Blue Ridge: Oh, How They Lived!

I did not set out to write a multi-part series on the Blue Ridge Mountain evictions, but as the original post became longer and longer, I decided to split it into parts, all of which I will post in upcoming days. Be sure you read parts One, Two, and Three.

My Blue Ridge Mountain Home Eviction: Part 4

Blue Ridge long

When things are our own, they tend to become a little more valuable, a little more beautiful, a little more precious. Just like we believe with our whole heart that our team is better, even if the score shows different, and we will defend them, and our belief in their superiority, to the end.

This would be key, of course, when the men from WMountain cabinashington came calling on my Blue Ridge ancestors with their bags of pennies and chewing gum, thinking a few treats for the kids, a few dollars for their parents, and a rational appeal would lure them from the land.

They thought it only logical that these people would want to be upwardly mobile, to move to a newer home on more fertile land. But they would be wrong. It would not be that easy.

Mountain living isn’t for the lazy or unspirited. Up there the winds howl louder, and colder. The ground is nearly impenetrable, the few inches of soil stony and too young to be nutritious to non-native plants, and at any rate little more than highly acidic ground leaves or needles.

Temperatures fall about 5.5 degrees for every 1,000 feet higher in elevation, making growing seasons shorter and crops smaller. Pioneer home

Water is a constant source of worry, whether from solid bedrock that makes a dug well impossible, life-giving springs and streams that occasionally run dry, or life-sucking drought. Winters are cold, sometimes bitterly so, and neighbors and supplies that must be bought are, for better or worse, miles away.

I’ve read that the Scots-Irish and the Germans took to the Blue Ridge because the lower, more fertile land was all taken. If bottom land was available, it was at prices these mostly poor immigrants couldn’t afford.

So they came to the mountains, where only the hearty would thrive, and who were more hearty than the Scots-Irish and Germans? They carved their homes from the mountainsides and began life anew in the Blue Ridge, and after a few years or a few generations, could not even imagine living anywhere else.Koonz chimney

Work on a mountain farm is constant, as it is on any farm. But the results are more meager. Our ancestors could grow little past what was necessary to feed the children, though some years there was enough for a pair of new shoes for each of them.

Maybe the mountaineers didn’t work harder than we do. Everyone I know works hard. But the mountaineers’ work was more desperate. If my friends don’t work hard, they can’t afford $200 dinners once or twice a week. If the mountaineers didn’t work hard, they wouldn’t bring in enough food to last the winter. If my friends don’t work hard, they can’t afford their $400 shoes. If the mountaineers didn’t work hard, they couldn’t afford any shoes.

But to the hearty souls who carved into Green Mountain or Piney Mountain or Grindstone Mountain, this was not dispiriting. My grandmother, Florence Collier Merica, spoke of how hard she and her sisters worked on their parents’ farm on the mountain above Naked Creek. Mill, Rockingham

They, as I’ve written elsewhere, “hoed corn all day and danced all night.” They looked forward to “visiting day,” when neighbors from over the mountain, or from the next hollow up, would come a’visiting. Each family put out food, for every guest to those homes, invited or not, must be offered food. It was the Blue Ridge way.  You never knew who would come. They’d stay a while, catch up on news and gossip, then move on down the trail.

Yes, there was time for dance, and fun, and love, and they did all that. A cousin related at several points by both blood and marriage, Bela Lam, who went on to record his music in New YorkBela Lam 45rpm and Richmond, played music at their parties, as did others in this music-loving neck of the woods.

One year my grandfather cooked up the idea of a Halloween party to keep the kids from going out and getting in trouble, and asked Bela to play. It worked. A different cousin collected folk song sheet music and lyrics, and had a vast store of them in an upstairs bedroom of my great grandmother’s home. I wish I knew what became of them when she died.

On Saturday nights neighbors would come to my grandparents’ home because they had the community’s first radio. It was in the parlor, and my grandfather took chairs from the dining room and set them around.My grandmother put a couple of straw mattresses and blankets in the corner, and that’s where the children sat.

Later in the evening, after Amos and Andy, and well into the Grand Ole’ Opera, the children drifted off to sleep. After the show was over, their parents gently picked them up and carried them home. My mother’s mother let her sleep there the entire night sometimes.

Their home was farther out from the mountain’s base, down Naked Creek and around the bend at Fleeburg. Thold farmis is where Florence Collier and Thomas Merica built their home when they got married and came down from the mountain.

