Bluegrass Messengers

The Southern Mountaineer in Fact and Fiction: Part II
by Cratis D. Williams and Martha H. Pipes
Appalachian Journal, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Winter 1976), pp. 100-162

[The editing of The Southern Mountaineer in Fact and Fiction has been made possible by the generous financial support of the Appalachian Consortium. Mr. Borden Mace, Executive Director of the Consortium, deserves special recognition, for it was to him that this project was originally outlined. We have all been encouraged by his enthusiasm for Dr. Williams' monumental study of mountain life and literature and by his belief that the work deserved wide dissemination. This is the second of four parts.]

PART II
Edited by Martha H. Pipes

The Southern Mountaineer in Fact an Fiction
by CRATIS D. WILLIAMS
 

CHAPTER 3.
The Shaping of the Fictional Legend of the Southern Mountaineer The most notable literary ancestors of the Southern mountaineer are Jonathan from Royall Tyler's The Contrast, the rustic who comes into polite society with his back-country speech and views of life, James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking, specifically of The Pioneers, and Augustus Longstreet's Ransy Sniffle from "The Fight" (1835). The motifs and the attitudes toward their subjects employed by Tyler, Cooper, and Longstreet are embryonic in much of the fiction pertaining to mountaineers. Yet neither Jonathan, the shrewd countryman, Natty Bumppo, the epic backwoodsman, hunter, and henchman, nor Ransy Sniffle, the depraved poor white, is in himself a mountaineer. But as the mountaineer becomes separated in fiction from the pioneer, the hunter, and the backwoodsman, he continues to remind the reader of his three most distinguished forebears in American literature.

I

The death of Daniel Boone in 1820, which in part inspired Cooper in his creation of the character of Natty Bumppo, turned the attention of Americans to the vanishing backwoodsman and prepared the way for much fiction that centered upon border life. For purposes of comparison, a con- sideration of two rather successful novels that did not attempt specifically to picture life among the mountain people bears fruit for the student who wishes to discover the point at which the mountaineer began to go his own way in fiction.

Harpe's Head: A Legend of Kentucky (1833), by James Hall,[1] is a historical novel that capitalizes on the activities of the villainous Harpe gang that had terrorized the frontier in the closing years of the eighteenth century.[2] There was much in the book that contributed toward the con- ception of a distinct mountaineer class in subsequent fiction. The democratic spirit displayed by the inhabitants of the Valley of Virginia at Major Heyward's celebrated barbecue, to which all people within a radius of many miles considered themselves invited, was an archetype of social gatherings in the mountain country for over a century to follow. Among the guests were those who would have been considered mountaineers, "plain farmers and their families, stout built, well fed, well clad, - an intelligent and independent race, who lived on their own farms, and justly considered them- selves the peers of the best in the land."3 In describing the barbecue, Hall observed that everybody talked and ate with a "rapidity that would have defied the skill of even a modern reporter. [4]
 
Hall characterized a class of shiftless poor whites who followed in the wake of the real pioneer. It is from this class that many historians have in- sisted the mountaineer is descended:

A frontier is often the retreat of loose individuals who, if not familiar with crime, have very blunt perceptions of virtue. The genuine woodsman, the real pioneer, are independent, brave, and upright; but as the jackal pursues the lion to devour his leavings, the footsteps of the sturdy hunter are closely pursued by miscreants destitute of his noble qualities. These are the poorest and the idlest of the human race - averse to labour, and impatient of the restraints of law and the courtesies of civilized society. Without the ardour, the activity, the love of sport, and patience of fatigue, which distinguish the bold backwoodsmen, these are doomed to the forest by sheer laziness, and hunt for a bare subsistence; they are "the cankers of a calm world and a long peace," the helpless nobodies, who, in a country where none starve and few beg, sleep until hunger pinches, then stroll into the woods for a meal, and return to their slumber. Frequently they are as harmless as the wart upon a man's nose, and as unsightly; but they are sometimes mere wax in the hands of the designing, and become the accessories of that guilt which they have not the courage or the industry to perpetrate.[5]
 
Hall handled acceptably the dialect of the people on the frontier. Such words as "peticklar," "heern," "sich," "tarnal," "sojers," "inemy," "sort o'," "forrard" (forward), "tote," "that 'ar," "arter" (after), "afore," "axed," "bodyaciously," "tee-totally obflisticated" (completely annihilated), "noratin'," "yaller janders," "hope" (helped), "pieded," "seed" (saw), "crittur," and "larn" apparently belonged to the vocabulary of the masses at the close of the eighteenth century. In Harpe's Head is the essential vocabulary reported from the mountain people down to the present time. Furthermore, the skillful use of invective and the colorful figures of speech that Hall occasionally reported have counterparts in recent moun- taineer fiction. When Hark Short, responding to a question from Micajah Harpe concerning what Hark's mother had to say of him, said "Well, she said, if anybody was to rake hell with a fine comb, they could not find sich a - sich a tarnal villain," [6] he was engaging in a kind of exact rhetoric that reflected what might be called an on-the-scene report that is characteristic of the speech of the mountain man of today who says that the weather is "hotter than the seven brass hinges on the gates of hell."7

If James Hall had chosen any southeastern Kentucky setting instead of the Bluegrass region as a destination of heroine Virginia Pendleton and left the story as it is otherwise, he would have had the first novel in American literature devoted largely to mountaineers. As it stands, it is a novel of the frontier that tells us as much about mountaineers as any other novel was to do for a half century. In 1839 Mrs. Caroline Matilda Stansbury Kirkland,8 under the pseudonym of "Mrs. Mary Clavers, an actual settler," published a fic- tionalized version of the experiences of her family as homesteaders on the frontier in Michigan during 1834-1835. A New Home - Who'll Follow? or, Glimpses of Western Life, a frankly realistic account of life in the back- woods, probably tells more of what life was like in mountain communities at the same time than writers of fiction about mountaineers themselves were to do for many years to come. Among the types assembled as homesteaders in Montacute were many Southerners, some of whom had moved along for two or three generations with the frontier as it pushed its way across the moun- tains and into the Midwest. In Mrs. Kirkland's book one finds a first-hand account of all the vulgarity, raw and cheap life, strange mixing, and crude democracy of the backwoods. Mrs. Kirkland reported considerable sexual license and illegitimacy on the frontier. The case of Hannah Parsons, mother of one illegitimate child, pregnant again, and a source of contamination for the daughters of the community, was discussed at some length. Hannah was admitted to the school and was accepted by the community, although Mrs. Kirkland thought it was due to the fierce, quarrelsome nature of her father, who had injured "either by personal abuse, or by vexatious litigation, half the people of the place."[9] She had little respect for the "protecting power of the law," administered "before an ignorant justice of the peace, who will be quite as likely to favor the wrong side as the right, as interest or prejudice may chance to incline him."[10] In handling the dialect of the backwoods people of Michigan Mrs. Kirkland reported much the same vocabulary and dialectical forms that were used by James Hall for Kentucky: "upsot," "gals," "git," "jist," "this here," "dreen," "leetle," "heared," "yaller," "knowed," "sich," "taters," "sperrit," "his'n," "afferdavy" (affidavit), etc., all of which appear in the dialect of the Southern mountains at the present time.

A New Home reflects a type of life that must have possessed many characteristics in common with pioneer life in the mountains, for many aspects of life on the frontier in Michigan one recognizes in the fiction dealing with mountaineers, even at a much later date. II The first writer of fiction to identify and label a mountaineer was George Tucker. In his The Valley of the Shenandoah (1824) a lank, loose- boned Scotch-Irishman, M'Culloch, dressed in homespun, befriended the Graysons, a family of background who had moved into the hills. M'Culloch, who had little patience with the stolid Germans living in the Valley of Virginia, was referred to as a "worthy mountaineer" and a "free-spoken mountaineer/' although he lived in a frame house and owned slaves. Im- provident and unable to manage his affairs successfully, he migrated to Kentucky.11 M'Culloch, a resourceful trouble-shooter for distressed gen- tlefolk, does not come into focus as a character, but certain traits associated with mountaineers are either assigned to him or implied in his behavior: he was "worthy," "free-spoken," "Scotch-Irish," quick-tempered, thriftless, and a failure economically. Physically, he was tall, lean, and dressed in homespun. Essentially, however, he appears closer to the "henchman" of the frontier than he does to the mountaineer of stereotype. Ten years later William Gilmore Simms introduced characters who were mountaineers in the formative stage in Guy Rivers: A Romance of Georgia (1834). Principally the story of Ralph Colleton' s struggle on the frontier in the gold-mining region of North Georgia with a heartless outlaw, Guy Rivers, and his consort, Munro, Guy Rivers nevertheless has much in it to suggest the mountaineer. Two characters, Mark Forrester, the hunter and henchman for Colleton, and Chub Williams, a misshapen moron, are moun- tain types. Mark is the familiar hunter with a buckskin belt, a foxskin cap, a long-barrel rifle, and a hunting knife in his belt.12 Chub, who enjoys the prerogatives of his lack-wit13 as Hetty Hutter is to do in The Deerslayer, is a counterpart of the "innocent" in subsequent fiction about mountaineers. Other characters that move in the shadows have more fully developed coun- terparts in later mountain fiction: Old Allen, a borderer, and his daughter Kate; and a lone widow and her beautiful daughter who live on the edge of the wilderness. A number of the stock elements in the fiction of the mountain people are to be found in Guy Rivers. The essential menu for the mountaineer's dinner was served to Mr. Colleton at Munro's log-cabin hotel14 in Chestatee: "eggs and ham, hot biscuits, hommony [sic], milk, marmalade, venison, Johnny, or journey cakes, and dried fruits stewed." ir> The view that mountain people are themselves not far removed from savagery Simms held of the borderers in the hills of Georgia whom he found "living on the borders of a savage nation [Indian], and forming the frontier of a class of whites little less savage."16 The borderers went West in order to be "secure from punish- ment"17 just as feudists and mountain bad men of fact and fiction did. The Scotch-Irish character of the borderer with his love for personal freedom was specifically identified.18 The mountaineer's usual preliminaries of "how are you, stranger?" "whar from?" "whar going?" were general among the borderers in Georgia.19 Holding outdoor religious meetings in the forest was customary in and around Chestatee.20 The lining of hymns to be sung straight and without musical accompaniment21 was the same as it is among Primitive Baptists and other mountain religious bodies today. Kate Allen's father was an absolute patriarch after the manner of fathers of mountain maidens. But like its predecessor, Guy Rivers cannot really be called a book about mountaineers, for Mark Forrester and Chub Williams remind us more of characters we have known outside the mountains than they do of moun- taineers. Plot elements and motifs occasionally suggest strongly the moun- taineer, but James Hall's book has in it even more plot elements and motifs that are to become identified with mountaineer fiction.22 Also in 1834 a novelette called The Counterfeiters appeared under the name of Thomas Singularity23 in Novelettes of a Traveller, edited by Henry Junius Nott. The setting of the story is in the mountains of North Carolina where outlaws and counterfeiters were known to have retreated from colonial days to the Civil War. Like Simms's Voltmeier (1869), The Coun- terfeiters peoples the mountains with outlaws, thieves, and counterfeiters who have earned a bad reputation for themselves among the farmers in the valley regions at the foot of the mountain. The mountaineers were regarded as dangerous and slippery. They drank too much whiskey and made trouble with their neighbors. Yet, it was thought that they did not have "corrupted hearts." Singularity, so far as I am aware, is the first commentator who at- tempted to explain the disappearance of the outlaw element in the moun- tains. That the vicious criminals should reform and move away to escape stigma in their home communities is certainly the report from frontier towns outside the mountains too. It will be noted at this point that undesirable elements had escaped censure in their own communities by moving away in Harpe's Head, A New Home, The Valley of the Shenandoah, and Guy Rivers. "Going West" was the accepted behavior. However, that the moun- taineer, closer to the pioneer hunter in appearance than his lowland neigh- bor and associated with an area to which outlaws and gangs of one sort or another had been known to flee, should have come to be thought of generally as possessing some of the slippery and untrustworthy quality associated with the lawless, and especially so because of his penchant for becoming dangerously drunk when he went outside the mountains, is logical enough. That such a stereotype of the mountaineer should have been cast in the minds of outsiders by the time he became differentiated from the hunter and trapper and first borderer is logical to assume. Singularity helped to create the stereotype in The Counterfeiters. Although Augustus B. Longstreet's Georgia Scenes, Characters, In- cidents, etc., in the First Half Century of the Republic (1835)24 is primarily about Georgia backwoods people whose patterns of thought and social customs were close to those of the mountaineer at the time, only one moun- taineer, Moses Firmby, appears in the book. A contestant in a shooting match in Upper Hogthief, Firmby was described as "a tall, slim man, of rather sallow complexion." Longstreet comments: "It is a singular fact, that though probably no part of the world is more healthy than the mountainous parts of Georgia, the mountaineers have not generally robust frames or fine complexions: they are, however, almost inexhaustible by toil."25 Here is the long, lean mountaineer with inexhaustible energy that became the moun- taineer of fiction! Georgia Scenes is filled with rustics, among whom poor whites may be counted. It is realistically raw, but since life among the vulgar could not be presented as straight realism in 1835, Longstreet introduced his characters, incidents, and scenes as humor. The book abounds in customs that belong to the factual and literary tradition of the mountaineers. Accounts of free-for- all, fist-and-skull fights such as Longstreet described in 'The Turf'26 were common among mountain people as was the mighty contest, in which anything was fair, between Billy Stallings and Bob Durham in 'The Fight."27 Ransy Sniffle, the classic example of the poor white, was the gossip and busybody who succeeded in bringing Stallings and Durham together in the epic ear-biting, nose-chewing, finger-champing, eye-gouging fight that left the contestants maimed for life.28 The gullibility of the backwoods people in regard to theatricals appears to have amounted to a motif. Longstreet employed it in his sketch called 'The Wax Works,"29 in which a group of local loafers impersonate wax figures in order to hold a show. A poor white, Rory Bushwood, exposes the fraud, but nearly loses a finger when one of the "wax figures" snaps it. One recalls the ventriloquist's show in A New Home, as well as the frauds of Captain Simon Suggs in Some Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs (1845) and of the King and the Duke in Huckleberry Finn. Longstreet, who understood the character of the backwoodsman, was a pioneer in presenting his shocking crudities, the violence his life demanded, the exaggerations in his humor, and his strangely incongruous vitalities. The mountaineers were preserving all these things at the same time they were being carried westward to become identified a generation later as examples of western humor. Longstreet' s objectivity, enabling him to present the gruesome, the sardonic, and the macabre as if it were rollicking fun, resulted in writing that approaches modern primitivism. Two present-day writers who have followed the tradition are William Faulkner for the Deep South and Jesse Stuart for the exaggerated violence that Longstreet saw and presented. Also in 1835 appeared John P. Kennedy's Horseshoe Robinson, A Tale of the Tory Ascendancy in South Carolina, in 1780. Set principally in the up- per Piedmont and the mountain regions of Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina, the novel tells the story of a valiant blacksmith from the Horseshoe Bend of the Catawba who was an expert woodsman and spy in the last days of the American Revolution. His function in the plot is that of henchman and spy for aristocratic Major Arthur Butler and his beautiful sweetheart, Mildred Lindsay, daughter of a Tory gentleman from Virginia. Kennedy's extensive research enabled him to present truthfully the factual background for his story. His portrait of the people living in the area in- dicates that there was certainly no unanimity in loyalty to the rebellion, and the fact that most of the Tories fighting under Ferguson at King's Mountain were also natives of the Carolina upper country demonstrates that the mountain people are not the pure "sons of liberty" that subsequent writers of fiction have sometimes indicated. Kennedy found certain areas in which the inhabitants were almost entirely "in the Tory interest." *

