mm Blue-erass and Rhododendron Melissa. Blue-grass and Rhododendron Out-dpors in Old Kentucky By John Fox, Jr. Charles Scribner's Sons New York :::::::::: I 901 THF LIBRARY OF CONGRESa Two Copies Rec^ivpo SEP, 21 #901 ^ CO(M«OHT Eirn»y SxLt ji. ;^o/ CLASS Q^XXa No. COPY A. Copyright, 1901, by Charles Scribner's Sons Published, October, 1901 Trow Directory Printing <5r* Bookbinding Company New York To JOSHUA F. BULLITT HENRY CLAY McDOWELL HORACE ETHELBERT FOX THE FIRST THREE CAPTAINS OF THE GUARD Contents Page The Southern Mountaineer i The Kentucky Mountaineer 25 Down the Kentucky on a Raft . . . . 55 After Br'er Rabbit in the Blue-grass . . 77 Through the Bad Bend loi Fox-Hunting in Kentucky 123 To the Breaks of Sandy 149 Br'er Coon in Ole Kentucky 177 Civilizing the Cumberland 207 Man-Hunting in the Pound 237 The Red Fox of the Mountains . . . 257 The Hanging of Talton Hall . . . .271 List of Illustrations Melissa Fror.tispiece Page Interior of a Log-cabin on Brownie's Creek . 8 "Gritting" Corn and Hand Corn-mill . .16 Breaking Flax near the mouth of Brownie's Creek 22 A Moonshine Still . . . . . .40 Rockhouse Post-office and Store, Letcher County 48 Ferrying at Jackson, Ky. . . . . -5^ Down goes her pursuer on top of her . . -94 The rest of us sat on the two beds . . .106 Calling ofF the Dogs . . . . -132 Listening to the Music of the Dogs . . -136 A Bit of Brush 142 They took us for the advance-guard of a circus . 158 Along roads scarce wide enough for one wagon . 162 At the Breaks 168 " Go it, Black Babe ! Go it, my White Chile ! " . 196 ix List of Illustrations The Infant of the Guard .... " Hev you ever searched for a dead man ? " Going to Circuit Court .... Hall stood as motionless as the trunk of an oak Page The Southern Mountaineer The Southern Mountaineer IT was only a little while ago that the materialists declared that humanity was the product of he- redity and environment; that history lies not near but in Nature; and that, in consequence, man must take his head from the clouds and study himself with his feet where they belong, to the earth. Since then, mountains have taken on a new importance for the part they have played in the destiny of the race, for the reason that mountains have dammed the streams of humanity, have let them settle in the valleys and spread out over plains; or have sent them on long detours around. Wlien some unusual pressure has forced a current through some mountain-pass, the hills have cut it off from the main stream and have held it so stagnant, that, to change the figure, mountains may be said to have kept the records of human history somewhat as fossils hold the history of the earth. Arcadia held primitive the primitive inhabitants of Greece, who fled to its rough hills after the Dorian 3 Blue-grass and Rhododendron invasion. The Pyrenees kept unconquered and strik- ingly unchanged the Basques — sole remnants perhaps in western Europe of the aborigines who were swept away by the tides of Aryan immigration; just as the Kocky Mountains protect the American Indian in primitive barbarism and not wholly subdued to-day, and the Cumberland range keeps the Southern moun- taineer to the backwoods civilization of the revolution. The reason is plain. The mountain dweller lives apart from the world. The present is the past when it reaches him; and though past, is yet too far in the future to have any bearing on his established order of things. There is, in consequence, no incentive what- ever for him to change. An arrest of development fol- lows; so that once imprisoned, a civilization, with its dress, speech, religion, customs, ideas, may be caught like the shapes of lower life in stone, and may tell the human story of a century as the rocks tell the story of an age. For centuries the Highlander has had plaid and kilt; the peasant of Norway and the mountaineer of the German and Austrian Alps each a habit of his own; and every Swiss canton a distinctive dress. Mountains preserve the Gaelic tongue in which the scholar may yet read the refuge of Celt from Saxon, and in turn Saxon from the Norman-French, just as they keep alive remnants like the Rhaeto-Roman, the 4 The Southern Mountaineer Basque, and a number of Caucasian dialects. The Car- pathians protected Christianity against the Moors, and in Java the Brahman faith took refuge on the sides of the Volcano Gunung Lawa, and there outlived the ban of Buddha. So, in the log-cabin of the Southern mountaineer, in his household furnishings, in his homespun, his linsey, and, occasionally, in his hunting-shirt, his coon- skin cap and moccasins, one may summon up the garb and life of the pioneer ; in his religion, his politics, his moral code, his folk-songs, and his superstitions, one may bridge the waters back to the old country, and through his speech one may even touch the remote past of Chaucer. For to-day he is a distinct remnant of Colonial times — a distinct relic of an Anglo-Saxon past. It is odd to think that he was not discovered until the outbreak of the Civil War, although he was nearly a century old then, and it is really startling to realize that when one speaks of the Southern mountaineers, he speaks of nearly three millions of people who live in eight Southern States — Virginia and Alabama and the Southern States between — and occupy a region equal in area to the combined areas of Ohio and Penn- sylvania, as big, say, as the German Empire, and richer, perhaps, in timber and mineral deposits than any other region of similar extent in the world. This region was 5 Blue-grass and Rhododendron and is an unknown land. It has been aptly called " Appalachian America," and the work of discovery is yet going on. The American mountaineer was dis- covered, I say, at the beginning of the war, when the Confederate leaders were counting on the presumption that Mason and Dixon's Line was the dividing line between the North and South, and formed, therefore, the plan of marching an army from Wheeling, in West Virginia, to some point on the lakes, and thus dissever- ing the North at one blow. The plan seemed so feasible that it is said to have materially aided the sale of Confederate bonds in England, but when Captain Gar- nett, a West Point graduate, started to carry it out, he got no farther than Harper's Ferry. When he struck the mountains, he struck enemies who shot at his men from ambush, cut down bridges before him, carried the news of his march to the Federals, and Gamett himself fell with a bullet from a mountaineer's squirrel rifle at Harper's Ferry. Then the South began to realize what a long, lean, powerful arm of the Union it was that the Southern mountaineer stretched through its very vitals ; for that arm helped hold Ken- tucky in the Union by giving preponderance to the Union sympathizers in the Blue-grass ; it kept the East Tennesseans loyal to the man ; it made West Virginia, as the phrase goes, " secede from secession "; it drew 6 The Southern Mountaineer out a horde of one hundred thousand vohmteers, when Lincoln called for troops, depleting Jackson County, Ky., for instance, of every male under sixty years of age and over fifteen, and it raised a hostile barrier between the armies of the coast and the armies of the Mississippi. The North has never realized, perhaps, wdiat it owes for its victory to this non-slaveholding Southern mountaineer. The war over, he went back to his cove and his cabin, and but for the wealth of his hills and the pen of one Southern woman, the world would have for- gotten him again. Charles Egbert Craddock put him in the outer world of fiction, and in recent years rail- roads have been linking him with the outer world of fact. Religious and educational agencies have begun work on him; he has increased in political importance, and a few months ago he went down, hea\aly armed with pistol and Winchester — a thousand strong — to assert his political rights in the State capital of Ken- tucky. It was probably one of these mountaineers who killed William Goebel, and he no doubt thought himself as much justified as any other assassin