The First Appalachians

The First Appalachians

There are a few places in America more beloved than the Appalachian Mountains. It has the beauty of a country long lived in, of door sills worn thin, of deep cool footpaths beneath the poplar trees. In the coves, there are proud frame houses, and here and there a log cabin. Flowers fill the yard, and grapevines follow the eaves of the houses, encircling them, with smoke rising from the fat stone chimneys. Indeed, it is a place of mellow beauty. The people of Appalachia are descended from Scotch-Irish, those rugged six-foot men and gaunt prolific women whom James the First induced to leave Scotland for Ireland in hopes that they would intermarry and convert the Irish to Protestantism. But while they were there, they did more quarreling than courting and more fighting than converting. King James went back on his promise of cheap land and low interest loans; instead, he levied heavy taxes on the liquor that the Irish had taught them to make, and he forbade them to bear arms. Now, these Scotch-Irish believed that the freedom to bear arms and to sell whiskey were a part of every man’s birthright, so they migrated to America in the 1700s, bringing their muskets and their thirsts with them to settle an area faster than all of New England, a roadless wilderness of crags and coves. Now, the first who arrived were educated, God-fearing Scots who took up the rich bottomland along the streams. They built churches and schools and even colleges. As their sons grew tall and they took wives for themselves, the old men helped them to build cabins further up the creeks, for no good Scot would let his clan be scattered, so communities of kinfolk grew up and married amongst themselves, cousins to cousins, and as one generation succeeded another, little cabins climbed further and further up the creeks where the soil was shallow and the bare bone of the mountain showed through. Near the summit, the hollows were barely a stone’s throw from ridge to ridge, leaving only a few steep sloping acres to farm. He was walled in by a jungle of tulip and oaks so tall that the sun at noon could barely wipe away the shadows.

So you see, each generation found life harder than the last. Schools and even churches in some places were forgotten. The few roads were little more than animal trails and used only by the folks who lived there, so the mountaineer’s life became more remote and lost, as changeless as it seemed as the mountains themselves. When sickness came, they had to rely on their own remedies: pennyroyal to sweat you, boneset tea to clear you out, buttermilk to cure a stomachache, parched beet leaves to draw a rise into a core, the liquor from a red-stemmed ivy for the itch, stump water for the warts. If some of the cures didn’t work, you still used them because there was nothing else and because someone you loved was suffering. You dipped a red flannel rag in lamp oil and gave it to a child to bite down on when he had a toothache. Indeed, they would even boil a polecat and have the child drink the grease to ease asthma. Now, despite their isolation, the clan grew. Women would marry at age 14 to 16, and nearly all had married by age 18. They bore great numbers of children; folks say the biggest family might have had 35 by two mothers, and folks were faithful back then. There was only the occasional fire-patch child born on the wrong side of the blanket. Heck, women barely took time out to have a baby. One woman was out picking berries when her time came. “There I was,” she said later laughing, “I had a bucket of berries and a baby, and I couldn’t figure out which one to take home first. I had to sweat over them both.” Now and then, a woman would complain of the work, and they’d say men-folk just want a woman that never sits down. They want one that’ll work in the cornfield without getting tired and be so rested when the day is done that she’ll get all the meals and tend to the children and do the chores while he eats, and have a whole basket of young’uns in her spare time, and milk the cows, because we all know it’s womanish for a man to do that. Yet her husband only had to slip his arm around her and say, “Oh lady, you’re right smart help to a man,” and she was amply rewarded. No mountain woman wanted a hen-husband.

Yes, sir, these Appalachians were proud of their land. “Up here is the only place to live,” they would say. They looked with scorn at the bottom land; why, down there the grass grows so thick that you can’t even bust it with a hoe, it would take a whole yoke of cattle. Now, a young man and his woman they could start a life a little more in these mountains than a skillet and a hoe. They would go up the mountain where the trees were so big and there was no underbrush and where the folks said you couldn’t hear a cowbell for all the birds singing together. The young couple would settle in a fern-shadowed holler where water was close by. They would deaden the trees by cutting off a ring of bark and hoe down kernels of corn in between. There was no need to plow the soil; it was so loose and mellow. After harvest, they had all the corn ground at the flutter mill, and in the embers of the fireplace they baked it into johnny ash cake. The food was abundant in the summer; the whole folks would say that there was plenty of game, wild turkeys gobbling from their oak thickets, deer grown fat from the acorns and the chestnuts that fell to the forest floor. Heck, you could buy a pig for a dollar, ear-notch him, and turn him loose in the forest; in the fall you could go out and shoot him. And if you found the means, you could get yourself a pair of oxen. They were the mountaineer’s friend; they could work on land too steep and rocky for horses, and they didn’t need grain and store-bought harnesses that horses did.

