Chapter 4

Another friend of Coonrod Pile was David Crockett. The "Hero of the Alamo" had many hunts in Fentress county, upon the "Knobs" and along the upper waters of the Cumberland. The old Crockett home still stands a few miles to the north of Jamestown beside the road that leads to Pall Mall. It was in a house upon land owned by Coonrod Pile that "Deaf and Dumb Jimmy Crockett" spent the last years of his life, and from which he made so many journeys to locate the silver mine of the Indians who had held him captive and who pinioned him to the ground while they dug their ore, never allowing him to see where they worked, but using him to help carry the mined product. David Crockett in his autobiography tells the story of "Deaf and Dumb Jimmy" but he places the scene in Kentucky, making probably the same mistake in the location of the state-line boundary which Coonrod Pile had made.

Coonrod Pile lived to the age of eighty-three and at the time of his death was the most powerful personality in Fentress county. His business interests had grown to such proportions that he had economic problems to solve and the simple practical methods he used are followed in the valley to-day.

He dug only so much coal as he could use, the transportation problem preventing its sale. He could only market the poplar, the cedar and such woods as he could float on the rises of the Wolf to the Cumberland river to be rafted. He raised cotton, but only the amount the women needed for their looms. He grew wheat and corn, but no more than was necessary for flour and meal for the neighborhood and to feed the stock he owned, laying aside a portion for use in time of need for the improvident and unfortunate.

He was ready at any time to trade with anybody for almost anything. In the last score of the years of his life, the most successful financially, he found that the money he could accumulate came only from the sale of products that could move from the valley across the mountains by their own motive power--something that could go on foot. So he turned to stock-raising and with his own slaves cut the present roadway from Pall Mall to Jamestown, there to join with the old Kentucky Stock road which ran from Atlanta and Chattanooga, along the Cumberland plateau by Jamestown on to the north through Frankfort and Cincinnati.

Old Coonrod was not a one-price man on the realty he owned. If the purchase was for speculation he was a trader with his sights set high. If the buyer wanted a home, he was generous. It meant the upbuilding of his community. So the people of that day lived in comradeship. There were few luxuries and no real want. If there was "a farming patch" to be cleared, the neighbors came from miles around and there was a "log-rolling." If it was a home or a crib to be built, it was a "log-raising," and everyone worked and made fun from it.

The steeple of a church arose in the valley. It was built by those of the Methodist faith. But before that and even afterward they held "camp-meetings" and "basket-meetings" where a community lunch was served under the trees and where the service lasted through the daylight hours, allowing for a mountain journey home. And the religious fervor was so sincere and intense at these meetings that they were called "melting sessions."

Up the mountainside above the York spring, a space was cleared for shooting matches, where the prizes were beeves and turkeys, and where the men shot so accurately that the slender crossing of two knifeblade marks was the bull's-eye of the target. And everyone went on hunts, long hunts when crops were laid by or winter had checked farm work. And as human nature is the same the world over, there was many an upright resident of the "Valley of the Three Forks o' the Wolf" who left the plow standing in the furrow because the yelp and baying of the hounds grew warm upon the mountainside.

The families of mountain men are usually large in number, and the estate of Old Coonrod has passed through a long division. He had eight children, and his son Elijah Pile, the branch of the family to which Sergeant York belongs, had eleven children. That portion of the estate which Elijah inherited passed into good hands. He conserved his part, handled well the talents left with him; but the second division by eleven, together with the ravages of the Civil War and the years that followed, left only seventy-five acres, and far from the best of it, to Mary York, the truly wonderful little mountain mother who gave to Alvin York those qualities of mind and heart which stood him in good stead in the Forest of Argonne, who taught him to so live that he feared no man, and to do thoroughly and always in the right way that which he had to do. "Else," as she so frequently said to him, "you'll have to 'do hit over, or hit'll cause you trouble."

III The People of the Mountains

The log cabin of the pioneer influenced architecture and gave to us the house of Colonial design, the first distinctively American type, for the Colonial home grew around the pioneer's two rooms of logs separated by an open passageway.

The muzzle-loading rifle--and it was the pioneer's gun--with its long barrel and its fine sights, gave confidence to the American soldier who carried it, for he trusted the weapon in his hands.

Progressive inventions finally displaced this rifle in military use, but for the accuracy of the shot it has never been surpassed, and it is to-day a loved relic and a valued hunting-piece. Men trained to shoot with it, used to the slender line of its silver foresight and to the delicate response of its hair-trigger, have made rare records in marksmanship. The very difficulty of loading--the time it took--taught its users to be accurate and not spend the shot.

This rifle stopped the British at Bunker Hill and Kings Mountain, and over its long barrel Alvin York and some of the best shots of the American army learned to bring their sights upward to the mark and tip the hair-trigger when the bead first reached its object.

