xt73tx351m1m https://exploreuk.uky.edu/dips/xt73tx351m1m/data/mets.xml Kephart, Horace, 1862-1931. 1913  books b92-133-29323349 English Outing Publishing Company, : New York : Contact the Special Collections Research Center for information regarding rights and use of this collection. Mountain whites (Southern States) Our southern highlanders  / by Horace Kephart. text Our southern highlanders  / by Horace Kephart. 1913 2002 true xt73tx351m1m section xt73tx351m1m 
 
Big Tom Wilson, the bear hunter, who discovered the body of Prof..   Elisha Mitchell where he perished near the summit of the          Peak that afterward was named in his honor, Dy v. :t.  rs  eve
 
OUR SOUTHERNHIGHLANDERS            BYHORACEKEPHARTAUTHOR OF " THIE BOOK OF CAMPING AND WOODCRAFT,' " CAMP      CooLcy, " SPORTING FIREARMS," ETC.           Illustrated          NEW YORKOUTING PUBLISHING           MCMXVICOMPANY
 
         COPYRIGHT, 1913, BYOUTING PUBLISHING COMPANY          All rights reserved        First Printing, November 1913        Second Printing. December 1913        Third Printing, January 1914        Fourth Printing, April 1914


 
              CONTENTSCHAPTER                                PAGE    I. "SOMETHING HIDDDEN; GO AND FIND IT"  I I    II. " THE BACK OF BEYOND. . . . .     28  III. THE GREAT SMOKY MOUNTAINS         50  IV. A BEAR HUNT IN THE SMOKIES        75  V. MOONSHINE LAND  . .    .           1. IIO  VI. WAYS THAT ARE DARK   . . . . . 126  VII. A LEAF FROM THE PAST .            145VIII. "BLOCKADERS" AND "THE REVENUE       i67  IX. THE OUTLANDER AND THE NATIVE   . . 191  X. THE PEOPLE OF THE HILLS . . .     2I2  XI. THE LAND OF Do WITHOUT  . . . . 234  XII. HOME FOLKS AND NEIGHBOR PEOPLE  .   256XIII. THE MOUNTAIN DIALECT....         276XIV. THE LAW OF THE WILDERNESS         305XV. THE BLOOD-FEUD   . . . . . . . 327XVI. WHO ARE THE MOUNTAINEERS         354XVII. "WHEN THE SLEEPER WAKES"          378
 
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                ILLUSTRATIONSBig Tom Wilson, the bear hunter  .  .  . Frontispiece                                             FACING PAGEMap of Appalachia     .   .  .  .   .  .   .  .  .    8A family of pioneers in the twentieth century  .  .  i6" The very cliffs are sheathed with trees and shrubs"  24At the Post-Office ...       .   .  .  ....           32The author in camp in the Big Smokies .  .  .  .  40" Bob "   .   .   .   .   .  .   .  .  .   .  .  .    48" There are few jutting crags " .   .  .   .  .  .    56The bears' home laurel and rhododendron   .  .   64The old copper mine .     .  .   .  .  .   .  .   .   72'"What soldiers these fellows would make under     leadership of some backwoods Napoleon" .  .  8o"By and by up they came, carrying the bear on the     trimmed sapling "    .   .  .  .   .  .   .  .   88Skinning a frozen bear    .  .  .   .  .   .  .  .    96".. . Powerful steep and laurely     . . ."         1I04Mountain still-house hidden in the laurel  .  .  . 112Moonshine still, side view.  .  .   .  .   .  .  .   120Moonshine still in full operation   .  .   .  .  . 128Corn mill and blacksmith forge   .  .  .   .  .  . 136A tub-mill .    .  .  .   .  .   .  .  .   .  .  . 152Cabin on the Little Fork of Sugar Fork of Hazel    Creek in which the author lived alone for three    years  .   .  .   .  .   .  .  .   .  .  .   .  160A mountain home . . ,        .   .  . ,    . ..      176
 
ILLUSTRATIONS                                         FACINGMany of the homes have but one window   .  .  .The schoolhouse  .   ........."At thirty a mountain woman is apt to have a worn    and faded look"  .   .   .  .  .  .  .   .The misty veil of falling water.  .  .  .  .  .An average mountain cabin  .  .   .  .  .  ..A bee-gum  .   .  .  .  .  .   .  ..    .  .  .Let the women do the work  .  .   .  .  .   ."Till the sky-line blends with the sky itself "   .Whitewater Falls  .  .  .  .  .   .  .  .  .  .The road follows the creek-there may be a dozen    fords in a mile  .  ...      .  .   .  .."Dense forest and luxuriant undergrowth"     .PAGB1922082i6232240248264288312320336


 
                       APPALACHIAThe wavy black line shows the outer boundaries of Southern Appalachian  Region. The shaded portion shows the chief areas covered by high            mountains, 3,000 to 6,700 feet above sea-level.
 
