The Mountaineers: Our Own Lost Tribes

By   ROLLIN   LYNDE   HARTT

Author of " New York, the National Stepmother," etc.
Illustrations by John Wolcott Adams

elder arrived, he ordered him off his premises.

"Can't I leave some tracts?" said the Mormon.
"All the tracks you want, if you leave 'em p'inted towards the gate."

But do I hold up these instances as typical? Nothing is typical of five and a half million Americans inhabiting 112,000 square miles of alpine paradise. Mountaineers differ,' mountain neighborhoods differ, and much that characterizes the mountains characterizes also the lowlands. Behold, in the please-contribute leaflet of a species not yet wholly extinct, "a typical mountain home." That one-room log cabin, with chinked walls, stone chimney, and hand-hewn shingles, is the usual penniless farmer's abode throughout the South. Meanwhile I can show you moun­tain homes that any rich planter might covet. From the literary point of view these bear the implied inscription, "Not for publication." Hence the genesis of what may be termed the mountain fib.

So does the mountain humbug. Two counties of Kentucky have dripped with gore; describe their feuds, without own­ing how exceptional they were, and you prompt the inference that every mountaineer, all the way from northern Virginia to midmost Alabama, is "warred up ag'in' his neighbors." Here and there a family goes to bed in one room minus even a curtain for privacy. State it; stop there. Readers will think all mountaineers un­civilized. In certain remote "coves" "tooth-jumping" survives; a nail is held slantwise against the embattled molar, a hammer does the rest. Tell it; avoid mentioning its extreme rarity. Then will humbug have its perfect work, till a district that should of rights be a national park is regarded as the national slum.

The district is picturesque, however. It has nooks where mountaineers celebrate "old Christmas," Gregorian style, on January 6, and at midnight on old Christ­mas eve "the alders bloom, and cattle kneel down. Hit would make you mighty solemn to see them kneel; you would n't feel like beatin' on them no more." Along many a highway drivers still keep to the left, as in England. Hand-made textiles and hand-made baskets perpetuate classic English designs. An occasional singing-school still uses "shaped" notes, with do, re, mi differing not only in their position on the staff, but also in form and semblance. A few tables, a very few, still sport the "lazy Susan," a kind of merry-go-round for eatables. Once in a great while you will see a mountain wife perched behind her husband on a mule. And the language! They "carry" a horse. They pamper the "least" child. Desiring a "preacher-parson" to say grace, they bid him "wait on the table." From Possum Trot to Still Hollow it is "two good looks and a right smart walk." What a hunt­ing-ground for local color and the where­withal for humbug!

As each peculiarity exists somewhere in the mountains, humbug feels free to make each particular mountaineer a museum of them all, a "type" so "typical" that his own mountains would scarcely know him. Whereas he is not struggling to epitomize and illustrate 112,000 square miles. He has other interests in life. Whole para­graphs he will talk to you without once lapsing into "Shaksperian English," al­though to my personal knowledge the Shaksperian words commonly used in the mountains number at least four: "buss" for "kiss," "poke" for "bag," "poppet" for "doll," "holp" for "helped." As well might you call it the English of Burns, since the "beasties" in "yon" pasture "want out." Or why not the English of rural Ohio because of "hain't," "colyume," and "gardeen"? By the same token, call it Montanian because of "pack" for "carry," or Chaucerian because "hit" replaces "it."

The lowlanders likewise say "hit," but let us not reveal that. Inspired ethnol­ogists, let us consider the mountaineers a race apart and dwell lovingly upon such idiosyncrasies as "sun-ball," "church-house," "rifle-gun," and "man-pusson." Especially let us cherish idiosyncrasies which, though too few to make a patois, are deceptive enough to make trouble.

