Ramp Hollow Page 2
A century later, historians, anthropologists, geographers, and political economists rejected most of Thünen’s ahistorical and socially simplistic model. They asked different questions. How did the financial power emanating from cities reorganize people and environments in its image? What happened to households and communities, as well as the landscapes they depended on, when everything took on monetary values? Have different forms of economy—peasant and capitalist—existed together at the same time? How can we use these relationships to understand the capitalist world? And instead of thinking only in terms of city and country, they broadened their thinking to include the various ways networks of capital allied with governments dominate resource peripheries and frontiers. In other words, rather than limit themselves to regions and nations, they saw the world itself as a division of labor, in which regions and nations created certain commodities. Rather than imagine exchanges between individuals on an equal footing, they discovered political power operating within and between markets.5
But while these ideas are good to think with, I don’t hold them too close. They aren’t flexible enough to absorb the depth and detail of actual people in actual places. Exactly when the southern mountains became a resource periphery is not entirely clear and not very important. Was it when the first colonial governor of Virginia granted the first tract of mountain land or when the first joint-stock corporation opened the first coal mine?
Yet grand theories offer us something worth carrying into the following pages. They construct the world historically. New geographical entities emerge from corporate strategies, leaps in transportation infrastructure, and other events that change the relationship between people and environments. All of which has helped me to understand a region called Appalachia. The southern mountains are half a billion years old, but Appalachia did not exist before the industrial invasion of those uplands during the nineteenth century. It appeared as a location within the capitalist world when its coal and labor ignited the American Industrial Revolution. It was created and constantly re-created by hunters and farmers of every ethnicity who employed the landscape for subsistence and exchange; by land-engrossing colonial elites; by corporate attorneys scheming to get hold of deeds; by investors wielding cadastral maps; by coal miners resisting company managers and starving on strike; by the social engineers of the New Deal; by the Appalachian Regional Commission; and by brokenhearted citizens watching beloved hollows buried by mountaintop-removal mining. Appalachia consists of these contextual identities and events and their continuing fallout between the Blue Ridge and the Ohio River.6
This book is about the ordeal of greater West Virginia, regarding that state as exemplary for the region as a whole. It takes place in the Pennsylvania counties that gave rise to the Whiskey Rebellion; in Scotts Run, a long industrial hollow near Morgantown; and in the coalfields near Flat Top Mountain, up against Kentucky and Virginia. It is predicated on the collision between two forms of economy: one represented by corporations, the other manifested in families and farms and as old as agriculture itself, if not older.
* * *
WE KNOW THE PEOPLE who lived in the mountains by various names: highlanders, mountaineers, or settlers of the backwoods. We also know them as individual frontiersmen, soldiers, and statesmen. William Henry Harrison led Kentuckians into the Old Northwest against forces commanded by the Shawnee brothers Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa. Andrew Jackson’s parents arrived in the mountains of South Carolina from Ireland in 1765. By 1814, Jackson had turned from fighting the British to fighting the Red-Stick Creeks. Two soldiers who would become backwoods legends served in Jackson’s Tennessee militia at Horseshoe Bend: Sam Houston (born on Timber Ridge in the Shenandoah Valley and reared in Tennessee) and David Crockett (born in Greene County, Tennessee). The Confederate general Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson grew up west of the Blue Ridge. Abraham Lincoln came from the same people, from Sinking Spring Farm in Hardin County, Kentucky. In 1832, in his first political address, Lincoln said, “I was born and have ever remained in the most humble walks of life.”7
No other son of the southern mountains commanded more cultural gravity than Daniel Boone. He was born in 1734 on the Pennsylvania frontier, soldiered for the British Empire during the French and Indian War, and arrived in Kentucky in 1767. He moved in and out of the region over the next decade, hunting and trapping for a living, fighting and negotiating with Shawnee and Delaware. In 1775, a North Carolina judge and merchant hired Boone to blaze a trail through the Cumberland Gap and northward into central Kentucky. It became known as the Wilderness Road. Boone established Boonesborough at its northern terminus on the Kentucky River and brought his family there.8
