Ramp Hollow

by Steven Stoll

  For foresters, missionaries, and businessmen, the thing to be overcome was the very cultural distinctiveness that travelers and geographers admired. When they said that mountaineers were different from other white citizens of the United States, they meant that highlanders wasted the resources under their control. They meant that older ways of being and doing things would never blend with twentieth-century needs and opportunities. They meant that folk religion deviated from institutional Protestantism. They meant that a people who used common lands for common uses lived within a deviant economic culture. By the late nineteenth century, they meant that industrial agriculture would not work in Appalachia. Sloping, rocky, narrow, inaccessible fields could not be modernized. A vast monoculture for export would never be planted there. Credit from financial institutions would never flow there.29

  Racialized qualities and geographical theories culminated in a single sentence. In 1900, a journalist for the New York Journal described a person he had never seen before. “A Hill-Billie is a free and untrammeled white citizen of Alabama, who lives in the hills, has no means to speak of, dresses as he can, talks as he pleases, drinks whiskey when he gets it, and fires off his revolver as the fancy takes him.” Hill-Billie was threatening for being free from hierarchy and unassimilated into Atlantic capitalism. But we cannot understand Billie without his historical setting. The mountains at that time were under full-scale assault. The landscape that sustained him by providing him with food at all seasons and commodities for exchange was vanishing. Writing in 1904, an engineer condemned highlanders with unusual ferocity. He called them “forlorn and miserable in appearance and behavior; but, never having known or dreamed of anything better than the wretched surroundings of their everyday life, they are supremely unconscious of their own misery.” The engineer mistook Hill-Billie’s condition for the historical process that had created him as poor and cast it back upon him.

  This is how a story that begins with Daniel Boone arrives at Hill-Billie, how admiration for frontier independence and tenacity turned into racialized condemnation and hatred within twenty or thirty years. The period of admiration might have been the exception. Plenty of people distrusted backwoods people before Boone’s career. It appears to have coincided with a certain moment in which settlement did not violate administrative authority but furthered American expansion. Nonetheless, it’s still remarkable how quickly the shift happened. The chapters that follow explain the events and methods that resulted in an astonishing process of dispossession, as well as the changes from within mountain ecology and economy that played a part in it.30

  And yet, some of the people most involved in extractive industry had another way of talking. They used a romantic language of light pathos and wistful regret. The president of the West Virginia Coal Mining Institute addressed assembled executives in 1912. He recalled his early career as a “mineral man,” climbing into hollows looking for coal. “I count it as a bit of rare good fortune that professional duties called me into the mountains while the men and women there were still natural, the spinning wheel in use, handmade rifles in service, good old sorghum served in coffee.” One night at twilight, “traveling a strange trail in a strange land,” he heard cowbells in the woods and smelled bacon from a nearby cabin. The inhabitants welcomed him in for “a long hour’s talk before a big log fire with all the family present.” The speaker did not wish to see those “natural” men and women again in possession of the mountains. In his mind, they now belonged to memory. And though he himself contributed to the demise of their way of life, he implies that a transcendent force of progress controlled events. Yet something else is striking about the speaker’s description of “natural” men and women, their homely ways, and their inevitable and necessary downfall. He could have been talking about American Indians.31

  * * *

  NO TWO DISPOSSESSIONS are the same. The white settler culture of the southern mountains did not share the same fate as the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, and Creek. The compulsory removal of these five nations in 1838, known in Cherokee as the Trail of Tears, would seem to have no connection to the coming of corporations to West Virginia. Still, these events bear a resemblance. They rhyme. In both instances, a privileged commercial class depicted the members of a target group as a despised race before taking their land.

  Forty years before, the United States favored a policy of assimilation. When Georgia planters and speculators tried to sway George Washington to help them eject the Creek from their homeland, the president snubbed them. If Creek men and women dressed, spoke, farmed, and worshipped like white southerners, Washington would commit the United States to protecting them. In the summer of 1790, he invited a Creek delegation to New York City. It was the beginning of an unprecedented pact with their vibrant leader, Alexander McGillivray. The son of a Scottish trader and a Creek mother, McGillivray had been commissioned a British colonel during the Revolution. He wanted to bridge the two worlds and the two peoples to whom he belonged. Weeks of negotiation and heavy drinking resulted in a treaty that established permanent borders to be enforced by the United States.

  On the twentieth of July, McGillivray and Washington stood at 39 Broadway. Said Washington, “I am glad you have come, Colonel. I have long felt that we had much in common.” Responded McGillivray, “I cannot flatter myself that much, Mr. President, but it has long been my ambition to shake your hand in friendship.” Their meeting held the promise of territorial sovereignty and Indian citizenship. Under the terms of the treaty, McGillivray became a brigadier general, suggesting a place for him within the nation-state. Over the following twenty years, many members of the five southern nations accepted certain aspects of white American culture. They became Christians and planted cotton. Some owned slaves. The Cherokee published a newspaper in their own language and ratified a constitution in accordance with the Constitution of the United States.

