APPALACHIAN SEQUENCE

DAVID M. BURNS

From primeval wilderness to endemic poverty

The old Kentucky Road followed creek-beds, winding its way through a disorderly tapestry of trees. Enormous hemlocks, towering beech, black gums, blooming sorrel, cucumber magnolia, and pungent sassafras grew in wild profusion on hillside, cove, and valley floor. There were clearings where trees had fallen from age, lightning, or high winds, leaving a thick layer of humus. These primeval woods were part of the great forest that once stretched from Nova Scotia to Alabama and from the Atlantic to the Mississippi.

The road was choked with thickets of grapevines, holly, and impenetrable tangles of rhododendron. It was a place of fragile bogs, a great variety of mosses, shoulder- high cinnamon ferns, bizarrely shaped and colorful fungi and mushrooms, lichen-covered rocks, sharp spurs, narrow valleys, and sandstone caves.

The giants were the poplars, some ten feet in diameter, straight as arrows and centuries old, so tall their tops could not be seen. Foliage was often so dense that little sunlight reached the forest floor and the hollows were murky and menacing.

The path was first trod by Ice Age animals, including mastodons and the giant sloth. Thousands of years later, the path was followed by woodland bison, elk, and deer, and by the Shawnee and Cherokee who hunted them. In the mid-18th century, Long Hunters returned this way with horse-loads of bison, bear, and beaver pelts after a year or more lost in the deep forest who-knows-where, competing with Indians for game. They also brought back deer and elk hides, tanned with animal brains or chestnut, oak, and hickory bark. The carcasses were left to rot in places that still bear names like Greasy Creek and Stinking Creek.

The route was first known as Athawominee, the Warrior’s Path. Indians and hunters followed it through Cumberland Gap, and ten miles farther north, through a dramatic cleft in Pine Mountain. They called the second gap Wasioto (shown on 18th-century French maps as “Ouasioto”), meaning in Shawnee, or perhaps in Wyandot, no one is sure, “land where deer are plentiful.” The name designated both Pine Gap (which settlers later dubbed “The Narrows”) and the rich hunting lands of the Cumberland Plateau.

TRIPLE GATEWAY TO AMERICA’S FIRST “WEST”

Dr. Thomas Walker of Charlottesville was by no means the first European to follow this trail into present- day Kentucky. But his 1750 exploration, almost 20 years before Daniel Boone, provided much information for early maps. He discovered and named the Cumberland River, and noted a place a mile beyond Pine Gap where the river runs wide and the water becomes so shallow horses and even children can wade across. Cumberland Ford was where settlers camped as they waited for the river to drop. The river was the last physical barrier to the settlement of Kentucky. Pine Gap and the ford formed, together with Cumberland Gap, a triple gateway to the West.Walker noted in his Journal, the first written account of what lay beyond Virginia’s Blue Ridge, that there were outcroppings of coal, and brought back samples, perhaps to prove there was something of economic worth on the other side.

A tollgate to raise money for the upkeep of the Kentucky Road was located at the entrance to Pine Gap. Over time, a village grew up beside the tollgate, with houses clinging precariously to the riverbank— cabins, stores, and stables strung out a mile or so. Today, virtually all traces of these structures have been obliterated. The haze that billows along is not dust raised by moccasins or hooves of horses, but diesel smoke from 18-wheeler trucks. The Warrior’s Path has become a four-lane superhighway.

Between 1780 and 1810, some 300,000 pioneer settlers followed the path. They walked, as horses and mules had to carry their kit. Anxiety about Indian attacks, entirely rational given eyewitness accounts of scalpings and murders, made the woods a place of wild terror, and changed the Warrior’s Path into the Wilderness Road. Fear was mixed with euphoria, the feeling among settlers that they had entered a new Eden.

