The Big Sandy River Influence On American Culture

 

The Big Sandy River Influence on American Culture

The Big Sandy River has had an amazing amount of influence on American Culture over the last 100 years with a number of musicians, educators, writers, folklorists, and politicians coming out of the region which is in great contrast with the total population of the area drained by the river.  Formed by the Tug River and the Levisa Fork along the Kentucky, West Virginia border it drains Boyd, Lawrence, Johnson, Floyd, Pike, and part of Knott counties in Kentucky and Wayne, Mingo, and McDowell counties in West Virginia.  The region in both states contains only about 300,000 people and the population has been in flux at various times as outmigration has often taken place in conjunction with ebbs in the coal business which has been the primary economic driver in the region.

Yet, this region has produced an astounding number of important figures in American history including many of the country’s most popular musicians, a significant number of educators with national reputations, and several significant politicians.  The list from Boyd County includes The Judds including the actress and social activist Ashley Judd, Billy Ray Cyrus, and the Goins Brothers who were not natives but spent most of their lives in the region.

 Lawrence County has produced Ricky Skaggs and the multi-media artist Nyoka Baker Chapman who is also an official of the Huntington League of Women Voters.  The great Appalachian educator and writer Cratis Williams for whom the graduate school at Appalachian State University is named was also from Lawrence County. The former Chief Justice of the United States Fred Vinson was born in the Lawrence County Jail while his father was jailer there.  He also was a major economic officer in the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt during the recovery from the Great Depression prior to his appointment to the court.  Former Kentucky Governor Paul Patton was also born in Lawrence County and was county judge executive in Pike County. He also served a term as lieutenant governor and was a major driver of the expansion of the University of Pikeville as both president and board member.

Johnson County has produced, and continues to produce an astounding number of important musicians including the Webb sisters, Loretta Lynn, Peggy Sue, and Crystal Gayle; Hylo Brown; Chris Stapleton;  and the minor Bluegrass band Five Miles From Nowhere.  Few Americans realize that the actor Richard Thomas of The Waltons is the son of a New York ballet dancer who grew up in Johnson County and Thomas often spent his summers with his grandparents in Paintsville.  The country singer Tyler Childers was born in Lawrence County and grew up in Johnson County.  Brett Ratliff, an old time musician and singer, also grew up in Johnson County. John Pelphrey who is a well known basketball coach and a member of the University of Kentucky team referred to as The Unforgetables also grew up in Paintsville, Kentucky, and has since been a head coach at the University of Arkansas, South Alabama University, and Tennessee Tech University where he still coaches today.  

Floyd County produced one of the greatest collectors and publishers of folk songs and folk tales, Leonard Roberts, who produced a half dozen books of his collected songs and stories from Appalachia and was a professor at Pikeville College until his death before it achieved university status.  Dwight Yoakam was born near his grandparents’ home in Betsy Layne in Floyd County and often refers to his Eastern Kentucky history despite having spent most of his childhood in Ohio.  Floyd County also produced the founder of the band Goose Creek Symphony, Charlie Gearheart.  The famous Bluegrass singer Tommy Webb is also a native and resident of Floyd County. McDowell in Floyd County produced the significant Appalachian painter and art professor Tim Sizemore who taught for many years at Prestonsburg Community College. The well known artist Russell May lived his entire life Floyd County.  In Wheelwright, Kentucky, Carol Stumbo and her English students produced the significant literary journal “Mantrip” for ten years along with the assistance of Albert Stewart, a highly admired poet and editor from Knott County. Floyd County also produced the man who is generally conceded to have been the best high school basketball player of all time, Kelly Coleman.   

Pike County is famous for having produced Patty Loveless but lesser known for having been the home of the early country singer Molly O’Day. The former Kentucky Poet Laureate Lillie D. Chaffin was also born in Pike County, spent most of her life there, and was a professor at Pikeville College.  The country musician, song writer, and night club owner Marlo Tackett grew up in Floyd County and ran a well known night club in Pike County for many years.

Although Knott County is not fully drained by the Big Sandy River, a significant portion of it is and the Floyd County Times in Prestonsburg was, for many years, the primary newspaper serving Knott County.  Due to the small size of Hindman, the county seat of Knott County, most people on the northern side of the county did their business for many years in Floyd County and students from that area were also bussed to Floyd County schools for many years due to the lack of paved roads in the county.  Knott County has produced Albert Stewart, the poet who founded “Appalachian Heritage” magazine and taught for many years at Alice Lloyd College.  Knott County also produced Verna Mae Slone who became a best selling author in her late 60’s. The most important writer of Wiccan books, Jessie Wicker Bell, was raised at Mousie in Knott County and produced her literature under the Wiccan name Lady Sheba.  Her ashes were scattered in the Wicker Family Cemetery at Mousie.  The county was also home for many years to James Still and Mae Stone, both connected to the Hindman Settlement School, both widely read authors, neither of whom grew up in the area.  Similarly, William Howard Cohen, a poet and professor at Alice Lloyd College came to the area and produced significant works while there. Cohen was also chosen as a Cultural Delegate to the 1968 Mexico City Olympics where he read his poetry and later produced a book of poems about the experience. 