who ever slew the man he thought a tyrant. Being a Unionist, because of the Revolution, a Republican, because of the Civil War, and having his antagonism aroused against the Blue-grass people, who, he believes, 7 Blue-grass and Rhododendron are trying to rob him of his liberties, he is now the pohtical factor with which the Anti-Goebel Demo- crats — in all ways the best element in the State — have imperilled the Democratic Party in Kentucky. Sooner or later, there will be an awakening in the mountainous parts of the seven other States; already the coal and iron of these regions are making many a Southern ear listen to the plea of protection; and some day the Na- tional Democratic Party will, like the Confederacy, find a subtle and powerful foe in the Southern moun- taineer and in the riches of his hills. In the march of civilization westward, the Southern mountaineer has been left in an isolation almost beyond belief. He was shut off by mountains that have blocked and still block the commerce of a century, and there for a century he has stayed. He has had no navigable rivers, no lakes, no coasts, few wagon-roads, and often no roads at all except the beds of streams. He has lived in the cabin in which his grandfather was born, and in life, habit, and thought he has been merely his grandfather bom over again. The first gen- eration after the Revolution had no schools and no churches. Both are rare and primitive to-day. To this day, few Southern mountaineers can read and write and cipher; few, indeed, can do more. They saw little of the newspapers, and were changeless in politics as 8 The Southern Mountaineer in everything else. They cared little for what was going on in the outside world, and indeed they heard nothing that did not shake the nation. To the average mountaineer, the earth was still llat and had four corners. It was the sun that girdled the earth, just as it did when Joshua told it to stand still, and pre- cisely for that reason. The stories of votes yet being cast for Andrew Jackson are but little exagger- ated. An old Tennessee mountaineer once told me about the discovery of America by Columbus, He could read his Bible, with marvellous interpretations of the same. He was the patriarch of his district, the philosopher. He had acquired the habit of delivering the facts of modern progress to his fellows, and it never occurred to him that a man of my youth might be acquainted with that rather well-known bit of history. I listened gravely, and he went on, by and by, to speak of the Mexican War as we would speak of the fighting in China; and when we got down to so recent and burning an issue as the late civil struggle, he dropped his voice to a whisper and hitched his chair across the fireplace and close to mine. " Some folks had other idees," he said, " but hit's my pussonal opinion that niggahs was the cause o' the war.'^ When I left his cabin, he followed me out to the fence, 9 Blue-grass and Rhododendron " Stranger," he said, " I'd nither you woiildn' say nothin' about whut I been tellin' ye." He had been a lone rebel in sympathy, and he feared violence at this late day for expressing his opinion too freely. This old man was a " citizen "; I was a " furriner " from the " settlements " — that is, the Blue-grass. Colum- bus was one of the " outlandish," a term that carried not only his idea of the parts hailed from but his personal opinion of Columbus. Living thus, his in- terest centred in himself, his family, his distant neighbor, his grist-mill, his country store, his county town; unaffected by other human influences; having no incentive to change, no wish for it, and remaining therefore unchanged, except where civilization during the last decade has pressed in upon him, the Southern mountaineer is thus practically the pioneer of the Revo- lution, the living ancestor of the Modern West. The national weapons of the pioneer — the axe and the rifle — are the Southern mountaineer's weapons to- day. He has still the same fight with Nature. His cabin was, and is yet, in many places, the cabin of the backwoodsman — of one room usually — sometimes two, connected by a covered porch, and built of unhewn logs, with a puncheon floor, clapboards for shingles, and wooden pin and auger-holes for nails. The crev- ices between the logs were filled with mud and stones lo The Southern Mountaineer when filled at all, and there were holes in the roof for the wind and the rain. Sometimes there was a window with a batten wooden shntter, sometimes no window at all. Over the door, across a pair of bnck antlers, lay the long, heavy, home-made rifle of the back- woodsman, sometimes even with a flint lock. One can yet find a crane swinging in a big stone fireplace, the spinning-wheel and the loom in actual nse; some- times the hominy block that the pioneers borrowed from the Indians, and a hand-mill for gTinding corn like the one, perhaps, from wdiicli one woman was taken and another left in biblical days. Until a decade and a half ago they had little money, and the medium of exchange was barter. They drink metheglin still, as well as moonshine. They marry early, and only last summer I saw a fifteen-year-old girl riding behind her father, to a log church, to be married. After the service her pillion was shifted to her young husband's horse, as was the pioneer custom, and she rode away behind him to her new home. There are still log- rollings, house-raisings, house-warmings, corn-shuck- ings, and quiltings. Sports are still the same — as they have been for a hundred years — wrestling, racing, jumping, and lifting barrels. Brutally savage fights are still common in which the combatants strike, kick, bite, and gouge until one is ready to cry " enough." II Blue-grass and Rhododendron Even the backwoods bully, loud, coarse, profane, bantering — a dandy who wore long hair and em- broidered his hunting-shirt with porcupine-quills — is not quite dead. I saw one not long since, but he wore store clothes, a gorgeous red tie, a dazzling brass scarf- pin — in the bosom of his shirt. His hair was sandy, but his mustache was blackened jet. He had the air and smirk of a lady-killer, and in the butt of the huge pistol buckled around him was a large black bow — the badge of death and destruction to his ene- mies. Funerals are most simple. Sometimes the coffin is slung to poles and carried by four men. Wliile the begum has given place to hickory bark when a cradle is wanted, baskets and even fox-horns are still made of that material. Not only many remnants like these are left in the life of the mountaineer, but, occasionally, far up some creek, it was possible, as late as fifteen years ago, to come upon a ruddy, smooth-faced, big-framed old fellow, keen-eyed, taciturn, avoiding the main-trav- elled roads; a great hunter, calling his old squirrel rifle by some pet feminine name — who, with a coon- skin cap, the scalp in front, and a fringed hunting- shirt and moccasins, completed the perfect image of the pioneer as the books and tradition have lianded him down to us. 12 The Southern Mountaineer It is easy to go on back across the water to tlie Old Country, One finds still among tlie mountaineers tlie pioneer's belief in signs, omens, and the practice of witchcraft ; for whatever traits the pioneer brought over the sea, the Southern mountaineer has to-day. The rough-and-tumble fight of the Scotch and the English square stand-up and knock-down boxing- match were the mountaineer's ways of settling minor disputes — one or the other, according to agreement — until the war introduced musket and pistol. The imprint of Calvinism on his religious nature is yet plain, in spite of the sway of Methodism for nearly a century. He is the only man in the world whom the Catholic Church has made little or no effort to proselyte. Dislike of Episcopalianism is still strong among people who do not know, or pretend not to know, what the word means. " Any Episcopalians around here? " asked a clergy- man at a mountain cabin. " I don' know," said the old woman. " Jim's got the skins of a lot