Our Southern Highlanders
by Horace Kephart · English · Gutenberg #31709 · 491,671 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Our Southern Highlanders
Author: Horace Kephart
Release date: March 20, 2010 [eBook #31709]
Language: English
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Produced by David Garcia, Stephanie Eason, and the Online
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OUR SOUTHERN HIGHLANDERS
[Illustration: Photo by U. S. Forest Service
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]
OUR SOUTHERN HIGHLANDERS
BY
HORACE KEPHART
AUTHOR OF "THE BOOK OF CAMPING AND WOODCRAFT," "CAMP
COOKERY," "SPORTING FIREARMS," ETC.
_Illustrated_
NEW YORK
OUTING PUBLISHING COMPANY
MCMXVI
COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY
OUTING PUBLISHING COMPANY
All rights reserved
First Printing, November 1913
Second Printing, December 1913
Third Printing, January 1914
Fourth Printing, April 1914
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. "SOMETHING HIDDEN; GO AND FIND IT" 11
II. "THE BACK OF BEYOND" 28
III. THE GREAT SMOKY MOUNTAINS 50
IV. A BEAR HUNT IN THE SMOKIES 75
V. MOONSHINE LAND 110
VI. WAYS THAT ARE DARK 126
VII. A LEAF FROM THE PAST 145
VIII. "BLOCKADERS" AND "THE REVENUE" 167
IX. THE OUTLANDER AND THE NATIVE 191
X. THE PEOPLE OF THE HILLS 212
XI. THE LAND OF DO WITHOUT 234
XII. HOME FOLKS AND NEIGHBOR PEOPLE 256
XIII. THE MOUNTAIN DIALECT 276
XIV. THE LAW OF THE WILDERNESS 305
XV. THE BLOOD-FEUD 327
XVI. WHO ARE THE MOUNTAINEERS? 354
XVII. "WHEN THE SLEEPER WAKES" 378
ILLUSTRATIONS
Big Tom Wilson, the bear hunter _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
Map of Appalachia 8
A family of pioneers in the twentieth century 16
"The very cliffs are sheathed with trees and shrubs" 24
At the Post-Office 32
The author in camp in the Big Smokies 40
"Bob" 48
"There are few jutting crags" 56
The bears' home--laurel and rhododendron 64
The old copper mine 72
"What soldiers these fellows would make under
leadership of some backwoods Napoleon" 80
"By and by up they came, carrying the bear on
the trimmed sapling" 88
Skinning a frozen bear 96
"... Powerful steep and laurely...." 104
Mountain still-house hidden in the laurel 112
Moonshine still, side view 120
Moonshine still in full operation 128
Corn mill and blacksmith forge 136
A tub-mill 152
Cabin on the Little Fork of Sugar Fork of Hazel
Creek in which the author lived alone for three years 160
A mountain home 176
Many of the homes have but one window 192
The schoolhouse 208
"At thirty a mountain woman is apt to have a
worn and faded look" 216
The misty veil of falling water 232
An average mountain cabin 240
A bee-gum 248
Let the women do the work 264
"Till the sky-line blends with the sky itself" 288
Whitewater Falls 312
The road follows the creek--there may be a dozen
fords in a mile 320
"Dense forest and luxuriant undergrowth" 336
[Illustration: APPALACHIA
The 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.]
OUR SOUTHERN HIGHLANDERS
OUR SOUTHERN HIGHLANDERS
CHAPTER I
"SOMETHING HIDDEN; GO AND FIND IT"
In one of Poe's minor tales, written in 1845, there is a vague allusion
to wild mountains in western Virginia "tenanted by fierce and uncouth
races of men." This, so far as I know, was the first reference in
literature to our Southern mountaineers, and it stood as their only
characterization until Miss Murfree ("Charles Egbert Craddock") began
her stories of the Cumberland hills.
Time and retouching have done little to soften our Highlander's
portrait. Among reading people generally, South as well as North, to
name him is to conjure up a tall, slouching figure in homespun, who
carries a rifle as habitually as he does his hat, and who may tilt its
muzzle toward a stranger before addressing him, the form of salutation
being:
"Stop thar! Whut's you-unses name? Whar's you-uns a-goin' ter?"
Let us admit that there is just enough truth in this caricature to give
it a point that will stick. Our typical mountaineer is lank, he is
always unkempt, he is fond of toting a gun on his shoulder, and his
curiosity about a stranger's name and business is promptly, though
politely, outspoken. For the rest, he is a man of mystery. The great
world outside his mountains knows almost as little about him as he does
of it; and that is little indeed. News in order to reach him must be of
such widespread interest as fairly to fall from heaven; correspondingly,
scarce any incidents of mountain life will leak out unless they be of
sensational nature, such as the shooting of a revenue officer in
Carolina, the massacre of a Virginia court, or the outbreak of another
feud in "bloody Breathitt." And so, from the grim sameness of such
reports, the world infers that battle, murder, and sudden death are
commonplaces in Appalachia.
To be sure, in Miss Murfree's novels, as in those of John Fox, Jr., and
of Alice MacGowan, we do meet characters more genial than feudists and
illicit distillers; none the less, when we have closed the book, who is
it that stands out clearest as type and pattern of the mountaineer? Is
it not he of the long rifle and peremptory challenge? And whether this
be because he gets most of the limelight, or because we have a furtive
liking for that sort of thing (on paper), or whether the armed outlaw be
indeed a genuine protagonist--in any case, the Appalachian people remain
in public estimation to-day, as Poe judged them, an uncouth and fierce
race of men, inhabiting a wild mountain region little known.
The Southern highlands themselves are a mysterious realm. When I
prepared, eight years ago, for my first sojourn in the Great Smoky
Mountains, which form the master chain of the Appalachian system, I
could find in no library a guide to that region. The most diligent
research failed to discover so much as a magazine article, written
within this generation, that described the land and its people. Nay,
there was not even a novel or a story that showed intimate local
knowledge. Had I been going to Teneriffe or Timbuctu, the libraries
would have furnished information a-plenty; but about this housetop of
eastern America they were strangely silent; it was _terra incognita_.
On the map I could see that the Southern Appalachians cover an area much
larger than New England, and that they are nearer the center of our
population than any other mountains that deserve the name. Why, then, so
little known? Quaintly there came to mind those lines familiar to my
boyhood: "Get you up this way southward, and go up into the mountain;
and see the land, what it is; and the people that dwelleth therein,
whether they be strong or weak, few or many; and what the land is that
they dwell in, whether it be good or bad; and what cities they be that
they dwell in, whether in tents, or in strongholds; and what the land
is, whether it be fat or lean, whether there be wood therein or not."
In that dustiest room of a great library where "pub. docs." are stored,
I unearthed a government report on forestry that gave, at last, a clear
idea of the lay of the land. And here was news. We are wont to think of
the South as a low country with sultry climate; yet its mountain chains
stretch uninterruptedly southwestward from Virginia to Alabama, 650
miles in an air line. They spread over parts of eight contiguous States,
and cover an area somewhat larger than England and Scotland, or about
the same as that of the Alps. In short, the greatest mountain system of
eastern America is massed in our Southland. In its upper zone one sleeps
under blankets the year round.
In all the region north of Virginia and east of the Black Hills of
Dakota there is but one summit (Mount Washington, in New Hampshire) that
reaches 6,000 feet above sea level, and there are only a dozen others
that exceed 5,000 feet. By contrast, south of the Potomac there are
forty-six peaks, and forty-one miles of dividing ridges, that rise above
6,000 feet, besides 288 mountains and some 300 miles of divide that
stand more than 5,000 feet above the sea. In North Carolina alone the
mountains cover 6,000 square miles, with an _average_ elevation of 2,700
feet, and with twenty-one peaks that overtop Mount Washington.
I repeated to myself: "Why, then, so little known?" The Alps and the
Rockies, the Pyrennees and the Harz are more familiar to the American
people, in print and picture, if not by actual visit, than are the
Black, the Balsam, and the Great Smoky Mountains. It is true that summer
tourists flock to Asheville and Toxaway, Linville and Highlands, passing
their time at modern hotels and motoring along a few macadamed roads,
but what do they see of the billowy wilderness that conceals most of the
native homes? Glimpses from afar. What do they learn of the real
mountaineer? Hearsay. For, mark you, nine-tenths of the Appalachian
population are a sequestered folk. The typical, the average mountain
man prefers his native hills and his primitive ancient ways.
We read more and talk more about the Filipinos, see more of the Chinese
and the Syrians, than of these three million next-door Americans who are
of colonial ancestry and mostly of British stock. New York, we say, is a
cosmopolitan city; more Irish than in Dublin, more Germans than in
Munich, more Italians than in Rome, more Jews than in nine Jerusalems;
but how many New Yorkers ever saw a Southern mountaineer? I am sure that
a party of hillsmen fresh from the back settlements of the Unakas, if
dropped on the streets of any large city in the Union, and left to their
own guidance, would stir up more comment (and probably more trouble)
than would a similar body of whites from any other quarter of the earth;
and yet this same odd people is more purely bred from old American stock
than any other element of our population that occupies, by itself, so
great a territory.
The mountaineers of the South are marked apart from all other folks by
dialect, by customs, by character, by self-conscious isolation. So true
is this that they call all outsiders "furriners." It matters not whether
your descent be from Puritan or Cavalier, whether you come from
Boston or Chicago, Savannah or New Orleans, in the mountains you are a
"furriner." A traveler, puzzled and scandalized at this, asked a native
of the Cumberlands what he would call a "Dutchman or a Dago." The fellow
studied a bit and then replied: "Them's the outlandish."
[Illustration: A Family of Pioneers in the Twentieth Century]
Foreigner, outlander, it is all one; we are "different," we are "quar,"
to the mountaineer. He knows he is an American; but his conception of
the metes and bounds of America is vague to the vanishing point. As for
countries over-sea--well, when a celebrated Nebraskan returned from his
trip around the globe, one of my backwoods neighbors proudly informed
me: "I see they give Bryan a lot of receptions when he kem back from the
other world."
No one can understand the attitude of our highlanders toward the rest of
the earth until he realizes their amazing isolation from all that lies
beyond the blue, hazy skyline of their mountains. Conceive a shipload of
emigrants cast away on some unknown island, far from the regular track
of vessels, and left there for five or six generations, unaided and
untroubled by the growth of civilization. Among the descendants of such
a company we would expect to find customs and ideas unaltered from the
time of their forefathers. And that is just what we do find to-day among
our castaways in the sea of mountains. Time has lingered in Appalachia.
The mountain folk still live in the eighteenth century. The progress of
mankind from that age to this is no heritage of theirs.
Our backwoodsmen of the Blue Ridge and the Unakas, of their connecting
chains, and of the outlying Cumberlands, are still thinking essentially
the same thoughts, still living in much the same fashion, as did their
ancestors in the days of Daniel Boone. Nor is this their fault. They are
a people of keen intelligence and strong initiative when they can see
anything to win. But, as President Frost says, they have been
"beleaguered by nature." They are belated--ghettoed in the midst of a
civilization that is as aloof from them as if it existed only on another
planet. And so, in order to be fair and just with these, our backward
kinsmen, we must, for the time, decivilize ourselves to the extent of
_going back_ and getting an eighteenth century point of view.
But, first, how comes it that the mountain folk have been so long
detached from the life and movement of their times? Why are they so
foreign to present-day Americanism that they innocently call all the
rest of us foreigners?
The answer lies on the map. They are creatures of environment, enmeshed
in a labyrinth that has deflected and repelled the march of our nation
for three hundred years.
In 1728, when Colonel William Byrd, of Westover, was running the
boundary line between Virginia and North Carolina, he finally was
repulsed by parallel chains of savage, unpeopled mountains that rose
tier beyond tier to the westward, everywhere densely forested, and
matted into jungle by laurel and other undergrowth. In his _Journal_,
writing in the quaint, old-fashioned way, he said: "Our country has now
been inhabited more than 130 years by the English, and still we hardly
know anything of the Appalachian Mountains, that are nowhere above 250
miles from the sea. Whereas the French, who are later comers, have
rang'd from Quebec Southward as far as the Mouth of Mississippi, in the
bay of Mexico, and to the West almost as far as California, which is
either way above 2,000 miles."
A hundred and thirty years later, the same thing could have been said of
these same mountains; for the "fierce and uncouth races of men" that Poe
faintly heard of remained practically undiscovered until they startled
the nation on the scene of our Civil War, by sending 180,000 of their
riflemen into the Union Army.
If a corps of surveyors to-day should be engaged to run a line due west
from eastern Virginia to the Blue Grass of Kentucky, they would have an
arduous task. Let us suppose that they start from near Richmond and
proceed along the line of 37° 50'. The Blue Ridge is not especially
difficult: only eight transverse ridges to climb up and down in fourteen
miles, and none of them more than 2,000 feet high from bottom to top.
Then, thirteen miles across the lower end of The Valley, a curious
formation begins.
As a foretaste, in the three and a half miles crossing Little House and
Big House mountains, one ascends 2,200 feet, descends 1,400, climbs
again 1,600, and goes down 2,000 feet on the far side. Beyond lie steep
and narrow ridges athwart the way, paralleling each other like waves at
sea. Ten distinct mountain chains are scaled and descended in the next
forty miles. There are few "leads" rising gradually to their crests.
Each and every one of these ridges is a Chinese wall magnified to
altitudes of from a thousand to two thousand feet, and covered with
thicket. The hollows between them are merely deep troughs.
In the next thirty miles we come upon novel topography. Instead of wave
following wave in orderly procession, we find here a choppy sea of small
mountains, with hollows running toward all points of the compass.
Instead of Chinese walls, we now have Chinese puzzles. The innate
perversity of such configuration grows more and more exasperating as we
toil westward. In the two hundred miles from the Greenbrier to the
Kentucky River, the ridges are all but unscalable, and the streams
sprangle in every direction like branches of mountain laurel.
The only roads follow the beds of tortuous and rock-strewn water
courses, which may be nearly dry when you start out in the morning, but
within an hour may be raging torrents. There are no bridges. One may
ford a dozen times in a mile. A spring "tide" will stop all travel, even
from neighbor to neighbor, for a day or two at a time. Buggies and
carriages are unheard of. In many districts the only means of
transportation is with saddlebags on horseback, or with a "tow sack"
afoot. If the pedestrian tries a short-cut he will learn what the
natives mean when they say: "Goin' up, you can might' nigh stand up
straight and bite the ground; goin' down, a man wants hobnails in the
seat of his pants."
James Lane Allen was not writing fiction when he said of the far-famed
Wilderness Road into Kentucky: "Despite all that has been done to
civilize it since Boone traced its course in 1790, this honored historic
thoroughfare remains to-day as it was in the beginning, with all its
sloughs and sands, its mud and holes, and jutting ledges of rock and
loose boulders, and twists and turns, and general total depravity....
One such road was enough. They are said to have been notorious for
profanity, those who came into Kentucky from this side. Naturally. Many
were infidels--there are roads that make a man lose faith. It is known
that the more pious companies of them, as they traveled along, would now
and then give up in despair, sit down, raise a hymn, and have prayers
before they could go further. Perhaps one of the provocations to
homicide among the mountain people should be reckoned this road. I have
seen two of the mildest of men, after riding over it for a few hours,
lose their temper and begin to fight--fight their horses, fight the
flies, fight the cobwebs on their noses."
Such difficulties of intercommunication are enough to explain the
isolation of the mountaineers. In the more remote regions this
loneliness reaches a degree almost unbelievable. Miss Ellen Semple, in a
fine monograph published in the _Geographical Journal_, of London, in
1901, gave us some examples:
"These Kentucky mountaineers are not only cut off from the outside
world, but they are separated from each other. Each is confined to
his own locality, and finds his little world within a radius of a
few miles from his cabin. There are many men in these mountains who
have never seen a town, or even the poor village that constitutes
their county-seat.... The women ... are almost as rooted as the
trees. We met one woman who, during the twelve years of her married
life, had lived only ten miles across the mountain from her own
home, but had never in this time been back home to visit her father
and mother. Another back in Perry county told me she had never been
farther from home than Hazard, the county-seat, which is only six
miles distant. Another had never been to the post-office, four
miles away; and another had never seen the ford of the Rockcastle
River, only two miles from her home, and marked, moreover, by the
country store of the district."
When I first went into the Smokies, I stopped one night in a single-room
log cabin, and soon had the good people absorbed in my tales of travel
beyond the seas. Finally the housewife said to me, with pathetic
resignation: "Bushnell's the furdest ever I've been." Bushnell, at that
time, was a hamlet of thirty people, only seven miles from where we sat.
When I lived alone on "the Little Fork of Sugar Fork of Hazel Creek,"
there were women in the neighborhood, young and old, who had never seen
a railroad, and men who had never boarded a train, although the Murphy
branch ran within sixteen miles of our post-office. The first time that
a party of these people went to the railroad, they were uneasy and
suspicious. Nearing the way-station, a girl in advance came upon the
first negro she ever saw in her life, and ran screaming back: "My
goddamighty, Mam, thar's the boogerman--I done seed him!"
But before discussing the mountain people and their problems, let us
take an imaginary balloon voyage over their vast domain. South of the
Potomac the Blue Ridge is a narrow rampart rising abruptly from the
east, one or two thousand feet above its base, and descending sharply to
the Shenandoah Valley on the west. Across the Valley begin the
Alleghanies. These mountains, from the Potomac through to the northern
Tennessee border, consist of a multitude of narrow ridges with steep
escarpment on both sides, running southwesterly in parallel chains, and
each chain separated from its neighbors by deep, slender dales. Wherever
one goes westward from the Valley he will encounter tier after tier of
these ridges, as I have already described.
[Illustration: Photo by U. S. Forest Service
"The very cliffs are sheathed with trees and shrubs"--Linville River and
Falls, N. C. The walls of one gorge are from 500 to 2,000 feet high.]
As a rule, the links in each chain can be passed by following small
gaps; but often one must make very wide detours. For example, Pine
Mountain (every link has its own distinct name) is practically
impassable for nearly 150 miles, except for two water gaps and five
difficult crossings. Although it averages only a mile thick, the people
on its north side, generally, know less about those on the south than a
Maine Yankee does about Pennsylvania Dutchmen.
The Alleghanies together have a width of from forty to sixty miles.
Westward of them, for a couple of hundred miles, are the labyrinthine
roughs of West Virginia and eastern Kentucky.
In southwestern Virginia the Blue Ridge and the Alleghanies coalesce,
but soon spread apart again, the Blue Ridge retaining its name, as well
as its general character, although much loftier and more massive than in
the north. The southeast front of the Blue Ridge is a steep escarpment,
rising abruptly from the Piedmont Plateau of Carolina. Not one river
cuts through the Ridge, notwithstanding that the mountains to the
westward are higher and much more massive. It is the watershed of this
whole mountain region. The streams rising on its northwestern front flow
down into central plateaus, and thence cut their way through the Unakas
in deep and precipitous gorges, draining finally into the Gulf of
Mexico, through the Tennessee, Ohio and Mississippi rivers.