I have not studied the important cultural figures from the West Virginia side of the Big Sandy River drainage as extensively as I have the Kentucky side but the Appalachian author Lee Maynard grew up in Crum, West Virginia in Wayne County and wrote extensively about the region.  In fact, his “Crum Trilogy” refers several times to the border conflicts which sometimes occurred between adolescent natives of the two states across the watery boundary.  Fannie Belle Fleming, known more widely as the burlesque star Blaze Star, was born in Wayne County. 

McDowell County West Virginia produced two very important Appalachian authors, Denise Giardina and Homer Hickam. Giardina is a liberal political activist in her spare time and made an unsuccessful run for governor. Hickam spent his career at NASA as a scientist after he and a group of other high school students won a national science competition.   

It is truly exceptional that such a small geographic area in what is sometimes disparaged as a struggling region could have produced so many influential and successful individuals.  There are also a large number of these people who grew up just outside the environs of the Big Sandy but were significantly influenced by the culture of the area.  Those include Keith Whitley, Don Rigsby, and his brother John Rigsby all of whom have been important musicians who grew up in Elliott County.  Don Rigsby also was Director of the Center for Traditional Music at Morehead State University for a time.  Tom T. Hall, one of the greatest song writers in the country as well as an important novelist and short story author, grew up in Carter County and worked for a time as disc jockey in Prestonsburg, Kentucky, on the Big Sandy.  Magoffin County also produced the Bluegrass singer and attorney Charlie Sizemore who played with Ralph Stanley for several years before quitting to go to college at Prestonsburg Community College and on to law school.  Magoffin County also produced Tom Whitaker who was a significant Appalachian artist and art professor at Prestonsburg Community College.  Magoffin County also produced the minor country singer Rebecca Lynn Howard and two Lexington, Kentucky, television weather forecasters, Chris Bailey and Jim Caldwell. The country singer Gary Stewart grew up in Letcher County and often played in Pike County in his early career.  All of these people, while not directly growing up in the Big Sandy River area, grew up within a few miles of the river and were influenced by the culture of the river basin. 

"Kentucky's Last Frontier" by Henry P. Scalf--Reflections On The Book

 

Henry P. Scalf was a newspaperman, genealogist, and Appalachian writer who lived from 1902 until 1979.  For many years, he worked for the "Floyd County Times" in Prestonsburg, Kentucky, and wrote on nearly every subject that a small courthouse town newspaper might cover.  He was also an avid student of the history of Eastern Kentucky and wrote and published several works which ranged from several pamphlet sized works including one about Jenny Wiley, an early Eastern Kentucky pioneer woman who was captured by and escaped from a band of native Americans, and about a half dozen genealogical books during his lifetime.  Much of his writing, documents, and books are in the Special Collections Department at the University Of Pikeville Library which I have used more than once in my research. I own one of his dozen or so self-published genealogical books about the Stepp-Stapp Families of America.  His best work was done in the fields of newspaper writing and genealogy.  Most of his books and pamphlets were self published in small editions and can be difficult to locate on the open market.  

I was able to purchase an autographed copy of the book we are discussing here, "Kentucky's Last Frontier" which was self published as a hardback in 1966 with a foreword by the eminent Kentucky historian Thomas D. Clark.  My copy of the book was part of the estate of another Kentucky newspaper writer, Helen Price Stacy and I was lucky enough to buy several works by other regional writers from her collections after they had passed into the hands of a friend who buys and sells antiques.  The book covers a "12-county area, centered by the Big Sandy, Licking, and North Fork Kentucky rivers...With a few southeastern counties of the state, it constituted "Kentucky's Last Frontier."  My copy is, sadly, not in great condition but due to the difficulty of finding a copy in any condition, I was glad to find it.  The book covers a large segment of the history of Eastern Kentucky from the times of early settlement to about 1955 or so.  It is possibly, at least partially, derived from earlier newspaper articles written by Scalf.  While the book is a wonderful resource for the student of Eastern Kentucky and Appalachian history, it does have several weaknesses including Scalf's unique style of documentation of sources and inclusion of notes.  Many times in the book, quotations are not clearly identified in the text and there is a section of notes which covers 109 pages in the back of the book and the notes are not cited in the text by any currently recognized system.  But these issues are offset by the fact that the Bibliography is 6 pages long and well documented.  Any reader with the desire to read all those documented sources would have a strong background in the history of the region up to the time this book was published.  

The book is composed of 25 chapters which are presented chronologically from an opening chapter about the geologic and prehistoric origins of the region to the final chapter about, in part, the widespread coal, oil, and gas extraction in the region which has served to greatly damage the beauty of the land.  There is a fine discussion of the consequences of the 1957 flood which devastated the region and, until the recent Eastern Kentucky flooding of the summer of 2022.  While the book can be a slow read, it is well worth the effort to find and read a copy if you are a student of either Eastern Kentucky or Appalachian History.  I know that there are copies in both the University of Pikeville library and at the library of Big Sandy Community and Technical College.  I suspect there might also be a copy in the collections of the Johnson County Library in Paintsville since they own a large, publicly available but non-circulating regional books.   I hope you can locate a copy if you are interested in the area which it covers. 

