“Giddep! I’ll be back by in the mornin’.”
“Farwell!”
Rather laconic. Yet, on occasion, when the mountaineer is drawn out of his natural reserve and allows his emotions free rein, there are few educated people who can match his picturesque and pungent diction. His trick of apt phrasing is intuitive. Like an artist striking off a portrait or a caricature with a few swift strokes his characterization is quick and vivid. Whether he use quaint obsolete English or equally delightful perversions, what he says will go straight to the mark with epigrammatic force.
I cannot quit this topic without reference to the bizarre and original place-names that sprinkle the map of Appalachia.
Many readers of John Fox’s novels take for granted that the author coined such piquant titles as Lonesome, Troublesome, Hell fer Sartin, and Kingdom Come. But all of these are real names in the Kentucky mountains. They denote rough country, and the country is rough, so that to a traveler it is plain enough why travel and travail were used interchangeably in old editions of Shakespeare. There is nothing like first-hand knowledge of mountain roads to revive sixteenth-century habits of thought and speech. The most scrupulous visitor will fain admit the aptness of mountain nomenclature.
Kentucky has no monopoly of grotesque and whimsical local names. The whole Appalachian region, from the Virginias to Alabama, is peppered with them. Whatever else the southern mountaineer may be, he is original. Elsewhere throughout America we have place-names imported from the Old World as thick as weeds; but the pioneers of the southern hills either forgot that there was an Old World or they disdained to borrow from it.
Personal names applied to localities are common enough, but they are those of actual settlers, not of notables honored from afar (Mitchell, LeConte, Guyot, were not the highlanders’ names for those peaks). Often a surname is put to such use, as Jake’s Creek, Old Nell Knob, and Big Jonathan Run. We even have Granny’s Branch, and Daddy and Mammy creeks.
In the main it is characteristic of our Appalachian place-names that they are descriptive or commemorate some incident. The Shut-in is a gorge; the Suck is a whirlpool; Pinch-gut is a narrow passage between the cliffs. Calf-killer Run is “whar a meat-eatin’ bear was usin’,” and Barren She Mountain was the death-ground of a she-bear that had no cubs. Kemmer’s Old Stand was a certain hunter’s favorite ambush on a runway. Meat-scaffold Branch is where venison was hung up for “jerking.” Graining-block Creek was a trappers’ rendezvous, and Honey Camp Run is where the bee hunters stayed. Lick-log denotes a notched log used for salting cattle. Still-house Branch was a moonshiners’ retreat. Skin-linn Fork is where the bast was peeled from young lindens. Big Butt is what Westerners call a butte. Ball-play Bottom was a lacrosse field of the Indians. Pizen Gulch was infested with poison ivy or sumach. Keerless Knob is “a joyful place for wild salat” (amaranthus). A “hell” or “slick” or “woolly-head” or “yaller patch” is a thicket of laurel or rhododendron, impassable save where the bears have bored out trails.
The qualities of the raw backwoodsmen are printed from untouched negatives in the names he has left upon the map. His literalness shows in Black Rock, Standing Stone, Sharp Top, Twenty Mile, Naked Place, The Pocket, Tumbling Creek, and in the endless designations taken from trees, plants, minerals, or animals noted on the spot. Incidents of his lonely life are signalized in Dusk Camp Run, Mad Sheep Mountain, Dog Slaughter Creek, Drowning Creek, Burnt Cabin Branch, Broken Leg, Raw Dough, Burnt Pone, Sandy Mush, and a hundred others. His contentious spirit blazes forth in Fighting Creek, Shooting Creek, Gouge-eye, Vengeance, Four Killer, and Disputanta.
Sometimes even his superstitions are commemorated. In Owesley County, Kentucky, is a range of hills bearing the singular name of Whoop fer Larrie. A party of hunters, so the legend goes, had encamped for the night in the shelter of a bluff. They were startled from sleep by a loud rumble, as of some wagon hurrying along the pathless ridge, and they heard a voice shouting “Whoop fer Larrie! Whoop fer Larrie!” The hills would return no echo, for the cry came from a riotous “ha’nt.”