It was training acquired in the forest, the same manner of marksmanship, the same self-reliance and individual resourcefulness as a soldier that gave to Sergeant York the power to come back over the hill in Argonne Forest, bringing one hundred and thirty-two prisoners, and to the army under Andrew Jackson at New Orleans, more than a hundred years before, the fighting resource to achieve victory with a loss of eight killed and thirteen wounded, while England's records show that "about three thousand of the British were struck with rifle bullets."

[Footnote: From "The True Andrew Jackson," by Cyrus Townsend Brady, Chap. IV, p. 88; published by J. B. Lippincott Co., 1906. ]

The man trained behind the muzzle-loading rifle in all the wars America has fought has been individually a fighter and "a shot," formerly but little skilled in military training, who while obeying orders fought along lines of personal initiative. In the earlier wars of the nation this soldier was known as a "rifleman." It was with this class that General Jackson fought his campaigns against the Indians and the British, and at New Orleans "the bone and sinew of his force were the riflemen of Tennessee and Kentucky."

Against Jackson, England had sent the flower of Wellington's army, distinguished for famous campaigns on the Spanish peninsula against the marshals of Napoleon. Wellington said of these men in his "Military Memoirs": "It was an army that could go anywhere and do anything."

Late in life when General Jackson had grown old, had twice been President, and was spending his declining days at the "Hermitage," his home near Nashville, as calmly and peacefully as it was possible for the fiery old warrior to live, he was shown this appreciation by Wellington.

"Well," he said, "I never pretended I had an army that 'could go anywhere and do anything!' but at New Orleans I had a lot of fellows that could fight more ways and kill more times than any other fellows on the face of the earth."

Returning from the Indian wars and from the War of 1812, the mountaineers and backwoodsmen, who were then rapidly settling up the valley of the Mississippi, hung their rifles over their open fireplaces, or between the rafters of their cabin homes and turned to the enjoyment of the peace they had won.

In the "Valley of the Three Forks o' the Wolf" Old Coonrod Pile was still the dominant figure.

Those who had settled in the valley were prospering on its fertile soil. It was then, as it is to-day, remote from popular highways, but the valley had grown into a community almost self-supporting. The owners of the land had equipped their farms with such agricultural tools as were in use in those days, and the Wolf river had been dammed and a water-driven flour mill erected.

The houses tho built of logs and chinked with clay were comfortable homes, where in winter wood-fires roared in wide chimney-places, where there was no problem of the high cost of living--and few problems of any kind relating to living.

The men of the valley farmed diversified crops, furnishing all that was needed for food and clothing, and they even raised tobacco for the pipes smoked at the general store run by Coonrod Pile in an end room of his home.

It was the day when the weaving-loom was the piano in the home, and all the women carded, spun and wove. The table-garden, the care of the house, the preparation of the meals and the making of the covering and the clothes were in the women's division of the labor. The families usually were large and every member a producer. To the girls fell shares of the mother's work. The boys helped in the fields, chopped the wood and rounded up the stock, that at times wandered far into the mountains. There were bells on the cows, on the sheep and even the hogs, and the boys soon learned to distinguish ownerships by the delicate differences in the browsing "tong" in the tone of the bells.

Residents of the valley sold to the outside world the live stock they raised, and poultry and feathers and furs, and tar and resin from the pines on the mountaintops. They purchased tea, coffee and sugar, a few household and farm conveniences, and little else. The balance of the trade was heavily in their favor and they were prosperous and happy.

They had no labor problems. They recognized without collective bargaining the eight-hour shift--"eight hours agin dinner and eight hours after hit; ef hit don't rain;" as one old mountaineer, living there to-day, interpreted the phrase, "A day's work."

Even when the home of the mountaineer was a one- or two-room cabin, accommodations for any stranger could be provided, and if he wished to remain, work could be found for him. They observed without thought of inconvenience the Colonial idea of "bundling."

When the stranger proved worthy there would be a log-rolling and a space of ground cleared for him to till, and a log-raising in which the community joined, and made a merry occasion of it, to give him a home. The way was easy for his ownership of the land and the cabin. Prices for cleared land, around the middle of the last century, ranged from twenty-five cents to five dollars an acre.

In the valley the father never talked to the son of the dignity of labor. Much was to be done and everyone labored and thought of it as but the proper use of the sunlight of a day.

Their life was primitive, rugged, but contented. Deer and bears were in the mountains, and wild turkeys were to be found in large flocks, while the cry of wolves added zest to the whine of a winter wind.

A cook-stove was an unknown luxury, and the women prepared their meals in the open fireplace. The men cut their small grain with a reap-hook and threshed it beneath the hoofs of horses.