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OUR SOUTHERN HIGHLANDERS
 
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  OUR SOUTHERN    HIGHLANDERS              CHAPTER I  "SOMETHING HIDDEN; GO AND FIND IT"I N one of Poe's minor tales, written in 1845,    there is a vague allusion to wild mountains    in western Virginia " tenanted by fierce anduncouth races of men." This, so far as I know,was the first reference in literature to our South-ern mountaineers, and it stood as their onlycharacterization until Miss Murfree (" CharlesEgbert Craddock") began her stories of theCumberland hills.  Time and retouching have done little to softenour Highlander's portrait. Among reading peo-ple generally, South as well as North, to namehim is to conjure up a tall, slouching figure inhomespun, who carries a rifle as habitually ashe does his hat, and who may tilt its muzzletoward a stranger before addressing him, theform of salutation being:                   II
 
12 OUR SOUTHERN HIGHLANDERS  "Stop thar I Whut's you-unses name Whar'syou-uns a-goin' ter"  Let us admit that there is just enough truth inthis caricature to give it a point that will stick.Our typical mountaineer is lank, he is alwaysunkempt, he is fond of toting a gun on his shoul-der, and his curiosity about a stranger's nameand business is promptly, though politely, out.spoken. For the rest, he is a man of mystery.The great world outside his mountains knowsalmost as little about him as he does of it; andthat is little indeed. News in order to reachhim must be of such widespread interest as fairlyto fall from heaven; correspondingly, scarce anyincidents of mountain life will leak out unlessthey be of sensational nature, such as the shoot-ing of a revenue officer in Carolina, the massacreof a Virginia court, or the outbreak of anotherfeud in "bloody Breathitt." And so, from thegrim sameness of such reports, the world infersthat battle, murder, and sudden death are com-monplaces in Appalachia.  To be sure, in Miss Murfree's novels, as inthose of John Fox, Jr., and of Alice MacGowan,we do meet characters more genial than feudistsand illicit distillers; none the less, when we haveclosed the book, who is it that stands out clearestas type and pattern of the mountaineer Is it
 
" SOMETHING HIDDEN"not he of the long rifle and peremptory chal-lenge And whether this be because he getsmost of the limelight, or because we have a fur-tive liking for that sort of thing (on paper), orwhether the armed outlaw be indeed a genuineprotagonist-in any case, the Appalachian peo-ple remain in public estimation to-day, as Poejudged them, an uncouth and fierce race ofmen, inhabiting a wild mountain region littleknown.  The Southern highlands themselves are amysterious realm. WAhen I prepared, eightyears ago, for my first sojourn in the GreatSmoky Mountains, which form the masterchain of the Appalachian system, I could findin no library a guide to that region. The mostdiligent research failed to discover so much asa magazine article, written within this genera-tion, that described the land and its people.Nay, there was not even a novel or a story thatshowed intimate local knowledge. Had I beengoing to Teneriffe or Timbuctu, the librarieswould have furnished information a-plenty; butabout this housetop of eastern America theywere strangely silent; it was terra incognita.  On the map I could see that the SouthernAppalachians cover an area much larger thanNew England, and that they are nearer theI3
 
14 OUR SOUTHERN HIGHLANDERScenter of our population than any other moun-tains that deserve the name. Why, then, so littleknown Quaintly there came to mind thoselines familiar to my boyhood: " Get you upthis way southward, and go up into the moun-tain; and see the land, what it is; and the peoplethat dwelleth therein, whether they be strong orweak, few or many; and what the land is thatthey dwell in, whether it be good or bad; andwhat cities they be that they dwell in, whetherin tents, or in strongholds; and what the landis, whether it be fat or lean, whether there bewood therein or not."  In that dustiest room of a great library where"pub. docs." are stored, I unearthed a govern-ment report on forestry that gave, at last, a clearidea of the lay of the land. And here was news.We are wont to think of the South as a lowcountry with sultry climate; yet its mountainchains stretch uninterruptedly southwestwardfrom Virginia to Alabama, 65o miles in an airline. They spread over parts of eight contigu-ous States, and cover an area somewhat largerthan England and Scotland, or about the sameas that of the Alps. In short, the greatest moun-tain system of eastern America is massed in ourSouthland. In its upper zone one sleeps underblankets the year round.
 
