10 - Our Southern Highlanders by Horace Kephart

Our Southern Highlanders is a captivating memoir by Horace Kephart, a Pennsylvania-born writer and librarian, who shares his profound experiences and cultural insights from his time in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina. Narrated by Meredith Womac Cook, this work offers a unique glimpse into a bygone era, though readers should be aware that it contains some offensive language and overt racism reflective of its time and setting.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Section ten of Our Southern Highlanders by Horace Keppart. This
LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The people of
the Hills in delineating a strange race, we are prone
to disregard what is common in our own experience and
observe sharply what is odd, the oddities we sketch and

(00:23):
remember and tell about. But there is little danger of
misrepresenting the physical features and mental traits of the hill people,
because among them there is one definite type that greatly predominates.
This is not to be wondered at when we remember
that fully three fourths of our Highlanders are practically of
the same descent, have lived the same kind of life

(00:45):
for generations, and have intermarried to a degree unknown in
other parts of America. Our average mountaineers lean inquisitive shrewd.
If that is what constitutes a Yankee, as is popularly
supposed outside of New England, then this Yankee of the
South is as true to type as the conventional Uncle

(01:06):
Sam himself. A fat mountaineer is a curiosity. The hill
folk even seem to affect a slender type of comeliness.
In Alice McGowan's Judith of the Cumberlands. Old Jepta Turantine
says of one of his sons, I named that boy
after the finest man that ever walked God's green earth.

(01:28):
And then the fool had to go and get fat
on me. Think of me with a fat son. I
allers did hold that a fat woman was bad enough,
but a fat man worked pentedly to be led out
and keelled. Spartan diet does not put on flesh. Still,
it should be noted that long legs, baggy clothing, and

(01:49):
scantiness or lack of underwear make people seem thinner than
they really are. Our Highlanders are conspicuously a tall race.
Out of seventy six men I have listed just as
they occurred to me, but four are below average American height,
and only two are fat. About two thirds of them
are browny or sinewy fellows of great endurance. The others

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generally are slab sided, stoop shouldered, but witty. The townsfolk
and the valley farmers, being better nourished and more observant
of the prime laws of wholesome living, are noticeably superior
in appearance, but not in stamina. Nearly all males of
the back country have a grave and deliberate bearing. They

(02:36):
travel with the long, surefooted stride of the born woodsmen,
not graceful and lithe like a moccasined Indian. Their coarse
brogns forbid it, but shambling, as if every joint had
too much play. There is nothing about them to suggest
the Swiss or Tyrolean mountaineers. Rather they resemble the Gillies

(02:56):
of the Scotch Highland. Generally they are lean, fast, sallow,
level browed, with rather high cheekbones. Gray eyes prenominate, sometimes vacuous,
but oftener, hard, searching, crafty, the feral eye of a
primitive man from infancy. These people have been schooled to

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dissimulate and hide emotion, and ordinarily their faces are as
opaque as those of veteran poker players. Many wear habitually
a sullen skowl, hateful and suspicious, which in men of
combative age, and often in the old women, is sinister
and vindictive. The smile of comfortable assurance the frank eye

(03:39):
of good fellowship are rare. Indeed, nearly all of the
young people and many of the adults, plant themselves before
a stranger and regard him with a fixed stare. Peculiarly
annoying until one realizes that they have no thought of impertinence.
Many of the women are pretty in youth, but hard
toil in house and field. Early marriage, frequent child bearing

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with shockingly poor attention and ignorance or defiance of the
plainest necessities of hygiene soon warp and age them at
thirty or thirty five. A mountain woman is apt to
have a worn and faded look, with form prematurely bent
and want wonder always bending over the hoe in the cornfield,

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and bending over the hearth as she cooks by an
open fire, or bending over her baby, or bending to
pick up for the thoutheth time the wet duds that
her lord flings on the floor as he enters from
the woods, or wonder that she soon grows short waisted
and round shouldered. The voices of the highland women, low

