13 - 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 thirteen of Our Southern Highlanders by Horace Kephart. This
LibriVox recording is in the public domain. The Mountain Dialect.
One day I handed the volume of John Fox's stories
to a neighbor and asked him to read it, being
curious to learn how those vivid pictures of mount life

(00:21):
would impress one who was born and bred in the
same atmosphere. He scanned a few lines of the dialog,
then suddenly stared at me in amazement. What's the matter
with it? I asked, wondering what he could have found
to startle him at the very beginning of a story.
Why that feller don't know how to spell? Gravely, I

(00:43):
explained that dialect must be spelled as it is pronounced,
so far as possible, or the life and savor of
it would be lost. But it was of no use.
My friend was outraged that tale teller is just making
fun of the mountain people by misspelling our talk. You
educated folks don't spell your own words the way you

(01:03):
say them. A most palpable hit, and it gave me
a new point of view to the mountaineers themselves. Their
speeches natural and proper, of course, and when they see
it bear to the spotlight, all eyes drawn toward it
by an orthography that is as odd to them as
it is to us. They are stirred to wrath, just

(01:24):
as we would be if our conversation were reported by
some Josh Billings or Artemis warn the curse of dialect
writing is I lesion. Still no one can write it
without using the apostrophe more than he likes to, For
our highland speech is excessively clipped. I'm a common directly
as acquaintance that should not be lost. We cannot visualize

(01:48):
the shambling but eager mountaineer with a sample of boar
in his hand unless the writer reports in faithfully wished
you jam in this rock for me. I hear tell
you as one of them spurts, although the hillsman save
some breath in this way. They waste a good deal
by inserting sounds where they do not belong. Sometimes it

(02:09):
is only an added consonant garden, a crossed corcus caucus,
sometimes a syllable loaferer, musicianer sudden ty. Occasionally a word
is both added to and clipped from as chiirn carrion.

(02:32):
They're fond of gray syllables. I got a mere deco keyards,
they ain't neery bity sense in it. More interesting are
substitutions of one sound for another. In mountain dialect, all
vowels may be interchanged with others. Various sounds of A
are confused with E as head, had, kim, came, careful,

(02:59):
or with I grit great rifle, riffle, with oh, pomper, topper, taper, rap,
or with you fur rather so. Any other vowel may
serve in place of E, serve, chist, upsut, tumble, any

(03:26):
other may displace I, iron, iron, each hinder, whoop or whoop.
Those sounds are more stable, but we have crop, crop, yon, cluss,
and many similar variants. Any other vowel may do for

(03:49):
you braysh or bresh, brush, chet, sitch, sure, sure mountaineers
have peculiar difficult with diphthongs, hair, hair, cheer, chair, brial,
and the host of others. The word coral is variously

(04:11):
pronounced coyel, coral or coral. Substitution of consonants is not
so common as of vowels, but most hillsman say nabel, navel, ballad, ballad, baptists,
wrench or wrench, bricky, brittle, and many say adder or

(04:35):
ardor jew do tegious, fascinator, fascinator a woman's scarf. They
never drop h nor substitute anything for it. The word
woman has suffered some strange sea changes. Most mountaineers pronounce
it correctly, but some drop the w almond. Others add

(04:59):
an womann and women, while in Mitchell County, North Carolina,
we hear the extraordinary forms wumann and dumern Bye look
at all the dumerans is a coming. On the other hand,
some words that most Americans mispronounce are always sounded correctly

(05:20):
in the Southern Highlands as new and new never do
New Creek has always given its true ee sound, never quick. Ne'er,
as we spell it in dialect stories, is simply the
right pronunciation of ne'er and nary is ne'erer h, with

(05:41):
the A turned into a short eye sound. It should
be understood that the dialect varies a good deal from
place to place, and even in the same neighborhood, we
rarely hear all families speaking it alike. Outlanders who say
to write it are prone to err by making their
character speak a too consistently. Is only in the backwoods

