August 18, 2025 • 27 mins
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.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Section seventeen of Our Southern Highlanders by Horace Keppart. This
libovox recording is in the public domain, chapter seventeen, when
the Sleeper wakes. The Southern Mountaineers are pre eminently a
rural folk. When the twentieth century opened, only four percent
(00:21):
of them dwelt in cities of eight thousand inhabitants and upwards.
There were but seven such cities in all Appalachia, a
region larger than England and Scotland combined, and these owed
their development to outside influences. Only seventy seven out of
one hundred eighty six mountain counties had towns of one
thousand and upwards. Our Highlanders are the most homogeneous people
(00:46):
in the United States. In nineteen hundred, out of a
total population of three million, thirty nine thousand, eight hundred
thirty five, there were only eighteen thousand, six hundred seventeen
of foreign birth. This includes the cities and industrial camps.
Back in the mountains, a man using any other tongue
than English, or speaking broken English was regarded as a freak.
(01:10):
Nine mountain counties of Virginia, four of West Virginia, fifteen
of Kentucky, ten of Tennessee, nine of North Carolina, eight
of Georgia, two of Alabama, and one of South Carolina
had less than ten foreign born residents each, three of
them had none at all. Compare the North Atlantic states
(01:31):
in this same census year, fifty seven percent of their
people lived in cities of eight thousand and upwards. As
for foreigners, the one city of Fall River, Massachusetts, with
one hundred four thousand, eight hundred and sixty three inhabitants,
had fifty thousand, forty two of foreign birth. The mountains
(01:51):
proper or free not only from foreigners, but from negroes
as well. There are many blacks in the larger valleys
and towns, but throughout most of our appalasia the population
is almost exclusively white. In nineteen hundred, Jackson County, Kentucky,
the saying that sent every one of its sons into
the Union Army who could bear arms, had only nineteen
(02:13):
negroes among ten thousand, five hundred and forty two whites.
Johnson County, Kentucky only one black resident among thirteen thousand,
seven hundred and twenty nine whites. Dickinson County, Virginia not
a single negro within its borders. In many mountain settlements,
negroes are not allowed to tarry. It has been assumed
(02:35):
that this prejudice against colored folk had its origin far
back in the time when poor whites found themselves thrust
aside by competition with slave labor. This is an error.
Our mountaineers never had to compete with slavery. Few of
them knew anything about it except from hearsay. They're just
like of negroes. Is simply an instinctive racial antipathy, plus
(02:58):
a contempt for anyone who submits to servile conditions. A
neighbor in the smoky said to me, I believe in
treating nigger square. The Bible says they're human leastway some
says it does, and so there or to be a
place for them. But it's someplace else, not around me.
(03:18):
That is the whole thing in a nutshell. Here, then,
is Appalasia, one of the great landlocked areas of the globe,
more English and speech than Britain itself, more American by
blood than any other part of America, encompassed by a
high tension civilization, yet less affected by day to day
modern ideas, less cognizant of modern progress than any other
(03:42):
part of the English speaking world. Of course, that's an anomaly.
Cannot continue. Commercialism has discovered the mountains at last, and
no sentiment, or ever honest, whoever hallowed, can keep it out.
The transformation is swift. Suddenly the Mountaineers. Awakened from his
eighteenth century bed by the blare of steam whistles and
(04:04):
the boom of dynamite, he sees his forest leveled and
whisked away, his rivers dammed by concrete walls, and shot
into turbines that outpower all the horses in Appalachia. He
is dazed by electric lights, non plussed by speaking wires,
awed by vast transfers of property, and sensed by rude demands.
(04:27):
Aroused now and wide eyed, he realizes with sinking heart
that here is a sudden end of that old dispensation
under which he and his ancestors were born, the beginning
of a new order that heeds him and his neighbors
not a wit. All this insults his conservatism. The old
(04:47):
way was the established order of the universe. To change
it is fairly impious. What is the good of all
this fuss and fury, that fifty story building that tell
about in their big city What is it but a
another tower of babble. And the silly, stuck up strangers
who brag and brag about modern improvements. What are they?
(05:08):
Under their fine manners and fine clothes, hirelings, all shrewdly,
he observes them in their relations to each other. Each
man is some man's servant, Every soul is by some
other's presence, quite discrowned. Proudly, he contrasts his ragedself, he
who never has acknowledged a superior, never has taken or
(05:31):
order from living man, save as a patriot in time
of war, And he turns upon his heel Yet before
he can fairly credit it as a reality, the lands
around his own home are bought up by corporations. All
about him, slash, crash, go the devastating forces. His old
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neighbors vanish, New and unwelcome ones swarm in. He is crowded,
but ignored, his hard earned patrimonies, robbed of all that
made it precious, It's homelike, seclusion, independence, dignity. He sells
out and moves away to some uninvaded place where he
will not be bothered. I don't like these improvements, said
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the old mountaineer to me. Some call them progress and
says they put money to circulating. So they do, but
who gets it. There's a class of highlanders, more sanguine,
more adaptable, that welcomes all outsiders who come with skill
and capital to develop their country. Many of these are
(06:35):
shrewd traders in merchandise or in real estate, or they
are capable foremen who can handle native labor much better
than any strangers could. Such men naturally profit by the change. Others,
deluded by what seems easy money, sell their little home
seats for just enough cash to set them up as
laborers in town or camp. Being untrained to any trade,
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they can get only the lowest wages, which are quickly
dissipated in rent and in foods that formerly they raise
for themselves. Unused to continuous labor, they irk under its discipline,
drop out, and fall into desultory habits. Meantime, false ambitions arise,
especially among the women folk. Store credit soon runs such
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a family and death. When I was a young man,
said one of my neighbors. The traders never thought of
bringing meal in here. If a man run out of
meal while he was out, and he had lived on
taters or something else. Nowadays we dress better and live better.