The mode of life made men of strong convictions and deep feelings. But those feelings were seldom expressed except under the influence of religious devotions.

The ministers were all circuit riders and venerated leaders of the people of the mountainsides. They traveled the mountains on horseback, constantly exposed to hardships, and they labored devoutly without consideration of the personal cost. It was the custom for these itinerant ministers to give free rein to their horses and read as they rode the mountain-paths, stopping for a prayer at every home they reached. Protracted meetings were held in almost every community they visited, for many months would pass before they returned. Funeral services would be held for all who had died during the absence of the minister. The meetings lasted so long as there was hope of a single conversion.

One of the preachers of those old days, who was born in the "Valley of the Three Forks o' the Wolf" and preached at Pall Mall as part of his circuit when ordained, has left a record of one year's work:

"During the conference year I preached 152 times, traveled 1,918 miles on horseback, prayed with 424 families, witnessed 80 conversions to God, and received 67 persons into the church. I sold about $40 worth of books, baptized 40 adults and 18 infants ... and received less than $30 of salary for same, and raised for benevolence $36.25. To God be all the glory! I have toiled and endured as seeing Him who is invisible. However, when God has poured from clouds of mercy rich salvation upon the people, and when in religious enjoyment, from the most excellent glory, I have been lifted to Pisgah's top, and have seen by faith the goodly land before me, I would not exchange this work for a city station."

Against the worldliness of some of his people, the same old mountain minister recorded a protest:

"I have known families who had three or four hundred dollars loaned out on interest, and not less than five hundred dollars' worth of fat cattle on the range, who did not own a Bible, or take any religious newspaper, nor any other kind, and did not have any books in their homes, and yet owned two or three fiddles and three or four rifle-guns."

The day of prosperity and religious contentment at Pall Mall lasted until the coming of the Civil War.

Fentress county had contributed its pro rata of volunteers to the conflict with Mexico, and Uriah York, the grandfather of Sergeant York, was among those who stormed the heights at Chapultepec.

Tho this war was declared by a President who came from Tennessee, the Mexican conflict did not reach to the firesides and into the hearts of the people of the mountains of the state as other wars had done. So years passed in which there was no outward evidence of the war spirit of Fentress county that was soon to tear families asunder, leave farms untenanted and to obliterate graveyards under the rush of horses' hoofs.

The Yorks had come to Fentress county from North Carolina and settled on Indian Creek. Uriah York was the son of John York, and they came from Buncombe county in that "Old North State," the county which had a reputation like Nazareth so far as turning out any good thing was concerned, and the path of the cant, derisive phrase, "All bunkum," leads directly back to the affairs of that good old county.

On Indian Creek the Yorks were farmers, but at his home Uriah started one of the few schools then in Fentress county. His school began after crops were laid by and ran for three months. He used but two text books--the "blue-backed speller" and the Bible.

There are men living to-day on Indian Creek who went to school under Uriah York, and they recall the uniqueness of his discipline as well as his school curriculum. The hickory rod was the enforcer of school rules, but full opportunity to contemplate the delicate distinction between right and wrong was given to all. A three-inch circle was drawn upon the schoolroom wall and the offending pupil was compelled to hold his nose within the penal mark until penitent.

Young and active he took part in all the school sports in the long recess periods, for his school lasted all day. Learning at the end of one school term that the pupils had planned as part of the simple commencement exercises to duck him in Indian Creek, he exposed their plot, playfully defied them, left the schoolroom with a bound through an open window and led them on a chase through the mountains. He circled in his course so he could lead the run back to the schoolhouse. As evidence of goodfellowship and as an example of the spirit of generosity in the celebration of victory, he gave to each of the boys as they came in, a drink of whisky, from a clay demijohn he had concealed in the schoolroom.

But in those days whisky and apple brandy were considered a necessary part of household supplies, and there was but little drunkenness. Whisky and brandy were medicine, used as first aid, regardless of the ailment, while awaiting the arrival of the doctor with his saddlebags of pills and powders. Their social value, too, was recognized, and the gourd and demijohn appeared almost simultaneously with the arrival of any guest. But it was bad form--evidence of a weak will--for anyone, save the old men, to show the influence of what they drank. This was, however, a perquisite and one of the tolerated pleasures of old age.

In the records of a lawsuit tried in Fentress county in 1841 the price-list of some necessaries and luxuries are shown:

"To two gallons of liquor, $1; one quart of whisky and six pounds of pork, 80 cents; one deer-skin, 75 cents; two kegs of tar, $2; two ounces of indigo, 40 cents; one gallon of whisky, 50 cents; five and one-half pints of apply brandy, 31-1/4 cents."

