Ramp Hollow

by Steven Stoll

  Hill wrote about Boone’s ineptitude and bankruptcy at the very moment that the plain folk of the southern mountains had entered their own eclipse. Hill’s interpretation of Boone has nothing to do with what actually happened in the mountains or how the people who lived there responded to change. Instead, it reflects a shifting mood. In 1860, approximately 150,000 households lived in the American highlands. Members of Congress no longer celebrated them. Charles Faulkner, who had wrapped them in poetry in 1832, spoke of them obliquely in 1876: “Ours is a mountain country. Its population is thinly scattered through its hills and valleys.” He told the House of Representatives that West Virginia might overtake Britain in coal and iron production but not if its treasures remained “unused in the bowels of the earth.” The best that Faulkner could say about the peasantry he once called Virginia’s pride and strength was that they posed no impediment to what was coming.18

  The cultural slide seemed to pause during the Civil War. Northerners praised those southerners who fought on their side. West Virginia seceded from Virginia during the war and joined the Union. Kentucky also refused to join the Confederacy. To northerners, loyal mountaineers seemed to prove the justness of their cause. A writer for the Saint Paul Press compared the cotton-bound coastal plain to an infested swamp. But liberty lived in the mountains. “Freedom has always loved the air of mountains … The skypiercing peaks of the continents are bulwarks against oppression: and from mountain valleys has often swept most fearful retribution to tyrants.” The New York Times consistently looked upon them favorably, as “loyal mountaineers,” “simple-hearted and faithful mountaineers,” and “brave mountaineers who have trusty rifles, and, if attacked, there will be some rebel blood left there to pollute the mountain soil.” But this esteem did not outlast the war. The ongoing struggle for control of the continent changed locations and took a different form in the 1870s. The conflict shifted to the Great Plains, where the Union fought the Sioux. Investors created wheat fields the size of counties, harvested them with steam engines, and employed armies of immigrants. The locomotive overtook the frontiersman as the paramount symbol of progress.19

  Before outright disdain came fascination. Edward Pollard, a Baltimore attorney born in Virginia, took a jaunt into the mountains in 1869. No one told him it had been done before. “The Author comes before the public … bearing what may be described to many readers in America as the discoveries or revelations of a New World!” He described the inhabitants as the sturdy poor: “There is nothing of the squalor or wretchedness of poverty in the mountains,” chirped Pollard. “The poverty of the mountain is picturesque; it is hardy, healthful; it is a school of rude but independent manners.” The giddy sophisticate went cabin to cabin in search of some kind of aesthetic sublime. What, exactly, did he mean by a “delicious sensation, with contrasts in it of bodily discomfort only sharp enough to increase the zest”?

  Pollard jumped up and down and clapped his hands at the rustic interiors. One evening after watching as his host (a stoic dude in homemade clothing) filled pipe after pipe for an hour, Pollard cleared his throat. “Look here … old man … why do you smoke so much?” Stoic dude responded, “Well, sir, I live here … I has my pleasure in whatsoever I is at for de time I am at it.” This only deepened the mystery. Another highlander seemed “a splendid specimen of his class—a stalwart son of the forest, of Herculean stature.” Pollard also noticed the landscape. Tazewell County (soon to become McDowell County) offered crystal springs and romantic views, ideal sites for spas and hotels. He advertised the place: “At present we are firmly persuaded that there is no field of investment in Virginia that presents such opportunities as does the already awakened improvement of springs property.” He found sulfur springs pouring with cool tonic water and had a gallon of it analyzed. Perfect for invalids!20

  Travelers continued to emphasize local color, but others wrote in a more menacing voice. An article appeared in Lippincott’s Magazine that seemed to mark a new conception of the region and its people. Its opening is benign. “We were journeying over the mountains in the autumn of 1869. Our camp was pitched in a valley of the ascending ridges of the Cumberland range, on the south-east border of Kentucky.” The author arrives at a cabin door. An African-American woman answers, revealing “the sordid interior … sickly with the smell of half-eaten food and unwashed dishes; the central figure a poor, helpless old man sitting on a stool.” The man was white, and the author supposes him a deposed slaveholder, rotting in some unspecified immorality among his former property.

