Southern Slumber: Chapter Two: Our Southern Highlanders

Tonight, settle into the cool shade of the Carolina mountains as we continue our reading of Our Southern Highlanders by Horace Kephart.

Through quiet wilderness trails, laurel thickets, towering forests, and misty blue Appalachian ridges, the evening's journey drifts through the Great Smokey Mountains. 

Settle into slumber with this bedtime story. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to Southern Slumber, Bedtime Stories for Sleep. I'm glad you're here tonight. I'm Holly, and each week we visit a corner of the American South, where the air is warm, the aroma of gardenias linger from the garden, and everything moves in slow motion. You can simply drift in and out, letting the sound of my voice carry you. If sleep comes, you can let it. I'll be right here as you rest. So close your eyes if you haven't already. Take a slow breath in and let it fall away. Tonight we return once more to the old Appalachian mountains, to winding trails hidden beneath towering chestnut and pine, the cabins tucked away into mist covered hollows where lantern light once flickered against cobbled stone. In these mountains life moved differently, slower, closer to the land. The people Horace Kepphart, who is the author, he encountered in our Southern Highlanders, lived among steep ridges, rushing creeks and forests so deep that the outside world often felt very far away. Their stories were carried on porch conversations, church gatherings, mountain songs and evenings spent beside crackling fires after long days of work. And tonight as you settle in beneath warm blankets and let the noise of the modern world drift farther away, we'll wander quietly through those hills together. So dim the lights, relax your shoulders, and let your breathing grow slow and steady as the blue shadows of the Southern Highlands gather softly around us. This is Southern Slumber, and tonight we continue to chapter two of our Southern Highlanders The Back of the Beyond Of certain remote parts of Aaron, Jane Barlow says In Bogland, if you inquire the address of such or such person, you will hear not very infrequently that he or she lives off away at the back of beyond. A traveller to the back of beyond may consider himself rather exceptionally fortunate, should he find that he is able to arrive at his destination by any mode of conveyance other than the two standin' feet of him. Often enough the last stage of his journey proceeds down some boggy boring or up some craggy hill track inaccessible to any wheel or hoof that ever was shod. So in an appalachia, one steps shortly from the railway into the primitive. Most of the river valleys are narrow. In their bottoms the soil is rich, the farms well kept and generous, the owners comfortable and urbane, but from the valleys directly spring the mountains, with slopes rising twenty to forty degrees or more. These mountains cover nine tenths of western North Carolina, and among them dwell a majority of the native people. The back country is rough. No boat nor canoe can stem its brawling waters, no bicycle nor automobile can enter it. No coach can endure its roads. Here is a land of lumber wagons and saddlebags and shackly little sleds that are dragged over the bare ground by harnessed steers. This is the country the ordinary tourists shun, and well for such that they do, since whoso cares more for bodily comfort than for freedom and air and elbow room, and should tarry by still waters and pleasant pastures. To him the backwoods could be only what Burns called Argyllshire, a country where savage streams tumble over savage mountains, thinly overspread with savage flocks which starvingly support as savage inhabitants. When I went south into the mountains, I was seeking a back of beyond. This for more reasons than one, when an inborn taste for the wild and romantic, I yearned for a strange land and a people that had the charm of originality. Again, I had a passion for early American history, and in far Appalachia, it seemed that I might realize the past in the present, seeing with my own eyes what life must have been to my pioneer ancestors of a century or two ago. Besides, I wanted to enjoy a free life in the open air, the thrill of exploring new ground, the joy of the chase, and the man's game of matching my woodcraft against the forces of nature with no help from servants or hired guides. So casting about for a bidding place that would fill such needs, I picked out the upper settlement of Hazel Creek, far up under the Lee of Smoky Mountains, and I had learned so little about. On the edge of this settlement, scant two miles from the post office of Medellin, there was a copper mine, long discussed on account of litigation, and I got permission to occupy one of its abandoned cabins. A mountain settlement consists of all who get their mail at the same place. Ours was made up of forty two households, about two hundred souls scattered over an area of eight miles long by two wide. These were airline measurements. All roads and trails wiggled and wiggled around so that some families were several miles from a neighbor. Fifteen homes had no wagon road and could be reached by no vehicle other than a narrow sled. Wheel Rose had not even a sled path, but journeyed full five miles by trail to the nearest wagon road. Metal in itself comprised two little stores built of rough planks and bearing no signs, a corn mill and four dwellings. A mile and a half away was the log schoolhouse, which once or twice a month served also as a church. Scattered about the settlement were seven tiny tub