The northwestern range, which corresponds to the Alleghanies of
Virginia, now assumes a character entirely different from them. Instead
of parallel chains of low ridges, we have here, on the border of North
Carolina and Tennessee, a single chain that dwarfs all others in the
Appalachian system. It is cut into segments by the rivers (Nolichucky,
French Broad, Pigeon, Little Tennessee, Hiwassee) that drain the
interior plateaus, and each segment has a distinct name of its own
(Iron, Northern Unaka, Bald, Great Smoky, Southern Unaka or Unicoi
mountains). The Carolina mountaineers still call this system
collectively the Alleghanies, but the U. S. Geological Survey has given
it a more distinctive name, the Unakas. While the Blue Ridge has only
seven peaks that rise above 5,000 feet, the Unakas have 125 summits
exceeding 5,000, and ten that are over 6,000 feet.
Connecting the Unaka chain with the Blue Ridge are several transverse
ranges, the Stone, Beech, Roan, Yellow, Black, Newfound, Pisgah, Balsam,
Cowee, Nantahala, Tusquitee, and a few minor mountains, which as a whole
are much higher than the Blue Ridge, 156 summits rising over 5,000
feet, and thirty-six over 6,000 feet above sea-level.
In northern Georgia the Unakas and the Blue Ridge gradually fade away
into straggling ridges and foothills, which extend into small parts of
South Carolina and Alabama.
The Cumberland Plateau is not attached to either of these mountain
systems, but is rather a prolongation of the roughs of eastern Kentucky.
It is separated from the Unakas by the broad valley of the Tennessee
River. The Plateau rises very abruptly from the surrounding plains. It
consists mainly of tableland gashed by streams that have cut their way
down in deep narrow gulches with precipitous sides.
Most of the literature about our Southern mountaineers refers only to
the inhabitants of the comparatively meagre hills of eastern Kentucky,
or to the Cumberlands of Tennessee. Little has been written about the
real mountaineers of southwestern Virginia, western North Carolina, and
the extreme north of Georgia. The great mountain masses still await
their annalist, their artist, and, in some places, even their explorer.
CHAPTER II
"THE BACK OF BEYOND"
Of certain remote parts of Erin, 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
Traveler 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
_boreen_, or up some craggy hill-track, inaccessible to any wheel or
hoof that ever was shod."
So in 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 saddle-bags, and shackly
little sleds that are dragged over the bare ground by harnessed steers.
This is the country that 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 should tarry by still waters and pleasant pastures.
To him the backwoods could be only what Burns called Argyleshire: "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. With 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 joys 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 biding place that would fill such needs, I
picked out the upper settlement of Hazel Creek, far up under the lee of
those Smoky Mountains that I had learned so 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 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 eight miles long by two wide. These are
air-line measurements. All roads and trails "wiggled and wingled 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. Quill Rose had not even a sledpath, but journeyed full five
miles by trail to the nearest wagon road.
Medlin 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 church. Scattered about the settlement were seven tiny tub-mills for
grinding corn, some of them mere open sheds with a capacity of about a
bushel a day. Most of the dwellings were built of logs. Two or three,
only, were weatherboarded 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 in all
the streams. Bears sometimes raided the fields, and 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 the 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 $499 a year. In Star Route days the mail was carried
afoot, two barefooted young men "toting the sacks on their own wethers"
over this thirty-two-mile round trip, for forty-eight cents a day; and
they boarded themselves!
In the group that gathered at mail time I often was solicited to "back"
envelopes, give out the news, or decipher letters for men who could not
read. Several times, in the postmaster's absence, I registered letters
for myself, or for someone else, the law of the nation being suspended
by general consent.
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 "Thar's lots o' folks
a-hurtin' around hyur 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 handspikes, "man-power the log
outen 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 jackknife.
[Illustration: At the Post-Office]
Trade was mostly by barter, in which 'coon skins 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 trade. When Bill took the last quart of meal from the house,
as rations for a bear hunt, his patient Marg walked five miles to the
store with a skinny old chicken, last of the flock, and offered to
barter it for "a dustin' o' salt." There was not a bite in her house
beyond potatoes, and "'taters don't go good 'thout 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 a near neighbor, served him as
barber and dentist, and would make him a coffin when he died. One
farmer was also the wagoner of the district, as well as storekeeper,
magistrate, veterinarian, and accoucheur. 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 ground for the sake of
reporting trespass and putting out fires--or, maybe, to prevent them
doing both. Nearly all of the wild land belonged to Northern timber
companies who had not yet begun operations (they have done so within the
past three years).
Titles 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 parts of the Kentucky he founded, and was
ejected and sent adrift. In our own 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 plow fields as steep as their own house roofs and
till with the hoe many an acre that is steeper still. John Fox tells of
a Kentucky farmer who fell out of his own cornfield and broke his neck.
I have 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's the hill o' corn I've propped up with a rock to keep it
from fallin' down-hill."[1]
Even in our new region many of the fields suffered quickly from erosion.
When a forest is cleared there is 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 its soluble,
fertile ingredients soon leach out and vanish. Without terracing, which
I have never seen practiced in the mountains of the South, no field with
a surface slope of more than ten degrees (about two feet in ten) will
last more than a few years. As one of my neighbors put it: "Thar, I've
cl'ared me a patch and grubbed hit out--now I can raise me two or three
severe craps!"
"Then what?" I asked.
"When corn won't grow no more I can turn the field into grass a couple
o' years."
"Then you'll rotate, and grow corn again?"
"La, no! By that time the land will be so poor hit 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: "Huk-uh; when I move, all I
haffter 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 hyur."
Right here is the basis for much of what strangers call shiftlessness
among the mountaineers. But of that, more anon 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 in wet weather. No one dreamt 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. The common plow 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 the green trees in half a day, and it lasted three seasons
on rocky ground). Sometimes no harrow was used at all, the plowed ground
being "drug" with a big evergreen bough. This needed only to be withed
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 was done with the hoe. For this the
entire family turned out, the toddlers being left to 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 chaff from basket to basket while the women
fluttered aprons or bed-sheets. Corn is topped for the blade-fodder, the
ears gathered from the stalk, and the main stalks afterwards used as
"roughness" (roughage). The cribs generally are ramshackle pens, and
there is much waste from mold and vermin.
The Carolina mountains are, by nature, one of the best fruit regions in
eastern America. Apples, grapes, and berries, especially, thrive
exceeding 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 are slighted. 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 root brings. It has
long since passed out of our pharmacopoeia, and is marketed only in
China, though our own people formerly esteemed it as a panacea for all
ills of the flesh. Colonel Byrd, in his "History of the Dividing Line,"
says of it:
"Though Practice wilt soon make a man of tolerable Vigour an able
Footman, yet, as a help to bear Fatigue I us'd to chew a Root of
Ginseng as I Walk't along. This kept up my Spirits, and made me
trip away as nimbly in my half Jack-Boots as younger men cou'd in
their Shoes. This Plant is in high Esteem in China, where it sells
for its Weight in Silver.... Its vertues are, that it gives an
uncommon Warmth and Vigour to the Blood, and frisks the Spirits,
beyond any other Cordial. It chears 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 Phlegmatick and Viscous Humours, that are apt to
obstruct the Narrow channels of the Nerves. It helps the Memory and
would quicken even Helvetian dullness. 'Tis friendly to the Lungs,
much more than Scolding itself. It comforts the Stomach, and
Strengthens the Bowels, preventing all Colicks 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, chearful, and good-humour'd."
Alas that only Chinamen and eighteenth-century Cavaliers could absorb
the virtues of this sovereign herb!
A successful ginseng grower of our settlement told me that two acres of
the plant will bring an income of $2,500 to $5,000 a year, planting
100,000 to the acre. The roots take eight years to mature. They weigh
from one and a half to four ounces each, when fresh, and one-third of
this dried. Two acres produce 25,000 roots a year, by progression. The
dried root, at that time, brought five dollars a pound. At present, I
believe, it is higher. Another friend of mine, who is in this business
extensively, tried exporting for himself, but got only $6.50 a pound in
Amoy, when the U. S. consul at that port assured him that the real
market price was from $12.60 to $24.40. The local trader, knowing
American prices, pocketed the difference.
[Illustration: The Author in Camp in the Big Smokies]
In times of scarcity many of our people took to the woods and gathered
commoner medicinal roots, such as bloodroot 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 did better, in the days
before Christmas, by gathering galax, "hemlock" (_leucothoe_), and
mistletoe, selling to the dealers at the railroad, who ship 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 galax is
abundant. Along the water-courses, _leucothoe_, which similarly turns
bronze in autumn, and lasts 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 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 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 "brakes" 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 sourwood crooks, 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 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 haffter 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 "bilin' 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
axe and a jackknife. 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 milch 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
1,500 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 razorback hogs. "Old cornbread and sowbelly" are a menu complete for
the mountaineer. The wild pig, roaming foot-loose 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 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 his life." And so he
is regarded by his owner with the same affection that Connemara Paddy
bestows upon "the gintleman that pays the rint."
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 _mind_--whatever
psychologists may say. He thinks. Anybody can see that when he is not
rooting or sleeping he is studying devilment. He shows remarkable
understanding of human speech, especially 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 razorback
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 out of joint: they
will 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 forked stakes and a lug-pole spanning parallel beds of rock.
When the pigs came, I fed them red-pepper pie. Then all said good-bye to
my hospitality save one slab-sided, tusky 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 fists in the dough. Then, charging at speed, he would knock
down a stake, 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 outgeneraled. Idle dream! He would slip off to my
favorite neighbor's, break through the garden fence, and raise Ned
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 to his own
notion by calling it Be-liar. "That Be-liar," swore he, "would cross
hell on a rotten rail to git into my 'tater patch!"
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 Belial as stealthily as ever
hunter crept 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.
[Illustration: "Bob"]
Exit Belial! It was equivalent to a broken heart. He emigrated, or
committed suicide, I know not which, but the Smoky Mountains knew him no
more.
CHAPTER III
THE GREAT SMOKY MOUNTAINS
For a long time my chief interest was not in human neighbors, but in the
mountains themselves--in that mysterious beckoning hinterland which rose
right back of my chimney and spread upward, outward, almost to three
cardinal points of the compass, mile after mile, hour after hour of
lusty climbing--an Eden still unpeopled and unspoiled.
I loved of a morning to slip on my haversack, pick up my rifle, or maybe
a mere staff, and stride forth alone over haphazard routes, to enjoy in
my own untutored way the infinite variety of form and color and shade,
of plant and tree and animal life, in that superb wilderness that
towered there far above all homes of men. (And I love it still, albeit
the charm of new discovery is gone from those heights and gulfs that are
now so intimate and full of memories).
The Carolina mountains have a character all their own. Rising abruptly
from a low base, and then rounding more gradually upward for 2,000 to
5,000 feet above their valleys, their apparent height is more impressive
than that of many a loftier summit in the West which forms only a
protuberance on an elevated plateau. Nearly all of them are clad to
their tops in dense forest and thick undergrowth. Here and there is a
grassy "bald": a natural meadow curiously perched on the very top of a
mountain. There are no bare, rocky summits rising above timber-line, few
jutting crags, no ribs and vertebræ of the earth exposed. Seldom does
one see even a naked ledge of rock. The very cliffs are sheathed with
trees and shrubs, so that one treading their edges has no fear of
falling into an abyss.
Pinnacles or serrated ridges are rare. There are few commanding peaks.
From almost any summit in Carolina one looks out upon a sea of flowing
curves and dome-shaped eminences undulating, with no great disparity of
height, unto the horizon. Almost everywhere the contours are similar:
steep sides gradually rounding to the tops, smooth-surfaced to the eye
because of the endless verdure. Every ridge is separated from its
sisters by deep and narrow ravines. Not one of the thousand water
courses shows a glint of its dashing stream, save where some far-off
river may reveal, through a gap in the mountain, one single shimmering
curve. In all this vast prospect, a keen eye, knowing where to look, may
detect an occasional farmer's clearing, but to the stranger there is
only mountain and forest, mountain and forest, as far as the eye can
reach.
Characteristic, too, is the dreamy blue haze, like that of Indian summer
intensified, that ever hovers over the mountains, unless they be swathed
in cloud, or, for a few minutes, after a sharp rain-storm has cleared
the atmosphere. Both the Blue Ridge and the Smoky Mountains owe their
names to this tenuous mist. It softens all outlines, and lends a
mirage-like effect of great distance to objects that are but a few miles
off, while those farther removed grow more and more intangible until
finally the sky-line blends with the sky itself.
The foreground of such a landscape, in summer, is warm, soft, dreamy,
caressing, habitable; beyond it are gentle and luring solitudes; the
remote ranges are inexpressibly lonesome, isolated and mysterious; but
everywhere the green forest mantle bespeaks a vital present; nowhere
does cold, bare granite stand as the sepulchre of an immemorial past.
And yet these very mountains of Carolina are among the ancients of the
earth. They were old, very old, before the Alps and the Andes, the
Rockies and the Himalayas were molded into their primal shapes. Upon
them, in after ages, were born the first hardwoods of America--perhaps
those of Europe, too--and upon them to-day the last great hardwood
forests of our country stand in primeval majesty, mutely awaiting their
imminent doom.
The richness of the Great Smoky forest has been the wonder and the
admiration of everyone who has traversed it. As one climbs from the
river to one of the main peaks, he passes successively through the same
floral zones he would encounter in traveling from mid-Georgia to
southern Canada.
Starting amid sycamores, elms, gums, willows, persimmons, chinquapins,
he soon enters a region of beech, birch, basswood, magnolia, cucumber,
butternut, holly, sourwood, box elder, ash, maple, buckeye, poplar,
hemlock, and a great number of other growths along the creeks and
branches. On the lower slopes are many species of oaks, with hickory,
hemlock, pitch pine, locust, dogwood, chestnut. In this region nearly
all trees attain their fullest development. On north fronts of hills the
oaks reach a diameter of five to six feet. In cool, rich coves, chestnut
trees grow from six to nine feet across the stump; and tulip poplars up
to ten or eleven feet, their straight trunks towering like gigantic
columns, with scarcely a noticeable taper, seventy or eighty feet to the
nearest limb.
Ascending above the zone of 3,000 feet, white oak is replaced by the no
less valuable "mountain oak." Beech, birch, buckeye, and chestnut
persist to 5,000 feet. Then, where the beeches dwindle until adult trees
are only knee-high, there begins a sub-arctic zone of black spruce,
balsam, striped maple, aspen and the "Peruvian" or red cherry.
I have named only a few of the prevailing growths. Nowhere else in the
temperate zone is there such a variety of merchantable timber as in
western Carolina and the Tennessee front of the Unaka system. About a
hundred and twenty species of native trees grow in the Smoky Forest
itself. When Asa Gray visited the North Carolina mountains he
identified, in a thirty-mile trip, a greater variety of indigenous trees
than could be observed in crossing Europe from England to Turkey, or in
a trip from Boston to the Rocky Mountain plateau. As John Muir has said,
our forests, "however slighted by man, must have been a great delight to
God; for they were the best He ever planted."
The undergrowth is of almost tropical luxuriance and variety. Botanists
say that this is the richest collecting ground in the United States.
Whether one be seeking ferns or fungi or orchids or almost anything else
vegetal, each hour will bring him some new delight. In summer the upper
mountains are one vast flower garden: the white and pink of
rhododendron, the blaze of azalea, conspicuous above all else, in
settings of every imaginable shade of green.
It was the botanist who discovered this Eden for us. Far back in the
eighteenth century, when this was still "Cherokee Country," inhabited by
no whites but a few Indian-traders, William Bartram of Philadelphia came
plant-hunting into the mountains of western Carolina, and spread their
fame to the world. One of his choicest finds was the fiery azalea, of
which he recorded: "The epithet fiery I annex to this most celebrated
species of azalea, as being expressive of the appearance of its flowers;
which are in general of the color of the finest red-lead, orange, and
bright gold, as well as yellow and cream-color. These various splendid
colors are not only in separate plants, but frequently all the varieties
and shades are seen in separate branches on the same plant; and the
clusters of the blossoms cover the shrubs in such incredible profusion
on the hillsides that, suddenly opening to view from dark shades, we
are alarmed with apprehension of the woods being set on fire. This is
certainly the most gay and brilliant flowering shrub yet known."
And we of a later age, seeing the same wild gardens still unspoiled, can
appreciate the almost religious fervor of those early botanists, as of
Michaux, for example, who, in 1794, ascending the peak of Grandfather,
broke out in song: "_Monté au sommet de la plus haut montagne de tout
l'Amérique Septentrionale, chante avec mon compagnon-guide l'hymn de
Marsellois, et crié, 'Vive la Liberté et la République Française!'_"
Of course Michaux was wildly mistaken in thinking Grandfather "the
highest mountain in all North America." It is far from being even the
highest of the Appalachians. Yet we scarcely know to-day, to a downright
certainty, which peak is supreme among our Southern highlands. The honor
is conceded to Mount Mitchell in the Black Mountains, northeast of
Asheville. Still, the heights of the Carolina peaks have been taken
(with but one exception, so far as I know) only by barometric
measurements, and these, even when official, may vary as much as a
hundred feet for the same mountain. Since the highest ten or a dozen of
our Carolina peaks differ in altitude only one or two hundred feet,
their actual rank has not yet been determined.
[Illustration: Photo by U. S. Forest Service
"There are few jutting crags"--Southeast profile of Whiteside Mountain,
N. C.]
For a long time there was controversy as to whether Mount Mitchell or
Clingman Dome was the crowning summit of eastern America. The Coast and
Geodetic Survey gave the height of Mount Mitchell as 6,688 feet; but
later figures of the U. S. Geological Survey are 6,711 and 6,712. In
1859 Buckley claimed for Clingman Dome of the Smokies an altitude of
6,941 feet. In recent government reports the Dome appears variously as
6,619 and 6,660. In 1911 I was told by Mr. H. M. Ramseur that when he
laid out the route of the railroad from Asheville to Murphy he ran a
line of levels from a known datum on this road to the top of Clingman,
and that the result was "four sixes" (6,666 feet above sea-level). It is
probable that second place among the peaks of Appalachia may belong
either to Clingman Dome or Guyot or LeConte, of the Smokies, or to
Balsam Cone of the Black Mountains.
In any case, the Great Smoky mountains are the master chain of the
Appalachian system, the greatest mass of highland east of the Rockies.
This segment of the Unakas forms the boundary between North Carolina
and Tennessee from the Big Pigeon River to the McDaniel Bald.
Although some parts of the Smokies are very rugged, with sharp changes
of elevation, yet the range as a whole has no one dominating peak. Mount
Guyot (pronounced _Gee_-o, with _g_ as in get), Mount LeConte, and
Clingman Dome all are over 6,600 feet and under 6,700, according to the
most trustworthy measurements. Many miles of the divide rise 6,000 feet
above sea-level, with only small undulations like ocean swells.
* * * * *
The most rugged and difficult part of the Smokies (and of the United
States east of Colorado) is in the sawtooth mountains between Collins
and Guyot, at the headwaters of the Okona Lufty River. I know but few
men who have ever followed this part of the divide, although during the
present year trails have been cut from Clingman to Collins, or near it,
and possibly others beyond to the northeastward.