Great Political Banners In Appalachia

Every now and then someone does something which I cannot resist passing on to the general public in the best interests of the country and the world at large.  This is one of those occasions and my cousin, really more like a brother, Jack Terry, is the person who has done it.  Jack and I have known each other since I was born 68 years ago.  You might say we go back a long way.  Our mothers were sisters and we grew up a lot alike, about 5 miles apart on the waters of Beaver Creek in Eastern Kentucky.  Our families actually spent several years, at different times, living in the same house on Steele's Creek near Wayland Kentucky.  Our upbringing was a lot alike and Jack, his brother Johnny, and I spent a lot of time together when we were not in school since we attended school in two different counties.  My parents moved out of that house and store on Steele's Creek in Floyd County in the summer of 1957 just before I turned six and started school.  As we moved out and further up Beaver Creek to Dema in Knott County, on the return trip down the creek, the truck and laborers stopped at the place Jack's parents had been living in and picked up a load of their house plunder and hauled it to the building we were moving away from.

Jack became career Army and later career Army Corps of Engineers and is now retired as am I.  He lives in a very rural part of Lawrence County Kentucky and recently sent me photos of two political banners he has erected on his property beside the state highway.  I love these banners.  They say at least part of what needs to be said about the ongoing political, moral, ethical, and legislative disaster which has been transpiring in America since January 20, 2017.  Here are the photos.  Feel free to share them anywhere you desire on social media or otherwise.  But please give photographer and creator credit to Jack D. Terry.

Political Banner--Created & Photographed by Jack D. Terry

Political Banner Created & Photographed by Jack D. Terry 

"Tales from Sacred Wind Coming of Age in Appalachia" by Cratis D. Williams--Book Review

Williams, Cratis D., and David Cratis Willams and Patricia D. Beaver, Editors. Tales From Sacred Wind Coming of Age in Appalachia (Jefferson, NC, McFarland & Co. 2003)

For my regular readers over the past month or so, it is no secret that I love this book.  Some of the most popular and easiest written blog posts I have ever done have been about particular segments of issues which Cratis D. Williams discusses in the book.  I have written about Death, Dying, and Burial Practices In Appalachia; Croton Oil And Cratis Williams; Traditional Appalachian Children's Games; and One More Short Lesson From Cratis Williams.  I had also written a much earlier post about some reading of his work which I had one under the title Responses To Some Reading Of Cratis Williams.  All of these posts were very easy to write and well received by my readers.  Cratis Williams was the Dean of the Appalachian State University Graduate School and taught there for several decades in addition to being one of the most influential scholars in all of the field of Appalachian Studies.  I have said repeatedly that I never met Dr. Williams and I regret that a great deal.  He was erudite, well read, incredibly funny, and one of the best experts on the culture of Appalachia, especially in the early twentieth century.  

This book was edited by his son, Dr. David Cratis Williams and Dr. Patricia D. Beaver who had been one of his professional colleagues at Appalachian State University.

Cratis D. Williams--Photo by the Williams Family

It was published eighteen years after his death.  It is basically a memoir of the first twenty or so years of his life.  It is assumed that he intended to complete a comprehensive memoir of his entire life and simply did not have the time during his academic career to complete and subsequently did not live long to complete the work after his retirement. That is a tragedy since this book is one of the finest books ever written about Appalachian Culture in the early twentieth century, especially the culture of the Big Sandy River Valley and Eastern Kentucky.  This book was published as the eighth produced in the Contributions To Southern Appalachian Studies Series from McFarland & Company in Jefferson, North Carolina.  The series is now comprised of roughly forty books and still being expanded regularly by the publisher.  They cover numerous areas of interest in the greater field of Appalachian Studies.  Although I have not read anywhere near the entire series, I am sure the majority of them are well worth reading.

Now, to get back to "Tales From Sacred Wind...", I am sure that most people tend to think that the name Sacred Wind for the post office in the community on Caines Creek in Lawrence County must have been rooted in religion.  According to Williams, it was not remotely rooted in religion.  He relates the story of how the first postmaster had been tasked with naming the post office and wanted to find a particularly meaningful name.  He had struggled with that effort and was sitting on his porch one day with a friend talking about the effort when the friend passed gas loudly and demonstratively and said, "Name it after that." which is exactly how the postmaster arrived at the name of Sacred Wind.  

