, being interpreted, means, “I’ll entertain you as best I can.”
The hospitality of the backwoods knows no bounds short of sickness in the family or downright destitution. Travelers often innocently impose on poor people, and even criticise the scanty fare, when they may be getting a lion’s share of the last loaf in the house. And few of them realize the actual cost of entertaining company in a home that is long mountain miles from any market. Fancy yourself making atwenty-mile round trip over awful roads to carry back a sack of flour on your shoulder and a can of oil in your hand; then figure what the transportation is worth.
Once when I was trying a short-cut through the forest by following vague directions I swerved to the wrong trail. Sunset found me on the summit of an unfamiliar mountain, with cold rain setting in, and below me lay the impenetrable laurel of Huggins’s Hell. I turned back to the head of the nearest water course, not knowing whither it led, fought my way through thicket and darkness to the nearest house, and asked for lodging. The man was just coming in from work. He betrayed some anxiety but admitted me with grave politeness. Then he departed on an errand, leaving his wife to hear the story of my wanderings.
I was eager for supper; but madame made no move toward the kitchen. An hour passed. A little child whimpered with hunger. The mother, flushing, soothed it on her breast.
It was well on in the night when her husband returned, bearing a little “poke” of cornmeal. Then the woman flew to her post. Soon we had hot bread, three or four slices of pork, and black coffee unsweetened—all there was in the house.
It developed that when I arrived there wasbarely enough meal for the family’s supper and breakfast. My host had to shell some corn, go in almost pitch darkness, without a lantern, to a tub-mill far down the branch, wait while it ground out a few spoonfuls to the minute and bring the meal back.
Next morning, when I offered pay for my entertainment, he waved it aside. “I ain’t never tuk money from company,” he said, “and this ain’t no time to begin.”
Laughing, I slipped some silver into the hand of the eldest child. “This is not pay; it’s a present.” The girl was awed into speechlessness at sight of money of her own, and the parents did not know how to thank me for her, but bade me “Stay on, stranger; pore folks has a pore way, but you’re welcome to what we got.”
This incident is a little out of the common, nowadays; but it is typical of what was customary until lumbering and other industrial works began to invade the solitudes. To-day it is the rule to charge twenty-five cents a meal and the same for lodging, regardless of what the fare and the bed may be. When you think of it, this is right, for “the porer folks is the harder it is togitthings.”
The mountaineers always are eager for news.In the drab monotony of their shut-in lives the coming of an unknown traveler is an event that will set the whole neighborhood gossiping. Every word and action of his will be discussed for weeks after he has gone his way. This, of course, is a trait of rural people everywhere; but imagine, if you can, how it may be intensified where there are no newspapers, few visitors, and where the average man gets maybe two or three letters a year!
Riding up a branch road, you come upon a white-bearded patriarch who halts you with a wave of the hand.
“Stranger—meanin’ no harm—wharare you gwine?”
You tell him.
“What did you say your name was?”
You had not mentioned it; but you do so now.
“What mought you-uns foller for a living?”
It is wise to humor the old man, and tell him frankly what is your business “up this ’way-off branch.”
Half a mile farther you espy a girl coming toward you. She stops like a startled fawn, wide-eyed with amazement. Then, at a bound, she dodges into a thicket, doubles on her course and runs back as fast as her nimble bare legscan carry her to report that “Some-body’s comin’!”
At the next house, stopping for a drink of water, you chat a few moments. High up the opposite hill is a half-hidden cabin from which keen eyes scrutinize your every move, and a woman cries to her boy: “Run, Kit, down to Mederses, and ax whoishe!”
As you approach a cross-roads store every idler pricks up to instant attention. Your presence is detected from every neighboring cabin and cornfield. Long John quits his plowing, Red John drops his axe, Sick John (“who’s allers ailin’, to hearhimtell”) pops out of bed, and Lyin’ John (whose “mouth ain’t no praar-book, if itdoesopen and shet”) grabs his hat, with “I jes’ got ter know who that feller is!” Then all Johns descend their several paths, to congregate at the store and estimate the stranger as though he were so many board-feet of lumber in the tree or so many pounds of beef on the hoof.
In every settlement there is somebody who makes a pleasure of gathering and spreading news. Such a one we had—a happy-go-lucky fellow from whom, they said, “you can hear the news jinglin’ afore he comes within gunshot.” It amused me to record the many wayshe had of announcing his mission by indirection. Here is the list:
“I’m jes’ broguin’ about.”