In August and September, 1900, Mr. James H. Ferriss and wife,
naturalists from Joliet, Illinois, explored the Smokies to the Lufty Gap
northeast of Clingman, collecting rare species of snails and ferns. No
doubt Mrs. Ferriss is the only white woman who ever went beyond
Clingman or even ascended the Dome itself. She stayed at the Lufty Gap
while her husband and a Carolina mountaineer of my acquaintance
struggled through to Guyot and returned. Of this trip Mr. Ferriss sent
me the following account:
"We bought another axe of a moonshiner, and, with a week's provisions on
our backs, one of the guides and I took the Consolidated American Black
Bear and Ruffed Grouse Line for Mount Guyot, twenty miles farther by map
measurement. The bears were in full possession of the property, and we
could get no information in the settlements, as the settlers do not
travel this line. They did not know the names of the peaks other than as
tops of the Great Smokies--knew nothing of the character of the country
except that it was rough. The Tennesseeans seem afraid of the mountains,
and the Cherokees of the North Carolina side equally so; for, two miles
from camp, all traces of man, except surveyors' marks, had disappeared.
In the first two days we routed eight bears out of their nests and mud
wallows, and they seemed to stay routed, for upon our return we found
the blackberry crop unharvested and had a bag pudding--'duff'--or what
you call it.
"A surveyor had run part of the line this year, which helped us
greatly, and the bears had made well-beaten trails part of the way. In
places they had mussed up the ground as much as a barnyard. We tried to
follow the boundary line between the two States, which is exactly upon
the top of the Smokies, but often missed it. The government [state]
surveyor many years ago made two hacks upon the trees, but sometimes the
linemen neglected to use their axes for half a mile or so. It took us
three and one-half days to go, and two and one-half to return, and we
arose with the morning star and worked hard all day. The last day and a
half, going, there was nothing to guide us but the old hacks.
"Equipped with government maps, a good compass, and a little conceit, I
thought I could follow the boundary-line. In fact, at one time we
intended to go through without a guide. A trail that runs through
blackberry bushes two miles out of three is hard to follow. Then there
was a huckleberry bush reaching to our waists growing thickly upon the
ground as tomato vines, curled hard, and stubborn; and laurel much like
a field of lilac bushes, crooked and strong as iron. In one place we
walked fully a quarter of a mile over the tops of laurel bushes and
these were ten or twelve feet in height, but blown over one way by the
wind. Much of the trail was along rocky edges, sometimes but six inches
or so wide, but almost straight down on both sides for hundreds of feet.
One night, delayed by lack of water, we did not camp till dark, and,
finding a smooth spot, lay down with a small log on each side to hold us
from rolling out of bed. When daylight came we found that, had we rolled
over the logs, my partner would have dropped 500 feet into Tennessee and
I would have dropped as far into North Carolina, unless some friendly
tree top had caught us. Sometimes the mountain forked, and these ridges,
concealed by the balsams, would not be seen. Then there were round
knobs--and who can tell where the highest ridge lies on a round mountain
or a ball? My woolen shirt was torn off to the shoulders, and my
partner, who had started out with corduroys, stayed in the brush until I
got him a pair of overalls from camp."
Even to the west of Clingman a stranger is likely to find some
desperately rough travel if he should stray from the trail that follows
the divide. It is easy going for anyone in fair weather, but when cloud
settles on the mountain, as it often does without warning, it may be so
thick that one cannot see a tree ten feet away. Under such circumstances
I have myself floundered from daylight till dark through heart-breaking
laurel thickets, and without a bite to eat, not knowing whither I was
going except that it was toward the Little Tennessee River.
In 1906 I spent the summer in a herders' hut on top of the divide, just
west of the Locust Ridge (miscalled Chestnut Ridge on the map), about
six miles east of Thunderhead. This time I had a partner, and we had a
glorious three months of it, nearly a mile above sea-level, and only
half a day's climb from the nearest settlement. One day I was alone,
Andy having gone down to Medlin for the mail. It had rained a good
deal--in fact, there was a shower nearly every day throughout the
summer, the only semblance of a dry season in the Smokies being the
autumn and early winter. The nights were cold enough for fires and
blankets, even in our well-chinked cabin.
Well, I had finished my lonesome dinner, and was washing up, when I saw
a man approaching. This was an event, for we seldom saw other men than
our two selves. He was a lame man, wearing an iron extension on one
foot, and he hobbled with a cane. He looked played-out and gaunt. I met
him outside. He smiled as though I looked good to him, and asked with
some eagerness, "Can I buy something to eat here?"
"No," I answered, "you can't buy anything here"--how his face
fell!--"but I'll give you the best we have, and you're welcome."
Then you should have seen that smile!
He seemed to have just enough strength left to drag himself into the
hut. I asked no questions, though wondering what a cripple, evidently a
gentleman, though in rather bad repair, was doing on top of the Smoky
Mountains. It was plain that he had spent more than one night
shelterless in the cold rain, and that he was quite famished. While I
was baking the biscuit and cooking some meat, he told his story. This is
the short of it:
"I am a Canadian, McGill University man, electrician. My company sent me
to Cincinnati. I got a vacation of a couple of weeks, and thought I'd
take a pedestrian tour. I can walk better than you'd think," and he
tapped the short leg.
I liked his grit.
"I knew no place to go," he continued; "so I took a map and looked for
what might be interesting country, not too far from Cincinnati. I picked
out these mountains, got a couple of government topographical sheets,
and, thinking they would serve like European ordnance maps, I had no
fear of going astray. It was my plan to walk through to the Balsam
Mountains, and so on to the Big Pigeon River. I went to Maryville,
Tennessee, and there I was told that I would find a cabin every five or
six miles along the summit from Thunderhead to the Balsams."
I broke in abruptly: "Whoever told you that was either an impostor or an
ignoramus. There are only four of these shacks on the whole Smoky range.
Two of them, the Russell cabin and the Spencer place, you have already
passed without knowing it. This is called the Hall cabin. None of these
three are occupied save for a week or so in the fall when the cattle are
being rounded up, or by chance, as my partner and I happen to be here
now. Beyond this there is just one shack, at Siler's Meadow. It is down
below the summit, hidden in timber, and you would never have seen it.
Even if you had, you would have found it as bare as a last year's mouse
nest, for nobody ever goes there except a few bear-hunters. From there
onward for forty miles is an uninhabited wilderness so rough that you
could not make seven miles a day in it to save your life, even if you
knew the course; and there is no trail at all. Those government maps
are good and reliable to show the _approaches_ to this wild country, but
where you need them most they are good for nothing."
[Illustration: The Bears' Home--Laurel and Rhododendron]
"Then," said he, "if I had missed your cabin I would have starved to
death, for I depended on finding a house to the eastward, and would have
followed the trail till I dropped. I have been out in the laurel
thickets, now, three days and two nights; so nothing could have induced
me to leave this trail, once I found it, or until I could see out to a
house on one side or other of the mountain."
"You would see no house on either side from here to beyond Guyot, about
forty miles. Had you no rations at all?"
"I traveled light, expecting to find entertainment among the natives.
Here is what I have left."
He showed me a crumpled buckwheat flapjack, a pinch of tea, and a couple
of ounces of brandy.
"I was saving them for the last extremity; have had nothing to eat since
yesterday morning. Drink the brandy, please; it came from Montreal."
"No, my boy, that liquor goes down your own throat instanter. You're the
chap that needs it. This coffee will boil now in a minute. I won't give
you all the food you want, for it wouldn't be prudent; but by and by you
shall have a bellyful."
Then, as well as he could, he sketched the route he had followed. Where
the trail from Tennessee crosses from Thunderhead to Haw Gap he had
swerved off from the divide, and he discovered his error somewhere in
the neighborhood of Blockhouse. There, instead of retracing his steps,
he sought a short-cut by plunging down to the headwaters of Haw Creek,
thus worming deeper and deeper into the devil's nest. One more day would
have finished him. When I told him that the trip from Clingman to Guyot
would be hard work for a party of experienced mountaineers, and that it
would probably take them a week, during which time they would have to
pack all supplies on their own backs, he agreed that his best course
would be down into Carolina and out to the railroad.
* * * * *
Of animal life in the mountains I was most entertained by the raven.
This extraordinary bird was the first creature Noah liberated from the
ark--he must have known, even at that early period of nature study, that
it was the most sagacious of all winged things. Or perhaps Noah and the
raven did not get on well together and he rid himself of the pest at
first opportunity. Doubtless there could have been no peace aboard a
craft that harbored so inquisitive and talkative a fowl. Anyway, the
wild raven has been superlatively shy of man ever since the flood.
Probably there is no place south of Labrador where our raven (_Corvus
corax principalis_) is seen so often as in the Smokies; and yet, even
here, a man may haunt the tops for weeks without sight or sound of the
ebon mystery--then, for a few days, they will be common. On the
southeast side of the Locust Ridge, opposite Huggins's Hell, between
Bone Valley and the main fork of Hazel Creek, there is a "Raven's Cliff"
where they winter and breed, using the same nests year after year.
Occasionally one is trapped, with bloody groundhog for bait; but I have
yet to meet a man who has succeeded in shooting one.
If the raven's body be elusive his tongue assuredly is not. No other
animal save man has anything like his vocal range. The raven croaks,
clucks, caws, chuckles, squalls, pleads, "pooh-poohs," grunts, barks,
mimics small birds, hectors, cajoles--yes, pulls a cork, whets a scythe,
files a saw--with his throat. As is well known, ravens can be taught
human speech, like parrots; and I am told they show the same preference
for bad words--which, I think, is quite in character with their
reputation as thieves and butchers. However, I may be prejudiced, seeing
that the raven's favorite dainties for his menu are the eyes of living
fawns and lambs.
A stranger in these mountains will be surprised at the apparent scarcity
of game animals. It is not unusual for one to hunt all day in an
absolute wilderness, where he sees never a fresh track of man, and not
get a shot at anything fit to eat. The cover is so dense that one
still-hunting (going without dogs) has poor chance of spying the game
that lurks about him; and there really is little of it by comparison
with such huntings fields as the Adirondacks, Maine, Canada, where game
has been conserved for many years. It used to be the same up there. The
late W. J. Stillman, writing in 1877 of the Maine woods, said:
"The most striking feature of the forest, after one has become
habituated to the gloom, the pathlessness, and the apparent
impenetrability of the screen it forms around him, is the absence
of animal life. You may wander for hours without seeing a living
creature.... One thinks of the woods and the wild beasts; yet in
all the years of my wilderness living I can catalogue the wild
creatures other than squirrels, grouse, and small birds (never
plenty, generally very rare) which I have accidentally encountered
and seen while wandering for hunting or mere pastime in the wild
forest; one deer, one porcupine, one marten (commonly called
sable), and maybe half a dozen hares. You may walk hours and not
see a living creature larger than a fly, for days together and not
see a grouse, a squirrel, or a bird larger than the Canada jay....
Lands running with game are like those flowing with milk and honey;
and when the sporting books tell you that game is abundant, don't
imagine that you are assured from starvation thereby. I have been
reduced, in a country where deer were swarming, to live several
days together on corn meal."
It is much the same to-day in our Appalachian wilderness, where no
protection worthy the name has ever been afforded the game and fish
since Indian times. There is a class of woods-loafers, very common here,
that ranges the forest at all seasons with single-barrel shotguns or
"hog rifles," killing bearing females as well as legitimate game,
fishing at night, even using dynamite in the streams; and so, in spite
of the fact that there is no better game harborage granted by Nature on
our continent than the Carolina mountains, the deer are all but
exterminated in most districts, turkeys and even squirrels are rather
scarce, and good trout fishing is limited to stocked waters or streams
flowing through virgin forest. The only game animal that still holds his
own is the black bear, and he endures in few places other than the
roughest districts, such as that southwest of the Sugarland Mountains,
where laurel and cliffs daunt all but the hardiest of men.
The only venomous snakes in the mountains are rattlers and copperheads,
the former common, the latter rare. The chance of being bitten by one is
about as remote as that of being struck by lightning--either accident
_might_ happen, of course. The mountaineers have an absurd notion that
the little lizard so common in the hills is rank "pizen." Oddly enough,
they call it a "scorpion."
From those two pests of the North Woods, black-flies and mosquitoes, the
Smokies are mercifully exempt. At least there are no mosquitoes that
bite or sting, except down in the river valleys where they have been
introduced by railroad trains--and even there they are but a feeble
folk. The reason is that in the mountains there is almost no standing
water where they can breed.
On the other hand, the common house-fly is extraordinarily numerous and
persistent--a daily curse, even on top of Smoky. I imagine this is due
to the wet climate, as in Ireland. Minute gnats (the "punkies" or
"no-see-ums" of the North) are also offensively present in trout-fishing
time. And every cabin is alive with fleas. A hundred nights I have
anointed myself with citronella from head to foot, and outsmelt a cheap
barber-shop, to escape their plague. In a tent, and without dogs, one
can be immune.
In most years there are very few chiggers, except on pine ridges. They
are worse along rivers than in the mountains. The ticks of this country
are not numerous, and seldom fasten on man.
The climate of the Carolina mountains is pleasantly cool in summer. Even
at low altitudes (1,600 to 2,000 feet) the nights generally are
refreshing. It may be hot in the sun, but always cool in the shade. The
air is drier (less relative humidity) than in the lowlands,
notwithstanding that there is greater rainfall here than elsewhere in
the United States outside of Florida and the Puget Sound country. The
annual rainfall varies a great deal according to locality, being least
at Asheville (42 inches) and greatest on the southeastern slope of the
Blue Ridge, where as much as 105 inches has been recorded in a year. The
average rainfall of the whole region is 73 inches a year.[2]
In general the mornings are apt to be lowery, with fogs hanging low
until, say, 9 o'clock, so that one cannot predict weather for the day.
Heavy dews remain on the bushes until about the same hour.
The winters are short. What Northerners would call cold weather is not
expected until Christmas, and generally it is gone by the end of
February. Snow sometimes falls on the higher mountains by the first of
October, and the last snow may linger there until April (exceptionally
it falls in May). Tornadoes are unknown here, but sometimes a hurricane
will sweep the upper ranges. On April 19, 1900, a blizzard from the
northwest struck the Smokies. In twenty minutes everything was frozen.
At Siler's Meadow seventeen cattle climbed upon each other for warmth
and froze to death in a solid hecatomb. A herdsman who was out at the
time, and narrowly escaped a similar fate, assured me that "that was the
beatenest snowstorm ever I seen." In the valleys there may be a few days
in January and February when the mercury drops to zero or a few
degrees lower. On the high peaks, of course, the winter cold often is
intense, and on the sunless north side of Clingman there are overhangs
or crevices where a little ice may be found the year around.
[Illustration: The old copper mine]
Undoubtedly there is vast mineral wealth hidden in the Carolina
mountains. A greater variety of minerals has been found here than in any
other State save Colorado. But, for the present, it is a hard country to
prospect in, owing to the thick covering of the forest floor. Not only
is the underbrush very dense, but beneath it there generally is a thick
stratum of clay overlaying the rocks, even on steep slopes. Gold has
been found in numberless places, but finely disseminated. I do not know
a locality in the mountains proper where a working vein has been
discovered. At my cabin I did just enough panning to get a notion that
if I could stand working in icy water ten hours a day I might average a
dollar in yellow dust by it. The adjacent copper mine carries
considerable gold. Silver and lead are not common, so far as known, but
there are many good copper and iron properties. Gems are mined
profitably in several of the western counties. The corundum, mica, talc,
and monazite are, I believe, unexcelled in the United States. Building
stone is abundant, and there is fine marble in various places. Kaolin is
shipped out in considerable quantities. The rocks chiefly are gneisses,
granites, metamorphosed marbles, quartzites, and slates, all of them far
too old to bear fossils or coal.
CHAPTER IV
A BEAR HUNT IN THE SMOKIES
"Git up, pup! you've scrouged right in hyur in front of the fire. You
Dred! what makes you so blamed contentious?"
Little John shoved both dogs into a corner, and strove to scrape some
coals from under a beech forestick that glowed almost hot enough to melt
brass.
"This is the wust coggled-up fire I ever seed, to fry by. Bill, hand me
some Old Ned from that suggin o' mine."
A bearded hunchback reached his long arm to a sack that hung under our
rifles, drew out a chuck of salt pork, and began slicing it with his
jackknife. On inquiry I learned that "Old Ned" is merely slang for fat
pork, but that "suggin" or "sujjit" (the _u_ pronounced like _oo_ in
look) is true mountain dialect for a pouch, valise, or carryall, its
etymology being something to puzzle over.
Four dogs growled at each other under a long bunk of poles and hay that
spanned one side of our cabin. The fire glared out upon the middle of an
unfloored and windowless room. Deep shadows clung to the walls and
benches, charitably concealing much dirt and disorder left by previous
occupants, much litter of our own contributing.
At last we were on a saddle of the divide, a mile above sea-level, in a
hut built years ago for temporary lodgment of cattle-men herding on the
grassy "balds" of the Smokies. A sagging clapboard roof covered its two
rooms and the open space between them that we called our "entry." The
State line between North Carolina and Tennessee ran through this
uninclosed hallway. The Carolina room had a puncheon floor and a
clapboard table, also better bunks than its mate; but there had risen a
stiff southerly gale that made the chimney smoke so abominably that we
were forced to take quarters in the neighbor State.
Granville lifted the lid from a big Dutch oven and reported "Bread's
done."
There was a flash in the frying-pan, a curse and a puff from Little
John. The coffee-pot boiled over. We gathered about the hewn benches
that served for tables, and sat _à la Turc_ upon the ground. For some
time there was no sound but the gale without and the munching of
ravenous men.
"If this wind 'll only cease afore mornin', we'll git us a bear
to-morrow."
A powerful gust struck the cabin, by way of answer; a great roaring
surged up from the gulf of Defeat, from Desolation, and from the other
forks of Bone Valley--clamor of ten thousand trees struggling with the
blast.
"Hit's gittin' wusser."
"Any danger of this roost being blown off the mountain?" I inquired.
"Hit's stood hyur twenty year through all the storms; I reckon it can
stand one more night of it."
"A man couldn't walk upright, outside the cabin," I asserted, thinking
of the St. Louis tornado, in which I had lain flat on my belly, clinging
to an iron post.
The hunchback turned to me with a grave face. "I've seed hit blow, here
on top o' Smoky, till a hoss couldn't stand up agin it. You'll spy,
to-morrow, whar several trees has been wind-throwed and busted to
kindlin'."
I recalled that several, in the South, means many--"a good many," as our
own tongues phrase it.
"Oh, shucks! Bill Cope," put in "Doc" Jones, "whut do you-uns know about
windstorms? Now, _I've_ hed some experiencin' up hyur that 'll do to tell
about. You remember the big storm three year ago, come grass, when the
cattle all huddled up a-top o' each other and friz in one pile, solid."
Bill grunted an affirmative.
"Wal, sir, I was a-herdin', over at the Spencer Place, and was out on
Thunderhead when the wind sprung up. Thar come one turrible vyg'rous
blow that jest nacherally lifted the ground. I went up in the sky, my
coat ripped off, and I went a-sailin' end-over-end."
"Yes?"
"Yes. About half an hour later, I lit _spang_ in the mud, way down
yander in Tuckaleechee Cove--yes, sir: ten mile as the crow flies, and a
mile deeper 'n trout-fish swim."