The book covers numerous areas of Appalachian Culture including those I have written about and numerous others such as feuds, family strife up to and including patricide and pedicide, the United Baptist Church, one room schools, education in general, farming, child birth, midwifery, and many others.  The book is well written but, if there is one area in which to critique it, the quality of the writing is variable, at times well above average and, at other times, the quality drops a bit.  The book was apparently written over several years in small to medium segments or sections each on a particular topic.  After his death, Cratis Williams' son and Dr. Beavers edited the manuscript and McFarland published it.  I am sure that it does not have the same level of consistency and quality that it would have if Cratis Williams had lived to fully complete the work to cover his entire life.  But the work is well worth reading and I certain that many of my regular readers on this blog will attest to that fact also.  It is well worth the money, time, and effort to buy and read it.   

Croton Oil And Cratis Williams

Over the last month or so, I have written several posts based on my reading of the book "Tales From Sacred Wind Coming Of Age In Appalachia" by Cratis D. Williams.  I have loved the book, loved writing about it, and the posts have generated a great deal of interest from my readers.  I had thought that I would not write any more of these single subject posts about the book and what I learned from it but I just cannot resist writing one more.

Croton Plant Potted As An Ornamental--Photo by Shutterstock

I do still owe the regular readers who have enjoyed these posts one more book review type post to discuss the book in general and I will do that.  But I just have to write about Cratis D. Williams and croton oil.  When we were both boys, forty years and fifty miles apart in the drainage of the Big Sandy River in Eastern Kentucky, both of us knew about croton oil although I never had a personal encounter with the stuff.  But Cratis Williams did, or thought he did, and wrote about it in the book.  Croton oil was a strong laxative which was extracted from plants of the croton family.  Croton plants are described as a tree native to India and the Malay Peninsula.  Based on photos I have been able to find, I believe we still see members of that family being sold as either potted plants or for transplantation as ornamentals in yards and gardens. I suspect that many of my readers will recognize the plant also.  If any of you have these plants in your homes or flower gardens, I would love to see what you know about it posted as a comment on this post.

As my parents, maternal grandparents, and other friends and relatives described it, croton oil was one of the most powerful laxatives you could use and was sold in most country stores in the late 19th and early 20th centuries all over Appalachia. Cratis Williams wrote the best description of a bout of diarrhea I have ever read in this book, which he and several others believed was due to croton oil, and I will get to it in a minute but I need to prepare the readers to fully understand how effective, or overly effective, croton oil could be.   In the stories I heard, most people who had ever used croton oil hated the experience and it was generally used only in times of desperate constipation.  It apparently caused a lot of pain; rapid, excessive, fire hose like evacuation; and nobody who ever used it desired to do so again. I have been lucky enough to locate one photo of a vintage bottle of croton oil on E-bay and post it here also.

Vintage Bottle of Croton Oil--Photo by E-bay

Based on what Cratis Williams said in the book about what he and several others believed was their group experience of it, he agreed with the people I knew about the overpowering effects of the concoction.  Croton oil also had other negative qualities and I found a report that the US Navy actually used it to prevent sailors from drinking alcohol which was known as "torpedo juice" because the croton oil was added in small amounts to the neutral grain spirits which propelled torpedoes in an attempt by the navy to stop sailors from drinking the torpedo fuel. The oil was intended to prevent sailors from drinking the alcohol based fuel. Sailors with experience in drinking and making alcohol would build crude stills on their ships to separate the alcohol from the croton oil since alcohol evaporates at a lower temperature than croton oil. I would not be surprised to someday learn that the first sailor to do that was from Appalachia and came from a family with experience in moonshining.  Members of the Norwegian resistance who had been ordered by the Nazi sympathizing Quisling government to turn over a boat load of freshly caught sardines to the Nazis whom Quisling had allowed to occupy Norway doctored the seized sardines with croton oil as they were about to be shipped to  a German U-boat base.  The Norwegian Resistance fighters had found a way to cooperate with British forces who supported the Norwegian Resistance to obtain a large shipment of croton oil to poison the entire boat load of sardines, whose fishy taste was expected to conceal the tampering.  I have actually read a lot about Eastern European Resistance efforts in World War II but had never run into that story before. I have added titles of a few books about the history of the European Resistance to the list on the front page of this blog which is labeled  "Books I Have Read Lately".  Based on what Cratis Williams wrote about it, and on the stories I heard from my family and friends, I would love to read a first person account from a Nazi soldier who served at that U-boat base about eating those sardines. Croton oil also has a long history of having been used in cosmetic skin peels due to its abrasive qualities which must have added to the pain of using it as a laxative. When applied externally, croton oil can cause irritation and swelling. Croton oil has been used widely in Phenol-croton oil chemical peels due to its caustic exfoliating effects.  Used in conjunction with phenol solutions, it results in an intense reaction which leads to initial skin sloughing.  I can only imagine what a person's digestive tract would have felt like after a large dose of the oil as a laxative. Since croton oil is very irritating and painful, it is used in laboratory animals to study how pain works  and I am certain that members of PETA probably hate it also.  But, I know I need to get to Cratis Williams' account about croton oil before I lose all my readers.