o' varmints up in the loft. Mebbe you can find one up thar." The Unionism of the mountaineer in the late war is in great part an inheritance from the intense American- ism of the backwoodsman, just as that Americanism came from the spirit of the Covenanters. His music is thus a trans- Atlantic remnant. In Harlan County, 1.3 Blue-grass and Rhododendron Ky., a mountain girl leaned her chair against the wall of her cabin, put her large, bare feet on one of the rungs, and sang me an English ballad three hundred years old, and almost as long as it was ancient. She said she knew many others. In Perry County, where there are in the French-Eversole feud Mclntyres, Mc- Intoshes, McKnights, Combs, probably McCombs and Fitzpatricks, Scotch ballads are said to be sung mth Scotch accent, and an occasional copy of Burns is to be found. I have even run across the modern survival of the wandering minstrel — two blind fiddlers who went through the mountains making up " ballets " to celebrate the deeds of leaders in Kentucky feuds. One of the verses ran : The death of these two men Caused great trouble in our land, Caused men to say the bitter word, And take the parting hand. Nearly all songs and dance tunes are written in the so-called old Scotch scale, and, like negi-o music, they drop frequently into the relative minor; so that if there be any truth in the theory that negro music is merely the adaptation of Scotch and Irish folk- songs, and folk-dances, with the added stamp of the negro's peculiar temperament, then the music 14 The Southern Mountaineer adapted is to be heard in the mountains to-day as the negro heard it long ago. In his speech the mountaineer tenches a very re- mote past. Strictly speaking, he has no dialect. The mountaineer simply keeps in use old words and mean- ings that the valley people have ceased to use; but nowhere is this usage so sustained and consistent as to form a dialect. To waiters of mountain stories the temptation seems quite irresistible to use more peculiar words in one story than can be gathered from the people in a month. Still, unusual words are abundant. There are perhaps two hundred words, meanings, and pronunciations that in the mountaineer's speech go back unchanged to Chaucer. Some of the words are: afcerd, afore, axe, holp, crope, clomb, peert, beest (horse), cryke, eet (ate), farwel, fer (far), fool (foolish — " them fool-women " ), heepe, hit (it), I is, lepte, pore (poor), right (very), slyk, study (think), souple (supple), up (verb), " he up and done it," usen, yer for year, yond, instid, yit, etc. There are others which have English dialect authority: blather, doated, antic, dreen, brash, faze (now modern slang), fernent, fer- ninst, master, size, etc. Many of these words, of course, the upper classes use throughout the South. These, the young white master got from his negro play- mates, who took them from the lips of the poor whites. 15 Blue-grass and Rhododendron The double negative, always used by the old English, who seem to have resisted it no more than did the Greeks, is invariable with the mountaineer. With him a triple negative is common. A mountaineer had been shot. His friends came in to see him and kept urging him to revenge. A woman wanted them to stop. " Hit jes' raises the ambition in him and donH do no good noJiow." The " dialect " is not wholly deterioration, then. What we are often apt to regard as ignorance in the mountaineer is simply our own disuse. Unfortunately, the speech is a mixture of so many old English dialects that it is of little use in tracing the origin of the people who use it. Such has been the outward protective effect of mountains on the Southern mountaineer. As a human type he is of unusual interest. No mountain people are ever rich. Environment keeps mountaineers poor. The strength that comes from numbers and wealth is always wanting. Agri- culture is the sole stand-by, and agriculture distributes population, because arable soil is confined to bottom- lands and valleys. Farming on a mountain-side is not only arduous and unremunerative — it is sometimes dangerous. There is a well-authenticated case of a i6 The Southern Mountaineer Kentucky mountaineer who fell out of liis own corn- field and broke bis neck. Still, tliougb fairly well- to-do in tbe valleys, tbe Southern mountaineer can be pathetically poor. A young preacher stopped at a cabin in Georgia to stay all night. His hostess, as a mark of unusual distinction, killed a chicken and dressed it in a pan. She rinsed the pan and made up her dough in it. She rinsed it again and went out and used it for a milk-pail. She came in, rinsed it again, and went to the spring and brought it back full of water. She filled up the glasses on the table and gave him the pan with the rest of the water in which to wash his hands. The woman was not a slattern ; it was the only utensil she had. This poverty of natural resources makes the moun- taineer's fight for life a hard one. At the same time it gives him vigor, hardihood, and endurance of body ; it saves him from the comforts and dainties that weaken; and it makes him a formidable competitor, when it forces him to come down into the plains, as it often does. For this poverty was at the bottom of the marauding instinct of the Pict and Scot, just as it is at the bottom of the migrating instinct that sends the Southern mountaineers west, in spite of a love for home that is a proverb with the Swiss, and is hardly less strong in the Southern mountaineer to-day. In- 17 Blue-grass and Rhododendron variably the Western wanderer comes home again. Time and again an effort was made to end a feud in the Kentucky mountains by sending the leaders away. They always came back. It is this poverty of arable land that further isolates the mountaineer in his loneliness. For he must live apart not only from the world, but from his neighbor. The result is an enforced self-reliance, and through that, the gradual growth of an individualism that has been " the strength, the weakness; the personal charm, the political stumbling-block; the ethical significance and the historical insignificance of the mountaineer the world over." It is this isolation, this individualism, that makes unity of action difiicult, public sentiment weak, and takes from the law the righting of private wrongs. It is this individualism that has been a rich mine for the writer of fiction. In the Southern moun- taineer, its most marked elements are religious feel- ing, hospitality, and pride. So far these last two traits have been lightly touched upon, for the reason that they appear only by contrast with a higher civilization that has begun to reach them only in the last few years. The latch-string hangs outside every cabin-door if the men-folks are at home, but you must shout " hello " always outside the fence. i8 The Southern Mountaineer " We ims is pore," you will be tokl, " but y'u're welcome ef y'u kin put up with what we have." After a stay of a week at a mountain cabin, a younj^ " furriner " asked what his bill was. The old moun- taineer waved his hand. " A'othin'," he said, " 'cept come agin! " A belated traveller asked to stay all night at a cabin. The mountaineer answered that his wife was sick and they were " sorter out o' fixin's to eat, but he reckoned he mought step over to a neighbor's an borrer some." lie did step over and he was gone three hours. He brought back a little bag of meal, and tliey had corn- bread and potatoes for supper and for breakfast, cooked by the mountaineer. The stranger asked how far away his next neighbor lived. " A leetle the rise o' six miles I reckon," was the answer. "Which way?" " Oh, jes' over the mountain thar." He had stepped six miles over the mountain and back for that little bag of meal, and he would allow his guest to pay nothing next morning. I have slept with nine others in a single room. The host gave up his bed to two of our party, and he and his wife slept with the rest of us on the floor. He gave us supper, kept us all night, sent us away next morning with a parting draught of