Armies of squirrels, the foremost delicacy of frontier cuisine, grew fat on mast. Dogwood, redbud, yellow lady slipper, and trillium provided splashes of color in spring. Jack-in-the-pulpit and pink buds of mountain ivy swelled into bloom. There were occasional whirling clouds of passenger pigeons, thrush singing in nests, yellow-headed Carolina parrots feeding in cocklebur patches, woodpeckers hammering noisily in dead snags, and owls flapping silently in the night. Many creek banks were choked with cane, Kentucky’s native bamboo. The streams were pristine and clear, full of crayfish and salamanders, and leaping trout and bass.

On the trek, and until they could make a crop, settlers lived mostly off deer, turkey, and wild greens. Forest game remained an important part of their diet, and a rifle, powder, and lead were as essential as a horse, an axe, and seeds. The final entry in Walker’s Journal reads:

We killed in the journey 13 buffaloes, 8 Elks, 53 Bears, 20 Deers, 4 Wild Geese, about 150 Turkeys, besides small game.We might have killed three times as much meat, if we had wanted it.

Many settlers drove hogs, turkeys, cattle, or sheep, and carried chickens in baskets. All brought as much parched corn, hominy, or meal as their animals could carry. They knew what they wanted—land and freedom.

Settlers sought out fertile bottoms, though in thin valleys there was never much. Clear steady-flowing water was essential, but springs could be found everywhere. Having selected a site, the settler’s first task was to chop down as many trees as possible and burn the stumps. This was his clearing, a place for his cabin and his crops. He then invited neighbors to help with “a workings.” Settlers knew they had to rely on each other.

They felled tulip poplars and oaks and dragged them to the clearing with horses and mules. The logs were set on stone piers, ends hewed to a tight half-dovetail notch with axes, wedges, and maul. Most cabins were single-pen, one door leading to the front of the clearing, two leather-hinged windows on each side. Gaps between the logs were chinked inside and out, then daubed wind-tight with clay. Chestnut logs were shaved flat for puncheon floors, and pegs in the walls held clothing. The cabin was roofed with split oak shingles set on skinned poles. There was enough height for a sleeping loft with tiny windows in each end. Bedsteads laced with sinews and topped with mattresses of corn shucks would do just fine for children certain to appear. A good-drawing chimney, the stones set in burnt limestone and sand, was essential for cooking and heating. Firewood was consumed in vast quantities, summer and winter alike, and trees were split for fencing. The work went quickly. The men were proud to build a solid cabin.

It was a life of unceasing hard work and lonely isolation. But there was land, though usually no clear title. The threat of massacres slowly subsided, the numbers of Indians diminished by warfare with settlers and, more significantly, rampant epidemics of measles and smallpox. Year by year,more settlers arrived and squatted. Like their hopeful predecessors, the newcomers also sought a better life. Big families, often exceeding eight children, were the norm. But increasing numbers meant more people and livestock to be sustained from tiny slivers of cropland, and the corn fields spread up the steepest slopes. After the wild game was shot out, they relied on cows and sheep, and thin hogs feeding on acorns and beechnuts.

RELENTLESS EROSION

By the Civil War, the grandchildren of the first settlers were grown. The land had been gutted.As rich soil accumulated over eons washed down barren hillsides to be deposited on floodplains miles away, the land was stripped of its hide. Farms were less productive and families were reduced to bare subsistence. Cabins went unrepaired; some fell off their foundations. Clearings became trash-filled hog-wallows, privies overflowing into springs and creeks.

People themselves seemed to erode, the children dying of croup while adults died young of vague fevers. All were inexorably diminished. Poverty led to bitter fatalism. The new Eden had been milked dry, and a listless apathy descended. Raw corn whiskey was the main source of cash and the proximate cause of a malady afflicting many Kentucky folk.

There was little industry in Eastern Kentucky before the coming of the railroads, other than corn whiskey and droves of animals. Logging grew in importance after the Civil War, becoming a big-money enterprise rather than a supplement to farming. The ancient giants were floated downstream on rafts, headed for big sawmills on the Kentucky, Big Sandy, and Tug Fork rivers. Some timber, especially big black walnut, was exported to Europe. Cherry, hickory, spruce, and ash were skidded down the mountains on a one-way trip to sawmills, most of it sold for a pittance.