" SOMETHING HIDDEN "  In all the region north of Virginia and east ofthe Black Hills of Dakota there is but one sum-mit (Mount Washington, in New Hampshire)that reaches 6,ooo feet above sea level, and thereare only a dozen others that exceed 5,0o0 feet.By contrast, south of the Potomac there areforty-six peaks, and forty-one miles of dividingridges, that rise above 6,ooo feet, besides 288mountains and some 300 miles of divide thatstand more than 5,ooo feet above the sea. InNorth Carolina alone the mountains cover 6,ooosquare miles, with an average elevation of 2,700feet, and with twenty-one peaks that overtopMount Washington.  I repeated to myself: "Why, then, so littleknown " The Alps and the Rockies, the Pyren-nees and the Harz are more familiar to theAmerican people, in print and picture, if not byactual visit, than are the Black, the Balsam, andthe Great Smoky Mountains. It is true thatsummer tourists flock to Asheville and Toxaway,Linville and Highlands, passing their time atmodern hotels and motoring along a few maca-damed roads, but what do they see of the billowywilderness that conceals most of the nativehomes Glimpses from afar. What do theylearn of the real mountaineer Hearsay. For,mark you, nine-tenths of the Appalachian popu-is
 
i6 OUR SOUTHERN HIGHLANDERSlation are a sequestered folk. The typical, theaverage mountain man prefers his native hillsand his primitive ancient ways.  We read more and talk more about the Fili-pinos, see more of the Chinese and the Syrians,than of these three million next-door Americanswho are of colonial ancestry and mostly of Brit-ish stock. New York, we say, is a cosmopoli-tan city; more Irish than in Dublin, more Ger-mans than in Munich, more Italians than inRome, more Jews than in nine Jerusalems; buthow many New Yorkers ever saw a Southernmountaineer I am sure that a party of hills-men fresh from the back settlements of the Una-kas, if dropped on the streets of any large cityin the Union, and left to their own guidance,would stir up more comment (and probablymore trouble) than would a similar body ofwhites from any other quarter of the earth; andyet this same odd people is more purely bredfrom old American stock than any other elementof our population that occupies, by itself, sogreat a territory.  The mountaineers of the South are markedapart from all other folks by dialect, by cus-toms, by character, by self-conscious isolation.So true is this that they call all outsiders " fur-riners." It matters not whether your descent


 
A Family of Pioneers in the Twentieth Century
 
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" SOMETHING HIDDEN   '7be from Puritan or Cavalier, whether you comefrom Boston or Chicago, Savannah or New Or-leans, in the mountains you are a " furriner."A traveler, puzzled and scandalized at this,asked a native of the Cumberlands what hewould call a " Dutchman or a Dago." The fel-low studied a bit and then replied: "Them'sthe outlandish."  Foreigner, outlander, it is all one; we are"different," we are " quar," to the mountaineer.He knows he is an American; but his conceptionof the metes and bounds of America is vagueto the vanishing point. As for countries over-sea-well, when a celebrated Nebraskan re-turned from his trip around the globe, one ofmy backwoods neighbors proudly informed me:" I see they give Bryan a lot of receptions whenhe kern back from the other world."  No one can understand the attitude of ourhighlanders toward the rest of the earth until herealizes their amazing isolation from all thatlies beyond the blue, hazy skyline of their moun-tains. Conceive a shipload of emigrants castaway on some unknown island, far from theregular track of vessels, and left there for fiveor six generations, unaided and untroubled bythe growth of civilization. Among the descend-ants of such a company we would expect to findI7
 
