Blue Ridge Country. Jean Pichon Thomas
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the quagmired bottoms and rocky uplands of other parts of the Blue Ridge. There are high and uninviting quaternary bluffs that lure only the eye. It was the fertile valleys with their rich limestone soil producing abundant cane that first proved irresistible to the immigrants of Europe and lured them farther inland from the Atlantic seaboard.
Long before man came with ax and arrow the wilderness of the Blue Ridge teemed with wild animal life. The bones of mastodon and mammoth remained to attest their supremacy over an uninhabited land thousands upon thousands of years ago. Then, following the prehistoric and glacial period, more recent fauna—buffalo, elk, deer, bear, and wolf—made paths through the forest from salt lick to refreshing spring. These salt licks that had been deposited by a receding ocean centuries before came to have names. Big Bone Lick located in what today is Boone County, Kentucky, was one of the greatest and oldest animal rendezvous in North America, geologists claim. It took its name doubtless from the variety of bones of prehistoric and later fauna found imbedded in the salty quagmire.
Man, like beast, sought both salt and water. Following the animal trails came the mound builder. But when he vanished, leaving his earthen house and the crude utensils that filled his simple needs—for the mound builder was not a warrior—there was but little of his tradition from which to reconstruct his life and customs.
A century passed before the Indian in his trek through the wilderness followed the path of buffalo and deer. Came the Shawnee, Cherokee, and Chickasaw to fight and hunt. To the Indian the Blue Ridge was a favorite hunting ground with its forests and rolling plains, while the fertile valleys with thick canebrakes offered bread in abundance. Sometimes these primeval trails which they followed took their names from the purpose they served. For instance, the Athiamiowee trail was, in the Miami dialect, the Path of the Armed Ones or the Armed Path and became known as the Warrior’s Path. It was the most direct line of communication between the Shawnees and the Cherokees, passing due south across the eastern part of the Cuttawa country (Kentucky) from the mouth of the Sciotha (Scioto) to the head of the Cherokee (Tennessee). Another trail was called Old Buffalo Path, another Limestone because of the soil. Then there was a Shawnee Trail named for the tribe that traversed it.
The Indian was happy and content with his hunting ground and the fertile fields. The streams he converted to his use for journeys by canoe. He had his primitive stone plow to till the soil and his stone mill for grinding grain. The fur of animals provided warm robes, the tanned hides gave him moccasins. Tribal traditions were pursued unmolested, though at times the tribes engaged in warfare. Each tribe buried its dead in its own way and when a tribe wearied of one location it moved on. Unlike the mound builders, the Indian had a picture language and he delighted to record it in cuttings on rocks and trees. He would peel the bark from the bole of a tree and with a sharp stone instrument carve deep into the wood figures of feather-decked chieftains, of drums, arrows, wild beasts. And having carved these symbols of the life about him, depicting scenes of the hunt and battle and conflict, he covered the carving with paint fashioned in his crude way from the colored earth on the mountain side. The warrior like his picture language vanished in time from the Blue Ridge. But not his trails.
These trails, the path of buffalo and deer and the lines of communication between the tribes, finally marked the course of explorer, hunter, and settler. As each in turn made his way to the wilderness he was glad indeed to find paths awaiting his footsteps. The scene was set for a rugged race. They came and stayed.
The People
The men and women who came to settle this region were a stalwart race, the men usually six feet in height, the women gaunt and prolific. They were descendants of English, Scotch, and Scotch-Irish who landed along the Atlantic coast at the close of the sixteenth century—around 1635, when the oppression of rulers drove them from England, Scotland, and Ireland. Some were impelled by love of religious freedom, while others sought political liberty in the new world. Their migration to America really started with a project, a project that had its beginning in Ireland as far back as 1610. It was called the English invasion of Ireland. King after king in England had sent colonists to the Emerald Isle and naturally the native sons resented their coming. Good Queen Bess in turn continued with the project and tried to keep peace between the invaders and the invaded by donating lands there to court favorites. But the bickerings went on. It was not until after Elizabeth’s death that King James I of England worked out a better project—temporarily at least. He sent sturdy, stubborn, tenacious Scots to Ulster; their natures made of them better fighters than the Irish upon whose lands they had been transplanted. But even though it was English rulers who had “planted” them there the Scots were soon put to all sorts of trials and persecution. They resented heartily the King’s levy of tax upon the poteen which they had learned to make from their adopted Irish brothers. Resentment grew to hatred of excise laws, hatred of authority that would enforce any such laws. These burned deep in the breast of the Scotch-Irish, so deep that they live to this day in the hearts of their descendants in the southern mountains.
So political strife, resentment toward governmental authority, hatred toward individuals acting for the rulers developed into feuds. In some such way the making of poteen and feuds were linked hand-in-hand long before the Anglo-Celtic and Anglo-Saxon set foot in the wilderness of America.
They were pawns of the Crown, used to suppress the uprisings of the Irish Catholics and in turn themselves even more unfairly treated by the Crown. They could not—these Presbyterians—worship as they chose; rather the place and form was set by the State. Their ships were barred from foreign trade, even with America; they were forbidden to ship products or cattle back to England, though after the Great Fire of London, Ireland generously sent thousands of head of cattle to London. Barred then from engaging in profitable cattle trade, they turned to growing wool. This too was defeated by prohibitive duties, and when Ireland undertook to engage in producing linen, England thwarted that industry too. They were forbidden to possess arms, they were expelled from the militia, and what with incessantly being called upon to pay tithes, added rents, and cess they had little left to call their own, little to show for their labors. Then adding insult to injury, the Crown declared illegitimate the children born of a marriage performed by the ministers of these Presbyterians, so that such offspring could not legally inherit the lands of their parents.
Oppressed and persecuted for a century, they could bear it no longer; these transplanted Scotch-Irish (as America came to call them) turned their faces to the new world.
The massacres of 1641 sent them across the uncharted seas in great numbers. And to stimulate and spur their continued migration to America these “adventurers” and “planters” were offered land in Maryland by Lord Baltimore—three thousand acres for every thirty persons brought into the state, with the provision of “free liberty of religion.” But Pennsylvania offered a heartier welcome and “genuine religious liberty” besides.
Oppression and unfairness continued to grow in Ireland. Protestants there had never owned outright the land which they struggled to clear and cultivate. Moreover they toiled without pay. Protest availed them little. And the straw that broke the camel’s back was laid on in the form of rent by Lord Donegal. In 1717 when their leases had expired in County Antrim, they found themselves in a worse predicament than ever. Their rents were doubled and trebled. Now, to hand over more than two thirds of what they had after all the other taxes that had been imposed upon them left them with little or nothing. How was a man to pay the added rent? Pay or get out! demanded Lord Donegal. Eviction from the lands which their toil had developed—a wasteland converted into fertile productive fields—stirred these Scotch-Irish to fury. They didn’t sit and tweedle their thumbs. Not the Scotch-Irish.
In 1719, just two years after the Antrim Eviction, thirty thousand more Protestants left Ulster for America. They continued to come for the next half century, settling in various parts of our land. There was a goodly settlement in the Virginia Valley of Scotch-Irish. You’d know by their names—Grigsby, Caruthers, Crawford, and McCuen.
As early as 1728 a sturdy Scot from Ulster, by name Alexander Breckinridge, was settled in the Shenandoah