Yesterday's People: Life in Contemporary Appalachia

3. Introducing the Mountaineer

3. Introducing the Mountaineer AMERICAN society has loved the caricaturization of the cowboy, and his ways have found entrance into the dreams and play of many an American child. There is something romantic and wholesome about the cowboy. The "western " image has a significant role in American entertainment, business, and even politics and religion. (Note the tengallon hat and boots that many Westerners still wear, and the evangelistic impact made by Roy Rogers and Dale Evans.) The mountaineer, on the other hand, has become an object of amusement and scorn. Who has not been confronted by a picture of the bare-footed man in ill-fitting homemade clothes, with a jug over one shoulder and his rifle in hand? His supposed affinity for "corn in the bottle," which he makes illegally, his shiftlessness, and his outmoded speech are staples of this image. Why is it that we regard one segment of our population as heroic, while another is, at best, pathetically amusing? Is it because the cowboy was successful in meeting the challenge of his environment before he became the victim of a changing economy, whereas the mountaineer, for generations cut off from the main stream of American life, seeks to meet the modern age with the same old-fashioned weapons? Or is it because the cowboy represents a frontier that, being gone, can be romanticized, while the mountaineer still lives on his frontier without having conquered it? Introducing the Mountaineer 29 The cowboy was able to accept the changing economy, the fenced range, moving from horse travel to truck, jeep, and even plane and helicopter. Each change that came to the mountaineer, however, was a threat, or served to embitter or further impoverish him. While the cowboy had what may be described as an "open door" culture, which presented him with opportunity for progress, the mountaineer had a "closed door" culture, which denied him the chance of advancement. How much his situation resembles the hero's in Kafka's The Trial: "The door keeper perceives that the man is at the end of his strength and that his hearing is failing, so he bellows in his ear: 'No one but you could gain admittance through this door, since the door was intended only for you. I am now going to shut it.'"1 It should not be surprising to find that the mountaineer has been molded in certain peculiar ways and that his culture has developed along lines that would allow him to bear up under the crushing loads he had put upon him. Just as the rubbing shoe, unknown to the wearer, begins to put calluses on the foot, changing its contour, so the mountaineer has had calluses rubbed on his mind and soul, worn there by the constant brushes of his life against a tight environment and an economy that denied him room to develop freely.2 INDIVIDUALISM A fierce independence was part of the heritage which the settlers brought with them to the region; it proved to 1 Franz Kafka, The Trial, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1945), pp. 270-71. 2 In this chapter I have made use of some of the categories and findings of Thomas R. Ford's chapter, "The Passing of Provincialism," in The Southern Appalachian Region: A Survey (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1962), pp. 9-34. 30 Yesterday's People be an absolutely essential trait. Since the hollow where a family lived was separated from the hollows where their neighbors lived, transportation and communication between them was infrequent. Each household lived its own separate life. Each man became his own provider, his own law and protector, his family's agent to the outside world, its doctor and dentist and even teacher for the children, since no one else could be counted on to provide these services. Hence the mountaineer came to, admire the man who was most independent, both economically and socially. "Here, then, is a key to much that is puzzling in highland character. In the beginning, isolation was forced upon the mountaineers; they accepted it as inevitable and bore it with stoical fortitude until in time they came to love solitude for its own sake and to find compensations in it for lack of society."3 Some activities in mountain life were cooperative—the corn husking, the cabin raising, the quilting parties, the building of a church—but these were the...