But some other fellow alers has his hands in our pockets,
(07:44):
then it is goodbye to the old independence. That may
such characters, manly and meshed in obligations that they cannot meet,
they struggle vainly, brood hopelessly, and lose their dearest of
all possessions. Their self respect is literal held to a mountaineer,
and when it is forced upon him, he turns into
(08:05):
a mean, underhanded, slinking fellow, easily tempted into crime. The
curse of our invading civilization is that its vanguard is
composed of men who care nothing for the welfare of
the people they dispossess. A northern lumberman admitted to me,
with frankness unusual in his class, that all we want
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here is to get the most we can out of
this country as quick as we can, and then get out.
This is all we can expect of those who exploit
raw materials, or of manufacturers that employ only cheap labor.
Until we have industries at the man's skilled workmen, and
until manual training schools are established in the mountains, we
(08:47):
may look for deterioration rather than betterment. Of those highlanders
who lead their firms. All who know the mountaineers intimately
have observed that the sudden inroad of commercialism has a
bad effect upon them. As President Frost says, ruthless change
is knocking at the door of every mountain cabin. The
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jackals of civilization have already abused the confidence of many
a highland home. The lumber, coal, and mineral wealth of
the mountains is to be possessed, and the unprincipled vanguard
of commercialism can easily depatch a simple people. The question
is whether the mountain people can be enlightened and guided
so that they can have a part in the development
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of their own country, or whether they must give place
to foreigners and melt away like so many Indians. It
is easy to say that the fittest will survive, but
the fittest for what Miss Miles answers. I have heard
it said that civilization, when it touches the people of
the backwoods, acts as a useful precipitate to thus sending
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the dregs to the bottom. As a matter of fact,
it is only the shrewder and more determined, not the truly fit,
that survived the struggle. Among these very submerged ones, reduced
to dependence on an alien people. There are thousands who
inherit the skill of their forefathers, who fashion their own locks,
musical instruments, and guns. And these very women who are
(10:15):
breaking their health and spirit over a thankless tub of SuDS,
ought surely to turn their talents to better account. Ought
to be designing and weaving coverlets and Roman striped drugs,
or piecing the quilt patterns now so popular. Need these
razors be used to cut grindstones. Must, as free folk,
who are in many ways the truest Americans of America,
(10:38):
be brought under the yoke of caste division, to the
degradation of all their finer qualities, merely for lack of
the right work to do. There are some who would
have it so, who would calmly write for these our
own kindred, as for the Indians, for runt their day
is pasted in the History of Southern Literature, written all
(11:00):
long ago by professor in the University of Virginia, A
sketch of Miss Murphrey's work closes with these words. There
at Beersheba Springs, Tennessee, it was that she first studied
the curious type of humanity, The Tennessee Mountaineer, of people
so ignorant, so superstitious, so far behind the world of today,
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as to excite wonder and even pity in all who
see them. She is telling the story of a people who,
in these opening years of the twentieth century, wander on
through their limited range of life, much as their ancestors
for generations have wandered. They too, will sometimes vanish, the
sooner the better. One cannot read such a sentiment without
(11:45):
wonder and even pity for the ignorance of history and
of human nature that it discloses. It is the case
of our mountaineer so much worse than that of the
Scottish Highlanders of two centuries ago. We know that those
Scotchmen did not vanish the quicker the better. What were
they before civilization reached them? Let us open the ready
(12:06):
pages of Macauley. It is not easy for a modern
Englishman to believe that, in the time of his great grandfathers,
Saint James Street had as little connection with the Grampians
as with the Andes. Yet so it was in the
south of our islands. Scarcely anything was known about the
Celtic part of Scotland, and what was known, excited no
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feeling but contempt and loathing. It is not strange that
the wild Scotch, as they were sometimes called, should, in
the seventeenth century have been considered by the Saxons as
mere savages. But it is surely strange that, considered as
savages they should not have been objects of interest and curiosity.
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The English were then abundantly inquisitive about the manners of
rude nations separated from our island by great continents and oceans.
Numerous books were printed describing the laws, the superstitions, the cabins,
the repasts, the dresses, the marriages, the funerals of Laplanders
and Hottentots, Mohawks and Malays. The plays and poems of
(13:13):
that age are full of allusions to the usages of
the black men of Africa and the Red men of America.