Horseshoe Robinson himself was portrayed as the archetypal hunter- mountaineer, a mutation of Daniel Boone, Natty Bumppo, and the moun- tain hunter. He was "tall, broad, brawny, and erect,"31 and his costume and personal accoutrements, which included "linsey-woolsey trousers adhering closely to his legs," the long rifle, and the deerskin pouch with powder horn attached, gave him the appearance of "a woodsman, or hunter from the neighboring mountains."32 Other mountaineers, such as Stephen Foster from the Blue Ridge in Virginia, were described as wearing hunter's costumes, as were the "men of the mountains" who defeated Ferguson at King's Mountain.-33 The Carolina homestead of Wat Adair,34 a mountaineer hunter and Tory spy, had about it many characteristics that anticipated the establishments of such mountain farmers with vast acres and slaves but the most primitive of abodes as Joel Turner in Fox's Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come. The old crone who smokes a pipe as she sits staring into a fire, apparently oblivious of all that takes place in the room about her, we meet for the first time in mountain fiction in Wat Adair's log house.35 Strange mutations in the names assigned to mountain children are illustrated in the name of one of Wat's brood, Marcus, who had been named for the Marquis de Lafayette.36 In Wat's household, supper was announced by an invitation to "draw up" a chair.37 The "mountaineer stoop" is explained as a posture that results from climbing mountains.38 Perhaps the most uncomplimentary trait Kennedy assigned mountaineers was savage cruelty. Wat Adair, one of the baser villains in the story, skinned a wolf alive.39 But, although they were committed in the name of vengeance and retaliation for similar offenses engaged in by the Tories themselves, the atrocities to which the army of mountaineers who won the battle of King's Mountain subjected their prisoners of war are shocking.40 The mountain soldiers were murderous and indiscreet41 and did not submit to discipline.42 The independent nature, the basic cruelty, the savage vengeance, and the hardihood of mountaineers differentiated them from their neighbors in Horseshoe Robinson, which contributed its share toward fixing a "typical mountaineer" in the mind of the average American. In 1836 two novels published by Nathaniel Beverley Tucker introduced Virginia mountaineers in minor parts. George Balcombe, regarded by Edgar Allan Poe as "the best American novel,"43 presented a trusted henchman, John Keizer, a mountaineer, whom Balcombe believed in despite the man's "desperate bad name."44 In The Partisan Leader, though, Tucker, who ap- parently knew little of mountaineers, gave the highlanders considerable space and attempted to analyze their character. The Partisan Leader, to which Sinclair Lewis no doubt owed something in It Can't Happen Here, is a projection of trends down to the year 1849 when, the author prophesied, Martin Van Buren would have made himself dictator and the North and the South would be entering a civil war. Tucker's faith in the essential goodness of the mountain men was badly misplaced, but his awareness of the im- portance of the mountains as well as the mountaineers themselves in the conflict he foresaw was essentially correct. Many of Tucker's notions of the highlanders, however, were important in shaping the mountaineer of legend. His selection of German names for his mountaineers suggests that he visualized leaders in mountain communities similar to those that he might have known in the Valley of Virginia, except that his mountaineers were in the tradition of the noble savage, "honest, brave, hardy, and high-spirited peasantry of Virginia," among whom he saw "examples of simple virtue and instinctive patriotism," and from whose lips he heard "lessons of that untaught wisdom, which finds its place in minds uncorrupted by artificial systems of education, and undebased by abject and menial occupations."45 The dialect Tucker assigned to the mountaineers was the low colloquial speech then found among people of similar educational background everywhere in America, but which in time did become associated with moun- taineers of fiction rather exclusively. Such words as "shaders" (shadows), "sartain," "clomb," "painter," "seed," "catched," "cretor," "axed," "sot," "knowed," "riglars" (regulars), "tictacs" (tactics), "I God" (ay, God), and such expressions as "fall in with him like as if you was a hunting"46 are familiar to readers of fiction about mountain people. The Partisan Leader is on the whole complimentary to the Virginia highlanders. The author's view that the mountain man is a noble savage of unerring instincts is perhaps the basic romantic concept. Customs and man- ners of mountain people, though not sharply identified, are in harmony with those of the mountaineer of fact and fiction. The problems presented by intermarriage and racial assimilation of In- dians and the squatters who were encroaching upon the land were at the center of Robert Strange' s Eoneguski, or, The Cherokee Chief: A Tale of Past Wars (1839). The locale of the book is the Yadkin Valley at the foot of the mountains in western North Carolina. Like Guy Rivers and Horseshoe Robinson, Eoneguski stresses the problems of the border settler prior to his becoming a mountaineer. Although the squatter encroaching upon the territory still belonging to the Indians occasionally found friends among his enemies, he nevertheless continued to feel contempt and hatred for redskins in general.47 Consequently, when the first settlers lived to see their sons and daughters marry half-breeds, they found it difficult to reconcile themselves to the fact even when the half-breeds were of good family. Senator Robert Strange had traveled in western North Carolina before he wrote the book, which gives a point of view that the travelers through the mountains who found mountain men married to Cherokee wives had not discovered. Moun- tain families descended from mixed marriages are known to be proud of their Indian ancestry today, and though few novelists have identified Indian ancestry in their subjects it would seem from the meager evidence available that descendants of the mixed marriages of pioneer days have become amalgamated with the predominantly Scotch-Irish character of the people.48 Ben Bramble in John Lewis's Young Kate (1844) is a little nearer to the mountaineer in the process of metamorphosis from frontier hunter and henchman to mountaineer than his counterpart in M'Culloch, William Colburn, Mark Forrester, Horseshoe Robinson, or Wat Adair of earlier fic- tion. Like M'Culloch in George Tucker's novel, Ben was a friend to the gen- teel family from Williamsburg that needed advice and guidance in its new life on the border in what is now southern West Virginia. Ben Bramble, however, is considerably closer to actuality in his genuineness of character than his forerunners were, but he is not so warm and personable as Horseshoe Robinson, whose most serious defect of character was that he never made a mistake. Ben Bramble is friendly and hearty, but he blunders socially and is ill at ease. Horseshoe Robinson, like Natty Bumppo, had been accepted wholly by the wives and daughters of aristocrats, but Ben Bramble, though loved and trusted by men, frightens their daughters and wives with his rough demeanor. One daughter had recoiled in fear when she saw Ben at White Sulphur Springs, dressed in his "wolfskin cap, blue hun- ting shirt with white fringe, a buckskin girdle, and that horrid knife sticking out from its sheath."49 The shrinking of tender females from heroic hunters with rough exteriors and pure hearts had not occurred before in fiction. Although Lewis began the trend in Young Kate bluntly and realistically, it was to continue down to 1930, vested with much romantic interest engen- dered by contrasts in background between rude mountain men and tender ladies from the lowlands. Present in much of the fiction of John Fox, it amounts to an absurdity in The Knight of the Cumberland. Charles Neville Buck used it in his fiction, and there are echoes of it in the first novels of Maristan Chapman. The Knights of the Horseshoe (1845), by William Alexander Carru- thers,50 is an adventure-packed historical novel of Virginia life during the administration of Governor Spotswood, in which an omniscient scout of yeoman origin accompanies Spotswood' s Tramontane Expedition to the Valley of Virginia in 1714. Joe Jarvis, the rough-and-ready scout, emerges as the only flesh-and-blood character in the book.51 Inasmuch as Jarvis, the inimitable scout, returns to the Valley of Virginia to live after the region is opened to settlers, he should be considered as a progenitor of mountaineers. He assumes importance in the story as the guide for the expedition. Prac- tical, filled with good fellowship, humorous, and given to quips, Jarvis's resourcefulness saves the expedition. The first gentlemen of Virginia are represented as holding Jarvis in high esteem notwithstanding that he was pronounced "almost as much a savage" as one of the Shawnee.52 In Joe Jarvis as progenitor of mountain men we see implications that were significant in 1845. Jarvis and his kind were doubtless also progenitors of the poor whites. Carruthers suggested that the Virginia mountaineers and the poor whites are therefore of the same stock. But Jarvis was certainly highly regarded by the cavaliers themselves and their sisters and sweethearts. In 1845 Carruthers, if he represented a point of view in the South, did not disdain or condescend to Jarvis and his kind. There is nothing in the book to indicate that its author felt that mountain people were any different from other Southerners of similar background and economic status. In John Esten Cooke's first novel, Leather Stocking and Silk; or, Hunter John Myers and His Times, which appeared in 1854, the frontier in the mountains had become static and the old hunter had assumed his role as a mountaineer. Although the title of the book implies that the old leather- stocking is to dominate the plot, he is actually a secondary character, but John Myers, "that stalwart mountaineer, the living type of the old border past,"5-1* and his way of life in his neat cabin home on Meadow Branch ten miles from Martinsburg, Virginia, are in contrast with the polite social life that had sprung up among the well-to-do families who lived in the towns of the Valley of Virginia. Leather Stocking and Silk, though an inferior novel, is important in con- sidering the fictional story of the mountaineer. The old hunter has chosen to become the mountaineer a decade before the Civil War, but his social position is equal to that of the natives of the towns, who are themselves only a generation or so removed from pioneer life. Significantly, the quality of Hunter John's speech differs little from that of his friends in the valley towns. There is in the hunter no consciousness of inferiority in any sense, nor do the dwellers in the towns feel superior to him. He is not the hunter- henchman who attaches himself to distressed aristocracy that we find in earlier novels, nor is the contrast between primitive and aristocratic culture carried to absurdity as it is in Emerson Bennett's The Bride of the Wilder- ness and Mrs. Mary^ Elizabeth Wormeley Latimer's Our Cousin Veronica. In The Last of the Foresters; or, Humors on the Border (1856) Cooke in- troduces a charming "natural boy," Verty, who has been reared by an old Indian woman residing in a rude hut in the hills near Winchester, Virginia. Verty, a skilled hunter with bow and arrow54 and an artist with the long- barreled rifle,55 was a familiar figure in Winchester and at the Apple Or- chard, home of the aristocratic Summers family, where he frequently ap- peared in the costume of the borderer - "moccasins, deerskin leggings, a shaggy forest paletot, fringed leather gauntlets," and a white fur hat.. Verty is obviously created upon the model of Natty Bumppo, for Cooke assigns him an Indian heart and refers to him as "a youthful Leather- stocking" who "seemed to be a part of the forest in which he lived, and from which he came."57 Although Verty plays on his rude fiddle "wild madrigals of the border,"58 keeps by his side at home and abroad a fierce hunting dog named Longears, and like the "mountain people, can get along with very lit- tle money,"59 he has little about him to suggest the mountaineer in fiction of later times. Cooke, however, does introduce a motif destined to be overworked in later fiction when he ambiguously discovers that the "noble savage" is not really a son of the wilderness at all but the son of Judge Rushton, whose curly-haired infant had been stolen by Indians on the warpath and is therefore a most eligible suitor of Redbud Summers. One of the unbreakable rules of fiction based on the lives of mountain people is that sons and daughters of real mountain folk may never be permitted to marry into gen- teel families of the "settlements," except on rare occasions when the moun- tain youths are subjected to the influences of distinguished colleges and finishing schools.60 Cooke's Fairfax: or, The Master of Greenway Court (1868) tells a romance of life on the frontier during the time that young George Washington was surveying lands on the border. Reminiscent of James Fenimore Cooper's stories, Fairfax is a strange mixing of transplanted English nobility with borderers and adventurers on the frontier. Only Cap- tain Wagner, an old soldier and successful Indian fighter retained by Lord Fairfax, is like the early ancestor of mountaineers. Cannie, loved by George Washington, is a beautiful flower of the wilderness who at first reminds us of the exciting mountaineer girl, but she is revealed as the granddaughter of an English nobleman who has fled to America. Shadowy mountain hunters join Captain Morgan in his campaign against the Indians rampaging on the border, but they are merely stand-ins with the inimitable captain. Mrs. Mary Elizabeth Wormeley Latimer divided her story in Our Cousin Veronica; or, Scenes and Adventures over the Blue Ridge (1855) between England and Virginia and concentrated her attention upon slavery as it was viewed by her leading characters, Veronica Lomax and Max Mandeville. Although Mrs. Latimer was generally unkind to all Americans, she was brutal to the mountaineers, who appeared infrequently in the novel. On a railroad train traveling down the Shenandoah Valley to Winchester, Virginia, Miss Mandeville, sister of Max, saw mountain men "dressed in coarse green frieze, looking as wild as untamed colts - the roughest people both in manners and appearance amongst whom I had ever been thrown; disgusting in their habits - but indeed to say the truth, chewing tobacco seemed to be the error of even the most aristocratic-looking men among our passengers."61 Mrs. Latimer's views of the mountain folk, however, do not contrast them with other Virginians so much as they differentiate mountain people from Virginia gentlefolk only in the degree of their insufferableness. Perhaps the most important book portraying the social life and customs of mountain people to appear before the Civil War was Fisher's River (North Carolina) Scenes and Characters (1859) by "Skitt, who was raised thar," the pseudonym of Harden E. Taliaferro (pronounced Tolliver), one of the South' s better known Baptist ministers of the nineteenth century. Taliaferro, who had left Surry County, North Carolina, in 1829, returned in 1857 for an extensive visit to the mountain community in which he had grown up. After his visit he wrote his account of mountain characters and customs as he recalled them during his boyhood days in the 1820's. A lapse of thirty years, during which time Longstreet had centered attention upon life among the Georgia "crackers" in a manner that no doubt suggested the technique that Taliaferro used, may have affected the author's selection of materials, but his galaxy of old-timers with their zest for life, their straight- face hoaxing, their antiquated speech, and their primitive customs is presen- ted with sympathy and admiration rather than with the supercilious con- descension Longstreet displayed in Georgia Scenes. Although his characters are certainly mountaineers living in the Carolina mountains just south of Virginia and west of the Dark Hollow, through which the major stream of migration to North Carolina had moved, Taliaferro does not specifically differentiate them from such groups as the crackers, the clay-eaters, and the poor whites that had appeared in earlier fiction. One has the impression that Taliaferro, instead of creating fiction, is selecting from his memory interesting anecdotes and experiences from his boyhood in a comparatively new pioneer community whose inhabitants, two generations after they had been there, still thought of themselves largely as Virginians, or North Carolinians from the lower and middle parts of the state. Settlers from Virginia, though certainly not of the "first families," found it "honor enough for them that they came from 'Fudginny.' "(>2 By far the most important contribution Fisher's River Scenes and Characters made to literature of the South is its folklore. The folk tales, adapted to local settings and characters and told consummately in the idiom and dialect of the region by such fabulous bards as Uncle Davy Lane and Tunbelly Johnson Snow, are peerless in their way. Furthermore, Taliaferro appears not to have done as Washington Irving had done in adapting Germanic folk tales he had learned in Europe to Hudson River 
settings but rather to have reported a vigorous organic tradition in oral literature flourishing in the Carolina mountains with bounding energy during the time Andrew Jackson, that idol of the mountain folk, was rising to political power and fame. The tales told by Uncle Davy, Tunbelly, and Jim Blevins'fit local settings, characters, and attitudes as easily as if they had been eyewitness accounts of actual happenings. That Taliaferro, instead of creating the tales or adapting them to his locale, reported skillfully what he found there has been pretty firmly established.^* Fisher's River Scenes and Characters rounded out the antebellum con- cept of the Southern mountaineer. At the beginning of the Civil War the Appalachian highlander was known to his countrymen as little more than an exemplar of the pioneer type of hunter-henchman who had been presented in fiction and sketch sometimes as a heroic Son of Nature with unerring in- nate republican principles, sometimes as a crude backwoods bumpkin, oc- casionally as a depraved savage hardly to be distinguished from the despised poor white, but rarely, and then usually by implication, as a regional type specifically identifiable as such. He had been referred to as a "mountaineer," but there is every evidence that the label was merely geographical. The Civil War, however, brought him into focus in a new light. Before the war was well under way both the North and the South began to realize that the mountaineer and his homeland were destined to play a strategic part in the conflict. It was during the war that the mountaineers really began to emerge in the national consciousness as Southerners com- prising a "fourth estate." A retrospective view from the vantage point of a century later shows that the highlander had possessed from the beginning those attributes of charac- ter, recorded here and there by those who had visited him or by those who had attempted to introduce him in fiction and in sketch to his fellow coun- trymen; but his attributes were more or less in a state of suspension and required the catalytic agency of the Civil War to crystallize them into that American type known for over a century now as the Southern Mountaineer. But he was not easily distinguished from the poor white at first, for the few novelists to introduce him from 1861 to 1880 continued to think of him broadly as a kind of "cracker," a stay-at-home cousin of the "Pike" then being burlesqued so successfully by the western local colorists. A generation was required before American literary styles, advancing toward modern realism through the local color movement, were successful in catching the essence of the mountaineer in fiction. However, the emphases that had taken three directions before the Civil War were to continue their several ways: the wholesome, heroic mountaineer that had derived ultimately from Cooper's epic backwoodsman and hunter, having found his finest expression in the novels of John Esten Cooke, would attract his devotees in Miss Murfree, John Fox, and others; the backwoods bumpkin with his crude pranks and his exaggerated dress and speech, introduced by Longstreet, Mrs. Latimer, Emerson Bennett, and to a certain degree by Taliaferro but derived ultimately from Jonathan in incongruous social situations and Hugh Henry Brackenridge's caricatures in Modern Chivalry, would come to his fullest absurdity in George Washington Harris's Sut Lovingood (1867), thereafter to appear occasionally as a stock character in 
fiction about the mountains; the mountaineer as a poor white, first seen in Kennedy and Longstreet, but emphasized in the revulsions of Mrs. Latimer, would figure as the low villain in almost all of the novels that would deal with the mountaineer in the Civil War and would appear in Maria Pool's novels about North Carolina mountain folk, Will Harben's stories about life in North Georgia, Maristan Chapman's Glen Hazard stories, and Jesse Stuart's fiction about the Kentucky mountains. But in the advance of American literature from local color romance through realism to primitivism the highlander, in whatever role he was presented, would possess montane qualities sufficient to differentiate him from other regional characters. Ill Cudjo's Cave (1863), a partisan novel by an ardent abolitionist, John Townsend Trowbridge, whose design was to "fire the Northern heart," is set near Cumberland Gap in East Tennessee in the early years of the Civil War. Trowbridge, who had never visited the region he described nor studied the dialect of its people,64 should not be held to strict account for the un- distinguished quality of his mountaineers, introduced as poor whites, nor for exaggerations of Cumberland topography. The cave, actually called "Cudgo's Cave," was a station in the underground railroad. The elaborateness with which Trowbridge described Cudjo's Cave is significant. Although the author admits that it is "for the most part imaginary,"65 the cave is impressive. Much mountaineer fiction is centered about caves in which moonshiners do business, gangs hide out, and captives are detained. Trowbridge' s success with the cave was so intriguing to subsequent novelists that the cave became an important prop in the fiction about mountain people. Tobias Wilson, A Tale of the Great Rebellion (1865) by Jeremiah Clemens[66] presents what purports to be "a correct portrait"67 of life in the mountainous part of northern Alabama during the Civil War. Rendered distasteful by a superabundance of pious flummery and platitude-packed Southern rhetoric, the novel nevertheless presents a panorama of bitterness, betrayal, arson, destitution, and suffering brought to the Alabama mountain people by jayhawkers, freebooters, and bands of guerillas engaged in in- timidation and robbery. Clemen's essential picture of the region is sustained by factual accounts. The Alabama mountain folk, "almost universally loyal to the government of the United States,"68 had little except livestock of which to be robbed, but they suffered misery and depredation at the hands of General Joseph Wheeler's raiders, who wantonly tramped down their crops, burned their fences and their homes, and drove away their livestock. Many neigh- borhoods became depopulated completely.69 Sidney Lanier's Tiger-Lilies (1867), largely a transcendental novel filled with youthful effusions of German romanticism and vague flower symbolism, has in it two Tennessee mountaineers, the only characters that ap- proach reality. Cain Smallin, the "good mountaineer," and his villainous brother Gorm, both said to have been based on real personalities that Lanier knew in the neighborhood of Montvale Springs, where his grandfather had operated a summer hotel,70 dominate at times the plot of the novel, which covers the Civil War period and shifts in setting from Thalberg (the fictional name of Montvale) in East Tennessee to the area around Norfolk, Virginia, where Lanier had been a prisoner during the war. Lanier introduced into his novel a motif to be made capital of in sub- sequent fiction about the Civil War: brother pitted against brother. Garland Greever has pointed out that he did it "naturally and effectively."71 Despite the predominantly poor-white aspect of his mountaineers, one a noble sort of toady to his betters and the other a depraved scoundrel, Lanier was perhaps the first interpreter of mountain life to approach integrity in his treatment of his subject, although at least once he overstepped the bounds of propriety by subjecting Gorm to outlandish social gaucherie in a restaurant,72 but he avoided generally the excessive melodrama and the caricature exploited by his predecessors in local color fiction, and notably by a retinue of successors in mountaineer fiction. 7} In Tiger-Lilies the mountaineer is set apart for the first time in fiction as a distinct regional type, clearly, but not wholly, identifiable as such, but per- ceptibly different from the frontier hunter, the backwoods buffoon, and the trifling poor white, all three of whom the Smallins resemble in one way or another. The novel is green and the Smallins, Lanier's best-drawn charac- ters, are unripe artistically, but here are real mountaineers, born of the Civil War, that are prototypes of the mountaineers to come after them. Perhaps one of the most far-fetched fictionalizations of the mountaineers of East Tennessee appears in Rose Mather (1868) by Mary Jane Holmes.74 Maude De Vere, "the heroine of the Cumberland Mountains,"75 whose father has been killed in the Battle of Bull Run and whose mother is dead, has "an awful sight of money, and heaps of niggers," 7(> but she has Union sympathies and assists in conducting northward Yankee soldiers who have escaped from Confederate prisons at Salisbury and Andersonville. Because Maude lives with an uncle, Paul Haverill, a South Carolinian and a plan- tation owner, who has moved to his "plantation" in the Cumberland Moun- tains because he believes the South should not have seceded,77 it is possible for her to use the cave on the mountain estate as a rest station for escapees. Although Maude De Vere is called a mountain girl, she moves with social charm and ease when she visits the home of her great uncle, a judge in Charleston, South Carolina.78 The "rough, savage looking" mountaineers who burn Paul Haverill's mountain house are Rebel guerillas, but Maude is "too much beloved by the rough mountaineers, to allow of harm falling upon her at once."79 After the Civil War is over, this mountain girl who moves with confidence in Charleston society fears going to New England to visit Rose Mather, for she feels "that they might criticise, and perhaps con- demn one who had lived so long among the pines of North Carolina and the mountains of Tennessee."80 Counterparts of such "right-thinking" slave- holding mountain folk as Maude and her uncle, who were at one and the same time Charleston aristocracy, antisecessionists, and Yankee sym- pathizers, have not been found in the study of the historical mountaineer. Waiting for the Verdict (1868) by Rebecca Harding Davis is a story of the Civil War which shifts its locale from Pennsylvania to the mountain country of Kentucky. Mrs. Davis makes no effort to characterize the Kentucky mountaineers except to pronounce them the lowest class of Rebels.81 the monotonous sweep of Kentucky hill country identifies the novel with the mountaineer tradition. Even the Battle of Middle Creek, in which James A. Garfield routed the Rebels under Humphrey Marshall, she does not specifically relate to mountaineers.82 The Phantoms of the Forest; A Tale of the Dark and Bloody Ground (1868), by Emerson Bennett, the ancestor of the dime novel, was more damaging to the character of the Kentucky mountaineer than were the Civil War novels of the time. This popular novel certainly tended to confirm such unsalutary observations on the character of eastern Kentuckians as those made by President Toulmin of Transylvania University in 1793. Furthermore, it introduced the locale with which the infamous renegade, Simon Girty, was being associated during the sixties and seventies in at least a half dozen of Beadle's dime novels. The youth who read Bennett as well as Beadle's library of fiction about such border villains as Girty, the Harpes, and their legion of fictional adaptations must have made, as adults, an easy transition of association from such border villains to the legion of Kentucky mountain feud leaders who emerged during the eighties and nineties. George Washington Harris's Sut Lovingood's Yarns (1867)8;i is a loosely connected group of tall tales told by a "natural born durn'd fool." Sut Lovingood, presented as a mountaineer from the Great Smoky Mountains, is said to have had as a model a "long, lank, drawling East Tennessee moun- taineer" who worked in Harris's printing shop in Knoxville,84 but his fool- playing, though characteristic of mountaineers, does not in itself dif- ferentiate him as a mountaineer. He is the rogue of the folk tale85 and the rascal in picaresque fiction. He is related to Simon Suggs, to Longstreet's gallery of poor whites from the sand hills of Georgia, and to Taliferro's pranksters in Surry County, North Carolina. Mark Twain, who reviewed Harris's book in a San Francisco paper,86 found in Sut a model for many of his rogues. Harris, whose career as a steamboat captain on the Tennessee River south of Knoxville and whose three or four years spent as a farmer in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains enabled him to become acquainted with mountain people, created in Sut Lovingood a character who was more than a "genuine naive roughneck mountaineer riotously bent on raising hell."87 He is in his attitudes a belated Jacksonian democrat, representing what had been a broad base of American society a generation earlier. Unaware of culture as respectable folk knew it, without taste, ignorant, and prejudiced against intellect, Sut gloried in his bestiality, his coarseness, his assumed superiority cloaked in his constant protestations of being a "natural born durn'd fool," and the brutality of the villainies he perpetrated upon his enemies. All of the Southern mountaineer epitomized in Sut Lovingood is real from his primitive insularity to his generous sympathy, from his merciless ridicule of sentimentality and gentility to his hatred and utter disdain of cir- cuit riders and sheriffs, from his expansive pride in his own ignorance and limitations to his acid scorn of ostentation and hypocrisy, and from the barnyard richness of his obscene diction to the soaring flights of his homely rhetoric. Real as a mountaineer, Sut has had few counterparts in mountain fiction. Miss Murfree presented a few scoffers at religion and law in The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains and The Despot of Broomsedge Cove and one incorrigible prankster, Mink Lorey, in In the Clouds, and John Fox incorporated a few of Sut' s qualities in the Wild Dog in The Knight of the Cumberland, but the earthy virility and salty language of characters like Sut could not be presented in the columns of such citadels of respectability as the Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Magazine, and Century. Sut's "ornery" behavior and scatological vocabulary remained largely in the oral tradition of mountain folk, but these attributes which belonged to the frontiersman and were shared with other Southern types have been raised to art by Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell and Thomas Wolfe,88 and have been included in some of the mountaineer fiction of Anne Armstrong and Jesse Stuart. George Washington Harris's knowledge of mountaineer speech was con- siderable. His rhythms, his metaphors, his exaggerated similes, his mounting rhetoric built with homely and familiar references to everyday experiences of mountain people, his honest, earthy vocabulary, and his uninhibited, free- running sentences are masterful, as Brom Weber has shown in his edition of Sut Lovingood's Yarns. To the uninitiated reader, Harris is difficult because he used the phonetic misspellings regarded as humor in his day. In his last two novels, neither ever published in book form, William Gilmore Simms turned to the mountains for his materials. The Cub of the Panther: A Mountain Legend and Voltmeier; or, The Mountain Men both appeared in 1869 as serials in little-known magazines. The Cub of the Pan- ther, based partly upon a local ballad called "Rose Carter," is set in the mountain country of South Carolina in the early years of the nineteenth cen- tury. The novel is hardly credible as an interpretation of life. The plot is not plausible. Except for the minor character, Squire Blanton, the characters do not approach reality. The leading characters are sentimentally conceived and Mrs. Carter, Mrs. Fairleigh, and Edward Fairleigh are the simply struck types of villainy that one would find in the local balladist's reper- toire. Because the events in the story are placed shortly after 1800, Simms presented his males dressed in the buckskins of the frontier hunters. Although he was no doubt reading backward from what he knew of moun- taineers just after the Civil War, and in doing so attributed to the fron- tiersman much of what he found in the mountaineers around him, his bor- derer-hunter of 1800 had not taken on that quality of degradation attributed to mountaineers after 1880. Simms used mountain dialect skillfully. A rather detailed glossary of his dialectical forms reveals that the low colloquial speech of the mountain folk of South Carolina was essentially the same as that for the entire mountain country and little different from what had been reported in earlier regional fiction of the United States. He did not use "hit" for "it" at all, however, and he had mountaineers using what as a relative pronoun,89 but such pleonasms as "boy-child" occurred frequently. Considering that Simms or- dinarily wrote in an awkward rhetorical style, even the rhythms of his con- versations in dialect are remarkably close to those of the real speech of mountain people. His dialect has hardly been improved upon by even such eminent masters of the mountain speech as Miss Murfree and James Still. In Voltmeier; or, The Mountain Men: A Tale of the Old North State, which appeared in The Illuminated Western World for 1869, Simms told a 
lumbering gothic tale of dual personalities, ghosts, counterfeiters, robbers, and villainous Yankees against a background of high mountains, mysterious caves, and beautiful waterfalls near Asheville in North Carolina. A very long novel, only a small part of it is of value to us in plotting the rise of the mountaineer in fiction. Simms informs us that there were many well-to-do farmers in the moun- tains, but he introduces only the Harness family. His emphasis in Voltmeier was upon the criminal element in the mountains. He had been fair to the real mountain folk across the state line in South Carolina's ''dark corner" in The Cub of the Panther. It suited his purpose best to deal primarily with the undesirable mountain folk in Voltmeier. He had a historical basis for peopling the area with criminals and cutthroats before 1830, but he did not presume to say that they were representative of the mountain folk in general. In Voltmeier Simms's literary sins were not committed against the mountaineer so much as against the high-toned characters whom he in- troduced to a mountain background. His dialect in the novel is not so good in general as it is in The Cub of the Panther. In both of his novels, as well as in "How Sharp Snaffles got His Wife," Simms demonstrated that he understood the emerging mountaineer. There are few false notes to be found in the three works. He attributed to mountain character most of the traits that it is known to have exhibited. Only the poverty and denser ignorance of a later time are missing from his sketches of the highlanders. In dealing with setting, Simms could write purple passages describing the Alps-like "land of the sky" with the best of them.90 IV During the 1870' s mountaineers were introduced into only one novel of significance.91 The first chapter of The Gilded Age (1873) by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner has as its setting Obedstown, Tennessee, a village of fifteen log cabins on a mountain top in the Cumberland range.92 The mountaineers Mark Twain presented by hearsay are not distinguishable on the surface from the poor-white wharf loafers that appear in his books dealing with life along the Mississippi River, but in many ways they are identifiable as mountaineers. The Obedstown resident's log house was in a state of decay. Gaunt hounds stretched across the threshold, and rubbish lay about the grassless yard. The bench beside the house held a pail of water, a gourd, and a tin wash basin. Ash-hoppers and soap kettles stood nearby.9 3 The chief citizen, the postmaster and merchant, was given the title of "squire." Mail arrived once a month, and the men and boys of the com- munity congregated about Squire Hawkins's store in order to learn the news. Dressed in homespun jeans supported by single suspenders, calico coats and vests, and tattered straw hats tilted at diverse angles, they loafed and drawled out mountain dialect, all chewing or smoking in corncob pipes the natural leaf tobacco they prepared on their own farms. Their hands thrust deeply into their pockets, they liked to sit on the top rail of the fence, "hump-shouldered and grave, like a company of buzzards assembled for supper."94 Attitudes caught in their conversation indicate that the foun- dation of their philosophy of life was "tomorrer'll do, I 'spect."95 They were instinctively opposed to change, they had no markets for their produce, and