They were almost uneventful years at Pall Mall from the days of Coonrod Pile until the Civil War. Less than a score of years lapsed from the death of the pioneer in 1849 until over the mountains broke the warstorm in a fury that has no parallel except in wars where father has fought son, and brother fought brother; where the cause of war and the principles for which it is fought are lost in the presence of cruelties created in personal hatred and deeds of treachery perpetrated for revenge. A third generation had grown to manhood at Pall Mall.

In Fentress county, the polling of the vote upon secession was marked with bloodshed. The county was on the military border between the free and the slaveholding states. Coonrod Pile had been a slaveholder, but few of the mountaineers were owners. Slavery as an institution did not appeal to their Anglo-Saxon principles; poverty had prevented slavery's advance into the mountains as a custom, and as racial distinction was not to be clearly defined into master and worker, the negro's presence in the mountains was unwelcomed. A war to uphold a custom they did not practise did not appeal to them; so as a great wedge the Alleghany mountains, extending far into the slaveholding states, was peopled with Union sympathizers.

Fentress county on the slope of the great mountain range and on the border between the territory firmly held by the North and by the South became a no-man's land, subjected successively to marauding bands from each side, a land for plunder and revenge.

Before the war the county had been sharply divided politically, and with few exceptions that alignment held. Those who were Union sympathizers went north into Kentucky and joined the Federal forces, and those on the side of the South went for enlistment in the armies of the Confederacy. The men who remained at home were compelled by public sentiment to take sides, and the bitterest of feeling was engendered. The raids of passing soldiers was the excuse for the organization, by both sides, of bands who claimed they were "Home Guards"--the Federals under "Tinker" Beaty, and the Confederates under Champ Ferguson. These bands, each striving for the mastery, soon developed into guerrillas of the worst type the war produced, and anarchy prevailed.

Churches were closed, for religious services were invaded that the bushwackers could get the men they sought. Homes were burned. Civil courts suspended. Post-offices and post-roads were abandoned. No stores were kept open and the merchandise they formerly held was concealed, and there became a great scarcity of the necessaries of life. Many homes were deserted by entire families and their land turned out as common ground. There was waste and ruin on every hand, and no man's life was safe.

Each deed of cruelty was met with an act of revenge, until men were killed in retaliation, the only charge brought against them being, "a Northern sympathizer," or "a Southern sympathizer." There is not a road in the county not marked with the blood of some soldier or non-combatant.

No section of the great Civil War suffered so enduringly as that which was the boundary line between the sections, and no part of the boundary suffered more from devastations of war in the passing to and fro of armed forces and from the raids of marauding bands, steel-heartened in quest of revenge, than did Fentress county.

At the outbreak of the war, Uriah York went north into Kentucky and joined the Federal forces. Ill, he had returned to the home of his wife's father at Jamestown, and while in bed learned of the approach of a band of Confederates. He arose and fled for safety to a refuge-shack his father-in-law had built in the forest of "Rock Castle." His flight was made in a storm that was half rain and half sleet, and from the exposure he died in the lonely hut three days afterward. Only forty years of age, he had served his country in two wars.

The "Valley of the Three Forks o' the Wolf" paid its tribute of blood and money. Elijah Pile had grown old and years before had succeeded his father, Coonrod Pile, as head of the family. All his sons had grown to manhood. He was a non-combatant, but a Union sympathizer. His four sons were divided in their allegiance--two upon each side. And two of them paid the supreme price, and they paid for their convictions as they rode along public highways.

Conrad Pile, Jr., "Rod" as he was known, like his father, Elijah Pile, was a non-combatant, but sympathized with the North. In the autumn of 1863 for some cause, unknown to his relatives, he was taken prisoner by Confederate troops, members of Champ Ferguson's band. As they rode along the road with him, some shots were fired. They left him there.

In June of the following year, Jeff Pile, a brother of "Rod," was riding along the road beyond the mill that creaks in the waters of Wolf River. He was going to visit a brother. He had taken no active part in the war, but was a Southern sympathizer. Some of "Tinker" Beaty's men galloped into sight, fired, galloped on. Mountain men fire but once.

But the murder of Jeff Pile threw a red shadow across the years that were to come after the war was ended.

The war-feuds of Fentress county did not end with the ending of the war. There was lawlessness for years. Some of the Union men and Union sympathizers, in the majority in the county during hostilities, assumed to the full the new power that came to them by the war's outcome. Conservative civic leaders sought to reestablish a condition of peace, but the lawless and desperate element prepared personally to profit from the situation.

Farms had been deserted and many of the owners of these lands who had fought on the side of the Confederacy were kept away through the threats of death should they return, and some who had remained throughout the war were forced to flee to protect their lives from those who coveted their property.

A series of land-frauds sprang up under the cloak of the law. Upon vacant farms false debts were levied; fake administrators took charge of lands whose owners had died during the conflict; other property was hastily forced under sale for taxes.