At a box-party (not theatrical) a girl from Denver said to a moun­tain lad, "Come and, talk to me." Shocking! In the mountains this means, "Come and make love to me." But reflect. Two centuries or thereabouts mountain English has lived withdrawn from the world. On the whole, it has improved. It scorns slang. It is innocent of stereotyped phrases. Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh and in its own individual way. For instance: "I do crave to quit tippin' the bottle, but I can't get the consent of my mind."

May Appalachia forgive me if these ex­amples make the highlander seem queer. Queer he is not. Hear his observations in the cabin or at the mill on grinding day or around the temple of justice during court-week. Few and far between— hardly noticeable, in fact—are his oddities of speech. Talk ripples on softly, pleas­antly, in the verbiage of the rural South, or perhaps of the urban South. Fine little cities dot the mountains. There is Asheville. There is Charleston, West Virginia, to say nothing of Chattanooga. If by "mountaineer" you mean anybody living in Appalachia, then some curious anomalies turn up. Mountaineers thronged to see Mme. Bernhardt ! Our driver on a never-to-be-forgotten trip through the mountains wore low shoes and lavender socks. But the very wilds and deeps of Appalachia afford proof that there are moun­taineers and moun­taineers. In fiction, however, reference is had to the latter only. In travelers' tales you meet a homogeneous race of "mountain whites." Whites, indeed! As if these proud, sensitive, ancestried pioneers had anything in common with the "po' white trash!" Come, come, let us keep things separate !

In the eighteenth century — just when no one knows — Scotch-Irishmen, a few Germans, and fewer Huguenots entered Appalachia and peopled its valleys. Their tribes increased. Sons of original settlers established themselves on the lower mountain-sides. Their tribes increased in turn. At last even the wildest, most inaccessible coves became in­habited. Conditions varied and do still. There is prosperity in the fertile valleys, moderate comfort along the lower moun­tain-sides, dire and heartbreaking misery here and there in remote fastnesses, illiteracy, too, and sometimes savagery. More­over, the first-comers were not all alike. Some were farmers, some professional hunters, some adventurers, some fugitives from justice at a time when the law meted out terrible punishment for offenses now considered trivial. Social distinctions of a sort existed at the outset. They have sharpened. In the mountains one hears of "good stock" and "bad stock." Repeatedly one hears the warning, "Don't think we are all alike."

Such, in sober fact, are these "impassable" mountains. Automobiles come, and motorcycles. Forty-five miles from a railroad a circus appeared. Mountain­eers still point out trees to which the elephants were chained. A single county in a single year voted ninety thousand dol­lars for good roads. If I hesitate to recommend the mountains as a continu­ous speedway for Sybarites, if I admit that in wet weather wheels sometimes go axle-deep, and if I report trails through wild gorges where no road could live a month and lost fastnesses without even a trail, I am only proving what I set out to. Mountain neighborhoods differ. The bridges show it as clearly as the roads. One sees primitive foot-logs, just as the novelists say. As the novelists avoid say­ing, there are also bridges of concrete and steel. Strange enough such modernities look in a landscape strewn with "typical mountain homes."

Ah, those "typical homes!" Window-less, one-room horrors, with open chinks between the logs and with chimneys either of stone or of sticks and mud. Well may the inhabitant "sit in the chimbly an' spit outdoors"—save for one fairly important detail; that is, nobody lives there. Aban­doned for years, these "typical homes" en­joy at present the status of ruins. To see such hovels inhabited, (and they still are in many an unfortunate neighborhood) you must generally force your way to some aery of a place peopled by the submerged. If this sounds paradoxical, never mind. The higher, up you go, the lower down you get.

Then what, in common honesty, is a "typical mountain home" ? We pass two-story frame-houses, set side toward the road, an exposed brick chimney at each end. We pass commodious log dwellings with lace curtains at the windows and flowers blooming in the dooryard. We pass cottages which, given the gingerbread frivolities they lack, might suit a vacationist. It sounds incredible, but we pass three huge, pillared mansions. The type? None exists. Nor can you find anywhere the "typical mountaineers" ranged in stiff rows before their dwellings and making the "typical" sour faces.