they traded by barter at the general store for the bare necessities their sub- sistence economy did not yield. Appalachian Journal 117 At first glance, Mark Twain's poor-white mountaineers seem like caricatures,96 but as one probes beneath the surface, he descries a hopelessness,- born of the futility of their stranded lives, and a waste of human resources, in an economic order which reduces their efforts to naught, that raise these slow-moving scarecrows to pathos. Only by relaxing, sharing their misery, and developing a sense of humor were they able to tolerate their mean existence. Although Mark Twain laughs at these "buz- zard hill-billies," he is in sympathy with them and understands their problems. Unfortunately, however, it is the poor white in his "laugh" rather than the mountaineer in his "sympathy" who lends his hand in creating the fictional stereotype. From 1873 to the appearance of Mary Noailles Murfree's In the Ten- nessee Mountains in 1884, the Southern highlander appeared infrequently in book-length fiction, but he was often the subject of short stories. In fact, it was in the short story rather than the novel that the mountaineer made his literary debut. He was not altogether a newcomer to short fiction in 1870, for James Hall, William Gilmore Simms, John Basil Lamar, John Esten Cooke and Elizabeth Haven Appleton had introduced mountain back- woodsmen in short stories.97 Edward King's articles on the Southern moun- tains, which had appeared in Scribner's Monthly during the early 1870' s and were included in The Great South (1875), doubtlessly attracted the at- tention of Rebecca Harding Davis, Constance Fenimore Woolson, Frances Hodgson Burnett and probably Mary Noailles Murfree to the possibilities of the socially retarded mountaineer as a subject for short stories. In three of his short stories William Gilmore Simms utilized materials that have a slight bearing upon mountaineers. "Two Camps" and "The Giant's Coffin" appeared in 1845 in a collection of Simms's tales called The Wigwam and the Cabin. "How Sharp Snaffles Got His Capital and Wife" appeared in Harper's Magazine in 1870, after Simms's death. "Two Camps" is a strange tale told by Daniel Nelson, an old hunter and Indian fighter, concerning a tragic love affair between his daughter and a handsome Cherokee chief. "The. Giant's Coffin" is an account of a feud between the sons of two pioneer hunters who settled in the mountain region of South Carolina. "How Sharp Snaffles Got His Capital and Wife" assays more of the mountaineer than either of Simms's earlier stories. Principally a monologue in much better dialect than the author usually employed, the piece is a tall tale. Simms no doubt owed much to Taliaferro's Fisher's River Scenes and Characters in which similar tall hunting tales are related. Another short story with a mountain setting but which reveals little of the mountaineer is John Basil Lamar's "The Blacksmith of the Mountain Pass" (1851). 9á It is a tall tale about a Scotch-Irish blacksmith, Ned Forger- son, whose library contained copies of Tom Paine' s Age of Reason, Volney's Ruins, and Taylor's Diegesis and whose special delight was to maul all itinerant Methodist preachers who rode by his forge beside a stream in a narrow mountain pass in North Georgia. In general the story may be in- cluded in the category of mountaineer fiction solely on the basis of its set- ting, which the author uses as a device for routing the ministers by the blacksmith's forge. There is a plethora of blacksmiths and millers in moun- tain fiction, but a Scotch-Irish mountaineer who is a son of the Age of Rationalism is a contradiction in terms." In the spring of 1852 John Esten Cooke, writing under the name of Pen. Ingleton, Esq., published in the Southern Literary Messenger a short story about mountaineers, the central purpose of which was to present the need for free education in Virginia. "Peony: A Tale of the Times Addressed to the Friends and Opponents of Free Schools" is social propaganda, but it presen- ted facets of mountain life, definitely identified as such, that had not been presented before. Peony's death, apparently not necessary in the story, is melodramatic, but the story contains much to show that Cooke was acquain- ted with Virginia mountaineers and appeared to have recognized them in 1850 as a specific type. The children in the story, who are not assigned family names, appear as types. The brutality evident in the squirrel- torturing scene recalls J. F. D. Smyth's account of the poor whites who tor- tured his cat and anticipates the ash-heap fight in Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. Although primitive brutality is a part of the moun- taineer's story, it need not necessarily distinguish him from other types. The most significant implication of Cooke' s story is that by 1850 poverty, ignorance, filth, and general shabbiness of the mountain people of Virginia, due no doubt to increased population on abused farm land in a neglected area, were sufficiently well known to be useful as material in a plea for social justice. Travelers were noting that such drunken mountaineers as Peony's father could be encountered in the Carolina mountains. The first short story writer to dip deeply enough into the life of mountain people to recreate a sense of reality was Elizabeth Haven Appleton in "A Half-Life and Half a Life," which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1864. The setting is in the mountain country of Eastern Kentucky a few miles south of Louisa at the time coal mining was being developed on the Burgess lands near the mouth of Nat's Creek along the Big Sandy River. Life at that time (the 1840's) in the Big Sandy Valley was primitive, for that part of Kentucky had been cleared for settlement only the generation before. The long, realistic story, told in first person, abounds in damaging implications concerning mountain character, but those implications are sustained by the factual account of mountain folk and become a part of the fictional stereotype perfected later. "The Divining Rod" by James Hall100 tells the tale of a search for a cache of silver in a cave overlooking the Cumberland River in the moun- tains of Tennessee. Although it is brief, "The Divining Rod" contains a full- length portrait of the mountain preacher, which has changed little during the past century. Uncle Zeddy Bangs was the champion of a sect that con- demned "all humarvlearning as vanity" and considered "a trained minister as little better than an imposter." He had learned to read after he was a man for the sole purpose of "gaining access to the Scriptures."101 A man of "melancholy, cadaverous countenance," his eyes burned with "a visionary, fanatic enthusiasm" as he ranted about the distinction between "head religion and heart religion." A mountain "rowdy" also appears in the story. Tom Johnson, though a member of Bangs' s congregation, "swops" horses, breeds fine colts, at- tends "race paths," plays loo, drinks deep, and takes "a small chunk of a 
fight."102 A mountain schoolmaster constructed on the pattern of Ichabod Crane also appears. "A tall, sallow, unhealthy-looking youth, with a fine clear blue eye and a melancholy countenance, which at times assumed a sly sarcastic expression that few could interpret," he is fond of engaging the preacher in religious disputation, but they always part in kindness.103 The setting^ of the story, the presence of high rocks and deep caves, legends of hidden silver, belief in water witches, the accurate portrayal of the mountain minister, the neighborhood rowdy, and the horse thief and his heartless betrayal of the preacher are all familiar materials in mountain fic- tion. Only the dialect is lacking. Rebecca Harding Davis's "The Yares of the Black Mountains," which appeared in Lippincott's Magazine in 1875, is a realistic story which gives an understanding and sympathetic account of life in the North Carolina moun- tains near Asheville at a time when the mountain people were sinking into pitiable poverty and isolation following the Civil War. In the story Mrs. Denby, a northern lady, is taking her sick child into the high balsam-covered mountains for its health. 'The Yares of the Black Mountains" has in it much of the pattern, material, and texture of mountain fiction succeeding it. There is a strong possibility that Mary Noailles Murfree, then contributing stories under the pen name of R. E. Dembry to Lippincott's Magazine, read the story and was influenced by it to turn toward mountain fiction herself.104 In 1876 Mary Noailles Murfree turned from light fiction on polite society toward something more real: the mountaineer of East Tennessee.105 "Taking the Blue Ribbon" is an integral part of Miss Murfree's mountain fiction in that its setting is in mythical Kildeer County, the seat of which is the valley village of Colbury, its leading characters are mountain folk who live on the side of Old Bear Mountain in the eastern extremity of the county, and the idiom of its mountain characters is generally free and natural and offered with few of the sly implications frequently employed by the writer who condescends to his humble subjects, with none of the pedantic comment of the antiquarian, and with little of the exhibitionism of the literary cicerone. Structurally the story leaves much to be desired in that too much is at- tempted in the plot, character and setting are not successfully fused, unity is impaired by a shift in emphasis on character, and the title, in view of the fact that the plot motif is essentially that of the rogue yarn such as Miss Murfree could have found in Sut Lovingood, emphasizes Jenkins Hollis's victory in the horse race at the county fair rather than the climax, which is Jacob Brice's success in winning Hollis's daughter, for Jacob rather than Jenks controls the action. It is a valuable story, however, for it not only shows something of the development of the most important writer to attempt to interpret comprehensively the local character of a little-known but con- siderable portion of America but also a transition in the total effort to make that interpretation. Moreover, as a germinal story it possesses many of the traits and qualities that characterize Miss Murfree's later work. "The Panther of Jolton's Ridge," 1()(> which appears to be the first story about moonshiners in the Southern Mountains to be sold to a publisher, missed the distinction of being the first on the subject to appear in print because the purchaser did not use it. Inferior to "Taking the Blue Ribbon" in quality, "The Panther" is perhaps more important than its companion for the materials it contains and for what it portends both for its author and for the total story in fiction of the Southern mountaineer. Whereas in the first story Miss Murfree succeeds in catching the essence of mountain character only in the women, in "The Panther" she discerns essential qualities in cer- tain types of mountain men and portrays another type of mountain woman. But she does not see yet a clean distinction between the poor white and the mountaineer, notwithstanding that the Brices, Joel Ruggles, and Mark Yates all have a limited authenticity. Basically the structure of "The Panther" has much to commend it. The action is contained within a late afternoon and night and limited to the con- fines of Jolton's Ridge, all of whose citizens are drawn into the conflict. The only reminder of the outside world is the symbol of its progress, the railroad, which, in passing high over the heads of the mountain folk, accents their awful isolation, but which is the means of Panther Brice' s death. The basic conflict is one of contending social forces, its ramifications approaching a complexity that Miss Murfree does not succeed in clarifying: the moun- taineer's deeply embedded notions of independence and freedom of personal action contend with an equally embedded fanaticism engendered by a narrow and highly emotional fundamentalism in religion. But the conflict is pyramidal. The Brices, embodying the spirit of independence and freedom, are pitted physically against the preacher and the physical embodiment of the fanaticism that attempts to thwart them, the church building itself. Widow Yates and Joel Ruggles, thoroughly converted to evangelical tem- perance by the emotional zeal of the crusading preacher, are antipodal to the Brices. Mose Carter, in the spirit, with the forces of fanaticism, is moved spiritually to action on their side, but in the flesh, with the forces of personal freedom, he is ambiguously moved to action on their side. At the apex the in- nocent boy, Mark Yates, susceptible to the influences of both forces, is the receptive observer. Miss Murfree succeeds in integrating action, character, setting, and atmosphere, but the story is hopelessly out of proportion, for the melodramatic reverie of Mark Yates' s experiences in helping to build the church is far too long and the thrust of the moral message at the conclusion is too heavy. Of the characters only Widow Yates achieves a degree of stature, but the others, and especially enraged Panther Brice, are promising sketches of fuller achievements in Miss Murfree' s best fiction in which moonshiners, religious fanatics, shrewish old women, garrulous visitors, pious neighbors, and innocent bystanders are raised to individuals but later, toward the end of her career, reduced to stereotypes. As in the case of "Taking the Blue Rib- bon," Miss Murfree has not dressed the title with the plot, for obviously the theme as it relates td character is the clearing of the moral vision of Mark Yates, the central person in the story. The significance of "The Panther of Jolton's Ridge" rests on what it achieves as a piece of local color fiction. In it highlanders are referred to as "humble mountaineers"107 and "simple foresters,"108 and much of the poor white is seen in the appearance of Mark Yates "leaning lazily on his rifle," "a dilapidated old hat" crowning his head, and his butternut suit "in con- sonance with the prominent ribs of his horse [Cockleburr], the poverty-stricken aspect of the place, and the sterile soil of a forlorn turnip patch which embellished the slope to the water's edge,"109 but the fact that Mark has despaired of hunting game that is no more and acquits himself courageously in his discourse with Panther Brice in the still-house clears him of damaging imputations. The theological views of the Jolton Ridge folk line up with the Calvinistic evangelism of the eighteenth century. With her moonshiners Miss Murfree excels. Her description of the still in operation and her picture of the moonshine gang sitting in semidarkness about the gurgling still while the doublings sing down the copper "worm" and suffuse the air with an "all-pervading and potent odor of spirits"110 give her moonshiners an on-the-scene reality that only she herself was to ex- cel in the fictional annals of moonshining in the mountains. Later, after the Federal Government began an earnest effort to quell moonshining, Murfree was to move her moonshiners and their equipment into the depths of gothic caves and abandoned mines, where the neighbors would not call as casually as they did at Brice' s cabin.111 In 1877 at least a half dozen short stories and sketches about North Carolina mountain folk appeared in leading magazines. Christian Reid in an article called "The Mountain Region of North Carolina"112 deplored the tourist's neglect of the region of highest mountains east of the Mississippi River as she described in glowing details the mountains, rivers, and mineral resources of this land "where the manners, customs, and traditions of by- gone generations still linger."113 During the same month that Miss Reid's article appeared in Appleton9 s Journal, Frances Hodgson Burnett's "Setti," a short story set in the coal- bearing Cumberland Mountains of Tennessee, appeared in Lippincott's Magazine. Railroad trains had been coming into Black Creek for only two months to carry away the coal from mines operated by English capital and worked by imported Welsh, English, and Irish miners living in the village of shanties.114 The sentimental story about a Lancashire girl (masquerading as a young man) who dies in a cholera epidemic has no native mountaineers in it, but the author introduces much description of the Cumberland Moun- tains in storm and in sunshine. In "Esmeralda," which is set in Paris, Frenchmen become acquainted with Americans of an "order entirely new" 115 whose richness of attire is "set at defiance by a strong element of incongruousness."116 After a family of Carolina mountaineers have become suddenly wealthy from the discovery of iron ore on their land, the strong-willed mother drags away to Paris her illiterate husband from his cronies and her beautiful daughter Esmeralda from her sweetheart. In "Lodusky"117 Mrs. Burnett wrought with a steadier hand than she had in "Esmeralda." A writer, Rebecca Noble, and her traveling companion attended a square dance in a two-room mountain cabin in a community located a few miles from Asheville, North Carolina, where they had gone for a rest and for an opportunity to study mountain character. Most interesting to the "foreign" women, however, was a beautiful tall mountain girl, Lodusky Dunbar, dressed in calico, who comported herself with a calm "which was slightly suggestive of the 'noble savage' " as two of her enraged rustic admirers fought for the right to walk home with her.118 Mrs. Hodgson handles dialect somewhat awkwardly and is unrealistic in her assumption that the abysmally ignorant and unpolished mountain girl should have made so much progress within two years, but she introduces plot motifs and character types in the story that would become conceits with writers of mountain fiction. Mountain youths whose primitive passions flare into violence at dances, mountain gossips, and illiterate but beautiful moun- tain girls loved by cultured outsiders who cannot cross the gulf to con- summate the love in marriage are all too familiar in fictional interpretations of mountain life. In Rebecca Harding Davis' s "A Night in the Mountains"119 the Sevier family of South Carolina make a trip to the mountains of North Carolina for their health. A few of their side glances at the natives and their customs assist in shaping the stereotypes of mountain fiction. At night the Seviers would sometimes stop at a house where the host and hostess "with their dozen children, gaunt, gigantic, and dirty, but invariably kindly and low- voiced" would make room for them; at other times they would spend the night in the log hut of a hunter "with plenty of dogs, tame bears, and fleas for company."120 Constance Fenimore Woolson's "Barnaby Pass"121 is set against a background of the Carolina mountains. Josepha Kay, who taught in a mission school located in Barnaby (mountaineer pronunciation of Bar- nabas) Pass and lived in a little brown house beside a rushing stream, spent much time admiring the scenery. The slight little story claims a place in this discussion merely because it has a mountain setting and because there is a fleeting superficial glimpse of mountain characters. The implication that people of German descent inhabit the mountains is sustained in North Carolina, where twenty-five per cent of the mountain population are thought to be of German origin. In "Up in the Blue Ridge"122 Miss Woolson achieved the distinction of having published the first piece of mountain fiction to employ as a motif the conflict between "revenuers" and moonshiners. In Ellerby, a resort town near Asheville, summer residents are drawn into a complex pattern of com- munity support of a moonshine gang, led by the son of a Confederate officer, Colonel Eliot. The emphasis which Miss Woolson placed upon community attitudes toward moonshining is important. Moonshiners were not of the lowest social and economic classes of mountain folk; efforts to thwart revenue officers were a community-wide undertaking. In a few side glances at mountain folk Miss Woolson emphasized what had already come to be regarded as typical. Mountain folk were tall and straight and dressed in homespun. They liked to congregate at the water mill, where they came from miles around to bring their grist to be ground and played with their whips as they talked slowly.12 * That the mountain people were not altogether honest is suggested in the fact that a large por- tion of Col. Eliot's corn "was regularly stolen by his own farm-hands."124 John Esten Cooke dealt with mountaineers in at least two short stories within the decade. In "Owlet"125 the narrator recounts having come upon a half-wild, half-dressed girl of startling beauty swinging on a grapevine in a remote mountain cove near the Shenandoah Valley. 12(i Later the narrator, who had discovered that Owlet was the sole heir to a fortune of seventy thousand pounds in England, married her, for she had responded with phenomenal aptitude to instruction in the ways of polite Virginia society. Cooke, like John Fox a generation later, was intrigued with the romantic possibilities of lost aristocracy in the mountains. Owlet's beauty, Cooke thought, could not have belonged to a mountain girl without "family." In "Moonshiners"127 John Norcross, a young New Yorker, had come to a mountain community in the New River section of West Virginia to hunt and fish. While there he fell in love with a moonshiner's daughter, Conny Neal, whom he first met as she was riding the family mare home from a grist- mill.128 John Norcross, however, in his condescension toward the idea of marrying a moonshiner's daughter, implied that there was considerable social disapproval of moonshining families during the Gilded Age. He thought: "But then to marry the daughter of an illicit distiller! To take his bride, the mother of his children, from such. surroundings! He was not much of an aristocrat, but the idea grated."129 In Cooke's "The Sumac-Gatherers"110 Mr. Willing found a wife among the sumac-gatherers, mountain families who collect the leaves of sumac for sale at one cent a pound to tanneries. However, Cary Holmes turned out to be not a "buxom mountain girl,"1'*1 but the daughter of a very respectable mountain farmer who lived in a stone house on a sizeable farm, from which the natural resources of stone and timber made him rich before Willing married Cary. Cooke's only comprehensive presentation of the third social class of mountaineers that were to become the subject of regional interpretations later was in "Peony." His lost aristocrats, old hunters, and moonshiners are not representative fictional types.1*2 His mountain maids turn out to be superrepresentative, his hunters have not yet become mountaineers, and his moonshiners are Southern gentlemen. Mrs. Katherine Sherwood Bonner McDowell (1849-1883), writing under the masculine pseudonym of Sherwood Bonner, included four short sketches of life in the Cumberland escarpments of Tennessee in Dialect Tales (1883), the last published of the books of her brief literary career.1** The four stories are bound together as a unit by setting, atmosphere, and basic attitudes of the characters, many of whom appear in more than one of the stories. The composite picture presented is that of a friendly mountain community with considerable variation in the economic security, moral standards, and cultural achievements of its inhabitants, but one marked by a homogeneity in language, spirit of conviviality, loathing of informers, and dislike for revenue officers. In handling the speech of mountain folk Mrs. McDowell was sensible in that she refrained from any attempt at reproducing strong preterites, discolored vowels, triphthongs, and strange elisions that frequently make mountain speech tedious in the works of writers who are too conscientious. As her dialogue stands, it is terse, rhythmical, and accurate in its idiom, but it differs little from the dialect she assigns in the same volume to the small- farmer class of Mississippl. Her description of the mountain setting is ac- curate and fulfills the demands of her stories without hampering their progress. But as stories only one of the four sketches, "Jack and the Moun- tain Pink," approaches art in structure; one other, "The Case of Eliza Bleylock," displays Mrs. McDowell's skill in handling subtlety of plot.1*4 Mountaineers played inconsequential roles in a few Southern novels published from 1880 to 1885, when Miss Murfree's The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains and her juvenile, Down the Ravine, appeared, each with a full cast of mountain characters, the first novels in American fiction con- cerned primarily with mountain people and their problems.135 Mountain characters appearing in a handful of books down to 1885 were presented as moonshiners and poor whites occupying roughly the same social status to which they had been relegated in most of the fiction in which they had ap- peared following the Civil War. All of the novelists to treat of the moun- taineer during these years failed to distinguish him from other Southern types, and especially from the poor white. Only John Esten Cooke and Joel Chandler Harris treated him sympathetically, but Daddy Welles in The Virginia Bohemians and Teague Poteet in Harris's story lacked the in- sularity of the real highlander to whom the term mountaineer became ap- plicable, and the communities in which these moonshiners lived, though in- dubitably mountainous, were not self-contained in the sense that clearly defined communities were to become in later mountain fiction. John Esten Cooke's The Virginia Bohemians (1880), a novel set in and around Piedmont in the Valley of Virginia, carries along a subplot centering upon the conflict of an old Confederate soldier, Daddy Welles, ostensibly a hunter but really the leader of a band of moonshiners, with officers of the Department of Internal Revenue. In dealing with the affair in which the city boarder, Mr. Elliot, fell in love with old Welles' s lovely daughter Nelly, Cooke brought into clearer focus a motif, to persevere in mountain fiction for a half century, that he had introduced earlier in The Last of the Foresters (1856) and to a more limited degree in Fairfax (1866): what solution should the novelist offer to the problem presented by permitting a cultured outsider to fall in love with a mountaineer? Mr. Elliot, a woodsman by instinct and inured to the empty sophistication of social life in New York and in European capitals, loses his inheritance through the rascality of a dishonest uncle and decides that it will never be necessary for him to present Nelly to his Fifth Avenue friends. Although Nelly, who has taught herself to read, is poignantly aware of the chasm that exists between her and her lover,136 she is finally persuaded by her friends to accept Mr. Elliot.137 The Virginia Bohemians is significant in the stream of mountaineer fic- tion. Only three years before the book appeared the Federal Government had begun serious efforts to enforce the laws regulating the manufacture of alcoholic liquors. Here is the first novel in which the moonshiner appears.138 During the decade known as the Gilded Age the social position of the Virginia mountaineers was not intolerable as it was to become later. Even moonshining mountaineers were deemed worthy and admirable by highly placed social groups on valley farms and in county towns. About this time the popular concept of the mountaineer, whose way of life became fixed in increasing poverty and ignorance at the same time life in the centers of culture was quickened by growing wealth and improvements in communications, crystallized into the stereotype reported by travelers and presented by novelists for the next generation. 124 Winter 1976
Fleeting glimpses of mountaineers are caught in Constance Fenimore Woolson's For the Major (1883), a slight novel depicting the affairs of a Southern aristocratic family ruined by the Civil War and forced to retire to their summer home in Far Edgerley in the Black Mountains of North Carolina. Mountaineers in the novel are chiefly menials employed by the im- poverished aristocrats of Far Edgerley. Joel Chandler Harris's "At Teague Poteet's," which appeared as a serial in Century Magazine during the summer of 1883 and was republished the following year in Mingo and Other Sketches in Black and White, picked up the motif of the moonshiner's daughter wooed by the outsider that John Esten Cooke had used Jn "Moonshiners" in 1879 and The Virginia Bohemians in 1880. The efforts of agents of the Federal Government to stamp out illicit distilling in the mountains had begun seriously in 1877, and stories dealing with the affairs of moonshining mountaineers capitalized on an awakening interest of the American public in the beleaguered mountain people. Although the tone of Harris's novelette is humorous, it nevertheless stands as his testimonial to the shrewdness, the implacable individualism, and the sterling quality of the mountain folk who dwelt on the Hog Moun- . tain Range in North Georgia. In that it assembled a gallery of types, "At Teague Poteet's" is without doubt the most significant story dealing with the Southern mountaineer that had appeared before Miss Murfree's star of fame began to rise with the publication of In the Tennessee Mountains in 1884. Most likely Harris owed much to Murfree's stories that had been appearing in the Atlantic since 1878 and to Cooke's The Virginia Bohemians (1880) as well as to some of Cooke' s short stories in Harper's, but Harris gathered within the compass of one novelette most of the materials that were to be used by purveyors of mountain fiction down to the time that John Fox turned to the feuds in Ken- tucky. His moonshiner was cut almost altogether from mountain homespun and approached reality more closely than had Woolson's Eliot, the son of a Confederate colonel in "Up in the Blue Ridge," or Cooke's Col. Neal, the blockade leader in "Moonshine," or Daddy Welles, the ex-hunter in The Virginia Bohemians, but Teague Poteet's "sensitiveness of his ancestors"139 prevented him from achieving the primitive cunning and inhuman vengeance of Groundhog Cayce in Murfree's The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains or the startling reality of murderous wild Bill Hicks in John Fox's A Mountain Europa. The characters in Harris's story have many counterparts in subsequent fiction dealing with mountain life. They are simple and without real in- dividuality in Harris's story, but he assembled them: the lank moonshiner who resembled Cooke's Tony Tummies more than any of his literary predecessors; the tall, sallow, awkward wife; the exotic daughter, with her wilfulness and her emotional storms, who dominated the family; the out- sider who fell in love with the pretty mountain girl; the humorous neigh- borhood character, Bible-spouting Jake Norris, who appeared at social func- tions; the peddler; the simple-minded boy, Ab Bonner, whose mistake caused tragedy; the "wild" person, Rachel Bonner, who roamed the woods. The author was sympathetic with his subjects without condescending and we feel that he was dealing with real people, although we are never able to see them clearly. The atmosphere around the story never cleared either, for the local color grew almost altogether out of the dialect, the idiom, and fleeting glances here and there of the basic social views of mountaineers. Many things that Harris could have done to bring his picture of life on Hog Mountain into focus he glossed over skillfully, perhaps because he was not well enough acquainted with details of mountain life to present them. He did not give his reader any concrete picture of Poteet's home and its fur- nishings. Although there are two dances, called "frolics," in the story, the reader learns only that a cotillion was danced to the music of a single fiddle. No calls were given and no fiddle tunes were mentioned.140 We are told nothing of the fascinating operations involved in the distillation of moon- shine whiskey except that Poteet was busying himself about his "doublings" when Sis blew the horn to warn him that the revenuers were coming.141 Harris reported many traits of mountain people, which had been recor- ded by observers and other writers of fiction, that were to remain in the store of materials used in interpreting mountain life. The conservative political views of mountain people,142 their impassiveness that they "had ap- parently borrowed from the vast, aggressive silences that give strength and grandeur to their mountains,"14* their "air of awkward, recklessly helpless independence which so often deceives those who strike the Mountain men for a trade,"144 and their "excess of caution and reserve" developed in them by their surroundings145 are attributes which the reader associates with the mountaineer of stereotype. Negro baiting, moonshining, and corrupting elections comprise the leading activities of a red-shirted masked organization of poor-white moun- taineers led by aristocrats and ex-Confederate officers operating in northern Alabama in Frederic Allison Tupper' s Moonshine: A Story of the Recon- struction Period (1884). Moonshining operations supervised by the aristocratic leaders and executed by the poor whites are deemed necessary in order to secure whiskey, untainted by a government stamp, to serve voters on election day.14(i Perhaps no writer has animadverted upon the character of mountaineer or poor white with such a loathing as Tupper displayed in estimating the character of the Alabama Sandlapper, whom he pronounced an "utterly degraded race" with "eyes that burn like coals through the yellow skin," a mind "directed by no principle, save that of the narrowest, most improvident selfishness," and a knowledge of "very much more morality than he puts into execution." In high-sounding balanced rhetoric Tupper invites his reader to "look on the statues of the Parthenon to see to what a height Caucasian civilization can go; look on the 'poor white' to see to what a depth it may sink!"147 Unfortunately, the speech of the Alabama hill people is not represented in the book, but such evidence as one may garner in- dicates that Tupper did not know mountaineers at all. Mountaineers from Sand Mountain near Birmingham, Alabama, who speak cracker dialect and behave like Georgia poor whites become involved in a subplot in Maurice Thompson's At Love's Extremes (1885). Like Tup- per' s Moonshine, At Love's Extremes emphasizes primarily the waste and violence in the lives of young aristocrats ruined by the Civil War. John Reynolds thought he had killed another Alabama aristocrat in a brawl on the Texas border six years before the story opens; he had fled to Sand Mountain where he had taken up his abode in the cabin of illiterate Tom White and was living the life of a scholarly recluse and hunter. The dialect spoken by the Whites is that of the Georgia cracker rather than the mountaineer, but many of the manners and customs observed by Moreton, the English visitor, and conventionally attributed to mountain folk place At Love's Extremes in the transition of the fictional mountaineer from poor white, as he had begun to be presented in Trowbridge's Cudjo's Cave, to mountaineer per se as Miss Murfree had been presenting him in the stories that were collected in In the Tennessee Mountains in 1884. Tom White and his "tall, angular" wife148 were generous folk. Although aristocrats made jokes at the expense of the mountaineers, whom they called "crackers" and "sandlapper˜," one young man who had become acquainted with mountain folk on a hunting trip testified that they were "very hospitable and obliging" and seemed to think they could not "do too much for one." 149 In his treatment of Milly, the "strangely beautiful mountain girl,"150 Thompson is notably offbeat. Milly' s beauty, the like of which one sees "among the hardy peasants of most mountain regions, but not so often in America as elsewhere," 151 is the conventional thing in mountain fiction. Her homespun attire and coarse shoes which do not succeed in obscuring her classic proportions, her brush of yellow hair, her delicate ears, and brown throat and neck152 are familiar entities in the anatomy of mountain beauty, but her wistfulness, helplessness, sweet innocence, simplicity, narrowness, and mental barrenness153 belong to the poor white of fiction. That she is made to seem "so vulgar, uncouth, and hopelessly shallow, withal,"154 and "quite illiterate, utterly unaware of conventional proprieties, truthful, honest, affectionate, passionate, after a fashion,"155 serves Thompson's pur- pose in preparing the ignominious depth to which his aristocratic protagonist, John Reynolds, a casualty of the social holocaust of his generation, must drop in symbolizing the fall of aristocracy, but Milly White is the counterpart in an earlier generation of Darling Jill in Erskine Cald- well's God's Little Acre and Lena Grove in William Faulkner's Light in August, not of the mountain heroines found in the fiction of Murfree, Fox, Buck, and Arnow. Milly is the girl who will grow into the infinitely patient and stolid poor-white woman who sits in the wagon and waits for her husband to buy a spotted horse in The Hamlet by William Faulkner, not the strong and resourceful mountain woman who takes her child to the doctor in The Dollmaker by Harriette Arnow. Thompson perceived that the moun- tain folk were trapped in a stasis. Because of the Civil War and Recon- struction, the aristocracy tumbled and shattered, its fragments sinking into the cesspools of poor-white degradation, but the mountaineers, paying their toll to the war too, became hopelessly stranded in internecine isolation. Except for incidental references to mountain folk occurring in such little- known works of fiction as John E. Edwards' The Log Meeting-house and the Mcllhanys (1884), a dull, purposive story of a Methodist preacher whose itinerary included the mountains of North Carolina and Virginia and whose interminable pedantic arguments for his faith convinced sedate moun- taineers as well as lowlanders, Maurice Thompson's At Love's Extremes marked the end of the period of emergence of the mountaineer in fiction. In 1885 Miss Murfree's The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains and Down the Ravine introduced for the first time the full-dressed mountaineer in complete dominance in full-length fiction. His emergence had been irregular and halting. From borderer, hunter, henchman, outlaw, rascal, poor white, and moonshiner, he was to emerge as the mountaineer, a composite of all of these, in Murfree's works. In the short stories of the 1870's and in the relatively brief scenes in the novels in which he appeared from Lanier' s Tiger-Lilies onward he spoke a dialect which, with refinements, became the mountain dialect and exhibited peculiar traits, not always fully identified, which were to become associated with him almost exclusively. Not always a dweller in a rude log cabin, he was, nevertheless, more often a cabin dweller than not and more often essentially undifferentiated from the poor white than not. But the stage was set, the actors chosen, and the drama cast when Murfree took over the direction of the play in the early 1880's. From a prologue of shadowy antics enacted by shadow shapes she turned to the flesh-and-bone mountaineers for the dramatis personae of her full-length performances.

