Appalachians All: East Tennesseans and the Elusive History of an American Region

Prologue: East Tennessee Insights into Elusive Appalachia

Prologue East Tennessee Insights into Elusive Appalachia Mere mention of the word Appalachia evokes images as complex as they are colorful : a landscape beautiful and bucolic, rustic and rugged, scarred and hardscrabble ; a people noble and benighted, self-reliant and indolent, independent, ignorant, and impoverished. The inherent contradictions these labels convey lead me to suggest that another adjective—elusive—should be added to the list of Appalachian descriptors. Elusiveness is both cause and consequence of practically every Appalachian attribute, actual and imagined, spanning from admirable to disgraceful, and everything in between. This elusiveness extends at least as far back as 1539, when Apalachee Indians greeted Spanish explorers at the coast of Florida’s panhandle. The natives quickly rid themselves of Hernando de Soto and his meddlesome band. Tales of rich goldfields lured the ambitious and gullible conquistadores to mysterious mountains supposedly only several days’ journey north—perhaps the first Appalachian whopper. The Spaniards’ trek through the rugged uplands proved tragically disappointing—but not inconsequential. Within half a century, European mapmakers applied several derivations of the name Apalachee to the unforgiving mountains that produced little gold and even less glory for de Soto’s band. The enduring designation “Appalachia” was, to be sure, a misnomer offering lasting proof of the natives’ shrewdness. More important for purposes here, the sixteenth-century cartographers’ “Appalachia” has proved as enduring, elastic , and elusive as it was inaccurate. Mapmakers nearly five centuries later still do not agree about the physical boundaries of the space called Appalachia. Descriptions of the region’s human inhabitants reflect a similar lack of precision . For more than a century and half, casual observers and commentators who should have known better have defined Appalachians as uniformly rural and “country,” dismissing and diminishing the region’s people with sweeping generalizations. Whether negative or positive, these perceptions more clearly reflect the eye of the beholder than they do any verifiable Appalachian realities. Many reporters have addressed the origins and persistence of inaccurate, enfeebling assumptions about Appalachia’s people and culture. I am writing Prologue 2 this book because I believe those of us who reside here—and that is my definition of Appalachians—have accepted these images for too long. In this concern, I share the view of a fellow East Tennessee native who lamented several years ago that many Appalachians “firmly believe that Appalachia is someplace other than where they reside.”1 This book explores the causes and consequences of this self-denial within the history of the Appalachian subregion this observer and I share as our homeland. Scholars and the Appalachian Awakening In the turbulent years from around 1965 to 1980, as unprecedented domestic and global traumas accelerated a natural swing of historical revisionism that challenged long-popular understandings of the American past, early scholars in the fields of African American and women’s history began offering insights and inspiration to many historically marginalized groups, including Native Americans, This 1597 map reveals the consequences of the Apalachee Indians’ tall tale and the Spanish explorers’ eagerness to find gold. The label “Apalche” overlays sites of Cherokee towns in the southern mountains that subsequent observers called the “Appalachians.” (From Bureau of American Ethnology, Fifth Annual Report. Special Collections Library, University of Tennessee, Knoxville.) 1. Michael Montgomery, “Myths: How a Hunger for Roots Shapes Our Notions About Appalachian English,” Now and Then 17 (Summer 2000): 8. East Tennessee Insights into Elusive Appalachia 3 Cartographers have long disagreed about Appalachia’s exact physical boundaries. This map from the Encyclopedia of Appalachia (University of Tennessee Press, 2006) reflects current consensus about the region’s confines and is endorsed by the Appalachian Regional Commission. Hispanos, and Appalachians. In an angry quest to address past wrongs, neglect, and misinformation, Appalachian studies pioneers addressed two essential tasks. One group explored the origins of the idea of Appalachia. Following the lead of cultural historian Henry J. Shapiro’s Appalachia on our Mind (1979), this group persuasively argued that popular “Appalachian” images first appeared in the minds and literary offerings of late-nineteenth-century mainstream Americans, most notably local-color journalists and home missionaries. The needs of these outside commentators—and the anxieties of their audiences—Shapiro and his heirs suggest, influenced depictions of Appalachia more than did actual conditions in the mountains. Shapiro left to a second group of Appalachian studies pioneers the task of establishing the veracity of prevailing Appalachian stereotypes and, indeed, the idea of an “Appalachian...