Christmas At The Hindman Settlement In Knott County

Early Wagon Travel / hristmas At The Hindman Settlement In Knott County When Miss Ethel de Long, of Springfield , Mass., came to spend a week with us at Christmastime and then wrote about it to her mother, we asked her to let us use in this letter what she had written, for it seemed to us that you who contribute to this work should have another point of view than ours. "It was cold and snowing when we three left Jackson, Miss Underwood, who is giving her services to the school as cooking and sewing teacher, Mr. Ritchie, as gaunt and kindly as ever, and I, ignorantly anticipating a winter ride through the mountains! Jackson is the forlornest little mountain town and that day the streets almost ran with unimaginable mud. New York and Boston mud are nothing compared with it. It is here, you know, that the Hargises, famous for their feuds, live and 'keep store.' We passed the court house corner where so many men have been shot, at their instigation it is said. The two brothers, the best business men in the mountains, run a store together, but they do not speak to each other. Yet it was Jim Hargis who said last year when he was tried at 10 Lexington: 'We mountain men believe in standing by our kin folk.' Their loyalty to their kin caused the death of twenty men in one year and of seventy in the last ten, they say. We were glad enough to get into the hills and they were lovely that afternoon. On every side were shadowy mountains, folding in and out, and dimly seen through the snow. Their primeval forests of hemlock and poplar and oak were wonderful with the snow upon them, and still silently falling. Sometimes our horses found scanty footing on the banks of the creeks, sometimes we had no path but the streams, whose edges were frozen , and sometimes we rode on the sides of the mountains, high above the water, along fine jumping-off places, for, as Mr. Ritchie said, 'you would have so fur to jump.' There are five mountains to cross between Jackson and Hindman, and we crossed three that afternoon. 'Crossing' means not only riding high upon the shoulder of a hill, but going over a divide, from Quicksand to Troublesome or Ball to Buckhorn. Once in a while in some valley that seemed lonelier than ever in the storm, or on a halfcleared hillside, we passed a tiny log cabin with thin blue smoke curling out of the chimney, the only sign of life within, for most of them were windowless. Often the door would open and let out into the storm the cheer of the firelight. Then we would see standing in the doorway a group of old and young women and little children in their quaint homespun dresses, who watched us silently and then shut the door. The older people's faces are so worn and wistful, and the children's so dumb that it makes your heart ache to think how shut out they are from opportunity. Way off in the middle of the woods, we met half a dozen men on horseback, part of a posse that had been raiding moonshine stills for the last two weeks; half a mile or so farther on we met the revenue officer and his young deputy. He told us they had visited the Hindman School only the night before, and were on their way back to Lexington after breaking up eight stills. 'You've got a rough trip ahead,' said he, 'but you'll find some lovely girls waiting to welcome you.' He was from the Bluegrass, you see, for the mountain people call them 'the fotched on women.' That meeting was the one event of the afternoon, for we passed nobody else, though we heard one or two shots from some rabbit hunters on the mountains. I soon began to feel that we had a rough trip, indeed. It was very cold and the wind blew the snow in our faces, and Mr. Ritchie's miles were so long that I thought we could never ride the twenty miles...