Chapter 19

The mountain preacher of yesterday is passing fast. Then, his was a manifold calling. When he traveled the lonely creek-bed road with his Bible in his saddlebags, he was the circuit rider bringing news of the outside world to the families along the widely scattered frontier. He, like the mountain doctor, was truly counselor and friend. The people looked to him to tell of things that would be happening in the near future. They hung upon his every word from the pulpit. His reasoning in spiritual matters was sound and his eloquence impelling. His sermons often combined quotations from the early writers of England, passages from Shakespeare, true echoes of Elizabethan English, as might be expected considering his ancestry. Words flowed freely from his lips. The mountain preacher to this day has a natural gift of oratory. It has been handed down through generations. He needs only the spur and the occasion to burst forth. The mountain preacher, as some may imagine, was not always untutored or illiterate--of the type we sometimes encounter today in remote mountain regions. In early days he was quite often both preacher and teacher, such as William E. Barton, father of Bruce Barton, who after preaching in the thinly settled parts of Knox County, Kentucky, became the pastor of a Chicago church in later years. Some of the early roving preachers even studied theology in the great centers of learning both in America and Europe.

At one time, even as late as the last quarter of a century, there were strait-laced Baptist preachers (my own blood kin among them) who would not permit an organ in the church. But today it is quite the vogue for young evangelistic couples to hold forth with piano-accordion and guitar. "It peps up the joiners," the evangelist says. On the other hand, in remote churches, where preachers still hold that note-singing and hymn books with notes are the works of the Devil, these same fellows will play up the hysteria of the audience with the "Holy Bark," the "And-ah," "Yep, Yep," and the "Holy Laugh," chiefly at foot-washing ceremonies.

The number of young people, however, who cling to the custom of foot-washing is comparatively small. One reason may be that they are too busy with other things, or that they consider such practices old-fashioned.

MOUNTAIN MEN

Old Virginia had its Patrick Henry, the Blue Grass its Clays and Breckinridges, but the Big Sandy produced from its most rugged quarter as fine and noble timber as could be found throughout the breadth and width of the Blue Ridge Country.

Early in his youth Hugh Harkins came from Pennsylvania to settle in Floyd County in the heart of the Big Sandy. That was far back in the 1830's. He knew the saddlery trade but the young man preferred the profession of law. So acquiring a couple volumes on practice and procedure he began to study for the bar. He built himself an office of stone which he helped to dig from the mountain side and with every spare dollar he bought more law books and timber land. He died in 1869, but by that time his grandson, Walter Scott Harkins, had a thirst to follow his footsteps. The boy, even before he was old enough to understand their meaning, listened avidly to the speeches of his grandfather in the courtrooms of the mountain counties. And when Walter Scott Harkins was only a strip of a lad he rode the unbeaten paths to courts of law with his law books in his saddlebags. If the day were fair he'd get off his horse, tether it to a tree and climb high on the ridge. There with statute or law reporter in hand he would read aloud for hours. Again he'd close the book and with head erect, hands behind him, young Harkins would repeat as much as he could remember of the text. Often he waxed enthusiastic. He longed to be an orator. Sometimes thoughtless companions would jeer at the young Demosthenes, even pelt him with acorns and pebbles from ambush. But Walter Scott Harkins wasn't daunted by any such boyish pranks. He kept on orating.

In the meantime, as he rode the lonely mountain paths, he took notice of the fine timber, just as his grandfather had before him. He was admitted to the bar in 1877 and hung out his shingle at the door of his grandfather's office. Like Hugh Harkins, the grandson also began investing his earnings, meager though they were, in timber land.

