It was from this home that Alvin went to war, and it was to it he returned.
Visitors know, and it is well for others to realize, that Pall Mall and the "Valley of the Three Forks o' the Wolf" are back among the rising ranges of the Cumberland Mountains forty-eight miles from the railroad.
Alvin York came from a line of ancestors who were cane-cutters and Indian fighters. The earliest ancestor of whom he has knowledge was a "Long Hunter," who with a rifle upon his shoulder strode into the Valley of the Wolf and homesteaded the river bottom-lands. Here his people lived far from the traveled paths. Marooned in their mountain fastnesses, they clung to the customs and the traditions of the past. Their life was simple, and their sports quaint. They held shooting-matches on the mountainside, enjoyed "log-rollings" and "corn-huskings." Strong in their loves and in their hates, they feared God, but feared no man. The Civil War swept over the valley and left splotches of blood.
Friends of Sergeant York, knowing that the history of his people was rich in story, and that the public was waiting, wanting to know more of the man the German army could not run, nor make surrender—and instead had to come to him—urged that his story be told.
He had been mustered out of the army and come back to the valley wanting to pick up again the dropped thread of his former life. He was striving earnestly and prayerfully to blot from recurrent memory that October morning scene on "York's Hill" in France.
His friends and neighbors at Pall Mall waited eagerly for his return. They wanted to hear from his own lips the story of his fight.
No man of the mountains was ever given the home-coming that was his. It was made the reunion of the people, with the neighbors the component parts of one great family.
When home again, Alvin wanted no especial deference shown him. He wished to be again just one of them, to swing himself upon the counter at the general store and talk with them as of old. He had much to tell from his experience, but always it was of other incidents than the one that made him famous.
Months passed. He lived in that mountain cabin with his little mother, whose counsel has ever influenced him, and yet not once did he mention to her that he had a fight in the Forest of Argonne.
His consent was gained for the publication of the story of his people, but it was with the pronounced stipulation that "it be told right."