  None of these concessions or adaptations, however, made them more secure. Washington never enforced the treaty with McGillivray. The army never arrived to protect the Creek against speculators who instigated confrontation by fraudulently offering Creek land for sale. McGillivray repudiated the treaty in 1792 and died the next year. The electoral defeat of the Federalists in 1800 left Indians subject to Thomas Jefferson, an expansionist with little commitment to tribal sovereignty. Instead, Jefferson thought up ways of dispossessing the Chickasaw by predatory lending and foreclosure. Let the Indians come and trade, he said, and the army would furnish them “with all the necessaries and comforts they may wish,” encouraging them “to run in debt for these beyond their individual means of paying.” Once the scam was running, “they will always cede lands to rid themselves of debt.” A general sense that Indian claims throughout the South would soon be open to whites inspired a popular ditty: “All I ask in this creation / Is a pretty little wife and a big plantation / Way up yonder in the Cherokee Nation.”

  With the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828, planters and speculators believed that they had accumulated the political influence necessary to eject every last Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, and Creek and send them to the far side of the Mississippi River. Georgia’s political leadership declared the Cherokee Constitution null and void (though its legislature and governor had no authority to do so) and passed a series of laws asserting their rights over the Cherokee homeland. The Supreme Court seemed to come to the defense of the Cherokee by ruling that no state could claim jurisdiction over any Indian nation. The Court affirmed, however, that the United States did possess that authority. In other words, the Court threw the entire question into national politics. The same forces and interests so intent on puncturing Cherokee autonomy immediately appealed to Jackson. He responded by giving them everything they ever wanted.

  The Indian Removal Act of 1830 authorized the president to make some unnamed location available for those Indians “as may choose to exchange the lands where they now reside, and remove there.” But no offer ever conveyed a more blatant threat. No
thing prevented Jackson from using extralegal means to enforce this “exchange,” which really required people to leave the only home they had ever known for one they never wanted. But what makes the lead-up to the Trail of Tears so important is that justification for this policy of dispossession required public argument. It called for definitions and explanations from every branch of government.

  Removal began with an intellectual process, a rhetorical attack intended to erase the long-standing relationship between the nations and the United States. Representative Lewis Cass of Michigan, a former governor of the Michigan Territory, attempted to undermine any notion that Indians and whites could share the same social space. He said that missionaries had tried for decades to teach Christian morality to the Cherokee, “but there seems to be some insurmountable obstacle in the habits and temperament of the Indians.” As for the assertion that many among the Cherokee had conformed to the expectations of whites, Cass lied that only “half-breeds” did. Instead, “the great body of the people are in a state of helpless and hopeless poverty,” improvident and indolent. “We doubt whether there is, upon the face of the globe, a more wretched race than the Cherokees.” Cass recast their desperate attempt to find stability and gain acceptance as shallow mimicry.32

  Andrew Jackson dismissed the Cherokee as a failed race. He expressed a mystical ideology of white supremacy, in which the white settlement of North America necessarily supplanted Indians. Addressing a delegation in 1835, Jackson revealed the sham of a voluntary exchange. “Listen to me … while I tell you that you cannot remain where you now are. Circumstances that cannot be controlled, and which are beyond the reach of human laws, render it impossible that you can flourish in the midst of a civilized community.” Some Cherokee fled to Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) in advance of the policy. Some hid high in the mountains and evaded expulsion. But sixteen thousand found no way to hold out, part of an estimated sixty thousand Indians throughout the South who were ripped from their farms by marshals and made into refugees. Jackson promised to ameliorate any suffering that might ensue during the forced migration, but in December 1838 he did nothing while four thousand died of starvation, hypothermia, and sickness.33

  This forced exile differed entirely from the departures of the Scots-Irish from their homes in the hollows. Even under similar aspersions of degeneracy, mountain whites had a different relationship with those in power. Unlike the Creek and Cherokee, the Scots-Irish did not claim a collective identity in a sovereign territory. The five nations had engaged in treaty negotiation with the United States as nations since the end of the Revolution. Then, when the United States extinguished that sovereignty, it ejected the Indians as Indians. This collective ethnic identification made the Removal Act and the Trail of Tears different from the slow violence that brought an end to agrarian autonomy in places like West Virginia. No act of Congress or appeal to the Supreme Court or disavowal of treaties characterized the industrial invasion of Appalachia.34

  But the similarities also matter. Both groups were cast as degenerate races with no capacity for historical progress. Neither Scots-Irish cattle herders nor Chickasaw maize gardeners could be brought into the circulation of capital without shedding their rootedness in locality and their household sufficiency. Indian territorial sovereignty conflicted with the expansion of cotton and slavery. Mountaineer kinship made some of the same kinds of claims on the landscape as homeplace. Neither group made much sense to an emerging conception of land as commodity. Most of all, perhaps, both underwent an intellectual dispossession that preceded the one that actually took away their land. “Assaults on a nation’s environmental resources frequently entail not just the physical displacement of local communities, but their imaginative displacement as well,” writes the scholar Rob Nixon. By the time marshals arrested those Cherokee who refused to go peacefully, the five nations had already become notional refugees, “uncoupled from the idea of both a national future and a national memory.” Mountain whites lost their land under the same assumptions, if not the same tactics, deployed against Indians. Neither vanished, but rather they resisted and endured. They shared one other thing in common: their displacements made them poor.35