mills for grinding corn, some of them mere open sheds with the capacity of about a bushel a day. Most of the dwellings were built of logs. Two or three only were weather boarded frame houses and attained the dignity of a story and a half. All about us was the forest primeval, where roamed some sparse herds of cattle, razorback hogs, and the wild beasts. Speckled trout were all in the streams. Bears sometimes raided the fields and the wildcats were a common nuisance. Our settlement was a mere slash in the vast woodland that encompassed it. The post office occupied a space about five feet square in a corner of one of those stores. There was a daily mail by rider serving four other communities along the way. The contractor for this service had to furnish two horses, working turnabout, pay the rider, and squeeze his own profit out of four hundred ninety nine dollars a year. In star route, in star route days the mail was carried afoot. Two barefooted young men toting the sacks on their own weathers over this thirty two mile round trip for forty eight cents a day, and they boarded themselves. Our stores, as I have said, were small, yet many of their shelves were empty. Oftentimes there was no flour to be had, no meat, cereals, canned goods, coffee, sugar, or oil. It excited no comment at all when old Pete would lean across his bare counter and lament that there's lots of folks a huntin' around here for lard and I ain't got none. I have seen the time when our neighborhood could get no salt nor tobacco without making a twenty four mile trip over the mountain and back in the dead of winter. This was due partly to the state of the roads and to the fact that there would be no wagon available for weeks at a time. Wagoning, by the way, was no sinecure. Often it meant to chop a fallen tree out of the road, and then with hand spikes, manpower the log out in the way. Sometimes an axle would break, far upon the mountain, 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 jaffknife. Trade was mostly done by barter, in which Coonskins and ginseng had the same rank as in the days of 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 freight. When Bill took the last quart of meal from the house as rations for a bear hunt, his patient Marge walked five miles to the store with a skinny old chicken, last of the flock, and offered to barter it for a dustin' assault. There was not a bite in her house beyond potatoes, and poters don't go good without salt. In our primitive community there were no trades, no professions. Every man was his own farmer, blacksmith, gunsmith, carpenter, cobbler, miller, tinker. Someone in his family, or near neighbor, served him as a barber and dentist, and would make him a coffin when he died. One farmer was also the wagner of the district, as well as the storekeeper, magistrate, veterinarian, and a coocher. He also owned the only tooth pullers in the settlement, a pair of universal forceps that he designed, forged, filed out, and wielded with barbaric grit. His wife kept the only boarding house for leagues around, truly an accomplished couple. About two thirds of our householders owned their homes. Of the remainder, about three fifths were renters and two fifths were squatters, in the sense that these last were permitted to occupy grounds for the sake of reporting trespass and putting out fires, or maybe to prevent them from doing both. Nearly all of the wild land belonged to Northern Timber Companies who had not yet begun operations. Idols were confused owing to careless surveys or guesswork in the past. Many boundaries overlapped, and there were bits of no man's land here and there, covered by no deed and subject to entry by anyone who discovered them. Our old frontier always was notorious for happy go lucky surveys and neglect to make legal entry of claims. Thus, Boone lost the fairest part of the Kentucky he founded and was ejected and sent adrift. In our time, overlapping boundaries have led to bitter litigation and murderous feuds. As our territory was sparsely occupied, there were none of those perpendicular farms, so noticeable in older settlements near the river valleys, where men plough fields as steep as their own house roofs, until with the whole many an acre that is steeper still. John Fock tells of a Kentucky farmer who fell out of his own cornfield and broke his neck. I've seen fields in Carolina where this might occur, as where a forty five degree slope is tilled to the brink of a precipice. A woman told me I've hoed corn many a time on my knees. Yes I have. And another many the hill of corn I've propped up with a rock to keep it from falling downhill. Even in our new region, many of the fields suffer quickly from erosion. When a forest is cleared there's a spongy humus on the ground surface that is extremely rich, but this washes away in a single season. The soil beneath is good, but thin on the hillsides, and it's soluble. Fertile ingredients soon leach out and vanish. Without terracing, which I've never seen practiced in the mountains of the south. No field with a surface slope of more than ten degrees, about two feet and ten, will last more than a few years. As one of my neighbors put it, there I've cleared me a patch and grubbed it out. Now I can raise me two or three severe crops. Then what? I asked. When corn won't grow no more I can turn the field into grass a couple of years. Then you'll rotate and grow corn again. Law no, by that time we'll be so poor it wouldn't raise a cuss fight. But then you must move and begin all over again. This continual moving must be a great nuisance. He rolled his quid