Boone became famous during his lifetime, but few among the eastern elite spoke a good word about anyone else who lived in the same places and in the same way he did. John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore, the last British governor of Virginia, considered mountain people dangerous to administrative order. “They acquire no attachment to Place … wandering about seems engrafted in their Nature.” A group of squatters went so far as to promulgate their own laws, sneered Dunmore, nearly declaring themselves “a separate State … distinct from and independent of his majesty’s authority.” In October 1780, Major Patrick Ferguson terrified his loyalist militia with this description: “Unless you wish to be eaten up by an inundation of barbarians … if you wish or deserve to live and bear the name of men, grasp your arms in a moment and run to camp … The Back-water men have crossed the mountains.” Ferguson reported that these vipers had cut up a boy in front of his father. Days later, backwater men killed Ferguson and 150 of his soldiers in the Battle of Kings Mountain.9
“The first settler in the woods is generally a man who has outlived his credit or fortune in the cultivated parts of the State,” claimed the Philadelphia doctor and essayist Benjamin Rush. He said that every pioneer lives in filth and rags, enduring privation and hunger. He lives and thinks like an Indian. Most of all, he hates “the operation of laws.” At best, thought Rush, these reckless and irredeemable people prepared the way for husbandmen who paid taxes and furnished the cities with food. Whether wilderness outliers would ever submit to constitutional authority remained the greatest question. They were, wrote J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, “a kind of forlorn hope.” The French-born author of Letters from an American Farmer scorned if he did not outright fear them. Along “our extended line of frontiers … many families exhibit the most hideous parts of our society.” In this view, no one who preferred hunting to farming could be relied upon as a civilizing force.10
Castoffs living in anarchy haunted the Federalists who came to power during the 1780s, but a different kind of migration brought the southern mountains into the Atlantic World. By grant and purchase, the Revolutionary elite came into millions of acres. None of the owners moved to western Virginia or eastern Kentucky. Properties the size of major watersheds belonged to men who would know them only as metes and bounds described on parchment. Most of the land was too steep to be cultivated in cotton or tobacco and too far from cities to have any other commercial use. Owners filed their deeds and forgot about them, unaware that a frontier society took shape on their property. The first census of the United States revealed that 56,000 whites, blacks, and Indians inhabited the area that became West Virginia, a density of 2.3 per square mile. Each household tended to claim around four hundred acres by squatting or “tomahawk right,” but others claimed much more, with the expectation that Virginia or Kentucky would acknowledge their titles. A two-tiered land system took shape. The first consisted of state-endorsed absentee ownership. The second appeared when cabin-building, cattle-grazing, bear-hunting households moved in.11
By the end of the Revolution, fear of the woodsmen at higher elevations had given way to a kind of admiration. To some, they exemplified national independence more vividly than planters or merchants or the farmers of New England. In 1805, a theater in Charleston, South Carolina, staged a performance of Independence; or Which Do You like B
est, the Peer, or the Farmer? In the play, Lord Fanfare attempts to re-create an English manor in the mountains. There he encounters Mr. Woodville, a perplexing commoner who refuses to play the part of serf or servant.
LAWYER WITTINGTON: That beautiful, romantic farm of the valley, is situated in the very centre of your lordship’s estate, and no sum whatever could tempt the now proprietor, Mr. Woodville, to part with it. He is one of the queerest animals I ever came across—an eccentric, by this light; celebrated for glorying in, and boasting of, his INDEPENDENCE, and declaring, that an honest farmer knows of no dependence, except on heaven … I had a presentiment ’twould be agreeable to you to possess Mr. Independence’s farm, so offered him three thousand pounds for it, on your lordship’s account; but he told me, by way of answer, he intended, God willing, to live fifty years, and would, in the course of that term, make five times the sum I proffered him, off of it—Ergo, ’twould be bad policy in him to sell it.