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toned by habit, often are singularly sweet, being pitched in
a sad musical minor key with strangers. Women are wont
to be shy, but speculative rather than timid, as they
glance betimed with a slow, long look of mild inquiry
or of general listlessness, or of unconscious and unaccountable melancholy. Many, however,

(05:09):
scrutinize a visitor calmly for minutes at a time, or
frankly measure him with the gipsy eye of Carmen. Outsiders,
judging from their fruits of labor in more favored lands,
have charged the mountaineers with indolence. It is the wrong
word shiftless. Many of them are afflicted with that malady

(05:30):
which Berry calls acute disinclination to work, but that is
not so much in their physical nature as in their
economic outlook. Rarely do we find mountaineers who loaf all
day on the floor of the doorstep, like so many
of the poor whites of the lowlands. If not laboring,
they at least must be doing something, be it no

(05:51):
more than walking ten miles to shoot a squirrel or
visit a crony. As a class, they have great and
restless physical energy. Considering the quantity and quality of what
they eat. There's no people who can beat them in
endurance of strain and privation. They are great walkers and
carriers of burdens. Before there was a tubmill in our settlement,

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one of my neighbors used to go every other week
thirteen miles to mill, carrying a two bushel sack of
corn one hundred twelve pounds, and returning with his meal
on the following day. This was done without any pack strap,
but simply shifting the load from one shoulder to the other. Betimes,

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one of our women, known as long Goody I measured
her six feet three inches. She stood, walked eighteen miles
across the Smokies into Tennessee, crossing at an elevation of
five thousand feet, merely to shop more advantageously than she
could at home. The next day, she shouldered fifty pounds
of flour and some other groceries and bore them home

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before nightfall. Uncle Jimmy Crawford, in his seventy second year,
came to join a party of us on a bear hunt.
He walked twelve miles across the mountain, carrying his equipment
in four days, ration for himself and dogs. Finding that
we had gone on ahead of him, he followed to
our camp on Siler's Bald twelve more miles, climbing another

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three thousand feet, much of it by bad trail, finished
a twenty four mile trip in seven hours, and then
wanted to turn in and help cut the night wood.
Young mountaineers afoot easily outstripped a horse on a day's
journey by road and trail in a climbing word showers
about two days out of three through the spring and summer.

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The women go about like the man, unshielded from the wet.
If you expostulate, one will laugh and reply, I ain't sugar,
no salt, nor nobody's honey. Slickers are worn only on horseback,
and two thirds of our people had no horses. A
man who was so eccentric as to carry an umbrella

(08:03):
is known to this day as umbrel John walker. In winter,
one sometimes may see adults and children going barefoot in
snow that is ankle deep. It used to be customary
in our settlement to do the morning chores barefooted in
the snow. Then, said one, our feet at tingle and burn,

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so they wouldn't get a bit cold all day when
we put our shoes on. I knew a family whose
children had no shoes all one winter, and occasionally we
had zero weather. It seems to have been common and
earlier times to go barefooted all the year. Frederick law Olmsted,
a noted writer of the Civil War, period was told

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by a squire of the Tennessee Hills that a majority
of the folks went barefoot all winter, though they had
snow much of the time four or five inches deep.
And the man said he didn't think most of the
men about here had more than one coat, and they
never wore one in winter except on holidays. That was
the healthiest way, he reckoned, just to toughen yourself and

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not wear no coat no matter how cold it was.
He didn't wear no coat. One of my neighbors and
the Smokies, never owned a coat until after his marriage,
when a friend of mine gave him one. It is
usual thing for men and boys to weigh cold trout
streams all day, come in at sunset this robe to

(09:28):
shirt and trousers, and then sit in the piercing drafts
of an open cabin, drying out before the fire. Though
the night be so cool that a stranger beside them
shivers in his dry flannels. After supper, the women, if
they have been wearing shoes, will remove them to ease
their feet, no matter if it be freezing cold, and

