Our Southern Highlanders

by Horace Kephart

Hit takes three days to make the round trip, less’n you break an axle, and then hit takes four. When you do git to the railroad, th’r ain’t no town of a thousand people within fifty mile. Now us folks ain’t even got wagons. Thar’s only one sarviceable wagon in this whole settlement, and you can’t hire it without

team and driver, which is two dollars and a half a day.

You see for yourself that corn can’t be shipped outen hyar. We can trade hit for store credit—that’s all. Corn juice is about all we can tote around over the country and git cash money for. Why, man, that’s the only way some folks has o’ payin’ their taxes!”

There is no telegraph, wired or wireless, in the mountains, but there is an efficient substitute. It seemed as though, in one night, the news traveled from valley to cove, and from cove to nook, that I was investigating the moonshining business, and that I was apparently “safe.” Each individual interpreted that word to suit himself.

askance,

blood-guilt.

Here an illicit distiller is called a blockader, his business is blockading, and the product is blockade liquor.

malum prohibitum

malum in se. There are two

extemporizing

Moreover, cattle, and especially hogs, are passionately fond of still-slop, and can scent it a great distance, so that no still can long remain unknown to them.

cheval-de-frise,

limpid

impracticable

whilom

redoubtable

drams

As a rule, the mountain people have no

compunctions

about drinking, their ideas on this, as on other matters of conduct, being those current everywhe...

abstemious

In drinking, as in everything else, this is the Land of Do Without. Comparatively few highlanders see liquor oftener than once or twice a month. The lumberjacks and townspeople get most of the output; for they can pay the price.

Blockade whiskey, until recently, sold to the consumer at from $2....

The average yield is only two...

b...

hopper

Three or four men, haggard from sleepless vigils, strike out into pathless forest through driving rain. Within five minutes the wet underbrush has drenched them to the skin. They climb, climb, climb. There is no trail for a long way; then they reach a faint one that winds, winds, climbs, climbs. Hour after hour the men climb. Then they begin to descend. They have crossed the divide, a mile above sea-level, and are in another State. Hour after hour they “climb down,” as they would say. They visit farmers’ homes at dead of night. Each man shoulders two bushels of shelled corn and starts back again over the highest mountain range in eastern America. It is twenty miles to the little mill. They carry the corn thither on their own backs. They sprout it, grind it, distill it. Two of them then carry the whiskey twenty miles in the opposite direction, and, at the risk of capture and imprisonment, or of death if they resist,

excise

adjudged

impost

exciseman

(poteen

the process being a common household art frequently practiced “every man for himself and his neighbor.” A tax, then, upon whiskey was as odious as a tax upon bread baked on the domestic hearth—if

spiri...

The north of Ireland, at the time of which we have been speaking, was not settled by Irishmen, but by Scotchmen, who had been imported by James I. to take the place of native Hibernians whom he had dispossessed from the three northern counties. These immigrants came to be known as the Scotch-Irish. They learned how to make poteen in little stills, after the Irish fashion, and to defend their stills from intrusive foreigners, also after the Irish fashion. By and by these Scotch-Irish fell out with the British Government, and large bodies of them emigrated to America, settling, for the most part, in western Pennsylvania.

pleonasm,

The first generation of Pennsylvania frontiersmen knew no laws but those of their own making. They were too far away, too scattered, and too poor, for the Crown to bother with them.

And yet these same men were the first rebels against the authority of the United States Government!

United Colonies

execrable—so

tillage,

Hibernia.

“milk-sick,”

efflorescence

emetic,

evince

foolishness”—their adherence to old ways is stubborn, sullen, and perverse to a degree that others cannot comprehend.

Cisterns are considered filthy; water that has stood overnight is ‘dead water,’ hardly fit to wash one’s face in. The mountaineer takes the same pride in his water supply as the rich man in his wine cellar, and is in this respect a connoisseur. None but the purest and coldest of freestone will satisfy him.”

aigrette,

tatter-demalion