LORD FANFARE: Why didn’t you make the plebeian acquainted with my rank and fortune? He certainly would not have dar’d refuse to accommodate a peer of the realm!
LAWYER WITTINGTON: I did, my lord, I did, tell him, what a monstrous great man you were; and he then, strutted about, like a beau ’fore a church porch, or a monkey, with the king’s evil, and swore, by the dignity of a man, he would not sell a single furrow! No, not a pound of earth; to gratify the caprice of any mortal; be him peer of the realm, or peddler of the highway, and that he would retain his to be envied INDEPENDENCE, pure and unsullied, in spite of you and all the peers and aristocrats in Christendom.
Woodville mocks Fanfare and outwits Wittington. The conflict between aristocratic rank and the anarchy of the backwoods is funny because Fanfare doesn’t understand that Woodville is not his subject. The audience recognized the misplaced lord. But Wittington introduces Woodville as “one of the queerest animals I ever came across.” The key to Woodville’s political and economic independence is his ability to seize land and subsist without regard to Fanfare. And while Fanfare represents feudal rules and obligations, Woodville is free in a way almost unintelligible to the aristocrat. He is disdainful of and unaccountable to power, more of a trickster than a clown.12
Politicians of the 1830s and 1840s praised these pioneers—a word that originally referred to an advance infantry of laborers who prepared for the regular army by digging fortifications and repairing roads. Representative Charles Faulkner of western Virginia promoted them: “Our native, substantial, independent yeomanry, constitute our pride, efficiency and strength; they are our defense in war, our ornaments in peace; and no population, I will venture to affirm, upon the face of the globe, is more distinguished for an elevated love of freedom—for morality, virtue, frugality and independence, than the Virginia peasantry west of the Blue Ridge.” Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri spoke of them in world-historical terms. To him, they were the vanguard of a racially defined society. In 1846, Benton recalled the Proclamation Line established by Great Britain after the French and Indian War to keep colonists out of the backcountry. “Where is that boundary now? The van of the Caucasian race now top the Rocky Mountains, and spread down to the shores of the Pacific … Civilization, or extinction, has been the fate of all people who have found themselves in the track of the advancing Whites.”13
Faulkner and Benton celebrated a mountain folk who crossed borders with little regard for those who governed from afar. As long as political elites pretended not to see the flaunting of private property and constitutional authority, they could continue to believe that the interests of the backwoods aligned with those of the nation-state. For a time, their interests did align. In every skirmish with Shawnee, in every frontier battle, the pioneers made visceral claims to territory. By defending and dying for their own homes, they fought the wars of the American Empire. In fact, the specific pioneers whom Benton exalted were not in Tennessee or Kentucky. They were a few miles from the Pacific Ocean, in territory disputed between Britain and the United States, where they founded the Provisional Government of Oregon. Senator Levi Woodbury of New Hampshire demanded forts and supply lines to protect them from Indians and Redcoats. He called the Oregon settlers defenseless, by which he meant stateless. “But they are American citizens no less than we—they are on American soil no less than we.” This is how a fierce and mobile people served the interests of the United States. Their unsanctioned seizure of a contested frontier justified the expansion of American authority.14
Washington Irving turned to the backwoods for a relevant symbol of national identity. In 1839, the lifelong New Yorker searched for a more rational nomenclature of citizenship than the one he had inherited. “United States citizen” seemed to him “a clumsy, lumbering title.” An American? “There are two Americas, each subdivided into various empires.” Irving found a new term in “one of the grand and eternal features of our country … I allude to the Appalachian or Alleghany mountains.” This grand feature stood in the middle of everything, separating the northern farm from the southern plantation, the Atlantic Seaboard from the Mississippi River Valley. Thus he announced the “United States of Appalachia.”15
Twenty years later, the relentless expansion of the United States had left the southern mountains behind. Texas had exploded into national politics, first as a borderland of cotton and slavery, then as a republic after its war of independence with Mexico. Its admission to the Union as the twenty-eighth state set off the Mexican–American War, in which the United States seized 529,000 square miles of arid territory. The California Gold Rush of 1849 and the discovery of the Comstock Lode in 1859 ignited emigration to the Far West. A political crisis ensued. Congress, riven by conflict over slavery, found it impossible to integrate the Mexican Cession as well as the unorganized remnants of the Louisiana Purchase. When the locus of territorial struggle shifted, expansionists no longer recognized their own aspirations for control of the continent in the settlers of western Virginia. The admiration of mountaineers marked a particular geopolitical moment. By 1860, that moment had ended.