iS OUR SOUTHERN HIGHLANDERScustoms and ideas unaltered from the time oftheir forefathers. And that is just what we dofind to-day among our castaways in the sea ofmountains. Time has lingered in Appalachia.The mountain folk still live in the eighteenthcentury. The progress of mankind from thatage to this is no heritage of theirs.  Our backwoodsmen of the Blue Ridge andthe Unakas, of their connecting chains, and ofthe outlying Cumberlands, are still thinking es-sentially the same thoughts, still living in muchthe same fashion, as did their ancestors in thedays of Daniel Boone. Nor is this their fault.They are a people of keen intelligence andstrong initiative when they can see anything towin. But, as President Frost says, they havebeen " beleaguered by nature." They are be-lated-ghettoed in the midst of a civilizationthat is as aloof from them as if it existed onlyon another planet. And so, in order to be fairand just with these, our backward kinsmen, wemust, for the time, decivilize ourselves to the ex-tent of going back and getting an eighteenth cen-tury point of view.  But, first, how comes it that the mountainfolk have been so long detached from the lifeand movement of their times Why are theyso foreign to present-day Americanism that they
 
" SOMETHING HIDDEN "innocently call all the rest of us foreigners  The answer lies on the map. They are crea-tures of environment, enmeshed in a labyrinththat has deflected and repelled the march of ournation for three hundred years.  In I728, when Colonel William Byrd, ofWestover, was running the boundary line be-tween Virginia and North Carolina, he finallywas repulsed by parallel chains of savage, un-peopled mountains that rose tier beyond tier tothe westward, everywhere densely forested, andmatted into jungle by laurel and other under-growth. In his Journal, writing in the quaint,old-fashioned way, he said: "Our country hasnow been inhabited more than 130 years by theEnglish, and still we hardly know anything ofthe Appalachian Mountains, that are nowhereabove 250 miles from the sea. Whereas theFrench, who are later comers, have rang'd fromQuebec Southward as far as the Mouth of Mis-sissippi, in the bay of Mexico, and to the Westalmost as far as California, which is either wayabove 2,000 miles."  A hundred and thirty years later, the samething could have been said of these same moun-tains; for the " fierce and uncouth races of men"that Poe faintly heard of remained practicallyundiscovered until they startled the nation onI9
 
20 OUR SOUTHERN HIGHLANDERSthe scene of our Civil War, by sending i8o,oooof their riflemen into the Union Army.  If a corps of surveyors to-day should be en-gaged to run a line due west from eastern Vir-ginia to the Blue Grass of Kentucky, they wouldhave an arduous task. Let us suppose that theystart from near Richmond and proceed alongthe line of 370 50'. The Blue Ridge is not es-pecially difficult: only eight transverse ridgesto climb up and down in fourteen miles, andnone of them more than 2,000 feet high frombottom to top. Then, thirteen miles across thelower end of The Valley, a curious formationbegins.  As a foretaste, in the three and a half milescrossing Little House and Big House mountains,one ascends 2,200 feet, descends i,400, climbsagain i,600, and goes down 2,000 feet on the farside. Beyond lie steep and narrow ridges athwartthe way, paralleling each other like waves atsea. Ten distinct mountain chains are scaledand descended in the next forty miles. Thereare few " leads " rising gradually to their crests.Each and every one of these ridges is a Chinesewall magnified to altitudes of from a thousandto two thousand feet, and covered with thicket.The hollows between them are merely deeptroughs.  In the next thirty miles we come upon novel
 
" SOMETHING HIDDEN"topography. Instead of wave following wavein orderly procession, we find here a choppy seaof small mountains, with hollows running to-ward all points of the compass. Instead ofChinese walls, we now have Chinese puzzles.The innate perversity of such configurationgrows more and more exasperating as we toilwestward. In the two hundred miles from theGreenbrier to the Kentucky River, the ridgesare all but unscalable, and the streams spranglein every direction like branches of mountainlaurel.  The only roads follow the beds of tortuousand rock-strewn water courses, which may benearly dry when you start out in the morning,but within an hour may be raging torrents.There are no bridges. One may ford a dozentimes in a mile. A spring " tide " will stop alltravel, even from neighbor to neighbor, for a dayor two at a time. Buggies and carriages areunheard of. In many districts the only meansof transportation is with saddlebags on horse-back, or with a "tow sack" afoot. If the pe-destrian tries a short-cut he will learn what thenatives mean when they say: " Goin' up, youcan might' nigh stand up straight and bite theground; goin' down, a man wants hobnails inthe seat of his pants."  James Lane Allen was not writing fiction2 V
 