There was silence for a moment. Then Little John spoke up: "I mind about
that time, Doc; but I disremember which buryin'-ground they-all planted
ye in."
"Planted! _Me?_ Huh! But I had one tormentin' time findin' my hat!"
The cabin shook under a heavier blast, to match Bill's yarn.
"Old Wind-maker's blowin' liars out o' North Car'lina. Hang on to yer
hat, Doc! Whoop! hear 'em a-comin'!"
"Durn this blow, anyhow! No bear 'll cross the mountain sich a night as
this."
"Can't we hunt down on the Carolina side?" I asked.
"That's whar we're goin' to drive; but hit's no use if the bear don't
come over."
"How is that? Do they sleep in one State and eat in the other?"
"Yes: you see, the Tennessee side of the mountain is powerful steep and
laurely, so 't man nor dog cain't git over it in lots o' places; that's
whar the bears den. But the mast, sich as acorns and beech and hickory
nuts, is mostly on the Car'lina side; that's whar they hafter come to
feed. So, when it blows like this, they stay at home and suck their paws
till the weather clars."
"So we'll have to do, at this rate."
"I'll go see whut the el-e-ments looks like."
We arose from our squatting postures. John opened the little clapboard
door, which swung violently backward as another gust boomed against the
cabin. Dust and hot ashes scattered in every direction. The dogs sprang
up, one encroached upon another, and they flew at each other's throats.
They were powerful beasts, dangerous to man as well as to the brutes
they were trained to fight; but John was their master, and he soon
booted them into surly subjection.
"The older dog don't ginerally raise no ruction; hit's the younger one
that's ill," by which he meant vicious. "You, Coaly, you'll git some o'
that meanness shuck outen you if you tackle an old she-bear to-morrow!"
"Has the young dog ever fought a bear?"
"No; he don't know nothin'; but I reckon he'll pick up some larnin' in
the next two, three days."
"Have these dogs got the Plott strain? I've been told that the Plott
hounds are the best bear dogs in the country."
"'Tain't so," snorted John. "The Plott curs are the best: that is, half
hound, half cur--though what we-uns calls the cur, in this case, raelly
comes from a big furrin dog that I don't rightly know the breed of.
Fellers, you can talk as you please about a streak o' the cur spilin' a
dog; but I know hit ain't so--not for bear fightin' in these mountains,
whar you cain't foller up on hossback, but hafter do your own runnin'."
"What is the reason, John?"
[Illustration: "What soldiers these fellows would make, under leadership
of some Backwoods Napoleon!"]
"Waal, hit's like this: a plumb cur, of course, cain't foller a cold
track--he just runs by sight; and he won't hang--he quits. But,
t'other way, no hound 'll raelly fight a bear--hit takes a big severe
dog to do that. Hounds has the best noses, and they'll run a bear all
day and night, and the next day, too; but they won't never tree--they're
afeared to close in. Now, look at them dogs o' mine. A cur ain't got no
dew-claws--them dogs has. My dogs can foller ary trail, same's a hound;
but they'll run right in on the varmint, snappin' and chawin' and
worryin' him till he gits so mad you can hear his tushes pop half a
mile. He cain't run away--he haster stop every bit, and fight. Finally
he gits so tired and het up that he trees to rest hisself. Then we-uns
ketches up and finishes him."
"Mebbe you-uns don't know that a dew-clawed dog is snake-proof----"
But somebody, thinking that dog-talk had gone far enough, produced a
bottle of soothing-syrup that was too new to have paid tax. Then we
discovered that there was musical talent, of a sort, in Little John. He
cut a pigeon-wing, twirled around with an imaginary banjo, and sang in a
quaint minor:
Did you _ever_ see the devil,
With his _pitchfork_ and ladle,
And his _old_ iron shovel,
And his old gourd head?
O, I _will_ go to meetin',
And I _will_ go to meetin',
Yes, I _will_ go to meetin',
In an old tin pan.
Other songs followed, with utter irrelevance--mere snatches from
"ballets" composed, mainly, by the mountaineers themselves, though some
dated back to a long-forgotten age when the British ancestors of these
Carolina woodsmen were battling with lance and long-bow. It was one of
modern and local origin that John was singing when there came a
diversion from without--
La-a-ay down, boys,
Le's take a nap:
Thar's goin' to be trouble
In the Cumberland Gap--
Our ears were stunned by one sudden thundering crash. The roof rose
visibly, as though pushed upward from within. In an instant we were
blinded by moss and dried mud--the chinking blown from between the logs
of our shabby cabin. Dred and Coaly cowered as though whipped, while
"Doc's" little hound slunk away in the keen misery of fear. We men
looked at each other with lowered eyelids and the grim smile that
denotes readiness, though no special eagerness, for dissolution. Beyond
the "gant-lot" we could hear trees and limbs popping like skirmishers in
action.
Then that tidal wave of air swept by. The roof settled again with only a
few shingles missing. We went to "redding up." Squalls broke against the
mountainside, hither and yon, like the hammer of Thor testing the
foundations of the earth. But they were below us. Here, on top, there
was only the steady drive of a great surge of wind; and speech was
possible once more.
"Fellers, you want to mark whut you dream about, to-night: hit'll shore
come true to-morrow."
"Yes: but you mustn't tell whut yer dream was till the hunt's over, or
it'll spile the charm."
There ensued a grave discussion of dream-lore, in which the illiterates
of our party declared solemn faith. If one dreamt of blood, he would
surely see blood the next day. Another lucky sign for a hunter was to
dream of quarreling with a woman, for that meant a she-bear; it was
favorable to dream of clear water, but muddy water meant trouble.
The wind died away. When we went out for a last observation of the
weather we found the air so clear that the lights of Knoxville were
plainly visible, in the north-north west, thirty-two miles in an air
line. Not another light was to be seen on earth, although in some
directions we could scan for nearly a hundred miles. The moon shone
brightly. Things looked rather favorable for the morrow, after all.
* * * * *
"Brek-k-k-_fust_!"
I awoke to a knowledge that somebody had built a roaring fire and was
stirring about. Between the cabin logs one looked out upon a starry sky
and an almost pitch-dark world. What did that pottering vagabond mean by
arousing us in the middle of the night? But I was hungry. Everybody half
arose on elbows and blinked about. Then we got up, each after his
fashion, except one scamp who resumed snoring.
"Whar's that brekfust you're yellin' about?"
"Hit's for you-uns to help _git_! I knowed I couldn't roust ye no other
way. Here, you, go down to the spring and fetch water. Rustle out, boys;
we've got to git a soon start if you want bear brains an' liver for
supper."
The "soon start" tickled me into good humor.
Our dogs were curled together under the long bunk, having popped indoors
as soon as the way was opened. Somebody trod on Coaly's tail. Coaly
snapped Dred. Instantly there was action between the four. It is
interesting to observe what two or three hundred pounds of dog can do to
a ramshackle berth with a man on top of it. Poles and hay and ragged
quilts flew in every direction. Sleepy Matt went down in the midst of
the mêlée, swearing valiantly. I went out and hammered ice out of the
wash-basin while Granville and John quelled the riot. Presently our
frying-pans sputtered and the huge coffee-pot began to get up steam.
"Waal, who dreamt him a good dream?"
"I did," affirmed the writer. "I dreamt that I had an old colored woman
by the throat and was choking dollars out of her mouth----"
"Good la!" exclaimed four men in chorus; "you hadn't orter a-told."
"Why? Wasn't that a lovely dream?"
"Hit means a she-bear, shore as a cap-shootin' gun; but you've done
spiled it all by tellin'. Mebbe somebody'll git her to-day, but _you_
won't--your chanct is ruined."
So the reader will understand why, in this veracious narrative, I cannot
relate any heroic exploits of my own in battling with Ursus Major. And
so you, ambitious one, when you go into the Smokies after that long-lost
bear, remember these two cardinal points of the Law:
(1) Dream that you are fighting some poor old colored woman. (That
is easy: the victuals you get will fix up your dream, all right.)
And--
(2) Keep your mouth shut about it.
There was still no sign of rose-color in the eastern sky when we sallied
forth. The ground, to use a mountaineer's expression, was "all spewed up
with frost." Rime crackled underfoot and our mustaches soon stiffened in
the icy wind.
It was settled that Little John Cable and the hunchback Cope should take
the dogs far down into Bone Valley and start the drive, leaving
Granville, "Doc," Matt, and myself to picket the mountain. I was given a
stand about half a mile east of the cabin, and had but a vague notion of
where the others went.
By jinks, it was cold! I built a little fire between the buttressing
roots of a big mountain oak, but still my toes and fingers were numb.
This was the 25th of November, and we were at an altitude where
sometimes frost forms in July. The other men were more thinly clad than
I, and with not a stitch of wool beyond their stockings; but they seemed
to revel in the keen air. I wasted some pity on Cope, who had no
underwear worthy of the name; but afterwards I learned that he would not
have worn more clothes if they had been given him. Many a night my
companions had slept out on the mountain without blanket or shelter,
when the ground froze and every twig in the forest was coated with rime
from the winter fog.
Away out yonder beyond the mighty bulk of Clingman Dome, which, black
with spruce and balsam, looked like a vast bear rising to contemplate
the northern world, there streaked the first faint, nebulous hint of
dawn. Presently the big bear's head was tipped with a golden crown
flashing against the scarlet fires of the firmament, and the earth
awoke.
A rustling some hundred yards below me gave signal that the gray
squirrels were on their way to water. Out of a tree overhead hopped a
mountain "boomer" (red squirrel), and down he came, eyed me, and
stopped. Cocking his head to one side he challenged peremptorily: "Who
are you? Stump? Stump? Not a stump. What the deuce!"
I moved my hand.
"Lawk--the booger-man! Run, run, run!"
Somewhere from the sky came a strange, half-human note, as of someone
chiding: "_Wal_-lace, _Wal_-lace, _Wat_!" I could get no view for the
trees. Then the voice flexibly changed to a deep-toned "Co-_logne_,
Co-_logne_, Co-_logne_," that rang like a bell through the forest
aisles.
Two names uttered distinctly from the air! Two scenes conjured in a
breath, vivid but unrelated as in dreams: Wallace--an iron-bound
Scottish coast; Cologne--tall spires, and cliffs along the Rhine! What
magic had flashed such pictures upon a remote summit of the Smoky
Mountains?
The weird speaker sailed into view--a raven. Forward it swept with great
speed of ebon wings, fairly within gunshot for one teasing moment. Then,
as if to mock my gaping stupor, it hurtled like a hawk far into the safe
distance, whence it flung back loud screams of defiance and chuckles of
derision.
As the morning drew on, I let the fire die to ashes and basked lazily in
the sun. Not a sound had I heard from the dogs. My hoodoo was working
malignly. Well, let it work. I was comfortable now, and that old bear
could go to any other doom she preferred. It was pleasant enough to
lie here alone in the forest and be free! Aye, it was good to be alive,
and to be far, far away from the broken bottles and old tin cans of
civilization.
[Illustration: "By and by up they came, carrying the Bear on a trimmed
sapling"]
For many a league to the southward clouds covered all the valleys in
billows of white, from which rose a hundred mountain tops, like islands
in a tropic ocean. My fancy sailed among and beyond them, beyond the
horizon's rim, even unto those far seas that I had sailed in my youth,
to the old times and the old friends that I should never see again.
But a forenoon is long-drawn-out when one has breakfasted before dawn,
and has nothing to do but sit motionless in the woods and watch and
listen. I got to fingering my rifle trigger impatiently and wishing that
a wild Thanksgiving gobbler might blunder into view. Squirrels made
ceaseless chatter all around my stand. Large hawks shrilled by me within
tempting range, whistling like spent bullets. A groundhog sat up on a
log and whistled, too, after a manner of his own. He was so near that I
could see his nose wiggle. A skunk waddled around for twenty minutes,
and once came so close that I thought he would nibble my boot. I was
among old mossy beeches, scaled with polyphori, and twisted into
postures of torture by their battles with the storms. Below, among
chestnuts and birches, I could hear the _t-wee, t-wee_ of "joree-birds"
(towhees), which winter in the valleys. Incessantly came the
_chip-chip-cluck_ of ground squirrels, the saucy bark of the grays, and
great chirruping among the "boomers," which had ceased swearing and were
hard at work.
Far off on my left a rifle cracked. I pricked up and listened intently,
but there was never a yelp from a dog. Since it is a law of the chase to
fire at nothing smaller than turkeys, lest big game be scared away, this
shot might mean a gobbler. I knew that Matt Hyde could not, to save his
soul, sit ten minutes on a stand without calling turkeys (and he _could_
call them, with his unassisted mouth, better than anyone I ever heard
perform with leaf or wing-bone or any other contrivance).
Thus the slow hours dragged along. I yearned mightily to stretch my
legs. Finally, being certain that no drive would approach my stand that
day, I ambled back to the hut and did a turn at dinner-getting. Things
were smoking, and smelt good, by the time four of our men turned up, all
of them dog-tired and disappointed, but stoical.
"That pup Coaly chased off atter a wildcat," blurted John. "We held the
old dogs together and let him rip. Then Dred started a deer. It was that
old buck that everybody's shot at, and missed, this three year back. I'd
believe he's a hant if 't wasn't for his tracks--they're the biggest I
ever seen. He must weigh two hunderd and fifty. But he's a foxy cuss.
Tuk right down the bed o' Desolation, up the left prong of Roaring Fork,
right through the Devil's Race-path (how a deer can git through thar I
don't see!), crossed at the Meadow Gap, went down Eagle Creek, and by
now he's in the Little Tennessee. That buck, shorely to God, has wings!"
We were at table in the Carolina room when Matt Hyde appeared. Sure
enough, he bore a turkey hen.
"I was callin' a gobbler when this fool thing showed up. I fired a shoot
as she riz in the air, but only bruk her wing. She made off on her legs
like the devil whoppin' out fire. I run, an' she run. Guess I run her
half a mile through all-fired thickets. She piped '_Quit--quit_,' but I
said, 'I'll see you in hell afore I quit!' and the chase resumed.
Finally I knocked her over with a birch stob, and here we are."
Matt ruefully surveyed his almost denuded legs, evidence of his chase.
"Boys," said he, "I'm nigh breechless!"
* * * * *
None but native-born mountaineers could have stood the strain of another
drive that day, for the country that Cope and Cable had been through was
fearful, especially the laurel up Roaring Fork and Killpeter Ridge. But
the stamina of these "withey" little men was even more remarkable than
their endurance of cold. After a small slice of fried pork, a chunk of
half-baked johnny-cake, and a pint or so of coffee, they were as fresh
as ever.
What soldiers these fellows would make, under leadership of some
backwoods Napoleon who could hold them together!--some man like Daniel
Morgan of the Revolution, who was one of them, yet greater!
I had made the coffee strong, and it was good stuff that I had brought
from home. After his first deep draught, Little John exclaimed:
"Hah! boys, that coffee hits whar ye hold it!"
I thought that a neat compliment from a sharpshooter.
We took new stands; but the afternoon passed without incident to those
of us on the mountain tops. I returned to camp about five o'clock, and
was surprised to see three of our men lugging across the "gant-lot"[3]
toward the cabin a small female bear.
"Hyur's yer old nigger woman," shouted John.
The hunters showed no elation--in fact, they looked sheepish--and I
suspected a nigger in the woodpile.
"How's this? I didn't hear any drive."
"There wa'n't none."
"Then where did you get your bear?"
"In one of Wit Hensley's traps, dum him! Boys, I wish t' we _hed_
roasted the temper outen them trap-springs, like we talked o' doin'."
"Was the bear alive?"
"Live as a hot coal. See the pup's head!"
I examined Coaly, who looked sick. The flesh was torn from his lower jaw
and hung down a couple of inches. Two holes in the top of his head
showed where the bear's tusks had tried to crack his skull.
"When the other dogs found her, he rushed right in. She hadn't been
trapped more'n a few hours, and she larned Coaly somethin' about the
bear business."
"Won't this spoil him for hunting hereafter?"
"Not if he has his daddy's and mammy's grit. We'll know by to-morrow
whether he's a shore-enough bear dog; for I've larned now whar they're
crossin'--seed sign a-plenty and it's spang fraish. Coaly, old boy!
you-uns won't be so feisty and brigaty after this, will ye!"
"John, what do those two words mean?"
"_Good_ la! whar was you fotch up? Them's common. They mean nigh about
the same thing, only there's a differ. When I say that Doc Jones thar is
brigaty among women-folks, hit means that he's stuck on hisself and
wants to show off----"
"And John Cable's sulkin' around with his nose out o' jint," interjected
"Doc."
"Feisty," proceeded the interpreter, "feisty means when a feller's
allers wigglin' about, wantin' ever'body to see him, like a kid when the
preacher comes. You know a feist is one o' them little bitty dogs that
ginerally runs on three legs and pretends a whole lot."
All of us were indignant at the setter of the trap. It had been hidden
in a trail, with no sign to warn a man from stepping into it. In
Tennessee, I was told, it is a penitentiary offense to set out a bear
trap. We agreed that a similar law ought to be passed as soon as
possible in North Carolina.
"It's only two years ago," said Granville to me, "that Jasper
Millington, an old man living on the Tennessee side, started acrost the
mountain to get work at the Everett mine, where you live. Not fur from
where we are now, he stepped into a bear trap that was hid in the
leaves, like this one. It broke his leg, and he starved to death in it."
Despite our indignation meeting, it was decided to carry the trapped
bear's hide to Hensley, and for us to use only the meat as recompense
for trouble, to say nothing of risk to life and limb. Such is the
mountaineers' regard for property rights!
The animal we had ingloriously won was undersized, weighing scant 175
pounds. The average weight of Smoky Mountain bears is not great, but
occasionally a very large beast is killed. Matt Hyde told us that he
killed one on the Welch Divide in 1901, the meat of which, dressed,
without the hide, weighed 434 pounds, and the hide "squared eight feet"
when stretched for drying. "Doc" Jones killed a bear that was "kivered
with fat, five inches thick."
Afterwards I took pains to ask the most famous bear hunters of our
region what were the largest bears they had personally killed. Uncle
Jimmy Crawford, of the Balsam Mountains, estimated his largest at 500
pounds gross, and the hide of another that he had killed weighed forty
pounds after three days' drying. Quill Rose, of Eagle Creek, said that,
after stripping the hide from one of his bears, he took the fresh skin
by the ears and raised it as high as he could reach above his head, and
that four inches of the butt end of the hide (not legs) trailed on the
ground. "And," he added severely, "thar's no lie about it." Quill is six
feet one and one-half inches tall. Black Bill Walker, of the middle
prong of Little River (Tennessee side), told me "The biggest one I ever
saw killed had a hide that measured ten feet from nose to rump,
stretched for drying. The biggest I ever killed myself measured nine and
a half feet, same way, and weighed a good four hundred net, which,
allowin' for hide, blood, and entrails, would run full five hunderd live
weight."
[Illustration: Skinning a frozen bear]
Within the past two years two bears of about 500 pounds each have been
killed in Swain and Graham counties, the Cables getting one of them.