But industrial-scale logging allowed even more topsoil to wash down hillsides. By the 1930s, the timber boom had left eastern Kentucky nothing of lasting benefit: no furniture industry; and no craftsmanship. Preservation began only after forests had been severely damaged. Even on “reclaimed” land there are few of the old species. The once-mighty giants have vanished from the forest, along with the Eastern bison, passenger pigeon, Carolina parrot, and many native plants.

The railroads also opened the way for coal mining. After the Civil War, steel mills created an insatiable demand for coking coal. Exploring geologists had described vast beds of bituminous coal under the wooded hills, and squads of smooth-talking attorneys began helping speculators buy mineral rights. This was much cheaper than owning land of no value aside from the coal underneath it. The accomplices were often local good ol’ boys, the lucky few who had managed to get an education. They camped out in county clerks’ offices, searching out titles, lawyering and dickering to obtain rights to both timber and minerals, sometimes by fraud. The buyers, eastern entrepreneurs funded by Mellon, J.P. Morgan, Rockefeller, and others with lots of capital, used charm and the immediate allure of shiny gold coins to acquire mineral rights from illiterate farmers for as little as fifty cents an acre.

Kentucky’s Broad Form deed, in force from 1890- 1990, permitted the owner of mineral rights to do anything whatsoever to extract whatever they thought might lie underneath, without further permission or payment to the landowner. The ignorance and poverty of subsistence farmers made for easy pickin’s. Poor farmers watched helplessly as their land was ripped and gutted.

Within a matter of decades, much of the land had been surface mined. Power shovels can quickly remove entire mountaintops; and bulldozers push trees, rocks, and mud over the side, choking the valleys and streams (though bass are returning). Once the black coal seam is revealed, draglines, some as tall as multi-story buildings, scrape out the coal, which is trucked to hundredcar unit trains often headed for TVA steam-powered electric plants. Some strip-mined land has been “restored,” but the result looks more like logged-over scrub than the forest it once was.

The hills were denuded, and with little vegetation to absorb the rainfall, sheets of water ran—and continue to run—unchecked. Floods devastate downstream towns. Today many of these towns are now protected, after decades of damage, by expensive dikes and floodwalls. Trees regrow, but it will take many centuries to recreate even an approximation of the wilderness encountered by early settlers.

Coal mining first hollowed out the mountains, and then removed them entirely. Coal also hollowed out miners and their families. Coal mines did provide jobs—though at a great cost in injuries and diseases such as emphysema.

The people of Kentucky, most of them descendents of early settlers, are tough; they will endure. Young people, who have been the state’s most valuable export for generations, leave as soon as they realize there is little or no work. Many in eastern Kentucky, like their kin elsewhere in Appalachia, seem devoid of hope, withered husks of their fiercely independent ancestors. Like the mountains that surround them, they, too, have been stripped.

Mining has been characterized in many times and in many places by an attitude of get it all, right now. It seldom asks what will be left, or is it worth it. The people of Eastern Kentucky are intensely attached to the mountains by ties of kinship and sentiment. It is ironic that much devastation was abetted by mountain people themselves, and by the local entrepreneurs in the timber and coal industries.

Coal brought electricity, hospitals, schools, motion pictures, and stores. The coal life, at least in the early years, held great appeal for poor farmers in remote “hollers.” They came eagerly to the mines—not that the poor ever have much choice. Families have to eat, and you simply cannot make a living farming eroded hillsides. In boom years, miners had decent salaries and hope. But a bust followed every boom, and thousands would be laid off. Unemployed miners began to migrate northward after World War I, often to DEEtroit. The exodus speeded up during the Depression and after World War II.

