Our Southern Highlanders Part 21

"Won't ye stay the night? Looks like to me we'll have a rainin', windin'

spell."

"No: I'll haffter go down."

"Well, come agin, and fix to stay a week."

"You-uns come down with me."

"Won't go now, I guess, Tom."

"Giddep! I'll be back by in the mornin'."

"Farwell!"

Rather laconic. Yet, on occasion, when the mountaineer is drawn out of his natural reserve and allows his emotions free rein, there are few educated people who can match his picturesque and pungent diction. His trick of apt phrasing is intuitive. Like an artist striking off a portrait or a caricature with a few swift strokes his characterization is quick and vivid. Whether he use quaint obsolete English or equally delightful perversions, what he says will go straight to the mark with epigrammatic force.

I cannot quit this topic without reference to the bizarre and original place-names that sprinkle the map of Appalachia.

Many readers of John Fox's novels take for granted that the author coined such piquant t.i.tles as Lonesome, Troublesome, h.e.l.l fer Sartin, and Kingdom Come. But all of these are real names in the Kentucky mountains. They denote rough country, and the country _is_ rough, so that to a traveler it is plain enough why travel and travail were used interchangeably in old editions of Shakespeare. There is nothing like first-hand knowledge of mountain roads to revive sixteenth-century habits of thought and speech. The most scrupulous visitor will fain admit the aptness of mountain nomenclature.

Kentucky has no monopoly of grotesque and whimsical local names. The whole Appalachian region, from the Virginias to Alabama, is peppered with them. Whatever else the southern mountaineer may be, he is original. Elsewhere throughout America we have place-names imported from the Old World as thick as weeds; but the pioneers of the southern hills either forgot that there was an Old World or they disdained to borrow from it.

Personal names applied to localities are common enough, but they are those of actual settlers, not of notables honored from afar (Mitch.e.l.l, LeConte, Guyot, were not the highlanders' names for those peaks). Often a surname is put to such use, as Jake's Creek, Old Nell k.n.o.b, and Big Jonathan Run. We even have Granny's Branch, and Daddy and Mammy creeks.

In the main it is characteristic of our Appalachian place-names that they are descriptive or commemorate some incident. The Shut-in is a gorge; the Suck is a whirlpool; Pinch-gut is a narrow pa.s.sage between the cliffs. Calf-killer Run is "whar a meat-eatin' bear was usin'," and Barren She Mountain was the death-ground of a she-bear that had no cubs.

Kemmer's Old Stand was a certain hunter's favorite ambush on a runway.

Meat-scaffold Branch is where venison was hung up for "jerking."

Graining-block Creek was a trappers' rendezvous, and Honey Camp Run is where the bee hunters stayed. Lick-log denotes a notched log used for salting cattle. Still-house Branch was a moonshiners' retreat. Skin-linn Fork is where the bast was peeled from young lindens. Big b.u.t.t is what Westerners call a b.u.t.te. Ball-play Bottom was a lacrosse field of the Indians. Pizen Gulch was infested with poison ivy or sumach. Keerless k.n.o.b is "a joyful place for wild salat" (_amaranthus_). A "h.e.l.l" or "slick" or "woolly-head" or "yaller patch" is a thicket of laurel or rhododendron, impa.s.sable save where the bears have bored out trails.

The qualities of the raw backwoodsmen are printed from untouched negatives in the names he has left upon the map. His literalness shows in Black Rock, Standing Stone, Sharp Top, Twenty Mile, Naked Place, The Pocket, Tumbling Creek, and in the endless designations taken from trees, plants, minerals, or animals noted on the spot. Incidents of his lonely life are signalized in Dusk Camp Run, Mad Sheep Mountain, Dog Slaughter Creek, Drowning Creek, Burnt Cabin Branch, Broken Leg, Raw Dough, Burnt Pone, Sandy Mush, and a hundred others. His contentious spirit blazes forth in Fighting Creek, Shooting Creek, Gouge-eye, Vengeance, Four Killer, and Disputanta.