But life at best was a struggle. Folks say it was a land of “make it do, make it yourself, or do without.” The one thing that made life easier for the people of the Appalachian Mountains was the chestnut tree. It fed them, it fattened their stock, warmed their fireplaces, cooked their cornbread, bought all their luxuries, their yard goods and pearl-handled pistols and snuff. The more children you had, the more chestnuts you could gather and roast on the hearth on a winter night, and you could haul by wagon to market. A young boy could quickly pick up enough to buy his shoes and clothes or doll or any other play-pretty that his father would bring home from selling chestnuts in a valley town. Hogs fattened on chestnuts were walked down the mountain in droves of hundreds. There was no better fireplace wood; you see, chestnut logs kept an even heat all night and they didn’t smoke. Blacksmiths would use it instead of coal in their forages. Chestnut lumber sealed up a house. Chestnut furniture was light enough for a porch baby to move about. A broth made of chestnut leaves could break up a deep-down cough. One woman who never bothered with a husband used to say a grove of chestnuts is a better provider than any man, and easier to be around too. If you needed a footbridge to cross a creek, you simply cut a chestnut long enough and dropped it across. The slim, stout pole was straight as an arrow and never sagged, and if the floods didn’t wash it away, it would last a lifetime. Now, if you nailed a board across it and stretched a wire for a hand to hold, you had yourself a footbridge fit for a preacher and his lady. You see, the acid in the wood halted all decay, and drainage ditches made out of chestnuts didn’t rot. Most of all, rail fences made of chestnut fenced in your kingdom from your neighbor. Splitting rails and laying down rail fences was hard work, but it was reverent work, for this is something that you were doing for not only your children, but their children too. There was something about having a rail fence; even humans, they seemed like old hands folded protectively around a place. That’s right, the chestnut tree was a gift from God to the southern mountaineer, and some say its bounty was so generous that the people were stirred to awe and almost reverence.

Now, liquor was like that too. It seemed that nature had intended the people of Appalachia to make liquor; heck, apples and corn grew on the slopes, and every fold of the hills had a tumbling stream of water to cool those coils. Most folks had a family-sized still, and their daily using liquor, they’d only sell what they might overproduce, and they continued to operate these stills long after it was legally forbidden. Heck, it took more than a ruling by a distant lawmaker to stop them, and lord knows there was nothing wrong with it. The lord had made the corn and the apples, the lord made the wood that fired the still and made the creeks that cooled it. How in God’s name could anyone call that wrong? So folks hid their stills in a tangle of laurel and ivy, and if they didn’t have the two bushels of corn, they made it into whiskey; they could carry it across the mountain a lot easier in a jug than in a sack. And if they didn’t have the two bushels of apples, that’s right, they made it into brandy. You see, the apples wouldn’t keep and they wouldn’t sell unless you hauled them miles down the mountain, and heck, you could sell brandy right at home and the market was steady.

The Scotch-Irish revered all that they had brought with them: their land hunger, their language, and their right to make whiskey. But most of all was a right to settle their own disputes without the interference of law, and the way to settle it was with a gun. Fathers taught their boys how to use a gun when they were eight years old, heck, often as young as six years old. It was good for all men to know how to hunt and gather food for the family, and you could never learn too early to protect yourself. So a gun became almost as much a part of a boy as a shirt or pants, even while he was still in knee-breeches. Young men were so proud of their guns that when they had their pictures taken by photographers who sometimes rode horseback through the mountains, they almost always posed with their pistols and their rifles. Now, there were reasons for the killing habit. Historians have long said that mountaineers first learned from the Indians how to fight from the ambush, and in the early days courts were way too far away near the Atlantic coast, and there was no sheriff and no constable. To survive, a man would take matters into his own hands. Good men, patient, cautious, and reserved, were also men that were courageous, prompt, and thorough. They fought their own fights and they fought to a finish; heck, they knew a half-beaten enemy was sure to seek revenge years later. Even when the courts did come closer, it was still hard to get a conviction because the population was so intermarried that everybody was a cousin of everybody else. In the rest of America, men hired lawyers to defend them, but in the Appalachian mountains the only counsel was a gun.

Along with the alcohol and guns, a third giant ruled the southern Appalachian mountains, and that was the Primitive Baptist Church. It was born of the old Calvinist doctrine, but freed of the restraints of education and seminaries, it sprouted like mushrooms from the dark corners of every holler in every cove. It had roots in the scriptures, but it thrived on superstition and fear, and was kept alive only by man’s ageless hunger for worship. Now, they called themselves primitive because they wanted to say that they were the first or the original, or to distinguish themselves from offshoot groups such as the Missionary Baptist. On any given Sunday, three or four preachers would gather to preach from the lids of the Bible. Now, few of them could read, yet they believed implicitly. One would say, “I believe it even if it ain’t so.” They spoke from visions or experiences rather than from a text. Generally, a preacher would start out, “I ain’t got no text today, but I’m here just ready to speak if God puts anything in my mouth, and if He don’t, I can’t.” This was called tuning up. As he mumbled on, it was clear that a mortal man was talking, fumbling indeed. He’d stop to drink a dipper of water from the bucket beside him, then he would page flip through the Bible searching for a text that he couldn’t have read if he found it. All during the service, it would last a whole day and people would walk in and out, I went up to the pulpit for a swig of water, there might be a half-dozen waiting in line, but the confusion didn’t bother the preacher since God was supplying his words. His shouting preachers gave excitement to the whole week. The preaching was something for mountaineers to talk about, and that was important, for since most everybody here was unable to read, there was little to discuss beyond the bare bones of existence. Each preacher was in effect his own church setting its rules. Few of them cared if a man came drunk to church, for the preacher themselves believed in the drink, but all these preachers were forbidden to take pay or salary except for the gift of a good old jug of wine or brandy. Heck, a timid speaker would take a drink of this and all of a sudden he’d become a powerful mouthpiece for the Lord after a morning session with a jug. And all of these preachers were uneducated; that seemed to be a requirement. An uneducated man was sure to be a mouthpiece for the Lord, for he was without wit or words of his own, so the Lord spoke through him. Anything that came out was God speaking, whereas a man with luke-learning might be tempted by the devil to speak words of his own. The more ignorant the man, the more faith folks had in him, for he couldn’t fool them like a cunning city preacher might. And so you see, the Appalachian mountains remained isolated for hundreds of years before the railroads and the roads came in. They cared little for the wars going on outside of the mountains in Europe and the war for America’s independence. In many ways, it was their own country, and the Scotch-Irish provided the backbone for America for centuries.