“Yes, I’m jest cooterin’ around.”
“I’m santerin’ about.”
“Oh, I’m jes’ prodjectin’ around.”
“Jist traffickin’ about.”
“No, I ain’t workin’ none—jest spuddin’ around.”
“Me? I’m jes’ shacklin’ around.”
“Yea, la! I’m jist loaferin’ about.”
And yet one hears that our mountaineers have a limited vocabulary!
Although this is no place to discuss the mountain dialect, I must explain that to “brogue” means to go about in brogues (brogans nowadays). A “cooter” is a box-tortoise, and the noun is turned into a verb with an ease characteristic of the mountaineers. “Spuddin’ around” means toddling or jolting along. To “shummick” (also “shammick”) is to shuffle about, idly nosing into things, as a bear does when there is nothing serious in view. And “shacklin’ around” pictures a shackly, loose-jointed way of walking, expressive of the idle vagabond.
A stranger takes the mountaineers for simple characters that can be gauged at a glance. This illusion—for it is an illusion—comes from thechildlike directness with which they ask him the most intimate questions about himself, from the genuine good-will with which they admit him to their homes, and from the stark openness of their domestic affairs in houses where no privacy can possibly exist.
In so far as simplicity means only a shrewd regard for essentials, a rigid exclusion of whatever can be done without, perhaps no white race is nearer a state of nature than these highlanders of ours. Yet this relates only to the externals of life. Diogenes sat in a tub, but his thoughts were deep as the sea. And whoever estimates our mountaineers as a shallow-minded or open-minded people has much to learn.
When Long John asks, “What you aimin’ to do up hyur? How much money do you make? Whar’s your old woman?” he does not really expect sincere answers. Certainly he will take them with more than a grain of salt. Conversation, with him, is a game. In quizzing you, the interests that he is actually curious about lie hidden in the back of his head, and he will proceed toward them by cunning circumventions, seeking to entrap you into telling the truth by accident. Being himself born to intrigue and skilled in dodging the leading question, he assumes that you have had equal advantages.When you discuss with him any business of serious concern, if you should go straight to the point, and open your mind frankly, he would be nonplussed.
The fact is that our highlanders are a sly, suspicious, and secretive folk. That, too, is a state of nature. Primitive society is by no means a Utopia or a Garden of Eden. In wilderness life the feral arts of concealment, spying, false “leads,” and doubling on trails, are the arts self-preservative. The native backwoodsman practices them as instinctively and with as little compunction upon his own species as upon the deer and the wolf from whom he learned them.
As a friend, no one will spring quicker to your aid, reckless of consequences, and fight with you to the last ditch; but fear of betrayal lies at the very bottom of his nature. His sleepless suspicion of ulterior motives is no more, no less, than a feral trait, inherited from a long line of forebears whose isolated lives were preserved only by incessant vigilance against enemies that stalked by night and struck without warning.
Casual visitors learn nothing about the true character of the mountaineers. I am not speaking of personal but of race character—type. No outsider can discern and measure those powerfulbut obscure motives, those rooted prejudices, that constitute their real difference from other men, until he has lived with the people a long time on terms of intimacy. Nor can anyone be trusted to portray them if he holds a brief either for or against this people. The fluttering tourist marks only the oddities he sees, without knowing the reason for them. On the other hand, a misguided champion flies to arms at first mention of an unpleasant fact, and either denies it, clamoring for legal proof, or tries to befog the whole subject and run it on the rocks of altercation.
The mountaineers are high-strung and sensitive to criticism. No one has less use for “that worst scourge of avenging heaven, the candid friend.” Of late years they are growing conscious of their own belatedness, and that touches a tender spot. “Hit don’t take a big seed to hurt a sore tooth.” Since they do not see how anyone can find beauty or historic interest in ways of life that the rest of the world has cast aside, so they resent every exposure of their peculiarities as if that were holding them up to ridicule or blame.
Strange to say, it provokes them to be called mountaineers, that being a “furrin word” which they take as a term of reproach. Theycall themselves mountain people, or citizens; sometimes humorously “mountain boomers,” the word boomer being their name for the common red squirrel which is found here only in the upper zones of the mountains. Backwoodsman is another term that they deem opprobrious. Among themselves the backwoods are called “the sticks.” Hillsman and highlander are strange words to them—and anything that is strange is suspicious. Hence it is next to impossible for anyone to write much about these people without offending them or else falling into singsong repetition of the same old terms.