(06:04):
or among old people, and the pend at home women
that the dialect is used with any integrity. In railroad towns,
we hear little of it, and farmers who trade in
those towns adapt their speech somewhat to the company They
may be in. The same man at different times may
say can't and can't set and sought jest and jests

(06:27):
and just adder and ardor or after seed and seen
here and here and here are heared and heared or
heard sich and such took and took. There is no
uniformity about it. An unconscious sense of euphony seems to

(06:50):
govern the choice of hit or it there or there.
Since the Appalachian people have a mark Scotch Irish strain,
we would expect their speech to show a strong Scotch influence.
So far as vocabulary is concerned, there is really little
of it. A few words Cagy, Cadgy coggled ferment again

(07:14):
for if necessity Trollope almost EXHAUSTI list of distinct scotticisms.
The Scotch Irish, as we call them, were mainly ulstermen,
and the Ulster dialect of today bears little analogy to
that of Appalacia. Scotch influence does appear However, and one
vital characteristic of the pronunciation, with few exceptions, our Highlanders

(07:40):
sound are distinctly wherever it occurs, though they never trill it.
In the British Isles is constant. Sounding of our and
all positions is peculiar. I think to Scotland, Ireland, and
a few small districts in the northern border counties of
England with us it is general practice outside of New
England and those parts of the southern Lowlands that had

(08:01):
no flood of Celtic immigration in the eighteenth century. I
have never heard of Carolina mountaineer say Nigga or North Carolina,
though in the last word the syllable ro is often eleded.
In some mountain districts, we hear dole, door flow, low yo, kota, scase,

(08:24):
long a, pussing, but such skipping of the iris common
only where Lowland influence has crept. In much oftener the
ras drop from dare first, girl, horse, nurse, parcel, worth, vast, fust, gal,

(08:45):
hass nuts, postle wood. By way of compensation. The hillsmen
sometimes insert euphonic are word has no business, just as
many New Englanders say the idea of it throughout Apple lasha.
Such words as last, past, advantage are pronounced with the

(09:06):
same vowel sound as is heard in Man. This helps
to delimit the people, classifying them with Pennsylvanians and Westerners,
a linguistic grouping that will prove significant, and we come
to study the origin and history of this isolated race.
An editor, who had made one or two short trips
into the mountains once wrote me that he thought the

(09:29):
average mountaineer's vocabulary did not exceed three hundred words. This
may be a natural inference if one spends but a
few weeks among these people and sees them only under
the prosaic conditions of workaday life. But gain their intimacy,
and you shall find that even the illiterates among them
have a range of expression that is truly remarkable. I

(09:51):
have myself taken down from the lifts of Carolina mountaineers
some eight hundred dialectical or obsolete words, to say nothing
of the much greater number of standard English terms that
they command. Seldom is a hillbilly at loss for a word.
Lacking other means of expression, There will come spang from
his mouth a coinage of his own. Instantly he will create,

(10:15):
always from English roots, of course, new words by combination
or by turning nouns into verbs or otherwise interchanging the
parts of speech. Crudity or deficiency of the verb characterizes
the speech of all primitive peoples. In mount vernacular, many
words that serve as verbs are only nouns of action

(10:35):
or adjectives or even adverbs that barrel meet me a
month they church pit for tailbaron. Granny kept faulting us
all day? Are you fixing the ghost? Squirreling cis blouses
her waste a purpose to carry a pistol, my boy

(10:56):
Jesse book kept for the campus, bad liquor. This poke
salad eats good. I ain't going to bet it no
longer lie a bed. We can't muscle this log up.
I wouldn't pleasure them enough to say it. Josh ain't

(11:16):
much on sweetheartin'. I don't confidence them dogs much. The
creak away up there turkey tails out into numerous legal forks.
A verb will be coined from an adverb we better
get some wood better than we, or from an adjective
Watch that dog and see won't he come along? Pet him,

(11:39):
make much of him. I didn't do nary a thing
to contrary her baby that onion know strong you little
Jimmy fell down and be nastied himself to beat the devil. Conversely,
nouns are created from verbs. It don't make no differ.