The veteran hunters that I have named have killed their hundreds of
bears and are men superior to silly exaggeration. In the Smoky Mountains
the black bear, like most of the trees, attains its fullest development,
and that it occasionally reaches a weight of 500 pounds when "hog fat"
is beyond reasonable doubt, though the average would not be more than
half that weight.
* * * * *
We spent the evening in debate as to where the next drive should be
made. Some favored moving six miles eastward, to the old mining shack at
Siler's Meadow, and trying the headwaters of Forney's Creek, around Rip
Shin Thicket and the Gunstick Laurel, driving towards Clingman Dome and
over into the bleak gulf, southwest of the Sugarland Mountains, that I
had named Godforsaken--a title that stuck. We knew there were bears in
that region, though it was a desperately rough country to hunt in.
But John and the hunchback had found "sign" in the opposite direction.
Bears were crossing from Little River in the neighborhood of Thunderhead
and Briar Knob, coming up just west of the Devil's Court House and
"using" around Block House, Woolly Ridge, Bear Pen, and thereabouts.
The motion carried, and we adjourned to bed.
We breakfasted on bear meat, the remains of our Thanksgiving turkey, and
wheat bread shortened with bear's grease until it was light as a
feather; and I made tea. It was the first time that Little John ever saw
"store tea." He swallowed some of it as if it had been boneset, under
the impression that it was some sort of "yerb" that would be good for
his insides. Without praising its flavor, he asked what it had cost,
and, when I told him "a dollar a pound," reckoned that it was "rich
man's medicine"; said he preferred dittany or sassafras or goldenrod.
"Doc" Jones opined that it "looked yaller," and he even affirmed that it
"tasted yaller."
"Waal, people," exclaimed Matt, "I 'low I've done growed a bit, atter
that mess o' meat. Le's be movin'."
It was a hard pull for me, climbing up the rocky approach to Briar Knob.
This was my first trip to the main divide, and my heart was not yet used
to mountain climbing.
The boys were anxious for me to get a shot. I was paying them nothing;
it was share-and-share alike; but their neighborly kindness moved them
to do their best for the outlander.
So they put me on what was probably the best stand for the day. It was
above the Fire-scald, a brulé or burnt-over space on the steep southern
side of the ridge between Briar Knob and Laurel Top, overlooking the
grisly slope of Killpeter. Here I could both see and hear an uncommonly
long distance, and if the bear went either east or west I would have
timely warning.
This Fire-scald, by the way, is a famous place for wildcats. Once in a
blue moon a lynx is killed in the highest zone of the Smokies, up among
the balsams and spruces, where both the flora and fauna, as well as the
climate, resemble those of the Canadian woods. Our native hunters never
heard the word lynx, but call the animal a "catamount." Wolves and
panthers used to be common here, but it is a long time since either has
been killed in this region, albeit impressionable people see wolf tracks
or hear a "pant'er" scream every now and then.
I had shivered on the mountain top for a couple of hours, hearing only
an occasional yelp from the dogs, which had been working in the thickets
a mile or so below me, when suddenly there burst forth the devil of a
racket.
On came the chase, right in my direction. Presently I could distinguish
the different notes: the deep bellow of old Dred, the hound-like baying
of Rock and Coaly, and little Towse's feisty yelp.
I thought that the bear might chance the comparatively open space of the
Fire-scald, because there were still some ashes on the ground that would
dust the dogs' nostrils and throw them off the scent. And such, I
believe, was his intention. But the dogs caught up with him. They nipped
him fore and aft. Time after time he shook them off; but they were true
bear dogs, and, like Matt Hyde after the turkey, they knew no such word
as quit.
I took a last squint at my rifle sights, made sure there was a cartridge
in the chamber, and then felt my ears grow as I listened. Suddenly the
chase swerved at a right angle and took straight up the side of
Saddle-back. Either the bear would tree, or he would try to smash on
through to the low rhododendron of the Devil's Court House, where dogs
who followed might break their legs. I girded myself and ran, "wiggling
and wingling" along the main divide, and then came the steep pull up
Briar Knob. As I was grading around the summit with all the lope that
was left in me, I heard a rifle crack, half a mile down Saddle-back. Old
"Doc" was somewhere in that vicinity. I halted to listen. Creation,
what a rumpus! Then another shot. Then the warwhoop of the South, that
we read about.
By and by, up they came, John and Cope and "Doc," two at a time,
carrying the bear on a trimmed sapling. Presently Hyde joined us, then
came Granville, and we filed back to camp, where "Doc" told his story:
"Boys, them dogs' eyes shined like new money. Coaly fit agin, all right,
and got his tail bit. The bear div down into a sink-hole with the dogs
a-top o' him. Soon's I could shoot without hittin' a dog, I let him have
it. Thought I'd shot him through the head, but he fit on. Then I jumped
down into the sink and kicked him loose from the dogs, or he'd a-killed
Coaly. Waal, sir, he wa'n't hurt a bit--the ball jest glanced off his
head. He riz an' knocked me down with his left paw, an' walked right
over me, an' lit up the ridge. The dogs treed him in a minute. I went to
shoot up at him, but my new hulls [cartridges] fit loose in this old
chamber and this one drap [dropped] out, so the gun stuck. Had to git my
knife out and fix hit. Then the dad-burned gun wouldn't stand roostered
[cocked]; the feather-spring had jumped out o' place. But I held back
with my thumb, and killed him anyhow.
"Fellers," he added feelingly, "I wish t' my legs growed
hind-side-fust."
"_What_ fer?"
"So 's 't I wouldn't bark my shins!"
"Bears," remarked John, "is all left-handed. Ever note that? Hit's the
left paw you wanter look out fer. He'd a-knocked somethin' out o' yer
head if there'd been much in it, Doc."
"Funny thing, but hit's true," declared Bill, "that a bear allers dies
flat on his back, onless he's trapped."
"So do men," said "Doc" grimly; "men who've been shot in battle. You go
along a battlefield, right atter the action, and you'll find most o' the
dead faces pintin' to the sky."
"Bears is almost human, anyhow. A skinned bear looks like a great
big-bodied man with long arms and stumpy legs."
I did not relish this turn of the conversation, for we had two bears to
skin immediately. The one that had been hung up over night was frozen
solid, so I photographed her standing on her legs, as in life. When it
came to skinning this beast the job was a mean one; a fellow had to drop
out now and then to warm his fingers.
The mountaineers have an odd way of sharing the spoils of the chase.
They call it "stoking the meat," a use of the word _stoke_ that I have
never heard elsewhere. The hide is sold, and the proceeds divided
equally among the hunters, but the meat is cut up into as many pieces as
there are partners in the chase; then one man goes indoors or behind a
tree, and somebody at the carcass, laying his hand on a portion, calls
out: "Whose piece is this?"
"Granville Calhoun's," cries the hidden man, who cannot see it.
"Whose is this?"
"Bill Cope's."
And so on down the line. Everybody gets what chance determines for him,
and there can be no charges of unfairness.
* * * * *
It turned very cold that night. The last thing I heard was Matt Hyde
protesting to the hunchback:
"Durn you, Bill Cope, you're so cussed crooked a man cain't lay cluss
enough to you to keep warm!"
Once when I awoke in the night the beech trees were cracking like
rifle-shots from the intense frost.
Next morning John announced that we were going to get another bear.
"Night afore last," he said, "Bill dremp that he seed a lot o' fat meat
layin' on the table; an' it done come true. Last night I dremp me one
that never was knowed to fail yet. Now you see!"
It did not look like it by evening. We all worked hard and endured
much--standers as well as drivers--but not a rifle had spoken up to the
time when, from my far-off stand, I yearned for a hot supper.
Away down in the rear I heard the snort of a locomotive, one of those
cog-wheel affairs that are specially built for mountain climbing. With a
steam-loader and three camps of a hundred men each, it was despoiling
the Tennessee forest. Slowly, but inexorably, a leviathan was crawling
into the wilderness and was soon to consume it.
[Illustration: "....Powerful steep and Laurely...."]
"All this," I apostrophized, "shall be swept away, tree and plant, beast
and fish. Fire will blacken the earth; flood will swallow and spew forth
the soil. The simple-hearted native men and women will scatter and
disappear. In their stead will come slaves speaking strange tongues, to
toil in the darkness under the rocks. Soot will arise, and foul gases;
the streams will run murky death. Let me not see it! No; I will
"'... Get me to some far-off land
Where higher mountains under heaven stand ...
Where other thunders roll amid the hills,
Some mightier wind a mightier forest fills
With other strains through other-shapen boughs.'"
Wearily I plodded back to camp. No one had arrived but "Doc." The old
man had been thumped rather severely in yesterday's scrimmage, but
complained only of "a touch o' rheumatiz." Just how this disease had
left his clothes in tatters he did not explain.
It was late when Matt and Granville came in. The crimson and yellow of
sunset had turned to a faultless turquoise, and this to a violet
afterglow; then suddenly night rose from the valleys and enveloped us.
About nine o'clock I went out on the Little Chestnut Bald and fired
signals, but there was no answer. The last we had known of the drivers
was that they had been beyond Thunderhead, six miles of hard travel to
the westward. There was fog on the mountain. We did some uneasy
speculating. Then Granville and Matt took the lantern and set out for
Briar Knob. "Doc" was too stiff for travel, and I, being at that time a
stranger in the Smokies, would be of no use hunting amid clouds and
darkness. "Doc" and I passed a dreary three hours. Finally, at midnight,
my shots were answered, and soon the dogs came limping in. Dred had been
severely bitten in the shoulders and Rock in the head. Coaly was bloody
about the mouth, where his first day's wound had reopened. Then came the
four men, empty-handed, it seemed, until John slapped a bear's "melt"
(spleen) upon the table. He limped from a bruised hip.
"That bear outsharped us and went around all o' you-uns. We follered him
clar over to the Spencer Place, and then he doubled and come back on the
fur side o' the ridge. He crossed through the laurel on the Devil's
Court House and tuk down an almighty steep place. It was plumb night by
that time. I fell over a rock clift twenty feet down, and if 't hadn't
been for the laurel I'd a-bruk some bones. I landed right in the middle
of them, bear and dogs, fightin' like gamecocks. The bear clim a tree.
Bill sung out 'Is it fur down thar?' and I said 'Purty fur.' 'Waal, I'm
a-comin',' says he; and with that he grabbed a laurel to swing hisself
down by, but the stem bruk, and down he come suddent, to jine the music.
Hit was so dark I couldn't see my gun barrel, and we wuz all tangled up
in greenbriers as thick as ploughlines. I had to fire twiste afore he
tumbled. Then Matt an' Granville come. The four of us tuk turn-about
crawlin' up out o' thar with the bear on our back. Only one man could
handle him at a time--and he'll go a good two hunderd, that bear. We
gutted him, and left him near the top, to fotch in the mornin'. Fellers,
I'm bodaciously tired out. This is the time I'd give half what I'm worth
for a gallon o' liquor--and I'd promise the rest!"
"You'd orter see what Coaly did to that varmint," said Bill. "He bit a
hole under the fore leg, through hide and ha'r, clar into the holler, so
t' you can stick your hand in and seize the bear's heart."
"John, what was that dream of yours?"
"I dremp I stole a feller's overcoat. Now d'ye see? That means a bear's
hide."
Coaly, three days ago, had been an inconsequential pup; but now he
looked up into my eyes with the calm dignity that no fool or braggart
can assume. He had been knighted. As he licked his wounds he was proud
of them. "Scars of battle, sir. You may have your swagger ribbons and
prize collars in the New York dog show, but _this_ for me!"
Poor Coaly! after two more years of valiant service, he was to meet an
evil fortune. In connection with it I will relate a queer coincidence:
Two years after this hunt, a friend and I spent three summer months in
this same old cabin on top of Smoky. When Andy had to return North he
left with me, for sale, a .30-30 carbine, as he had more guns than he
needed. I showed this carbine to Quill Rose, and the old hunter said: "I
don't like them power-guns; you could shoot clar through a bear and kill
your dog on the other side." The next day I sold the weapon to Granville
Calhoun. Within a short time, word came from Granville's father that
"Old Reelfoot" was despoiling his orchard. This Reelfoot was a large
bear whose cunning had defied our best hunters for five or six years. He
got his name from the fact that he "reeled" or twisted his hind feet in
walking, as some horses do, leaving a peculiar track. This seems rather
common among old bears, for I have known of several "reelfoots" in
other, and widely separated, regions.
Cable and his dogs were sent for. A drive was made, and the bear was
actually caught within a few rods of old Mr. Calhoun's stable. His teeth
were worn to the gums, and, as he could no longer kill hogs, he had come
down to an apple diet. He was large-framed, but very poor. The only
hunters on the spot were Granville, with the .30-30, and a northern
lumberman named Hastings, with a Luger carbine. After two or three shots
had wounded the bear, he rose on his hind feet and made for Granville. A
.30-30 bullet went clear through the beast at the very instant that
Coaly, who was unseen, jumped up on the log behind it, and the missile
gave both animals their death wound.
CHAPTER V
MOONSHINE LAND
I was hunting alone in the mountains, and exploring ground that was new
to me. About noon, while descending from a high ridge into a creek
valley, to get some water, I became enmeshed in a rhododendron "slick,"
and, to some extent, lost my bearings.
After floundering about for an hour or two, I suddenly came out upon a
little clearing. Giant hemlocks, girdled and gaunt, rose from a steep
cornfield of five acres, beyond which loomed the primeval forest of the
Great Smoky Mountains. Squat in the foreground sat one of the rudest log
huts I had ever seen, a tiny one-room shack, without window, cellar, or
loft, and without a sawed board showing in its construction. A thin curl
of smoke rose from one end of the cabin, not from a chimney, but from a
mere semi-circle of stones piled four feet high around a hole cut
through the log wall. The stones of this fireplace were not even
plastered together with mud, nor had the builder ever intended to raise
the pile as high as the roof to guard his premises against the imminent
risk of fire. Two low doors of riven boards stood wide open, opposite
each other. These, helped by wide crevices between the unchinked logs,
served to let in some sunlight, and quite too much of the raw November
air. The surroundings were squalid and filthy beyond anything I had
hitherto witnessed in the mountains. As I approached, wading ankle-deep
in muck that reached to the doorsill, two pigs scampered out through the
opposite door.
Within the hut I found only a slip of a girl, rocking a baby almost as
big as herself, and trying to knit a sock at the same time. She was
toasting her bare toes before the fire, and crooning in a weird minor
some mountain ditty that may have been centuries old.
I shivered as I looked at this midget, comparing her only garment, a
torn calico dress, with my own stout hunter's garb that seemed none too
warm for such a day as this.
Knowing that the sudden appearance of a stranger would startle the girl,
I chose the quickest way to reassure her by saluting in the vernacular:
"Howdy?"
"Howdy?" she gasped.
"Who lives here?"
"Tom Kirby."
"Kirby? Oh! yes, I know him--we've been hunting together. Is your father
at home?"
"No, he's out somewheres."
"Where is your mother?"
"She's in the field, up yan, gittin' roughness."
I took some pride in not being stumped by this answer. "Roughness," in
mountain lingo, is any kind of rough fodder, specifically corn fodder.
"How far is it to the next house?"
"I don't know; maw, she knows."
"All right; I'll find her."
I went up to the field. No one was in sight; but a shock of fodder was
walking away from me, and I conjectured that "maw's" feet were under it;
so I hailed:
"Hello!"
The shock turned around, then tumbled over, and there stood revealed a
bare-headed, bare-footed woman, coarse featured but of superb
physique--one of those mountain giantesses who think nothing of
shouldering a two-bushel sack of corn and carrying it a mile or two
without letting it down.
[Illustration: Moonshine Still-House Hidden in the Laurel]
She flushed, then paled, staring at me round-eyed--frightened, I
thought, by this apparition of a stranger whose approach she had not
detected. To these people of the far backwoods everyone from outside
their mountains is a doubtful character at best.
However, Mistress Kirby quickly recovered her aplomb. Her mouth
straightened to a thin slit. She planted herself squarely across my
path, now regarding me with contracted lids and a hard glint, till I
felt fairly bayoneted by those steel-gray eyes.
"Good-morning. Is Mr. Kirby about?" I inquired.
There was no answer. Instead, the thin slit opened and let out a yell of
almost yodel quality, penetrating as a warwhoop--a yell that would carry
near half a mile. I wondered what she meant by this; but she did not
enlighten me by so much as a single word. It was puzzling, not to say
disconcerting; but, charging it to the custom of a country that still
was new to me, I found my tongue again, and started to give credentials.
"My name is Kephart. I am staying at the Everett Mine on Sugar Fork----"
Another yell that set the wild echoes flying.
"I am acquainted with your husband; we've hunted together. Perhaps he
has told you----"
Yell number three, same pitch and vigor as before.
By this time I was quite nonplussed. I waited for her to speak; but
never a word did the woman deign. So there we stood and stared at each
other in silence--I leaning on my rifle, she with red arms akimbo--till
I grew embarrassed, half wondering, too, if the creature were demented.
Suddenly a light flashed upon my groping wits. This amazon was on
picket. Her three shrieks had been a signal to someone up the branch.
Her attitude showed that there was no thoroughfare in that direction at
present. Circumstances, whatever they were, forbade explanation.
Clearly, the woman thought that I could not help seeing how matters
stood. Not for a moment did she suspect but that her yells, her
belligerent attitude, and her refusal to speak, were the conventional
way, this world over, of intimating that there was a _contretemps_. She
considered that if I was what I claimed to be, an acquaintance of her
husband and on friendly footing, I would be gentleman enough to retire.
If I was something else--an officer, a spy--well, she was there to stop
me until the captain of the guard arrived.
For one silly moment I was tempted to advance and see what this martial
spouse would do if I tried to pass her on the trail. But a hunter's
instinct made me glance forward to the upper corner of the field. There
was thick cover beyond the fence, with a clear range of a hundred and
fifty yards between it and me--too far for Tom to recognize me, I
thought, but deadly range for his Winchester, I knew. One forward step
of mine would put me in the status of an armed intruder. So I concluded
that common sense would better become me at this juncture than a bit of
fooling that surely would be misinterpreted, and that might end
ingloriously.
"Ah, well!" I remarked, "when your husband gets back, tell him, please,
that I was sorry to miss him; though I did not call on any special
business--just wanted to say 'Howdy?' you know. Good day!"
I turned and went down the valley.
All the way home I speculated on this queer adventure. What was going on
"up yan"?
A month before, when I had started for this wildest nook of the Smokies,
a friend had intimated that I was venturing into a dubious
district--Moonshine Land. It is but frank to confess that this prospect
was not unpleasant. My only fear had been that I might not find any
moonshiners, or that, having found them, I might not succeed in winning
their confidence to the extent of learning their own side of an
interesting story. As to how I could do this without getting tarred with
the same stick, I was by no means clear; but I hoped that good luck
might find a way. And now it seemed as if luck had indeed favored me
with an excuse for broaching the topic to some friendly mountaineer, so
I could at least see how he would take it.
And it chanced (or was it chance?) that I had no more than finished
supper, that evening, when a man called at my lonely cabin. He was the
one that I knew best among my scattered neighbors. I gave him a rather
humorous account of my reception by Madame Kirby, and asked him what he
thought she was yelling about.