  For the author, that moment set off a torrent of scorn against the poor whites of the mountains, some of it strange and shocking. “The natives of this region are characterized by marked peculiarities of the anatomical frame. The elongation of the bones, the contour of the facial angle, the relative proportion or disproportion of the extremities, the loose muscular attachment of the ligatures.” This racialized condemnation, perhaps more than any other insult and degradation they received, most indicates the extent to which they had fallen down a cultural gradient, from the formidable owners of their material world to curiosities—at best the makers of homely quilts and rough-hewn furniture, at worst moonshine-distilling insurgents and violent slackers against the social order. The disparaging writing about the poor whites of the southern mountains tends to assert or imply their incapacity for historical change. It accuses them of stagnation amid opportunities for wealth. Rather than admit that they did not understand the people they confronted, the journalists, social scientists, and tourists who produced this writing often castigated and dismissed them.21

  The writers expressed three attitudes, sometimes in combination. Some, like Pollard, delighted in cultural difference. They regarded the mountaineers as the survivors of a pure Anglo-Saxon culture that should be preserved. Others diagnosed degeneracy. In this view, the descendants of the bold pioneers became wretched in isolation and failed to live up to their supposed Anglo-Saxon potential. Another group held either of the first two views and also tried to figure out where the mountaineers had come from as a way of diagnosing their problem. This last group is the most interesting, since they claimed to be doing social science.

  Nineteenth-century social science came into being in order to categorize so-called backward and changeless people. “Let students of sociology leave their books,” advised one authority, “and at first hand in the Cumberlands deal with the phenomena of a social order arrested at a relatively early stage of evolution.” The historian Frederick Jackson Turner made a similar pronouncement in 1893. “Among isolated coves … the frontier has survived, like a fossil, in a more recent social formation.” Two broad explanations emerged, one environmental, the other racial. Some theorized that geology and geography influence certain qualities or characteristics. In other words, the left-behind posterity of the first settlers eventually succumbed to isolation; they became stunted by the hollows. Another line of investigation attempted to trace the mountaineers to an originating ethnic group. In this view, degeneracy could be passed from generation to generation as an inherited trait.22

  Several of these ideas appear in the writings of William Goodell Frost and Ellen Churchill Semple. Born in Buffalo, New York, the son and grandson of New England missionaries and abolitionists, Frost presided over Berea College in Madison County, Kentucky, for almost thirty years. He believed that the highlanders composed a forgotten colony of Anglo-Saxons, unchanged by the times, like air bubbles trapped in Arctic ice. “The mountaineer is to be regarded as a survival,” wrote Frost in 1898. “In his speech you will soon detect the flavor of Chaucer; in his home you shall see the fireside industries of past ages … in a word, he is our contemporary ancestor!” Frost’s oxymoron contains a theory of regionalism. He defined Appalachia as the place where physical isolation preserved the cultural traits of a frontier society.

  Frost also expressed an environmental theory of cultural formation, an idea popular among the northeastern elite. Along with Theodore Roosevelt and Frederic
k Jackson Turner, Frost believed that the struggle and strain of frontier life provided an experience of conquest that produced the American character. According to Turner, the end of the frontier as a place of conflict and a process of state formation marked the end of an epoch. Appalachians stood apart from the relentless technological change of the late nineteenth century, and for Frost, Turner, and Roosevelt that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. With other metropolitans they certainly advocated for locomotives and electricity, but they also thought that white mountaineers represented certain barbarian virtues worth preserving. The highlanders’ steadiness offered a polestar—“a fixed point which enables us to measure the progress of the moving world.” How or whether these noble savages in their redoubts would withstand industrial capitalism no one could say.23