(12:00):
I didn't hear no give out at meetin' announcement. You
can get you one more, gettin the wood up there.
That nantahala is a master shut in just a plumb gorge,
or from an adjective, them bugs, the little old hatefuls.
If anybody wanted a history of this county for fifty years,

(12:21):
he'd get lavish of it by reading that mind suit testimony,
or from an adverb nance took the biggest through at
meetin' shouting spell. That old lady quoted to me in
a plaintive quaver it matters not so I've been told
where the body goes when the heart grows cold. But

(12:44):
she added a person has a rather about where he'd
be put. In Mountain vernacular, the old English strong past
ten still lives in begun, drunk, halped wrung, shrunk, sprung yunk,
sung sunk swamp Hope is used both as a preter

(13:06):
right and as an infinitive. The O is long and
the L distinctly sounded by most of the people, but
elited by such as drop it from almost already self.
The l is elded from help by many who use
that form of the verb. Examples of a strong preter
ight with dialectical change of the vowel or brook, brung,

(13:31):
drap or draped, drug, friz, roke or rock raked, sant, scent, chet, shuck, shook, whooped,
long oh. The variant wop is a scottishism. Wop is
sometimes used in the present tense, but wop is more

(13:52):
common by some. The vowel of wap is sounded like
ooh in book mister Fox right whoop, which I presume
he intends for that sound. In many cases, a week
pre to write, supplants the proper strong one, dive, drive,
fit gin or give rid, riv riz writ done, run,

(14:21):
scene or seed blowed, crowed, drod, growed, node, throwed. There
are many corrupt forms of the verb, such as gwyn
for gone or going, mott for might, dim, hat, ort

(14:43):
or order, wed, weeded, war, was or were the a
as in fire, shun, showe, cotch in all tenses, or cotched,
fought or fotched, borned, herded, drimp. Peculiar adjectives are formed

(15:07):
from verbs. Chair bottoming is easy, setting down work when
my youngest was a legal sett along child interpreted as
setting along the floor. That thunderhead is a torn down
this place. Them's the travelinist hosses I ever seed, she's

(15:28):
a workin This woman Jim is a disablist one of
the family. Damn this fotch on kraut that comes in
tin cans. A verb may serve as an adverb. If
I'd have been thoughted enough, an adverb may be used
as an adjective. I hope the folks with you is

(15:50):
gaily well. An adjective can serve as an adverb. He
laughed master. Sometimes a conjunction is employed as preposition, we
have obliged to take care on him. These are not
mere blunders of individual illiterates, but usage is common throughout

(16:10):
the mountains and hence real dialect. The ancient syllabic plural
is preserved in beasties, horses, nesties, post these trousies. These
are not diminutives, and in that strange word dumberances that
I cited before, pleonasms are abundant. I done done it,

(16:35):
have done it, or did do it during the while
in this day and time, I thought it would surely
undoubtedly turn cold. A small little bitty hoole, Jane's a tolerable, big,
large fleshy woman generally usually take a dram mornings. These

(16:58):
ridges are mighte nice, straight up and down, and as
a feller said, perpendicular, everywhere in the mountains we hear
of biscuit, bread, hand, meat, rifle, gun, rock, cliff riding, critter,
col brute man, person, women, folks, preacher, man, granny, woman,

(17:19):
and neighbor. People in this category belong the famous double
barreled pronouns we all and you all in Kentucky, wihuans
and ewan's in Carolina and Tennessee. I have even heard
such locution as this, let's we uns all go over
to Urns's house. Such usages are regarded generally as mere barbarisms,

(17:43):
and so they are in English, but Miss Murphy cites
correlatives in the Romance languages French, news, Oat, Italian, noi Altrie,
Spanish no sotros. The mountain have some queer ways of
intensifying expression. I'd tell a man with the stress as