NOTES Chapter 3

1. James Hall (1793-1868), soldier, lawyer, judge, editor, and author, lived in Cincinnati during the latter half of his life. Harpe's Head was his only novel (DAB). -A good brief account of Micajah and Wiley Harpe, known as Big and Little Harpe, sons of a North Carolina Tory, may be found in Robert L. Kincaid, The Wilderness Road (Indianapolis, 1947), pp. 197- 200, and in North Callahan, Smoky Mountain Country (New York, 1942), pp. 23-26. The transgressions of the Harpes furnished the villainy for at least one of Beadle's "half dime" novels, John J. Marshall's The Outlaw Brothers; or, The Captive of the Harpes (1879), which is a hack's reworking of Hall's novel. :iHarpe's Head in Legends of the West (Cincinnati, 1869), p. 33.
Ibid., p. 44. 
Ibid., pp. 271-272. áIbid., p. 114. "In discussing the language of the pioneer, Hall said: "His language, which is commonly brief, sen- tentious, and abrupt, becomes, when excited by the interest of the subject or by passion, highly expletive, and redundant with exaggerated forms and figures and comparisons. When he swears.. .in earnest, his philology becomes concentrated, and explodes with an appalling energy" (Ibid., Preface, p. xii). *Mrs. Kirkland (1801-1861 ), teacher, writer, editor, lived with her family at Pinckney, Michigan, in the early days of the community. She also wrote Forest Life (1842) and Western Clearings (1845), which deal with pioneer life (see DAB). M New Home. 2nd ed. (New York. 1840K n. 322. ."Ibid. ' "See George Tucker, The Valley of the Shenandoah; or Memoirs of the Graysons (New York, 1824), I, 40-59, 160-161. ].Guy Rivers (Atlanta, n.d.), pp. 42-54. .
Ibid., p. 350.
ibid., p. 114.
Ibid., p. 110. .
Ibid., p. 296. '"Ibid., p. 213. 'áIbid., pp. 318; 347-348. ."Ibid., p. 348. -"Ibid., p. 148. ttimms descriDea a ousn-arnor meeting in aetan. ^.Ibid., p. 150. -Other novels dealing with the frontier and portraying old hunters, borderers, Indian fighters, back- woods villains, and rustics in buckskin similar to the mountaineer as he first appeared in fiction were Tokeah; or, The White Rose (1829), by Charles Sealsfield, a story of the Georgia border in the early part of the nineteenth century; Westward Hot (1832), by James Kirke Paulding, a story of the Kentucky fron- tier at the time of the American Revolution, into which is introduced a stutfy of the religious fanaticism, in the character of Dudley Rainsford, that rampaged along the frontier at the time; Nick of the Woods, or, The Jibbenainosay (1837), by Robert Montgomery Bird, in which appear a braggart and horse thief, Roaring Ralph Stackpole; a pioneer, Pardon Dodge; a poor white, Abel Doe; and an old trapper and In- dian fighter, Nathan Slaughter; Tales and Sketches from the Queen City (1838), by Benjamin Drake, which relates anecdotes and stories of pioneer types in early Cincinnati; The Forest Knights; or, Early Times in Kentucky (1846), by James Duncan Nourse, a story of pioneering; Alamance; or, The Great and Final Experiment (1847), by Calvin Henderson Wiley, based on the activities of the Scoteh-Irish Regulators in North Carolina on the eve of the American Revolution; The Renegade: A Historical Romance of Border Life (1848), by Emerson Bennett, about Kentucky; and Lonzo Powers; or, The Regulators. A Romance of Kentucky Founded on Facts (1850), by James Weld, which follows Regulator pioneers into Kentucky. Except for Nick of the Woods and Westward Ho! the novels are of inferior quality. Customs, manners, activities, and speech appearing in the books show a strong influence of Cooper and generally reduplicate the types found in the novels I have chosen to analyze for harbingers of the mountaineer. -'Thomas Singularity may have been a pseudonym for Jeremiah Hopkins, a South Carolina printer born in Charleston in 1795. See Novelettes of a Traveller (New York and London. 1&34). IL 143. -4First published in Augusta, Georgia, in 1835, it was published again by Harper's in 1875. References are to the Harper's edition. ->r>"The Shooting Match," Georgia Scenes, pp. 206-207. .áIbid., pp. 151-161. ."Ibid., pp. 53-64. .áLongstreet identified Ransy as a "clay-eater" (Ibid., pp. 54-55), the Georgia name for a poor white. The "clay-eaters," who congregated at certain spots to chew and swallow Georgia clay, have contributed at least one place name to a Georgia community, Lick Bank. Ransy, the talebearing community ne'er-do- well, has his counterpart in many a mountain community. .âIbid., pp. 179-186. wHorsehoe Robinson, A. L. Burt reprint edition (New York, n. d.), p. 250. "Ibid., p. 8. ^Ibid., pp. 13-27. ."Ibid., pp. 433-434. "Ibid.. DD. 101-102. "âIbid., p. 102. âáIbid., p. 108. ."loia., p. nu. ááIbid., p. 292. "âIbid., p. 130. ^'Ibid., p. 478. ^'IDia., pp. 3U4-3U0. á.Ibid., p. 423. "The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison (New York, 1902), IX, 264. "George Balco m be (New York, 1835), I, 193, 196. v>The Partisan Leader (New York, 1861), I, iv. *áIbid., I, 29. i'Eoneguski (Washington, D.C., 1839), I, 89-90. ."Charles Neville Buck attributed characteristics of the villain in The Roof Tree to Indian ancestry. In Kit Brandon Sherwood Anderson suggests the possibility that Kit's fat, stolid, uncommunicative mother was of Indian descent. John Fox suggested that the untamed quality of his heroine in "The Courtship of Allaphair" derived from Indian blood. .Young Kate; or, The Rescue: A Tale of the Great Kanawha (New York, 1844), I, 16. The book was republished in 1855 under the title of New Hope; or, The Rescue. :>0William Alexander Carruthers (1800-1850) was a Virginia medical doctor and writer whose three novels, The Cavaliers of Virginia; or, the Recluse of Jamestown (1832), The Kentuckians in New York (1834), and The Knights of the Horseshoe (1845) and a few magazine articles are the sum of production (see Carl Holliday, "William Alexander Carruthers," Library of Southern Literature). "â'Holliday pointed out that "Red Jarvis is a character comparable with Cooper's Natty Bumppo, and as great a series of tales might have been created around him" (Ibid., p. 756). .The Knights of the Horseshoe; A Traditionary Tale of the Cocked Hat Gentry in the Old Dominion, Harper's Franklin Square Library edition No. 269 (September 8, 1882), p. 77, col. iii. It was first published in 1845 at Wetumpa, Alabama. â.Leather Stocking and Silk (New York, 1854), p. 401. â*The Last of the Foresters (New York and Cincinnati, 1856), p. 49. Verty brought down Miss Redbud Summers' pigeon on the wing with a single trial. .ââSee ibid., p. 54, for an account of his skill in calling and killing a wary wild turkey. âáIbid., p. 37. "â"Ibid., p. 202. 
r>áIbid., p. 367. ..Ibid., p. 66. áâThere appears not to be a single instance in which a novelist permits a native mountaineer of the type usually portrayed in fiction who does not become educated or who is not discovered to be aristocratic to marry a worthy outsider. á.Latimer, Our Cousin Veronica (New York, 1855), pp. 158-159. á^Harden E. Taliaferro, Fisher's River (North Carolina) Scenes and Characters (New York, 1859), p. 17. á'See Ralph Steele Boggs, "North Carolina Folktales Current in the 1820 V The Journal of American Folklore, 47 (October-December, 1934), 269-288. Boggs visited Surry County and neighboring areas and found most of the tales still flourishing a century later. David K. Jackson, in Carolina Humor (Richmond, Virginia, 1938), points out in his introduction to the book that many of the Fisher's River tales are variants of European tall tales. See especially his references to parallels between "The Pigeon Roost" and "The Peach-Rocked Deer" and similar tales told by Baron Muncfrausen, p. vi. ááTrowbridge, My Own Story (Boston and New York, 1903), pp. 261-262. á;'See Cudjo's Cave (New York, n. d.), p. 340. ááJeremiah Clemens (1814-1865), soldier, United States senator (1850-1856), and novelist, lost political favor in Alabama because he supported the candidacy of Fi Umore for the presidency. He turned to writing historical romances. Because he was an avowed Unionist, he moved to Philadelphia in 1862 (see DAB). á7Clemens, Tobias Wilson, A Tale of the Great Rebellion (Philadelphia, 1865), p. viii. ááIbid., p. 310. .'âIbid., p. 312. 70Nathalia Wright, "The East Tennessee Background of Sidney Lanier' s Tiger-Lilies," American Literature, 19 (May, 1947), 130. See also Garland Greever's introduction to the Centennial Edition of Sid- ney Lanier, Vol. V: Tiger-Lilies and Southern Prose, footnote 47, p. xxv, for information he had gleaned from Miss Wright's manuscript before it was published. 7 .Sidney Lanier, Tiger-Lilies, Centennial Edition (Baltimore, 1945), p. xxix. 7*Ibid., pp. 148-152. 7 âGreever said: "But Lamer does not set the mountain folk, and above all the Smalhns, before us as mere Pike County curiosities. He does not make them shiftless, taciturn, and queer as their kind came to be represented. He portrays them as individuals" (Ibid., p. xxxii). 74Mary Jane (Hawes) Holmes (1825-1907), a New Englander who married a Kentucky doctor and lived for a while in Versailles, Kentucky, began her career as a writer with Tempest and Sunshine (1854). Thereafter she wrote novels at the rate of almost one a year, the net circulation of which has been estimated at over two million. Next to E. P. Roe, Mrs. Holmes was probably the most popular American novelist during the period following the Civil War (see DAB). 7râHolmes, Rose Mather (New York, 1868), p. 407. 7áIbid., p. 329. 77Ibid., p. 312. 'áIbid., p. 311. "âIbid., pp. 354-356. áâIbid., p. 387. á.Davis, Waiting for the Verdict (New York, 1868), p. 150. á!.Ibid., p. 222. Although an awkward and strongly prejudiced writer, James Roberts Gilmore (Edmund Kirke,psei/rf.), in On the Border (Boston, 1867), covered much more vividly Garfield's eastern Kentucky campaign. Battle scenes at Hagar's Bottom, Middle Creek, and Pound Gap are convincing, but, like Mrs. Harding, Gilmore did not differentiate Kentucky mountaineers from other Southerners of the lower class. Richard Schuster's The Selfish and the Strong (New York, 1958) also deals with Garfield's campaign. áâGeorge Washington Harris (1814-1869), born in Pennsylvania of Virginia stock, moved to Knoxville with his family in 1820. Steamboat captain, farmer, merchant, postmaster of Knoxville, and railroad man, Harris found time to write only one book. Sut Lovingood is a collection of yarns he had written for various papers, beginning in 1854, when "Sut Lovingood's Daddy, Acting Horse" appeared in William T. Porter's Spirit of the Times (see Brom Weber's introduction to Sut Lovingood, New York, 1954). á4See J. Thompson Brown, Jr., ueorge wasnington narns in L,iorary oj oouinem lsueruiure, v, 2101. á'âWalter Blair has pointed out Sut's similarity to Til Eulenspiegel (Native American Humor [Mew York, 1937], p. 101). ááSee Weber, p. xii. Weber points out that the influence of Sut Lovingood's Yarns is traceable in Mark Twain's work: "The fantasy of Harris, his grotesque humor and satirical imagination, his sensitive reproduction of ordinary language are also characteristic of Twain." á7Franklin J. Meine, Tall Tales of the Southwest (New York, 1930), p. xxiv. ááWeber, p. xiv. áâ"And what's fifteen miles to a man what calls his horse 'Go It'?" The Cub of the Panther in Old Guard, 7 (1869), 14. W)Voltmeier in Western World, 1 (1869), No. 23. He described the mountains as hanging upon the nor- thern borders of Spartanburg County "in long, irregular elevations, rising from several hundred to as many thousand^feet, and sending their blue peaks aloft, as if to sustain the great arch of heaven that spanned them with an azure which admirably harmonized with their own" (Voltmeter, No. 10, p. 1). In viewing a sunset from a peak near Asheville he clutched at his heart before "the grand panorama of the sky, which usually, among these mountains, closed the drama of the day - a wondrous spectacle of golden clouds, and orange and purple vapors, islands in seas of green and azure" (No. 23, p. 6). ."Among four or five obscure novels in which mountaineers appear or in which mountains are used as settings are two dime novels about the Carolina border at the time of the American Revolution. The Bat- tle of King's Mountain figures in both of them. In Charles Bertrand Lewis's Mad Dan, the Spy of 1776, one of Beadle and Adams' thrillers for 1873, a feeble-minded mountaineer named Mad Dan acts as a go- between in the love affair of an American captain and the daughter of an aristocratic Tory. Herrick John- stone's The Secret Shot, or The Rivals of Misty Mount, a Romance of the Old North State (1874) is set in the mountains, but it relates how âthe beautiful mulatto daughter of a well-to-do planter plots to destroy her father's family because they have mistreated her. The Land of the Sky; or Adventures in Mountain By-ways (1875) by Frances Christine (Fisher) Tiernan {pseud., Christian Reid) was famous in its day as a travel novel about the mountain country around Asheville ("The Land of the Sky"), but only the in- terminable gazing of properly chaperoned sophisticates at the glorified scenery is significant in the literary history of the mountaineers. The plot of Elizabeth Van Loon's The Shadow of Hampton Mead (1878) centers around the efforts of a stereotyped villain to destroy the aristocratic Hampton family and seize "Hampton Mead," their plantation in a high valley in the Carolina mountains behind the Blue Ridge. The villain's designs are thwarted in this romance, as fantastically plotted as Mrs. Holmes's Rose Mather. Carolina mountaineers do not become clearly identified in any of these novels. â-During his boyhood in Missouri Samuel Clemens probably heard accounts of life in the Cumberland Mountains of Tennessee, for his family had lived in a number of communities there from 1825 to 1835 when they departed for Missouri a few months before Samuel's birth. Obedstown appears to be Jamestown, Tennessee, the seat of Fentress County, where John Clemens, like Squire Hawkins in The Gilded Age, bought a vast tract of land. John Clemens, also like Squire Hawkins, had kept a country store and a post office in the same log building at Three Forks of Wolf River (see Albert B. Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography [New York, 1912], I, 5-8). ââThe Gilded Age (Hartford, 1902), pp. 17-18. The book was first published in 1873. âáIbid., pp. 20-21. âáIbid., p. 21. !MiFentress County, Tennessee, just south of the Kentucky line, is in the region which historians claim received large numbers of poor whites migrating from the poor white reservoir of southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina, where William Byrd had found them in 1728 living under conditions similar to those Mark Twain describes here. â7See R. C. Beale, Development of the Short Story in the South (Charlottesville, Virginia, 1911), pp. 70- 80, for a resume of mountain short stories. Mildred L. Rutherford, The South in History and Literature (Athens, Georgia, 1906), I, 309, knew only of the stories of Lamar and Cooke. â"Polly Peablossom's Wedding and Other Tales, ed. T. A. Burke (Philadelphia, 1851), pp. 76-88. The story is included in The Library of Southern Literature, XIV, 6308-6317. John Basil Lamar (1812-1862) was a Georgia writer who was killed in Virginia during the Civil War. ââ"The Blacksmith of the Mountain Pass" was revised by Charles Dickens with the title of "Col. Quagg's Conversion" (Edd Winfield Parks, Charles Egbert Craddock [Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1941], p. 73). "â"The story appeared in Legends of the West: Sketches Illustrative of the Habits, Occupations, Privations, Adventures and Sport of the Pioneers of the West, entered in 1857 but printed in Cincinnati in 1867, pp. 267-285. "'.Ibid., p. 268. "â".Ibid., p. 270. "â..âIbid., p. 276. ¡á¡áSee Edd Winfield Parks, Charles Egbert Craddock (Chapel Hill, 1941), pp. 71-72. "âá"Taking the Blue Ribbon at the County Fair" and "The Panther of Jolton's Ridge" were both sold to Appleton's Weekly under the pseudonym of R. E. Dembry, which Miss Murfree had been signing to her clever fiction that had been appearing in LippincotVs Magazine, but "Taking the Blue Ribbon" did not appear until the summer of 1880 and "The Panther," which was re-sold to a church magazine, not until 1885, but both under the new and well-known name in local color: Charles Egbert Craddock (see Parks, Charles Egbert Craddock, pp. 80-84). Because both stories are probationary and experimental in technique and belong to a period of tran- sition in the career of their author, they are being placed in the period of the emergence of the moun- taineer in fiction rather than in the period of his arrival, for in both stories the mountaineer is not plainly differentiated from the poor white despite the fact that he is never labeled a poor white. Because Miss Murfree was the first writer after the Civil War to make that differentiation, she is accorded the credit for introducing the mountaineer to American literature, but her sights did not rest upon him accurately until she wrote "The Dancin' Party at Harrison's Cove" in 1878. ââáMiss Murfree sold this story, along with "Taking the Blue Ribbon," to Appleton's Weekly, but the editor, Oliver B. Bunce, never published it. Apparently he sold it to the editors of The Christian Union in which it appeared in 1885, nine years after Bunce had bought it. It was republished in 1899 in The Bush- whackers and Other Stories (see. Parks, p. 83). .âUbid., p. 155. ââáIbid., p. 213. .âáIbid.. DD. 124-125. ¡"âIbid., pp. 145-146. "¡Murfree's story invites comparison with Constance Fenimore Woolson's "Up in the Blue Ridge," the first story about mountain moonshining to appear in print. ".Appleton's Journal, N. S. 2 (March, 1877), 193-204. ".''Ibid., p. 193. "*Lippincott's Magazine, 19 (March, 1877), 298. ...^Frances Hodgson Burnett, "Esmeralda," Scribner's Monthly, 14 (May, 1877), 82. The story also ap- pears in Surly Tim and Other Stories (New York, 1905), pp. 124-161. Mrs. Burnett and William Gillette wrote a play based on the story in 1881. Esmeralda, which has the first act in the mountains of North Carolina, ran for a year in New York and was produced from time to time as late as 1900 (see Arthur Hobson Quinn, A History of the American Drama from the Civil War to the Present Day [New York, 1936], II, 215). ..áIbid., p. 81. .."Appeared in Scribner's Monthly, 14 (September, 1877), 673-687. ""lDia., p. b/4. ..âAppeared in Appleton's Journal, N. S. 3 (December, 1877), 505-506. .-'âIbid., p. 506. !.!Harper's Magazine, 55 (July, 1877), 261-271. ...The storv aDDeared in Appleton's Journal, N. S. 5 (August, 1878), 104-125. ..áIbid., p. 105. '.^Ibid., p. 106. !^Harper's Magazine, 57 (June, 1878), 199-211. '.áIbid., p. 200. ..'Cooke, Harper's Magazine, 58 (February, 1879), 380-390. ..áIbid., p. 382. ..âIbid., p. 385. "âHarper's Magazine, 63 (November, 1881), 867-880. ¡.'"Ibid., p. 870. '.'.Subsequent sociological investigations, however, do confirm Cooke's position that moonshining was an occupation of a fairly respectable class of mountain people rather than the class to which Peony's father belonged. 1 ( {Born in Holly Springs, Mississippi, Mrs. McDowell spent most of her mature years in Boston, where she was a favorite of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. She probably had little actual acquaintance with Tennessee mountaineers (see Alexander L. Bondurant, Sherwood Bonner: Her Life and Place in the Literature of the South [Jackson, Mississippi, 1899], pp. 55-56). ¡."Isabella D. Harris believes that Mrs. McDowell should be credited as a co-discoverer with Miss Murfree of the Tennessee mountaineer and that Mrs. McDowell's mountaineers approach reality more closely than Miss Murfree's. She points out that Mrs. McDowell's characters "were active, more vivacious, more sprightly, and more entertaining. They danced as gaily (with much better conscience!), made moonshine liquor as regularly, and quarreled more violently. Furthermore, less addicted to the passive sports of porch-sitting and yarn-swapping, they went about the business of living with more agile bodies and stouter hearts" (The Southern Mountaineer in American Fiction, unpublished Duke Univer- sity dissertation, 1948, pp. 90-91). .:{:)Simms's The Cub of the Panther comes close to qualifying as the first mountaineer novel, but since it was never published in book form and its plot is concerned partly with the affairs of the aristocratic Fairleighs, the distinction is accorded Miss Murfree. Joel Chandler Harris's "At Teague Poteet's" is a novelette. Marion S. Cann's On Skidd's Branch: A Tale of the Kentucky Mountains, a 56-page novelette published in a booklet which appeared in 1884, is an insipid story of a romance between a "revenuer" and a moonshiner's ward in a setting of spurious local color. . "The Virginia Bohemians (New York, 1880), p. 69. .{7I. D. Harris pronounces Cooke's skill in presenting Nelly and her agonies "a picture as authentic and genuine as similar studies by Miss Murfree" (The Southern Mountaineer in American Fiction, p. 85). .'áC. Dunning Clark's Captain Paul, the Kentucky Moonshiner; or, The Boy Spy of the Mountains, which appeared in Beadle's "Half Dime Library" in 1880, shares honors with Cooke's novel. Captain Paul, the Kentucky Moonshiner relates the story of how a handsome deputy marshal is captured by a band of ruthless moonshiners and rescued by Marian Lynn, a beautiful mountain girl disguised as a boy. After the marshal, with the help of vigilantes, has routed the moonshiners, he and the girl are married. Cooke had published a short story "Moonshine" in Harper's Magazine (58, 380-390) in 1879 in which an outsider falls in love with the beautiful daughter of a moonshiner. C. F. Woolson's "Up in the Blue Ridge" had appeared in Appleton's Journal in August, 1878. > 'â"At Teague Poteet's" in Mingo, etc. (Boston, 1884), p. 46. 1 ââHarris declared: "It is not necessary to describe the marriage of Sis and Woodward, nor to recite here the beautiful folk-songs that were served for the wedding music" (Ibid., p. 164). m Ibid., p. 95. '^Ibid., p. 60. .áâIbid., p. 114. ."Ibid., p. 137. .âr>Ibid., p. 54. '^Tupper, Moonshine (Boston, 1884), pp. 66-67. H'lbid., pp. 63-64. .ááThompson, At Love's Extremes (New York, 1885), p. 7. .áâIbid., p. 224. âââIbid., p. 21. "i Ibid., p. 9. "â*Ibid., p. 7. "âIbid., pp. 22, 73. â."Ibid., p. 22. "â."âIbid., p. 73.
 