The only barbarian about whom there was no wish to
have any information was the Highlander. While the old Gaelic
institutions were in full vigor, no account of them was
given by any observer qualified to judge of them fairly.
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Had such an observer studied the character of the Highlanders,
he would doubtless have found in it closely intermingled the
good and the bad qualities of an uncivilized nation. He
would have found that the people had no love for
their country or for their king, that they had no
attachment to any commonwealth larger than the clan, or to
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any magistrates superior to the chief. He would have found
that life was governed by a code of morality and
honor widely different from that which is established in peaceful
and prosperous societies. He would have learned that a stab
in the back or a shot from behind a fragment
of rock were approved modes of taking satisfaction for insults.
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He would have heard men relate boastfully how they or
their fathers had wrecked on hereditary enemies in a neighboring valley,
such vengeance as would have made old soldiers of the
Thirty Years War shudder. He would have found that robbery
was held to be a calling not merely innocent, but honorable.
He would have seen wherever he turned that dislike of
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steady industry, and that disposition to throw on the weaker
sex the heaviest part of manual labor, which are characteristic
of savages. He would have been struck by the spectacle
of athletic men basking in the sun, angling for salmon,
or taking aim at grouse, while their aged mothers, their
pregnant wives, their tender daughters were reaping their scanty harvest
(15:04):
of oats. Nor did the women repine at their hard lot.
In their view, was quite fit that a man, especially
if he assumed the aristocratic title of dony wassel and
adorned his bonnet with the eagle's feather, should take his ease,
except when he was fighting, hunting, or marauding. To mention
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the name of such a man in connection with commerce
or with any mechanical art was an insult. Agriculture was
indeed less despised, Yet a high born warrior was much more,
becomingly employed in plundering the land of others and in
tilling his own. The religion of the greater part of
the Highlands was a rude mixture of popery and paganism.
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The symbol of redemption was associated with heath and sacrifices
and incantations. Baptized men poured libations of ale on one
damon and set out offerings of milk for another. Seers
wrapped themselves up in bulls hides, and awaited in that
vesture the inspiration which was to reveal the future. Even
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among those minstrels and genealogists whose hereditary vocation was to
preserve the memory of past events, an enquiry would have
found very few who could read. In truth. He might
easily have journeyed from sea to sea without discovering a
page of Gaelic printed or written. The price which he
would have had to pay for his knowledge of the
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country would have been heavy. He would have had to
endure hardships as great as if he had sojourned among
the Eskimox or the Samoiods. Here and there, indeed at
the castle of some great lord who had a seat
in Parliament and Privy Council, and who was accustomed to
pass a large part of his life in the cities
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of the south, might have been found wigs and embroidered coats,
plate and fine linen lace, in jewels, French dishes and
French wines. But in general the traveler would have been
forced to content himself with very different quarters. In many dwellings,
the furniture, the food, the clothing, nay, the very hair
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and skin of his hosts would have put his philosophy
to the proof. His lodging would sometimes have been in
a hut of which every milk would have swarmed with vermin.
He would have inhaled an atmosphere thick with peat, smoke,
and foul with a hundred exhalations at supper grain fit.
Only four horses would have been set before him, accompanied
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with a cake of blood drawn from living cows. Some
of the company with whom he would have feasted would
have been covered with cutaneous eruptions, and others would have
been smeared with tar like sheep. His couch would have
been the bare earth, dry or wet as the weather
might be, and from that couch would have risen half
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poisoned with stench, half blind with the reek of turf,
and half mad with the itch. This is not an
attractive picture, and yet an enlightened and dispassionate observer would
have found in their character and manners of this rude
people something which might well excite admiration and a good hope.
(18:19):
Their courage was what great exploits achieved in all the
four quarters of the globe have since proved it to
be their intense attachment to their own tribe and to
their own patriarch. Though politically a great evil partook of
the nature of virtue. The sentiment was misdirected and ill regulated,
but still it was heroic. There must be some elevation
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of soul in a man who loves the society of
which he is a member, and the leader whom he follows,
with a love stronger than the love of life. It
was true that the highlander had few scruples about shedding
the blood of an enemy. But it was not less
true that he had high notions of the duty of
observing faith to allies and hospitality to guests. It was
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true that his predatory habits were most pernicious to the commonwealth.
Yet those airred greatly who imagine that he bore any
resemblance to villains, who, in rich and well governed communities
lived by stealing. When he drove before him the herds
of lowland farmers up the pass which led to his
native glen, he no more considered himself as a thief
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than the Raleighs and Drakes considered themselves as these when
they divided the cargoes of Spanish galleons. He was a warrior,
seizing lawful prize of war, a war never once intermitted
during the thirty five generations which had passed away since
the Teutonic invaders had driven the children of the soil
to the mountains. His inordinate pride of birth and his
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contempt for labor and trade were indeed great weaknesses, and
had done far more than the inclemency of the air
and the sterility of the soil to keep his country
poor and rude. Yet even here there was some compensation.