There was no answering smile on my visitor's face. He pondered in
silence, weighing many contingencies, it seemed, and ventured no more
than a helpless "Waal, now I wonder!"
It did not suit me to let the matter go at that; so, on a sudden
impulse, I fired the question point-blank at him: "Do you suppose that
Tom is running a still up there at the head of that little cove?"
The man's face hardened, and there came a glint into his eyes such as I
had noticed in Mistress Kirby's.
"Jedgmatically, I don't know."
"Excuse me! I don't want to know, either. But let me explain just what I
am driving at. People up North, and in the lowlands of the South as
well, have a notion that there is little or nothing going on in these
mountains except feuds and moonshining. They think that a stranger
traveling here alone is in danger of being potted by a bullet from
almost any laurel thicket that he passes, on mere suspicion that he may
be a revenue officer or a spy. Of course, that is nonsense;[4] but there
is one thing that I'm as ignorant about as any novel-reader of them all.
You know my habits; I like to explore--I never take a guide--and when I
come to a place that's particularly wild and primitive, that's just the
place I want to peer into. Now the dubious point is this: Suppose that,
one of these days when I'm out hunting, or looking for rare plants, I
should stumble upon a moonshine still in full operation--what would
happen? What would they do?"
"Waal, sir, I'll tell you whut they'd do. They'd fust-place ask you some
questions about yourself, and whut you-uns was doin' in that thar neck
o' the woods. Then they'd git you to do some triflin' work about the
still--feed the furnace, or stir the mash--jest so 's 't they could
prove that you took a hand in it your own self."
"What good would that do?"
"Hit would make you one o' them in the eyes of the law."
"I see. But, really, doesn't that seem rather childish? I could easily
convince any court that I did it under compulsion; for that's what it
would amount to."
"I reckon you-uns would find a United States court purty hard to
convince. The judge 'd right up and want to know why you let grass go to
seed afore you came and informed on them."
He paused, watched my expression, and then continued quizzically: "I
reckon you wouldn't be in no great hurry to do _that_."
"No! Then, if I stirred the mash and sampled their liquor, nobody would
be likely to mistreat me?"
"Shucks! Why, man, whut could they gain by hurtin' you? At the wust,
s'posin' they was convicted by your own evidence, they'd only git a
month or two in the pen. So why should they murder you and get hung for
it? Hit's all 'tarnal foolishness, the notions some folks has!"
"I thought so. Now, here! the public has been fed all sorts of nonsense
about this moonshining business. I'd like to learn the plain truth about
it, without bias one way or the other. I have no curiosity about
personal affairs, and don't want to learn incriminating details; but I
would like to know how the business is conducted, and especially how it
is regarded from the mountain people's own point of view. I have already
learned that a stranger's life and property are safer here than they
would be on the streets of Chicago or of St. Louis. It will do your
country good to have that known. But I can't say that there is no
moonshining going on here; for a man with a wooden nose could smell it.
Now what is your excuse for defying the law? You don't seem ashamed of
it."
The man's face turned an angry red.
"Mister, we-uns hain't no call to be ashamed of ourselves, nor of ary
thing we do. We're poor; but we don't ax no favors. We stay 'way up hyar
in these coves, and mind our own business. When a stranger comes along,
he's welcome to the best we've got, such as 'tis; but if he imposes on
us, he gits his medicine purty damned quick!"
"And you think the Government tax on whiskey is an imposition."
"Hit is, under some sarcumstances."
My guest stretched his legs, and "jedgmatically" proceeded to enlighten
me.
"Thar's plenty o' men and women grown, in these mountains, who don't
know that the Government is ary thing but a president in a biled shirt
who commands two-three judges and a gang o' revenue officers. They know
thar's a president, because the men folks's voted for him, and the women
folks's seed his pictur. They've heered tell about the judges; and
they've seed the revenuers in flesh and blood. They believe in
supportin' the Government, because hit's the law. Nobody refuses to pay
his taxes, for taxes is fair and squar'. Taxes cost mebbe three cents on
the dollar; and that's all right. But revenue costs a dollar and ten
cents on twenty cents' worth o' liquor; and that's robbin' the people
with a gun to their faces.
"Of course, I ain't so ignorant as all that--I've traveled about the
country, been to Asheville wunst, and to Waynesville a heap o'
times--and I know the theory. Theory says 't revenue is a tax on luxury.
Waal, that's all right--anything in reason. The big fellers that
makes lots of money out o' stillin', and lives in luxury, ought to pay
handsome for it. But who ever seen luxury cavortin' around in these
Smoky Mountains?"
[Illustration: MOONSHINE MILL--SIDE VIEW
The trails that lead hither are blind and rough. Behind the mill rises
an almost precipitous mountain-side. Much of the corn is brought in on
men's backs at the dead of night.]
He paused for a reply. Even then, with my limited experience in the
mountains, I could not help wincing at the idea. Often, in later times,
this man's question came back to me with peculiar force. Luxury! in a
land where the little stores were often out of coffee, sugar, kerosene,
and even salt; where, in dead of winter, there was no meal, much less
flour, to be had for love or money. Luxury! where I had to live on
bear-meat (tough old sow bear) for six weeks, because the only side of
pork that I could find for sale was full of maggots.
My friend continued: "Whiskey means more to us mountain folks than hit
does to folks in town, whar thar's drug-stores and doctors. Let ary
thing go wrong in the fam'ly--fever, or snake bite, or somethin'--and we
can't git a doctor up hyar less'n three days; and it costs scand'lous.
The only medicines we-uns has is yerbs, which customarily ain't no good
'thout a leetle grain o' whiskey. Now, th'r ain't no saloons allowed in
all these western counties. The nighest State dispensary, even, is sixty
miles away.[5] The law wunt let us have liquor shipped to us from
anywhars in the State. If we git it sent to us from outside the State it
has to come by express--and reg-lar old pop-skull it is, too. So, to be
good law-abiding citizens, we-uns must travel back and forth at a heap
of expense, or pay express rates on pizened liquor--and we are too
durned poor to do ary one or t'other.
"Now, yan's my field o' corn. I gather the corn, and shuck hit and grind
hit my own self, and the woman she bakes us a pone o' bread to eat--and
I don't pay no tax, do I? Then why can't I make some o' my corn into
pure whiskey to drink, without payin' tax? I tell you, _'taint fair_,
this way the Government does! But, when all's said and done, the main
reason for this 'moonshining,' as you-uns calls it, is bad roads."
"Bad roads?" I exclaimed. "What the----"
"Jest thisaway: From hyar to the railroad is seventeen miles, with two
mountains to cross; and you've seed that road! I recollect you-uns said
every one o' them miles was a thousand rods long. Nobody's ever measured
them, except by mountain man's foot-rule--big feet, and a long stride
between 'em. Seven hundred pounds is all the load a good team can haul
over that road, when the weather's good. Hit takes three days to make
the round trip, less'n you break an axle, and then hit takes four. When
you do git to the railroad, th'r ain't no town of a thousand people
within fifty mile. Now us folks ain't even got wagons. Thar's only one
sarviceable wagon in this whole settlement, and you can't hire it
without team and driver, which is two dollars and a half a day. Whar one
o' our leetle sleds can't go, we haffter pack on mule-back or tussle it
on our own wethers. Look, then! The only farm produce we-uns can sell is
corn. You see for yourself that corn can't be shipped outen hyar. We can
trade hit for store credit--that's all. Corn _juice_ is about all we can
tote around over the country and git cash money for. Why, man, that's
the only way some folks has o' payin' their taxes!"
"But, aside from the work and the worry," I remarked, "there is the
danger of being shot, in this business."
"Oh, we-uns don't lay _that_ up agin the Government! Hit's as fair for
one as 'tis for t'other. When a revenuer comes sneakin' around, why,
whut he gits, or whut we-uns gits, that's a 'fortune of war,' as the old
sayin' is."
There is no telegraph, wired or wireless, in the mountains, but there is
an efficient substitute. It seemed as though, in one night, the news
traveled from valley to cove, and from cove to nook, that I was
investigating the moonshining business, and that I was apparently
"safe." Each individual interpreted that word to suit himself. Some
regarded me askance, others were so confiding that their very frankness
threatened at times to become embarrassing.
Thereafter I had many talks and adventures with men who, at one time or
other, had been engaged in the moonshining industry. Some of these men
had known the inside of the penitentiary; some were not without
blood-guilt. I doubt not that more than one of them could, even now,
find his way through night and fog and laurel thicket to some "beautiful
piece of copper" that has not yet been punched full of holes. They knew
that I was on friendly terms with revenue agents. What was worse, they
knew that I was a scribbler. More than once I took notes in their
presence while interviewing them, and we had the frankest understanding
as to what would become of those notes.
My immunity was not due to any promises made or hostages given, for
there were none. I did not even pose as an apologist, but merely
volunteered to give a fair report of what I heard and saw. They took me
at my word. Had I used such representations as a mask and secretly
played the spy or informer--well, I would have deserved whatever might
have befallen me. As it was, I never met with any but respectful
treatment from these gentry, nor, to the best of my belief, did they
ever tell me a lie.
CHAPTER VI
WAYS THAT ARE DARK
Our terms moonshiner and moonshining are not used in the mountains. Here
an illicit distiller is called a blockader, his business is blockading,
and the product is blockade liquor. Just as the smugglers of old Britain
called themselves free-traders, thereby proclaiming that they risked and
fought for a principle, so the moonshiner considers himself simply a
blockade-runner dealing in contraband. His offense is only _malum
prohibitum_, not _malum in se_.
There are two kinds of blockaders, big and little. The big blockader
makes unlicensed whiskey on a fairly large scale. He may have several
stills, operating alternately in different places, so as to avert
suspicion. In any case, the still is large and the output is quite
profitable. The owner himself may not actively engage in the work, but
may furnish the capital and hire confederates to do the distilling for
him, so that personally he shuns the appearance of evil. These big
fellows are rare. They are the ones who seek collusion with the
small-fry of Government officialdom, or, failing in that, instruct their
minions to "kill on sight."
The little moonshiner is a more interesting character, if for no other
reason than that he fights fair, according to his code, and
single-handed against tremendous odds. He is innocent of graft. There is
nothing between him and the whole power of the Federal Government,
except his own wits and a well-worn Winchester or muzzleloader. He is
very poor; he is very ignorant; he has no friends at court; his
apparatus is crude in the extreme, and his output is miserably small.
This man is usually a good enough citizen in other ways, of decent
standing in his own community, and a right good fellow toward all the
world, save revenue officers. Although a criminal in the eyes of the
law, he is soundly convinced that the law is unjust, and that he is only
exercising his natural rights. Such a man, as President Frost has
pointed out, suffers none of the moral degradation that comes from
violating his conscience; his self-respect is whole.
In describing the process of making whiskey in the mountain stills, I
shall confine myself to the operations of the little moonshiner,
because they illustrate the surprising shiftiness of our backwoodsmen.
Every man in the big woods is a jack-of-all-trades. His skill in
extemporizing utensils, and even crude machines, out of the trees that
grow around him, is of no mean order. As good cider as ever I drank was
made in a hollowed log fitted with a press-block and operated by a
handspike. It took but half a day's work to make this cider press, and
the only tools used in its construction were an ax, a mattock in lieu of
adze, an auger, and a jackknife.
It takes two or three men to run a still. It is possible for one man to
do the work, on so small a scale as is usually practiced, but it would
be a hard task for him; then, too, there are few mountaineers who could
individually furnish the capital, small though it be. So three men, let
us say, will "chip in" five or ten dollars apiece, and purchase a
second-hand still, if such is procurable, otherwise a new one, and that
is all the apparatus they have to pay money for. If they should be too
poor even to go to this expense, they will make a retort by inverting a
half-barrel or an old wooden churn over a soap-kettle, and then all they
have to buy is a piece of copper tubing for the worm.
[Illustration: Moonshine Still in Full Operation]
In choosing a location for their clandestine work, the first
essential is running water. This can be found in almost any gulch; yet,
out of a hundred known spring-branches, only one or two may be suitable
for the business, most of them being too public. In a country where
cattle and hogs run wild, and where a good part of every farmer's time
is taken in keeping track of his stock, there is no place so secret but
that it is liable to be visited at any time, even though it be in the
depths of the great forest, several miles from any human habitation.
Moreover, cattle, and especially hogs, are passionately fond of
still-slop, and can scent it a great distance, so that no still can long
remain unknown to them.[6] Consequently the still must be placed several
miles away from the residence of anyone who might be liable to turn
informer. Although nearly all the mountain people are indulgent in the
matter of blockading, yet personal rivalries and family jealousies are
rife among them, and it is not uncommon for them to inform against
their enemies in the neighborhood.
Of course, it would not do to set up a still near a common trail--at
least in the far-back settlements. Our mountaineers habitually notice
every track they pass, whether of beast or man, and "read the sign" with
Indian-like facility. Often one of my companions would stop, as though
shot, and point with his toe to the fresh imprint of a human foot in the
dust or mud of a public road, exclaiming: "Now, I wonder who _that_
feller was! 'Twa'n't (so-and-so), for he hain't got no squar'-headed
bob-nails; 'twa'n't (such-a-one), 'cause he wouldn't be hyar at this
time o' day"; and so he would go on, figuring by a process of
elimination that is extremely cunning, until some such conclusion as
this was reached, "That's some stranger goin' over to Little River
[across the line in Tennessee], and he's footin' hit as if the devil was
atter him--I'll bet he's stobbed somebody and is runnin' from the
sheriff!" Nor is the incident closed with that; our mountaineer will
inquire of neighbors and passersby until he gets a description of the
wayfarer, and then he will pass the word along.
Some little side-branch is chosen that runs through a gully so choked
with laurel and briers and rhododendron as to be quite impassable, save
by such worming and crawling as must make a great noise. Doubtless a
faint cattle-trail follows the backbone of the ridge above it, and this
is the workers' ordinary highway in going to and fro; but the descent
from ridge to gully is seldom made twice over the same course, lest a
trail be printed direct to the still-house.
This house is sometimes inclosed with logs, but oftener it is no more
than a shed, built low, so as to be well screened by the undergrowth. A
great hemlock tree may be felled in such position as to help the
masking, so long as its top stays green, which will be about a year.
Back far enough from the still-house to remain in dark shadow when the
furnace is going, there is built a sort of nest for the workmen, barely
high enough to sit up in, roofed with bark and thatched all over with
browse. Here many a dismal hour of night is passed when there is nothing
to do but to wait on the "cooking." Now and then a man crawls on all
fours to the furnace and pitches in a few billets of wood, keeping low
at the time, so as to offer as small a target as possible in the flare
of the fire. Such precaution is especially needed when the number of
confederates is too small for efficient picketing. Around the little
plot where the still-shed and lair are hidden, laurel may be cut in such
way as to make a _cheval-de-frise_, sharp stubs being entangled with
branches, so that a quick charge through them would be out of the
question. Two or three days' work, at most, will build the still-house
and equip it ready for business, without so much as a shingle being
brought from outside.
After the blockaders have established their still, the next thing is to
make arrangements with some miller who will jeopardize himself by
grinding the sprouted corn; for be it known that corn which has been
forced to sprout is a prime essential in the making of moonshine
whiskey, and that the unlicensed grinding of such corn is an offense
against the law of the United States no less than its distillation. Now,
to any one living in a well-settled country, where there is, perhaps,
only one mill to every hundred farms, and it is visited daily by men
from all over the township, the finding of an accessory in the person of
a miller would seem a most hopeless project. But when you travel in our
southern mountains, one of the first things that will strike you is that
about every fourth or fifth farmer has a tiny tub-mill of his own. Tiny
is indeed the word, for there are few of these mills that can grind
more than a bushel or two of corn in a day; some have a capacity of only
half a bushel in ten hours of steady grinding. Red grains of corn being
harder than white ones, it is a humorous saying in the mountains that "a
red grain in the gryste [grist] will stop the mill." The appurtenances
of such a mill, even to the very buhr-stones themselves, are fashioned
on the spot. How primitive such a meal-grinder may be is shown by the
fact that a neighbor of mine recently offered a new mill, complete, for
sale at six dollars. A few nails, and a country-made iron rynd and
spindle, were the only things in it that he had not made himself, from
the raw materials.
In making spirits from corn, the first step is to convert the starch of
the grain into sugar. Regular distillers do this in a few hours by using
malt, but at the little blockade still a slower process is used, for
malt is hard to get. The unground corn is placed in a vessel that has a
small hole in the bottom, warm water is poured over the corn and a hot
cloth is placed over the top. As water percolates out through the hole,
the vessel is replenished with more of the warm fluid. This is continued
for two or three days and nights until the corn has put forth sprouts a
couple of inches long. The diastase in the germinating seeds has the
same chemical effect as malt--the starch is changed to sugar.
The sprouted corn is then dried and ground into meal. This sweet meal is
then made into a mush with boiling water, and is let stand two or three
days. The "sweet mash" thus made is then broken up, and a little rye
malt, similarly prepared in the meantime, is added to it, if rye is
procurable. Fermentation begins at once. In large distilleries, yeast is
added to hasten fermentation, and the mash can then be used in three or
four days; the blockader, however, having no yeast, must let his mash stand
for eight or ten days, keeping it all that time at a proper temperature
for fermentation. This requires not only constant attention, but some
skill as well, for there is no thermometer nor saccharometer in our
mountain still-house. When done, the sugar of what is now "sour mash"
has been converted into carbonic acid and alcohol. The resulting liquid
is technically called the "wash," but blockaders call it "beer." It is
intoxicating, of course, but "sour enough to make a pig squeal."
This beer is then placed in the still, a vessel with a closed head,
connected with a spiral tube, the worm. The latter is surrounded by a
closed jacket through which cold water is constantly passing. A wood
fire is built in the rude furnace under the still; the spirit rises in
vapor, along with more or less steam; these vapors are condensed in the
cold worm and trickle down into the receiver. The product of this first
distillation (the "low wines" of the trade, the "singlings" of the
blockader) is a weak and impure liquid, which must be redistilled at a
lower temperature to rid it of water and rank oils.
In moonshiners' parlance, the liquor of second distillation is called
the "doublings." It is in watching and testing the doublings that an
accomplished blockader shows his skill, for if distillation be not
carried far enough, the resulting spirits will be rank, though weak, and
if carried too far, nothing but pure alcohol will result. Regular
distillers are assisted at this stage by scientific instruments by which
the "proof" is tested; but the maker of "mountain dew" has no other
instrument than a small vial, and his testing is done entirely by the
"bead" of the liquor, the little iridescent bubbles that rise when the
vial is tilted. When a mountain man is shown any brand of whiskey,
whether a regular distillery product or not, he invariably tilts the
bottle and levels it again, before tasting; if the bead rises and is
persistent, well and good; if not, he is prepared to condemn the liquor
at once.
It is possible to make an inferior whiskey at one distillation, by
running the singlings through a steam-chest, commonly known as a
"thumpin'-chist." The advantage claimed is that "Hit allows you to make
your whiskey afore the revenue gits it; that's all."
The final process is to run the liquor through a rude charcoal filter,
to rid it of most of its fusel oil. This having been done, we have
moonshine whiskey, uncolored, limpid as water, and ready for _immediate
consumption_.
I fancy that some gentlemen will stare at the words here italicised; but
I am stating facts.