Even before the park evictions, most of the homes were not high up, they were in the greater valley, or gathered at the lower elevations, inside the hollows that cleave the mountains, the houses clustered there as if they all slipped down the mountainsides and came to rest nearly on top of each other at the bottom, dotted on opposite sides of a rough trail, or better, a streambed.

Even deep within the mountains, most residents lived in the hollows: Hensley Hollow, Weaver Hollow, Turner Hollow, Crow Hollow, Allen Hollow, Fox Hollow.

Around them, these farmers planted crops and gardens in the more fertile topsoil that flowed down from the mountaintops with every creek and cloudburst.

But whether on the mountain or in the hollows, they raised corn and beans, planted orchards of apples and plums, raised their famiZerkelImagelies and buried their old, and often their young too, in cemeteries just a few steps away. Midwives delivered babies, herbalists consulted on medicine, and occasionally, the fortune teller up in the woods near Waynesboro read nervous young women’s futures.

My great grandmother used mustard plaster for colds, wild cherry bark for coughs, baking soda for stomachaches, and a little brandy in hot water for winter’s chill. To this day, I use cherry cough drops, baking soda in water for stomachache, and warm brandy (without the water) for a deep chill.

The mountaineers supplemented their diets with food gleaned from the forest. Chestnuts, berries, morels, venison, squirrel, raccoon, horseradish, sassafrass. I think of horseradish as a relish or lightly-applied sauce, but my mother told me of a young poor girl she saw who had nothing but a bag of wild horseradish to eat for lunch. She never forgot that girl, and now I don’t think I will either.

In some ways Farm buildingmy Blue Ridge ancestors and their neighbors lived their lives nearly free from outside contact. That wasn’t unusual for many communities, mountain or not, before rail or the automobile. But changing ways was inevitable once the auto started to become popular.

That kind of progress can’t be stopped, and neither can the change that comes with it. Even if the government didn’t take their lands, change would have started happening more and more rapidly for my Blue Ridge ancestors, and maybe their culture would have been lost by now just the same. We’ll never know for sure.

What we do know is that hindsight is everything. Even the Park Service wishes now that the men and women who came to record how these Blue Ridge people lived would have hSpring house entrancead more respect for their customs and folkways; would have preserved the way of life as best they could, because now it is irretrievably lost.

But the park builders had their deadlines, and so we can never go back to see our great grandparents’ homes. But the shiny side of that coin is that today we can see the mountains as they were when our fifth and sixth great grandparents first saw them and decided, “Here we will live.” And, oh, did they ever!

Who else can say that?!

You can read Part Five of My Blue Ridge Mountain Home Eviction here. Or access the whole series here. To make sure you don’t miss any installments, go to the “subscribe” form at the top of this page.

The Puzzling “White Indians” Who Loved Their Abductors.

Yesterday I wrote about the five Boyd children who were brutally captured by Iroquois warriors in 1756.The White

If that sounds terrifying, it probably was. At least it started out that way.

The Boyd children were taken by force, their mother and youngest brother killed because they couldn’t keep up.

The children were with their captors for seven years. Then the frontier wars were settled. Treaties were signed stipulating that all captives be returned. Colonial troops went into the wilderness to rescue them, returning with hundreds at a time.

But several of the Boyd children fought against returning home.

When they were forced under guard to reunite with their European-American families, these children managed to escape, and returned to the communities of their captors.

My blog post yesterday was a story of events, not explanations. Captured by Indians

Now I’m wondering about the explanations.

Why did not just these children, but so many others, and adult women and occasionally men as well, choose to stay with their Native captors?

Was it Stockholm Syndrome, wherein a captive irrationally identifies with her captor and blames her own people for not rescuing her?

Or was it something else, something the European Colonials did not want to even think about, that the Natives actually had the more desirable way of living?

If you’re expecting a definitive answer to that question, I can’t give it. I have only supposition, and some input from far more knowledgeable people than I.

Catheraine Carey LoganCaptive-taking by Native Americans was surprisingly common in Colonial times.

It was also common for captives to choose their Native communities over their Colonial families.

This puzzled the European Americans to no end.

They came to America believing that conversion would be easy once Natives saw the superiority of the Europeans’ religion, clothing, agriculture, dwellings, and every comfort known so far to man.

Yet there were very few Indians who converted to English culture, while large numbers of English chose to become Indian. Even Benjamin Franklin pondered why:

“When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and makes one Indian ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return. [But] when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho’ ransomed by their friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.”

One author put a bottom line on it in 1782, writing that,

“thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those Aborigines having from choice become Europeans!”

Those are not the popular writers of their time, the serial novelists aCaptive Womennd journalists who sensationalized stories of captor brutality that today’s academics call “capture narratives.”

These narratives were the thrillers of their time, and the public ate them up.

I have no doubt of much of their truth, aside from the sensationalism. A few were written as eye-witness captive accounts, after all.

Yet James Axtell, historian at Sarah Lawrence College, writes in the William and Mary Quarterly that the Natives treated their captives as equals nearly from the beginning of their captivity.

He notes that though food on the trail was scarce, it was shared equally with the captives. The children were given soft moccasins for running, lessons in survival, snow shoes for easier travel.

White captivesOnce in the villages, the captives were given Indian clothes, taught Indian songs and dances, and welcomed as family members into specifically appointed adoptive families.

It wasn’t necessarily easy. There were often rituals and trials that had to be passed, such as a gauntlet to beat the whiteness out of them, and afterwards, a second ritual to wash it out.

But once these trials were passed, captives were awarded full integration into the tribe.

Compared to the stern and rigorous life of a New England Puritan, or the hardscrabble life of a pioneer farmer, this life might have seemed more compassionate and civilized. The English were new here, still trying to tame the wilderness, bring it to its knees before the saw and the plow, to furrow its land and regiment its growth, much as it did its children.

I can see where life would definitely be more difficult for a European-American child of that time.

Most of the thousands of “white Indians” left no explanation as to why they chose their adopted Native families and culture over the Colonials. They just traded in their hard shoes and disappeared into the wilderness.

The only narratives we have are from those who chose to return to Colonial society. In those writings, it is clear that the “white Indians” valued what Axtell calls the Natives’

“strong sense of community, abundant love, and uncommon integrity – values that the English colonists also honored, if less successfully.”

Mary JemisonAxtell also notes other values, such as:

“social equality, mobility, adventure, and, as two adult converts acknowledged, ‘the most perfect freedom, the ease of living, [and] the absence of those cares and corroding solicitudes which so often prevail with us.”

As I said, I’m no expert. I’ve read only a few academic papers, not even enough to make me dangerous.

But if what these academic researchers say is true – and I have no reason to doubt them – isn’t it a shame that the imposition of culture was so one-way? Isn’t it a tragedy that the annihilation so complete?

We lost a whole culture. But what did we also lose in not heeding the lessons of our own children who chose to have different families?

My Tragic Boyd Blood

Aside

On my father’s side I come from a long line of Boyds. So far so good. But things happen to Boyds that make me want to look over my shoulder now and then just for having Boyd blood.

Of course, things happen to every family, but when they happen to Boyds they tend to be so big or tragic or astonishing that they are recorded in history books.

This story tells only one of them.

Starting with Robert dictus de Boyd in 1262, the Scottish Boyds ascended to nobility…were given a castle…were accused of treason…lost their castle…were literally stabbed in the back…regained Royal favor and a few more castles…were imprisoned in the Tower of London…executed… mortified… regained favor again…and were generally kicked about like royal hacky sacks for some 500-odd years.

Then, in 1746 Sir William Boyd was executed for attempting to take the British Crown. cabin-in-the-wilderness-lake-georgeMeanwhile, half a world away in the wilds of Pennsylvania, John and Nancy Boyd were about to have their lives ripped apart.

In the mid-1700s my Scots-Irish ancestors came to America in search of a place where the land would sustain them.

Where they could build a home, raise a family, and live in peace, far from the volatile mess in their homeland.

the-comforts-of-homeJohn Boyd and Nancy Urie thought they found it in the unbroken wilderness of Pennsylvania’s Cumberland Valley.

They cut their plot of land from the forest, built a log cabin, and commenced living the hard but independent life of a frontier family.

John was a farmer, and a few miles away lived his neighbor, John Stewart, a weaver.

the-french-lessonOn February 10, 1756, John and his oldest son, William, started out for Stewart’s to buy a web of cloth.

With five active children and a new one on the way, Nancy Urie Boyd needed plenty of cloth to sew, one stitch at a time, into clothes.

David Boyd was a responsible boy of 13, and after his father left for Stewart’s, his mother sent David out to chop wood.

He took his hatchet, and his little brother John, who was six, went along to pick up chips.

cherokee-scouting-fort-duquesneTheir two sisters, Sallie and Rhoda, ten and seven, stayed inside with their mother and little brother.

David got busy with the wood, and his hatchet rang out through the forest.

He put all his concentration on placing the hatchet perfectly straight into the log, splitting it right through the middle.

Taking of captive babyHe was concentrating so hard, in fact, that he didn’t hear the Iroquois Indian who had walked right up to him.

But little John did, and he screamed. David turned, but it was too late.

The Iroquois grabbed David by his belt, threw him over his shoulder, and ran off into the forest.

John was snatched the same way, and in seconds the two boys disappeared into the trees.

Within moments Sally and Rhoda and their little brother, not yet three, were taken, and all five of them were brought together a short ways off.

chase-womanThe Natives instructed the children to run.

As he ran, David looked back to see his agonized mother standing before their home in flames, her hands raised to the heavens, praying, “O God, be merciful to my children going among these savages.”

The party of Natives that took the Boyd children also took their mother after setting the cabin to flames.

They drove the party on until the pregnant mother and smallest child could go no more, and so they were killed along the trail.

Boone_abductionThe children were traumatized. But they did as their captors told them, running on the trail, always running, and staying silent.

And so they survived and were taken hundreds of miles into the Ohio Territory, and there they were separated and given to different tribes.

But they were not made to be prisoners in the way we usually understand the term.

rice-gatherersYou would think that a captor brutal enough to slaughter a babe before his mother and a mother before her children could not show humanity.

But the Boyd children were adopted by the community and given new parents who taught the children this different way of life.

They ate and slept alongside these Iroquois and Delaware people.

They helped to hunt or prepare food, to care for babies and elders, sew shirts, haul firewood, prepare herbal medicine.

Tthe-tannerhey learned lessons of the forest and the stars and the animals. They became what people of the day called white Indians.

After living in the tribe for four years, David Boyd’s adoptive Delaware father decided it was time to return him to his white family.

David hesitated. This had become his new family, and he liked his new life.

He went reluctantly and was reunited with his father, John Boyd.

Twice thereafter he attempted to flee back to his Delaware family, but was brought back each time, and eventually he married a white woman, settled down, and had ten children.

Rhoda Boyd was rescued by the famous captive hunter, Colonel Bouquet.

Sarah Columbia Boyd Berryman.border.rBut on the trip to Fort Pitt, where she was to be reunited with family, she escaped to her Native family, and never returned to white society.

Sallie was returned to her father on February 10, 1764. John was returned on November 15 that same year, along with his brother, Thomas.

That was exactly 250 years ago. I don’t know of any Boyd tragedies of the kind that make history that have happened since then. My family left the Boyd line behind with my great-grandmother, Sarah Columbia Boyd.

Perhaps the Boyd family can rest now.

There are numerous differing accounts of the Boyd capture. I chose to follow what seems the most credible source, the book Setting All the Captives Free, by the scholar, Ian K. Steele.

I’m Finally Embracing My Scots-Irish Ancestry

I’ve never embraced my Scotch-Irish ancestry.

In the first place, my mother always emphasized that the word is “Scots,” not “Scotch.” I’m prettyturnbull-s-whiskey-of-hawick-scotland sure it’s because she disliked Scotch’s association with whiskey. And she never hyphenated “Scots” with the “Irish” part.  To her, our ancestors were purely Scottish, and the fact that they passed through Ireland for a generation or two was of negligible consequence. Irish meant Catholic to Presbyterian her, and we assuredly were not Catholic, thank you very much, and here you can see where comes all the trouble in the Isles of England.

But the main reason I never embraced the Scots-Irish is because any time that designation is mentioned it seems to be preceded by “The Fighting.” I don’t find that embraceable. A certain segment of Scots-Irish Americans, led lately by former Secretary of the Navy, Jim Webb, likes to proudly point to the Scots-Irish propensity to, as he says, mistrust government and bear and use arms. Butler_Lady_Scotland_for_EverHe even wrote a book called, “Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America.”

If the Scots-Irish are so damn testy, where are all of Scotland’s wars? Huh?

Webb and his cohorts say the Scots-Irish have “a propensity” to mistrust government and bear and use arms. All “a propensity” means is “a prejudice.” A propensity to mistrust means that however a person decides to act, the decision is already weighted toward mistrust; the deck is stacked against trust. Completely objective people do not have “a propensity” to believe a certain way, no matter what the evidence says.

battle-of-king-s-mountain-south-carolina-1780-american-revolutionNow, don’t go all political on me. There’s no political subtext meant here. Honestly, if Webb and others are right, I’m glad the Scots-Irish were around to save our butts in the Revolutionary War. (But then, if three quarters of the Rebel Army was Scots-Irish, as he points out, how do you explain the South losing the Civil War? …Just askin’.)