Chapter 4
Charles Egbert Craddock and the Southern Mountaineer in Fiction i The Southern mountaineer came into his fullest flower in fiction in the works of Mary Noailles Murfree, who wrote under the pen name of Charles Egbert Craddock.1 Miss Murfree, member of an aristocratic family im- portant in the history of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, became acquainted with mountain people in and around Beersheba Springs in the general neigh- borhood of Montvale (where Sidney Lanier's grandfather had kept a sum- mer hotel) during the summers of her girlhood, which she spent there with her family. After a brief career in writing under the pseudonym of R. E. Dembry, she shifted from her pale stories of sophisticated life that had ap- peared in Lippincott's Magazine to stories about the Tennessee mountains, which were accepted at once by William Dean Howells, then editor of The Atlantic Monthly. The first of her mountain stories, "The Dancin' Party at Harrison's Cove," was written as the first chapter in a novel she and her sister had planned about the mountain folk.2 At her father's insistence she mailed it to Howells as it stood, and the novel was never completed. "The Dancin' Party," which appeared in The Atlantic Monthly for May 1878, had been followed by seven other mountain stories in the Atlantic by 1884, when the eight were brought out by Houghton Mifflin Company in one volume under the title In the Tennessee Mountains. Because the book was immensely popular* and because it contained some of the best writing that Murfree was to do, the year of its publication may be called the annus mirabilis in the history of the mountain people in fiction, for 1884 definitely marks the time at which the Southern mountain people had become generally recognized as a people possessing their own idiosyncrasies, not to be confused with other Southern types. Murfree' s stories of the Tennessee mountaineers appeared in the heyday of the local color movement in America, and it is perhaps not an exaggeration to say that she best exemplifies the movement in the South. 134 Winter 1976
The standardization of American life that began with the rise of materialism following the Civil War soon led to nostalgic interest in such eddies of the older rural individualism as could be found in the backwaters of our civilization. In most instances the quaint survivals exploited by the local colorists were caught on the threshold of change to the new order if they were not altogether recaptured from the reminiscences of writers who recognized that they had vanished from the scene completely as in the case of Bret Harte, the father of the movement in America, whose characters and their way of life had already disappeared when he began to write about them. Murfree is unique, however, in that she reversed the usual process by cap- turing in her stories a way of life that was not disappearing but was actually becoming more clearly defined in its eccentricities for a full generation after "The Dancin' Party at Harrison's Cove" appeared in 1878. Social and cultural facts in the history of the Appalachian South indicate that the highlanders did not share in the new materialism that tended to bring stan- dardization to American life. The mountain folk were generally so com- pletely insulated from outside influences that the already old-fashioned bor- der life they were living on the eve of the Civil War had become intensified, through poverty, through a growth in population, and through an increased ignorance (due in part if not entirely to neglect of the mountain areas in the state capitols during an era notorious not only for open thievery of its business and for industrial tycoons but also for the blatant corruption of its political leaders from ward heelers to Washington moguls) into a way of life marked by exaggerations of character and custom that had hitherto been unknown in America. Murfree's early stories caught not a dying way of life but an adolescent day in the growth of a blight of waste and decay that was to be neglected until it produced a strangely metamorphosed American (ap- parently within two generations) the likes of whom had not been seen in the land before. Her career as an interpreter of the mountaineer spanned the years of adolescence and maturity of this beleaguered American. To those who met him only in fiction, the highlander's exaggerated traits of character made him seem as unreal as a caricature of a caricature, but he was ac- tually more real in the raw aspects of his life than the genteel restrictions imposed upon literature during Murfree's career would permit her to say, if she actually knew.4 Murfree, except for her heavy-handed moralizing, is closer to realism in most of her work than she is to romanticism. At her best in a handful of her short stories in which she successfully integrates character, action, and set- ting; she approaches Thomas Hardy, whose Return of the Native (1878) had appeared during the time she was writing her first stories about the moun- taineers.5 But her emphasis upon setting, delightful in her early stories, becomes a boring conceit before long. Not only are her tedious pages of pur- ple patches tiring, but they are in general misleading in that her presen- tation of the mountaineer as an expression uttered by the rushing streams, the dizzy heights, the beetling crags, and the lonely sweep of blue-hazed mountains falling away ridge after ridge is spurious naturalism. Perhaps her most serious mistake in her preparation for her role as an interpreter of the mountain people was her failure to become intimately acquainted with more mountaineers and with their social history.6 But that she presented them as she saw them within the limitations imposed upon her by the genteel age in which she lived is accepted by all who have examined her work. Moreover, she is credited with presenting them faithfully, accurately, and sym- pathetically, within those same limitations, and her insistence that they were children of nature and motivated by the same desires and emotions as people in more complex social organizations led her to marvel at times at nobility and self-sacrifice thought to belong only to the tenderly nurtured and refined children of wealth and culture.7 II "The Dancin' Party at Harrison's Cove" specifically identifies the natives of the coves and ridges around New Helvetia Springs as moun- taineers. They are presented as stereotypes speaking a well-defined patois and exemplifying in their attitude, costume, manners, and customs a way of life projected from a particular background of heritage and setting. Fur- thermore, they are not seen from their own point of view but rather from that of two outsiders, Mrs. Darley and her uncle Ambrose Kenyon, summer residents at the Springs. "The Dancin' Party" is one of Murfree's better stories. It is vital, finished, and sustained. All of its parts are fitted skillfully together. To an "outsider," Mr. Kenyon, himself an outsider, emerges as the most con- vincing character. But Murfree was faithful to her mountaineer characters too. Mrs. Johns, in her faded calico, sitting on the edge of a chair as she fan- ned herself with sunbonnet and relayed her "news" in the "peculiar ex- pressionless drawl of the mountaineer," is the first in Murfree's gallery of pathetic mountain women. Mrs. Johns was "tall and lank, and with such a face as one never sees except in these mountains,- elongated, sallow, thin, with pathetic, deeply sunken eyes, and high cheek-bones, and so settled an expression of hopeless melancholy that it must be that naught but care and suffering had been her lot; holding out wasted hands to the years as they pass, - holding them out always, and always empty."8 She is a stereotype, but she existed. In other ways, too, "The Dancin' Party" struck true notes. The attitudes of the mountain folk toward dancing, a heinous sin which might cost one his treasures in heaven, must have gone far toward laying the foundations for such outbreaks of bloodshed and terror as Mr. Kenyon averted at Harrison's party, for in the theology of the mountaineers one who is guilty of the least is guilty of the whole, and a devil more real than Americans of today can understand wanted nothing better than a dancing party to bring out "the old Adam" in everybody present.9 The young people, born old themselves, could not become gay and lightsome: "the awkward young mountaineers clogged heavily about in their uncouth clothes and rough shoes, with the stolid-looking, lack-lustre maids of the hill [sic], to the violin's monotonous iteration of The Chicken in the Bread-Trough, or The Rabbit in the Pea-Patch, - all their grave faces as grave as ever."10 Here are the people, young and old, that have already become incapable of gaiety and camaraderie. Murfree was daring in at least one instance when she permitted Rick Pearson to use an expansive simile that epitomizes the sulphurous rhetoric the mountaineer was capable of. When Rick recognized Kenyon, he cried: "Ye may drag me through hell an' beat me with a soot-bag ef hyar ain't the old fightin' preacher agin!"11 The dialect, though showing a few in- consistencies, is probably as good as any mountain writer has ever achieved. From the social point of view, perhaps the most serious objection to be made to the mountaineers as Murfree presents them is that they are too much alike. Here she is dealing with one kind of mountaineer, the poorest type, and though all mountaineers were more like one another in their basic attitudes and ethical views than they were like other Americans, Murfree presents generally only the poorest type, as have her followers. It might be said that she created the demand in fiction for a certain mountaineer for whom the American reader has not yet been willing to accept a substitute. But he was a real mountaineer none the less. Error rises when we accept him as the only mountaineer. But Murfree' s mountaineer has always been the most interesting - in fact, the only mountaineer that has been in the least interesting - so far as fiction is concerned. Murfree' s next story, "The Star in the Valley," which appeared in the Atlantic for November 1878, is a failure structurally, but its symbolism and pathos, vaguely reminiscent of Hawthorne, appealed to many readers at the time.12 Its dominating plot motif, the interest of an outsider of cultural pretensions in a beautiful mountain girl, had been used in a modified form by John Esten Cooke in Fairfax (1868), but Murfree in this story gives the motif point for the first time. Henceforth, it is to become the most over- worked motif in mountaineer fiction. The title refers to the light in drunken old Jerry Shaw's forge, which Reginald Chevis, a young sportsman, watches every night from his camp on a ridge above. Changes in taste have dealt hard with this story. But there are many things in it that pointed directions for handling life among the mountaineers in fiction. Celia Shaw is the first of "the ethereal woodland flowers" 1;* to disturb the outsider, with his polish and urbane manners, because he finds himself unable to "cross the gulf between his way of life and that of the mountain-born maiden.14 Celia Shaw, whose green faded dress, rough shoes, and calico sunbonnet could not hide the compelling beauty of the "opaline lights in her dreamy eyes," nor "golden sunbeams.. .in her bronze hair," nor the "subtle affinity between her and other pliant, swaying, graceful young things, waving in the mountain breezes,"15 is another of Murfree's ar- chetypes. 1(> One theme presented in "The Star in the Valley" was destined to become one of the overworked conceits in mountaineer fiction: unawareness on the part of mountaineers of social distinctions between themselves and outsiders. Chevis's companion on his hunting trip to the mountains was an- noyed because of their mountain guide's "utter insensibility to their social position."17 Celia "had no idea of the heights of worldly differences that divided them, more insurmountable than precipices and flying chutes of mountain torrents, and chasms and fissures of the wild ravines."18 "Electioneerin' on Big Injun Mounting"19 introduces another motif to be made capital of by Murfree's followers: the success achieved by the moun- tain boy whose talents are permitted to "burst through the stony crust of cir- cumstance"-0 in the new environment he finds when he leaves the mountains. Twenty years before the story opens, Rufus Chadd, who "had lived seventeen years in ignorance of the alphabet" and who "was the first of his name who could write it,"21 had left his home on "Big Injun Mounting" for a lawyer's office in the county seat in the valley. "Electioneerin' on Big Injun Mounting" presages a stream of fiction about mountain boys "out in the big world." Murfree, in her treatment of the motif,22 is to be given credit for the restraint she exhibited in not presen- ting Chadd as a buffoon during the days of his adjustment to his en- vironment in the "settlemints," a temptation that many writers about mountain folk have been unable to withstand. But in "Electioneerin' " the artistic bounds Murfree set for herself preclude that she should have done so. Murfree showed keen insight in regard to the mountaineer's concept of law and justice. In his native habitat the mountaineer is known not to have been able to conceive the terms abstractly. To him they were always matters of favoritism shown by those in office who were "on his side" or malice by those who were "on the other side." The weakest story in the collection is "The Romance of Sunrise Rock," which appeared in the Atlantic for December 1880. Its theme is that of "The Star in the Valley," dressed with a double helping of melodramatic sen- timentality. Two young sophisticates who have failed to make places for themselves in their professions in the "city" have retired to the mountains where they hope to find security. The young recluses are as unreal in their emotional attachment to a dead mountain girl as Reginald Chevis is in "The Star in the Valley." Such Poesque necrophilia no doubt made its appeal to tender readers of the Gilded Age and does not deserve harsh critical strictures from a later generation. The artistic fallacy in "The Romance of Sunrise Rock" is Mur- free' s failure to see that such great drama of the heart could not possibly have come to the John Cleaver she presented to her readers. But her story emphasizes more strongly the motif of the uncomprehending mountain girl in love with the sophisticated outsider that she had introduced in "The Star in the Valley." Trelawney's willingness to marry Selina only heightens suspense. Murfree' s removal of the girl by death strains at the leash of ar- tistic propriety, but writers of mountain fiction have accepted the bounds she imposed and never permit sophisticated men to marry mountain girls until the girls are discovered not to be real mountain girls at all or until they have been made worthy by education. "Over on the T'other Mounting"2* differs from the earlier stories in that it is completely montane in conception. Not a single character has ever been outside the mountains. In it, too, the mountaineers are presented as vegetative outgrowths of the setting. They are hopelessly ignorant and their superstitious fears dominate* their lives. T'other Mountain, with its ever- changing sinister personality, falls as a shadow upon the gnarled lives of the people who dwell upon the lower range. The story has many authentic touches in it. The octogenarian, Nathan White's father, with the authority of the patriarch, recounts between naps the tales and legends relating to the bewitched mountain.24 One of the elderly women in the White household interprets a natural phenomenon in terms of the Bible;25 the herb doctor, a familiar figure in most mountain communities and a minor stereotype in fiction, is presented faithfully; and the preference of the mountain folk for herb doctors rather than medical doctors, whom they have generally mistrusted, is demonstrated.26 In three respects, though, Murfree erred. In her preoccupation with scenery, T'other Mountain seems more important than the mountaineers living in its shadow; and the superstitious mountaineers are presented as curiosities for the delight of sophisticated readers rather than for them- selves. Murfree rarely, and perhaps never intentionally, presented the moun- tain people as objects of humor. In her emphasis upon the belief of the mountaineers in witchcraft Murfree left an incorrect impression. Sociological research has not revealed that mountain folk have believed in witchcraft extensively. Such echoes and survivals of witchcraft as have tur- ned up in the superstitious lore of the Appalachian South derive from a broad foundation of popular belief in the seventeenth century and appear not to have recrudesced into overt witchcraft in the mountains south of Pennsylvania. Murfree, recognizing the mountaineer as a primitive man, ap- pears to have reasoned that he ought to believe in witches because Negroes and poor whites, also considered primitive, believed in them. But Scotch- Irish fanaticism had spent itself traditionally in religious frenzy rather than in hanging witches. In Murfree's own opinion "The 'Harnt' That Walks Chilhowee," which appeared in the Atlantic in May 1883, is the best of the eight stories in In the Tennessee Mountains.21 'The 'Harnt,' " which has appeared frequently in anthologies of Southern literature, possesses merit. Except for the sheriff, all characters are mountaineers. Although the title includes the place, set- ting does not dominate the plot, as frequently happens in Murfree' s stories. Because mountaineers do not reach the nadir of superstition and gullibility as they do in "T'other Mounting," they are credible. There are many characters, but the interplay of the ensemble evokes, without becoming dif- fuse, the spirit of a community as it relates to Clarsie Giles, one of Murfree' s best characterizations of the wilful young female. The author restrains her- self nicely in her use of adjective-burdened description and sociological com- ment. "The 'Harnt' That Walks Chilhowee" supplies additional stereotypes in mountaineer fiction. Peter Giles, "a pale, listless, and lank mountaineer," who sits in a chair tilted against a post of the porch to his cabin and con- templates his weed-choked garden,-8 is the mountain prototype of the lowland poor white. His wife, "a slovenly, indolent woman" who has "betaken herself to the chimney-corner and a pipe" at the age of forty-five,29 is not typical of Murfree' s mountain women, for she, too, is a poor white, but as a type of mountain woman of the lowest class she is representative. Reuben Crabb, rumpled by pranksters, is the stereotype of the unfortunate one found frequently in mountain fiction. Reuben does not become clearly defined as the "innocent," but he shares with the feeble-minded the inhuman treatment accorded unfortunate persons in mountain com- munities. The most notable archetype Murfree offered in "The 'Harnt' " is Clarsie, another of her strangely beautiful and unaccountably intelligent mountain girls. Clarsie, dressed in a blue-checked homespun dress and with a pail of water on her head, first appears singing a melody as she walks a foot log across a stream. She is "tall" and "lithe," and has "that delicately transparent complexion often seen among the women of these mountains." She has "lustreless black hair" and her large deer-like eyes have "something free, untamable, and yet gentle" in them.'*0 But her intractable wilfulness sets her apart from the beautiful girls Murfree had introduced in earlier stories and accords her an individuality that distinguishes her as another stereotype,*1 but again a stereotype that existed, as ample evidence warrants. "A-Playin' of Old Sledge at the Settlemint"*2 is a better story, when judged by the standards of local color literature, than "The 'Harnt.' " Mur- free was not to achieve so successfully in the future the skillful harmonizing of setting, character, motivation, and action found in "A-Playin' of Old Sledge." The story is a companion piece for "The Dancin' Party at Harrison's Cove." Both stories plumb the depths of the mountaineer's Calvinistic conscience. Both examine revenge, the strongest and most dangerous emotion the mountaineer knew, asserting itself against a background of forbidden pastimes. Both stories present an instrument of frustration to the revenge: in "The Dancin' Party," effective physical restraint preceding moral reflection and in "A-Playin' of Old Sledge," the voice of the prophet that precedes a lust to kill followed by a moral reflec- tion of broader sweep. In both stories the mores of the community are ex- pressed or implied in gossip representing the conscience of the group. In both, the temptations of Satan are made so horrible by the deep-seated Calvinistic theology that the poor mountaineers are rendered incapable of enjoying the sins they are compelled to taste. In both, an acute sense of moral unworthiness only renders more sensitive eccentric pride and in- dependence, which, when thwarted in the stubborn mountaineers, reduce them to mad men of the most primitive order. But "A-Playin' of Old Sledge" is the more carefully executed of the two stories. The absence of outsiders, the use of humor rising naturally from situations and enjoyed by the mountain characters themselves, the careful integration of effects, such as light and shadow, sound and silence, animation and lassitude, that keep echoing the theme of moral conflict that runs through the story, and the skillful touches of naturalism, spurious as they might be, are all subor- dinated with admirable proportion to the main theme of conflict, which they heighten, between Budd Wray and Josiah Tait. Sociologically the story is essentially sound, too. The grudging road work required of mountaineers by law did more in "drawing together the diver- sely scattered settlers" than it did in improving the passway.** The self- importance of Tobe Rains, the foreman who has the only crowbar in the crew, is the nucleus of the local demagogue who will in the future squander road funds according to the principles of nepotism and political favoritism. "Drifting Down Lost Creek," ;M twice as long as any of the other stories in In the Tennessee Mountains, is a novelette in which Murfree introduced new themes and conceits to be appropriated by her successors in moun- taineer fiction. "Drifting Down Lost Creek" is skillfully ordered in its rather intricate plot, and there is carefully wrought harmonizing of action with character that seems vividly real, setting that becomes creditable sym- bolism, and the folk-spirit that is both the source of motivation and the judge of behavior. Admirable proportion obtains in the delicate balancing of characters in their relationships to the heroine of the story, Cynthia Ware. Murfree demonstrated in this story that she had become able to present the more intricate aspects of the mountaineer complex without resorting to the use of outsiders as standards of judgment. "Drifting Down Lost Creek," like "The Dancin' Party at Harrison's Cove," "A-Playin' of Old Sledge," and "The 'Harnt' That Walks Chilhowee," is successful in catching the essence of mountain life in certain phases, but in its artistic conception and skillful execution there is little doubt that it is the best story in the book. "Drifting Down Lost Creek" steers cleanly away from sentimentality and melodrama. Cynthia Ware clings admirably to her self-respect and does not indulge in self-pity. What she does for Evander Price is out of her love for him, and though her efforts to secure a pardon for Evander seem hopeless, the irony of her situation is that it frees Evander Price from the narrow im- prisonment of the mountain community and opens to him a world of op- portunity from which her fate bars her - the mountain-bound girl whose stream of years joins "the sequestered subterranean current of Lost Creek charged with its own inscrutable, imperative mission." *r> Not knowing how Evander "kin make out ter furgit the mountings,"'*6 she adjusts her heart anew and relies on her proud independence. Elijah Price is the first full-length portrait of the idiot in mountaineer fic- tion. He has antecedents in fiction of the border *7 and Murfree had presen- ted an incompetent, Reuben Crabb, in "The 'Harnt' That Walks Chilhowee." It is particularly significant that the idiot whose intercedence precipitates tragedy for those who love him and tolerate him appears for the first time in mountain fiction here.-'18 'Lijah achieves individuality, but he is a stereotype whose salient features may be identified readily in the fiction of Murfree's successors and whose function in narrative is, in the main, always what it is in "Drifting Down Lost Creek." That the mental incompetent, seen frequently in the large families of the mountain people, was loved and protected tenderly by his relatives is a known fact.?9 Murfree's mountaineers on Lost Creek are not all of the "classic" type, but the Wares are. Their cabin home, neatly kept, hummed with the in- dustry of "practiced hands." It had windows through which sunlight streamed to brighten "the festoons of red pepper and popcorn and peltry swinging from the rafters."40 But the Prices were presented as poor whites, though Murfree refrained from labeling them as such. Their crooked cabin stood at the end of a "vagrant, irresponsible-looking path." Hounds came huddling over a rickety fence to meet Cynthia when she visited there. A sow and her litter of pigs started up from the trash-strewn and weed-grown yard. The porch was cluttered with cooking utensils, garments, and broken chairs, in the midst of which untidy and disheveled Mrs. Price "rested" while "an old crone," visible through the open door, was "leisurely preparing supper." The only reference in these stories to the coming of the industrial age to the mountains appears in "Drifting Down Lost Creek." Accompanying Evander on his return to Lost Creek after an absence of ten years was a traveling companion, "who hailed from the same neighborhood, and talked learnedly of coal measures, and prodded and digged and bought leagues of land for a song, - much of it dearly bought."41 Murfree rarely interested her- self in the impact of the coming of industry and its attendant evils upon the mountaineers with their primitive culture and their slow-paced tempo of living. Although her career as a novelist spanned the most difficult years of adjustment for the Cumberland mountaineers, she preferred to present them as she had known them down to about 1885. Murfree' s In the Tennessee Mountains presents the basic props and most of the character stereotypes to be used in mountain fiction down to 1930. Her log cabins with their appointments, her little villages and hamlets of weather-beaten cabins, her mountain landscapes with Alps-like eminences and vistas of forest and field and sky, her uncertain mountain trails, her rushing streams with footlogs across them, her attention to flora and fauna are stock-in-trade for her successors. In the volume appear the witchlike crones, in their poke bonnets and with pipes in their toothless mouths, who crouch in chimney corners or move leisurely about their timeless tasks; her octogenarians who pipe in their treble voices the authority of patriarchs; her broods of tow-headed children; her slovens and intractable gossips; her blacksmiths; her feudists and mountain bad men; her unreal outsiders who pine for the unrequited love of mountain maidens; her âstrangely beautiful and wilful mountain girls; her card players and gamblers consumed with revenge; and her crowds of homespun-clad men meeting at the courthouse, on the road, at crossroads stores, or in the homes of cronies. A few of her best types will be presented elsewhere: her moonshiners and roisterers, her revenue officers, her mineral hunters, her little mountain girls who enslave the household, her mountain preachers, and her witches and wizards. A few types, just as real as those she presents, she avoids altogether: adulterers, fallen women, bastards, profligate lovers, and well-to-do mountain folk of culture and refinement. She chose and presented her favorite mountaineers, those who represented in her day what might be called a lower middle group socially and economically. The book, rated high at the time it appeared, does not deserve the neglect it has fallen into. Five of its eight stories are excellent local color and present mountain folk in a true and living reality with a vigor that seemed so masculine in her day that the country was shocked to learn that Charles Egbert Craddock was a lame little aristocratic woman whose life was "proper" in every sense of the word. Ill While the stories in In the Tennessee Mountains were appearing in The Atlantic Monthly, Murfree, in response to a request of the editor of Youth's Companion, was writing a group of stories for young readers, which ap- peared in the magazine from time to time between 1879 and 1885. 42 Although they are simple in plot and each has as its hero a mountain boy who "comes to a good end," they are not juvenile stories in a modern sense. Written in dialect, they contain vocabulary too difficult for children. Widely read in one of the most reputable publications, some of the stories have a place in this discussion because of the influence they exerted in shaping the mountaineer of fictional legend. The boy heroes themselves possess more reality than boys usually do in juvenile books, and the fact that Murfree considered the stories worth collecting in a volume after she had become well established as a novelist tends to indicate that she thought well of them. They are simple and usually brief. Each points a moral. Many of them may be considered better from the point of view of the contemporary reader than the bulk of Murfree' s writing in that she tones down the description and simplifies the dialect of the mountaineers. In "On a Higher Level" Jack Dunn yields his chance to escape from an old mill as it tumbles into a swirling mountain stream to a weaker, smaller boy, but children who read the, story caught a glimpse of a mountain cabin and a "tall, thin woman, clad in a blue-checked homespun dress, and seated before a great hand-loom." 4* They learned, too, that such wild game as a young hunter might bring in "air a mighty savin' " in a land in which coffee and tea are almost unknown and the evening meal consists of "broiled venison, corn-dodgers, and sorghum" with "apple-jack" and water, if the cow runs off to Bailey's.44 "A Warning" presents the interior of a neatly kept mountain cabin with a genial fire burning in its deep fireplace, "strings of red pepper-pods hanging from the rafters," bright colors flashing from "the clean patchwork quilt on the bed," shining pots and pans on the shelf, a great framework of warping-bars rising from the shadows and still holding "sized yarn" ready for weaving, and a tow-headed child sitting in a box cradle.[45] In "The% Conscripts' Hollow" two innocent boys are suspected of com- plicity in robbing a crossroads store. As he is being taken by the sheriffs posse from Goliath Mountain to the county seat, one of the boys, watching Goliath fade into the blue rim of mountains in the distance, begins to ex- perience "the homesickness of the exiled mountaineer, - far more terrible than the homesickness of lowlanders."4(> As they reach the valley, the boy, "born and bred on those breezy heights," can "scarcely breathe," for even tourists, "coming down from these mountains to the valley below, struggle with a sense of suffocation and oppression."47 Young Si Creyshaw's shadow falling on the face of a rock at moonrise as he attempts to reach an owl's nest horrifies the boy's family and a crowd of loafers from the village in "The Mystery of Old Daddy's Window." Readers are treated to such ghost lore as "a beckonin' harnt air a sure sign ye' 11 hev ter die right straight."4á The decrepit grandfather, "Old Daddy," a boaster and braggart with a treble voice, dozes by the hearth49 in a crude cabin, from the rafters of which depend the usual strings of pepper-pods, gourds, and herbs.50 The settlement three miles away is comprised of four or five log huts built around a store on a sun-baked clearing scooped out of the forest.51 References are made to the "praiseworthy deference" accorded to the aged52 and "the hospitality characteristic of these mountaineers."5* In "Borrowing a Hammer" Stephen Ryder, a blacksmith, upon overhearing his little son telling his tow-headed cronies about how lazy, gluttonous, and thieving the miller says Stephen is, goes to the mill to demand a retraction of the insults. He is seized and held by the loafers there as a maniac, but escapes. When he confronts his son with what he had overhead, he learns that the miller was talking of an old "tarrier" named Steve that he had given to the boy. The best scene in the story is Stephen's visit to the mill, a "crazy, weather-beaten old building tottering precariously on the brink of the impetuous torrent."54 Two brothers quarrel over a filly in i4A Mountain Storm."55 But Thad decides not to ride Ben's filly to warn his drunken father that revenue of- ficers are in the neighborhood. In the frightful storm that overtakes him Thad falls through a "sink-hole" into a cave. Ben reaches the stable in time to release the filly before the stable collapses in the wind, but the filly has escaped. As the frightened "ignorant, superstitious mountaineers"-. prepare for bed, they discover the filly, which they mistake for Satan, in the shed- room. A "croaking grandfather" keeps remembering terrible things that happened on this night many years ago. Perhaps the most significant bit of insight into mountaineer character is that Thad and Ben offer no apology to each other in their reconciliation.*7 The best story in the volume is "'Way Down in Poor Valley." Ike Hooden is an apprentice blacksmith to his stepfather, hard but honest Pearce Tallam. Murfree had emphasized the blacksmith as a mountain type in "Drifting Down Lost Greek" and "Borrowing a Hammer," and she had described the old-time shop in some detail, but in " 'Way Down in Poor Valley" she made the forge vivid for the first time.58 Her youthful readers were treated to many phases of mountaineer life and custom. Sterile soil on the high mountain and chert-ridge farms did not produce well. Tallam' s corn crop had failed and his wheat "was hardly better."59 Farmers saw lit- tle money. Farm produce was bartered at country stores for such necessities as powder and salt.(i0 Mountain youths were resourceful, but they possessed an oddly "slow, stolid demeanor." (n "In the 'Chinking' " and "Christmas on Old Windy Mountain" had not appeared in print before they were published in The Young Mountaineers. In the first story one end of a very small boy's comforter, which he has wrapped about himself and tied behind, falls through a crack in the log walls of a country church and is tied by a prankster to a sumac bush out- side. The boy falls asleep, and when he wakes up the congregation has gone. Robbers come in and divide the money they have taken from the pocketbook of a traveler they have just robbed. Little Jeemes, released by the robbers, is frightened by them into telling tales that involve his father in the crime, but a young man who had peeked through the chinking while the robbers were in the church sets the officers straight. In "Christmas on Old Windy Moun- tain" another boy falls into a cave on Christmas Day into the midst of drunken moonshiners who try to force him to drink. His stout courage prevails and they blindfold him and lead him through another opening far into the woods. The stories are not up to the quality of those that had ap- peared in Youth's Companion. The Young Mountaineers contributed materially to fixing the fictional legend of mountaineers. The poverty of the mountain folk, their super- stitious ignorance, the caves, cliffs, chasms, floods, snowstorms, the cabin homes with their fireside tableaux, the mills by rushing torrents, the forges and blacksmiths, the robbers that retreat to the mountains, the little log churches, and the moonshiners are the stuff of which mountain fiction is compounded. Murfree' s first novel, Where the Battle Was Fought (1884), is about the Civil War as it affected life around her home town, Murfreesboro, Ten- nessee. It is significant in the story of the Southern mountaineer only to the extent that the dialect assigned to men in the ranks in the novel is essen- tially the same as that spoken by the mountaineers !n Murfree's stories and novels about the Tennessee mountains. A comparison of the speech of the mountaineers in her fiction and that of her poor whites in such novels as The Fair Mississippian (1908) indicates that she found the speech of uneducated white Southerners essentially the same everywhere in the South. Her first novel about mountain life is a juvenile book, Down the Ravine (1885). 