It must, in fairness be acknowledged that the patrician virtues
were not less widely diffused among the population of the
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Highlands than the patrician vices. As there were no other
part of the island where men sordidly clothed, lodged, and fed,
indulged themselves to such a degree in the idle, sauntering
habits of an aristocracy. So there is no other part
of the island where such men had in such a
degree the better qualities of an aristocracy, grace and dignity
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of manner, self respect, and that noble sensibility which makes
dishonor more terrible than death. A gentleman of sky or lockerber,
whose clothes were begrined with the accumulated filth of years,
and whose hovels smelt worse than an English Hogstye would
often do the honors of that hobble with a lofty
(21:00):
courtesy worthy of the splendid circle of Versailles. Though he
had as little book learning as the most stupid plowboys
of England, it would have been a great error to
put him in the same intellectual rank with such plowboys.
It is indeed only by reading that men can become
profoundly acquainted with any science. But the arts of poetry
(21:21):
and rhetoric may be carried near to absolute perfection, and
may exercise a mighty influence on the public mind in
an age which books are wholly or almost wholly unknown.
So too, in the rudest communities of Appalacia, among the
most trifling and unmral natives of this region, among the
illiterate and hide bound, there still as much to excite
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admiration and good hope. I have not shrunk from telling
the truth about these people, even when it was far
from pleasant. But I would have preserved strict silence had
I not seen in the most backward of them certain
sterling qualities of manliness that our nation can ill afford
to waste. It is the truth as old as a
(22:04):
human race, that savageries may coexist with admirable qualities of
head and heart. The only people who can consistently despair
of the future for even the lowest of our mountaineers,
are those who deny evolution, and who believe, with Archbishop Usher,
that man was created perfect. At nine am on the
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twenty first of October in the year BC four thousand
and four, let us remember, sir and madame, that we
ourselves are descended from white barbarians, from William the conquer
You very well how many other ancestors of yours were
walking about England and elsewhere at the time of William
(22:48):
untold thousands of them were just such people as you
can find today brawling in some mountain steelhouse. Unless there
has been a deal of incest somewhere along your line,
and you have more of their blood in your veins
than you have of the conquerors, who, by the way,
could he be reincarnated, would not be tolerated in your
(23:09):
drawing room for half an hour. I may have made
the point to brutally plain, but if it sinks through
the smug self complacency of those who do not belong
to the masses, who act as though civilization and morals
and good manners were entailed to them through a mere
dozen or so of selected ancestors. I remain unrepentant and unashamed.
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Let us thank whatever gods there be, that it is
not merely thou and I, our few friends and next
of kin, but all humanity that scientific faith embraces and
will sustain. People who have been among their Southern Mountaineers testify,
says mister Fox, that as a race, they are proud, sensitive, hospitable, kindly,
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obliging in an unreckoning 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 Southern Mountains
a storehouse of patriotism in themselves. They are an important
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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, or as the heathen
to whom we give millions. President Frost, a Bria College
who has worked among these people for nearly lifetime and
has helped educate their young folks by thousands, says it
(24:40):
does once hard good to help a young Lincoln who
comes walking in perhaps a three days journey on foot,
with a few hard earned dollars in his pocket and
a great eagerness for the education. He can so faintly comprehend.
Scores of our young people see their first railroad train
at Borea, and it is a joy to welcome. The
(25:00):
mountain girl comes back after having taught her first school,
bringing the money to pay her debts and buy her
first comfortable outfit, including rubbers and suitable underclothing, and perhaps
bringing with her a younger sister. Such a girl exerts
a great influence in her school and mountain home. An
enthusiastic mountaineer described an example in this wise, I tell
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you it takes a mighty resolute gale to do what
that there gal had done. She got a reckon about
the toughest district in the county, which is saying a
good deal. And then for Borden Place, well, there weren't
much choice. There was one house with one room, but
she kept right on, and you would have thought she
(25:45):
was having the finest kind of time to look at her.
And then the last day, when they were saying their
pieces and such, some sorry fellas come in there full
of moonshine and shot their revolvers. I'm telling you it
takes a mighty resume. The great need of our mountaineers
today is trained leaders of their own. The future of
(26:06):
Appalachi allignes mostly in the hands of those resolute Native
boys and girls who win the education fitting them for
such leadership. Here is where the nation at large is
summoned by a solemn duty, and it should act quickly,
because commercialism exploits and debauches quickly. But the schools needed
here are not ordinary graded schools. It should be vocational
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schools that will turn out good farmers, good mechanics, good housewives. Meantime,
let a model farm be established in every mountain county
showing how to get the most out of mountain land.
Such object lessons would speedily work in economic revolution. It
is an economic problem fundamentally that the mountaineer has to face.
(26:52):
The end end of section seventeen read by Bryce chrys Ohio.
End of Our Our Southern Highlanders by Horace Keppart
Section seventeen of Our Southern Highlanders by Horace Keppart. This
libovox recording is in the public domain, chapter seventeen, when
the Sleeper wakes. The Southern Mountaineers are pre eminently a
rural folk. When the twentieth century opened, only four percent
(00:21):
of them dwelt in cities of eight thousand inhabitants and upwards.
