Five Years in the Alleghanies

by Jonathan Cross

No one of them knew a letter in the alphabet, or who was the Saviour of sinners. They were children of nature isolated from the world, equally ignorant of both its vices and its virtues. We spent more than an hour trying to teach them the alphabet of Christianity, and then commended them to God. They seemed amazed at what we said; God only knows the results.

We reached the place where our evening meeting was to be held after one o’clock, exhausted with hunger and heat. The cabin was but little better than the one just described; it contained some kind of table and a few stools, but had neither door nor floor, and cattle and hogs ran into it to avoid the flies when they chose.

Mr. C——, whose patience was nearly exhausted, told the woman that we were almost starved, and to hurry and get us something to eat, and to make it as clean and as good as she could. The children were sent to borrow tools; a fire was soon blazing under an arbor made of bushes near the house; a pail of meal set beside it, waiting for the skillet to heat, out of which the hens helped themselves every time she turned her back to them. The children soon returned with a little coffee-pot minus the handle, and with a knife and a fork one prong lacking.

We were soon invited in to our dinner from under the shade of a tree where we had observed the whole process. The table was a block of wood, with four legs to hold it up, and a stool at each side for us to sit on. Some pet pigs were under it waiting for the crumbs: they tramped on our toes, which led us to kick them; but our kind hostess soon made the children catch them and confine them behind my back in a big gumm, a tub sawn off a hollow log, which treatment, from their noise, they seemed to dislike very much.

Soon after our meal was finished the people began to gather in to hear the gospel. The cabin was more than full, with the same appearance of the congregation as last described. We supplied all with books and tracts—in most cases with the first book they ever had. The night was spent much like the previous one, food and lodging about the same.

The next morning we rode nine miles to meet another appointment at eleven o’clock. By the time we reached the place I was so sick that I had to lie down, while brother C—— preached to the people from Jeremiah 6:16. At the close we supplied all with little books and tracts, and received many thanks. The dinner was set under a shed outside of the house, but the sight of it sent me out to the shade of a tree so sick that I could not stand on my feet.

I then told brother C—— that I should be compelled to make my escape to some place where I could get something to eat and take some rest; and asked him to take all the books and give them away at each appointment to the best advantage he could.

At two o’clock I was on my horse, which, happily for me, had been along the road before, and was suffering from hunger as much as his rider. In six hours he was standing at the steps of Mr. S——’s house, two miles from the town of F——, from which we started three days before. I was well acquainted with Mr. S—— and his family, having been frequently there; but fever had dethroned my reason, which did not return till I was taken in and my head bathed with cold water, and I had drank a cup of coffee.

It was three days before I was sufficiently recovered to resume my work. We had visited twenty-seven families, talked and prayed with them all, given them books and tracts, and held three meetings. One half of the people were without any part of a Bible. As for other books they had none, and not one in ten could read a word.

I have detailed this one journey of three days not only to show the condition of this portion of our country, but as little more than a fair representation of destitute parts of many states in the Union. If each colporteur of the Tract Society who has visited these dark, broken, isolated regions of our country for the last eighteen years, had kept a journal of all the ignorance and wretchedness he met, it would have been the most interesting missionary journal the world ever saw. Their reports would differ as widely as the reports of those whom Joshua sent out to visit the promised land. While some would bring in the rich clusters of Eshcol, others, with equal truthfulness, could say that the land was inhabited by giants, whose walls were ignorance and superstition.