62 It is a delightful story compounded of the same wholesome elements and pointing the same moral that one finds in the stories included in The Young Mountaineers and in her later juvenile novel, The Story of Keedon Bluffs (1887). The young hero is a widow's son, Beit Dicey, who must work in Jubal Jenkins's tanyard in order to help support the family. Beit's self-sacrificing devotion to mother and family and his success in saving them from poverty are the moral bases of the story, bases upon which Murfree usually built her juvenile stories. Widely read in a reputable magazine for young people, Down the Ravine preached its sermon at the same time that it sustained the fictional legend of the mountaineer. The Story of Keedon Bluffs (1887P tells an exciting story about the search of two boys, Ike Guyther and Skimpy Sawyer,64 for old "Squair" Torbett's gold, reportedly hidden during the Civil War in a hold in the face of Keedon Bluffs. The book has many familiar elements of Murfree fiction in it. The adventurous but essentially good mountain boys, the narrow and superstitious Civil War veteran, the evil poor-white deserter, the beautiful little Rosamondy in blue-checked homespun who dominates her elders, the sharp-tongued Aunt Jemimy, the bumbling constable, and gossiping Mrs. Peters, who arrives on a white horse, are characters who appear from time to time in her mountain stories. Her fondness for caves as hide-outs for men of evil appears here, as do the country store and the mill. The mountain storm is used twice in the novel. Other elements that are important are the coon hunt, one of the best episodes in the novel, and the practical joke played on fat old Corbin at Sawyer's store, both of which are the type of thing found in the works of such frontier humorists as Longstreet, Thomp- son, and Taliaferro. Like Down the Ravine and The Young Mountaineers, The Story of Keedon Bluffs impressed upon the minds of a generation of young Americans who read Wide-Awake certain stereotypes and conceits that came to be associated widely with the mountaineer and his way of life. The picture of towering Cumberland Mountains with their cliffs, "splintered and creviced, and with rugged, beetling ledges, all atilt,"(>5 perpetuates the exaggerated height of the Southern mountains as reported first by travelers. IV In 1885 appeared the first of Murfree' s ten novels dealing with mountain life. The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains, written in St. Louis, Missouri, during the summer of 1884 at the request of Thomas Bailey Aldrich, who wanted a short serial for The Atlantic Monthly,^ and issued in book form the following year, gathers into longer fiction the essential qualities of life in the Tennessee mountains that Murfree had already presented so successfully in her volume of short stories, In the Tennessee Mountains.*'1 The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains presents a com- pletely self-contained picture of mountain life. No outsider appears in it to measure life in the Tennessee cove community by the standards of civilization current at the time. The book re-incarnates mountain types that had appeared in Murfree's short stories: the obtusely jealous mountain youth, the beautiful girl (in this instance, a moonshiner's daughter), the shrewish old woman, the domineering tow-headed infant, the sheriff, the blacksmith, the moonshiners, the fugitive from justice, the fanatical, brim- stone-spouting Calvinist preacher, the stubborn adolescent girl, and the pompous "squair." It does not contain the "innocent" and the stranger, characters that had appeared in In the Tennessee Mountains, but an ex- ploited little boy, Jeremiah Hoodendin, plays a role close to that of the lack- wit. The title of the novel is misleading in that Hiram Kelsey, the "prophet," does not dominate the plot, but it is appropriate in that Hiram's struggles with religious doubt are interpreted by the cove people as a literal surrender to Satan, for the theme of the novel is the fear of mountain folk of the law and of Satan and, one might say, of God Himself, and the theme supplies the wellsprings of action. Hiram Kelsey, intelligent but uneducated, is driven to religion for the wrong reasons - remorse of conscience and self- concern - because he has accidentally poisoned his wife and child. He knows that Christ lives in the heart, but for all his sincere and prayerful efforts he cannot accept rationally the doctrines of Calvinism and a literal in- terpretation of the Bible. He symbolizes the fear of doubt to those who "per- fess religion." Rick Tyler, the fugitive who is innocent of the charge of mur- der against him, symbolizes the ignorant and superstitious fear of the law. Gid Fletcher, the giant blacksmith, is the physical incarnation of op- portunism that thrives by its threat of force on superstitious and fanatical fear of both law and religion. But the plot of the novel touches all these things tangentially, for it cen- ters on the personality of Dorinda Cayce, not a member of the church but willing to accept Christianity, who is sought in love by Rick Tyler, Hiram Kelsey, and the miller's son, Amos James, whose attitude toward the law and religion might be called neutral. Appropriately enough, Dorinda is willing to accept Rick Tyler as a lover even when his innocence before the law is not yet established, but she rejects him when she discovers that the principles of Christ's love are not in his heart. Hiram's adoration of Dorinda, never expressed, is felt by Dorinda and by her other lovers. Dorinda, then, is the symbol of things hoped for and the menace of the future sterility in the mountaineer's way of life when it is left to run its own course without influence from the outside. That she is left stranded at the end of the novel after Hiram, a living incarnation of the teachings of Christ, has taken Micajah Green's place in death, after she has rejected Rick because he would not offer evidence that Hiram had not helped him to escape from the blacksmith shop, and after she has found that Amos James offers only the creature comforts of life is most significant. True Christianity cannot prevail in the mountains until education comes to teach the spiritual values of honest doubt, to dissipate the superstitious fear of law and order, and to awaken values that transcend mere creature comforts. Mur free' s characters are real in a historical sense except for Hiram Kelsey, who is only superficially real. In his physical aspects, in the fanaticism of Kelsey the parson, making "the sinners spin" over the wrath of hell as he fills their nostrils with the smell of brimstone,68 he is real, but in his vague uncertainties in matters of theology, his inability to find a third dimension for himself in his feeble efforts at intellectual probing, and his courage in confessing his inability to believe, he is not a typical mountaineer. But for him to have achieved clarity in these directions would have thrown him out of context with the quarantined world of which he was a part and made of him a man with a greatness of character out of keeping with Mur- free's purpose in creating him. He is a symbol of the lost potential of the provincial mind insulated by abysmal ignorance and a fiendish theology but capable of the highest nobility of action as seen in terms of the positive aspects of Christian ethic. (>9 When seen in this light, Parson Kelsey supplies the novel with the element needed to complete its artistic proportion. It is, then, a great novel in conception and execution, for with proper restraint it fulfills the demands imposed upon it by the theme Murfree had set for her- self.70 In The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains the beleaguered frontier culture is penetrated with the dry rot of increasingly narrow Calvinism reduplicating itself in minds waxing in ignorance and superstition in a social framework of barter economy and a lawlessness made bitter by recollections of past political conflicts and made violent by the Federal Government's ef- forts to quell illicit distilling. Although Murfree deals with these problems in subsequent novels and stories, she never succeeds again in catching so well the mountaineer's dilemma in his darkest hour as she does in The Prophet. The political contests, the gander-pulling, the church services, the scenes at James's mill, the visits to the cave where Groundhog Cayce kept his neat and fully described distillery, the man hunt, the generous dinners in moun- tain homes all reflect the lively activity on the frontier, but they lack the am- plitude of generosity here that they had possessed a half century before. Here such activities are terminated in bitterness and strife born of poverty and neglect and the gracelessness of a grudging theology. Here is the com- pleted portrait of the Southern mountaineer. Hereafter we are to see him only in different poses. Murfree's mountain fiction from The Prophet to The Ordeal (1912) seems repetitious to one who reads the novels in the order of their publication. She is never to achieve as much again as she achieved in The Prophet. Had she never written another mountaineer novel, her slender fame would have suf- fered no diminution. But to the reader who should pick up any of the novels published after The Prophet, her mountain characters in most instances would seem as real and as fresh and her situations as true as they do in the archetypes presented in In the Tennessee Mountains and amplified in The Prophet In the Clouds (1887)71 is a poor novel structurally. Its theme, the moun- taineer's fear of the law, is supported by plot elements based almost entirely upon incidents that appear to have happened but did not in a setting in the mist-shrouded high coves of the Great Smoky Mountains near the North Carolina border. Superstition and ignorance magnify and multiply effects of childlike, innocent causes into horrible grotesques out of all proportion to the insignificant events that produce them. Padded with interminable descriptions of the landscape and stretched to nearly three times the length of The Prophet, In the Clouds lacks propor- tion. Murfree's interpolations of exciting scenes in Nashville hotels and the state capitol impair the structural unity, but the purpose of the scenes, designed to illustrate the irresponsible and selfish interests of legislators as their actions are reflected in the lives of mountain folk, is certainly ap- propriate to the theme of the novel. In so far as it paints a broad canvas with authentic details of mountain life, In the Clouds is more successful than its predecessors. The scenery, though proliferated abundantly throughout the novel, is accurately presented.72 Details of mountain thought, attitudes, habits, customs, and folklore are amplified more fully than they have been before. The Despot of Broomsedge Cove (1888)73 has the same theme as The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains. In the struggle between inept law and narrow religion for the domination of disinherited mountain character, however, religion clearly wins, for Teck Jepson, unlike Hiram Kelsey, has no doubts; his literal mind and his flaming imagination impose the stories from the Old Testament upon Smoky Mountain settings. Just as the title of The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains derives from a theme motif that dominates the plot, so does the title of The Despot of Broomsedge Cove derive from Teck who is precisely what Hi Kelsey might have been had he possessed a different order of intelligence. The plot is pivoted upon the affairs of the superintelligent daughter of the conscientious but ineffectual constable of the Cove, Marcella Strobe, for whom the time arrives to choose a husband from among four suitors. Marcella' s lovers in- clude the guileless but skilled blacksmith, Clem Sanders; an adoring but weak youth near her own age, Andy Longwood; the young physician from the outside who has come to the mountains to prospect for silver, Eugene Rathburn; and the dauntless saint and prophet, Teck. But dominating the plot from first to last is literal religion that brooks no argument, symbolized in the despot whom people resent but cannot circumvent. The despot, sym- bolizing the triumph of cruel and inhuman religion over all other social for- ces in a community riddled with superstition and ignorance, wins Marcella, who wavers between the young physician and the despot but whose instincts save her from the romantic fate of Cinderella. Murfree had raised the question in The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains that is central to the two novels that follow it: what is the fate of the mountaineer when he is left to his own cultural resources? In each novel, the young woman sym- bolizes that fate. Multiple answers are posed. Dorinda Cayce and Alethea Sayles, who cannot compromise, are left stranded, for there is nothing in mountain life of the 1880's to suggest that the time is yet ripe for a positive religion of liberal principles or political justice that transcends fear engen- dered by ignorance and superstition, regulators, and the machinations of moonshine gangs. Marcella Strobe does compromise, for in her compromise is biological continuity, but it is a continuity sustained by the bitter waters of an Old Testament Calvinism which inhibits it with a dangerously un- social individualism. Eli Strobe's persistent illusion that he had broken Teck Jepson' s neck in the election-day affray is cleverly concealed by Mar- cella from the jury that tries Eli for insanity. When Marcella' s mad dash on the sheriffs horse brings violently the forces of law face to face with the for- ces of religion, Teck is maimed but victorious. When stubborn Calvinism cracks the head of legal authority in mountain communities, legal authority can but jockey itself into the delusion of having broken the neck of Calvinism and preserve itself by ambiguous compromise. In the "Stranger People's" Country (1891 )74 explores superstition as a force in the lives of Tennessee mountain folk. The theme, presented through the most plausible plot sequence that Murfree ever developed in her longer fiction, is skillfully integrated with character and setting and is sustained more successfully than the theme of her three preceding novels. Although religious doubt and the ineptitude of law enforcement agencies are minor themes, -they are subordinated to the main theme, which has as its focus the superstitious regard of the mountain folk for the graves of the pigmies, known locally as the "lettle people." Action in the novel rises basically from the fear of the natives that the graves will be disturbed. More restrained in her use of pictorial description than she had been in The Despot of Broom- sedge Cove and In the Clouds, Murfree subordinated the setting to charac- ter, plot, and theme. Although superstition triumphs and the reader is never permitted to view the contents of a pigmy grave, the theme historically was not so vitally significant to the mountaineer as were his fear of religion and his fear of the law. Hence, what might be her best novel structurally75 lacks that vital central force that dominates In the Clouds and The Despot and rises to great power in The Prophet. V Following the publication of In the "Stranger People's" Country in 1891, Murfree wrote very little for two years. Except for the novelette, The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain (1895), she was to write nothing of significance thereafter. Her next novel, His Vanished Star (1894),. has no center of gravity and the plot trails into nothingness as the story closes. The last of Murfree' s mountain novels to possess commendable artistic merit is The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain (1895).77 Witch-Face Moun- tain, which mysteriously lights up at night and displays a witch's face grimacing malevolently, pervades the lives of all the characters in the story, dominates the plot, and permeates the atmosphere. Vaguely Hawthornesque in its symbolism, the mountain is a touchstone to the destinies of the charac- ters, both native and outside, drawn into its shadows. The broad base of superstition in the native population, coupled with the resistance of the local moonshiners, cattle growers, and land speculators to a proposal to build a road, affords what would normally be the antecedent action, but what in this story is the antecedent "inertia." The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain epitomizes within the restraints of artistic proportion and properly ordered subordination most of what Mur- free had to say about mountain life. The mountaineer's conservatism, super- stition, and fear of a law that denies him his right to make whiskey are all here. Moreover, the characters are representative. Of the major types com- monly appearing in her stories, only the religious fanatic and the infant are absent from the roll call of characters in The Mystery of Witch-Face Moun- tain. Appearing in the same volume were two other stories, "Taking the Blue Ribbon," the first mountain story Murfree had ever written, and "The Casting Vote," which had appeared serially in Century Magazine in 1893. "The Casting Vote," although it fades into sentimentality toward the close, is one of Murfree' s better mountain stories. Most of Murfree' s better stories written after the appearance of In the Tennessee Mountains were collected in The Phantoms of the Foot-Bridge and Other Stories in 1895. Four of the five stories have essentially the same theme: burly mountaineers in the thraldom of an infant. In three of them family feuds are resolved when participants identify an infant with the Christ child at Christmas time. Four of the stories had appeared first in December issues of Harper's Magazine or Weekly from 1885 to 1893. In general these five stories, better unified but without the power of those in In the Tennessee Mountains, reflect the same basic problems of the moun- taineers in regard to religion and superstition, law and moonshining, and ignorance and poverty that Murfree was concerned with in the novels she wrote during the time the stories were appearing. 44 'Way Down in Lonesome Cove"78 is technically one of Murfree's best short stories. The story, completely insular, includes a realistic grandmother who nags her daughter for making an unwise marriage and Murfree's fullest portrait of the autocratic infant, "the Cunnel," for whom Tobe' s lowering countenance and blustering temper hold no fear. With "Lonesome Cove" Murfree succeeded admirably, for she exercised restraint in harmonizing the elements that go into the story. The theme, trite as it is, is motivated suc- cessfully, and is in fact an important one in considering mountain folk, whose old Scotch-Irish love for family life remained strong. "The Riddle of the Rocks"79 is formulary in plot and lacks the artistic merit of "Lonesome Cove." Distinctly superior to "The Riddle of the Rocks" in its treatment of the feud motif and in the plausibility of its conclusion, "His 'Day in Court' " is creditable fiction. The Johnse Hatfield-Roseanna McCoy elopement, as well as other features of the famed Kentucky feud, must have been in Murfree's mind as she wrote the story,80 but she is too gentle to invest the feud with the sanguinariness and ruthlessness and too garrulous to order it with the neat precision that her successors John Fox, Jr., and Charles Neville Buck do. But in fairness to Murfree it should be said that the commonplace nature of her feuds, in which reprisals were taken by inflicting property damages rather than murder, is in keeping with the feuding tradition of the Appalachian mountain country south of the Kentucky-Virginia line. "The Moonshiners of Hoho-Hebee Falls,"81 the least satisfactory of the stories in the volume, is a novelette that gives an account of the trials of an orphan, Leander Yerby, whose uncle Nehemiah gave him to Tyler and Laurelia Sudley, mourning for the death of their own baby, to raise. "The Phantoms of the Foot-Bridge,"82 from which the collection takes its name but which departs from the theme about which the other stories are grouped, is unique in Murfree's fiction for the effectiveness of unity achieved through a sprung plot. Murfree was successful in creating a mood to complement the inner tur- moils of the sophisticated outsider caught with his conscience in a gothic set- ting. Her mountain characters are not egregious and the story centers upon Dundas, but the stresses developed in the lives of the mountaineers by the presence of the outsider are balanced with precision against the inner stresses of the outsider himself. The Juggler (1897)8* is a weak novel showing a marked decline in Mur- free's ability to present mountaineers. Although her mountain characters are variations of those she had used in her best fiction, they do not achieve a living reality in The Juggler. The formulary plot, which invites comparison with that of John Fox's A Mountain Europa, which had appeared in Century Magazine in 1892, develops the theme, of perennial interest to moun- tain writers, of the impact of outside culture upon that of the backward mountain folk as it affects the lives of the cultured outsider and the ignorant but high-spirited mountain girl with whom he is in love.81 As the title suggests, the plot is dominated by the outsider rather than the moun- taineers. In shifting from her interpretation in her earlier novels of the moun- taineer's own point of view to that of the sophisticated outsider as he viewed the mountaineer, Murfree moved away from the source of power that gave strength and conviction to her best mountain fiction. The Juggler with its uninteresting, smug, and condescending socialites at the summer hotel and its scornful sophisticates from the lower middle class (lately risen in the world) in the county town of Colbury, exposes the mountaineer to an unjust shame. He has become the shabby spectacle in homespun from " 'way up in the Cove" who appears in the county seat as "an awe-stricken visitor from the backwoods,"8"' or who comes to sell fruit, vegetables, and venison at the hotel and supplements his errand "by a trifle of loitering to mark the developments of a life so foreign" to his experience. 8(i But the novel offers one significant observation concerning the mountaineer and his relationship with the outsider: just as the mountaineer cannot cross the abyss that separates him from contemporary civilization, neither can the cultured out- sider cross the abyss that separates him from the mountaineer. In The Windfall (1907) Murfree returned to the mountaineer after a lapse of a decade during which she had devoted her literary talents to writing seven books on historical subjects. In the meantime her mountain bailiwick had been invaded by a considerable number of successful in- terpreters. John Fox had done his best work by the time The Windfall ap- peared. Sarah Barnwell Elliott's The Durket Sperret (1898), Will Allan Dromgoole's A Moonshiner's Son (1898), William E. Barton's Pine Knot (1900) and A Hero in Homespun (1901), and Sarah E. Ober's Ginsey Kreider (1900) had dealt successfully with mountain life in Kentucky and Tennessee. Will N. Harben, like Fox in Kentucky, had already completed his best interpretations of life in the mountains of Georgia in an imposing list of titles which included Northern Georgia Sketches (1900), Abner Daniel (1902), Pole Baker (1905), Ann Boyd (1906), and Mam9 Linda (1907). Moreover, the mountaineer had won a secure place in historical romance, which came into great favor during the decade and which Murfree herself had been writing, but perhaps most significant of all was O. Henry's use of mountain character and scene in four or five of his better-known short stories such as "A Blackjack Bargainer" (1901), "The Whirligig of Life" (1903), and "Squaring the Circle" (1904), all of which appeared in reputable publications with wide circulations. Her diminishing royalty checks no doubt had something to do with Murfree's turning again to the mountaineer when it appeared obvious that others were doing so well in an area in which her pre-eminence had not yet been seriously challenged. A feeble book penned by a tired hand, The Windfall demonstrates that Murfree had changed her focus in her view of the mountaineers. Although she includes many of the types she had used earlier: the moonshiner, his stalwart obedient sons, the old crone, the dominating infant, the fugitive from justice, and the beautiful young woman, she shows little sympathy for her subjects, even for Clotilda, the beautiful daughter of old moonshining Shadrach Pinnott. But for all her curtailment of the mountaineers she is more successful with them than she is with the leading characters in this travesty which must be marked down as a cheap romance. Murfree's last novel to include highlanders was The Ordeal (1912). Moonshiners shoot a summer visitor whom they mistake for a revenue of- ficer and kidnap his little nephew in order to prevent detection of their crime. Because they do not wish to kill the child, they leave him with a Cherokee squaw on the Qualla Reservation. The mountaineers are card- board villains in melodramatic romance of low calibre. Even the cave in which the moonshiners operate87 is faded and shabby in comparison with caves in earlier Murfree fiction, and the moonshiner Jubal Clenk's argument that the apples and peaches "b'long ter we-uns - an' gosh! the government can't hender!"88 has lost its freshness. The Windfall and The Ordeal have little to recommend them. Having lost touch with the cove mountaineers whom she had known in the 1870' s and had succeeded so well in presenting in her earlier work, Murfree presen- ted mountaineers in her last two novels to deal with them who are as thoroughly stereotyped as those appearing in the shoddiest fiction produced between the heyday of Fox's success and Tarleton's A Cycle of the Hills (1929), a generation in which the leading interpreters were Charles Neville Buck and Lucy Furman. Murfree's nine mountain short stories, most of which had appeared in magazines between 1908 and 1912, included in The Raid of the Guerilla (1912), have more quality in them than the novels, but they are undistinguished pieces reflecting a certain craftsmanship in plot manipulation but adding nothing to what she had already said about the Tennessee mountaineers. VI Murfree bequeathed a legacy to her literary descendants which they have held from her contemporaries to those in this generation who continue to labor in the domain she staked out for herself and her heirs. The boun- dary lines of her literary estate and its appurtenances were so clearly defined that the reader who turns from a representative sampling of her fic- tion to that of almost any other writer of mountain fiction can readily trace her influence, for her creation of a literary mountaineer from a narrowly limited real mountaineer was so successfully done that writers who have at- tempted to present a literary mountaineer based on any type of real moun- taineer other than the one she selected have met with an indifferent popular success. Only those whose mountaineers fit at least approximately the pat- terns she cut for the Tennessee covites have succeeded in satisfying American readers that they were presenting mountaineers at all. Since Mur- free created the literary mountaineer and the props that go with him, her ar- chetypes and stereotypes in character, setting, and atmosphere have remained standard instruments for calibrating the success of other moun- tain writers. Only in shifted emphases have writers dared with impunity to depart radically from her principles. Those who have emphasized the feud spirit of mountain folk, even when they have chosen feud leaders outside the class Murfree identified, have labored assiduously to cover their departure with a sufficient measure of what came to be regarded as orthodox moun- taineer qualities. Writers like Lucy Furman have used the same qualities to underscore their emphasis upon the need for education, and even the recent realists and proletarians have clung tightly to the same qualities in their various pleas for social and economic justice. Murfree's overelaboration of mountain settings with their exaggerations of perspective and color has been reduced only in profuseness, not in quality. Alps-like foothills and overselectiveness in presentation of wood and stream have continued as part and parcel of mountain fiction, even through Still, Stuart, and Arnow, although there is considerable evidence that these tricks were at least in part idiosyncrasies of Murfree which she did not limit specifically to her mountain fiction.89 But local colorists labored to evoke a sense of place. Murfree was certainly skillful in doing so. Her trick of drawing the eye of the reader at once to immense heights shimmering in lurid color and them permitting him to lower his head slowly toward shadow-filled chasms below him produces a sense of tumultuousness in the mountain landscape in contrast with the effect of sweeping grandeur achieved by the presentation of views which draw the eye of the beholder down, across, and up.90 But for all the profusion of wild and color-splashed beauty about him, the mountaineer in Murfree's fiction is unaware of it unless he has gone out of the mountains and returned. Narcissa Hanway, for example, had never deemed the view from her cabin door beautiful: "it was the familiar furniture of her home. Upon this her eyes had first opened."91 Although there is ample evidence that homes varied much in con- struction and style in the Tennessee mountains during the 1870's, Murfree preferred the ancient pioneer log cabin of the subsistence farmer living on his patch farm in the remote cove or on the high mountainside to the more elaborate establishments of such mountain folk as the Apples in Sherwood Bonner' s stories and the Warrens in Elliott's The Durket Sperret. Except in The "Stranger People's" Country one rarely has his attention drawn to any type of home other than the log cabin with the chimney finished with sticks which she introduced in "Taking the Blue Ribbon."92Murfree saw cabins like these and visited mountain folk who lived in them. These cabin homes with their rugged furnishings were little different from those which travelers had described as far back as the 1830' s and were to remain essentially un- changed in mountain fiction down to the 1930' s. The gallery of character types which Murfree assembled in her early stories and novels she kept intact throughout her career as a mountain fic- tionist. Before she had half-run her literary course, her mountaineers had become stereotypes in her own stories. Murfree's mature mountain women have a distinctive charm about them, even when they are broken with their burdens, but like all of her types, they are too frequently the same woman in other guises. Although a few, like Theodosia Blakely in "The Casting Vote" and Mrs. Sims in The Juggler, are fat and shapeless, most of them are variants of Mrs. Hollis, who was "spare and gaunt," and "with many lines in her prematurely old face."93 The resourceful woman seated before the hand-loom,94 or coming to the door to greet the visitor,95 or crouching over the fire as she smokes her cob-pipe,96 or peering anxiously from the paneless window of a rugged cabin,97 or scampering with surprising energy in and out of a kitchen,98 or "chuckling between the whiffs of her own pipe" as she goes
about her round of duties," is the pillar of strength by which mountain society is supported. Because her burden is oppressive she sometimes relinquishes it in middle age to older daughters while she assumes the privileges and nurses the ailments of advanced years. But if necessary she is willing to assume again, even in quite advanced age, onerous burdens that fall into her line of duty.100 She becomes frequently an intractable shrew in old age, owing in part to "the deferential humility characteristic of the mountaineers toward the aged among them."101 The mountain man in Mur free' s stories is too often the same man. When young, he is a "tall athletic fellow"102 who frequently shows unmistakable kinship with the forester and the hunter of an earlier day.103 But whether he is a hunter, a moonshiner, a farmer's son, a prophet, or a young feudist, he is invariably a "striking figure," with "lithe, elastic" movement such as was attributed to the first young mountain men whom Murfree described.104 As the mountaineer grows older he loses little of his youthful litheness, but his hair and his whiskers are gray and his sunburned face achieves a corrugated aspect.105 Older mountain men are rarely likable in Murfree's stories. If they are ordinary mountain farmers they have much of the poor white in their make-up; if they are squires and country storekeepers they are doltish and tend toward caricatures. Sheriffs are particularly obtuse, and preachers are imbued with religious arrogance. Moonshiners, horse thieves, and outlaws fare better in her hands than other older men. But she is indulgent in her treatment of the ancient mountain grandfather, whose piping voice rings ominously through much of her fiction. Her sympathies encompass women, children, lack-wits, those men who are at odds with the status quo, and the mountain maiden who must choose a husband from among in- sensitive and arrogant admirers. Outsiders in love with mountain girls are gentle and considerate, but never succeed in crossing the cultural and social chasm which separates them from the primitive mountain society. Murfree was most indulgent in her presentation of the tow-headed infant who dominated the rest of the family. Because mountain folk possessed an exaggerated sense of family and generally restrained themselves in showing tenderness and affection for adults, infants were lavished profusely with the attentions and the endearments of the whole household. Perhaps Murfree was at her best in handling the infant in In the "Stranger People's" Coun- try, in which "leetle Mose" enthralls his mother so completely that she declares, "I never expect ter see no better company 'n leetle Mose ter the las' day I live, an' I never did see none!"106 But little girls like "Cunnel" Gryce become absolute tyrants.107 The willingness of the mountaineer to permit the autocratic child to lead him about by the nose became a conceit in mountain fiction that has persisted vigorously down to Harriette Arnow,108 but there is every reason to believe that the dominating child is not an idle conceit in fiction, for a plethora of evidence supports it as a fact. Family life is emphasized in Murfree' s fiction. The brood of children with their dogs and pets ranged around a wide fireplace while the mother spins, the grandmother smokes her pipe, the father swaps yarns with a visitor, and the grandfather dozes but rouses up from time to time to insert recollections from his experiences, is a familiar picture, as are references to mealtime in the mountain cabin. Murfree' s estimate of the temper of the mountain man's character has
been as enduring in subsequent fiction as her log cabins and her crowd scenes at the crossroads or the county seat. The stubbornness with which the mountain man clings to notions that have become set in his mind, his ab- solute unwillingness to change his views, is a part of his pride and is at the very heart of the conservatism that held him in the awful bondage of isolation and stagnation for over a century. His dead certainty that he is right is illustrated very aptly in the old mountain man's explanation of why he was a Republican: "I b'lieves that ennybody what is a Dimmycrat air teched in the head, an' hain't 'sponsible fur thar foolishness, 'kase sensible folks ain't Dimmycrats. That's been my 'speriunce fur eighty year, an' I hev hed no call ter change my mind."109 Because the mountain man is so sure he is right, he cannot abide those who differ with him or are different from him if they emphasize their differences. In Murfree's fiction the moun- taineer's word is his bond. A promise is kept at all costs. As among primitive people generally, mountain humor as Murfree found and reported it is frequently based on physical pain and discomfort. Pranks rigged on helpless people, or incompetents, or unpopular folk, or one's enemies are fairly common in Murfree's fiction. Even though the mountain people are dismally superstitious, they still manage to extract a macabre humor from ghost and goblin stories.110 Also present in Murfree's fiction is much humor developed by piling up exaggerated details to make an unlikely situation appear authentic. That Murfree's estimate of the sense of humor of mountain people is dependable can hardly be doubted, and it is to her credit that she handled it so skillfully that the reader often finds himself laughing with the mountain folk but rarely at them. The mountaineer's religion, compounded of superstition, folklore, Calvinism of the eighteenth century perpetuated largely by oral tradition, and the emotional revivalism that had flourished on the frontier, had become by 1880 one of the most powerful forces supporting the conservatism of mountain folk and the most formidable deterrent of their progress. Mur- free was perhaps more successful than any other interpreter of mountain life in presenting the religious aspect of the mountaineer's character. He was basically a fatalist who believed that he "would die when his time came,"111 but the emphasis his religion placed upon "experience" as the criterion for assurance in spiritual matters produced arrogance and pride which often led to cruel intolerance.112 Building a reputation for special piety assured one "a sort of social distinction and a guarantee of a certain position" in com- munities among the coves and ridges of Tennessee.113 But piety rested solely on conviction of sin and the ecstasy of a sudden conversion.114 Salvation assured, the convert gloried in the recollections of his own sinfulness in the days before he "jined the church an' tuk ter consortin' with the saints,"115 but he lashed out at the wickedness of dancing and dropped no opportunity to assure the unregenerate that "Satan hides in a fiddle."116 The mountain preacher drove a hard bargain in salvation, so hard that many "feebly sought to resign themselves to damnation, so imminent did it seem under his ministration."117 During the rousing revivals he was fond of roaring sonorously above the singing:

