Seedtime on the Cumberland

Epilogue

335 Epilogue The kettle singing from the crane above the glowing hickory embers was like most other aspects of pioneer life, both new and old. Fire and kettles were old in Europe when Martin Chartier visited the Cumberland . The heat of hickory embers had long been known to the American Indian, but was strange to England. The pioneer put the three together. The first settlers on the Cumberland, like first settlers elsewhere, invented nothing and most certainly not democracy. They pioneered no new system of government or religion or agriculture. Rather the successful pioneer was a master hand at adapting old learnings to a new environment; we see this not only in the physical aspects of his life—log house learned from the Swede; whiskey from the Scotch; corn, moccasins, poplar dugout, from the Indians, but also in the pattern of agriculture, trade, industry, education, speech, and all other aspects of his life so abundantly represented in source materials, my gleanings could not be incorporated into one book. Zachariah White, running from his classroom into mortal combat with Indians in the spring of 1781, taught in a form of fort, unknown in England. Yet, he like all other early teachers on the Cumberland used textbooks of English origin. Most early ministers on the Cumberland, even Asbury, preached at times in the woods, but the basic tenets of their theology were, like the hymns of Watts and Wesley, of European origin. The new log house in the new ground field was new to the man who cleared the land, but behind him other men on older borders to the east had built cabins and cleared fields. The Cumberland pioneer was merely re-creating a way of life known by that date to many other men; the pattern shaped and changed somewhat by the land, the climate, the river, and the Indians. All these influenced the pattern of his life, but it was not a new pattern. Mr. Gubbins, admitted to the Davidson County Bar in 1785, dead of Indians less than a year later, was a pioneer lawyer, but in his dress, his Blackstone, his quires of writing paper and packets of ink he was trying to re-create the life of a lawyer he had known in North Carolina Tidewater. He, 336| Epilogue like most of the other men about him, was still part of the world on the other side of the mountains. General James Winchester, buying Lord Chesterfield, Paine, Dilworth, and Voltaire, stocking them in his store on Bledsoe’s Creek, was attempting to re-create a bit of Philadelphia’s cultural and educational life on the frontier; and most of this life in turn was owed to England. Basically he was still an English colonial; what we now refer to as the American Way of Life had not, south of New England, begun to develop. Much has been written of a thing called “the pioneer mind.” I found no mind I could hold up and call “the pioneer mind,” and no man I could call “the pioneer.” The difference between the first settlers on the Cumberland and the rest of the country was one of degree and not of kind. They did not call themselves pioneers; later, other men, viewing them with different eyes, gave the name. The old ones lived to learn they were the last of their generations to plant British culture in the woods. Past the Mississippi the trees thinned, and the settlers who went there were quite often self-consciously American. Whatever the pioneer on the Cumberland was, he was not that. As one delves deeper into the complexities of his social, intellectual, and educational life one realizes more and more that the purely physical aspects of his world were in a sense the least of him. One also realizes there can never be a complete and perfect seeing. We cannot see him as he saw himself; this is not a mere matter of time or change in physical environment. Our eyes, looking at him across the years, must study him through a maze of modern concepts in sociology and psychology, unknown to the pioneer, but thick about us as Cumberland River fog. Our attitudes toward religion, man’s relationship to his government and his fellow man are entirely different from those that surrounded the old south from which most pioneers came. Pavlov ’s dog had not yet salivated, and the Reformation was still a vital force. ...