Our Southern Highlanders

by Horace Kephart

In a climate where it showers about two days out of three through spring and summer the women go about, like the men, unshielded from the wet. If you expostulate, one will laugh and reply: “I ain’t sugar, nor salt, nor nobody’s honey.” Slickers are worn only on horseback—and two-thirds of our people had no horses. A man who was so eccentric as to carry an umbrella is known to this day as “Umbrell’” John Walker.

In winter, one sometimes may see adults and children going barefoot in snow that is ankle deep. It used to be customary in our settlement to do the morning chores barefooted in the snow. “Then,” said one, “our feet ’d tingle and burn, so ’t they wouldn’t git a bit cold all day when we put our shoes on.” I knew a family whose children had no shoes all one winter, and occasionally we had zero weather.

It seems to have been common, in earlier times, to go barefooted all the year. Frederick Law Olmsted, a noted writer of the Civil War period, was told by a squire of the Tennessee hills that “a majority of the folks went barefoot all winter, though they had snow much of the time four or five inches deep; and the man said he didn’t think most of the men about here had more than one coat, and they never wore one in winter except on holidays. ‘That was the healthiest way,’ he reckoned, ‘just to toughen yourself and not wear no coat.’ No matter how cold it was, he ‘didn’t wear no coat.’” One of my own neighbors in the Smokies never owned a coat until after his marriage, when a friend of mine gave him one.

It is the usual thing for men and boys to wade cold trout streams all day, come in at sunset, disrobe to shirt and trousers, and then sit in the piercing drafts of an open cabin drying out before the fire, though the night be so cool that a stranger beside them shivers in his dry flannels. After supper, the women, if they have been wearing shoes, will remove them to ease their feet, no matter if it be freezing cold—and the cracks in the floor may be an inch wide.

In bear hunting, our parties usually camped at about 5,000 feet above sea level. At this elevation, in the long nights before Christmas, the cold often was bitter and the wind might blow a gale. Sometimes the native hunters would lie out in the open all night without a sign of a blanket or an axe. They would say: “La! many’s the night I’ve been out when the frost was spewed up so high [measuring three or four inches with the hand], and that right around the fire, too.” Cattle hunters in the mountains never carry a blanket or a shelter-cloth, and they sleep out wherever night finds them, often in pouring rain or flying snow. On their arduous trips they find it burden enough to carry the salt for their cattle, with a frying-pan, cup, corn pone, coffee, and “sow-belly,” all in a grain sack strapped to the man’s back.

Such nurture, from childhood, makes white men as indifferent to the elements as Fuegians. And it makes them anything but comfortable companions for one who has been differently reared. During “court week” when the hotels at the county-seat are overcrowded with countrymen, the luckless drummers who happen to be there have continuous exercise in closing doors. No mountaineer closes a door behind him. Winter or summer, doors are to be shut only when folks go to bed. That is what they are for. After close study of mountain speech I have failed to discern that the word draft is understood, except in parts of the Virginia and Kentucky mountains, where it means a brook. One is reminded of the colonial, who, visiting England, remarked of the British people: “It is a survival of the fittest—the fittest to exist in fog.” Here, it is the fittest to survive cold, and wet, and drafts.

Running barefooted in the snow is exceptional nowadays; but it is by no means the limit of hardiness or callosity that some of these people display. It is not so long ago that I passed an open lean-to of chestnut bark far back in the wilderness, wherein a family of Tennesseans was spending the year. There were three children, the eldest a lad of twelve. The entire worldly possessions of this family could easily be packed around on their backs. Poverty, however, does not account for such manner of living. There is none so poor in the mountains that he need rear his children in a bark shed. It is all a matter of taste.

There is a wealthy man known to everyone around Waynesville, who, being asked where he resided, as a witness in court, answered: “Three, four miles up and down Jonathan Creek.” The judge was about to fine him for contempt, when it developed that the witness spoke literal truth. He lives neither in house nor camp, but perambulates his large estate and when night comes lies down wherever he may happen to be. In winter he has been known to go where some of his pigs bedded in the woods, usurp the middle for himself, and borrow comfort from their bodily heat.

This man is worth over a hundred thousand dollars. He visited the world’s fairs at Chicago and St. Louis, wearing the old long coat that serves him also as blanket, and carrying his rations in a sack. Far from being demented, he is notoriously so shrewd on the stand and so learned in the law that he is formidable to every attorney who cross-questions him.

I cite these last two instances not merely as eccentricities of character, but as really typical of the bodily stamina that most of the mountaineers can display if they want to. Their smiling endurance of cold and wet and privation would have endeared them to the first Napoleon, who declared that those soldiers were the best who bivouacked shelterless throughout the year.