One summer evening near dusk the young lawyer was riding toward the mouth of Big Sandy when he was startled to see in the distance a giant tongue of flame shooting skyward. At first he thought there was fire on the mountain but he soon discovered that the flame did not spread but continued in a straight column upward. He sat motionless in the saddle for a moment. By this time darkness had descended. The young lawyer was fascinated by the brilliant flame and determined to test its strength. Taking a law book from his saddlebags he opened the volume and, to his surprise, was able to read the small type by the light of the distant flame with as great ease as though an oil lamp burned at his elbow. Then he recalled the story of how Dr. Walker, the English explorer, had once read his maps by the light of a burning spring. Unlike the early explorer young Harkins determined to do something about it. The legal mind of the lad spurred his zeal to find the cause of the illuminating flame.

Walter Scott Harkins not only found the cause but he probed the effect with fine results. With the aid of other interested persons he acquired mineral rights of lands in the Big Sandy country which included the burning spring, the like of which in the next decade was to illuminate towns and cities and operate industries as far removed as one hundred miles.

Moreover Walter Scott Harkins lived to see more than 75,000 acres of his own forest leveled, whereby he piled up a fortune that could scarcely be exhausted even unto the fifth generation of Harkinses.

On the window of his law office in Prestonsburg, Floyd County, Kentucky, appears in letters of gold, an unbroken line of five generations of Harkinses who have followed the practice of law. Likewise the Harkins' descendants hold unbroken title to the largest acreage of timber land in the country. The virgin forest brought its owner more than $160,000 and the second growth is ready to cut.

Lumber companies bought 70,000 acres of forest and constructed their own railroads to carry out the timber. They calculated it would take about twenty-five years to cull out all the big timber and by that time there would be a second growth. Wasteful methods of lumbering, together with frequent forest fires and man's utter disregard for the future, have already brought about the necessity for reforestation in many mountain sections. As far back as 1886 out of the Big Sandy alone was run $1,500,000 worth of timber.

Rafts of logs carpeted the Big Sandy River and at its mouth was the largest round timber market in the world. With its row of riverfront saloons Catlettsburg, between the Big Sandy and the Ohio Rivers, was then called the wettest spot on earth. Through its narrow streets strode loggers and raftsmen. Theirs was talk of cant hooks and spike poles, calipers and rafts. "You best come and have a drink down to Big Wayne's that'll put fire in your guts." The boss wanted his whole crew to be merry, so the whole crew headed for Big Wayne Damron's Black Diamond.

Today the old riverfront lives only in memory. That part of the county seat is a ghost town. Timbermen and loggers gather no more for revelry at the riverfront saloon. And should you ask the reason, the old river rat will answer with a slow-breaking smile, "See off yonder--locks and dams! Can't run the logs through that!"

Forests that were felled a quarter of a century ago are once again ready for the woodsman's ax.

The present generation of timbermen look upon a very different scene. Their dim-eyed grandparents complacently beheld the push boat, that crude ark which was urged along the stream by means of long poles. It gave way to shallow drift steamers. And in turn the steamers were shoved aside for the railroad which was quicker. The boats, _Red Buck_, _Dew Drop_, once the pride of the river, soon went to anchor and deterioration.

The county seat changed as well. Once women came to do their trading there with homemade basket, filled with eggs, butter, ginseng which they swapped for fixings, thread, and calico. They motor in now to shop.

Typical of the changing scene is the town of Prestonsburg in Floyd County. It became a county seat in 1799 and was once called Spurlock Station. Today it is a thriving city with a country club. Daughters of once rugged farmers and struggling country lawyers now have a social position to maintain.

Mountain women are becoming class conscious! More's the pity.

COAL

It is often said, "Old mother nature must have laughed heartily at the pioneer, who in his mad rush to go west hurried down through the wide troughs between the mountains, hurrying on through the valleys, passing unheeded the wealth in forests on either side, the wealth in minerals under his very feet." But there came a time when the mountain men discovered the treasure.

Over in Johnson County, adjoining Floyd, where Walter Scott Harkins had an eye for timber, his young friend was being twitted for a different reason. "John Caldwell Calhoun Mayo," they'd string out his long name, "when you're cooped up in the poorhouse or the lunatic asylum, you can't say we didn't warn you to quit digging around trying to find a fortune under the ground."