(18:07):
here indicated is simply a strong affirmative. We had one
more time, meaning arousing good time. Punt blank is a
superlative or an epithet. We just punt blank, got it
to do well, punt blank. If they ever come back again,
I'll move. A double negative is so common that it

(18:30):
may be crowded into a single word. I did it
the unthoughtless of anything I ever done in my life.
Triple negatives are easy. I ain't gotten eiry none a
mountaineer can accomplish the quadruple. That boy ain't never done
nothing nohow yes, even the quintupple. I ain't never seen

(18:53):
no men. Folks of no kind do no washing. On
the other hand, the various deliterates startle a stranger by
a glib use of some word that most of us
picked up in school or seldom use informally. I can
make one hundred pounds of pork out in that hog tutor.
It just right them clouds denote rain. She's so dilitary.

(19:21):
They stood there and cammeled about it. That exceeds the measure.
Old Tom is blind, but he can't discern when the
sun is shining. Jerry profered to fix the gun for me.
I had supposed that The words cuckoled and mooncalf had
none but literary usage in America, but we often hear

(19:43):
them in the Mountains, cuckled being employed both as verb
and as noun, and mooncalf in its baldy literal sense
that would make prosperos taunt to caliban a superlative insult.
Our highlander often speaks in elizabethan or chasse, or even
prechos Arian terms, his pronoun hit and Todate's English itself

(20:06):
being the Anglo saxon neuter of he e god. A
favorite expletive is the original of egad and goes back
of Chaucer. Acts for ask and tag for keg were
their primitive and legitimate forms, which were trace as far
as the time of Layman. When the mountain boy challenges

(20:28):
his mate hydaria, I ain't a feared. This verb and
participle use are of the same ancient and sterling rank
A four A TwixT a war, heap of folks, parrot
up and done it using for us. All these everyday
expressions of the backwoods were contemporary with the Canterbury tales.

(20:52):
A man said to me, of three of our acquaintances,
there's been a fray in the river. I don't know
how the fraction begun, but ohs feathered into Dan and
Phil feeding them lead. He meant frey in its original
sense of deadly combat, as was fitting when two men
were killed. Fraction for rupture is an archaic word, rare

(21:15):
in literature, though we find it in Troilus and Cressida
feathered into them. Where else can we hear today a
phrase that passed out of standard English. When villain is
Saltpeter supplemented the long bow, it means to bury an
arrow up to the feather, as when the old chronicler
Harrison says another arrow should have been feathered in his bowels.

(21:40):
Our schoolmaster, composing a form of oath for the new
mail carrier, remarked, let me study this thing over, then
I can exact it. A verb so rare and obsolete
that we find it in no American dictionary, but only
in Murray. A remarkable word common in the Smokies is daunt,
defined for me as mincy about eating, which is to

(22:04):
say fastidious over nice. Donci probably is a variant of daunch,
of which the Oxford New English Dictionary sites, but one
example from the Townly Mysteries of circa fourteen sixty. A
queer term used by Carolina mountaineers without the faintest notion
of its origin is doni long oh or donigal, meaning

(22:29):
as sweetheart. Its history is unique. British sailors of the
Olden time brought it to England from Spanish or Italian ports.
Donie is simply dounia or donna, a trifle anglicized and
pronunciation odd though that it should be preserved in America
by none but backwoodsmen, whose ancestors, for two centuries never

(22:52):
saw the tides. In the vocabulary of the mountaineers. I
have detected only three words of directly foreign origin. Dony
is one another's krout, which is a sole contribution to
Highland speech of those numerous Germans, mostly Pennsylvania Dutch, who
joined the first settlers in this region, and whose descendants,

(23:13):
under wondrously anglicized names, form today a considerable element of
the Highland population. The third is saschiate French chasse, used
in calling figures at the country dances. There is something
intrinsically stubbornly English in the nature of the mountaineer. He
will assimilate nothing foreign in the Smokies. The Eastern band