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the cracks in the floor may be an inch wide.
In bear hunting, our parties usually camped out about five
thousand feet above sea level. At this elevation, in the
long nights before Crittmis, the cold often was bitter, and
the wind might blow a gale. Sometimes the native hunters
would lie out in the open all night, without a

(10:08):
sign of a blanket or an axe. They would say, ah,
many's the night I've been out when the frost was
spewed up so high, measuring three or four inches with
the hand, and that right around the fire too. Cattle
hunters in the mounds never carry a blanket or a
shelter cloth, and they sleep out wherever night finds them,

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often in pouring rain or flying snow. On their arduous trips,
they find it burden enough to carry the salt for
their cattle with a frying pan, cup, corn pone, coffee,
and sow belly, all in a grain sack strapped to
the man's back. Such nurture from childhood makes white men

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as indifferent to the elements as fugens, and it makes
them anything but comfortable companions for one who has been
differently reared. During court week, when the hotels that the
county seat are overcrowded with countrymen, the luckless drummers who
happen to be there have continuous exercise in closing doors.

(11:10):
No mountaineer closes the door behind him. Winter or summer
doors are to be shut only when folks go to bed.
That is what they are for. After close study of
mountain speech, I have failed to discern that the word
draft is understood except in parts of the Virginia and
Kentucky mountains, where it means a brook. One is reminded

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of the colonial who visiting England remarked of the British people.
It is a survival of the fittest, the fittest to
exist in fog. Here, it is the fittest to survive
cold and wet and drafts. Running barefoot in the snow
is exceptional nowadays. But it is by no means the

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limit of herdiness or callosity that some of these people display.
It is not so long ago that I passed an
old and lean to of chestnut bark, far back in
the wilderness, wherein a family of Tennesseeans was spending the year.
There were three children, the eldest a lad of twelve.
The entire worldly possessions of this family could easily be

(12:15):
packed around on their backs. Poverty, however, does not account
for such manner of living. There is none so poor
in the mountains that he need rear his children in
a bark shed. It is all a matter of taste.
There is a wealthy man known to everyone around Waynesville, who,
being asked where he resided as a witness in court,

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answered three or four miles up and down Jonathan Creek.
The judge was about to find him for contempt when
it developed that the witness spoke literal truth. He lives
neither in house nor camp, but perambulates his large estate,
and when night comes, lies down wherever he may happen
to be. In winter, he has been known to go

(12:59):
where some of his pigs bedded in the woods, usurped
the middle for himself, and borrow comfort from their bodily heat.
This man is worth over one hundred thousand dollars. He
visited the World's Fair at Chicago and Saint Louis, wearing
the old long coat that serves him also as blanket,
and carrying his rations in a sack. Far from being demented,

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he is notoriously so shrewd on the stand, and so
learned in the law that he is formidable to every
attorney who cross questions him. I cite these last two
instances not merely as eccentricities of character, but as really
typical of the bodily stamina that most of the mountaineers
can display if they want to. Their smiling endurance of

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cold and wet and privation would have endeared them to
the first Napoleon, who declared that those soldiers were the
best who bivouac shelterless throughout the year. In spite of
such apparent toughness, the mountaineers are not notably healthy people.
The man who exposes himself wantonly year after year must

(14:06):
pay the piper. Sooner or later he adopts a rheumatis,
and the adoption lasts till he dies. So also in
dietary manners, the backwoodsmen, through ruthless weeding out of the
normally sensitive, have acquired a wonderful tolerance of swimming, grease,
doughy bread, and half fried cabbage. But even so they

(14:29):
are gawd by dyspepsia. This accounts in great measure for
the galantio sour disdain that mars so many continences. A
neighbor said to me of another he is a gridge
against all creation and glories in human misery, so would
anyone else who ate at the same table. Many a