  To the geographer Ellen Churchill Semple, the wayward mountaineers composed a seed bank, the stored germ plasm of Anglo-Saxon Puritans, “as if they had disembarked from their eighteenth-century vessel but yesterday.” She knew that just yesterday the reeking scum of Europe had disembarked from their nineteenth-century vessel. Irishmen patrolled the streets of New York City and Boston. By the 1880s, their political machines had supplanted the genteel influence of the Astors and the Lowells. The ongoing invasion of Italians and Jews sent the guardians of Anglo-Saxon culture into anxious fits of racial conservation. They invented eugenics, spread chapters of the Daughters of the American Revolution, and gated Plymouth Rock. The people of upland Kentucky gave Semple strange solace. They had been tainted by a smidgeon of French and German but were otherwise pure. “The stock has been kept free from the tide of foreign immigrants.” But what proof did she have for the pure blood of the hollow folk?24

  Frost and Semple both believed that they heard Elizabethan English spoken in West Virginia and Kentucky. Words like afeared, and learn (for teach, as in “Learn me how to lose a winning match,” from Romeo and Juliet) are among the few cited as evidence. But there is no evidence. These words were common all over the South. They did not “survive” in the mountains. It isn’t clear why mountaineers would speak like Shakespeare anyway, given that they had stronger ties to Scotland and Ireland than to England. Neither Frost nor Semple knew of the Swedish and Finnish origins of the backwoods settlement culture or that the ancestors of the log-cabin folk had spent the seventeenth century at or near the seaboard, mixing with Delaware Indians. The contention that Appalachian dialect originated in early-modern England, writes the linguist Michael Montgomery, “cannot withstand even a little objective scrutiny.”

  What Frost and Semple thought they knew turns out to be less important than what they assumed. They believed that certain people created culture; others received it. In this view, Appalachians exhibited inherited traits, having invented nothing themselves. Other examples of the same thinking also involve mountain dwellers. In northern Luzon, the largest island of the Philippines, smallholders cultivate wet rice in terraces. Anthropologists once believed that the practice of terrace construction had arrived from China in about 1500 B.C. False. Recent studies show that the terraces date only to the seventeenth century, when lowland farmers sought refuge at higher elevations from the Spanish colonial military. Within a relatively short time, in other words, highland Filipinos developed practices that observers could not conceive of as having come from them.25

  It isn’t the falseness of these ideas that makes them interesting but the problems they appeared to solve. A few old English words here and there, a comforting assertion about elevation and culture, simplified matters too complex for the prevailing models of reality. Some of the same geographers who invented Appalachia advocated environmental determinism, or the idea that climate and geography generate human differences and drive history. Ellsworth Huntington, the best-known determinist of the twentieth century, claimed to have cut a clarifying path through the messiness of human events. “Maps of what we may call climatic energy are practically identical with maps of health, crop yields, transportation, income, wages, education, and a host of other economic and social conditions … Therefore the only logical conclusion is that the main geographical pattern is set by climate.” Huntington invented “climate energy” out of thin air and then confused correlation with causation. He didn’t really practice social science at all. Climate didn’t pose questions for his investigation. Instead, it provided simple answers to historical problems he did not understand.26

  The two broad explanations of highland degeneracy often appeared in the same works. The basic premise was that a class of northern Europeans (either sturdy Anglo-Saxon pioneers or Scots-Irish criminals) found their way into the mountains and became trapped by topography, stagnating in their remoteness and turning into the grotesque mountaineers of the 1890s. It should be clear that none of this came from what we would recognize as ethnographic fieldwork. Frost, Semple, and Huntington made what they wanted of their subjects. No one asked them to justify their faulty methods because their so-called findings reinforced the Atlantic elite’s most versatile sociological category: race.