There were but seven such cities in all Appalachia, a
region larger than England and Scotland combined, and these owed
their development to outside influences. Only seventy seven out of
one hundred eighty six mountain counties had towns of one
thousand and upwards. Our Highlanders are the most homogeneous people
(00:46):
in the United States. In nineteen hundred, out of a
total population of three million, thirty nine thousand, eight hundred
thirty five, there were only eighteen thousand, six hundred seventeen
of foreign birth. This includes the cities and industrial camps.
Back in the mountains, a man using any other tongue
than English, or speaking broken English was regarded as a freak.
(01:10):
Nine mountain counties of Virginia, four of West Virginia, fifteen
of Kentucky, ten of Tennessee, nine of North Carolina, eight
of Georgia, two of Alabama, and one of South Carolina
had less than ten foreign born residents each, three of
them had none at all. Compare the North Atlantic states
(01:31):
in this same census year, fifty seven percent of their
people lived in cities of eight thousand and upwards. As
for foreigners, the one city of Fall River, Massachusetts, with
one hundred four thousand, eight hundred and sixty three inhabitants,
had fifty thousand, forty two of foreign birth. The mountains
(01:51):
proper or free not only from foreigners, but from negroes
as well. There are many blacks in the larger valleys
and towns, but throughout most of our appalasia the population
is almost exclusively white. In nineteen hundred, Jackson County, Kentucky,
the saying that sent every one of its sons into
the Union Army who could bear arms, had only nineteen
(02:13):
negroes among ten thousand, five hundred and forty two whites.
Johnson County, Kentucky only one black resident among thirteen thousand,
seven hundred and twenty nine whites. Dickinson County, Virginia not
a single negro within its borders. In many mountain settlements,
negroes are not allowed to tarry. It has been assumed
(02:35):
that this prejudice against colored folk had its origin far
back in the time when poor whites found themselves thrust
aside by competition with slave labor. This is an error.
Our mountaineers never had to compete with slavery. Few of
them knew anything about it except from hearsay. They're just
like of negroes. Is simply an instinctive racial antipathy, plus
(02:58):
a contempt for anyone who submits to servile conditions. A
neighbor in the smoky said to me, I believe in
treating nigger square. The Bible says they're human leastway some
says it does, and so there or to be a
place for them. But it's someplace else, not around me.
(03:18):
That is the whole thing in a nutshell. Here, then,
is Appalasia, one of the great landlocked areas of the globe,
more English and speech than Britain itself, more American by
blood than any other part of America, encompassed by a
high tension civilization, yet less affected by day to day
modern ideas, less cognizant of modern progress than any other
(03:42):
part of the English speaking world. Of course, that's an anomaly.
Cannot continue. Commercialism has discovered the mountains at last, and
no sentiment, or ever honest, whoever hallowed, can keep it out.
The transformation is swift. Suddenly the Mountaineers. Awakened from his
eighteenth century bed by the blare of steam whistles and
(04:04):
the boom of dynamite, he sees his forest leveled and
whisked away, his rivers dammed by concrete walls, and shot
into turbines that outpower all the horses in Appalachia. He
is dazed by electric lights, non plussed by speaking wires,
awed by vast transfers of property, and sensed by rude demands.
(04:27):
Aroused now and wide eyed, he realizes with sinking heart
that here is a sudden end of that old dispensation
under which he and his ancestors were born, the beginning
of a new order that heeds him and his neighbors
not a wit. All this insults his conservatism. The old
(04:47):
way was the established order of the universe. To change
it is fairly impious. What is the good of all
this fuss and fury, that fifty story building that tell
about in their big city What is it but a
another tower of babble. And the silly, stuck up strangers
who brag and brag about modern improvements. What are they?
(05:08):
Under their fine manners and fine clothes, hirelings, all shrewdly,
he observes them in their relations to each other. Each
man is some man's servant, Every soul is by some
other's presence, quite discrowned. Proudly, he contrasts his ragedself, he
who never has acknowledged a superior, never has taken or
(05:31):
order from living man, save as a patriot in time
of war, And he turns upon his heel Yet before
he can fairly credit it as a reality, the lands
around his own home are bought up by corporations. All
about him, slash, crash, go the devastating forces. His old
(05:51):
neighbors vanish, New and unwelcome ones swarm in. He is crowded,
but ignored, his hard earned patrimonies, robbed of all that
made it precious, It's homelike, seclusion, independence, dignity. He sells
out and moves away to some uninvaded place where he
will not be bothered. I don't like these improvements, said
(06:14):
the old mountaineer to me. Some call them progress and
says they put money to circulating. So they do, but
who gets it. There's a class of highlanders, more sanguine,
more adaptable, that welcomes all outsiders who come with skill
and capital to develop their country. Many of these are
(06:35):
shrewd traders in merchandise or in real estate, or they
are capable foremen who can handle native labor much better
than any strangers could. Such men naturally profit by the change. Others,
deluded by what seems easy money, sell their little home
seats for just enough cash to set them up as
laborers in town or camp. Being untrained to any trade,
(06:59):
they can get only the lowest wages, which are quickly
dissipated in rent and in foods that formerly they raise
for themselves. Unused to continuous labor, they irk under its discipline,
drop out, and fall into desultory habits. Meantime, false ambitions arise,
especially among the women folk. Store credit soon runs such
(07:22):
a family and death. When I was a young man,
said one of my neighbors. The traders never thought of
bringing meal in here. If a man run out of
meal while he was out, and he had lived on
taters or something else. Nowadays we dress better and live better.