(23:37):
of Cherokee still holds its ancient capital on the Oconna
Lufty River, and the Whites mingle freely with these redskins,
bearing them no such despite as they do Negroes, but
eating at the same table and admitting Indians to the
white compartment of a jim crowcar. Yet the Mount Daalac
contains not one word of Cherokee origin, albeit many of

(24:00):
the whites can speak a little Cherokee. In our country.
Some Indians always appear at each term of court, and
an interpreter must be engaged. He never goes by that name,
but by the obsolete title Lincaster, or a Lynkster by
some Lingaster. Many other old fashioned terms are preserved in

(24:21):
Appalacia that sound delightfully quaint to strangers who never met them.
Outside of books. A married woman is not addressed as
missus by the mountaineers, but as mistress. When they speak
formally and miss or miss for a contraction, we will
hear an aged man referred to as old grant, sir

(24:42):
so and so back. This letter for me is a
phrase unchanged from the days before envelopes, when an address
had to be written on the back of the letter itself.
Can I borrow a race of ginger means the unground root.
You will find the word in a winter's tale damn
sorry fellers denote scabby knaves good for nothings. Sorry has

(25:06):
no entomological connection with sorrow, but literally means sorry covered
with sores, and the highlander sticks to its original import.
We have in the mountains many home born words to
fit the circumstances of backwoods life. When maize has passed
from the soft and milky stage of roasting ears but

(25:27):
is not yet hard enough for grinding, the ears are
grated into a soft meal and baked into delectable pones
called gridded bread. In some places today we still find
the ancient cern or hand mill, jocularly called an armstrong machine.
Someone who irked from turning it invented the extraordinary improvement

(25:49):
that goes by the name of pounding mill. This consists
of a pole pivoted horizontally on top of a post
and free to move up and down like the walking
beam of an old fashioned engine. To one end of
this poles attached the heavy pestle that works in a mortar.
Underneath at the other end is a box from which
water flows from an elevated spout. When the box fills,

(26:13):
it will go down, lifting the pestle, and then the
water spills out, and the pestl's weight lifts the box
back again. Who knows what a tottoc or tattle is.
I did not until my friend Dargan reported it from
the Natahala. Ben didn't get a full turn of meal,
but just a tottic. When a farmer goes to one

(26:35):
of our little tubmills mentioned in previous chapters, he leaves
a portion of the meal as toll. This he measures
out in a toll dish or tottic or tattle. The
name varies with the locality which the mill owner left
for that purpose. Tottk then is a small measure. A
turn of meal is so called because each man corn

(26:58):
is ground in turn. He waits turn. When one dines
in a cabin back in the hills, he will taste
some strange dishes that go by still stranger names. Beans
dried in the pod, then boiled whole and all are
called leather breeches. This is not slang, but the regular name.

(27:18):
Green Beans in the pods are called snaps. When shelled,
they are shuck beans. The Old Germans taught their Scottish
and English neighbors the merits of scrapple, but here it
is known as poor dew. Lath Open bread is made
from biscuit, though with soda and buttermilk in the usual way,
except that the shortening is worked in last. It is

(27:40):
then baked in flat cakes and has a peculiar property
of parting readily into thin flakes when broken. Edgewise, I
suppose that poor dew was originally poor doings, and lath
open bread denotes that it opens into lath like strips.
But etymology cannot be pushed recklessly in the mountains, and

(28:01):
I offer these clues as a mere surmise. Your hostess
proffering apple sauce will ask do you love Sas I
had to kick my chum andy shins the first time
he faced this question. It is well for a traveler
to be forewarned that the word love is commonly used
here in the sense of like or relish. If one

(28:24):
is especially fond of a certain dish, he declares that
he is a fool about it. I'm a plum fool
about pickle beans. Conversely, I ain't much of a fool
about liver. It's rather more than a hint of distaste.
I at me. A bait literally means a mere snack,
but jack cozily it may admit a hearty meal. If