22 OUR SOUTHERN HIGHLANDERSwhen he said of the far-famed Wilderness Roadinto Kentucky: " Despite all that has beendone to civilize it since Boone traced its coursein 1790, this honored historic thoroughfare re-mains to-day as it was in the beginning, with allits sloughs and sands, its mud and holes, and jut-ting ledges of rock and loose boulders, andtwists and turns, and general total depravity. ...One such road was enough. They are said tohave been notorious for profanity, those whocame into Kentucky from this side. Naturally.Many were infidels-there are roads that makea man lose faith. It is known that the morepious companies of them, as they traveled along,would now and then give up in despair, sitdown, raise a hymn, and have prayers beforethey could go further. Perhaps one of the pro-vocations to homicide among the mountainpeople should be reckoned this road. I haveseen two of the mildest of men, after riding overit for a few hours, lose their temper and beginto fight-fight their horses, fight the flies, fightthe cobwebs on their noses."  Such difficulties of intercommunication areenough to explain the isolation of the mountain-eers. In the more remote regions this lonelinessreaches a degree almost unbelievable. Miss El-len Semple, in a fine monograph published in
 
" SOMETHING HIDDEN"23the Geographical Journal, of London, in i90i,gave us some examples:  " These Kentucky mountaineers are not only cut off fromthe outside world, but they are separated from each other.Each is confined to his own locality, and finds his littleworld within a radius of a few miles from his cabin. Thereare many men in these mountains who have never seen atown, or even the poor village that constitutes their county-seat.. . . The women      . . . are almost as rootedas the trees. We met one woman who, during the twelveyears of her married life, had lived only ten miles across themountain from her own home, but had never in this timebeen back home to visit her father and mother. Anotherback in Perry county told me she had never been fartherfrom home than Hazard, the county-seat, which is onlysix miles distant. Another had never been to the post-office, four miles away; and another had never seen theford of the Rockcastle River, only two miles from herhome, and marked, moreover, by the country store of thedistrict."  When I first went into the Smokies, I stoppedone night in a single-room log cabin, and soonhad the good people absorbed in my tales oftravel beyond the seas. Finally the housewifesaid to me, with pathetic resignation: " Bush-nell's the furdest ever I've been." Bushnell,at that time, was a hamlet of thirty people, onlyseven miles from where we sat. When I livedalone on "the Little Fork of Sugar Fork of
 
24 OUR SOUTHERN HIGHLANDERSHazel Creek," there were women in the neigh-borhood, young and old, who had never seen arailroad, and men who had never boarded atrain, although the Murphy branch ran withinsixteen miles of our post-office.  The firsttime that a party of these people went to therailroad, they were uneasy and suspicious. Near-ing the way-station, a girl in advance came uponthe first negro she ever saw in her life, and ranscreaming back: " My goddamighty, Main,thar's the boogerman-I done seed him !"  But before discussing the mountain peopleand their problems, let us take an imaginaryballoon voyage over their vast domain. Southof the Potomac the Blue Ridge is a narrow ram-part rising abruptly from the east, one or twothousand feet above its base, and descendingsharply to the Shenandoah Valley on the west.Across the Valley begin the Alleghanies. Thesemountains, from the Potomac through to thenorthern Tennessee border, consist of a multi-tude of narrow ridges with steep escarpment onboth sides, running southwesterly in parallelchains, and each chain separated from its neigh-bors by deep, slender dales. Wherever one goeswestward from the Valley he will encounter tierafter tier of these ridges, as I have already de-scribed.


 
Photo by U. S.)rest Service"The very cliffs are sheathed with trees and shrubs"-Linville River            and Falls, N. C. The wvalls of one gorge are                     from 50o to 2,000 feet high.M             ik   ,
 
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" SOMETHING HIDDEN"  As a rule, the links in each chain can be passedby following small gaps; but often one mustmake very wide detours. For example, PineMountain (every link has its own distinct name)is practically impassable for nearly iSo miles,except for two water gaps and five difficult cross-ings. Although it averages only a mile thick,the people on its north side, generally, know lessabout those on the south than a Maine Yankeedoes about Pennsylvania Dutchmen.  The Alleghanies together have a width offrom forty to sixty miles. Westward of them,for a couple of hundred miles, are the labyrin-thine roughs of West Virginia and eastern Ken-tucky.  In southwestern Virginia the Blue Ridge andthe Alleghanies coalesce, but soon spread apartagain, the Blue Ridge retaining its name, as wellas its general character, although much loftierand more massive than in the north. The south-east front of the Blue Ridge is a steep escarp-ment, rising abruptly from the Piedmont Pla-teau of Carolina. Not one river cuts throughthe Ridge, notwithstanding that the mountainsto the westward are higher and much more mas-sive. It is the watershed of this whole moun-tain region. The streams rising on its north-western front flow down into central plateaus,25
 