moonshine apple-jack, of 19 Blue-grass and Rhododendron his own brewing, by the way, and woukl suffer no one to pay a cent for his entertainment. That man was a desperado, an outlaw, a moonshiner, and was running from the sheriff at that very time. Two outlaw sons were supposed to be killed by offi- cers. I offered aid to the father to have them decently clothed and buried, but the old man, who was as bad as his sons, declined it with some dignity. They had enough left for that; and if not, why, he had. A woman whose husband was dead, who was sick to death herself, whose four children were almost starved, said, when she heard the " furriners " were talking about sending her to the poor-house, that she " would go out on her crutches and hoe corn fust " (and she did), and that " people who talked about sending her to the po'-house had better save their breath to make prayers with." It is a fact — in the Kentucky mountains at least — that the poor-houses are usually empty, and that it is considered a disgrace to a whole clan if one of its members is an inmate. It is the exception when a family is low and lazy enough to take a revenue from the State for an idiot child. I saw a boy once, astride a steer which he had bridled with a rope, barefooted, with his yellow hair sticking from his crownless hat, and in blubbering ecstasy over the fact that he was 20 The Southern Mountaineer no longer under the humiliation of accepting $75 a year from the State. He had proven his sanity by his answer to one question. " Do you work in the field? " asked the commis- sioner. " Well, ef I didn't," was the answer, " thar wouldn't be no work done." I have always feared, however, that there was an- other reason for his happiness than balm to his suf- fering pride. Relieved of the ban of idiocy, he had gained a privilege — unspeakably dear in the mountains — the privilege of matrimony. Like all mountain races, the Southern mountaineers are deeply religious. In some communities, religion is about the only form of recreation they have. They are for tlie most part Methodists and Baptists — some- times Ironsides feet-washing Baptists. They will walk, or ride when possible, eight or ten miles, and sit all day in a close, windowless log-cabin on the flat side of a slab supported by pegs, listening to the high- wrought, emotional, and, at times, unintelligible rant- ing of a mountain preacher, while the young men sit outside, whittling with their Barlows and huge jack- knives, and swapping horses and guns. '' If anybody wants to extribute anything to the ex- port of the gospels, hit will be gradually received." A 21 Blue-grass and Rhododendron possible remark of this sort will gauge the intelligence of the pastor. The cosmopolitanism of the congrega- tion can be guessed from the fact that certain ciders, filling a vacancy in their pulpit, once decided to " take that ar man Spurgeon if they could git him to come." It is hardly necessary to add that the " extribution to the export of the gospels " is very, very gradually received. Naturally, their religion is sternly orthodox and most literal. The infidel is unknown, and no moun- taineer is so bad as not to have a full share of religion deep down, though, as in his more civilized brother, it is not always apparent until death is at hand. In the famous Howard and Turner war, the last but one of the Turner brothers was shot by a Howard while he was drinking at a spring. He leaped to his feet and fell in a little creek, where, from behind a sycamore- root, he emptied his Winchester at his enemy, and be- tween the cracks of his gun he could be heard, half a mile away, praying aloud. The custom of holding funeral services for the dead annually, for several years after death, is common. I heard the fourth annual funeral sermon of a dead feud leader preached a few summers ago, and it was consoling to hear that even he had all the virtues that so few men seem to have in life, and so few to lack 22 /;/ t- R to cu The Southern Mountaineer when dead. But in spite of the universality of religious feeling and a surprising knowledge of the Bible, it is possible to find an ignorance that is almost incredible. ■^The mountain evangelist, George O. Barnes, it is said, once stopped at a mountain cabin and told the story of the crucifixion as few other men can. When he was quite through, an old woman who had listened in ab- sorbed silence, asked: " Stranger, you say that that happened a long while ago?" "Yes," said Mr. Barnes; "almost two thousand years ago." "And they treated him that way when he'd come down fer notliin' on earth but to save 'em? " " Yes." The old woman was crying softly, and she put out her hand and laid it on his knee. " Well, stranger," she said, " let's hope that hit ain't so." She did not want to believe that humanity was capable of such ingratitude. Wliile ignorance of this kind is rare, and while we may find men who know the Bible from " kiver to kiver," it is not impossible to find children of shrewd native intelligence who have not heard of Christ and the Bible. ^ Now, whatever interest the Southern mountaineer 23 Blue-grass and Rhododendron has as a remnant of pioneer days, as a relic of an Anglo- Saxon past, and as a peculiar type that seems to be the invariable result of a mountain environment — the Kentucky mountaineer shares in a marked degiee. Moreover, he has an interest peculiarly his own; for I believe him to be as sharply distinct from his fellows, as the blue-grass Kentuckian is said to be from his. 24 The Kentucky Mountaineer The Kentucky Mountaineer A THE Kentucky moimtaincers are practically valley people. There are the three forks of the Ciunbcrland, the three forks of the Ken- tucky, and the tributaries of Big Sandy — all with rich river-bottoms. It was natural that these lands should attract a better class of people than the average mountaineer. They did. There were many slave- holders among them— a fact that has never been mentioned, as far as I know, by anybody who has written about the mountaineer. The houses along these rivers are, as a rule, weather-boarded, and one will often find interior decorations, startling in color and puzzling in design, painted all over porch, wall, and ceiling. The people are better fed, better clothed, less lank in figure, more intelligent. They wear less homespun, and their speech, while as archaic as else- where, is, I believe, purer. You rarely hear "' you uns " and " we uns," and similar untraceable con- fusions in the Kentucky mountains, except along the 27 Blue-grass and Rhododendron border of the Tennessee. Moreover, the mountaineers who came over from West Virginia and from the southwestern corner of old Virginia were undoubtedly the daring, the hardy, and the strong, for no other kind would have climbed gloomy Black Mountain and the Cumberland Range to fight against beast and savage for their homes. However, in spite of the general superiority that these facts give him, the Kentucky mountaineer has been more isolated than the mountaineer of any other State. There are regions more remote and more sparsely settled, but nowhere in the Southern moun- tains has so large a body of mountaineers been shut off so completely from the outside world. As a result, he illustrates Mr. Theodore Roosevelt's fine observation that life away from civilization simply emphasizes the natural qualities, good and bad, of the individual. The effect of this truth seems perceptible in tliat any trait common to the Southern mountaineer seems to be in- tensified in the mountaineer of Kentucky. He is more clannish, prouder, more hospitable, fiercer, more loyal as a friend, more bitter as an enemy, and in simple meanness — when he is mean, mind you — he can out- Herod his race with great ease. To illustrate his clannishness: Three mountaineers with a grievance went up to some mines to drive the 28 The Kentucky Mountaineer book-keeper away. A fourth man joined them and stood with drawn pistol during the controversy at the mines, because his wife was a first cousin by marriage of one of the