Mountaineers - People who are talked about

Mountaineers

Mountaineers with all their pride, prejudice, and poverty play a colorful part in Americana. Their wit and wisdom are reflected in yarns from the hills and tales from the cloud country. Peering up the roaring creeks you see mountain shacks that seem ancient as the hills surrounding them. Each shack boasts a packed-dirt floor, a lopsided door swinging on a leather hinge, one small, rag-stuffed broken window pane that serves as a lookout . . . and a chimney fashioned of sticks and clay to carry the wood smoke up and away. Each sagging stoop is festooned with tattered men folk and flea-bitten dogs lolling in almost indescribable attitudes of repose. Some of them are out early when the morning mists are fresh . . . and others stay through the day and on until the lonesomeness has moved down from the hills and the moon is “middle ways of the sky.”

Even today shaggy old coots back there in the hills take pot shots at one another … still feuding for reasons they’ve long since forgotten. They cling to a grudge like a flea to a hound . . . and as for their shootin’ they can knock the eyes right out of a somersaulting squirrel. At long range some of these lanky sharpshooters get so good they have to rub rock salt on their bullets to keep the game from spoiling before they cut their way through the cat claws and briar patches to pick it up. These men of the hills manage to keep their women barefooted, pregnant and busy … that’s why mountain folk have more kin than a microbe. A want-ad in the Mountain Country Clarion Call tells the story of these work-worn women:

WANTED: A mule fit for me to ride to go fishin’ and gentle enough for the old lady to hitch to her plow.
The same Mountaineer stopped at the store one time to get a present for Samantha. “A presunt?” she blinked in surprised delight. “Yep,” he told her, “Doc says you gotta take it easier and durned if I ain’t a gonna git ye a lighter axe.

In the more remote regions, snuff-sniffin’ women do all the chores, raise a dozen kids, and make hooked rugs in their spare time. Mountain men have been known to wear out three wives in a lifetime. They begin with child brides taken to wife before they’re half through teething. According to their peculiar way of thinking, a woman who waits too long either gets to spittin’ like a wildcat, or she gets to lookin’ sullen like a hoot owl and you gotta near whup her to death to make her work!

Out in the jackpine flats and misty river bottoms, a sprinkling of the natives still put stock in “spells.” Way back there where neither railroad nor telephone reaches and the last carrier pigeon went into somebody’s stew, some primitive souls hold with relics of sorcery although the majority are “smartenin’ up” to hear tell. With the coming of the highways, learning is seeping through to people up and down the creeks and in the hollers. One proud lad boasts that he kin read numbers but cain’t read writin’ … he can tell from a sign how fur to but not whur to. And his baby-havin’ tater-hoein’ sister brags, “we talks about the same as other folks, ‘cept we ain’t got no accent.” Mountain men are frugal folk; when a visitor spied a little four-legged cook stove set on tree stumps he asked whether the housewife had such a weak back she couldn’t bend . . . and her man explained, “Nope, tweren’t thet . . . it’s jes that that ther’s all the stovepipe whut we had.”
When he saw his first avacado, the storekeeper asked Zeke if he wanted to try one, but “Nope” he drawled back,

“I already got me so many tastes I cain’t satisfy I ain’t about to take on no more!”
According to fact and legend, these people consume quantities of corn liquor, a circumstance explained by the Bald Hill boy who said, “You got to remember a keg of likker don’t last long in a fam’ly that cain’t afford to keep no cow.”
Some of these hill folk wilt at the thought of work and others are too lazy to entertain a hope. One hillbilly sat with his son in front of a warm fire, crossing and uncrossing their skinny legs. After a while the man told the boy to “git outside and see if it’s a’rainin” . . . but without looking up the boy whined back, “Aw, Paw, jes’ call in the dawg and see if he’s wet!” When the same dog kept howling one day, the boy told a passing salesman, “Ain’t nuthin’ ailin’ him; he’s jes bin a-layin’ ‘ginst a busted jug an’ he’s too lazy to turn hisself over.”

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