When Williams was living in a boarding house in Lousia in order to attend high school twenty-five miles from his home on Craines Creek, the residents of his boarding house and several other homes on that street all got their water from one well in a yard nearby.  Since this was the middle to late 1920's, the well was no doubt a hand dug well and the boarding house had an outdoor toilet in the back yard as I suspect most of the other houses did also.  Williams also related earlier in the book that the city water supply for Louisa at that time was stored on a hillside above the town inside a remodeled Civil War stone fort which also probably put everyone who drank that water at risk.  But here is Williams' account of the croton oil incident, or what he and several others believed was a croton oil incident. They thought that a local prankster had poured a large amount of croton oil into the shared well. Whether it was caused by croton oil or by contaminated water, which is what I suspect, it is the best description I have ever read of diarrhea.

"One night I became dimly aware of much activity elsewhere in the house as abdominal pains woke me up.  The pains, passing like waves, mounted in intensity, and, before I was fully prepared to admit that a trip out back through the darkness was a necessity, I found that unless I hurried I might not be able to make it to the privy in time to head off an accident.  Pulling on my pants and slipping my feet into my shoes without taking precious time to tie the laces, I rushed headlong down the stairs and in a half bent posture on toward the back door, half embarrassed to see all the members of the household up and scattered along the way through the dining room, kitchen, and laundry room, all with the gas lamps on, highlighting my hegira through the ranks of smiling, but nonetheless puzzled faces.  As I fumbled hurriedly with the lock on the back door, Ernest called out that it was a good thing for me that I had appeared.  Perplexed by the remark but without time or inclination to determine its significance, I dashed toward the privy, my shoe laces whipping at my legs and my shoes playing loosely on my feet.  Halfway there I flung one of my shoes, which I decided not to bother to find just at that time.  The rowling pain was so severe  and the need for relief so intense that I thought I had waited perhaps two seconds too long as I released my pants and thumped myself down on the bench.  An explosion was followed by a mad rush outward of everything in me, like the crashing of wild waters down a valley after a dam has been dynamited.  But the relief did not meet my Gulliver-like need for satisfaction. The pain continued.  Other floods, driven by the growling anger of my bowels, followed in rapid succession.  After what seemed eight or ten minutes, I realized that even though the pain continued, I was thoroughly, completely, and absolutely purged but that had my tonsils given away my entire intestinal tract would have turned itself inside out and fluttered behind me in comfort on the night breeze like the tail of a comet."  (Cratis D. Williams, "Tales From Sacred Wind Coming Of Age In Appalachia, pp. 394-395)

 I repeat that section from the book above is absolutely the best description of diarrhea I have ever read, anywhere, any time, from anybody and, in spite of those of you who might be mildly offended, I just had to pass it on for the reading pleasure of those of you who have had similar experiences but lacked the words to describe it.  That description lives up to every story I ever heard told by those I knew who had also experienced croton oil as a laxative.  I can assure you that I am very grateful that croton oil had stopped being marketed in country stores in Appalachia by the time I was a boy. Cratis Williams, the other residents of his boarding house, and several people in neighboring houses who all drank water from the same dug well believed that some prankster had poured croton oil in the well as I stated above.  But the houses in that part of Louisa were fairly close to the Big Sandy River and most of them had outdoor toilets and dug wells. In a typical small town lot, those wells and toilets were probably not often as much as one hundred feet apart which is well within a range capable of causing ground water contamination of the wells from the toilets.  I suspect it is much more likely that the well was contaminated from either a high water table from the river or one of the outdoor toilets.  It is also probable that the combination of river, high water table, and outdoor toilets combined accounted for the contamination of the common well and the widespread bout of diarrhea that night.  

Here are links to several other posts I have written on the blog about Cratis Williams, his life, work, and the book.  Death, Dying, and Funeral Practices In Appalachia;  Traditional Appalachian Children's Games such as Fox and Geese; Responses To Some Reading Of Cratis Williams;  A Short Lesson From Cratis Williams And "Sacred Wind...".  I hope some of you at least enjoy them all. 

One More Short Lesson From Cratis Williams and "Sacred Wind..."

Reading "Tales From Sacred Wind Coming Of Age in Appalachia" by Cratis D. Williams has been a real pleasure for me and, based on page views of the other blog posts I have written about it, many of my readers on this blog agree with me.  My posts about "Traditional Appalachian Children's Games" and "Death, Dying, and Funeral Rites In Appalachia" have been some of the most well received posts I have ever written on this blog.  I appreciate the interest in both my writing about his work and about the work of Cratis D. Williams. 

Cratis D. Williams--Photo by the Williams Family

He was one of the early founding fathers of the entire Appalachian Studies movement and he deserves that respect.  I am nearly through the book and will write a longer, more traditional book review of the book in a few days when I finish it.  But I just came across another story of a completely different nature in the book which I want to discuss at length here because it reflects on an important cultural and moral value among Appalachian people which I believe has vanished to a great degree in much of the region.  