and placidly answered Eh when I move all I have to do is put out the fire and call the dog. His apparent indifference was only philosophy expressed with sardonic humor, just as another neighbor would say this is good strong land or it wouldn't hold up all the rocks there is around ya. Right here is the basis for much of what strangers call shiftlessness among the mountaineers, but of that more in other chapters. In clearing new ground, everyone followed the ancient custom of girdling the tree trunks and letting them stand in spectral ugliness until they rotted and fell. This is a quick and easy way to get rid of the shade that otherwise would stunt the crops, and it prevents such trees as chestnut, buckeye, and basswood from sprouting from the stumps. In the fields stood scores of gigantic hemlocks, deadened, that never would be used even for fuel, save as their bark furnished the women with quick burning stove wood and wet weather. No one dreamed that hemlock ever would be marketable, and this was only five years ago. The tillage was as rude and destructive as anything we read of in pioneer history. A common plough was a bull tongue, which has aptly been described as hardly more than a sharpened stick with a metal rim. The harrows were of wood throughout, with locust teeth. A friend and I made one from green trees in half a day, and it lasted three seasons on rocky ground. Sometimes no harrow was used at all, the ploughed ground being drug with a big evergreen bough. This needed only to be with directly to a pony's tail, as they used to do in ancient Ireland, and the picture of prehistoric agriculture would have been complete. After the corn was up, all cultivating play in the furrows while their mother toiled like a man. Corn was the staple crop. In fact, the only crop of most farmers. Some rye was raised along the creek, and a little oats, but our settlement grew no wheat. There was no mill that could grind it. Wheat is raised to some extent in the river bottoms and on the plateaus of the interior. I have seen it flailed out on the bare ground and winnowed by pouring the grain and shaft from basket to basket while the women fluttered aprons on bed sheets. Corn is topped for the blade fodder, the ears gathered from the stalk and the main stalk afterwards used as roughness. The cribs generally are ramshackle pins, and this is much weight. From mold and vermin. The Carolina Mountains are one of the best fruit regions in Eastern America. Apples, grapes, and berries thrive exceedingly well. But our mountaineer is no horticulturist. He lets his fruit trees take care of themselves, and so everywhere except on select farms near the towns, we see old apple and peach trees that never were pruned, bristling with shoots and often bearing wizened fruit, dry and bitter, or half rotted on the stem. So too the gardens were slided. Late in the season our average garden is a miniature jungle, chiefly of weeds that stand high as one's head. Cabbage and field beans survive and figure mightily in the diet of the mountaineer. Potatoes generally do well, but few farmers raise enough to see them through the winter. Generally some tobacco is grown for family consumption, the strong twist being smoked or chewed indifferently. An interesting crop in our neighborhood was ginseng, of which there were several patches in cultivation. This curious plant is native throughout the Appalachians, but has been exterminated in all but the wildest regions on account of the high price that its dried roots bring. It has long since passed out of our pharmacopoeia and is marketed only in China through our own people, formerly esteemed it as a panacea for all ills of the flesh. Colonel Bird in his History of the Dividing Line says of it Though practice will soon make a man of tolerable vigor an able footman, yet as a help to bear fatigue, I as could chew a root of ginseng as I walked along. This kept up my spirits and made me trip away as nimbly in my half jack boots as younger men coulda in their shoes. This plant is in high esteem in China, where it sells for its weight and silver. Its virtues are that it gives an uncommon warmth and vigor to the blood, and frisk the spirits beyond any other cordial. It cheers the heart, even of a man that has a bad wife, and makes him look down with great composure on the crosses of the world. It promotes insensible perspiration, dissolves all phlegmatic and viscous humors that are apt to obstruct the narrow channels of the nerves. It helps the memory and would quicken even Helvetian dullness, is friendly to the lungs much more than scolding itself. It comforts the stomach and strengthens the bowels, preventing all colics and fluxes. In one word, it will make a man live a great while, and very well while he does live. And what is more, it will even make old age amiable by rendering it lively, cheerful, and good humored. Alas, that only Chinamen and eighteenth century cavaliers could absorb the virtues of this sovereign herb. A successful ginzin grower of our settlement told me that two acres of the plant will bring an income of twenty five hundred dollars to five thousand dollars a year, planting one hundred thousand to the acre. The roots take eight years to mature. They weigh from one and a half to four ounces each, when fresh dried root at that time brought five dollars a pound. At present I believe it is higher. Another friend of mine, who was in this business extensively, tried exporting for himself, but only got six fifty a pound in a moy when the US consul at that port assured him that the real market price was from twelve sixty