They do it systematically in the photo­graphs, and very oddly it strikes one to see them about their business in real life, swinging terrible, Roman-looking, double-edged axes, or strolling the wilderness, rifle on shoulder, or toiling at farm-work on slopes so precipitous that a man may "break his leg falling out of his corn­field," and the only way to plant is "with a shot-gun from the opposite slope." No nonsense can exaggerate. In such places a wheeled vehicle is useless; nothing but the low wooden sledge will keep right side up. To think that men till these cruelly upturned acres and still have a ready smile and greeting for the "furriner"!

Gentle, winning, and hospitable, they hail you with a "Howdy, stranger! Light

an' set. What mought your name be? What mought your business be?" Be­tween women the exchange of civilities may begin: "How old be you? Be you married? How many children have you got ? I hain't got but ten, myself. Hit seems like a body ought to have at least a dozen." Forthwith they invite you to stay all day, which leads to your staying all night, which leads to your staying half the next day. It requires no tact to get into a mountain home, but it takes both genius and self-denial to get out. Although fortune has acquainted me with several good dinners (in the mountains "several" means "many"), a dinner at Paul Jeffer­son's ranks with the best. As for Paul, think of John Burroughs, John Muir, John Burns; then shut your eyes, and you will see that magnificent patriarch.

What a host is Paul! What a hostess is Mrs. Paul! She will spin for you, smiling as she spins. She will weave. She will present you to Ann of the rosy cheeks (a living Perugino) and to "blos­som-eyed" Elizabeth and to half a dozen stalwart sons. In college togs instead of homespun suits, immense black slouch hats, and leather leggings, they would pass for nabobs.

Exceptional all this? Such a house­hold would be exceptional anywhere. But choose a log cabin at random, the poorest, even. You will meet the same geniality, the same gentility. However, you will miss the glowing faces. With privation and hardship come premature wrinkles. Much that seems to indicate longevity among the mountaineers indicates only the early havoc of youth. There goes a story about a "furriner" who found an old, old man weeping by the roadside.

"Why   do you weep?" inquired the stranger. The "old, old" man replied:

 "Daddy whipped me for sassing grandma." It is a foolish yarn, confessedly, yet not without its specious grain of truth. The haggard, wrinkled countenances you see in photographs belong often to mountaineers whom struggle, not time, has aged.

Nevertheless, the impression one gets in the mountains is of a race exception­ally strong and en­ergetic. Their farms languish, but not by reason of "shiftlessness." Antiquated methods, a depleted soil, and the intermin­ably long road to market keep agriculture in the doldrums, or frequently do, and the mountaineer content "jist to rock along." He works off his surplus vitality by track­ing a fox; he climbs three successive ranges to visit a friend; he stays out till dawn if a possum invites, and tramps home re­freshed. During the Spanish War the tall­est, heaviest soldiers came from the moun­tains. Revolutionary patriots marched to Massachusetts in twenty-one days. During the War of 1812 mountaineers reached New Orleans without weapons, but in such spirits that they declared, "We'll foller them Tennesseeans into battle, and every time one falls, we'll  jist inherit his gun."

Theoretically, mountain life fosters health; practically, it is sometimes fairer to say that health survives despite mountain life. Hair-lifting tales one hears of three-year-olds munching tobacco, of infants dosed with whisky ("Maw she drinks hit,

too, an' gives hit to the baby to see hit act quar") ; and in isolated cases such tales may be true. Whole districts lack a physician to teach even the a-b-c's of hygiene; certain others "suffer less from the absence of physicians than from their presence." In the least-favored regions cookery kills at forty paces. After a meal in a cabin twelve miles from nowhere, Mr. Horace Kephart wrote passionately, "What the butcher ruined the cook damned." Yet I challenge Christendom to produce a finer, hardier, wirier stock than these highlanders.

