But it must be known that the future of this really fine race is, at bottom, an economic problem, which must be studied hand-in-hand with the educational one. Civilization only repels the mountaineer until you show him something to gain by it—he knows by instinct what he is bound to lose. There is no use in teaching cleanliness and thrift to serfs or outcasts. The independence of the mountain farm must be preserved, or the fine spirit of the race will vanish and all that is manly in the Highlander will wither to the core.
It is far from my own purpose to preach or advise. “Portray the struggle, and you need write no tract.” Still farther is it from my thought to let characterization degenerate into caricature. Wherever I tell anything that is unusual or below the average of backwoods life, I give fair warning that it is admitted only for spice or contrast, and let it go at that. But even in writing with severe restraint it will be necessary at times to show conditions so rude and antiquated that professional apologists will growl, and many others may find my statements hard to credit as typical of anything at all in our modern America.
So, let me remind the reader again that full three-fourths of our mountaineers still live in the eighteenth century, and that in their far-flung wilderness, away from large rivers and railways, the habits, customs, morals of the people have changed but little from those of our old colonial frontier; in essentials they are closely analogous to what we read of lower-class English and Scottish life in Covenanter and Jacobite times.
CHAPTER X
THE PEOPLE OF THE HILLS
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 same kind of life for generations, and have intermarried to a degree unknown in other parts of America.
Our average mountaineer is lean, inquisitive, shrewd. If that be what constitutes a Yankee, as is popularly supposed outside of New England, then this Yankee of the South is as true to type as the conventional Uncle Sam himself.
A fat mountaineer is a curiosity. The hill folk even seem to affect a slender type of comeliness. In Alice MacGowan’s Judith of the Cumberlands, old Jepthah Turrentine says of one of his sons: “I named that boy after the finest man that ever walked God’s green earth—and then the fool had to go and git fat on me! Think of me with a fat son! I allers did hold that a fat woman was bad enough, but a fat man ort p’intedly to be led out and killed!”