In the section to which I am referring, Cratis went to the home of some school friends during a school year break when he going to high school in Louia and living in the home of some relatives because his home on Craines Creek was twenty-five miles away, too far in the 1920's to live at home and go to school. At the time, it was a full day's ride on mule back or in a wagon. As he relates the story, during his time in the home of these friends, he could hear sounds coming from somewhere in the house and could not account for the person making the sounds since everyone he had met was in sight of him at the time.  As Williams begins the story: "I kept hearing hearing a moan and chatter followed by high pitched laughter coming from somewhere in the house.  Nobody said anything about it and the Boggses talked on as if they heard nothing."  For nearly anyone, such an occurrence would cause a lot of thoughts, possibly some worry and fear.  But, as it turned out, there was no cause for any concern, worry, fear, or other negative emotions.  But Williams goes on with the story: "During the first night I was there, I could hear that curious moaning and high pitched laughter from time to time all through the night.  But, the next morning, Cratis Williams got his answers about the moaning and laughter when the mother of the family asked one of his friends "...to bring Hettie to warm and to be fed by the fire.  Two of the boys disappeared.  In a few minutes, they returned carrying a high chair in which was strapped a badly deformed little girl with a misshapen face."  As Cratis Williams relates the story, he was then told that the father of the family had been out and about in the community one day when he had heard noises coming from what appeared to be an abandoned house.  He went to the house, looked in the curtainless window and saw two small children in the empty house, one dead, and the other, Hettie, still alive but very weak crawling in the floor. The man then went to the closest neighbor for help and they entered the house, rescued the living child, and reported the events to the authorities in Louisa.  As it turned out, the two severely disabled children were orphans whose parents had been first cousins and that consanguinity resulted in their severe handicaps.  The parents had died and left the children to another sibling and her husband who were not handicapped.  But these caretakers had abandoned the two children and "...left the country.  No one knew where they had gone."  The community had buried the dead child and the county had allowed this family to take care of the severely handicapped little girl, a job which they had accepted freely at a time when there was no such things as welfare, kinship care, child support, foster care, or food stamps.  This family had seen a human being in need, unable to care for even her most basic needs, and had taken on the responsibility of caring for her for the rest of her life, no matter how long that might be.  Williams does not relate that the authorities were ever able to locate the two adults who abandoned the children.  But, in light of the limited ability of police agencies in that time to locate fugitives, it is unlikely that anyone ever heard from them again.  

This story, while not absolutely common in Appalachia, does point out a tendency among native Appalachian people in the early twentieth century to see a need and step up to address it in whatever way seemed best at the time.  We are people of compassion, honesty, honor, and willingness to provide for those who cannot provide for themselves.  I have written in several places on this blog about the "Appalachian Values" of Loyal Jones, another of the early fathers of the Appalachian Studies movement and someone I have known.   I have never known of a story exactly like this one in my life in Appalachia.  But I have seen a few occasions when an elderly person without close relatives has been accepted into an unrelated home to be cared for until death. Some Mennonite friends of mine cared for an older woman until her death and are now caring for an elderly man about the same age.  I have known several instances of families having disabled members, both children and adults, who have been cared for and protected admirably by their family.  In my own family in another state, a niece and her husband have a severely handicapped daughter whom they care for with love, respect, and compassion that is admirable anywhere.  It is sad that such a story could have been true in Eastern Kentucky in the 1920's but such stories are not completely unheard of anywhere.  What is to be learned from this story is that in Appalachia, people usually have tried to do the right thing in nearly all circumstances and still do today.   This is one of the most moving stories in the Williams book and it is well worth reading. 

Cratis Williams And I On Traditional Appalachian Children's Games

An earlier post on "Death, Dying, and Funeral Rites In Appalachia" which I wrote about a week ago, based on some of the writing in Cratis Williams' book "Tales From Sacred Wind: Coming Of Age In Appalachia", was one of the most appealing for my readers in quite some time and I promised that I would write a more formal review of the book when I complete it which I promise I will still do.  I haven't completed the book yet but I have encountered another section in it which has prompted me to write it while it is still fresh in my mind.  At the time I wrote these two most recent posts about Cratis Williams, I neglected to mention in either of them that I had written a much earlier post called "Responses To Some Reading Of Cratis Williams" which might also be interesting to some of you.  It is a response to a small pamphlet he wrote about his most important early teacher, William H. Vaughan, who was a primary influence in leading Williams to pursue a career in academia which was not common at the time in Eastern Kentucky. 

Cratis Williams--Photo by The Williams Family

The section in discussion here is called "Appalachian Folkways: At Play" and prompted me to remember many experiences from my own childhood growing up in Knott County in Eastern Kentucky about forty years and fifty miles from Sacred Wind where Cratis Williams spent his childhood.  This section in his book is only about four pages but it contains a lot of excellent reminiscences and reminded me a great deal of my own childhood.  Admittedly, Williams grew up on a dirt road in what were still, essentially, horse and buggy days.  I grew up on Kentucky Route 7, a paved state highway,
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 but still in one of the more remote areas of the Big Sandy River drainage which also takes in Sacred Wind.  But I grew up with a father, Ballard Hicks,  who was sixty-four when I was born and about the same age as Cratis Williams' father.  I was also strongly influenced by my maternal grandparents, Woots and Susie Hicks, who were actually a few years younger than my father.  My mother, Mellie Hicks, was roughly the same age as Cratis Williams' mother so our major cultural influences came from people  who were about the same age who had spent their lives in much the same way.  Both his grandfather and my father ran small country stores for many years.  Both our extended families were primarily subsistence farmers.  In many ways our childhoods were the same although I do admit that I probably grew up under less financial stress than he and his siblings.

