The mountaineers are non-social. As they stand to-day, each man “fighting for his own hand, with his back against the wall,” they recognize no social compact. Each one is suspicious of the other. Except as kinsmen or partisans they cannot pull together. Speak to them of community of interests, try to show them the advantages of co-operation, and you might as well be proffering advice to the North Star. They will not work together zealously even to improve their neighborhood roads, each mistrusting that the other may gain some trifling advantage over himself or turn fewer shovelfuls of earth. Labor chiefs fail to organize unions or granges among them because they simply will not stick together.
Miss Miles says of her people (the italics are my own): “There is no such thing as a community of mountaineers. They are knit together, man to man, as friends, but not as a body of men.... Our men are almost incapable of concerted action unless they are needed by the Government.... Between blood-relationship and the Federal Government no relations of master and servant, rich and poor, learned and ignorant, employer and employee, are interposed to bind society into a whole.... The mountaineers must awake to a consciousness of themselves as a people. For although throughout the highlands of Kentucky, Tennessee and the Carolinas our nature is one, our hopes, our loves, our daily life the same, we are yet a people asleep, a race without knowledge of its own existence. This condition is due ... to the isolation that separates the mountaineer from all the world but his own blood and kin, and to the consequent utter simplicity of social relations. When they shall have established a unity of thought corresponding to their homogeneity of character, then their love of country will assume a practical form, and then, indeed, America, with all her peoples, can boast no stronger sons than these same mountaineers.”
To the Highlanders of four States here mentioned should be added all those of Old Virginia, West Virginia, Georgia, and Alabama, making an aggregate to-day of close on four million souls. Together they constitute a distinct people. Not only are they all closely akin in blood, in speech, in ideas, in manners, in ways of living; but their needs, their problems are identical throughout this vast domain. There is no other ethnic group in America so unmixed as these mountaineers and so segregated from all others.
And the strange thing is that they do not know it. Their isolation is so complete that they have no race consciousness at all. In this respect I can think of no other people on the face of the earth to which they may be likened.
As compensation for the peculiar weakness of their social structure, the Highlanders display an undying devotion to family and kindred. Mountaineers everywhere are passionately attached to their homes. Tear away from his native rock your Switzer, your Tyrolean, your Basque, your Montenegrin, and all alike are stricken with homesickness beyond speech or cure. At the first chance they will return, and thenceforth will cling to their patrimonies, however poor these be.
So, too, our man of the Appalachians.—“I went down into the valley, wunst, and I declar I nigh sultered! ’Pears like there ain’t breath enough to go round, with all them people. And the water don’t do a body no good; an’ you cain’t eat hearty, nor sleep good o’ nights. Course they pay big money down thar; but I’d a heap-sight ruther ketch me a big old ’coon fer his hide. Boys, I did hone fer my dog Fiddler, an’ the times we’d have a-huntin’, and the trout-fishin’, an’ the smell o’ the woods, and nobody bossin’ and jowerin’ at all. I’m a hill-billy, all right, and they needn’t to glory their old flat lands to me!”
Domestic affection is seldom expressed by the mountaineers—not even by motherly or sisterly kisses—but it is very deep and real for all that. In fact, the ties of kinship are stronger with them, and extend to remoter degrees of consanguinity, than with any other Americans that I know. Here again we see working the old feudal idea, an anachronism, but often a beautiful one, in this bustling commercial age. Our hived and promiscuous life in cities is breaking down the old fealty of kith and kin. “God gives us our relatives,” sighs the modern, “but, thank God, we can choose our friends!” Such words would strike a mountaineer deep with horror. Rather would he go the limit of Stevenson’s Saint Ives: “If it is a question of going to hell, go to hell like a gentleman, with your ancestors!”
Photo by U. S. Forest Service
Whitewater Falls