But young Mayo, like his friend Harkins the lawyer, would only say, thumbs hooked in suspenders, "He who laughs last, laughs best."

Some of his youthful companions continued to poke fun but John Caldwell Calhoun Mayo turned them a deaf ear. On foot he trudged endless miles when he was a poor lad, or rode a scrubby nag along the Warrior's Path, always seeking coal deposits, pleading with landowners for leases and options on acreage he knew to be rich in minerals. He surmounted seemingly impossible barriers, even having legislation enacted to set aside Virginia land grants. He tapped hidden treasures, developed the wealth of the Big Sandy country that had been locked in mountain fastnesses for centuries. Through his vision, thriving cities blossom where once was wilderness.

The United States Geological Survey shows one eighth of the total coal area of the nation to be in this region; it supplies nearly one quarter of all the country's bituminous coal.

PUBLIC WORKS

Only in recent years has the mountaineer begun to forsake his cove, however unproductive the earth may be, for the valley and public works. Indeed mountain folk long looked down on their own who sought employment at public works, mines, lumber camps, steel mills. They decried any employment away from the hillside farm, because it meant to them being an underling. No mountaineer ever wanted to be company-owned. Leastwise none of the Wellfords of Laurel Creek. But Clate, youngest of Mark Wellford's family, lured by the promise of big cash money, decided to quit the farm and take his wife and little family down to the foothills. "There's a good mine there, pays good money, and there's a good mine boss on the job," so Clate was told. Some two years later Clate, a weary figure, emerged one evening from the company commissary. His face was smudged with coal dust. A miner's lamp still flickered on his grimy cap. He carried a dinner bucket and the baby on one arm. Over his shoulder hung a gunnysack that bulged with canned goods and a poke of meal. At his heels followed his bedraggled, snaggle-toothed wife, a babe in her arms and another tugging at her skirts. Her faded calico dress that dragged in the back was tied in at the waist with a ragged apron. There was a look of sad resignation in her eyes. Now and then she brushed a hand up the back of her head to catch the drab stray locks. She might have been fifty, judging from the stooped shoulders and weary step. Yet the rounded arms--her sleeves were rolled to the elbow--looked youthful.

Clate halted a few minutes to talk to another miner, a boy in his teens. "What'd you load today?" the younger asked after casual greetings. "'Tarnal buggy busted a dozen times, held me back," Clate complained, shifting the dinner pail and the baby. "Always something to hold a man back." "I'm figuring on going to Georgia," the young lad sounded hopeful. "Got a buddy down there in the steel mill. Beats the mines any day." He saw some young friends across the street and hurried to join them.

"Come on, Phoebe!" Clate called over his shoulder to his wife, "get a mosey on you. I'm hongry. And 'ginst you throw a snack of grub together it'll be bedtime. An' before you know it, it's time to get up and hit for the hill again." He plodded on up the winding path to a row of shacks. His little family followed.

The row of dilapidated shacks where the miners lived was clinging to the mountain side at the rear, while the fronts were propped up with rough posts. They were all alike with patched rubberoid roofs, broken tile chimneys, windows with broken panes. Rough plank houses unpainted, though here and there a board showed traces of once having been red or brown. Between the houses at rare intervals a fence post remained. But the pickets had long since been torn away to fire the cookstove or grate. There were no gardens. Coal companies did not encourage gardening. Miners and their families lived out of cans, and canned goods come high at the company's commissary.

A tipple near the drift mouth of the mine belched coal and coal dust day after day. When Phoebe--you'd never have known her for the pretty girl she used to be far back in the Blue Ridge--rubbed out a washing on the washboard, hung it to dry on the wire line stretched from the back door to a nail on the side of the out-building, she knew that every rag she rubbed and boiled and blued would be grimy with coal dust before it dried. What was she to do about it? Where else could the wash be hung? Once Phoebe thought she had found the right place. A grassy plot quite hidden beyond a clump of trees. She put the wet garments in a basket and carried them off to dry, spreading them upon the green earth. But no sooner had she spread out the last piece than a fellow came riding up. "What's the big idea?" he demanded, shaking a fist at the garments on the ground. And Phoebe, from Shoal's Fork of Greasy Creek, never having heard the expression, mumbled in confusion, "I'm pleased to meet you."