It is quite impracticable for a blockader to age his whiskey. In the
first place, he is too poor to wait; in the second place, his product is
very small, and the local demand is urgent; in the third place, he has
enough trouble to conceal, or run away with, a mere copper still, to say
nothing of barrels of stored whiskey. Cheerfully he might "waive the
quantum o' the sin," but he is quite alive to "the hazard o'
concealin'." So, while the stuff is yet warm from the still, it is taken
by confederates and quickly disposed of. There is no exaggeration in the
answer a moonshiner once made to me when I asked him how old the best
blockade liquor ever got to be: "If it 'd git to be a month old, it 'd
fool me!"
[Illustration: Photo by F. B. Laney
Cornmill and Blacksmith Forge]
They tell a story on a whilom neighbor of mine, the redoubtable Quill
Rose, which, to those who know him, sounds like one of his own: "A
slick-faced dude from Knoxville," said Quill, "told me once that all
good red-liquor was aged, and that if I'd age my blockade it would bring
a fancy price. Well, sir, I tried it; I kept some for three months--and,
by godlings, _it aint so_."
As for purity, all of the moonshine whiskey used to be pure, and much of
it still is; but every blockader knows how to adulterate, and when one
of them does stoop to such tricks he will stop at no halfway measures.
Some add washing lye, both to increase the yield and to give the liquor
an artificial bead, then prime this abominable fluid with pepper,
ginger, tobacco, or anything else that will make it sting. Even
buckeyes, which are poisonous themselves, are sometimes used to give the
drink a soapy bead. Such decoctions are known in the mountains by the
expressive terms "pop-skull," "bust head," "bumblings" ("they make a
bumbly noise in a feller's head"). Some of them are so toxic that their
continued use might be fatal to the drinker. A few drams may turn a
normally good-hearted fellow into a raging fiend who will shoot or stab
without provocation.
As a rule, the mountain people have no compunctions about drinking,
their ideas on this, as on other matters of conduct, being those current
everywhere in the eighteenth century. Men, women and children drink
whiskey in family concert. I have seen undiluted spirits drunk, a
spoonful at a time, by a babe that was still at the breast, and she
never batted an eye (when I protested that raw whiskey would ruin the
infant's stomach, the mother replied, with widened eyes: "Why, if
there's liquor about, and she don't git none, _she jist raars_!"). In
spite of this, taking the mountain people by and large, they are an
abstemious race. In drinking, as in everything else, this is the Land of
Do Without. Comparatively few highlanders see liquor oftener than once
or twice a month. The lumberjacks and townspeople get most of the
output; for they can pay the price.
Blockade whiskey, until recently, sold to the consumer at from $2.50 to
$3.00 a gallon. The average yield is only two gallons to the bushel of
corn. Two and a half gallons is all that can be got out of a bushel by
blockaders' methods, even with the aid of a "thumpin'-chist," unless
lye be added. With corn selling at seventy-five cents to a dollar a
bushel, as it did in our settlement, and taking into account that the
average sales of a little moonshiner's still probably did not exceed a
gallon a day, and that a bootlegger must be rewarded liberally for
marketing the stuff, it will be seen that there was no fortune in this
mysterious trade, before prohibition raised the price. Let me give you a
picture in a few words.--
Here in the laurel-thicketed forest, miles from any wagon road, is a
little still, without so much as a roof over it. Hard by is a little
mill. There is not a sawed board in that mill--even the hopper is made
of clapboards riven on the spot.
Three or four men, haggard from sleepless vigils, strike out into
pathless forest through driving rain. Within five minutes the wet
underbrush has drenched them to the skin. They climb, climb, climb.
There is no trail for a long way; then they reach a faint one that
winds, winds, climbs, climbs. Hour after hour the men climb. Then they
begin to descend.
They have crossed the divide, a mile above sea-level, and are in another
State. Hour after hour they "climb down," as they would say. They visit
farmers' homes at dead of night. Each man shoulders two bushels of
shelled corn and starts back again over the highest mountain range in
eastern America. It is twenty miles to the little mill. They carry the
corn thither on their own backs. They sprout it, grind it, distill it.
Two of them then carry the whiskey twenty miles in the opposite
direction, and, at the risk of capture and imprisonment, or of death if
they resist, peddle it out by dodging, secret methods.
This is no fancy sketch; it is literal truth. It is no story of the
olden time, but of our own day. Do you wonder that one of these men
should say, with a sigh--should say this? "Blockadin' is the hardest
work a man ever done. And hit's wearin' on a feller's narves. Fust
chance I git, I'm a-goin' ter quit!"
And it is a fact that nine out of ten of those who try the moonshining
game do quit before long, of their own accord.
* * * * *
One day there came a ripple of excitement in our settlement. A blockader
had shot at Jack Coburn, and a posse had arrested the would-be
assassin--so flew the rumor, and it proved to be true.
Coburn was a northern man who, years ago, opened a little store on the
edge of the wilderness, bought timber land, and finally rose to
affluence. With ready wit he adapted himself to the ways of the
mountaineers and gained ascendancy among them. Once in a while an
emergency would arise in which it was necessary either to fight or to
back down, and in these contests a certain art that Jack had acquired in
Michigan lumber camps proved the undoing of more than one mountain
tough, at the same time winning the respect of the spectators. He was
what a mountaineer described to me as "a practiced knocker." This
phrase, far from meaning what it would on the Bowery, was interpreted to
me as denoting "a master hand in a knock-fight." Pugilism, as
distinguished from shooting or stabbing, was an unknown art in the
mountains until Jack introduced it.
Coburn had several tenants, among whom was a character whom we will call
Edwards. In leasing a farm to Edwards, Jack had expressly stipulated
that there was to be no moonshining on the premises. But, by and by,
there was reason to suspect that Edwards was violating this part of the
contract. Coburn did not send for a revenue officer; he merely set forth
on a little still-hunt of his own. Before starting, he picked up a
revolver and was about to stick it in his pocket, but, on second
thought, he concluded that no red-headed man should be trusted with a
loaded gun, even in such a case as this; so he thrust the weapon back
into its drawer, and strode away, with nothing but his two big fists to
enforce a seizure.
Coburn searched long and diligently, but could find no sign of a still.
Finally, when he was about to give it up, his curiosity was aroused by
the particularly dense browse in the top of an enormous hemlock that had
recently been felled. Pushing his way forward, he discovered a neat
little copper still installed in the treetop itself. He picked up the
contraband utensil, and marched away with it.
Meantime, Edwards had not been asleep. When Jack came in sight of the
farmhouse, humped under his bulky burden, the enraged moonshiner seized
a shotgun and ran toward him, breathing death and destruction. Jack,
however, trudged along about his business. Edwards, seeing that no bluff
would work, fired; but the range was too great for his birdshot even to
pepper holes through the copper still.
Edwards made a mistake in firing that shot. It did not hurt Coburn's
skin, but it ruffled his dignity. In this case it was out of the
question to pommel the blackguard, for he had swiftly reloaded his gun.
So Jack ran off with the still, carried it home, sought out our
magistrate, Brooks, and forthwith swore out a warrant.
Brooks did not fuss over any law books. Moonshining in itself may be
only a peccadillo, a venial sin--let the Government skin its own
skunks--but when a man has promised not to moonshine, and then goes and
does it, why that, by Jeremy, is a breach of contract! Straightway the
magistrate hastened to the post-office, and swore in, as a posse
comitatus, the first four men that he met.
Now, when four men are picked up at random in our township, it is safe
to assume that at least three of them have been moonshiners themselves,
and know how this sort of thing should be done. At any rate, the posse
wasted no time in discussion. They went straight after that malefactor,
got him, and, within an hour after the shot was fired, he was drummed
out of the county for good and forever.
But Edwards had a son who was a trifle brash. This son armed himself,
and offered show of battle. He fired two or three shots with his
Winchester (wisely over the posse's heads) and then took to the tall
timber. Dodging from tree to tree he led the impromptu officers such a
dance up the mountainside that by the time they had corralled him they
were "plumb overhet."
They set that impetuous young man on a sharp-spined little jackass,
strapped his feet under the animal's belly, and their chief (my hunting
partner, he was) drove him, that same night, twenty-five miles over a
horrible mountain trail, and lodged him in the county jail, on a charge
more serious than that of moonshining.
In due time, a United States deputy arrived in our midst, bearing a
funny-looking hatchet with a pick at one end, which he called a "devil."
With the pick end of this instrument he punched numerous holes through
the offending copper vessel, until the still looked somewhat like a
gigantic horseradish-grater turned inside out. Then he straightened out
the worm by ramming a long stick through it, and triumphantly carried
away with him the copper-sheathed staff, as legal proof, trophy, and
burgeon of office.
The sorry old still itself reposes to this day in old Brooks's backyard,
where it is regarded by passersby as an emblem, not so much of Federal
omnipotence, as of local efficiency in administering the law with
promptitude, and without a pennyworth of cost to anybody, save to the
offender.
CHAPTER VII
A LEAF FROM THE PAST
In the United States, moonshining is seldom practiced outside the
mountains and foothills of the southern Appalachians, and those parts of
the southwest (namely, in southern Missouri, Arkansas and Texas), into
which the mountaineers have immigrated in considerable numbers.
Here, then, is a conundrum: How does it happen that moonshining is
distinctly a foible of the southern mountaineer?
To get to the truth, we must hark back into that eighteenth century
wherein, as I have already remarked, our mountain people are lingering
to this day. We must leave the South; going, first, to Ireland of 150 or
175 years ago, and then to western Pennsylvania shortly after the
Revolution.
The people of Great Britain, irrespective of race, have always been
ardent haters of excise laws. As Blackstone has curtly said, "From its
original to the present time, the very name of excise has been odious
to the people of England." Dr. Johnson, in his dictionary, defined
excise as "A hateful tax levied upon commodities, and adjudged not by
the common judges of property, but by wretches hired by those to whom
excise is paid." In 1659, when the town of Edinburgh placed an
additional impost on ale, the Convenanter Nicoll proclaimed it an act so
impious that immediately "God frae the heavens declared his anger by
sending thunder and unheard tempests and storms." And we still recall
Burns' fiery invective:
Thae curst horse-leeches o' the Excise
Wha mak the whisky stills their prize!
Haud up thy han', Deil! ance, twice, thrice!
There, seize the blinkers! [wretches]
An bake them up in brunstane pies
For poor d--n'd drinkers.
Perhaps the chief reason, in England, for this outspoken detestation of
the exciseman lay in the fact that the law empowered him to enter
private houses and to search at his own discretion. In Scotland and
Ireland there was another objection, even more valid in the eyes of the
common people; excise struck heaviest at their national drink.
Englishmen, at the time of which we are speaking, were content with
their ale, not yet having contracted the habit of drinking gin; but
Scotchmen and Irishmen preferred distilled spirits, manufactured, as a
rule, out of their own barley, in small pot-stills (_poteen_ means,
literally, a little pot), the process being a common household art
frequently practiced "every man for himself and his neighbor." A tax,
then, upon whiskey was as odious as a tax upon bread baked on the
domestic hearth--if not, indeed, more so.
Now, there came a time when the taxes laid upon spirituous liquors had
increased almost to the point of prohibition. This was done, not so much
for the sake of revenue, as for the sake of the public health and
morals. Englishmen had suddenly taken to drinking gin, and the immediate
effect was similar to that of introducing firewater among a race of
savages. There was hue and cry (apparently with good reason), that the
gin habit, spreading like a plague, among a people unused to strong
liquors, would soon exterminate the English race. Parliament, alarmed at
the outlook, then passed an excise law of extreme severity. As always
happens in such cases, the law promptly defeated its own purpose by
breeding a spirit of defiance and resistance among the great body of the
people.
The heavier the tax, the more widespread became the custom of illicit
distilling. The law was evaded in two different ways, the method
depending somewhat upon the relative loyalty of the people toward the
Crown, and somewhat upon the character of the country, as to whether it
was thickly or thinly settled.
In rich and populous districts, as around London and Edinburgh and
Dublin, the common practice was to bribe government officials. A
historian of that time declares that "Not infrequently the gauger could
have laid his hands upon a dozen stills within as many hours; but he had
cogent reasons for avoiding discoveries unless absolutely forced to make
them. Where informations were laid, it was by no means uncommon for a
trusty messenger to be dispatched from the residence of the gauger to
give due notice, so that by daybreak next morning 'the boys,' with all
their utensils, might disappear. Now and then they were required to
leave an old and worn-out still in place of that which they were to
remove, so that a report of actual seizure might be made. A good
understanding was thus often kept up between the gaugers and the
distillers; the former not infrequently received a 'duty' upon every
still within his jurisdiction, and his cellars were never without 'a sup
of the best.'... The commerce was carried on to a very great extent,
and openly. Poteen was usually preferred, even by the gentry, to
'Parliament' or 'King's' whiskey. It was known to be free from
adulteration, and had a smoky flavor (arising from the peat fires) which
many liked." Another writer says that "The amount of spirits produced by
distillation avowedly illicit vastly exceeded that produced by the
licensed distilleries. According to Wakefield, stills were erected even
in the kitchens of baronets and in the stables of clergymen."
However, this sort of thing was not moonshining. It was only the
beginning of that system of wholesale collusion which, in later times,
was perfected in our own country by the "Whiskey Ring."
Moonshining proper was confined to the poorer class of people,
especially in Ireland, who lived in wild and sparsely settled regions,
who were governed by a clan feeling stronger than their loyalty to the
central Government, and who either could not afford to share their
profits with the gaugers, or disdained to do so. Such people hid their
little pot-stills in inaccessible places, as in the savage mountains and
glens of Connemara, where it was impossible, or at least hazardous, for
the law to reach them. With arms in hand they defied the officers. "The
hatred of the people toward the gauger was for a very long period
intense. The very name invariably aroused the worst passions. To kill a
gauger was considered anything but a crime; wherever it could be done
with comparative safety, he was hunted to the death."
Thus we see that the townsman's weapon against the government was graft,
and the mountaineer's weapon was his gun--a hundred and fifty years ago,
in Ireland, as they are in America to-day. Whether racial character had
much to do with this is a debatable question. But, having spoken of
race, a new factor, and a curious one, steps into our story. Let it be
noted closely, for it bears directly on a problem that has puzzled many
of our own people, namely: What was the origin of our southern
mountaineers?
The north of Ireland, at the time of which we have been speaking, was
not settled by Irishmen, but by Scotchmen, who had been imported by
James I. to take the place of native Hibernians whom he had dispossessed
from the three northern counties. These immigrants came to be known as
the Scotch-Irish. They learned how to make poteen in little stills,
after the Irish fashion, and to defend their stills from intrusive
foreigners, also after the Irish fashion. By and by these Scotch-Irish
fell out with the British Government, and large bodies of them emigrated
to America, settling, for the most part, in western Pennsylvania.
They were a fighting race. Accustomed to plenty of hard knocks at home,
they took to the rough fare and Indian wars of our border as naturally
as ducks take to water. They brought with them, too, an undying hatred
of excise laws, and a spirit of unhesitating resistance to any authority
that sought to enforce such laws.
It was these Scotchmen, in the main, assisted by a good sprinkling of
native Irish, and by the wilder blades among the Pennsylvania-Dutch, who
drove out the Indians from the Alleghany border, formed our rear-guard
in the Revolution, won that rough mountain region for civilization, left
it when the game became scarce and neighbors' houses too frequent,
followed the mountains southward, settled western Virginia and Carolina,
and formed the vanguard westward into Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, and
so onward till there was no longer a West to conquer. Some of their
descendants remained behind in the fastnesses of the Alleghanies, the
Blue Ridge, and the Unakas, and became, in turn, the progenitors of that
singular race which, by an absurd pleonasm, is now commonly known as
the "mountain whites," but properly southern highlanders.
The first generation of Pennsylvania frontiersmen knew no laws but those
of their own making. They were too far away, too scattered, and too
poor, for the Crown to bother with them. Then came the Revolution. The
backwoodsmen were loyal to the new American Government--loyal to a man.
They not only fought off the Indians from the rear, but sent many of
their incomparable riflemen to fight at the front as well.
They were the first English-speaking people to use weapons of precision
(the rifle, introduced by the Pennsylvania-Dutch about 1700, was used by
our backwoodsmen exclusively throughout the war). They were the first to
employ open-order formation in civilized warfare. They were the first
outside colonists to assist their New England brethren at the siege of
Boston. They were mustered in as the First Regiment of Foot of the
Continental Army (being the first troops enrolled by our Congress, and
the first to serve under a Federal banner). They carried the day at
Saratoga, the Cowpens, and King's Mountain. From the beginning to the
end of the war, they were Washington's favorite troops.
[Illustration: A Tub Mill]
And yet these same men were the first rebels against the authority of
the United States Government! And it was their old commander-in-chief,
Washington himself, who had the ungrateful task of bringing them to
order by a show of Federal bayonets.
It happened in this wise:
Up to the year 1791 there had been no excise tax in the United Colonies
or the United States. (One that had been tried in Pennsylvania was
utterly abortive). Then the country fell upon hard times. A larger
revenue had to be raised, and Hamilton suggested an excise. The measure
was bitterly opposed by many public men, notably by Jefferson; but it
passed. Immediately there was trouble in the tall timber.
Western Pennsylvania, and the mountains southward, had been settled, as
we have seen, by the Scotch-Irish; men who had brought with them a
certain fondness for whiskey, a certain knack in making it, and an
intense hatred of excise, on general as well as special principles.
There were few roads across the mountains, and these few were
execrable--so bad, indeed, that it was impossible for the backwoodsmen
to bring their corn and rye to market, except in a concentrated form.
The farmers of the seaboard had grown rich, from the high prices that
prevailed during the French Revolution; but the mountain farmers had
remained poor, owing partly to difficulties of tillage, but chiefly to
difficulties of transportation. As Albert Gallatin said, in defending
the western people, "We have no means of bringing the produce of our
lands to sale either in grain or in meal. We are therefore distillers
through necessity, not choice, that we may comprehend the greatest value
in the smallest size and weight. The inhabitants of the eastern side of
the mountains can dispose of their grain without the additional labor of
distillation at a higher price than we can after we have disposed that
labor upon it."
Again, as in all frontier communities, there was a scarcity of cash in
the mountains. Commerce was carried on by barter; but there had to be
some means of raising enough cash to pay taxes, and to purchase such
necessities as sugar, calico, gun powder, etc., from the peddlers who
brought them by pack train across the Alleghanies. Consequently a still
had been set up on nearly every farm. A horse could carry about sixteen
gallons of liquor, which represented eight bushels of grain, in weight
and bulk, and double that amount in value. This whiskey, even after it
had been transported across the mountains, could undersell even so
cheap a beverage as New England rum--so long as no tax was laid upon it.
But when the newly created Congress passed an excise law, it virtually
placed a heavy tax on the poor mountaineers' grain, and let the grain of
the wealthy eastern farmers pass on to market without a cent of charge.