Coal operators controlled towns like little kingdoms, weakening the proud traditions of the mountain folk.Miners were paid on a piecework basis and began to view themselves as company property and the hills around them as a mineral colony. They were expected to vote as the company wanted. They paid high prices at company-owned stores, a policy enforced by paying miners in scrip that could be spent only at the company store. A wage check-off paid for doctors and teachers hired by the company. The operators also hired deputy sheriffs, mainly to intimidate union organizers. Miners were expected to be silent, and were fired and evicted if they were not.

Uneducated, often illiterate, men, many in their teens, navigated the black maze of tunnels under the mountains, where the roofs were so low there was no place to stand upright. With only the light of sputtering carbide lanterns, they blasted and shoveled until they dropped.Many were killed or injured by dynamite that went awry, pockets of explosive methane, roof falls, electrocution. Old miners die today from dust inhaled when they were young, their last years a time of distress. They cough constantly, gasping for breath, as black lung kills them, slowly, but very surely.

The story of coal in eastern Kentucky, or anywhere in Appalachia, is a tangled skein of investments, boomand- bust economics, jobs, emotional and bitter labor conflicts and violence, and grief from accidents. Coal has affected the quality of life of thousands, and still does. Coal permeates every aspect of Kentucky politics, and the tentacles of the industry run deep into the lives of families.

Eastern Kentucky reached its peak population during World War II, and has been losing people ever since. In the 1940s, coal was in demand and the mines required lots of workers. Today, almost all the underground mines are closed. A handful of men with machines can produce the coal that once required thousands of workers. The infrastructure of underground mining was sold for scrap, or has rusted away. Mountain people say the scars of surface mining “hair over” with scrub. This is true, and makes it hard to find the huge mounds of slate and slag that smoldered from internal combustion. Weed-choked old camps keep eroding slowly. These are the places where the Depression never went away.

County seats also suffer from Appalachia’s chronic poverty. Towns in eastern Kentucky prospered in tandem with timber and coal, providing work for surveyors, lawyers, engineers, doctors, dentists, mechanics, railway workers, postal employees, and telegraph operators. There were once thriving banks and stores of every kind—hardware, dry goods and notions, animal feed and fertilizer, drugs, and groceries. The little towns that once served 20 or more mining camps are as desolate and rundown as the camps themselves.

TRAPPED IN POVERTY

Two and a half centuries after the Kentucky Road began to lure settlers west, Eastern Kentucky strives hard for economic development. Education has greatly improved, but the state is still stuck just above Mississippi in national comparisons. Schools often have excellent physical facilities. But teachers are poorly paid and many are not fully qualified. There are programs that teach job skills, often for jobs that do not exist. Despite an abundance of initiatives and programs, almost all state and federally funded, there is little industry.

There is an excellent modern road system, built mostly in the past 50 years with federal dollars. And, like the rest of America, drugs are ubiquitous. Kentucky’s most important cash crop is marijuana, far surpassing tobacco. Methamphetamine is produced in backyard labs, and there is an active market for all kinds of narcotics.

Pioneer settlers wanted land to farm, and the right to be left alone. They braved the terror of unknown wilderness to make a better life for themselves and their children. Eastern Kentucky’s resources, natural and mineral, were severely depleted by greed and heedless profligacy. An intelligent, hard-working people are left with slim prospects.

Today, the mining jobs are mostly gone. There is still a little money in logging and mining, but no more than one-hundredth as much as in the boom years. Many people survive on disability payments, including remittances for black lung sufferers. Social Security payments, Women, Infants, and Children allowances, and Food Stamps put food on the table.Descendants of pioneers subsist today not by farming hillsides, but by remittances and welfare. Their chief concern is that the green checks arrive on schedule. It may require generations for mountain people to work their way out of endemic poverty and welfare dependency.

David M. Burns (CC ’81) was born in Pineville, Kentucky. The author of Gateway: Dr. Thomas Walker and the Opening of Kentucky, he currently serves on the board of the Kentucky Mountain Laurel Festival and the Kentucky Natural Lands Trust.

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