26 OUR SOUTHERN HIGHLANDERSand thence cut their way through the Unakasin deep and precipitous gorges, draining finallyinto the Gulf of Mexico, through the Tennessee,Ohio and Mississippi rivers.  The northwestern range, which correspondsto the Alleghanies of Virginia, now assumesa character entirely different from them. In-stead of parallel chains of low ridges, we havehere, on the border of North Carolina and Ten-nessee, a single chain that dwarfs all others inthe Appalachian system. It is cut into seg-ments by the rivers (Nolichucky, French Broad,Pigeon, Little Tennessee, Hiwassee) that drainthe interior plateaus, and each segment has adistinct name of its own (Iron, Northern Unaka,Bald, Great Smoky, Southern Unaka or Unicoimountains). The Carolina mountaineers stillcall this system collectively the Alleghanies, butthe U. S. Geological Survey has given it amore distinctive name, the Unakas. While theBlue Ridge has only seven peaks that rise aboveSoo0 feet, the Unakas have 125 summits exceed-ing 5,ooo, and ten that are over 6,ooo feet.  Connecting the Unaka chain with the BlueRidge are several transverse ranges, the Stone,Beech, Roan, Yellow, Black, Newfound, Pis-gah, Balsam, Cowee, Nantahala, Tusquitee, anda few minor mountains, which as a whole are
 
" SOMETHING HIDDEN"much higher than the Blue Ridge, I56 summitsrising over 5,ooo feet, and thirty-six over 6,ooofeet above sea-level.  In northern Georgia the Unakas and the BlueRidge gradually fade away into stragglingridges and foothills, which extend into smallparts of South Carolina and Alabama.  The Cumberland Plateau is not attached toeither of these mountain systems, but is rathera prolongation of the roughs of eastern Ken-tucky. It is separated from the Unakas by thebroad valley of the Tennessee River. The Pla-teau rises very abruptly from the surroundingplains. It consists mainly of tableland gashedby streams that have cut their way down in deepnarrow gulches with precipitous sides.  Most of the literature about our Southernmountaineers refers only to the inhabitants ofthe comparatively meagre hills of eastern Ken-tucky, or to the Cumberlands of Tennessee.Little has been written about the real mountain-eers of southwestern Virginia, western NorthCarolina, and the extreme north of Georgia.The great mountain masses still await their an-nalist, their artist, and, in some places, eventheir explorer.27


 
CHAPTER II          "THE BACK OF BEYOND"O    F certain remote parts of Erin, Jane Bar-      low says: "In Bogland, if you inquire      the address of such or such person, youwill hear not very infrequently that he or shelives ' off away at the Back of Beyond.' . . . ATraveler to the Back of Beyond may considerhimself rather exceptionally fortunate, shouldhe find that he is able to arrive at his destinationby any mode of conveyance other than 'the twostandin' feet of him.' Often enough the laststage of his journey proceeds down some boggyboreen, or up some craggy hill-track, inacces-sible to any wheel or hoof that ever was shod."  So in Appalachia, one steps shortly from therailway into the primitive. Most of the rivervalleys are narrow. In their bottoms the soil isrich, the farms well kept and generous, the own-ers comfortable and urbane. But from the val-leys directly spring the mountains, with slopesrising twenty to forty degrees or more. These                      28
 
" THE BACK OF BEYOND"mountains cover nine-tenths of western NorthCarolina, and among them dwell a majority ofthe native people.  The back country is rough. No boat norcanoe can stem its brawling waters. No bicy-cle nor automobile can enter it. No coach canendure its roads. Here is a land of lumberwagons, and saddle-bags, and shackly little sledsthat are dragged over the bare ground by har-nessed steers. This is the country that ordinarytourists shun. And well for such that they do,since whoso cares more for bodily comfort thanfor freedom and air and elbow-room shouldtarry by still waters and pleasant pastures. Tohim the backwoods could be only what Burnscalled Argyleshire: "A country where savagestreams tumble over savage mountains, thinlyoverspread with savage flocks, which starvinglysupport as savage inhabitants."  When I went south into the mountains I wasseeking a Back of Beyond. This for more rea-sons than one. With an inborn taste for the wildand romantic, I yearned for a strange land anda people that had the charm of originality.Again, I had a passion for early American his-tory; and, in Far Appalachia, it seemed that Imight realize, the past in the present, seeing withmy own eyes what life must have been to my29
 