"Don't try to get fresh," the fellow scowled. "Don't you know this ground is company-owned? The big boss keeps this plot for his saddle horse to graze on. Pick up your rags and beat it!"

She understood from the gesture the meaning of beat it and obeyed in haste.

There was little room to stretch up a line indoors, though she did sometimes in the winter when the backyard was too sloppy to walk in. Clate Wellford's was one of the smaller shacks, a room with a lean-to kitchen. The others, with two rooms, cost more. Besides there were other things to be taken out of date's pay envelope before it reached him; there were electric light, coal, the store bill, and the company doctor.

"None of my folks have been sick. We've never even set eyes on the doctor," Clate complained to the script clerk on the first payday.

"What of it?" the script clerk replied. "You'd be running quick enough for the doctor if one of your kids or your old woman got sick or met with an accident, wouldn't you? The doctor's got to live same as the rest of us."

So the miner stumbled out with no more to say. Sometimes he'd vent his spleen upon his wife. "You wuz the one that wanted to come here! Wisht I'd never married. A man can't get nowheres with a wife and young ones on his hands." And the wife, remembering the way of mountain women, offered no word of argument.

When the owners of the coal operation came from the East to check up output and earnings they didn't take time to make a tour of inspection of the shacks. Certainly they had no time to listen to complaints of miners.

Lured by the promise of big money Clate Wellford, like many other mountain men, forsook the familiar life of his own creek for the strange work-a-day of the mining camp.

Back on Shoal's Fork of Greasy Creek there was always milk a-plenty to drink. Bless you, Clate knew the time when he'd carried buckets full of half-sour milk to the hogs. How they guzzled it! Here there was never a drop of cow's milk to drink. You got it in cans--thick, condensed, sickeningly sweet. Couldn't fool the children, not even when you thinned it with water. "It don't taste like Bossy's milk," the youngsters shoved it away.

What was more, back on Shoal's Fork there was always fried chicken in the spring. All you could eat. Turkey and goose and duck, if you chose, through the winter and plenty of ham meat. There was never a day date's folks couldn't go out into the garden and bring in beans, beets, corn, and cabbage. He'd never known a time when there were not potatoes and turnips the year round. The Wellfords had come to take such things for granted. But here in the coal camp you could walk the full length of the place from the last ramshackle house on down to the commissary and never see a bed of onions and lettuce. The shacks were so close together there was no room for a garden, even if the company had permitted it.

"That's company-owned!" the boss growled at Clate that time he was trying to break up the hard crusty earth with a hoe.

"I've got my own onion sets," Clate tried to explain. "My folks fetched 'em down."

"Who cares?" the company boss snarled. "What you reckon the company's running a commissary for? The store manager can sell you onions--ready to eat."

So the miner didn't set out an onion bed.

Again, Clate found some old warped planks outside the drift mouth of the mine; he brought them home and was building a pigpen. The mine boss came charging down upon him.

"What you doing with the company's planks?"

The frightened Clate tried to explain that he had supposed the wood thrown aside was useless and that he was making ready for the young shoat his folks meant to bring him.

"What you suppose the company would do if every miner packed off planks and posts that he happens to see laying around?" he eyed Clate suspiciously. "We'd soon shut down, that's what would happen. And as for meat. You can buy sow-belly and bologna at the commissary." There was something more. "If you want to keep out of trouble and don't want a couple bucks taken out of your pay, you better get them planks and posts back where you found them!"

The miner's shack was perched on such high stilts that the wind whistled underneath the floor until it felt like ice to the bare feet of the children. It took a lot of coal in the grate and the kitchen stove to keep the place halfway warm. The children were sick all through the winter. Now and then the company doctor stopped in on his rounds of the coal camp to leave calomel and quinine.

