Our Southern Highlanders

by Horace Kephart

There is 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 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 homesteads for just enough cash to set them up as laborers in town or camp. Being untrained to any trade, they can get only the lowest wages, which are quickly dissipated in rent and in foods that formerly they raised 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 womenfolk. Store credit soon runs such a family in debt.

“When I was a young man,” said one of my neighbors, “the traders never thought of bringin’ meal in here. If a man run out of meal, why, he was out, and he had to live on ’taters or somethin’ else. Nowadays we dress better, and live better, but some other feller allers has his hands in our pockets.”

Then it is “good-by” to the old independence that made such characters manly. Enmeshed in obligations that they cannot meet, they struggle vainly, brood hopelessly, and lose that dearest of all possessions, their self-respect. Servility is literal hell to a mountaineer, and when it is forced upon him he turns into 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 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 manufactures that employ only cheap labor. Until we have industries that demand skilled workmen, and until manual training schools are established in the mountains, we may look for deterioration, rather than betterment, of those highlanders who leave their farms.

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 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 debauch 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 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 precipitant in thus sending the dregs to the bottom. As a matter of fact, it is only the shrewder and more determined, not the truly fit, that survive 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 fashioned their own locks, musical instruments, and guns. And these very women who are 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 rugs, or ‘piecing’ the quilt patterns now so popular. Need these razors be used to cut grindstones? Must this free folk who are in many ways the truest Americans of America 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, fuerunt—their day is past. In a History of Southern Literature, written not long ago by a professor in the University of Virginia, a sketch of Miss Murfree’s work closes with these words: “There [at Beersheba Springs, Tenn.] it was that she first studied the curious type of humanity, the Tennessee mountaineer, a people so ignorant, so superstitious, so far behind the world of to-day 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 20th century, wander on through their limited range of life much as their ancestors for generations have wandered. They, too, will some time vanish—the sooner the better.”

One cannot read such a sentiment without wonder and even pity for the ignorance of history and of human nature that it discloses. Is the case of our mountaineers so much worse than that of the Scotch 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 pages of Macaulay.—

“It is not easy for a modern Englishman ... to believe that, in the time of his great-grandfathers, Saint James’s Street had as little connection with the Grampians as with the Andes. Yet so it was. In the south of our island scarcely anything was known about the Celtic part of Scotland; and what was known excited no feeling but contempt and loathing....