Sometimes even his superst.i.tions are commemorated. In Owesley County, Kentucky, is a range of hills bearing the singular name of Whoop fer Larrie. A party of hunters, so the legend goes, had encamped for the night in the shelter of a bluff. They were startled from sleep by a loud rumble, as of some wagon hurrying along the pathless ridge, and they heard a voice shouting "Whoop fer Larrie! Whoop fer Larrie!" The hills would return no echo, for the cry came from a riotous "ha'nt."

A sardonic humor, sometimes smudged with "that touch of grossness in our English race," characterizes many of the backwoods place-names. In the mountains of Old Virginia we have Dry Tripe settlement and Jerk 'em Tight. In West Virginia are Take In Creek, Get In Run, Seldom Seen Hollow, Odd, Buster k.n.o.b, Shabby Room, and Stretch Yer Neck. North Carolina has its Shoo Bird Mountain, Big Bugaboo Creek, Weary Hut, Frog Level, Shake a Rag, and the Chunky Gal. In eastern Tennessee are No Time settlement and No Business k.n.o.b, with creeks known as Big Soak, Suee, Go Forth, and How Come You. Georgia has produced Scataway, Too Nigh, Long Nose, Dug Down, Silly Cook, Turkey Trot, Broke Jug Creek, and Tear Breeches Ridge.

Allowing some license for the mountaineer's irreverence, his whimsical fancies, and his scorn of sentimentalism, it must be said that his descriptive terms are usually apposite and sometimes felicitous. Often he is poetically imaginative, occasionally romantic, and generally picturesque. Roan Mountain, Grandfather, the Lone Bald, Craggy Dome, the Black Brothers, Hairy Bear, the Balsam Cone, Sunset Mountain, the Little s...o...b..rd, are names that linger lovingly in one's memory.

The writer recalls with pleasure not only the features but the mere t.i.tles of that superb landscape that he shared with the wild creatures and a few woodsmen when living far up on the divide of the Great Smoky Mountains. Immediately below his cabin were the Defeat and Desolation branches of Bone Valley, with Hazel Creek meandering to the Little Tennessee. Cheoah, Tululah, Santeetlah, the Tuckaseegee, and the Nantahala (Valley of the Noonday Sun) flowed through gorges overlooked by the Wauchecha, the Yalaka and the Cowee ranges, Tellico, Wahyah, the Standing Indian and the Tusquitee.[10] Sonorous names, these, which our pioneers had the good sense to adopt from the aborigines.

To the east were Cold Spring k.n.o.b, the Miry Ridge, Siler's Bald, Clingman's Dome, and the great peaks at the head of Okona Lufty. On the west rose Brier k.n.o.b, Laurel Top, Thunderhead, Blockhouse, the Fodder-stack, and various "balds" of the Unakas guarding Hiwa.s.see. To the northward were Cade's Cove and the vale of Tuckaleechee, with Chilhowee in the near distance, and the Appalachian Valley stretching beyond our ramparts to where the far c.u.mberlands marked an ever-blue horizon.

What matter that the plenteous roughs about us were branded with rude or opprobrious names? Rip Shin Thicket, Dog-hobble Ridge, the Rough Arm, Bear-wallow, Woolly Ridge, Roaring Fork, Huggins's h.e.l.l, the Devil's Racepath, his Den, his Courthouse, and other playgrounds of Old Nick--they, too, were well and fitly named.

CHAPTER XIV

THE LAW OF THE WILDERNESS

It is only a town-dreamed allegory that represents Nature as a fond mother suckling her young upon her breast. Those who have lived literally close to wild Nature know her for a tyrant, void of pity and of mercy, from whom nothing can be wrung without toil and the risk of death.

To all pioneer men--to their women and children, too--life has been one long, hard, cruel war against elemental powers. Nothing else than warlike arts, nothing short of warlike hazards, could have subdued the beasts and savages, felled the forests and made our land habitable for those teeming millions who can exist only in a state of mutual dependence and cultivation. The first lesson of pioneering was self-reliance. "Provide with thine own arm," said the Wilderness, "against frost and famine and skulking foes, or thou shalt surely die!"

