“But then you must move, and begin all over again. This continual moving must be a great nuisance.”
He rolled his quid and placidly answered: “Huk-uh; when I move, all I haffter do is put out the fire and call the dog.”
His apparent indifference was only philosophy expressed with sardonic humor; just as another neighbor would say, “This is good, strong land, or it wouldn’t hold up all the rocks there is around hyur.”
Right here is the basis for much of what strangers call shiftlessness among the mountaineers. But of that, more anon in other chapters.
In clearing new ground, everyone followed the ancient custom of girdling the tree trunks and letting them stand in spectral ugliness until they rotted and fell. This is a quick and easy way to get rid of the shade that otherwise would stunt the crops, and it prevents such trees as chestnut, buckeye and basswood from sprouting from the stumps. In the fields stood scores of gigantic hemlocks, deadened, that never would be used even for fuel, save as their bark furnished the women with quick-burning stove-wood in wet weather. No one dreamt that hemlock ever would be marketable. And this was only five years ago!
The tillage was as rude and destructive as anything we read of in pioneer history. The common plow was a “bull-tongue,” which has aptly been described as “hardly more than a sharpened stick with a metal rim.” The harrows were of wood, throughout, with locust teeth (a friend and I made one from the green trees in half a day, and it lasted three seasons on rocky ground). Sometimes no harrow was used at all, the plowed ground being “drug” with a big evergreen bough. This needed only to be withed directly to a pony’s tail, as they used to do in ancient Ireland, and the picture of prehistoric agriculture would have been complete. After the corn was up, all cultivating was done with the hoe. For this the entire family turned out, the toddlers being left to play in the furrows while their mother toiled like a man.
Corn was the staple crop—in fact, the only crop of most farmers. Some rye was raised along the creek, and a little oats, but our settlement grew no wheat—there was no mill that could grind it. Wheat is raised, to some extent, in the river bottoms, and on the plateaus of the interior. I have seen it flailed out on the bare ground, and winnowed by pouring the grain and chaff from basket to basket while the women fluttered aprons or bed-sheets. Corn is topped for the blade-fodder, the ears gathered from the stalk, and the main stalks afterwards used as “roughness” (roughage). The cribs generally are ramshackle pens, and there is much waste from mold and vermin.
The Carolina mountains are, by nature, one of the best fruit regions in eastern America. Apples, grapes, and berries, especially, thrive exceeding well. But our mountaineer is no horticulturist. He lets his fruit trees take care of themselves, and so, everywhere except on select farms near the towns, we see old apple and peach trees that never were pruned, bristling with shoots, and often bearing wizened fruit, dry and bitter, or half rotted on the stem.
So, too, the gardens are slighted. Late in the season our average garden is a miniature jungle, chiefly of weeds that stand high as one’s head. Cabbage and field beans survive and figure mightily in the diet of the mountaineer. Potatoes generally do well, but few farmers raise enough to see them through the winter. Generally some tobacco is grown for family consumption, the strong “twist” being smoked or chewed indifferently.
An interesting crop in our neighborhood was ginseng, of which there were several patches in cultivation. This curious plant is native throughout the Appalachians, but has been exterminated in all but the wildest regions, on account of the high price that its dried root brings. It has long since passed out of our pharmacopœia, and is marketed only in China, though our own people formerly esteemed it as a panacea for all ills of the flesh. Colonel Byrd, in his “History of the Dividing Line,” says of it: