Our Southern Highlanders by Horace Kephart

Author:Horace Kephart [Kephart, Horace]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Appalachians (People) -- Social life and customs, Appalachian Region, Southern -- Social life and customs, Appalachian Region, Southern -- Description and travel
Published: 2010-03-19T16:00:00+00:00

“At thirty a mountain woman is apt to have a worn and faded look”

In a climate where it showers about two days out of three through spring and summer the women go about, like the men, unshielded from the wet. If you expostulate, one will laugh and reply: “I ain’t sugar, nor salt, nor nobody’s honey.” Slickers are worn only on horseback—and two-thirds of our people had no horses. A man who was so eccentric as to carry an umbrella is known to this day as “Umbrell’” John Walker.

In winter, one sometimes may see adults and children going barefoot in snow that is ankle deep. It used to be customary in our settlement to do the morning chores barefooted in the snow. “Then,” said one, “our feet ’d tingle and burn, so ’t they wouldn’t git a bit cold all day when we put our shoes on.” I knew a family whose children had no shoes all one winter, and occasionally we had zero weather.

It seems to have been common, in earlier times, to go barefooted all the year. Frederick Law Olmsted, a noted writer of the Civil War period, was told by a squire of the Tennessee hills that “a majority of the folks went barefoot all winter, though they had snow much of the time four or five inches deep; and the man said he didn’t think most of the men about here had more than one coat, and they never wore one in winter except on holidays. ‘That was the healthiest way,’ he reckoned, ‘just to toughen yourself and not wear no coat.’ No matter how cold it was, he ‘didn’t wear no coat.’” One of my own neighbors in the Smokies never owned a coat until after his marriage, when a friend of mine gave him one.

It is the usual thing for men and boys to wade cold trout streams all day, come in at sunset, disrobe to shirt and trousers, and then sit in the piercing drafts of an open cabin drying out before the fire, though the night be so cool that a stranger beside them shivers in his dry flannels. After supper, the women, if they have been wearing shoes, will remove them to ease their feet, no matter if it be freezing cold—and the cracks in the floor may be an inch wide.

In bear hunting, our parties usually camped at about 5,000 feet above sea level. At this elevation, in the long nights before Christmas, the cold often was bitter and the wind might blow a gale. Sometimes the native hunters would lie out in the open all night without a sign of a blanket or an axe. They would say: “La! many’s the night I’ve been out when the frost was spewed up so high [measuring three or four inches with the hand], and that right around the fire, too.” Cattle hunters in the mountains never carry a blanket or a shelter-cloth, and they sleep out wherever night finds them, often in pouring rain or flying snow.

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