But there were compensations. As the school of the woods was harsh and stern, so it brought up sons and daughters of lion heart. And its reward to those who endured was the most outright independence to be had on earth. No king was so irresponsible as the pioneer, no czar so absolute as he. It needed no martyr spirit in him to sing:

"I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul."

We have seen that the Appalachian region was peculiar in this: that good bottom lands were few and far between. So our mountain farmers were cut off more from the world and from each other, were thrown still more upon their individual resources, than other pioneers. By compulsion their self-reliance was more complete; hence their independence grew more haughty, their individualism more intense. And these traits, exaggerated as they were by force of environment, remain unweakened among their descendants to the present day.

Here, then, is a key to much that is puzzling in highland character. In the beginning isolation was forced upon the mountaineers; they accepted it as inevitable and bore it with stoical fort.i.tude until in time they came to love solitude for its own sake and to find compensations in it for lack of society.

Says a native writer, Miss Emma Miles, in a clever and illuminating book on _The Spirit of the Mountains_: "We who live so far apart that we rarely see more of one another than the blue smoke of each other's chimneys are never at ease without the feel of the forest on every side--room to breathe, to expand, to develop, as well as to hunt and to wander at will. The nature of the mountaineer demands that he have solitude for the unhampered growth of his personality, wing-room for his eagle heart."

Such feeling, such longing, most of us have experienced in pa.s.sing moods; but in the highlander it is a permanent state of mind, sustaining him from the cradle to the grave. To enjoy freedom and air and elbow-room he cheerfully puts aside all that society can offer, and stints himself and bears adversity with a calm and steadfast soul. To be free, unbeholden, lord of himself and his surroundings--that is the wine of life to a mountaineer.

Such a man cannot stand it to be bossed around. If he works for another, it must be on a footing of equality. Poverty may oblige him to take a turn on some "public works" (by which he means any job where many men work together, such as lumbering or railroad building), but he must be handled with more respect than is shown common laborers elsewhere. At a sharp order or a curse from the foreman he will flare back: "That's enough out o' you!" and immediately he will drop his tools. Generally he will stay on a job just long enough to earn money for immediate needs; then back to the farm he goes.

Bear in mind that in the mountains every person is accorded the consideration that his own qualities ent.i.tle him to, and no whit more.

It has always been so. Our Highlanders have neither memory nor tradition of ever having been herded together, lorded over, persecuted or denied the privileges of free-men. So, even within their clans, there is no servility nor any headship by right of birth. Leaders arise, when needed, only by virtue of acknowledged ability and efficiency. In this respect there is no a.n.a.logy whatever to the clan system of ancient Scotland, to which the loose social structure of our own highlanders has been compared.

We might expect such fiery individualism to cool gradually as population grew denser; but, oddly enough, crowding only intensifies it in the shy backwoodsman. Neighborliness has not grown in the mountains--it is on the wane. There are to-day fewer log-rollings and house-raisings, fewer husking bees and quilting parties than in former times; _and no new social gatherings have taken their place_. Our mountain farmer, seeing all arable land taken up, and the free range ever narrowing, has grown jealous and distrustful, resenting the encroachment of too many sharers in what once he felt was his own unfenced domain. And so it has come about that the very quality that is his strength and charm as a man--his staunch individualism--is proving his weakness and reproach as a neighbor and citizen. The virtue of a time out-worn has become the vice of an age new-born.

The mountaineers are non-social. As they stand to-day, each man "fighting for his own hand, with his back against the wall," they recognize no social compact. Each one is suspicious of the other. Except as kinsmen or partisans they cannot pull together. Speak to them of community of interests, try to show them the advantages of co-operation, and you might as well be proffering advice to the North Star. They will not work together zealously even to improve their neighborhood roads, each mistrusting that the other may gain some trifling advantage over himself or turn fewer shovelfuls of earth. Labor chiefs fail to organize unions or granges among them because they simply will not stick together.