With the birth of her last baby, Clate's wife got down with a bealed breast after she had been up and about for a week. "I'm bound to hire someone," Clate told his wife. So he hired Liz Elswick to come and do the cooking, washing, and ironing and to look after the children.

Out on Shoal's Fork neighbor women came eagerly to help each other in case of sickness.

Though it was not much they had to pay Liz--she took it out in trade at the store, the makings of a calico dress, a pair of shoes--it was a hardship on the Wellfords. For Liz Elswick, like other women in a coal camp, never having handled real money, knew little of cost. Nor did she know how to supply the simple needs of the family. Phoebe was too ill to offer a word of advice, poor though it would have been. So, before long, Clate was behind with his store bill. Or to put it the other way around, for the company always took theirs first, Clate had nothing left in his pay envelope on payday.

Then, when he might have had a few dollars coming, something else would happen: shoes would be worn out, he'd have to buy new ones for the children couldn't go barefoot in the winter. He himself had to wear heavy boots in the mine in order to work at all, for Clate had to stand in water most of the time when he picked or loaded. Another time the house caught fire and burned up their beds, chairs, everything. Even though he had steady work that month he had to sell his time to the script clerk in order to get cash to replace his loss. A buddy in the mine was selling out his few possessions at a sacrifice because his wife had run off with a Hunkie. The Hungarian showed the faithless creature a billfold with greenbacks in it, promised her a silk dress and a permanent.

"Why don't you buy new furniture at the commissary?" the script clerk wanted to know of Clate. "There are beds and chairs, bureaus and tables. Get them on time."

"I can't afford it," Clate said honestly.

So, after much bickering, the company's script clerk offered to give the miner script for his time.

"My buddy has to have cash money," Clate argued. "He's quitting. Going back to his folks over in Ohio."

Clate found out that when he sold his time he got only about fifty cents for a dollar.

"What you think I'm accommodating you for?" the company's script clerk wanted to know. "I'm not out for my health. Course if you don't want to take it"--he shoved the money halfway across the counter to Clate--"you don't have to. There are plenty of fellows who are glad to sell their time."

There was nothing left for Clate to do. He and his family had to have the bare necessities, bed, table, chairs.

Soon he was in the category with the other miners, always behind, always overdrawn, always selling his time before payday. Soon he was getting an empty envelope with a lot of figures marked on the outside. Clate was company-owned! If he lived to be a hundred he'd never be paid out.

Though Clate Wellford and the other coal miners never heard the word redemptioner and indent, they were not unlike those pioneer victims of unscrupulous subordinates. Men in bondage like the sharecropper of the Deep South, the Okie of the West.

How different the children of the coal field looked to those along the creeks in the shady hollows of the Blue Ridge!

In the coal camps they were unkempt and bony, in dirty, ragged garments. They squabbled among themselves and shambled listlessly along the narrow path that led past the row of shacks toward the commissary. The path was black with coal dust and slate dumped along the way to fill the mud holes.

Why do they continue to live in such squalor and in bondage? Why don't they move away?

If a miner should decide to move out, he has no means of getting his few belongings to the railroad spur some distance from the camp, for he has neither team nor wagon. All these are company-owned. The company, which controls the railroad spur, also has control too over the boxcars that are on the track. Only the company can make requisition for an empty boxcar. If a miner wants to move he cannot even get space, though he is willing to pay for it, in a boxcar to have his goods hauled out.

He stays on defeated and discouraged.

If, however, he does quit one coal camp and get out he is unskilled in other labor and if he should try to evade his store and other obligations with one coal company, the office employees have a way of passing on the information to another operation. There are ways of putting a laborer on the blacklist.

But why should he try to move on? Word comes back to the miner from other buddies who have tried other camps. "They're all the same. Might as well stay where you are."

Behind every shack is a dump heap of cans, coal ashes, potato peel, coffee grounds, and old shoes.