Or a more interesting stamp of character. Lincoln's parents were Ap­palachians. So were Daniel Boone, David Crockett, Sam Houston, Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk, Andrew Johnson, "Stone­wall" Jackson, and Admiral Farragut, not f;o mention such notables as General Love, Congressman Green Adams, Governor Woodward, and Justices Samuel F. Mil­ler and William Pitt Ballinger of the United States Supreme Court. What a showing by the region for which Senator Blackburn prescribed dynamite!

The honorable gentleman objected quite properly to feuds. Yet feuds, too, were honorable. A heritage from Scotland, they continued among clans that are "still living in the eighteenth century." Men slew for conscience' sake. Even the oc­casional crime of violence outside the vendetta counties has its honorable points. Unwritten law not only permits a mount­aineer to avenge wrong, but requires him to. Unhappily, "mountain dew" will sometimes bring down vengeance too hastily in this "land of sunshine and of 'moonshine.' "

Personally, I detest moonshine (what little there is of it to detest), but respect moonshiners. Middle-Westerners turn corn into hog to make it portable ; with the same object a very limited class of mountaineers turn corn into whisky. In districts where it would cost more than the corn is worth to get it to market "blockade" goes out at a profit on the "blockader's" back. Tourists, even remarkably good tourists, hoodwink the

customs officer if they can. Rebelling against what appears to them an oppressive law, moonshiners outwit a revenue officer if they can. At a pinch they may shoot. Oftener, when "ketched," they jeer the marshal. Quoth "Atch" Young (christened Achilles, but subsequently abbreviated) : "Say, Captain, hit tuck a heap of elbow grease to get that still set up, an' really hit 's a mighty sweet-runnin' consairn. If hit won't make hit wuss fer us, let 's run a pint or two before you cut hit up." From Buck Towner you will hear that "when folks get word that the marshals are comin', they put stuff in hit to pizen hit. The marshals allers do take as much as they want, an' the pizen makes 'em so they cain't crawl around for over a week." One blockader regularly exacts tribute for betraying a still. Aside, sotto voce: the still is his own.

Were moonshine particularly plenti­ful,—and the novelists imply that it trickles from the very tree-trunks, any­where and everywhere,—a "fotched-on furriner" like yourself might fancy the mountaineers quite habitually drunken. On the contrary, they are quite habitually "nice." Dare I say it? They are curi­ously like the rest of us. They have their faults, not worse than ours. They have also their shining virtues.

Mountain ethics present some oddities now and then, I confess. In certain rare neighborhoods our Ellen Keys would be­hold their principles in full operation. But commercialized vice has no foothold among the genuine highlanders. Thieves, tramps, and gunmen are unheard of. Even feudists and moonshiners go faith­fully to church. They tell of a highway­man who met a bishop and stripped him of his all. Said the victim:

"Don't you think it 's a shame to rob a poor Episcopal bishop?" To which the bandit replied:

"What, you an Episcopalian? Take your money! I 'm an Episcopalian, my­self." Remarkable, very, on the part of a highwayman who never existed! I can go alone anywhere in the mountains. A girl could. As a matter of fact, girls do.

"Why don't you sell this miserable patch of ground and get out?" said an in­truder in Hell-fer-Sartain. His vis-a-vis replied:

"I ain't so pore 's you think. I don't own this patch of ground."

In Europe we love the primitive and unspoiled. In America it shocks, and philanthropy unites with patriotism to bid us "poke the 'eathen out." Yet how eagerly we once read "La vie simple"! How we yearn for an escape from arti­ficiality! The mountaineers have found both, and in what a setting, surrounded by scores of lovely, dim, blue peaks! You "can stand on the summit of Roan and tickle the feet of the angels." From such a paradise the " 'eathen" decline to be poked out. As well ask the Swiss to leave Switzerland!