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homicide in the mountains can be traced directly to bad
food and the raw whiskey taken to appease a soured stomach.
Danger in Appalachia is quick to note the high percentage
of defectives among the people. However, we should bear in
mind that in the mountains proper there are few, if any,
public refuges for this class, and that home ties are

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so powerful that mountaineers never send their fitified folks or
half wits or other unfortunates to any institution in the lowlands,
so long as it is bearable to have them around.
Such poor creatures as would be segregated in more advanced
communities far from the public eye. Here go at large

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and reproduce their kind. Extremely early marriages are tolerated, as
among all primitive people. I knew a hobbledehoy of sixteen
who married a frail tuberculosis girl of twelve, and in
the same small settlement another lad of sixteen who wedded
a girl of thirteen. In both cases the result was

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wretched beyond description. The evil consequences of inbreeding of persons
closely akin are well known to the Mountaineers, but here
knowledge is no deterrent, since whole districts are interrelated to
start with, Owing to the isolation of the clans and
their extremely limited travels, there are abundant cases like those

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caustically mentioned in King Spruce, All skeets and bushies and
married back and forth and crossways and upside down, till
every man is his own grandmother, if he only knew
enough to figure relationship. The Mountaineers are touchy on these topics,
and it is but natural that they should be so. Nevertheless,

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it is the plain duty of society to study such
conditions and apply the remedy. There was a time when
the Scottish people, to cite only one instance out of many,
were in still worse case, threatened with race degeneration, but
improved economic conditions followed. My education made them over into
one of the most vigorous of modern peoples. When I

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lived up in the Smokies, there was no doctor within
sixteen miles, and then none who had ever attended a
medical school. It was inevitable that my first aid kid
and limited knowledge of medicine should be requisitioned until I
became a sort of doctor to the settlement. My services,
being free at once, became popular, and there is no escape.

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For if I treated the smiths, let us say, and
ignored a call from their Robinson's, the slight would be
resented by all Robinson connections throughout the land. So my
normal occupations often were interrupted by such calls as these
John's lies hand, she ain't much. Can't you uns give
her some ease and powder for that hurting in her chest?

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Old uncle Bobby Tuttle's got a poone come up on
his side. Looks like he might't drop off him being
weak and right marversh and sick with a head swimming.
Ike Borgan Pringles have been a horse throwed down the cliff,
and he's a man of stone, dead right sensibly between
the shoulders. I've got a pain, something's gone wrong with

(18:15):
my stomach. I don't pear to have no strength left,
and sometimes I'm nigh suffocated. What you reckon ails me?
Come right over to missus. Foolweiler's quick. She's fell down
and busted a rib inside of her. On these errands
of mercy, I soon picked up some rules of practice
that are not laid down in the books. I learned

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to carry not only my own bandages, but my own
towels and utensils for washing and sterilizing. I kept my
mouth shut about germ theories of disease, having no troops
to enforce orders, and finding that mere advice incited downright perversity.
I administered potent drugs in person and left nothing to
be taken according to direction except placebos. Once in forgetfulness,

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I left a tablet of corrosive sublimate on the mantle
after dressing a wound, and the man of the house
told me next day that he had allowed to swallow
it and see if it wouldn't ease his headache. A
geologist and I, exploring the hills with the mountaineer, fell
into a discussion of filth, diseases, and germs, not realizing

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that we were overheard happening to pass in ant hill.
Frank remarked to me that formic acid was supposed to
be antagonistic to the germ of laziness. Instantly we heard
a ground from our woodsman. My god, I was expecting
to like a that ordinarily wounds are stanched with dusty

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cobwebs and bound up with any old rag. If infection ensues,
Providence has to take the blame. A woman gashed her
foot badly with an axe. Asked her what she did
for it. Disdainfully, she answered, tied it up in soot
and a rag and went to hoe and corn. An
injured person gets scant sympathy. If any so far as

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outward demeanor goes in public comment, the witnesses are utterly callous.
The same indifference is shown in the face of impending death.
People crowd around with no other motive, seemingly than morbid
curiosity to see a person die. I asked our local
preacher what the folks would do if a man broke
his sighs so that the bone protruded. He merely elevated

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his eyebrows and replied, we set around and sing until
he died. The mountaineer's fortitude under severe pain is heroic,
though often needless. For all minor operations, and frequently for
major ones, they obstinately refused to take an anesthetic, being
perversely suspicious of everything that they do not understand. Their own.