But some other fellow alers has his hands in our pockets,
(07:44):
then it is goodbye to the old independence. That may
such characters, manly and meshed in obligations that they cannot meet,
they struggle vainly, brood hopelessly, and lose their dearest of
all possessions. Their self respect is literal held to a mountaineer,
and when it is forced upon him, he turns into
(08:05):
a mean, underhanded, slinking fellow, easily tempted into crime. The
curse of our invading civilization is that its vanguard is
composed of men who care nothing for the welfare of
the people they dispossess. A northern lumberman admitted to me,
with frankness unusual in his class, that all we want
(08:26):
here is to get the most we can out of
this country as quick as we can, and then get out.
This is all we can expect of those who exploit
raw materials, or of manufacturers that employ only cheap labor.
Until we have industries at the man's skilled workmen, and
until manual training schools are established in the mountains, we
(08:47):
may look for deterioration rather than betterment. Of those highlanders
who lead their firms. All who know the mountaineers intimately
have observed that the sudden inroad of commercialism has a
bad effect upon them. As President Frost says, ruthless change
is knocking at the door of every mountain cabin. The
(09:07):
jackals of civilization have already abused the confidence of many
a highland home. The lumber, coal, and mineral wealth of
the mountains is to be possessed, and the unprincipled vanguard
of commercialism can easily depatch a simple people. The question
is whether the mountain people can be enlightened and guided
so that they can have a part in the development
(09:29):
of their own country, or whether they must give place
to foreigners and melt away like so many Indians. It
is easy to say that the fittest will survive, but
the fittest for what Miss Miles answers. I have heard
it said that civilization, when it touches the people of
the backwoods, acts as a useful precipitate to thus sending
(09:51):
the dregs to the bottom. As a matter of fact,
it is only the shrewder and more determined, not the truly fit,
that survived the struggle. Among these very submerged ones, reduced
to dependence on an alien people. There are thousands who
inherit the skill of their forefathers, who fashion their own locks,
musical instruments, and guns. And these very women who are
(10:15):
breaking their health and spirit over a thankless tub of SuDS,
ought surely to turn their talents to better account. Ought
to be designing and weaving coverlets and Roman striped drugs,
or piecing the quilt patterns now so popular. Need these
razors be used to cut grindstones. Must, as free folk,
who are in many ways the truest Americans of America,
(10:38):
be brought under the yoke of caste division, to the
degradation of all their finer qualities, merely for lack of
the right work to do. There are some who would
have it so, who would calmly write for these our
own kindred, as for the Indians, for runt their day
is pasted in the History of Southern Literature, written all
(11:00):
long ago by professor in the University of Virginia, A
sketch of Miss Murphrey's work closes with these words. There
at Beersheba Springs, Tennessee, it was that she first studied
the curious type of humanity, The Tennessee Mountaineer, of people
so ignorant, so superstitious, so far behind the world of today,
(11:22):
as to excite wonder and even pity in all who
see them. She is telling the story of a people who,
in these opening years of the twentieth century, wander on
through their limited range of life, much as their ancestors
for generations have wandered. They too, will sometimes vanish, the
sooner the better. One cannot read such a sentiment without
(11:45):
wonder and even pity for the ignorance of history and
of human nature that it discloses. It is the case
of our mountaineer so much worse than that of the
Scottish Highlanders of two centuries ago. We know that those
Scotchmen did not vanish the quicker the better. What were
they before civilization reached them? Let us open the ready
(12:06):
pages of Macauley. It is not easy for a modern
Englishman to believe that, in the time of his great grandfathers,
Saint James Street had as little connection with the Grampians
as with the Andes. Yet so it was in the
south of our islands. Scarcely anything was known about the
Celtic part of Scotland, and what was known, excited no
(12:29):
feeling but contempt and loathing. It is not strange that
the wild Scotch, as they were sometimes called, should, in
the seventeenth century have been considered by the Saxons as
mere savages. But it is surely strange that, considered as
savages they should not have been objects of interest and curiosity.
(12:50):
The English were then abundantly inquisitive about the manners of
rude nations separated from our island by great continents and oceans.
Numerous books were printed describing the laws, the superstitions, the cabins,
the repasts, the dresses, the marriages, the funerals of Laplanders
and Hottentots, Mohawks and Malays. The plays and poems of
(13:13):
that age are full of allusions to the usages of
the black men of Africa and the Red men of America.