Some migrate, it is true. Misguidedly, they seek the mill towns, where aristo­crats look down on "hands." That stings. "I 'm as good as you are," says the mount­aineer, "an' I don't eat at nobody's second table." He grieves to be a "hireling." Opportunity may beckon, promising wealth and its advantages if only he will be patient; but what cares he? Pride, not inertia, inspires his declaration, "I don't aim to rise above my raisin'." Back he comes, like as not, reviling the twentieth century, belauding the eighteenth. A mountain woman, getting her first glimpse of our much-vaunted civilization, cried fervently, "I 'd rather be a knot in a log on Perilous." When you have seen Peril­ous and felt its charm, you will under­stand.

Prosperous farmers lack the incentive to migrate; poverty-stricken farmers lack the means. Where barter prevails, and the "least" child carries an egg to the store for an egg's-worth of candy, a family may go a year without handling ten dollars in money. Move? Start afresh else­where? It is out of the question.

Given a chance at education, young mountaineers will deign to "rise above their raisin'." They make insatiable students. The youthful Lincoln, doing sums on a snow-shovel in a log cabin, was

Think of typhoid and tuberculosis, with no one to hint at prevention or cure. Think of district schools closed seven months in the year, if district schools there be, and pupils unable to read after several terms of so-called instruction. Think of squalor and misery and aching depriva­tion. Three hundred thousand mountain­eers, adding one luckless neighborhood to another, live in wretchedness unspeakable. Our kinsmen, mind you; not hyphenates, but descendants of the original Americans. Appalachia furnished the rear-guard of the Revolution. It is through no fault of theirs that the three hundred thousand have fallen on evil days. It is the work of isolation.

Little by little isolation gives way before industrial inroads. New railways come. Lumbermen attack-remote forests. Coal is discovered. Electrical engineers plan the damming of streams, the building of power­houses. Resorts bring loiterers from high­land and lowland. But contact with the outer world brings dangers as well as bene­fits. No one who has the future of Appa­lachia at heart wants to see it either in­vaded or evacuated. Every one who has the future of Appalachia at heart wants to see it brought into its own. It ought' from the first to have been a sovereign commonwealth. Failing that, it was gerry-mandered among nine separate States, affording an admired, but neglected, back yard to each.

Lost tribes I call these mountaineers. Lost to America, I mean: several millions of our best people shut away where as a race they contribute little or nothing to our modern progress. Individual persons emerge, it is true. Here and there a thriv­ing town springs up, to link itself with America. Yet for the most part Ap­palachia lives in solitary confinement; in cold storage almost. And while a pre-Revolutionary America within an America is interesting and romantic and a joy to our novelists, solitary confinement and cold storage involve the handicapping of abilities. They insulate genius. They in­sulate talent. Both are as common in Ap­palachia as elsewhere. Both are waste material and remain so except as some random fortuity provides the outlet.

A vicious circle obtains. Without pros­perity, no opportunity. Without oppor­tunity, no prosperity. All praise, then, to the new leaders who have set about breaking that circle. They intend that hereafter the Ben Wentworths shall re-

turn to Possum Trot. They will fit them to return and to succeed after they have returned. They are teaching them modern farmin, the principles of improved housing, the niceties of enlightened hygiene. They are teaching them to teach others. They have adopted and applied the maxim of George Ade, "When uplifting, get underneath."

"They needn't send missionaries to us," say the highlanders; "we ain't no heathen." No, and neither are these new leaders missionaries in any sense hither-to known. Money from denominational coteries supports them, to be sure, but they aim to abolish missions by bringing prosperity, so that the mountaineers will before long have their own churches, their own schools. The motive is less benevolent than patriotic. It would "induct Appalachia into the Union" not for Appalachia's sake, but for the Union's. Their spirit resenbles Dr. George T. Winston's when he addressed a returning governor of North Carolina.

"Sir," said he, "our welcome is largely selfish. We do not welcome you to our midst; we welcome ourselves to yours."