In this section of his book, he talks about the games and other forms of amusement he and his siblings and classmates benefited from as children.   Many of those experiences were nearly identical to my own.  My one regret about this section of his book is that he did not write more at length on this topic.  In the days in which we grew up, there were no electrical toys and most of our recreation was comprised of games and amusements which required no money, no extensive use of physical equipment, and no store bought devices.  He discusses attempts to catch wild game as a child and I did that also as a form of amusement more than he did.  For his family, catching wild game was purely a subsistence effort.  He discusses building figure four wooden triggers to set dead falls for small animals which I never learned to do.  He also discusses setting homemade box traps for the same wild game such as opossums, ground hogs, rabbits, and raccoons which I and my peers also did but on a more limited basis.  The box traps we all used were homemade with screen wire and/or wood and I came to know them as Hoover Boxes because they had been so named during the Great Depression by my ancestors and their peers all over America.  Williams also discussed going ground hog, opossum, and racoon hunting.  My father had effectively stopped hunting due to his age by the time I was old enough to go hunting but I did hunt in a limited way as a child with other members of my family and friends. But one of my most pleasant memories of my father when I was a small child, sometime before I was six, he went on what must have been one of his last squirrel hunting trips and brought back a squirrel he had shot just as it was starting to eat a hickory nut which was locked in its mouth still.  I was never an effective shot with a rifle so I never became a shooter who could "bark" a squirrel but I did rabbit hunt sometimes and went coon hunting a few times with other local people.  For those of you who have never heard of "barking" a squirrel, it was a practice used sometimes by expert shots with a twenty-two rifle in which they would not shoot directly at a squirrel on a tree but would judge their shot so that the bullet would strike within a quarter inch or less of the animal's head and kill it with the concussion without leaving a mark on it.  By doing this, the head, in my opinion the most delicious part of a squirrel, was not harmed and you got to eat it all including the tongue and brain.  In early spring, ground hog hunting was common for nearly all boys my age.  All you needed was a dog which would chase and, if necessary, fight a ground hog which is not an easy task for a dog.  If the ground hog made it into the hole,  you could attempt to smoke it out by building a small fire in the mouth of the hole, blowing the smoke into the hole, and the animal would usually come out although sometimes it would be through a second exit from the burrow which nearly all ground dwelling animals have.  Sometimes, even without a dog, you could get a ground hog if you knew where one was denning by either stalking it from fifty yards or so away and shooting it when it came out or digging it out which could sometimes be a lot of work.  It was also common in my childhood for ground hog hunters in early spring to dig out litters of young ground hogs and bottle raise them as pets which Williams does not mention.  My grandparents, well before I was born, had a pet ground hog for several years which I have heard many stories about.  It would live at the house all spring, summer, and most of the fall and then disappear to hibernate for the winter.  For several years, this ground hog whose name I don't remember, would come waddling back home when hibernation ended in early spring.  I also knew several families on Beaver Creek who had, at various times, pet squirrels, raccoons, ground hogs, and flying squirrels.  If you caught any of these animals when they were quite young, they all made good pets.  

Cratis Williams also discussed fishing and gigging along with using either a rifle or a sledge hammer to kill fish through ice in winter.  I fished and gigged all through my childhood but I had never heard of using the concussion of hitting ice with a sledge hammer to kill fish if they were visible.  But I also rarely saw ice thick enough in winter to have done that if I had known about it.  In my opinion, global warming had already become a mild issue in the forty years between my childhood and Williams'.  Williams also discusses a game he and his peers played in the woods which they called "Fox And Hounds".  It was basically a tag or chasing game in which a group of children would choose teams of "Foxes" and "Hounds" and the "Hounds" would chase the "Foxes" and try to catch them.  In my childhood, any game of this nature had just become tag.  Williams also discusses a war game which corresponded to our "Cowboys And Indians" which he and his peers called "Colonials And Redcoats".  I and my peers had already, to a limited extent, been influenced by television and, if that game had ever existed in Knott County as it had in his native Lawrence County, it had just reverted to "Cowboys And Indians".  Williams also discussed having made homemade bows and arrows from small tree branches.  I saw some of this in my childhood and actually knew a family who had a son lose an eye to a homemade arrow which had been shot by one of his friends.  