  * * *

  ALL AGRARIANS PRACTICE SOME VERSION of the same kind of economy. Anthropologists call it the household mode of production. It describes people who grow their own food and the ways they organize themselves to do so. A mode of production is not a particular way of making something. It is the making of something within all its social, environmental, and historical relationships. Think of someone working a plow. Is it an English peasant behind a horse, c. 1200? Or is it a worker under the direction of a district manager riding a tractor, c. 2000? Looked at one way, all plowing is the same. It opens the earth for planting. But to think of farmers in all places and times as doing the very same thing is a mistake. The peasant sustains his village and his lord, to whom he owes rent. He lives within webs of local obligation and religious devotion. The manager lives in a suburban community and regards agriculture as a source of income. He produces commodities for a remote corporation and is paid for his time. Each operates under differing conceptions of his place in the world. A mode of production describes the entire context of making something, including cultural cues and forms of authority. Thinking this way leads us to ask who benefits by any new tool and who doesn’t.

  As a mode of production, the household unites Daniel Boone with every African-American slave, each English peasant, and most of the humans who have ever lived. The words I will use to describe this form of economy (and explain later, along with the household itself) are subsistence, makeshift, and self-provisioning. Urbanized people of the twenty-first century tend to know little about the household mode of production, and often approach it with misconceptions and prejudices. Peasants, campesinos, and smallholders provoke two typical responses. They represent either a past of deprivation and suffering from which the people of the industrial world have escaped, or they exemplify lost simplicity, mutuality, and natural community to which we must return. They’re either brutish or noble, stupid or wise. We have seen this in the way outsiders to Appalachia looked at the people who lived there during the nineteenth century (loyal and brave during the Civil War, ignorant and degenerate after). The same thinking is common among whites toward American Indians. Yet neither way of thinking helps us to see people for who they are. It might be that the persistence of peasants and smallholders violates our implicit belief in progress, not the progress that we experience in working toward completing a task but the world-historical progress we think we see in technological innovation.

  This sense of progress is embedded in capitalism, a social system that demands constant expansion into new environments, absorbing new people in order to increase its rate of profit. Since expansion brings wealth to those who own and invest in production, they conceive of it as progress in the world-historical sense. Tens of millions of people link their identities, the trajectory and meaning of their lives, to a social system with all sorts of destructive tendencies, associating it with the highest aims of society itself. But if the perpetuation of capital is the same thing as progress, where does that leave smallholders all over the world, up to their shins in muck day in and day out? Though they buy and sell into the global economy (as I will explain), they have a different sense of progress. They thus appear to exist in some other universe, outside the dominant way of seeing and being. As the sociologist Teodor Shanin has written, “The real peasantry does not fit well into any of our concepts of contemporary society.” This is one of the problems at the center of this book.

  The peculiar thing about our way of thinking is that it conditions us to see peasants and others who live in “traditional” societies as inherently poor, awaiting the redemption of modernity. We compare their daily labor and stock of food to the abundance we experience on automotive gathering expeditions to the supermarket. Peasants sometimes don’t have enough to eat, though they might work at little else. Periodic sh
ortages of food can happen because of drought, flood, or a fast-growing population. But smallholders with sufficient access to the landscape rarely go hungry. The diversity of their environments and occupations provide safeguards and fallbacks.

  Nonetheless, we’ve all seen images of villagers starving, desperate mothers clutching gaunt and listless babies, older children with bellies distended by kwashiorkor.36 Journalists detail the suffering, and we are sometimes left with an impression of perennial misery. One argument of this book is that whenever we see hunger and deprivation among rural people, we need to ask a simple question: What went on just before the crisis that might have caused it? We can escape false assumptions and dichotomies by understanding a people’s history.

  An example will make my point. In 1940, an anthropologist named Allan Holmberg spent a number of years in the rainforest of eastern Bolivia studying a people called the Sirionó, in a region known as the Beni. Their culture seemed remarkably simple. They used few words, played no games or music, and seemed to lack mythology, medicine, and rituals. They had almost no tools but their longbows. They feared dogs, built poor shelters, and were strangely unfamiliar with their own environment. Holmberg said that they scrambled for food every waking moment and bickered over what little they found. He declared them among “the most culturally backward peoples of the world,” regarding them as primitives in the earliest stages of social evolution. Holmberg’s report, Nomads of the Longbow (1950), became essential reading for students of anthropology for more than forty years.37

  And yet, almost everything Holmberg wrote about the Sirionó turned out to be wrong. He noticed that they planted informal plots, which they abandoned and revisited at harvest. But he didn’t ask why. In addition to their food plants, they grew cotton and tobacco. When did they acquire these seeds and from whom? Why didn’t they garden more and hunt less when game ran short? The answers would have provided clues to their recent experience. By concentrating intently on what the Sirionó lacked and all the ways they failed his test of civilization, Holmberg hardly saw them at all.