Miss Miles says of her people (the italics are my own): "There is no such thing as a community of mountaineers. They are knit together, man to man, as friends, but not as a body of men.... Our men are almost incapable of concerted action unless they are needed by the Government.... Between blood-relationship and the Federal Government no relations of master and servant, rich and poor, learned and ignorant, employer and employee, are interposed to bind society into a whole....

_The mountaineers must awake to a consciousness of themselves as a people._ For although throughout the highlands of Kentucky, Tennessee and the Carolinas our nature is one, our hopes, our loves, our daily life the same, we are yet a people asleep, _a race without knowledge of its own existence_. This condition is due ... to the isolation that separates the mountaineer from all the world but his own blood and kin, and to the consequent utter simplicity of social relations. When they shall have established a unity of thought corresponding to their h.o.m.ogeneity of character, then their love of country will a.s.sume a practical form, and then, indeed, America, with all her peoples, can boast no stronger sons than these same mountaineers."

To the Highlanders of four States here mentioned should be added all those of Old Virginia, West Virginia, Georgia, and Alabama, making an aggregate to-day of close on four million souls. Together they const.i.tute a distinct people. Not only are they all closely akin in blood, in speech, in ideas, in manners, in ways of living; but their needs, their problems are identical throughout this vast domain. There is no other ethnic group in America so unmixed as these mountaineers and so segregated from all others.

And the strange thing is that they do not know it. Their isolation is so complete that they have no race consciousness at all. In this respect I can think of no other people on the face of the earth to which they may be likened.

As compensation for the peculiar weakness of their social structure, the Highlanders display an undying devotion to family and kindred.

Mountaineers everywhere are pa.s.sionately attached to their homes. Tear away from his native rock your Switzer, your Tyrolean, your Basque, your Montenegrin, and all alike are stricken with homesickness beyond speech or cure. At the first chance they will return, and thenceforth will cling to their patrimonies, however poor these be.

So, too, our man of the Appalachians.--"I went down into the valley, wunst, and I declar I nigh sultered! 'Pears like there ain't breath enough to go round, with all them people. And the water don't do a body no good; an' you cain't eat hearty, nor sleep good o' nights. Course they pay big money down thar; but I'd a heap-sight ruther ketch me a big old 'c.o.o.n fer his hide. Boys, I did hone fer my dog Fiddler, an' the times we'd have a-huntin', and the trout-fishin', an' the smell o' the woods, and n.o.body bossin' and jowerin' at all. I'm a hill-billy, all right, and they needn't to glory their old flat lands to me!"

Domestic affection is seldom expressed by the mountaineers--not even by motherly or sisterly kisses--but it is very deep and real for all that.

In fact, the ties of kinship are stronger with them, and extend to remoter degrees of consanguinity, than with any other Americans that I know. Here again we see working the old feudal idea, an anachronism, but often a beautiful one, in this bustling commercial age. Our hived and promiscuous life in cities is breaking down the old fealty of kith and kin. "G.o.d gives us our relatives," sighs the modern, "but, thank G.o.d, we can choose our friends!" Such words would strike a mountaineer deep with horror. Rather would he go the limit of Stevenson's Saint Ives: "If it is a question of going to h.e.l.l, go to h.e.l.l like a gentleman, with your ancestors!"

[Ill.u.s.tration: Photo by U. S. Forest Service

Whitewater Falls]

When the wilderness came to be settled by white men, courts were feeble to puerility, and every man was a law unto himself. Many hard characters came in with the pioneers--bad neighbors, arrogant, thievish, bold. As society was not organized for mutual protection, it was inevitable that cousin should look to cousin for help in time of trouble. So arose the clan, the family league, and, as things change very slowly in the mountains, we still have clan loyalty outside of and superior to the law. "My family _right or wrong_!" is a slogan to which every highlander will rise, with money or arms in hand, and for it he will lay down his last dollar, the last drop of his blood. There is scarce any limit to which this fealty will not go. Your brother or cousin may have committed a crime that shocks you as it does all other decent citizens; but will you give him up to the officers and testify against him? Not if you are a mountaineer. You will hide him out in the laurel, carry him food, keep him posted, help him to break jail, perjure yourself for him in court--anything, everything, to get him clear.