"Come! come! Delay not! My bretheren, I hev never seen a meetin' whar the devil held sech a strong hold! Come! Hell yawns fur ye! Come! Yer time is short! Grace beckons! Come! The fires o' perdition air kindled! The ñames air red!"118

Murfree had attended church in the mountains. Her description of the service is accurate. Subsequent mountain novelists have reported the same sort of thing down to Jesse Stuart. Dancing or playing the fiddle [119 was the worst possible sin one could commit; hence, moral barriers were lowered for those who were guilty. When mixed with primitive jealousy and high-powered brush whiskey, such "sinfulness" frequently led to murder and destruction, as Murfree illustrated many times. The influence of the Civil War pervades Murfree' s fiction. Old soldiers among the loafers at gathering places refer frequently to their war ex- periences and many of the leading characters in her stories are veterans of the conflict. The predominant Union spirit of East Tennessee suffuses the coves and ridges which serve as her settings.120 In line with the prevailing point of view of her characters, Murfree often sees the Confederate mountain soldier as the villain who has betrayed his own kind,121 but she is aware that the divided family was not unusual in East Tennessee.122 The aftermath of the Civil War produced violent feuds in the mountains of Kentucky, but the feuds in East Tennessee as presented by Murfree are pale in comparison and not directly related to the war. Of the neighborhood quarrels in her fiction only three become clearly enough defined to identify as feuds: the Johns-Pearson feud in "The Dancin' Party at Harrison's Cove," the Quimbey-Kittredge feud in "His 'Day in Court,' " and the Grin- nell-Purdue feud in "The Riddle of the Rocks." Because its intricacies were incomprehensible to them, the law was set aside by mountain folk when they had wrongs that needed righting, or when they felt that the infringements of law were in themselves wrong. i2:i Moun- tain women, especially, set law at naught as "the men's foolishness," which "they air a-changin' of forever till 't ain't got no constancy."124 But then, when women deliver their opinions of men in Murfree' s stories, they are frequently low ones indicating that, even though women honor and obey their fathers and brothers and husbands and sons, they do not hold them in high esteem. To one sharp-tongued shrew "men folks.. .air freakish, an' frac- tious, an' set in thar way, an' gin ter cur'ous cavortin'." To her it was no surprise that "arter the Lord made man he turned in an' made woman, the fust job bein' sech a failure."125 Moonshining plays a major role in the life of the Tennessee moun- taineers. Beginning with "The Panther of Jolton's Ridge" and continuing through her last novel and many of her last stories, the moonshiner and his problems are treated. At first in genuine sympathy with the moonshiner, Murfree never changed her basic views, but in her later work she tended to reiterate without special feeling the views she had at first made convincing. Those engaged in moonshining found it necessary to develop a rationale of their conduct, a rationale that had become familiar to officialdom in the nation's capital as far back as the Whiskey Rebellion and echoed the protests of the colonials against the British government at the time of the American Revolution. Moonshining was central to the economy of mountain folk, and the laws forbidding it struck at their basic concept of individual rights. That the government for which they had so recently fought should impose such laws at a time when they were suffering most as a result of the Civil War could but add anguish to agony. The primitive mountaineers, betrayed by their faith, wreaked their vengeance on the raider himself when they were able to do so; but their reprisals against the informer smacked of medieval fanaticism. The moonshiner's arbitrary code of justice which was applied to the informer or the revenue spy was one of the most savage imaginable. Although the natural dignity and instinctive politeness of the moun- taineer tended to become upset as a result of the efforts to enforce whiskey tax laws, Murfree frequently caught the essence of his character. The fact that he was illiterate "and trapped in an economic and cultural stasis had reduced his mental processes in his calmer moods to "sad introspection or reminiscence."126 His sojourn on the frontier which became fixed about him following the Civil War had taught him the values of the "stolid gravity" which became characteristic of him, but when occasion demanded he became covertly alert, his almost inimical sharpness of attention focusing it- self instantaneously and reflecting "many an agile unclassified mental faculty." 127 The mountaineer frequently found much in the stranger which he disdained. A thoroughly masculine man himself, he scorned effeminacy in the outsider. Conservative in his own tastes, he "would as soon have thought of wearing a petticoat" as a ring on his finger.128 However, hospitality to the stranger was for him a sacred duty, and he did not hesitate to drawl sonorously above the blast of barking hounds, "Kern in, stranger! Ye air hearty welcome ef ye kin put up with sech ez we-uns kin gin ye."129 For all his bluster and gruffness, he was tender in his feelings for the un- fortunate.130 His loyalty to his friends and his devotion to his "word" were simple and direct, admitting of no qualifications.131 Self-effacing as a guest in the home of another, he adjusted to the accommodations available and made a point of requiring no special attention. If his host were working when he called, he mechanically began to assist him, "the usual courtesy of a guest in the mountains when he finds his host employed."132 Murfree appears to have understood that the isolated mountaineers, marooned in the fusion of two essentially incongruous concepts, evangelical Calvinism and natural rights, that swept the colonies in the latter half of the eighteenth century, had through a literal application of both concepts become in themselves a contradiction which they were unable to resolve in their loose social organization which bordered on political anarchy, but their personalities, when not completely dominated by their narrow theological doctrines, possessed much of the freshness and innocence associated with mankind in the golden age of myth and epic. The educated outsider with perceptive insight - and except for criminals escaping to the mountains her outsiders are educated - understood that charming maidens from the mountains could not possibly fit into urban society without com- pletely losing the very traits that gave them their charm. It is to her credit that she did not subject the mountain girl to a course of study imposed by some handsome outsider's sister, in a home equipped with modern gadgetry, in order to prepare her for her role as the wife of some idolized exponent of the fudge-and-moth-balls stratum of the American middle class aristocrat herself, Murfree felt no kinship with mountain folk and carefully eschewed any temptation she might have had* to present the mountaineers as the descendants of lost nobility or travel-worn and discouraged aristocrats who decided to go no further when the axle of the wagon broke.

