Photo by U. S. Forest Service Big Tom Wilson, the bear hunter, who discovered the body of Prof. Elisha Mitchell where he perished near the summit of the Peak that afterward was named in his honor...

In one of Poe’s minor tales, written in 1845, there is a vague allusion to wild mountains in western Virginia “tenanted by fierce and uncouth races of men.” This, so far as I know, was the first reference in literature to our Southern mountaineers, and it stood as their only characterization until Miss Murfree (“Charles Egbert Craddock”) began her stories of the Cumberland hills. Time and retouching have done little to soften our Highlander’s portrait. Among reading people generally, South as we

Of certain remote parts of Erin, Jane Barlow says: “In Bogland, if you inquire the address of such or such person, you will hear not very infrequently that he or she lives ‘off away at the Back of Beyond.’... A Traveler to the Back of Beyond may consider himself rather exceptionally fortunate, should he find that he is able to arrive at his destination by any mode of conveyance other than ‘the two standin’ feet of him.’ Often enough the last stage of his journey proceeds down some boggy boreen ,

For a long time my chief interest was not in human neighbors, but in the mountains themselves—in that mysterious beckoning hinterland which rose right back of my chimney and spread upward, outward, almost to three cardinal points of the compass, mile after mile, hour after hour of lusty climbing—an Eden still unpeopled and unspoiled. I loved of a morning to slip on my haversack, pick up my rifle, or maybe a mere staff, and stride forth alone over haphazard routes, to enjoy in my own untutored wa

“Git up, pup! you’ve scrouged right in hyur in front of the fire. You Dred! what makes you so blamed contentious?” Little John shoved both dogs into a corner, and strove to scrape some coals from under a beech forestick that glowed almost hot enough to melt brass. “This is the wust coggled-up fire I ever seed, to fry by. Bill, hand me some Old Ned from that suggin o’ mine.” A bearded hunchback reached his long arm to a sack that hung under our rifles, drew out a chuck of salt pork, and began sli

I was hunting alone in the mountains, and exploring ground that was new to me. About noon, while descending from a high ridge into a creek valley, to get some water, I became enmeshed in a rhododendron “slick,” and, to some extent, lost my bearings. After floundering about for an hour or two, I suddenly came out upon a little clearing. Giant hemlocks, girdled and gaunt, rose from a steep cornfield of five acres, beyond which loomed the primeval forest of the Great Smoky Mountains. Squat in the f

Our terms moonshiner and moonshining are not used in the mountains. Here an illicit distiller is called a blockader, his business is blockading, and the product is blockade liquor. Just as the smugglers of old Britain called themselves free-traders, thereby proclaiming that they risked and fought for a principle, so the moonshiner considers himself simply a blockade-runner dealing in contraband. His offense is only malum prohibitum , not malum in se . There are two kinds of blockaders, big and l

In the United States, moonshining is seldom practiced outside the mountains and foothills of the southern Appalachians, and those parts of the southwest (namely, in southern Missouri, Arkansas and Texas), into which the mountaineers have immigrated in considerable numbers. Here, then, is a conundrum: How does it happen that moonshining is distinctly a foible of the southern mountaineer? To get to the truth, we must hark back into that eighteenth century wherein, as I have already remarked, our m

Little or no attention seems to have been paid to the moonshining that was going on in the mountains until about 1876, owing, no doubt, to the larger game in registered distilleries. In his report for 1876-7, the new Commissioner of Internal Revenue called attention to the illicit manufacture of whiskey in the mountain counties of the South, and urged vigorous measures for its immediate suppression. “The extent of these frauds,” said he, “would startle belief. I can safely say that during the pa

Among the many letters that come to me from men who think of touring or camping in Highland Dixie there are few but ask, “How are strangers treated?” This question, natural and prudent though it be, never fails to make me smile, for I know so well the thoughts that lie back of it: “Suppose one should blunder innocently upon a moonshine still—what would happen? If a feud were raging in the land, how would a stranger fare? If one goes alone into the mountains, does he run any risk of being robbed?

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 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

Homespun ss jeans and linsey used to be the universal garb of the mountain people. Nowadays you will seldom find them, except in far-back places. Shoddy “store clothes” are cheaper and easier to get. And this is a sorry change, for the old-time material was sound and enduring, the direct product of hard personal toil, and so it was prized and taken care of; whereas such stuff as a backwoodsman can buy in his crossroads store is flimsy, soon loses shape and breaks down his own pride of personal a

Despite the low standard of living that prevails in the backwoods, the average mountain home is a happy one, as homes go. There is little worry and less fret. Nobody’s nerves are on edge. Our highlander views all exigencies of life with the calm fortitude and tolerant good-humor of Bret Harte’s southwesterner, “to whom cyclones, famine, drought, floods, pestilence and savages were things to be accepted, and whom disaster, if it did not stimulate, certainly did not appall.” It is a patriarchal ex

One day I handed a volume of John Fox’s stories to a neighbor and asked him to read it, being curious to learn how those vivid pictures of mountain life would impress one who was born and bred in the same atmosphere. He scanned a few lines of the dialogue, 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 explained that dialect mu

It is only a town-dreamed allegory that represents Nature as a fond mother suckling her young upon her breast. Those who have lived literally close to wild Nature know her for a tyrant, void of pity and of mercy, from whom nothing can be wrung without toil and the risk of death. To all pioneer men—to their women and children, too—life has been one long, hard, cruel war against elemental powers. Nothing else than warlike arts, nothing short of warlike hazards, could have subdued the beasts and sa

In Corsica, when a man is wronged by another, public sentiment requires that he redress his own grievance, and that his family and friends shall share the consequences. “Before the law made us citizens, great Nature made us men.” “When one has an enemy, one must choose between the three S’s— schiopetto, stiletto, strada : the rifle, the dagger, or flight.” “There are two presents to be made to an enemy— palla calda o ferro freddo : hot shot or cold steel.” The Corsican code of honor does not req

The Southern Appalachian Mountains happen to be parceled out among eight different States, and for that reason they are seldom considered as a geographical unit. In the same way their inhabitants are thought of as Kentucky mountaineers or Carolina mountaineers, and so on, but not often as a body of Appalachian mountaineers. And yet these inhabitants are as distinct an ethnographic group as the mountains themselves are a geographic group. The mountaineers are homogeneous so far as speech and mann

The southern mountaineers are pre-eminently a rural folk. When the twentieth century opened, only four per cent. of them dwelt in cities of 8,000 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 77 out of 186 mountain counties had towns of 1,000 and upwards. Our highlanders are the most homogeneous people in the United States. In 1900, out of a total populati