Naturally enough, the excitable people of the border regarded such a law
as aimed exclusively at themselves. They remonstrated, petitioned,
stormed. "From the passing of the law in January, 1791, there appeared a
marked dissatisfaction in the western parts of Pennsylvania, Maryland,
Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia. The legislatures of North
Carolina, Virginia and Maryland passed resolutions against the law, and
that of Pennsylvania manifested a strong spirit of opposition to it. As
early as 1791, Washington was informed that throughout this whole region
the people were ready for revolt." "To tax their stills seemed a blow at
the only thing which obdurate nature had given them--a lot hard indeed,
in comparison with that of the people of the sea-board."
Our western mountains (we call most of them southern mountains now)
resembled somewhat those wild highlands of Connemara to which reference
has been made--only they were far wilder, far less populous, and
inhabited by a people still prouder, more independent, more used to
being a law unto themselves than were their ancestors in old Hibernia.
When the Federal exciseman came among this border people and sought to
levy tribute, they blackened or otherwise disguised themselves and
treated him to a coat of tar and feathers, at the same time threatening
to burn his house. He resigned. Indignation meetings were held,
resolutions were passed calling on all good citizens to _disobey_ the
law, and whenever anyone ventured to express a contrary opinion, or
rented a house to a collector, he, too, was tarred and feathered. If a
prudent or ultra-conscientious individual took out a license and sought
to observe the law, he was visited by a gang of "Whiskey Boys" who
smashed the still and inflicted corporal punishment upon its owner.
Finally, warrants were issued against the lawbreakers. The attempt to
serve these writs produced an uprising. On July 16, 1794, a company of
mountain militia marched to the house of the inspector, General Neville,
to force him to give up his commission. Neville fired upon them, and, in
the skirmish that ensued, five of the attacking force were wounded and
one was killed. The next day, a regiment of 500 mountaineers, led by
one "Tom the Tinker," burned Neville's house, and forced him to flee for
his life. His guard of eleven U. S. soldiers surrendered, after losing
one killed and several wounded.
A call was then issued for a meeting of the mountain militia at the
historic Braddock's Field. On Aug. 1, a large body assembled, of whom
2,000 were armed. They marched on Pittsburgh, then a village of 1,200
souls. The townsmen, eager to conciliate and to ward off pillage,
appointed a committee to meet the mob half way. The committee, finding
that it could not induce the mountain men to go home, made a virtue of
necessity by escorting 5,400 of them into Pittsburgh town. As Fisher
says, "The town was warned by messengers, and every preparation was
made, not for defense, but to extinguish the fire of the Whiskey Boys'
thirst, which would prevent the necessity of having to extinguish the
fire they might apply to houses.... Then the work began. Every citizen
worked like a slave to carry provisions and buckets of whiskey to that
camp." Judge Brackenridge tells us that it was an expensive as well as
laborious day, and cost him personally four barrels of prime old
whiskey. The day ended in a bloodless, but probably uproarious,
jollification.
On this same day (the Governor of Pennsylvania having declined to
interfere) Washington issued a proclamation against the rioters, and
called for 15,000 militia to quell the insurrection. Meantime he had
appointed commissioners to go into the disaffected region and try to
persuade the people to submit peacefully before the troops should
arrive. Peace was offered on condition that the leaders of the
disturbance should submit to arrest.
While negotiations were proceeding, the army advanced. Eighteen
ringleaders of the mob were arrested, and the "insurrection" faded away
like smoke. When the troops arrived, there was nothing for them to do.
The insurgent leaders were tried for treason, and two of them were
convicted, but Washington pardoned both of them. The cost of this
expedition was more than one-third of the total expenditures of the
Government, for that year, for all other purposes. The moral effect upon
the nation at large was wholesome, for the Federal Government had
demonstrated, on this its first test, that it could enforce its own laws
and maintain domestic tranquility. The result upon the mountain people
themselves was dubious. Thomas Jefferson wrote to Madison in December:
"The information of our [Virginia's] militia, returned from the
westward, is uniform, that though the people there let them pass
quietly, they were objects of their laughter, not of their fear; that
one thousand men could have cut off their whole force in a thousand
places of the Alleghany; that their detestation of the excise law was
universal, and has now associated with it a detestation of the
Government; and that a separation which was perhaps a very distant and
problematical event, is now near and certain, and determined in the mind
of every man."
But Jefferson himself came to the presidency within six years, and the
excise tax was promptly repealed, never again to be instituted, save as
a war measure, until within a time so recent that it is now remembered
by men whom we would not call very old.
The moonshiners of our own day know nothing of the story that has here
been written. Only once, within my knowledge, has it been told in the
mountains, and then the result was so unexpected, that I append the
incident as a color contrast to this rather sombre narrative.--
I was calling on a white-bearded patriarch who was a trifle vain of his
historical learning. He could not read, but one of his daughters read
to him, and he had learned by heart nearly all that lay between the two
lids of a "Universal History" such as book agents peddle about. Like one
of John Fox's characters, he was fond of the expression "hist'ry says"
so-and-so, and he considered it a clincher in all matters of debate.
Our conversation drifted to the topic of moonshining.
"Down to the time of the Civil War," declared the old settler, "nobody
paid tax on the whiskey he made. Hit was thataway in my Pa's time, and
in Gran'sir's, too. And so 'way back to the time of George Washington.
Now, hist'ry says that Washington was the Father of his Country; and I
reckon he was the _greatest_ man that ever lived--don't you?"
I murmured a complaisant assent.
"Waal, sir, if 't was right to make free whiskey in Washington's day,
hit's right _now_!" and the old man brought his fist down on the table.
"But that is where you make a mistake," I replied. "Washington did
enforce a whiskey tax." Then I told about the Whiskey Insurrection of
1794.
This was news to Grandpa. He listened with deep attention, his brows
lowering as the narrative proceeded. When it was finished he offered
no comment, but brooded to himself in silence. My own thoughts wandered
far afield, until recalled to the topic by a blunt demand:
[Illustration: Cabin on the Little Fork of Sugar Fork of Hazel Creek in
which the author lived alone for three years]
"You say Washington done that?"
"He did."
"George Washington?"
"Yes, sir: the Father of his Country."
"Waal, I'm satisfied now that Washington was a leetle-grain cracked."
* * * * *
The law of 1791, although it imposed a tax on whiskey of only 9 to 11
cents per proof gallon, came near bringing on a civil war, which was
only averted by the leniency of the Federal Government in granting
wholesale amnesty. The most stubborn malcontents in the mountains moved
southward along the Alleghanies into western Virginia and the Carolinas,
where no serious attempt was made to collect the excise; so they could
practice moonshining to their heart's content, and there their
descendants remain to-day.
On the accession of Jefferson, in 1800, the tax on spirits was repealed.
The war of 1812 compelled the Government to tax whiskey again, but as
this was a war tax, shared by commodities generally, it aroused no
opposition. In 1817 the excise was again repealed; and from that time
until 1862 no specific tax was levied on liquors. During this period of
thirty-five years the average market price of whiskey was 24 cents a
gallon, sometimes dropping as low as 14 cents. Spirits were so cheap
that a "burning fluid," consisting of one part spirits of turpentine to
four or five parts alcohol was used in the lamps of nearly every
household. Moonshining, of course, had ceased to exist.
Then came the Civil War. In 1862 a tax of 20 cents a gallon was levied.
Early in 1864 it rose to 60 cents. This cut off the industrial use of
spirits, but did not affect its use as a beverage. In the latter part of
1864 the tax leaped to $1.50 a gallon, and the next year it reached the
prohibitive figure of $2. The result of such excessive taxation was just
what it had been in the old times, in Great Britain. In and around the
centers of population there was wholesale fraud and collusion. "Efforts
made to repress and punish frauds were of absolutely no account
whatever.... The current price at which distilled spirits were sold in
the markets was everywhere recognized and commented on by the press as
less than the amount of the tax, allowing nothing whatever for the cost
of manufacture."
Seeing that the outcome was disastrous from a fiscal point of view--the
revenue from this source was falling to the vanishing point--Congress,
in 1868, cut down the tax to 50 cents a gallon. "Illicit distillation
practically ceased the very hour that the new law came into operation;
... the Government collected during the second year of the continuance
of the act $3 for every one that was obtained during the last year of
the $2 rate."
In 1869 there came a new administration, with frequent removals of
revenue officials for political purposes. The revenue fell off. In 1872
the rate was raised to 70 cents, and in 1875 to 90 cents. The result is
thus summarized by David A. Wells:
"Investigation carefully conducted showed that on the average the
product of illicit distillation costs, through deficient yields, the
necessary bribery of attendants, and the expenses of secret and unusual
methods of transportation, from two to three times as much as the
product of legitimate and legal distillation. So that, calling the
average cost of spirits in the United States 20 cents per gallon, the
product of the illicit distiller would cost 40 to 60 cents, leaving but
10 cents per gallon as the maximum profit to be realized from fraud
under the most favorable conditions--an amount not sufficient to offset
the possibility of severe penalties of fine, imprisonment, and
confiscation of property.... The rate of 70 cents ... constituted a
moderate temptation to fraud. Its increase to 90 cents constituted a
temptation altogether too great for human nature, as employed in
manufacturing and selling whiskey, to resist.... During 1875-6,
highwines sold openly in the Chicago and Cincinnati markets at prices
less than the average cost of production plus the Government tax.
Investigations showed that the persons mainly concerned in the work of
fraud were the Government officials rather than the distillers; and that
a so-called 'Whiskey Ring' ... extended to Washington, and embraced
within its sphere of influence and participation, not merely local
supervisors, collectors, inspectors, and storekeepers of the revenue,
but even officers of the Internal Revenue Bureau, and probably, also,
persons occupying confidential relations with the Executive of the
Nation."
* * * * *
Such being the condition of affairs in the centers of civilization in
the latter part of the nineteenth century, let us now turn to the
mountains, and see how matters stood among those primitive people who
were still tarrying in the eighteenth. Their situation at that time is
thus briefly sketched by a southern historian[7]:
"Before the war these simple folks made their apples and peaches into
brandy, and their corn into whiskey, and these products, with a few
cattle, some dried fruits, honey, beeswax, nuts, wool, hides, fur,
herbs, ginseng and other roots, and woolen socks knitted by the women in
their long winter evenings, formed the stock in trade which they
bartered for their plain necessaries and few luxuries, their homespun
and cotton cloths, sugar, coffee, snuff, and fiddles.... The raising of
a crop of corn in summer, and the getting out of tan-bark and lumber in
winter, were almost their only resources.... The burden of taxation
rested lightly on them. For near two generations no excise duties had
been levied.... The war came on. They were mostly loyal to the Union.
They paid the first moderate tax without a murmur.
"They were willing to pay any tax that they were able to pay. But
suddenly the tax jumped to $1.50, and then to $2, a gallon. The people
were goaded to open rebellion. Their corn at that time brought only from
25 to 40 cents a bushel; apples and peaches, rarely more than 10 cents
at the stills. These were the only crops that could be grown in their
deep and narrow valleys. Transportation was so difficult, and markets so
remote, that there was no way to utilize the surplus except to distill
it. Their stills were too small to bear the cost of government
supervision. The superior officers of the Revenue Department
(collectors, marshals, and district-attorneys or commissioners) were
paid only by commissions on collections and by fees. Their subordinate
agents, whose income depended upon the number of stills they cut up and
upon the arrests made, were, as a class, brutal and desperate
characters. Guerrilla warfare was the natural sequence."
CHAPTER VIII
"BLOCKADERS" AND "THE REVENUE"
Little or no attention seems to have been paid to the moonshining that
was going on in the mountains until about 1876, owing, no doubt, to the
larger game in registered distilleries. In his report for 1876-7, the
new Commissioner of Internal Revenue called attention to the illicit
manufacture of whiskey in the mountain counties of the South, and urged
vigorous measures for its immediate suppression.
"The extent of these frauds," said he, "would startle belief. I can
safely say that during the past year not less than 3,000 illicit stills
have been operated in the districts named. Those stills are of a
producing capacity of 10 to 50 gallons a day. They are usually located
at inaccessible points in the mountains, away from the ordinary lines of
travel, and are generally owned by unlettered men of desperate
character, armed and ready to resist the officers of the law. Where
occasion requires, they come together in companies of from ten to fifty
persons, gun in hand, to drive the officers out of the country. They
resist as long as resistance is possible, and when their stills are
seized, and they themselves are arrested, they plead ignorance and
poverty, and at once crave the pardon of the Government.
"These frauds had become so open and notorious ... that I became
satisfied extraordinary measures would be required to break them up.
Collectors were ... each authorized to employ from five to ten
additional deputies.... Experienced revenue agents of perseverance and
courage were assigned to duty to co-operate with the collectors. United
States marshals were called upon to co-operate with the collectors and
to arrest all persons known to have violated the laws, and
district-attorneys were enjoined to prosecute all offenders.
"In certain portions of the country many citizens not guilty of
violating the law themselves were in strong sympathy with those who did
violate, and the officers in many instances found themselves unsupported
in the execution of the laws by a healthy state of public opinion. The
distillers--ever ready to forcibly resist the officers--were, I have no
doubt, at times treated with harshness. This occasioned much
indignation on the part of those who sympathized with the
lawbreakers...."
The Commissioner recommended, in his report, the passage of a law
"expressly providing that where a person is caught in the act of
operating an illicit still, he may be arrested without warrant." In
conclusion, he said: "At this time not only is the United States
defrauded of its revenues, and its officers openly resisted, but when
arrests are made it often occurs that prisoners are rescued by mob
violence, and officers and witnesses are often at night dragged from
their homes and cruelly beaten, or waylaid and assassinated."
* * * * *
One day I asked a mountain man, "How about the revenue officers? What
sort of men are they?"
"Torn down scoundrels, every one."
"Oh, come, now!"
"Yes, they are; plumb onery--lock, stock, barrel and gun-stick."
"Consider what they have to go through," I remarked. "Like other
detectives, they cannot secure evidence without practicing deception.
Their occupation is hard and dangerous. Here in the mountains, every
man's hand is against them."
"Why is it agin them? We ain't all blockaders; yet you can search these
mountains through with a fine-tooth comb and you wunt find ary critter
as has a good word to say for the revenue. The reason is 't we know them
men from 'way back; we know whut they uster do afore they jined the
sarvice, and why they did it. Most of them were blockaders their own
selves, till they saw how they could make more money turncoatin'. They
use their authority to abuse people who ain't never done nothin' nohow.
Dangerous business? Shucks! There's Jim Cody, for a sample [I suppress
the real name]; he was principally raised in this county, and I've
knowed him from a boy. He's been eight years in the Government sarvice,
and hain't never been shot at once. But he's killed a blockader--oh,
yes! He arrested Tom Hayward, a chunk of a boy, that was scared most
fitified and never resisted more'n a mouse. Cody, who was half drunk
his-self, handcuffed Tom, quarreled with him, and shot the boy dead
while the handcuffs was on him! Tom's relations sued Cody in the County
Court, but he carried the case to the Federal Court, and they were too
poor to follow it up. I tell you, though, thar's a settlement less 'n a
thousand mile from the river whar Jim Cody ain't never showed his nose
sence. He knows there'd be another revenue 'murdered.'"
"It must be ticklish business for an officer to prowl about the
headwaters of these mountain streams, looking for 'sign.'"
"Hell's banjer! they don't go prodjectin' around looking for stills.
They set at home on their hunkers till some feller comes and informs."
"What class of people does the informing?"
"Oh, sometimes hit's some pizen old bum who's been refused credit.
Sometimes hit's the wife or mother of some feller who's drinkin' too
much. Then, agin, hit may be some rival blockader who aims to cut off
the other feller's trade, and, same time, divert suspicion from his own
self. But ginerally hit's jest somebody who has a gredge agin the
blockader fer family reasons, or business reasons, and turns informer to
git even."
It is only fair to present this side of the case, because there is much
truth in it, and because it goes far to explain the bitter feeling
against revenue agents personally that is almost universal in the
mountains, and is shared even by the mountain preachers. It should be
understood, too, in this connection, that the southern highlander has a
long memory. Slights and injuries suffered by one generation have their
scars transmitted to sons and grandsons. There is no denying that there
have been officers in the revenue service who, stung by the contempt in
which they were held as renegades from their own people, have used their
authority in settling private scores, and have inflicted grievous wrongs
upon innocent people. This is matter of official record. In his report
for 1882, the Commissioner of Internal Revenue himself declared that
"Instances have been brought to my attention where numerous prosecutions
have been instituted for the most trivial violations of law, and the
arrested parties taken long distances and subjected to great
inconveniences and expense, not in the interest of the Government, but
apparently for no other reason than to make costs."
An ex-United States Commissioner told me that, in the darkest days of
this struggle, when he himself was obliged to buckle on a revolver every
time he put his head out of doors, he had more trouble with his own
deputies than with the moonshiners. "As a rule, none but desperadoes
could be hired for the service," he declared. "For example, one time my
deputy in your county wanted some liquor for himself. He and two of his
cronies crossed the line into South Carolina, raided a still, and got
beastly drunk. The blockaders bushwhacked them, riddled a mule and its
rider with buckshot, and shot my deputy through the brain with a
squirrel rifle. We went over there and buried the victims a few days
later, during a snow storm, working with our holster flaps unbuttoned. I
had all that work and worry simply because that rascal was bent on
getting drunk without paying for it. However, it cost him his life.
"They were not all like that, though," continued the Judge. "Now and
then there would turn up in the service a man who had entered it from
honorable motives, and whose conduct, at all times, was chivalric and
clean. There was Hersh Harkins, for example, now United States Collector
at Asheville. I had many cases in which Harkins figured."
"Tell me of one," I urged.
"Well, one time there was a man named Jenks [that was not the real name,
but it will serve], who was too rich to be suspected of blockading.
Jenks had a license to make brandy, but not whiskey. One day Harkins was
visiting his still-house, and he noticed something dubious. Thrusting
his arm down through the peach pomace, he found mash underneath. It is a
penitentiary offense to mix the two. Harkins procured more evidence
from Jenk's distiller, and hauled the offender before me. The trial was
conducted in a hotel room, full of people. We were not very formal in
those days--kept our hats on. There was no thought of Jenks trying to
run away, for he was well-to-do; so he was given the freedom of the
room. He paced nervously back and forth between my desk and the door,
growing more restless as the trial proceeded. A clerk sat near me,
writing a bond, and Harkins stood behind him dictating its terms.
Suddenly Jenks wheeled around, near the door, jerked out a navy
revolver, fired and bolted. It is hard to say whom he shot at, for the
bullet went through Harkins's coat, through the clerk's hat, and through
my hat, too. I ducked under the desk to get my revolver, and Harkins,
thinking that I was killed, sprang to pick me up; but I came up firing.
It was wonderful how soon that room was emptied! Harkins took after the
fugitive, and had a wild chase; but he got him."
* * * * *
It was my good fortune, a few evenings later, to have a long talk with
Mr. Harkins himself. He was a fine giant of a man, standing six feet
three, and symmetrically proportioned. No one looking into his kindly
gray eyes would suspect that they belonged to one who had seen as hard
and dangerous service in the Revenue Department as any man then living.
In an easy, unassuming way he told me many stories of his own adventures
among moonshiners and counterfeiters in the old days when these southern
Appalachians fairly swarmed with desperate characters. One grim affair
will suffice to give an impression of the man, and of the times in which
his spurs were won.
There was a man on South Mountain, South Carolina, whom,
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