(28:48):
the provender be scant, the hostess may say that's right
at a smidgeon, meaning little more than a mite. But
if plenteous, then they are riptions. To gravel taters is
to pick from a hill of new potatoes a few
of the best, then smooth back the soil without disturbing
the immature ones. If the house being disorder, it is

(29:12):
said to be all gormed or gombed up, or things
are just in a mamoch. When man is tired, he
likely will call it worried. If in a hurry, he
is in a swivet. If nervous, he has the all overs.
If declining in health, he is on the down go.
If he and his neighbor dislike each other, there is

(29:34):
a hardness between them. If they quarrel, it is a ruction,
a rippet, a jour, or an upscuttle. So be it
there no fatalities which would amount to a real fray.
A choleric or fretful person is teuchius sir vigris. Sir
vigris is a superlative of vigres here pronounced vigres with

(30:00):
long eye as a servigrous baby, a most sevigrous cusser.
Bodaciously means bodily or entirely. I'm bodaciously, ruined, seriously injured,
sim greened him out, bodaciously, to green out or sap
is to outwit. In trade, to disfurnish or discomfit means

(30:24):
to incommode. I hope it does not disconfit you very bad.
Two shan't means to shingle or trim one's hair. A
bastard is a woods colt or an outsider. Slaunchways denotes slanting,
and see godlin or sea Antigodlin is out of plum
or out of square. Factitious words, of course mere nonsense.

(30:49):
Terms like cattawampus, critter, and beast are usually restricted to
horse and mule, and brute to a bowbine. A bowl
of boar is not to be mentioned as such an
mixed company, but male brute and male hog are used
as euphemisms. A female shot is called a gilt. A
spotted animal is said to be pied, pied, and a stripe.

(31:12):
One is listed in the Smokey's. A toad is called
a frog or a toad frog, and a toadstool is
a frog stool. The woodpecker is turned around into peckerwood,
except that the giant woodpecker here still a common bird
is known as a woodcock or wood hen. What the
mountaineers called hemlock is the shrub lucatho. The hemlock tree

(31:37):
is named spruce pine, while spruce is he balsam, Balsam
itself is she balsam, Laurel is ivy, and rhododendrum is laurel.
In some places, pine needles are called twinkles, and the
locust insect is known as a feral feral. A tree
top left on the ground after logging is called the lap.

(32:02):
Sobby would mean soggy or sodden, and the verb is
to sob Evening in the mountains begins at noon instead
of at sunset. Spell is used in the sense of
while a good spell afterward and soon for early I
soon start in the morning. The hillsmen say a year

(32:24):
come June Thursday twas a week ago, and the year
nineteen and eight. Many common English words are used in
peculiar senses by the mountain folk as called for name
or mention or occasion, Clever for obliging, mimic or mock
for resemble, a power or a sight for much, rising

(32:48):
for exceeding, also for inflammation, ruin for injure, scout for elude,
stove for jabbed, surround for go around, word for phrase
take off or help yourself. Tail always means an idle
or malicious report. Some Highland usages that sound odd to

(33:11):
us are really no more than the original and literal meanings,
as budget for a bag or parcel, hampered for shackled
or jailed. When a mountain swain carries his gal to meeting,
he is not performing so great an athletic feed, as
was reported by Benjamin Franklin, who said, my father carried

(33:32):
his wife with three children to New England from Pennsylvania.
A mountaineer does not throw a stone. He flings a rock.
He sharpens tools on grinded rock or wet rock. Tomato, cabbage, molasses,
and baking powder are used always as plural mounts. Pass
me them, molasses, I'll have a few more of them. Cabbage.

(33:57):
How many bacon powders has you got. Many peculiar words
and phrases are explained in their proper place. Elsewhere in
this volume, the speech of the Southern Highlanders is alive
with quaint idioms. I swap passes, and I'll tell you
for why your name ain't much common? Who got the beat?

(34:21):
You think me of it? In the morning, I allow
to go to town tomorrow. The woman's aiming to go
to meeting. I hadn't had to plow today, but it's
come on to rain. I've laid off and laid off
to fix that fence. Reckon Pete was known to the circumstance.