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Minor surgery and obstetric practice is barbarous. Proportion of the mountain.
Doctors know less about human anatomy than a butcher does
about a pig's. Sometimes its ignorance passes below ordinary common sense.
There is a doctor still practicing who, after a case
of confinement, sits beside the patient and presses hard upon

(21:18):
the hips for half an hour, explaining that it is
to push the bones back into place. Don't you know
they always come uncoupled in the socket. This, I suppose
is a limit, But there are very many practicing physicians
in the backcountry who could not name or locate the
arteries of either foot or hand to save their lives.

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It was here I first heard of tooth jumping. Let
one of my old neighbors tell it in his own way.
You take a cut nail, not one of them round
wire nails, and place its square pent up against the
ridge of the tooth, just under the edge of the gum.
Then jump the tooth out with a hammer. A man

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who knows how can jump a tooth out without it
hurtin half as bad as pullin'. But old uncle neddie
Citer went to jump one of his own teeth out
one time and missed the nail and mashed his nose
with a hammer. He had the weak trembles. I've heard
of tooth jumping, said I, and reported it to dentists
back home, and they laughed at me. Well, they needn't laugh,

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for it's so some men get to be as experienced
at it as tooth dennis are at pullin'. They cut
around the gum, and they put the nail at just
such an angle, slantin' downwards for an upper tooth, or
upwards for a lower one, and hit one lick. Will
a tooth come out at the first lick? Generally? If

(22:45):
it didn't, you might as well stick your head in
a swarm of bees and forget who you are. Our
back teeth extracted in that way, yes, sir, any kind
of tooth. I burnt my hollow teeth out with a
red hot wire. Good god, HiT's so the wired sizzle
like frying. Killed the nerve. No, but it'd sear the

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marr so wouldn't be so sensitive. Didn't hurt, eh, hurt
like hell for a moment. I held the wire one
time for Jim Bob Jim Wright, who couldn't reach the
spot for herself. I told him to hold his tongue back,
but when I touched the holler, he jumped an whooped
his tongue again the wire. The words that man used

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ain't fitty to tell. Some of the elements common in
the mountains were new to me. For instance, dew pisin
presumably the poison of some wheat which dissolved in dew.
And there's a blood through a scratch or abrasion. As
a woman described it, dew pison comes like a horizon

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an laws of mercy. How it does hurt. I soove
a briar in my heel once and then had to
hunt cows every mornin In the dew, my legs swelled
up black to clear above the knee, and doctor stitchcomb
lance the place. Seven times. I lay in a palette
on the floor for over a month. My leg like

(24:10):
to kill me. I've seen person just a lot of
sores all over as big as my hand from dupeisen.
A more mysterious disease is milk sick, which prevails in
certain restricted districts, chiefly where the cattle graze in rich
and deeply shaded coves. If not properly treated, it is

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fatal both to the cow and to any human being
who drinks her fresh milk or eats her butter. It
is not transmitted by sour milk or by buttermilk. There
is a characteristic fetter of the breath. It is said
that milk from an infected cow will not foam, and
that silver is turned black by it. Mountaineers are divided

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in opinion as to whether this disease is of vegetable
or of mineral origin. Some think it is an effervescence
from gas that settles on plants. This much is certain
that it disappears from milk sick coves when they are
cleared of timber and the sunlight let in. The prevalent
treatment is an emetic, followed by large doses of apple

(25:17):
brandy and honey than oil to open the bowels. Perhaps
the extraordinary distaste for fresh milk and butter, or the
universal suspicion of these foods that mountaineers events in so
many localities may have sprung up from experience with milk
sick cows. I have not found this malady mentioned in
any treatise on medicine. Yet it has been known from