NOTES Chapter 4
The best biography and study of Miss Murfree as a writer is Edd Winfield Parks' Charles Egbert Craddock (Chapel Hill, 1941). A meticulous study of her as a writer of short stories, in which she is en- thusiastically overrated, was by Alfred Reichert, Charles Egbert Craddock Und die amerikanische short story (Leipzig, 1912). The most valuable analysis of her interpretation of the life of the Tennessee moun- tain folk has been made by Isabella D. Harris in "Charles Egbert Craddock as an Interpreter of Moun- tain Life," an unpublished master's thesis in the Duke University Library, 1933. Miss Harris's doctoral dissertation, The Southern Mountaineer in American Fiction (Duke University, 1948), relates Murfree to the total effort to interpret the mountaineer in literature down to 1910. ¿See Parks, pp. 92-93. 'It went through fourteen editions within two years (Parks, p. 108). Murfree was as scrupulous as a nun in avoiding lust, sex, incest, common law marriages, vile language, and roaring oaths. She is not to be blamed, of course, with prudery in an age that required such care, but the facts in the life of the mountaineer indicate that he was at that time, and was to continue to be until the present, primitive and raw and more animal than human in his basic behavior. r>The possibility that Hardy influenced Murfree is suggested by Fred Lewis Pattee, The Development of the American Short Story (New York, 1923), p. 273. "There is not much evidence to indicate that mountaineers have ever been markedly sensitive to the in- fluences of topography; there is much evidence to suggest that their social background and political con- servatism led to their abandonment in the mountains that trapped them rather than made them. 7Murfree's closing paragraph in "The 'Harnt' that Walks Chilhowee," which appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in May 1883, states: "The grace of culture is, in its way, a fine thing, but the best that art can do - the polish of a gentleman - is hardly equal to the best that Nature can do in her higher moods" {In the Tennessee Mountains [New York, 1884], p. 322). «Ibid., p. 217. !)See ibid., pp. 226-227, for Murfree' s exploration of guilt in those present at the dance. ""Ibid., p. 227. »Ibid., p. 242. '-See Parks, p. 9«, for an account of the reception of "The star in the Valley." •:J/n the Tennessee Mountains, p. 138. •»Ibid., p. 132. •••Ibid., p. 131. •»Celia and Melissa Turner in John Fox's The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come are cut from the same cloth. Melissa, shy and secretly in love with "her betters," also exposes herself to the rigors of in- clement weather in an act of great sacrifice that results in consumption and death. Chad, like Chevis, never forgets. •7/n the Tennessee Mountains, p. 134. •«Ibid., p. 136. '""Elect ioneerin' "appeared in The Atlantic Monthly for January 1880. William Dean Howells, in a letter to Murfree, wrote that it "had a vigor and raciness of the soil" that her earlier work had not possessed (see Parks, p. 97). -°/n the Tennessee Mountains, p. 163. ¿'Ibid. ¿¿This motif is basic in four or five later novels about mountain boys: Sarah Barnwell Elliott's Jerry (1891); John Fox's The Kentuckian (1897) and The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come (1903); Charles Neville Buck's The Call of the Cumberlands (1913) and The Tempering (1920); and Maristan Chapman's Happy -Mountain (1928). Rufe Chadd possesses many characteristics that one finds in Boone Stallard in Fox's The Kentuckian. Chadd is suggestive in reference to the name of the protagonist, Chad Buford, in The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come. ¿'Published in The Atlantic Monthly, June 1881. ¿4/n the Tennessee Mountains, pp. 249-253. ¿•'Ibid., p. 253. ¿«Ibid., p. 259. 2 'See quotations from a letter Murfree wrote to Houghton, Mifflin and Company in June 1882, in Parks, p. 104. -HIn the Tennessee Mountains, p. 284. ¿•'Ibid., p. 290. »'Ibid., pp. 288-289. ;nClarsie's most notable literary descendant is perhaps the heroine of Sherwood Anderson's Kit Bran- don (1936). June Tolliver in Fox's Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1908) bears striking resemblance to Clar- sie. Subrinea Tussie in Jesse Stuart's Trees of Heaven (1940) is a torrid blonde, but in the poor-white character of her background and in the wilfulness of her behavior she is like Clarsie. »¿Appeared in The Atlantic Monthly for October 1883. •»•»i/i the Tennessee Mountains, p. 81. »^Appeared in two installments in The Atlantic Monthly, March and April 1884. Thomas Bailey Aldrich, then editor of the Atlantic, liked this story so much that he urged Mr. Houghton to publish a volume comprising the best of Miss Murfree' s contributions to The Atlantic Monthly. In the Tennessee Mountains appeared in the late spring of 1884 (Parks, pp. 107-108). ;ir»//i the Tennessee Mountains, pp. 78-79. »«Ibid., p. 72. •"Hetty Hutter in Cooper's The Deerslayer is a half-wit whom the author uses for advancing the plot; Chub Williams in Simms's Guy Rivers is a well-defined idiot used for the same purpose. Hark Short in James Hall's Harpe's Head is not clearly delineated as an "innocent," but he has many characteristics of the mentally limited person and serves the same function in the novel as mental incompetents serve for Cooper and Simms. »8The idiot in literature deserves a thorough investigation. He is a favorite of naturalists and primitivists. The possibility suggests itself that the idiots in Thomas Hardy's Jude, the Obscure (1896), functioning somewhat as Elijah functions in "Lost Creek," derive from Murfree. Idiots and incompetents are particularly important in the fiction of William Faulkner, i.e., Benjie Compson in The Sound and the Fury (1929) and Charles Bond in Absalom, Absalom! (1936). ''•Attitudes of protectiveness prevented mountain families from sending mental incompetents, both feeble-minded and insane, to state institutions. There is no evidence that the per capita ratio of idiots was any higher in the mountains than elsewhere in America, but because the incompetents were kept in the community and went with the family to social functions, travelers and observers thought so. M)In the Tennessee Mountains, p. 33. "Ibid., p. 75. »¿All but one of the stories that had appeared in Youth's Companion and two others not previously published ("In the 'Chinking,' " and "Christmas Day on Old Windy Mountain") are included in The Young Mountaineers, brought out by Houghton, Mifflin and Company in 1897. "The Young Mountaineers (Boston, 1897), pp. 232-233. »Ibid., pp. 234-235. *»Ibid., pp. 174-175. '«Ibid., p. 144. »"Ibid., p. 145. »«Ibid., p. 3. »!'Ibid., p. 4. r»°Ibid., p. 6. '•'Ibid., p. 10. This settlement, with a new courthouse added, is almost identical with the one in "A- Playin' of Old Sledge at the Settlemint." »-'Ibid., p. 11. '¡Ibid., p. 15. "'»Ibid., p. 91. This is Murfree' s first description of the water-driven mill and the activities that went on in it. Such mills, reported as numerous in the mountains at this time, became as important as meeting places in the fiction of the mountains as they had been in reality. '»'»It appeared in Youth's Companion in March 1886 as "A Fight in the Shed-Koom." 7tliThe Young Mountaineers, p. 77. "»"Ibid., p. 82. Mountaineers were too proud to apologize and too independent to show "beholdens" by saying "Thank you." "»«Ibid., p. 35. »"Ibid., p. 59. •»"ibid., p. 38. «'Ibid., p. 56. "-Down the Ravine had been published serially in Wide-Awake, December 1884-May 1885. Murfree's stories collected in In the Tennessee Mountains had attracted so much attention that editors were bom- barding her with requests for stories and articles. She contributed Down the Ravine at the request of Wide-Awaked editor, Edith F. Pratt (see Parks, p. 11 In). ««Published serially in Wide-Awake, June-October 1887. «•Ike and Skimpy are cleaned up versions of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, whom Murfree must have had in mind when she created them. ^The Story of Keedon Bluffs (Boston, 1887), p. 1. «»'»Parks, pp. 1 Hi- 117. Parks points out that The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains was "con- sidered a great novel" at the time it appeared (p. 137). «"Parks, in estimating Murfree's contribution to American literature, says: "In the Tennessee Moun- tains contains her best work; her first novel, The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains, though less per- fect artistically than In the "Stranger People's" Country, has far greater sweep and power. On this one novel and one volume of stories her slight fame must continue to rest. For these had freshness, newness; they added to literature a small cove never before noticed" (p. 177). li*The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains (Boston and New York, 1885), p. 175. «!»Parks, it seems to me, errs in his understanding of the purpose of Hiram Kelsey in The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains when he "expects a delineation of a powerful character on the borderland be- tween insanity and spiritual exaltation" (Charles Egbert Craddock, p. 182). 70Parks admits that it is "a distinguished novel . . . considered entirely by itself (Ibid.). "'Published serially in The Atlantic Monthly, January-December 1886. "'-See Milton T. Atkins, "The Mountains and Mountaineers of Craddock's Fiction," The Magazine of American History, 24 (October, 1890), 308 (cited also in Parks, p. 198). 7{Published serially in The Atlantic Monthly, January-December 1888. 7 'Published serially in Harper's Magazine, January-June 1891. "»Parks pronounces In the "Stranger People's" Country "easily the most artistic of the novels ... the best executed novel she was ever to write, with a sustained, well-rounded plot" (pp. 184-185). 7«Published serially in The Atlantic Monthly, July 1893-March 1894. 77It first appeared in three installments in The Atlantic Monthly, September-November 1895. 7«It was first published in Harper's Magazine, 72 (December, 1885), 128-146. 7!'It appeared first under the title of "Processioning Furdee s Land in Harpers Weekly, M) (Decem- ber, 1886), 798-806. "«The dispute over the ownership of vagrant livestock, the maiming of horses, arson, and the manner in which Absalom and Eveliny met at a "bran dance" all have their parallels in the story of the Hatfield- McCoy feud. For a good brief account of the Hatfield-McCoy feud, see S. S. MacClintock, "The Kentucky Mountains and Their Feuds," The American Journal of Sociology, 7 (1901), 176-187. See also Charles G. Mutzenberg, Kentucky's Famous Feuds and Tragedies (New York, 1917), pp. 29-110. «'It appeared in Harper's Weekly for September 23 & 30, 1893. «¿Appeared first in Harper's Magazine in December 1893. «»Published serially in The Atlantic Monthly, November 1896-August 1897. «4It seems highly probable that A Mountain Europa, which shows many influences of Murfree, must m turn have influenced her in The Juggler. Both books are concerned with the same theme. In both the handsome outsider competes in love with a fanatical mountain religionist, the mother of the mountain girl understands affairs of the heart, the father is opposed to the outsider and acts to bring about his destruction, industry begins an invasion of the mountain fastnesses, the center of the industrial invasion is the clearing house of gossip and speculation about the motives of the outsider, and, finally, the religionist, when he sees the maiden choose the outsider, is reconciled to his loss and becomes a devoted friend to the outsider. *»The Juggler (Boston and New York, 1897), p. 238. ««Ibid., pp. 309-310. *~The Ordeal (Philadelphia, 1912), pp. 113-115. ««Ibid., p. 238. «^Consider, for example, the landscape visible to Fortescue from the window of a billiards room in a town in Middle Tennessee west of the Cumberland Plateau as he "gazed far down the bosky recesses of the precipitous slopes where, now and then, a gap in the foliage gave glimpses of the winding road. The purple splendor of the sunset glorified the distant mountain-summits; they glowed transfigured, like the lights of heaven. Below, all along the coves and ravines, and in the heavily timbered valley, skulked the dusky shadows of the coming night, like troglodytes emerging from the cavernous earth. A mist sifted through the chasms. Among the wild tangles of 'the laurel,' a cow-bell jangled faintly. The cicada's song grew loud. The pungent fragrance of the humble herbs, nestling by the waterside, drifted by on the air that throbbed responsive to every eloquent apostrophe of the declamatory cataract" (Where the Battle Was Fought [Boston, 1884], p. 333). îM)A cross section of representative mountain scenes in Murfree's fiction from her early short stories to The Juggler which illustrates fairly adequately her technique for achieving crowded profusion of per- pendicular heights may be seen by examining the following references: The Young Mountaineers, pp. 1, 182-183; The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains, p. 1; The Story of Keedon Bluffs, p. 1; The Juggler, p. 115; and The Mystery of Witch Face Mountain (Boston and New York, 1895), p. 120. "The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain, p. 121. tylThe Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain, p. 166. Similar cabins appear in " 'Way Down in Lonesome Cove" in The Phantoms of the Foot-Bridge and Other Stories (New York, 1895), p. 153; In the Clouds (Boston and New York, 1887), pp. 36-37; The Despot of Broomsedge Cove (Boston and New York, 1888), p. 14; "The Casting Vote" in The Mystery, pp. 221-222; "The Raid of the Guerilla," p. 8, and "Who Crosses Storm Mountain?" pp. 52-53, in The Raid of the Guerilla, just to mention a few. "'"Taking the Blue Ribbon," The Mystery, p. 167. !)4"On a Higher Level," The Young Mountaineers, p. 233. !>r>"The Mystery of Old Daddy's Window," The Young Mountaineers, p. 3. WiIn the Clouds, p. 38. ^"The Casting Vote," The Mystery, p. 228. !)8"The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain," The Mystery, p. 117. "The Juggler, p. 66. '""Grandma Kettison made much of the fact that, "though housebound from 'rheumatics,' she had reared her dead daughter's 'two orphin famblies,' the said daughter having married twice, neither man 'bein' of a lastin' quality"' ("Wolfs Head" in The Raid, p. 187). "»The Prophet, p. 86. • "¿"Taking the Blue Ribbon," The Mystery, p. 173. 10 'Jacob Brice in "Taking the Blue Ribbon" (1876) bore accoutrements "exactly such as might have been borne a hundred years ago by a hunter of Old Bear Mountain" (The Mystery, p. 173), and Bruce Gilhooley in "Who Crosses Storm Mountain?" (1908) is the same sort of hunter-mountaineer (The Raid, p. 53). •"«"The Panther of Jolton's Ridge," The Bushwhackers (New York, 1899), p. 124. lor>Gus Griff, the miller in In the Clouds, p. 24, is sixty years old. He has a beard like a patriarch's and lone hair which comes down to meet it. Most older mountain men in Murfree's stories look like Gus. i°«/n the "Stranger People's" Country (New York, 1891), p. 4. 10 'See Way Down in Lonesome (Jove in Ine Fhantoms, p. 134, tor the account ot (Junnei dominating her vile-tempered father. IOHJoe Gilham became a slave to Jerry Wilkerson in Elliott s Jerry, the burly teud leader Judd Tolliver was docile and tractable in the hands of his autocratic little daughter June in The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, and the foster daughter Smiles dominated the old feudist Big Jerry Webb with an iron hand in Elliott Harlow Robinson's "Smiles": A Rose of the Cumberlands. In only one notable instance does a novelist show that such unbridled freedom of the child to tyrannize might possibly lead to the development of personality traits that bring disaster later: Lucy Furman's The Lonesome Road. UilThe Prophet, p. 95. This same old man had voted fur Andy Jackson tur Fresicfmf, outer respec tur his mem'ry, ev'y 'lection sense the tormentin' old critter died" (Ibid., pp. 89-90). 1 l0See "The Riddle of the Rocks" in The Phantoms, p. 337, for the account of Widow Peters' seeing her husband's ghost hoeing in the garden about the time he was being killed by a slide in the mountains. One mountaineer at the blacksmith shop observed, "Mis' Peters she knowed suthin' were a-goin' ter happen when she seen that harnt a-hoein'." The blacksmith, stretching himself, replied, "I reckon she did. Jim never hoed none when he war alive. She mought hev knowed he war dead ef she seen him hoein'." "•77ie Despot, p. 20. ••-Teck Jepson declared, "I dunno no way ter jedge o' right an' wrong 'cept by the light ez kerns from within" (The Despot, p. 408). Regardless of the rustic's ignorance of worldly matters, he stoutly main- tained "the arrogations of a spiritual adept" (Ibid., p. 364). •""The Panther," The Bushwhackers, p. 162. •i 'When Mark Yates confessed that he had seen nothing during his religious experience, Joel Ruggles, speaking with the authority and asperity of a religious expert, retorted, "Then ye never hed no religion. I knows, 'kase I hev hed a power o' visions. I hev viewed heaven an' hung over hell" ("The Panther of Jolton's Ridge," The Bushwhackers, pp. 125-126). "s/n the Clouds, p. 123. ••«Ibid. "'The Despot, pp. 33-34. "*/n ¿Ae Clouds, p. 105. •'"Perhaps the mountain attitude toward playing the fiddle was best represented in Murfree's fiction by Laurelia Sudley, who ordered her foster son never to bring his fiddle into her house, for she would not stand any of "Satan's devices*' there ("The Moonshiners of Hoho-Hebee Falls" in The Phantoms, pp. 195-19(5). ■•¿•»"The Raid of the Guerilla," The Raid. p. 8. »2 «This is notably true in the juvenile novel The Story of Keedon Bluffs in which the two boy heroes are beguiled by an ex-Confederate soldier. ^Keedon Bluffs, p. f>. By the mid 188()'s she was able to report that "the bitterness of these differences was fast dying out." '-{In discussing the Tennessee law forbidding horse racing on public roads, a mountaineeer argued: "Tell me it's agin the law fur me an' Jube ter race our critters 'long the road, an' yit it ain't agin the law ter race yer critters on a reg' lar race-track, kase it puts suthin' inter the State's pocket! Thar ain't no jestice in that law, an' I won't abide by it. Naw, folkses, wrong is wrong everywhar, an' money can't make it right. No use payin' the State fur a license ter do wrong" {The Despot, pp. 170-171). •24/rc the Clouds, p. 50. An ancient grandmother declares, "Shucks! I ain't keerin' for the law! 'Tain't none o' my job. The tomfool men make an* break it. Ennybody ez hev seen this war air obleeged to take note o' the wickedness o' men in gineraL.I ain't got no call ter know nuthin' 'bout the law, bein' a 'ornan an' naterally ignorunt" ("The Phantoms of the Foot-Bridge" in The Phantoms, pp. 50-51). •2ii//i the Clouds, p. 94. '->(i"The Moonshiners of Hoho-Hebee Falls," The Phantoms, p. 202. 12 In the Clouds, p. 3. '-'»"The Phantoms of the Foot-Bridge," The Phantoms, p. 44. l¿l>Keedon Bluffs, p. 34. '«Tyler Sudley brought the orphan Leander Yerby into his own childless home where he treated him with solicitude and tenderness ("The Moonshiners of Hoho-Hebee Falls" in The Phantoms, n 190) '"Promises were kept literally, even when doing so brought great hardship (see "A Chilhowee Lily," The Raid, p. 270). The mountain girl whose devotion to one she loves draws her into rough weather to warn him of danger is a common motif in Murfree's fiction as well as in that of other writers (see "The Phantoms of the Foot-Bridge" in The Phantoms, p. 57). l:l*/n the Clouds, p. 235.