  Race emerged as the self-serving ideology at the center of social science. It’s a spectacular fabrication in which one group collects the qualities of another group (speech, skin color, geography, social status, or foodways) and casts them as inferior under an inviolate authority (God, Nature, or Progress). As the historian Jacqueline Jones argues, “Race signifies neither a biological fact, nor a primal prejudice, and it lacks the coherence of a robust political ideology; rather, it is a collection of fluid, contingent mythologies borne of (among other imperatives) fighting a war, assembling a labor force, advancing the designs of demagogues, organizing a labor union, and preserving voting and public schooling as privileges reserved for some, rather than as rights shared by all.” We know that white slaveholders began to prefer African to English indentures for a variety of reasons and only later justified African slavery on the basis of skin color. Once black became synonymous with slave in the Atlantic World, planters could deploy a circular argument for bondage, torture, and rape.27

  Poor whites also became a despised race defined by their own circular argument. Descriptions of mountaineers emphasize their supposed degeneracy and grotesqueness, which came from their isolation, causing moral depravity, resulting in … degeneracy and grotesqueness. Once a racial type is in place, any worsening of a subject people’s condition reinforces the type, providing proof after proof. Racialization has often gone along with ejectment and enclosure, offering an intellectual tool for taking resources away from people said to be incapable of progress or change. This is what we find in the southern mountains. The knowledge that wood, coal, and other minerals existed there came first, soon followed by the technical capability and political organization necessary to extract them. Between the 1860s and 1900, metropolitans accused struggling households, many in tenuous legal possession of the land they farmed, of unfitness for the modern world. The writer James Lane Allen fired a shot for speculators and shareholders. “For, within a hundred years, the only thing to take possession of it, slowly, sluggishly overspreading the region of its foot-hills, its vales and fertile slopes—the only thing to take possession of it and to claim it has been a race of mountaineers, an idle, shiftless, ignorant, lawless population.” Aspersions of stupidity, backwardness, primitivism, and volatility coincided with the seizure of the environment.

  Inventing a race of people and depriving them of land not only required the force of law, it required a story. The writer Allen told it dramatically. Once upon a time mountaineers lived in high-and-away Kentucky, “a zone of almost inaccessible hills with steep slopes, forests difficult to penetrate, and narrow jagged gorges … a virgin wilderness, a vast isolating and isolated barrier.” The author lived to see the fortress of the Cumberlands fall before the world-historical movement of extractive industry, “bringing into it the new, and letting the old be scattered until it is lost.” The people, like the landscape, are redeemed to a higher purpose. “Old manners and customs, old types of
character and ideals of life, old virtues and graces as well as old vices and horrors,” are obliterated.

  Isolation appears often in these stories. No one who lived in Kentucky thought that they lived behind “inaccessible hills … a vast isolating and isolated barrier,” as Allen called it. Merchants and farmers there sold cattle to Baltimore, floated logs to Ohio, and shipped whiskey down to New Orleans. They acquired consumer products from all over. And yet, the slant of the ranges favored commerce in certain directions and not others, northeasterly in the Blue Ridge, northwesterly on the Plateau. Getting around wasn’t like galloping through Kansas over a hundred miles of good road. The mountains made travel difficult much of the year and at times impossible. But industry had no trouble finding what it wanted and removing it. Corporations lay track into thousands of hollows and pulled billions of dollars in lumber and coal from the region over the following century. Still, those searching for the causes of poverty in Appalachia—throughout the twentieth century and even today—blame its isolation.

  As recently as 2007, the Appalachian Regional Commission used a boilerplate that could have been written a century earlier. “These … mountains have stood throughout history as nearly impenetrable barriers to socioeconomic interaction, commerce, and prosperity … Appalachia is a place apart, a place where people have long-suffered the chronic economic consequences of physical isolation.” Isolation, as it is used in this sense, doesn’t really describe location. It describes an unholy remove from civil society, an outlier status. Like race, it doesn’t really exist, but the story requires it. It defines the thing to be overcome.28