I have found it beyond me to convince anyone here that my studies of the mountain dialect are made from any better motive than vulgar curiosity. It has been my habit to jot down, on the spot, every dialectical word or variant or idiom that I hear, along with the phrase or sentence in which it occurred; for I never trust memory in such matters. And although I tell frankly what I am about, and why, yet all that the folks can or will see is that—
A chiel ’s amang ye, takin’ notes,And, faith, he’ll prent ’em.
Nothing worse than dour looks has yet befallen me, but other scribes have not got off soeasy. On more than one occasion newspaper men who went into eastern Kentucky to report feuds were escorted forcibly to the railroad and warned never to return. The feudists are scarce to blame, for the average news story of their wars is neither sacred nor profane history. It is bad enough to be shown up as an assassin; but when one is posed as “cocking thetrigger” of a gun, or shooting a “forty-four” bullet from a thirty-caliber “automaticrevolver,” who in Kentucky could be expected to stand it?
The novelists have their troubles, too. President Frost relates that when John Fox gave a reading from his Cumberland tales at Berea College “the mountain boys were ready to mob him. They had no comprehension of the nature of fiction. Mr. Fox’s stories were either true or false. If they were true, then he was ‘no gentleman’ for telling all the family affairs of people who had entertained him with their best. If they were not true, then, of course, they were libellous upon the mountain people. Such an attitude may remind us of the general condemnation of fiction by the ‘unco gude’ a generation ago.”
The Schoolhouse
As for settlement workers, let them teach more by example than by precept. Bishop Wilson has given them some advice thatcannot be bettered: “It must be said with emphasis that our problem is an exceedingly delicate one. The Highlanders are Scotch-Irish in their high-spiritedness and proud independence. Those who would help them must do so in a perfectly frank and kindly way, showing always genuine interest in them but never a trace of patronizing condescension. As quick as a flash the mountaineer will recognize and resent the intrusion of any such spirit, and will refuse even what he sorely needs if he detects in the accents or the demeanor of the giver any indication of an air of superiority.”
“The worker among the mountaineers,” he continues, “must ‘meet with them on the level and part on the square’ and conquer their oftentimes unreasonable suspicion by genuine brotherly friendship. The less he has to say about the superiority of other sections or of the deficiencies of the mountains, the better for his cause. The fact is that comparatively few workers are at first able to pass muster in this regard under the searching and silent scrutiny of the mountain people.”
Allow me to add that this is no place for the “unco gude” to exercise their talents, but rather for those whose studies and travels have taught them both tolerance and hopefulness.Some well-meaning missionaries are shocked and scandalized at what seems to them incurable perversity and race degeneration. It is nothing of the sort. There are reasons, good reasons, for the worst that we find in any Hell-fer-Sartin or Loafer’s Glory. All that is the inevitable result of isolation and lack of opportunity. It is no more hopeless than the same features of life were in the Scotch highlands two centuries ago.
But it must be known that the future of this really fine race is, at bottom, an economic problem, which must be studied hand-in-hand with the educational one. Civilization only repels the mountaineer until you show him something to gain by it—he knows by instinct what he is bound to lose. There is no use in teaching cleanliness and thrift to serfs or outcasts. Theindependenceof the mountain farm must be preserved, or the fine spirit of the race will vanish and all that is manly in the Highlander will wither to the core.
It is far from my own purpose to preach or advise. “Portray the struggle, and you need write no tract.” Still farther is it from my thought to let characterization degenerate into caricature. Wherever I tell anything that is unusual or below the average of backwoods life,I give fair warning that it is admitted only for spice or contrast, and let it go at that. But even in writing with severe restraint it will be necessary at times to show conditions so rude and antiquated that professional apologists will growl, and many others may find my statements hard to credit as typical of anything at all in our modern America.
So, let me remind the reader again that full three-fourths of our mountaineers still live in the eighteenth century, and that in their far-flung wilderness, away from large rivers and railways, the habits, customs, morals of the people have changed but little from those of our old colonial frontier; in essentials they are closely analogous to what we read of lower-class English and Scottish life in Covenanter and Jacobite times.
Indelineating 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 ofcomeliness. In Alice MacGowan’sJudith 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 afatson! 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), butshambling 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 andage 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 yearcame 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 himselfand 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.
“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 coldall 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—andthe 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 behindhim. 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,” themountaineers 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 inmore 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 inKing 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 instill 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 settlement.”[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 wasexpectin’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 nailand 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. Itoldhim to hold his tongue back; but when I touchedthe 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 tome. 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.