(34:43):
I'll name it to nude if so be he's there.
I knowed in reason that she'd have the mullygrubs over
them doings. You can't handily blame her, Are you plumb bereft?
How come? What was this? He done me dirt? I
ain't caring which, nor whether about it? Sam went to

(35:06):
Andrews or to Murphy one. I took my foot in
my hand and lit out. He lit a rag for home.
Don't much believe the wagon'll come today? Tain't powerful long
to dinner? I don't reckon phil Zanne give it out
to each and every that Walt and Leone dore to wed?

(35:30):
How did Tom light and hitch reckon? I better get on,
come in and set can't stop long? Oh, sit down
and eat you some supper I've been. Won't you stay
the night? Looks like to me we'll have a rain
and wind and spell. No, I'll have to go down. Well,

(35:56):
come again and fix to stay a week onets come
down with me? Won't go now? I guess Tom get app,
I'll be back by in the morning. Farewell. Rather laconic,
yet on occasion when the mountaineers drawn out of his
natural reserve and allows his emotions free reign, there are

(36:18):
few educated people who can match his picturesque and pungent diction.
His trick of app phrasing is intuitive, like an artist
striking off a portrait or a caricature with a few
swift strokes. His characterization is quick and vivid. Whether he
uses quaint, obsolete English or equally delightful perversions, what he

(36:40):
says will go straight to the mark with an epigrammatic force.
I cannot quit this topic without reference to the bizarre
and original place names that sprinkle the map of Appalasia.
Many readers of John Fox's novels take for granted that
the author coinsets piquin titles as Lonesome, Troublesome, Hell for

(37:01):
Sartain and Kingdom Come. But all of these are real names.
In the Kentucky Mountains. They denote rough country, and the
country is rough, so that to a traveler it is
plain enough why travel and travail were used interchangeably in
old editions of Shakespeare. There's nothing like first ten knowledge
of mountain roads to revive sixteenth century habits of thought

(37:24):
and speech. The most scrupulous visitor will faint admit the
aptness of mountain nomenclature. Kentucky has no monopoly on grotesque
and whimsical local names. The whole Appalachian region from the
Virginias to Alabama is peppered with them. Whatever else a
Southern mountaineer may be, he is original. Elsewhere throughout America

(37:48):
we have place names imported from the Old World as
thick as weeds. But the pioneers of the Southern Hills
either forgot that there was an Old world or they
disdained to borrow from it. Personal names applied to localities
are common enough, but they are those of actual settlers,
not of notables honored from Afar, Mitchell, Lecante, Guillot were

(38:12):
not the Highlanders' names for those peaks. Often the sur
name is put to such use as Jake's Creek, Old
Nell Knob, and Big Jonathan Run. We even have Granny's
Branch and Daddy and Mommy creeks in the main. It
is characteristic of our Appalachian place names that they are

(38:33):
descriptive or commemorate some incident. The shut in is a gorge,
the suck is a whirlpool. Pinch Gut is a narrow
passage between the cliffs. Calf Killer Run is where a
meat eaten bear was using, and baron Shee Mountain was
a death ground of a she bear that had no cubs.

(38:57):
Keimer's Old Stand was a certain hunter's favorite ambush on
a runway. Meat Scaffold Branch is where venison was hung
up for jerking graining. Block Creek was a trapper's rendezvous,
and honey Camp Run is where the bee hunter state
Lick log denotes a notched log used for salting cattle.

