Spartan diet does not put on flesh. Still, it should be noted that long legs, baggy clothing, and scantiness or lack of underwear make people seem thinner than they really are. Our highlanders are conspicuously a tall race. Out of seventy-six men that I have listed just as they occurred to me, but four are below average American height and only two are fat. About two-thirds of them are brawny or sinewy fellows of great endurance. The others generally are slab-sided, stoop-shouldered, but withey. The townsfolk and the valley farmers, being better nourished and more observant of the prime laws of wholesome living, are noticeably superior in appearance but not in stamina.
Nearly all males of the back country have a grave and deliberate bearing. They travel with the long, sure-footed stride of the born woodsman, not graceful and lithe like a moccasined Indian (their coarse brogans forbid it), but shambling as if every joint had too much play. There is nothing about them to suggest the Swiss or Tyrolean mountaineers; rather they resemble the gillies of the Scotch Highlands. Generally they are lean-faced, sallow, level-browed, with rather high cheek-bones. Gray eyes predominate, sometimes vacuous, but oftener hard, searching, crafty—the feral eye of primitive man.
From infancy these people have been schooled to dissimulate and hide emotion, and ordinarily their faces are as opaque as those of veteran poker players. Many wear habitually a sullen scowl, hateful and suspicious, which in men of combative age, and often in the old women, is sinister and vindictive. The smile of comfortable assurance, the frank eye of good-fellowship, are rare indeed. Nearly all of the young people and many of the adults plant themselves before a stranger and regard him with a fixed stare, peculiarly annoying until one realizes that they have no thought of impertinence.
Many of the women are pretty in youth; but hard toil in house and field, early marriage, frequent child-bearing with shockingly poor attention, and ignorance or defiance of the plainest necessities of hygiene, soon warp and age them. At thirty or thirty-five a mountain woman is apt to have a worn and faded look, with form prematurely bent—and what wonder? Always bending over the hoe in the cornfield, or bending over the hearth as she cooks by an open fire, or bending over her baby, or bending to pick up, for the thousandth time, the wet duds that her lord flings on the floor as he enters from the woods—what wonder that she soon grows short-waisted and round-shouldered?
The voices of the highland women, low toned by habit, often are singularly sweet, being pitched in a sad, musical, minor key. With strangers, the women are wont to be shy, but speculative rather than timid, as they glance betimes with “a slow, long look of mild inquiry, or of general listlessness, or of unconscious and unaccountable melancholy.” Many, however, scrutinize a visitor calmly for minutes at a time or frankly measure him with the gipsy eye of Carmen.
Outsiders, judging from the fruits of labor in more favored lands, have charged the mountaineers with indolence. It is the wrong word. Shiftless many of them are—afflicted with that malady which Barrie calls “acute disinclination to work”—but that is not so much in their physical nature as in their economic outlook. Rarely do we find mountaineers who loaf all day on the floor or the doorstep like so many of the poor whites of the lowlands. If not laboring, they at least must be doing something, be it no more than walking ten miles to shoot a squirrel or visit a crony.
As a class, they have great and restless physical energy. Considering the quantity and quality of what they eat there is no people who can beat them in endurance of strain and privation. They are great walkers and carriers of burdens. Before there was a tub-mill in our settlement one of my neighbors used to go, every other week, thirteen miles to mill, carrying a two-bushel sack of corn (112 pounds) and returning with his meal on the following day. This was done without any pack-strap but simply shifting the load from one shoulder to the other, betimes.
One of our women, known as “Long Goody” (I measured her; six feet three inches she stood) walked eighteen miles across the Smokies into Tennessee, crossing at an elevation of 5,000 feet, merely to shop more advantageously than she could at home. The next day she shouldered fifty pounds of flour and some other groceries, and bore them home before nightfall. Uncle Jimmy Crawford, in his seventy-second year came to join a party of us on a bear hunt. He walked twelve miles across the mountain, carrying his equipment and four days’ rations for himself and dogs. Finding that we had gone on ahead of him he followed to our camp on Siler’s Bald, twelve more miles, climbing another 3,000 feet, much of it by bad trail, finished the twenty-four-mile trip in seven hours—and then wanted to turn in and help cut the night-wood. Young mountaineers afoot easily outstrip a horse on a day’s journey by road and trail.
“At thirty a mountain woman is apt to have a worn and faded look”