The pioneers went from the present to the past. One way to explain how their fortunes changed is to look at one of the first biographies of Daniel Boone, published by a Connecticut journalist named George Canning Hill in 1859. What makes Boone’s story (in Hill’s telling) so important for understanding the fate of Appalachia in the nineteenth century is that Boone’s life did not conform to that of other mythic heroes. He didn’t die in a ritualistic battle between good and evil. He never made it back home. Between the American Revolution and his death in 1820, Boone endured a tangle of financial missteps and hardships having to do with land. All this matters because what happened to Boone mirrors what was happening in Appalachia. Hill’s story displays nearly every aspect of the declining cultural significance of the southern mountains.
After the Revolution, the Commonwealth of Virginia granted millions of acres in its far-distant counties to soldiers, politicians, and financiers. The owners often turned around and sold their holdings, setting off a frenzy. The thought that wilderness land might be valuable sent all sorts of people into the mountains to grab it up. Kentucky was part of Virginia until 1792, and Boone joined in the rush. He bought and sold warrants, which conferred the right to make a claim that might result in title (meaning ownership). But if another claimant proved that he had made the first survey or demonstrated a superior right in some other way, all competing warrants became void. This made buying a warrant like placing a bet. The process required tenacity, a touch of mendacity, and a smattering of legal knowledge. Between the early 1780s and the early 1790s, Boone bought warrants to at least thirty-nine thousand acres, resulting in about twelve thousand acres in his name.
Soon after, Boone lost almost all of it, leading his biographer to write about the wealthy men who bought the ground from under him.
How was he doomed to the bitterest of disappointments! The title, however it might have been concocted, was put before the occupancy! The speculator could drive
out the brave and self-sacrificing pioneer!… And this the law permitted. There seemed to be no help for it. The authority of the original pioneer and discoverer was not accounted equal to that of the man who held cunningly drafted instruments in his hand, and could quote nice technicalities in his favor … Boone was turned out of his home, and his farm became the property of another!
Hill’s morality tale is much simplified, but it isn’t wrong. Boone loaned money without security. He sold to people who never paid him. He bought land for his children at significant cost. To raise money, he sold pieces of his holdings at a discount, then invested in additional warrants that never turned into titled property. Plaintiffs sued him, called him a liar, and won judgments against him. He stopped defending himself and failed to show up in court. In 1798, a judge ordered him taken into custody, but the pioneer of Kentucky had fled to Missouri. The mythic journey of the most American of all American heroes began in wilderness and ended in petty lawsuits over real estate.16
The frontier hero plays a distinctive historical role. He might be born in the woods, but he dedicates his life to the destruction of the very forces that create him as a hero. The first cut for civilization requires a touch of savagery. Only Boone’s colossal moral strength allows him to maintain his mission, though he is continually exposed to moral danger. But the schemers finally get him. In Hill’s account, they defeat the hunter without the blade-and-gunpowder contest he always won. Title overcomes occupancy; technicalities undercut self-sacrifice. Most of all, there seemed to be no help for it. Cunningly drafted instruments represent the way of the world. They indicate that Boone has lost his grip on the times. “Settling up a new country is not civilizing it.” Boone knows how to find a path through the woods and seize territory—not how to develop it into governed, productive space.17