(39:19):
Stillhouse Branch was a moonshiner's retreat. Skin Land Fork was
where the bast was peeled from young Linden's big butt
is what Westerners call a butte ballplay bottom was a
lacrosse field of the Indians. Pison gulch was infested with poison,

(39:39):
ivy or sumac. Cureless knob was a joyful place for
wild slat Amorenthus, a hell or slick or wooly head
or yellow patch is a thicket of laurel or rhododendron,
impassable save where the bears have bored out trails. The
quality of the raw backwoodsmen are printed from untouched negatives

(40:04):
in the names he has left upon the map. His
literalness shows in black rock, standing stone, sharp top, twenty mile,
naked place, the pocket, tumbling creek, and in the endless
designations taken from trees, plants, minerals, or animals noted on
the spot. Incidents of his lonely life are signalized in

(40:28):
dust camp, run, mad sheep, mountain, dog, slaughter, creek, drowning creek,
burnt cabin, branch, broken leg, raw dough, burnt pone, sandy mush,
and one hundred others. His contentious spirit blazes forth in
fighting creek, shooting, creek, gougei, vengeance, four killer, and disputanta.

(40:56):
Sometimes even his superstitions are commemorated. County Kentucky is a
range of hills bearing the singular name of Woof for Larry.
A party of hunters, so the legend goes, had encamped
for the night in the shelter of a bluff. They
were startled from sleep by a loud rumble, as of
some wagon hurrying along the pathless ridge. And they heard

(41:19):
a voice shouting, woof for Lari, whoof for Lari? The
hills would return no echo for the cryers from a
riotous haunt. A sardonic humor, sometimes smudged with that touch
of grossness in our English race, characterizes many of the
backwoods place names. In the Mounds of Old Virginia, we

(41:40):
have dry tripe, settlement and jerkham tight. In West Virginia
are take in creek, get in run, seldom seen, hollow,
od buster, knob, shabby room, and stretch your neck. North
Carolina has its shoe bird Mountain, big Bugaboo creek, weary

(42:02):
hot frog, level, shake a rag, and the chunky gal.
In Eastern Tennessee are no time settlement and no business knob,
with creeks known as big silk Sue go Forth, and
how come You. Georgia has produced Scataway, Two Nigh Long Nose,

(42:24):
Dug Down, Silly Cook, Turkey Trot, Broke Jug Creek, and
terr Breeches Ridge, allowing some license for the mountaineers irreverence,
his whimsical fancies, and his scorn of sentimentalism. It must
be said that his descriptive terms are usually opposite and
sometimes felicitous. Often he is poetically imaginative, occasionally romantic, and

(42:50):
generally picturesque. Roan Mountain, Grandfather, the lone Bald, Craggy Dome,
the Black Brothers, Harry Bear, the Balsam Cone, Sunset Mountain,
the Little Snowbird are names that linger lovingly in one's memory.
The writer recalls with pleasure not only the features, but

(43:12):
the mere titles of that superb landscape that he shared
with the wild creatures and a few woodsmen when living
far up on the divide of the Great Smoky Mountains.
Immediately below his cabin were the defeat and desolation branches
of Bone Valley, with Hazel Creek meandering to the Little Tennessee, Chiola, Telulah, Santitla,

(43:37):
the Tucka Sig, and the Nantahala Valley of the noonday
sun flow through gorges, overlooked by the Wachecha, the Ylaka,
and the Kawee Ranges, Teleco Wahaia, the Standing Indian and
the Tusketee Sonoris name sees which our pioneers had the

(43:59):
good sense to it. From the Aborigines to the east
were a cold spring knob, the myri ridge, Siler's bald,
Klingman's dome, and the great peaks at the head of
the Okana Lufty. On the west rose briar knob, laurel top, thunderhead, blockhouse,
the fodderstack, and various balds of the Yunakas guarding Hawassi.

(44:25):
To the northward were Cade's Cove and the Vale of Takalichi,
with Chihawe in the near distance, and the Appalachian Valley
stretching beyond our ramparts to where the far Cumberlands marked
an ever blue horizon. What mattered that the plenteous roughs
about us were branded with rude or opprobrious names ription

(44:47):
thicket Dog, hobble Ridge, the rough arm, bare wallow, wooly Ridge,
roaring Fork, Huggin's Hell, the Devil's race path, his dan,
his courthouse, and other playgrounds of old nick. They too
were well and fitly named, and of Section thirteen read

(45:08):
by Bry's crys Ohio