three who had the grievance. In Re- pui)lican counties, county officers are often Democratic — blood is a stronger tie even than politics. As to his hospitality: A younger brother of mine was taking dinner with an old mountaineer. There was nothing on the table but some bread and a few potatoes. " Take out, stranger," he said, heartily. " Have a 'tater — take two of 'em — take damn nigh all of 'em ! " A mountaineer, who had come into possession of a small saw-mill, was building a new house. As he had plenty of lumber, a friend of mine asked why he did not build a bigger house. It was big enough, he said. He had two rooms — " one fer the family, an' t'other fer company." As his family numbered fifteen, the scale on which he expected to entertain can be im- agined. The funeral sermon of a mountaineer, who had been dead two years, was preached in Turkey Foot at the base of Mount Scratchum in Jackson County. Three branches run together like a turkey's foot at that point. The mountain is called Scratchum because it is hard to climb. " A funeral sermon," said the old preacher, 29 Blue-grass and Rhododendron " can be the last one you hear, or the fust one that's preached over ye atter death. Maybe I'm a-preachin' my own funeral sermon now." If he was, he did him- self justice, for he preached three solid hours. The audience was invited to stay to dinner. Forty of them accepted — there were just forty there — and dinner was served from two o'clock until six. The forty were pressed to stay all night. Twenty-three did stay, sev- enteen in one room. Such is the hospitality of the Kentucky mountaineer. As to his pride, that is almost beyond belief. I always hesitate to tell this story, for the reason that I can hardly believe it myself. There was a plague in the mountains of eastern Kentucky, West Virginia, and the southwest corner of old Virginia in 1885. A cattle convention of St. Louis made up a relief fund and sent it for distribution to General Jubal Early of Virginia. General Early sent it to a lawyer of Ab- ingdon, Va., who persuaded D. F. Campbell, another lawyer now living in that town, to take the money into the mountains. Campbell left several hundred dollars in Virginia, and being told that the West Vir- ginians could take care of themselves went with the balance, about $1,000, into Kentucky, where the plague was at its worst. He found the suffering great — nine dead, in one instance, under a single roof. 30 The Kentucky Mountaineer He spent one montli going from honse to house in the eonntics of Letclier, Perry, and Pike, carrying the money in his saddle-bags and riding nnarmed. Every man, woman, and child in the three counties knew he had the money and knew his mission. He left $5 at a country store, and he got one woman to persuade another woman whose husband and three children were just dead, and who had indignantly refused his per- sonal offer of assistance, to accept $10. The rest of the money he took Ijack and distributed without trouble on his own side of the mountain. "While in Kentucky he found trouble in getting enough to eat for himself and his horse. Often he had only bread and onions; and yet he was permitted to pa}' but for one meal for either, and that was under protest at a regular boarding-house in a mountain town. Over tlie three counties, he got the same answer. " You are a stranger. We are not beggars, and we can take care of ourselves." " They are a curious people over there," said Camp- bell, who is a born Virginian. " No effort was made to rob me, though a man who was known as ' the only thief in Perry County,' a man whom I know to have been trusted with large sums by his leader in a local war, sent me a joking threat. The people were not sus- picious of me because I was a stranger. They con- 31 Blue-grass and Rhododendron cealed cases of suffering from me. It was pride that made tliem refuse the money — nothing else. They are the most loyal friends you ever saw. They will do anything for you, if they like you. They will get up and go anywhere for you day or night, rain or snow. If they haven't a horse, they'll walk. If they haven't shoes, they'll go barefooted. They will combine against you in a trade, and take every advantage they can. A man will keep you at his house to beat you out of a dollar, and when you leave, your board-bill is nothing." This testimony is from a Virginian, and it is a par- ticular pleasure for a representative of one of the second-class families of Virginia who, as the first fami- lies say, all emigrated to Kentucky, to prove, by the word of a Virginian, that we have some advantage in at least one section of the State. Indeed, no matter what may be said of the mountain- eer in general, the Kentucky mountaineer seems to go the fact one better. Elsewhere, families are large — " children and heepe," says Chaucer. In Jackson County a mountaineer died not long ago, not at an extreme old age, who left two hundred and seven de- scendants. He had fifteen children, and several of his children had fifteen. There was but one set of twins among them — both girls — and they were called 32 The Kentucky Mountaineer Louisa and Louisa. There is in the same county a woman forty-seven years of age, with a grand-daugh- ter who has been married fifteen months. Only n break in the family tradition prevented her from be- ing a great-grandmother at forty-seven. It may be that the Kentucky mountaineer is more tempted to an earlier marriage than is the mountaineer elsewhere, for an artist who rode with me through the Kentucky mountains said that not only were the men finer looking, but that the women were far hand- somer than elsewhere in the southern Alleghanies. While I am not able to say this, I can say that in the Kentucky mountains the pretty mountain girl is not always, as some people are inclined to believe, pure fiction. Pretty girls are, however, rare; for usually the women are stoop-shouldered and large waisted from working in the fields and lifting heavy weights; for the same reason their hands are large and so are their feet, for they generally go barefoot. But usually they have modest faces and sad, modest eyes, and in the rich river-bottoms, where the mountain farmers have tenants and do not send their daughters to the fields, the girls are apt to be erect and agile, small of hand and foot, and usually they have a wild shyness that is very attractive. I recall one girl in crimson homespun, with very big dark eyes, slipping like a 33 Blue-grass and Rhododendron flame through the dark room, behind me, when I was on the porch; or gliding out of the one door, if I chanced to enter the other, which I did at every oppor- tunity. A friend who was with me saw her dancing in the dust at twdlight, next day, when she was driving the cows home. He helped her to milk and got to know her quite well, I believe. I know that, a year later, when she had worn away her shyness and most of her charm at school in her county seat, she asked me about him, with embarrassing frankness, and a look crept into her eyes that told an old tale. Pretty girls there are in abundance, but I have seen only one very beautiful mountain girl. One's standard can be affected by a long stay in the mountains, and I should have distrusted mine had it not been for the artist who was with me, fresh from civilization. We saw her, as we were riding up the Cumberland, and we silently and simultaneously drew rein and asked if we could get buttermilk. We could, and we swung from our horses. The girl was sitting behind a little cabin, with a baby in her lap, and her loveliness was startling. She was slender; her hair was gold- bro\vn; her hands were small and, for a wonder, beau- tifully shaped. Her teeth, for a wonder, too, were very white and even. Her features were delicately perfect ; her mouth shaped as Cupid's bow never was and never 34 The Kentucky Mountaineer would be, said the artist, who christened her eyes after Trilby's — " twin gray stars " — to which the eyebrows and the long lashes gave an indescribable softness. But I felt more the