The only barbarian about whom there was no wish to
have any information was the Highlander. While the old Gaelic
institutions were in full vigor, no account of them was
given by any observer qualified to judge of them fairly.
(13:35):
Had such an observer studied the character of the Highlanders,
he would doubtless have found in it closely intermingled the
good and the bad qualities of an uncivilized nation. He
would have found that the people had no love for
their country or for their king, that they had no
attachment to any commonwealth larger than the clan, or to
(13:56):
any magistrates superior to the chief. He would have found
that life was governed by a code of morality and
honor widely different from that which is established in peaceful
and prosperous societies. He would have learned that a stab
in the back or a shot from behind a fragment
of rock were approved modes of taking satisfaction for insults.
(14:18):
He would have heard men relate boastfully how they or
their fathers had wrecked on hereditary enemies in a neighboring valley,
such vengeance as would have made old soldiers of the
Thirty Years War shudder. He would have found that robbery
was held to be a calling not merely innocent, but honorable.
He would have seen wherever he turned that dislike of
(14:41):
steady industry, and that disposition to throw on the weaker
sex the heaviest part of manual labor, which are characteristic
of savages. He would have been struck by the spectacle
of athletic men basking in the sun, angling for salmon,
or taking aim at grouse, while their aged mothers, their
pregnant wives, their tender daughters were reaping their scanty harvest
(15:04):
of oats. Nor did the women repine at their hard lot.
In their view, was quite fit that a man, especially
if he assumed the aristocratic title of dony wassel and
adorned his bonnet with the eagle's feather, should take his ease,
except when he was fighting, hunting, or marauding. To mention
(15:25):
the name of such a man in connection with commerce
or with any mechanical art was an insult. Agriculture was
indeed less despised, Yet a high born warrior was much more,
becomingly employed in plundering the land of others and in
tilling his own. The religion of the greater part of
the Highlands was a rude mixture of popery and paganism.
(15:48):
The symbol of redemption was associated with heath and sacrifices
and incantations. Baptized men poured libations of ale on one
damon and set out offerings of milk for another. Seers
wrapped themselves up in bulls hides, and awaited in that
vesture the inspiration which was to reveal the future. Even
(16:12):
among those minstrels and genealogists whose hereditary vocation was to
preserve the memory of past events, an enquiry would have
found very few who could read. In truth. He might
easily have journeyed from sea to sea without discovering a
page of Gaelic printed or written. The price which he
would have had to pay for his knowledge of the
(16:33):
country would have been heavy. He would have had to
endure hardships as great as if he had sojourned among
the Eskimox or the Samoiods. Here and there, indeed at
the castle of some great lord who had a seat
in Parliament and Privy Council, and who was accustomed to
pass a large part of his life in the cities
(16:53):
of the south, might have been found wigs and embroidered coats,
plate and fine linen lace, in jewels, French dishes and
French wines. But in general the traveler would have been
forced to content himself with very different quarters. In many dwellings,
the furniture, the food, the clothing, nay, the very hair
(17:14):
and skin of his hosts would have put his philosophy
to the proof. His lodging would sometimes have been in
a hut of which every milk would have swarmed with vermin.
He would have inhaled an atmosphere thick with peat, smoke,
and foul with a hundred exhalations at supper grain fit.
Only four horses would have been set before him, accompanied
(17:36):
with a cake of blood drawn from living cows. Some
of the company with whom he would have feasted would
have been covered with cutaneous eruptions, and others would have
been smeared with tar like sheep. His couch would have
been the bare earth, dry or wet as the weather
might be, and from that couch would have risen half
(17:57):
poisoned with stench, half blind with the reek of turf,
and half mad with the itch. This is not an
attractive picture, and yet an enlightened and dispassionate observer would
have found in their character and manners of this rude
people something which might well excite admiration and a good hope.
(18:19):
Their courage was what great exploits achieved in all the
four quarters of the globe have since proved it to
be their intense attachment to their own tribe and to
their own patriarch. Though politically a great evil partook of
the nature of virtue. The sentiment was misdirected and ill regulated,
but still it was heroic. There must be some elevation
(18:42):
of soul in a man who loves the society of
which he is a member, and the leader whom he follows,
with a love stronger than the love of life. It
was true that the highlander had few scruples about shedding
the blood of an enemy. But it was not less
true that he had high notions of the duty of
observing faith to allies and hospitality to guests. It was
(19:06):
true that his predatory habits were most pernicious to the commonwealth.
Yet those airred greatly who imagine that he bore any
resemblance to villains, who, in rich and well governed communities
lived by stealing. When he drove before him the herds
of lowland farmers up the pass which led to his
native glen, he no more considered himself as a thief
(19:28):
than the Raleighs and Drakes considered themselves as these when
they divided the cargoes of Spanish galleons. He was a warrior,
seizing lawful prize of war, a war never once intermitted
during the thirty five generations which had passed away since
the Teutonic invaders had driven the children of the soil
to the mountains. His inordinate pride of birth and his
(19:52):
contempt for labor and trade were indeed great weaknesses, and
had done far more than the inclemency of the air
and the sterility of the soil to keep his country
poor and rude. Yet even here there was some compensation.