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our earliest frontier times. Abraham Lincoln's mother died of it.
That the hill folk remain a rugged and hearted people
in spite of unsanitary conditions so gross that I can
barely hint at them. Is due chiefly to their love
of pure air and pure water. No mountain cabin needs
a window to ventile it. There are cracks and cat

(26:02):
holes everywhere, and as I have said, the doors are
always open except the night. Tight houses sheet or plastered
are universally despised, partly from inherited shiftlessness, partly for less
obvious reasons. One of Miss McGowan's characters fairly insulted the
neighborhood by building a modern house. Why lord, you look

(26:25):
a here, creed remonstrated dos probine over our question of
matching boards and battering joints. If you get your pen
so almighty tight as that you won't get no fresh air.
Man's bound to have ventilation. Of course, you can leave
the door open all the time, like we all do.
But when you're holding caught and such like, maybe you

(26:48):
want to shut that dough sometimes, And then what do
you'll get breath? To breathe? All these here glass windows
is blamed foolishness to me, if you need light, open
the dough. If somebody comes that you don't want in,
you can shut it and put up a bar. But
saw the walls full of holes and set in glass windows,

(27:08):
and any fellow that got of mind to can pick
you off with the rifle ball as easy as not
whilst you set by the fire of an evening. When
mountain people move to the lowlands and go to living
in tight framed houses, they soon deteriorate like Indians. It
is of no use to teach them to ventilate by
lowering windows from the top. That is some more blame foolishness.

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That adherence to old waves is stubborn, sullen, and perverse
to a degree that others cannot comprehend. Then two in
the lowlands they simply cannot stand the water. As Ema
Miles says, no other advantage will ever make up for
the lack of good water. There is a strong prejudice
against pumps. If a well must be dug, it is

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usually left open to the air, and the water is
reached by means of a hooked pole, which require some
skillful manipulation to prevent losing the bucket. Cisterns are considered filthy.
Water that has stood overnight is dead water. Hardly fit
to wash one's facing. The mountaineer takes the same pride
in his water supply as a rich man in his

(28:17):
wine cellar, and is in the respect of our connoisseur,
none but the purest and coldest of freestone will satisfy him. Once,
when I was staying in the lumber camp on the
Tennessee side at the top of Smoky my friend Bob
and I tramped down to the nearest town ten miles
for supplies. We did not start until after dinner, and

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intended to spend the night at a hotel. It was
a sultry day, and we arrived very thirsty. Bob took
some ice water into his mouth and instantly spat it out, exclaiming,
be damned if I'll stay here that ain't fit to drink.
I'm going back and back. He would have gone ten
miles up a hard grade at night if someone had

(29:01):
not shown us a spring. A little colony of our
Hazel Creek people took a notion to try the Georgia
cotton mills. They nearly died there from homesickness, tight houses,
and bad water. All but one family returned as soon
as they possibly could, while trying to save enough money

(29:21):
to get away. One old man said, I lied to
my God when I left the mountains and come to
these devilish cotton mills. If only he turned me into
a farment, I'd run right back tonight. Boys, I dream
I'm in a torment, And when I wake up, I
lay there and think of the spring branch running over
the root of that there poplar, And I say, could

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I get me one drink of that water, I'd be
content to lay me down and die. Poor old John
in his country, there are a hundred spring branches running
over poplar roots, But that there poplar we knew the
very one he meant, who was by the roadside. The
brooklet came from a disused steel house hidden in laurel

(30:05):
and hemlocks so dense that direct sunlight never penetrated. The glen,
cold and sparkling and crystal clear. The gushing water enticed
every wayfarer to bend and drink, whether he was thirsty
or no. John is back in his own land now,
and doubtless often goes to drink of that veritable fountain
of youth. End of section ten, read by Brye's cries

(30:30):
Ohio