30 OUR SOUTHERN HIGHLANDERSpioneer ancestors of a century or two ago. Be-sides, I wanted to enjoy a free life in the openair, the thrill of exploring new ground, the joysof the chase, and the man's game of matchingmy woodcraft against the forces of nature, withno help from servants or hired guides.  So, casting about for a biding place thatwould fill such needs, I picked out the uppersettlement of Hazel Creek, far up under the leeof those Smoky Mountains that I had learnedso little about. On the edge of this settlement,scant two miles from the post-office of Medlin,there was a copper mine, long disused on ac-count of litigation, and I got permission to oc-cupy one of its abandoned cabins.  A mountain settlement consists of all who gettheir mail at the same place. Ours was madeup of forty-two households (about two hundredsouls) scattered over an area eight miles long bytwo wide. These are air-line measurements.All roads and trails "wiggled and wingledaround" so that some families were severalmiles from a neighbor. Fifteen homes had nowagon road, and could be reached by no vehicleother than a narrow sled. Quill Rose had noteven a sledpath, but journeyed full five miles bytrail to the nearest wagon road.  Medlin itself comprised two little stores built
 
" THE BACK OF BEYOND" 3of rough planks and bearing no signs, a cornmill, and four dwellings. A mile and a halfaway was the log schoolhouse, which, once ortwice a month, served also as church. Scat-tered about the settlement were seven tiny tub-mills for grinding corn, some of them mere opensheds with a capacity of about a bushel a day.Most of the dwellings were built of logs. Twoor three, only, were weatherboarded framehouses and attained the dignity of a storn and ahalf.  All about us was the forest primeval, whereroamed some sparse herds of cattle, razorbackhogs, and the wild beasts. Speckled trout werein all the streams. Bears sometimes raided thefields, and wildcats were a common nuisance.Our settlement was a mere slash in the vastwoodland that encompassed it.  The post-office occupied a space about fivefeet square, in a corner of one of the stores.There was a daily mail, by rider, serving fourother communities along the way. The contrac-tor for this service had to furnish two horses,working turnabout, pay the rider, and squeezehis own profit, out of 499 a year. In 'StarRoute days the mail was carried afoot, two bare-footed young men " toting the sacks on theirown wethers " over this thirty-two-mile round3 1
 
32 OUR SOUTHERN HIGHLANDERStrip, for forty-eight cents a day; and theyboarded themselves!  In the group that gathered at mail time I of-ten was solicited to " back " envelopes, give outthe news, or decipher letters for men who couldnot read. Several times, in the postmaster's ab-sence, I registered letters for myself, or forsomeone else, the law of the nation being sus-pended by general consent.  Our stores, as I have said, were small, yetmany of their shelves were empty. Oftentimesthere was no flour to be had, no meat, cereals,canned goods, coffee, sugar, or oil. It excitedno comment at all when Old Pete would leanacross his bare counter and lament that " Thar'slots o' folks a-hurtin' around hyur for lard, andI ain't got none."  I have seen the time when our neighborhoodcould get no salt nor tobacco without making atwenty-four-mile trip over the mountain andback, in the dead of winter. This was due,partly, to the state of the roads, and to the factthat there would be no wagon available forweeks at a time. Wagoning, by the way, wasno sinecure. Often it meant to chop a fallentree out of the road, and then, with handspikes," man-power the log outen the way." Some-times an axle would break (far upon the moun-


 





























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"THE BACK OF BEYOND "



tain, of course); then a tree must be felled, and
a new axle made on the spot from the green
wood, with no tools but axe and jackknife.
  Trade was mostly by barter, in which 'coon
skins and ginseng had the same rank as in the
days oi Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone. Long
credits were given on anticipated crops; but the
risks were great and the market limited by local
consumption, as it did not pay to haul bulky
commodities to the railroad. Hence it was self-
preservation for the storekeepers to carry only a
slender stock of essentials and take pains to have
little left through unproductive times.
  As a rule, credit would not be asked so long as
anything at all could be offered in trade. When
Bill took the last quart of meal from the house,
as rations for a bear hunt, his patient Marg
wal