You know, it takes (at least) two sides to make a war. Nearly all Scotland’s wars were fought with the English, but we don’t go around calling them, “The Fighting English,” do we?

A little background might help here.

andrew-carrick-gow-cromwell-at-dunbar-1650When the Scottish people began their several hundred year migration to America, they had just spent 700 years battling the English. No kidding. 700 years! Finally, in the early 1700s, Scotland’s James I became king and unified Great Britain. James decided to stock Ireland with Protestants from Scotland, and the Scots were only too happy to oblige because they were just coming out of a decade-long famine and hoped for better lives elsewhere. Their new lands were in Northern Ireland, where they were immediately seen as the enemy by the Catholics opposed to their religion and infringement on Ireland’s lands.

So far we’ve tallied 700 years of war, a ten-year famine, and now 150 or so years of strife within Northern Ireland. But there’s more.

frontier-father-reading-to-his-children-by-firelight-1800sThe American Colonies were prospering, but they had problems with the Natives. (And the Natives had problems with them!) Natives kept attacking the towns and settlements, and the situation was particularly bad in those parts of the Colonies that bordered the frontier. So the secretary of state of Pennsylvania thought up a clever solution. He would create a human buffer between his colony’s towns and the frontier. And who better to be border buffers than the fighting Scots-Irish. So he offered free land to lure immigrants, who were already eager to get out of Ireland.woman-weeping-outside-a-log-cabin-in-ruins

Those poor Scots-Irish. An entire people suffering from “soldier’s heart,” a sort of constant anxiety first described in Civil War veterans. They couldn’t catch a break.

People become conditioned to their environments. Said a different way, your environment can make you a different person. If they had just come out of 860 years of peace instead of war, maybe Jim Webb’s book would be called “The Peace-Loving Scots-Irish.”

small_house-on-the-hudsonMy mother’s mostly-Scottish family is rural Virginia, though by what evidence I’ve seen so far they came by way of Jamestown, not by the well-traveled Scots-Irish route via Pennsylvania and down through the Ohio Valley. The character of my mother’s family is gentle, communal, earthy, peace-loving, home-loving, and not particularly religious or political.

Since getting interested in genealogy I’ve come to better embrace my one quarter Scots-Irishness. I can move beyond media-friendly monikers like “Born Fighting.” ernie-cselko-frontier-reflectionsI can see now that it’s not about the fighting. It’s about the courage. They didn’t move into Ireland to fight. They didn’t sail to America to fight.

Labels like “The Fighting Scots-Irish” emphasize a certain kind of courage at the expense of other kinds. Like the courage to cross a border, even a sea, to better their lives. Like the courage to walk into the wilderness and carve out a place to call their own. That doesn’t take aggression. They didn’t move forward by way of slaughter or hacking down forests. They moved forward by facing the unknown with a powerful strength of character and purpose. To carve a place in the wilderness and make it their own, after being chased around and out of for a couple centuries. “Leave us be!” could have been their moniker.

Leave us be! To live our lives in peace and community, we’ve crossed the Irish Sea, and then the Atlantic Ocean. We were lured by King James, who planted us as Presbyterian seeds in Ireland, and then by American colonists who sent us to the hinterlands and planted us a buffer between them and the Natives. Conflict precedes us, it does not follow us. You think us fighters, but we are not. Leave us in peace and we stay in peace!

john-faed-evangeline-and-gabrielNow here we are further cementing the fate of these people by popularizing the fighting image, lauding them as heroes for sending their boys to fight our shared wars. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be proud of them, because we should. But we shouldn’t make it seem expected of them because they’ve got fighting in their blood and that’s always been their role.

I’m embracing the one quarter of my blood that is Scots-Irish. These are most assuredly people of strength and courage, and I like that. Of course, there’s also the music, but that’s another story for another time.

May the best ye’ve ever seen
Be the warst ye’ll ever see.
May the moose ne’er lea’ yer aumrie
Wi’ a tear-drap in his e’e.
May ye aye keep hail an’ hertie
Till ye’re auld eneuch tae dee.
May ye aye be jist as happy
As we wiss ye noo tae be.