to twenty four dollars forty cents. The local trader, knowing American prices, pocketed the difference. In times of scarcity, many of our people took to the woods and gathered commoner medicinal roots, such as blood roux, root and wild ginger. There are scores of others growing wild in great profusion, but made only a pittance at it, as synthetic drugs have mostly taken the place of herbal simples in modern medicine. Women and children, they did better. They did better in the days right before Christmas by gathering gay locks, hemlock, and mistletoe, selling to the dealers at the railroad who shipped them north for holiday decorations. One bright lad from town informed me with evident pride of geography that some of this goes to London, England. Nearly everywhere in our woods the beautiful ruddy bronze galacs is abundant along the water courses, which similarly turn bronze in autumn and last throughout the winter, is so prolific as to be a nuisance to travelers being hard to push through. Most of our farmers had neither horse nor mule, for the rough work of cultivating the hillsides as a single steer hitched to the bull tongue was better adapted, and the same steer patiently dragged a little sled to the trading post. On sleek on steep declivities the sled is more practical than a cart or wagon because it can go where wheels cannot. It does not require so wide a track and it breaks automatically in going downhill. Nearly all the farmer's hauling is downhill to his home or down farther to the village. A sled can be made quite easily by one man, out of wood growing on the spot, and with few iron fittings or none at all. The runners are usually made of natural sour wood, this timber being chosen because it wears very smooth and does not fur up nor splinter. The hinterland is naturally adapted to grazing rather than to agriculture. As it stands, the best pasturage is high up in the mountains, where there are balds covered with succulent wild grass that resembles Kentucky bluegrass. Clearing and sowing would ex sowing would extend such areas indefinitely. The cattle forage for themselves through eight or nine months of the year, running wild like the razorbacks, and the only attention given them is when the herdsmen go out to salt them or to mark the calves. Nearly all the beasts are scrub stock. Jerseys and other blooded cattle thrive in the valleys where there are no free ranges, but the backwoodsman does not want critters that have to be gentled and hand fed. The result is that many families go without milk a great part of the year and seldom indeed taste butter or beef. The truth is that mountain beef being fed nothing but grass and browse, with barely enough corn and roughage to keep the animal alive through winter, is blue fleshed, watery, and tough. If properly reared, the quality would be as good as any. Almost any of our farmers could have had a pasture near home and could have grown hay, but not one in ten would take the trouble. His cattle were only for export. Let the buyer fatten them. It should be understood that nobody had any provision for taking care of fresh meat when the weather was not frosty. On those rare occasions when somebody killed a beef, he had to travel all over the neighborhood to dispose of it in small portions. The carcass was cut up in the same way as a hog, and all parts except the cheap billin pieces were sold at the same price ten cents a pound, or whatever they would bring on the spot. The butchering was done with an ax and a jack knife. The meat was either sliced thin and fried to a crackling, or cut in chunks and boiled furiously just long enough to fit it for boot heels. What the butcher mangled, the cook damned. Few sheep were raised in our settlement, and these only for their wool. The untamed smokies were no place for such defenseless creatures. Sheep will not, cannot run wild. They are wholly dependent on the fostering hand of man and perish without his shepherding. Curiously enough, our mountaineer knows little or nothing about the goat, an animal perfectly adapted to the free range of the smokies. I am convinced that goats would be more profitable to the small farmers of the wild mountains than cattle. Goats do not graze, but browse upon the shrubbery, of which there is a vast superfluity in all the southern mountains. Unlike the weak, timorous and stupid sheep, a flock of goats can fight their own battles against wild animals. They are hardy in any weather and thrive from their own pickings, where other foragers would starve. A good milk goat gives more and richer milk than the average mountain cow, and a kid yields excellent fresh meat in manageable quantity at a time when no one would butcher a beef because it would spoil. I used to shut my eyes and imagine the transformation that would be wrought in these mountains by a colony of Swiss, who would turn the coves into gardens, the moderate slopes into orchards, the steeper ones into vineyards, by terracing, and who would export the finest of cheese made from the surplus milk of their goats? But our native mountaineers well a man who will not eat beef nor drink fresh cow's milk, and who despises butter cannot be interested in anything of the dairy order. The chickens ran wild and scratched for a living. Hence were thin, tough and poor layers. Eggs seldom were for sale. It was not of much use to try to raise many chickens where they were unprotected from hawks, minks, foxes, weasels and snakes. Honey often was procured by spotting wild bees to their hoard and chopping the tree, a mild form of sport in which most settlers are expert. Our local