brooding pathos that lay in them, that came from generations of lonely mothers before her, waiting in lonely cabins for the men to come home — back to those wild pioneer days, when they watched with an ever-present fear that they might not come at all. It was late and we tried to get to stay all night, for the artist wanted to sketch her. He was afraid to ask her permission on so short an acquaintance, for she would not have understood, and he would have frightened her. Her mother gave us buttermilk and we furtively studied her, but we could not stay all night: there were no men-folks at home and no '' roughness " for our horses, and we rode regretfully away. Now, while the good of the mountaineer is empha- sized in the mountaineer of Kentucky, the evil is equally marked. The Kentucky mountaineer may be the best of all — he can be likewise the worst of all. A mountaineer was under indictment for moon- shining in a little mountain town that has been under the refining influence of a railroad for several years. Unable to give bond, he was ordered to jail by the 35 Blue-grass and Rhododendron judge. When the sheriff rose, a huge mountaineer rose, too, in the rear of the court-room and whipped out a big revolver. " You come with me," he said, and the prisoner came, while judge, jury, and sheriff Avatched him march out. The big fellow took the pris- oner through the town and a few hundred yards up a creek, " You go on home," he said. Then the rescuer went calmly back to his house in town, and nothing further has been said or done to this day. The mountiaineer was a United States deputy marshal, but the prisoner was his friend. This marshal was one of the most picturesque figures in the mountains. When sober, he was kind-hearted, good-tempered, and gentle ; and always he was fearless and cool. Once, while firing at two assailants who were shooting at him, he stopped long enough to blow his nose deliberately, and then calmly went on shooting again. lie had a companion at arms who, singularly enough, came from the North, and occasionally these two would amuse themselves. When properly exhil- arated, one would put a horse-collar on the other, and hitch him to an open buggy. He would fill the buggy with pistols, climb in, and drive around the court- house — each man firing off a pistol with each hand and yelling himself hoarse. Then they would execute an Indian war-dance in the court-house square — firing 36 The Kentucky Mountaineer their pistols alternately into the ground and into the air. The town looked on silently and with great respect, and the two were most exemplary until next time. A superintendent of some mines near a mountain toAvn went to the mayor one Sunday morning to get permission to do some work that had to be done in the town limits that day. He found the august official in his own jail. Exhilaration! It was at these mines that three natives of the town went up to drive two young men into the bushes. Be- ing met with some firmness and the muzzle of a Winchester, they went back for reinforcements. One of the three was a member of a famous fighting clan, and he gave it out that he was going for his friends to make the " furriners " leave the country. The young men appealed to the town for protection for themselves and property. There was not an ofiicer to answer. The sheriff was in another part of the county and the constable had just resigned. The young men got Winchester repeating shot-guns and waited a week for their assailants, who failed to come; but had they been besieged, there would not have been a soul to give them assistance, except perhaps the mar- shal and his New England friend. In this same county a man hired an assassin to kill 37 Blue-grass and Rhododendron his rival. The assassin crept to the window of the house where the girl lived, and, seeing a man sitting by the fire, shot through the window and killed him. It was the wrong man. Assassinations from ambush have not been uncommon in every feud, though, in almost every feud, there has been one faction that refused to fight except in the open. I have even heard of a snare being set for a woman, who, though repeat- edly warned, persisted in carrying news from one side to the other. A musket was loaded with slugs and placed so that the discharge would sweep the path that it was believed she would take. A string was tied to the trigger and stretched across the foot road and a mountaineer waited under a bluff to whistle, so that she would stop, when she struck the string. That night the woman happened to take another path. This, however, is the sole instance I have ever known. Elsewhere the Southern mountaineer holds human life as cheap; elsewhere he is ready to let death settle a personal dispute ; elsewhere he is more ignorant and has as little regard for law; elsewhere he was divided against himself by the war and was left in sub- sequent conditions just as lawless; elsewhere he has similar clannishness of feeling, and elsewhere is an occasional feud which is confined to family and close kindred. But nowhere is the feud so common, so 38 The Kentucky Mountaineer old, so persistent, so deadly, as in the Kentucky mountains. jSTowhere else is there such organization, such division of enmity to the limit of kinship. About tliirty-five years ago two boys were playing marbles in the road along the Cumberland River — down in the Kentucky mountains. One had a patch on the seat of his trousers. The other boy made fun of it, and the boy with the patch went home and told his father. Thirty years of local war was the result. The factions fought on after they had forgotten why they had fought at all. While organized warfare is now over, an occasional fight yet comes over the patch on those trousers and a man or two is killed. A county as big as Rhode Island is still bitterly divided on the subject. In a race for the legislature not long ago, the feud was the sole issue. And, withoirt knowing it, perhaps, a mountaineer carried that patch like a flag to victory, and sat under it at the capital — making laws for the rest of the State. That is the feud that has stained the highland border of the State with blood, and abroad, has engulfed the reputation of the lowland blue-grass, where there are, of course, no feuds — a fact that sometimes seems to require emphasis, I am sorry to say. Almost every mountain county has, or has had, its feud. On one side is a leader whose authority is rarely questioned. 39 Blue-grass and Rhododendron Each leader has his band of retainers. Always he arms them; usually he feeds them; sometimes he houses and clothes them, and sometimes, even, he hires them. In one local war, I remember, four dollars per day were the wages of the fighting man, and the leader on one occasion, while besieging his enemies — in the county court-house — tried to purchase a cannon, and from no other place than the State arsenal, and from no other personage than the governor himself. It is the feud that most sharply differentiates the Kentucky mountaineer from his fellows, and it is extreme isolation that makes possible in this age such a relic of mediaeval barbarism. For the feud means, of course, ignorance, shiftlessness, incredible lawless- ness, a frightful estimate of the value of human life; the horrible custom of ambush, a class of cowardly assassins who can be hired to do murder for a gun, a mule, or a gallon of moonshine. Now these are the blackest shadows in the only picture of Kentucky mountain life that has reached the light of print through the press. There is another side, and it is only fair to show it. The feud is an inheritance. There were feuds before the war, even on the edge of the blue-grass; there were fierce family fights in the backwoods before and during the Revolution — when the war between Whig 40 The Kentucky Mountaineer and Tory served as a pretext for satisfying personal animosities already existing, and it is not a wild fancy that the Kentucky mountain feud takes root in Scot- land. For, while it is hardly possible that the enmities of the Revolution