Yet the Scots have always been a notably warlike and fearless race. So, too, are our southern mountaineers: in the Civil War and the Spanish War they sent a larger proportion of their men into the service than almost any other section of our country.
Let us not overlook the fact that it demands courage of a high order for one to stay in a feud-infested district, conscious of being marked for slaughter—stay there month in and month out, year in and year out, not knowing at what moment he may be beset by overpowering numbers, from what laurel thicket he may be shot, or at what hour of the night he may be called to his door and struck dead before his family. On the credit side of their valor, then, be it entered that few mountaineers will shrink from such ordeal when, even from no fault of their own, it is thrust upon them.
The blood-feud is simply a horrible survival of medievalism. It is the highlander’s misfortune to be stranded far out of the course of civilization. He is no worse than that bygone age that he really belongs to. In some ways he is better. He is far less cruel than his ancestors were—than our ancestors were. He does not torture with the tumbril, the stocks, the ducking-stool, the pillory, the branding-irons, the ear-pruners and nostril-shears and tongue-branks that were in everyday use under the old criminal code. He does not tie a woman to the cart’s tail and publicly lash her bare back until it streams with blood, nor does he hang a man for picking somebody’s pocket of twelve pence and a farthing. He does not go slumming in bedlam, paying tuppence for the sport of mocking the maniacs until they rattle their chains in rage or horror. He does not turn executions of criminals into public festivals. He never has been known to burn a condemned one at the stake. If he hangs a man, he does not first draw his entrails and burn them before his eyes, with a mob crowding about to jeer the poor devil’s flinching or to compliment him on his “nerve.” Yet all these pleasantries were proper and legal in Christian Britain two centuries ago.
This isolated and belated people who still carry on the blood-feud are not half so much to blame for such a savage survival as the rich, powerful, educated, twentieth-century nation that abandons them as if they were hopelessly derelict or wrecked. It took but a few decades to civilize Scotland. How much swifter and surer and easier are our means of enlightenment to-day! Let us not forget that these highlanders are blood of our blood and bone of our bone; for they are old-time Americans to a man, proud of their nationality, and passionately loyal to the flag that they, more than any other of us, according to their strength, have fought and suffered for.
CHAPTER XVI
WHO ARE THE MOUNTAINEERS?
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 manners and experiences and ideals can make them. In the aggregate they are nearly twice as numerous and cover twice as much territory as any one of the States among which they have been distributed; but in each of these States they occupy only the backyard, and generally take back seats in the councils of the commonwealth. They have been fenced off from each other by political boundaries, and have no such coherence among themselves as would come from common leadership or a sense of common origin and mutual dependence.