preacher had a hundred hives of tame bees, producing fifteen hundred pounds of honey a year, for which he got ten cents a pound at the railroad. The mainstay of every farmer, aside from his cornfield, was his litter of razor back hogs. Old cornbread and sow belly are a menu complete for the mountaineer. The wild pig roaming footloose and free over hill and dale, picks up his own living at all seasons and requires no attention at all. He is the cheapest possible source of milk, meat and yields the quickest return. No other food animal can increase his own weight a hundred and fifty fold in the first eight months of life, and so he is regarded by his owner with the same affection that Connamera Patty bestows upon the gentleman that pays the rent. In physique and mentality, the razorback differs even more from a domestic hog than a wild goose does from a tame one. Shaped in front like a thin wedge, he can go through laurel thickets like a bear. Armored with tough hide, cushioned by bristles, he despises thorns, brambles, and rattlesnakes alike. His extravagantly long snout can scent like a cat's, and yet burrow, uproot, overturn as if made of metal. The long legs, thin flanks, pliant hoofs fit him to run like a deer and climb like a goat. In courage and sagacity he outranks all other beasts. A warrior born, he is also a strategist of the first order. Like man, he lives a communal life and unites with others of his kind for purposes of defense. The pig is the only large mammal I know of, besides man, whose eyes will not shine by reflected light. They are too bold and crafty, I wit. The razorback has a mind of his own, not instinct but mine. Whatever psychologists may say, he thinks. Anybody can see that when he is not rooting or sleeping, he is studying devilment. He shows a remarkable understanding of human speech, even profane speech, and even an uncanny gift of reading men's thoughts whenever those thoughts are directed against the peace and dignity of pigship. He bears grudges, broods over indignities, and plans redresses for the morrow or the week after. If he cannot get even with you, he will lay for your unsuspecting friend. And at the last when arrested in his crimes and lodged in the pen, he is liable to attacks of mania from sheer helpless rage. If you camp out in the mountains, nothing will molest you but razor back hogs. Bears will flee and wildcats sneak to their dens, but the moment incense of cooking arises from your camp, every pig within two miles will scent it and hasten to call. You may throw your arm at a joint, they'll laugh in your face, you may curse in five languages. It is music to their titillating ears. Throughout summer and autumn I cooked out of doors on the woodsman's range of fork steaks and a lug pole spanning parallel beds of rock. When the pigs came, I fed them red pepper pie, then all said goodbye to my hospitality, save one slab sided husky old boar, and he planned a campaign. At the first smell of smoke he would start for my premises. Hiding securely in a nearby thicket, he would spy on the operations until my stew got to simmering gently, and I would retire to the cabin and get my fist in the dough. Then, charging at speed, he would knock down a steak, trip the lug pole and send my dinner flying. Every day he would do this. It got so that I had to sit there facing the fire all through my cooking, or that beast of a hog would ruin me. With this, I thought he was out general. Idle dream. He would slip off to my favorite neighbour's, break through the garden fence and raise net instanter, all because he hated me for that peppery fraud, and knew that Bob and I were cronies. I dubbed this pig Belial, a name that Bob promptly adapted with his own notion by calling it Beliar. That Beliar, swore he, would cross hell on a rotten rail to get into my tater flash. Finally I could stand it no longer, and took down my rifle. It was a nail driver, and I, through constant practice in beheading squirrels, was in good form. However, in the mountains it is more heinous to kill another man's pig than to shoot the owner. So I took craft for my guide and guile for my heart's counsel. I stalked the lyle as stealthily as ever. Hunter crept up on an antelope against the wind. At last I had him dead right, broadside to me and motionless as if in a daydream. I knew that if I drilled his ear or shot his tail clean off, it would only make him meaner than ever. He sported an uncommonly fine tail, and was proud to flaunt it. I drew down on that member, purposely, a trifle scant, fired, and away scuttled that boar with a broken tail that would dangle and cling to him disgracefully through life. As the mountain paths grow quiet tonight, and the last lanterns dim along the ridges, we'll leave these highlands behind for now, these remote coves and weathered cabins tucked deep within the folds of the southern mountains. In these pages we've wandered among old traditions, hard lives, front porch conversations and voices that once echoed through narrow valleys beneath the blue haze of the Appalachians. And now, as the night settles in around you, perhaps you can imagine the soft creak of a rocking chair, the distant chorus of summer insects, the faint scenario. Pine, wood smoke, and cool mountain air drifting through an open window. Let your breathing slow, let the mountains grow quiet, and allow sleep to come gently like fog settling softly into a hidden hollow. Thank you for joining me for chapter two of our Southern Highlanders here on Southern Slumber. Rest well, and I'll be back again next week beneath the quiet mountain stars.