were transmitted to the Civil War, it is quite sure that whatever race instinct, old-world trait of character, or moral code the backwoodsman may have taken with him into the mountains — it is quite sure that that instinct, that trait of character, that moral code, are living forces in him to-day. The late war was, however, the chief cause of feuds. When it came, the river-bottoms were populated, the clans were formed. There were more slave-holders among them than among other Southern mountaineers. For that reason, the war divided them more evenly against themselves, and set them fighting. When the war stopped elsewhere, it simply kept on with them, be- cause they were more isolated, more evenly divided; because they were a fiercer race, and because the issue had become personal. The little that is going on now goes on for the same reason, for while civilization pressed close enough in 1890 and 1891 to put an end to organized fighting, it is a consistent fact that after the failure of Baring Brothers, and the stoppage of the flow of English capital into the mountains, and the check to railroads and civilization, these feuds slowly 41 Blue-grass and Rhododendron started up again. When I left home for the Cuban war, two companies of State militia were on their way to the mountains to put down a feud. On the day of the Las Guasimas fight these feudsmen fought, and they lost precisely as many men killed as the Rough Riders — eight. Again : while the feud may involve the sympathies of a county, the number of men actually engaged in it are comparatively few. Moreover, the feud is strictly of themselves, and is based primarily on a privi- lege that the mountaineer, the world over, has most grudgingly surrendered to the law, the privilege of avenging his private wrongs. The non-partisan and the traveller are never molested. Property of the beaten faction is never touched. The women are safe from hann, and I have never heard of one who was subjected to insult. Attend to your own business, side with neither faction in act or word and you are much safer among the Kentucky mountaineers, when a feud is going on, than you are crossing Broadway at Twenty-third Street. As you ride along, a bullet may plough through the road ten yards in front of you. That means for you to halt. A mountaineer will come out of the bushes and ask who you are and where you are going and what your business is. If your answers are satisfactory, you go on unmolested. 42 The Kentucky Mountaineer Asking for a place to stay all night, you may be told, " Go to So and So's house; he'll pertect ye; " and he will, too, at the risk of his own life when you are past the line of suspicion and under his roof. There are other facts that soften a too harsh judg- ment of the mountaineer and his feud — harsh as the judgment should be. Personal fealty is the corner- stone of the feud. The mountaineer admits no higher law; he understands no conscience that will \dolate that tie. You are my friend or my kinsman ; your quarrel is my quarrel; whoever strikes you, strikes me. If you are in trouble, I must not testify against you. If you are an officer, you must not arrest me, you must send me word to come into court. If I'm innocent, why, maybe I'll come. Moreover, the worst have the list of rude virtues already mentioned; and, besides, the mountaineer is never a thief nor a robber, and he will lie about one thing and one thing only, and that is land. He has cleared it, built his cabin from the trees, lived on it and he feels that any means necessary to hold it are justifiable. Lastly, religion is as honestly used to cloak deviltry as it ever was in the Middle Ages. A feud leader who had about exterminated the op- posing faction, and had made a good fortune for a mountaineer while doing it, for he kept his men busy 43 Blue-grass and Rhododendron getting out timber when they weren't fighting, said to me, in all seriousness : " I have triumphed agin my enemies time and time agin. The Lord's on my side, and I gits a better and better Christian ever' year." A preacher, riding down a ravine, came upon an old mountaineer hiding in the bushes with his rifle. " What are you doing there, my friend? " " Ride on, stranger," was the easy answer. " I'm a-waitin' fer Jim Johnson, and with the help of the Lawd I'm goin' to blow his damn head off." Even the ambush, the hideous feature of the feud, took root in the days of the Revolution, and was borrowed, maybe, from the Indians. Milfort, the Frenchman, who hated the backwoodsman, says Mr. Roosevelt, describes with horror their extreme malevo- lence and their murderous disposition toward one an- other. He says that whether a wrong had been done to a man personally or to his family, he would, if necessary, travel a hundred miles and lurk around the forest indefinitely to get a chance to shoot his enemy. But the Civil War was the chief cause of bloodshed; for there is evidence, indeed, that though feeling be- tween families was strong, bloodshed was rare and the 44 The Kentucky Mountaineer Engiisli sense of fairness prevailed, in certain com- munities at least. Often you shall bear an old moun- taineer say: " Folks usen to talk about bow fer tbey could kill a deer. Now bit's bow fer tbey can kill a man. Wby, I bave knowed tbe time wben a man would bev been druv outen tbe county fer drawin' a knife or a pistol, an' if a man was ever killed, bit wus kinder accidental by a Barlow. I reckon folks got used to weepons an' killin' an' sbootin' from tbe bresb endurin' tbe war. But bit's been gettin' wuss ever sence, and now bit's dirk an' Wincbester all tbe time." Even for tbe ambusb tbere is an explanation. " Ob, I know all tbe excuses folks make. Hit's fair for one as 'tis fer t'otber. You can't figbt a man far and squar wbo'll sboot you in tbe back. A pore man can't figbt money in tbe courts. Tbar liain't no witnesses in tbe lorrel but leaves, an' dead men don't bev mucb to say. I know bit all. Looks like lots o' decent young folks bev got usen to tbe idee; tbar's so mucb of it goin' on and tbar's so mucb talk about sbootin' from tbe bresb. I do reckon bit's wuss'n stealin' to take a feller critter's life tbat way." It is also a fact tbat most of tbe men wbo bave been engaged in tbese figbts were born, or were cbildren, during tbe war, and were, in consequence, accustomed to bloodshed and busbwbacking from infancy. Still, 45 Blue-grass and Rhododendron even among the fighters there is often a strong preju- dice against the ambush, and in most fends, one or the other side discountenances it, and that is the faction usually defeated, I know of one family that was one by one exterminated because they refused to take to the " bresh." Again, the secret of the feud is isolation. In the mountains the war kept on longer, for personal hatred supplanted its dead issues. Railroads and newspapers have had their influence elsewhere. Elsewhere court circuits include valley people. Civilization has pressed slowly on the Kentucky mountains. The Kentucky mountaineer, until quite lately, has been tried, when brought to trial at all, by the Kentucky mountaineer. And when a man is tried for a crime by a man who would commit that crime under the same circum- stances, punishment is not apt to follow. Thus the influence that has helped most to break up the feud is trial in the Blue-grass, for there is no ordeal the mountaineer more hates than trial by a jury of bigoted " furriners." Who they are — these Southern mountaineers — is a subject of endless conjecture and dispute — a question that perhaps will never be satisfactorily solved. While there are among them the descendants of the old bond servant and redemptioner class, of vicious runaway 46 The Kentucky Mountaineer criminals and the trashiest of the poor whites, the ruKng class has imdonbtedly come from the old free settlers, English, German, Swiss, French Huguenot, even Scotch and Scotch-Irish. As the German and Swiss are easily traced to iSTorth Carolina, the Hugiie- nots to South Carolina and parts of Georgia, it is more than probable, from