It must, in fairness be acknowledged that the patrician virtues
were not less widely diffused among the population of the
(20:15):
Highlands than the patrician vices. As there were no other
part of the island where men sordidly clothed, lodged, and fed,
indulged themselves to such a degree in the idle, sauntering
habits of an aristocracy. So there is no other part
of the island where such men had in such a
degree the better qualities of an aristocracy, grace and dignity
(20:38):
of manner, self respect, and that noble sensibility which makes
dishonor more terrible than death. A gentleman of sky or lockerber,
whose clothes were begrined with the accumulated filth of years,
and whose hovels smelt worse than an English Hogstye would
often do the honors of that hobble with a lofty
(21:00):
courtesy worthy of the splendid circle of Versailles. Though he
had as little book learning as the most stupid plowboys
of England, it would have been a great error to
put him in the same intellectual rank with such plowboys.
It is indeed only by reading that men can become
profoundly acquainted with any science. But the arts of poetry
(21:21):
and rhetoric may be carried near to absolute perfection, and
may exercise a mighty influence on the public mind in
an age which books are wholly or almost wholly unknown.
So too, in the rudest communities of Appalacia, among the
most trifling and unmral natives of this region, among the
illiterate and hide bound, there still as much to excite
(21:44):
admiration and good hope. I have not shrunk from telling
the truth about these people, even when it was far
from pleasant. But I would have preserved strict silence had
I not seen in the most backward of them certain
sterling qualities of manliness that our nation can ill afford
to waste. It is the truth as old as a
(22:04):
human race, that savageries may coexist with admirable qualities of
head and heart. The only people who can consistently despair
of the future for even the lowest of our mountaineers,
are those who deny evolution, and who believe, with Archbishop Usher,
that man was created perfect. At nine am on the
(22:26):
twenty first of October in the year BC four thousand
and four, let us remember, sir and madame, that we
ourselves are descended from white barbarians, from William the conquer
You very well how many other ancestors of yours were
walking about England and elsewhere at the time of William
(22:48):
untold thousands of them were just such people as you
can find today brawling in some mountain steelhouse. Unless there
has been a deal of incest somewhere along your line,
and you have more of their blood in your veins
than you have of the conquerors, who, by the way,
could he be reincarnated, would not be tolerated in your
(23:09):
drawing room for half an hour. I may have made
the point to brutally plain, but if it sinks through
the smug self complacency of those who do not belong
to the masses, who act as though civilization and morals
and good manners were entailed to them through a mere
dozen or so of selected ancestors. I remain unrepentant and unashamed.
(23:32):
Let us thank whatever gods there be, that it is
not merely thou and I, our few friends and next
of kin, but all humanity that scientific faith embraces and
will sustain. People who have been among their Southern Mountaineers testify,
says mister Fox, that as a race, they are proud, sensitive, hospitable, kindly,
(23:55):
obliging in an unreckoning 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 Southern Mountains
a storehouse of patriotism in themselves. They are an important
(24:17):
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, or as the heathen
to whom we give millions. President Frost, a Bria College
who has worked among these people for nearly lifetime and
has helped educate their young folks by thousands, says it
(24:40):
does once hard good to help a young Lincoln who
comes walking in perhaps a three days journey on foot,
with a few hard earned dollars in his pocket and
a great eagerness for the education. He can so faintly comprehend.
Scores of our young people see their first railroad train
at Borea, and it is a joy to welcome. The
(25:00):
mountain girl comes back after having taught her first school,
bringing the money to pay her debts and buy her
first comfortable outfit, including rubbers and suitable underclothing, and perhaps
bringing with her a younger sister. Such a girl exerts
a great influence in her school and mountain home. An
enthusiastic mountaineer described an example in this wise, I tell
(25:25):
you it takes a mighty resolute gale to do what
that there gal had done. She got a reckon about
the toughest district in the county, which is saying a
good deal. And then for Borden Place, well, there weren't
much choice. There was one house with one room, but
she kept right on, and you would have thought she
(25:45):
was having the finest kind of time to look at her.
And then the last day, when they were saying their
pieces and such, some sorry fellas come in there full
of moonshine and shot their revolvers. I'm telling you it
takes a mighty resume. The great need of our mountaineers
today is trained leaders of their own. The future of
(26:06):
Appalachi allignes mostly in the hands of those resolute Native
boys and girls who win the education fitting them for
such leadership. Here is where the nation at large is
summoned by a solemn duty, and it should act quickly,
because commercialism exploits and debauches quickly. But the schools needed
here are not ordinary graded schools. It should be vocational
(26:30):
schools that will turn out good farmers, good mechanics, good housewives. Meantime,
let a model farm be established in every mountain county
showing how to get the most out of mountain land.
Such object lessons would speedily work in economic revolution. It
is an economic problem fundamentally that the mountaineer has to face.
(26:52):
The end end of section seventeen read by Bryce chrys Ohio.
End of Our Our Southern Highlanders by Horace Keppart
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