In the two room school in which I grew up, boys in the fourth through the eighth grades were allowed to go anywhere we wanted to for the hour of lunch so long as we could return to school in time for "Books" to be called to resume class.  Most of us older boys, in that hour, would hit the woods, except for a few who had to run home to eat lunch.  We would climb, run, chase each other, and swing on grape vines which we had cut at the bottom to give us a free end but leave the grapevine still attached to the tree.  We also had a game which we called "Riding Out" young poplars.  The better climbers would climb as high as possible up a young, slim poplar tree until they reached the point where the tree began to lean and eventually get close enough to the ground for the rider to drop off or actually just step off. If you were agile and strong, you could sometimes find a stand of young poplars on a hillside and ride from tree to tree down the hill for quite a distance. But we had one event in this game which effectively put an end to it for a long while.  A neighbor boy older than me was "Riding Out" a young poplar which it turned out had a weak spot near the top.  The tree broke and he fell close to fifteen or twenty feet to the ground and was unconscious for a while.  The other boys carried him back to the school where he was laid on a long table which the first graders used for class and he eventually regained consciousness with some soreness and no long lasting damage.  I also remember one incident in which the boys who were gathering kindling for the coal stoves in the two rooms found a copper head about two or three feet long which was nearly frozen on a cold morning after having crawled out the day before in warmer weather.  They brought the poisonous snake into the classroom and laid it in front of the stove where it thawed out enough to crawl around.  Then somebody picked it up with the coal shovel and threw it back out in the cold where it became stiff again.  The teachers actually allowed us to bring it back into school a couple of times before it was eventually killed as I recall.  I am sure that if teachers in today's world ever allowed children to "Ride Out" young trees or bring poisonous snakes into school they would be immediately fired.  But not one negative word was ever said about either of these events.  To our families, it was just boys being boys.  

Cratis Williams also discusses what he calls "throwing" games which usually involved rocks and says one of his sisters was the best at those amusements. He says they often would throw rocks at lizards and sometimes actually catch sleeping lizards with a small stick and a noose made of skinned, limber tree bark.  By the time I was in school forty years later, we had baseball and basketball with an actual basketball goal on a pole in the school yard.  But our baseball game, which we and many other young Appalachians of the time called "Round Town", was played with bases made of flat rocks and a rubber ball. We rarely had any baseball gloves the rubber ball was much easier than a hard ball to catch.  In the early grades from first to fourth, we boys often played "Cowboys and Indians" in the school yard with a herd of stick horses usually cut from sumac, or "shoemake", trees as Williams and I both grew up calling sumac.  We even took this game to the point that we actually named our best stick horses.   

Interestingly, Cratis Williams does not talk about any kind of board game at all.  By the time of my childhood, we at least had checkers and I suspect he might have also.  But one of the things he reminded me of was a traditional Appalachian Folk board game which my father tried to teach me and I was not interested in enough to bother to learn it which I deeply regret.  That game was called "Fox And Geese" and apparently can be traced back to Europe well before American colonization.  Some experts claim it might actually be Medieval in origin.  The game is played on a board which can be made of anything from tanned animal skin to cardboard to a flat piece of a wide board.  The layout is a cross shaped area which is broken into five smaller areas comprised of the center section and the four wings.  There is only one "Fox" and fifteen geese.  When my father tried to teach me, he had drawn the board on a piece of a cardboard box from our little country store. His geese were white grains of corn and his fox was a red grain.

Fox And Geese Board--Photo by Masters Of Games

I have learned that there are also variations of the game with thirteen, seventeen, or twenty-two geese.  According to the website which I linked above, the game is described this way:  Fox & Geese is a game of inequality. The geese cannot capture the fox but aim, through the benefit of numbers, to hem the fox in so that he cannot move. The objective of the fox, on the other hand, is to capture geese until it becomes impossible for them to trap him. The geese start by occupying all 6 squares of one arm of the cross plus the whole first adjacent row and the two end points of the central row. The fox starts in the middle of the board.  The game of Fox & Geese is played upon a cross shaped board consisting of a 3x3 point square in the middle with four 2 x 3 point areas adjacent to each face of the central square. This makes a total of 33 points. Pieces are allowed to move from one point to another only along lines which join points. Accompanying the board, there should be a single playing piece representing the fox in black or red and 15 white playing pieces representing the geese.  According to the Masters Of Games website cited above, the game is actually considered to have been rooted in medieval times.  I don't know that a mathematician would say that this game is as complicated as chess but you can surely bet that it is more complicated than checkers.  I never learned to play it with my father and I deeply regret having been too young and dumb to have given both of us that joy.  Now, forty-nine years after my father's death, I am considering making my own board, shelling a few grains of corn, and trying to induce my wife to learn it with me.  She has also become fascinated with the game and we intend to try to play it until we get some skill.  The woman who cleans our house is about my age and also remembers the game being played by her father who was about 37 years younger than my father.  I also knew that man before his death a few years ago, visited him numerous times, and regret that I also unknowingly lost a second opportunity to learn "Fox And Geese" from someone who grew up playing it.   

Ballard Hicks, My Father--Photo by Roger D. Hicks