the scant study that has been given the question, that the strongest and largest cur- rent of blood in their veins comes from none other than the mighty stream of Scotch-Irish. Briefly, the theory is this: From 1720 to 1780, the settlers in southwest Virginia, middle jSTorth Carolina and western South Carolina were chiefly Scotch and Scotch-Irish, They were active in the measures pre- ceding the outbreak of the Revolution, and they declared independence at Abingtou, Va., even before they did at Mecklenburg, N. C. In these districts they were the largest element in the patriot army, and they were greatly impoverished by the war. Being too poor or too conscientious to own slaves, and unable to compete with them as the planter's field hand, black- smith, carpenter, wheelwright, and man-of-all-work, especially after the invention of the cotton-gin in 1792, they had no employment and were driven to mountain and sand-hill. There are some good reasons for the theory. Among prominent mountain fami- 47 Blue-grass and Rhododendron lies direct testimony or unquestioned tradition point usually to Scotch-Irish ancestry, sometimes to pure Scotch origin, sometimes to English. Scotch-Irish family names in abundance speak for themselves, as do folk-words and folk-songs and the characteristics, mental, moral, and physical, of the people. Broadly speaking, the Southern mountaineers are characterized as " peaceable, civil, good-natured, kind, clever, nat- urally witty, with a fair share of common-sense, and morals not conscientiously bad, since they do not consider ignorance, idleness, poverty, or the ex- cessive use of tobacco or moonshine as immoral or vicious." Another student says: " The majority is of good blood, honest, law-abiding blood." Says still another: " They are ignorant of books, but sharp as a rule." Says another: " They have great reverence for the Bible, and are sturdy, loyal, and tenacious." More- over, the two objections to this theory that would naturally occur to anyone have easy answers. The mountaineers are not Presbyterian and they are not thrifty. Curiously enough, testimony exists to the effect that certain Methodist or Baptist churches were once Presbyterian; and many preachers of these two denominations had grandfathers who were Presby- terian ministers. The Methodists and Baptists were 48 The Kentucky Mountaineer perhaps more active; they were more popular in the mountains as they M'^ere in the backwoods, because they were more democratic and more emotionah The back- woodsman did not like the preacher to be a preacher only. He, too, must work with his hands. Scotch-Irish thriftiness decayed. The soil was poor; game was abundant; hunting bred idleness. There were no books, no schools, few church privileges, a poorly educated ministry, and the present illiteracy, thriftlessness, and poverty were easy results. Deed- books show that the ancestors of men who now make their mark, often wrote a good hand. Such, briefly, is the Southern mountaineer in gen- eral, and the Kentucky mountaineer in particular. Or, rather, such he was until fifteen years ago, and to know him now you must know him as he was then, for the changes that have been wrought in the last decade aifect localities only, and the bulk of the mountain-people is, practically, still what it was one hundred years ago. Still, changes have taken j^lace and changes will take place now swiftly, and it rests largely with the outer world what these changes shall be. The vanguards of civilization — railroads — unless quickly followed by schools and churches, at the ratio of four schools to one church, have a bad effect on 49 Blue-grass and Rhododendron the Southern mountaineer. He catches up the vices of the incoming current only too readily. The fine spirit of his hospitality is worn away. He goes to some little " boom " town, is forced to pay the enormous sum of fifty cents for his dinner, and when you go his way again, you pay fifty cents for yours. Care- lessly applied charity weakens his pride, makes him dependent. You hear of aiTCsts for petty thefts some- times, occasionally burglaries are made, and the moun- taineer is cowed by the superior numbers, superior intelligence of the incomer, and he seems to lose his sturdy self-respect. And yet the result could easily be far different. Not long ago I talked with an intelligent young fellow, a young minister, who had taught among them many years, exclusively in the Kentucky mountains, and is now preaching to them. He says, they are more tractable, more easily moulded, more easily uplifted than the people of a similar grade of intelligence in cities. He gave an instance to illustrate their general susceptibility in all ways. When he took charge of a certain school, every boy and girl, nearly all of them grown, chewed tobacco. The teacher before him used tobacco and even exchanged it with his pupils. He told them at once they must stop. They left off in- stantly. SO The Kentucky Mountaineer It was a " blab " school, as the mountaineers char- acterize a school in which the pupils study aloud. He put an end to that in one day, and he soon told them they must stop talking to one another. After school they said they didn't think they could ever do that, but they did. In another county, ten years ago, he had ten boys and girls gathered to organize a Sunday- school. None had ever been to Sunday-school and only two knew what a Sunday-school was. He an- nounced that he would organize one at that place a week later. When he reached the spot the following Sunday, there were seventy-five young mountaineers there. They had sung themselves quite hoarse wait- ing for him, and he was an hour early. The Sunday- school was founded, built up and developed into a church. When the first printing-press was taken to a certain mountain-town in 1882, a deputation of citizens met it three miles from town and swore that it should go no farther. An old preacher mounted the wagon and drove it into town. Later the leader of that crowd owned the printing-press and ran it. In this town are two academies for the education of the moun- taineer. Young fellows come there from every moun- tain-county and work their way through. They curry liorses, carry water, work about the houses — do every- 51 Blue-grass and Rhododendron thing; many of tliem cook for themselves and live on four dollars a month. They are quick-witted, strong-minded, sturdy, tenacious, and usually very religious. Indeed, people who have been among the Southern mountaineers testify that, as a race, they are proud, sensitive, hospitable, kindly, obliging in an unreckon- ing way that is almost pathetic, honest, loyal, in spite of their common ignorance, poverty, and isolation ; that they are naturally capable, eager to learn, easy to uplift. Americans to the core, they make the South- ern mountains a store-house of patriotism; in them- selves, they are an important offset to the Old World outcasts whom we have welcomed to our shores; and they surely deserve as much consideration from the nation as the negroes, for whom we have done, and are doing so much, or as the heathen, to whom we give millions. I confess that I have given prominence to the best features of mountain life and character, for the reason that the worst will easily make their own way. It is only fair to add, however, that nothing that has ever been said of the mountaineer's ignorance, shiftlessness, and awful disregard of human life, especially in the Kentucky mountains, that has not its basis, perhaps, in actual fact. 52 The Kentucky Mountaineer First, last, and always, however, it is to be remem- bered that to begin to understand the Southern moun- taineers you must go back to the social conditions and standards of the backwoods before the Revolu- tion, for practically they are the backwoods people and the backwoods conditions of pre-Revolutionary days. Many of their ancestors fought with ours for American independence. They were loyal to the Union for one reason that no historian seems ever to have guessed. For the loyalty of 18