Big Meeting is still carried on just as Uncle Dyke wished it.
In September, 1940, I went again to mingle with the hundreds who show their reverence for the Good Shepherd of the Hills by keeping fresh in memory his teaching through their prayers and hymns at the Big Meeting each autumn. And here again a worthy follower of Uncle Dyke Garrett eulogized his deeds and mourned his loss. And close by, for all her ninety-two years, his beloved Miss Sallie, with a trembling hand on the arm of a kinsman, listened intently while those who knew and loved him extolled her lost mate.
And now Miss Sallie is gone too. She died on July 28, 1941, at the age of ninety-three and loving hands place mountain flowers on her grave and that of Levicy Hatfield far across the mountain.
Taking Sides
Some took sides in the feuds that have been carried on throughout the Blue Ridge Country and thereby got themselves enthralled, while others, more tactful, managed to keep aloof and remain friends with the belligerents.
There’s Uncle Chunk Craft on Millstone Creek in Letcher County. Enoch is his real name. There’s nothing he likes better than to tell of the days when he was one of Morgan’s raiders. Then, when he was only twenty-two, that was in 1864, Uncle Chunk slept in a cornfield near Greenville, Tennessee, the very night General John Hunt Morgan, who had taken shelter in a house a couple of miles away, was betrayed by the woman of the house and shot to death by Unionists.
“We were tuckered out,” he said, “had tramped through rain and mud and finally rolled in our blankets, if we were lucky enough to have one, and fell asleep wherever it was. I burrowed in with a comrade. But we didn’t get much rest. For, first thing you know, seemed I’d just dozed off, someone come shoutin’ through the cornfield that the General had been killed. We shouldered our muskets and stumbled off through the field, grumbling and growling that we’d ’tend to the ones that had betrayed him. But even if the woman had been found I reckon we’d a-shunned killin’ her. There’s a heap that goes on in war that a man don’t like to think on.”
Uncle Chunk was proud to own, however, that he saw hard fighting through Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky and was glad enough when the war was ended. He came back, married Polly Ann Caudill, and settled down in Letcher. It wasn’t long until another war started. This time between his neighbors. But with all the carryings-on between John Wright and Clabe Jones in the adjoining counties of Floyd and Knott, Enoch Craft managed to stay friends with both sides. Whichever side happened to round in at his home, hungry and footsore from scouting in the woods for the other faction, found a welcome at Uncle Chunk’s and plenty to eat. “Fill up the kittle, Polly Ann,” he’d call to his wife, as he went on digging potatoes. “Here comes some of John Wright’s crew.” Or, “Put on the beans, I see Clabe Jones’s men comin’!”