Part 13

The current bore me down stream like an arrow, but an accomplishment, picked up in truant days, came in good stead, and with a few, strong strokes, I reached and climbed out on a sand-bar, at some distance below where I had made the plunge. As I rose to my feet, I was dumb-founded to see an antlered head rise from behind the rocks where lay the supposed slaughtered deer. Then the whole blue form of a buck appeared in view, and leaped from sight, up the rocks, and under the trees on the mountain’s steep front. The sight chilled me more than the waters of the Tennessee. It was the very buck I had shot.

I hurried up the bank, clambered over the cold rocks, and reached the sand-bar where my game had fallen. It was bare! I could not convince myself of its being a dream, for there were the imprints of the hoofs. I picked up the shattered prong of an antler. It had been cut off by a charge of buckshot. The mystery of the fall and subsequent disappearance was explained. My shot had hit one of his antlers and simply stunned him for a moment. Just then a voice rang from the rocks across the river:

“Are ye taking a swim?”

“No, just cooling off,” I answered.

It was Ben Lester who spoke, and with him was Sanford and the dogs.

“Where is the deer that came this way? What luck have you had? Why aint you here watching?” yelled Sanford.

I did not stop to answer his volley of questions, but plunged into the river, and reached the opposite bank. Then, dressing myself, I explained.

“Well,” said Lester, as I finished, “no more could have been expected.”

“Why?” I asked rather indignantly; for, although I fully realized that I had proved myself a miserable shot, I did not like being accused of it in terms like these.

“No one could have done any better,” he answered.

“No better?”

“Not a bit. It was the duck-legged buck!”

“Are you sure?” I asked, feeling like a drowning man sighting a buoy; for here lay the shadow of an excuse for my failure.

“Of course. I saw him leave you. I’ll bet my last dollar that he has inside of him a mad-stone as big as your fist!” Then shaking his head, and talking half aloud to himself; “Strange, strange, strange! Fifteen years old, and still alive!”

I did not attempt to scatter his superstition by telling that in reality I had hit the buck, and that it was wholly due to my poor marksmanship that he escaped. Sanford then told how he had topped a doe at his stand and killed her,--the only game secured that day. In the afternoon the Rose brothers brought it with our horses, as we had directed, to the house of Daniel Lester.

Lester’s is an unpretentious, double log house, situated in the center of a tract of cultivated hill-side land on the north or east bank of the Little Tennessee, thirty-three miles from Charleston, North Carolina, and three miles from the Tennessee state line. It is approached by a good wagon-road from Charleston, or from Marysville, Tennessee, the head of the nearest railroad. The view from the door-way is of exquisite beauty, especially towards evening when the wine-red October sun is sinking amid the clouds beyond the mountain summits at the far end of the river, and pours a dying glory over the scene. Daniel Lester is a man of prominence in the county. His is a North Carolinian hospitality, and we will always hold in pleasant remembrance our short stay at his humble dwelling.

The most pleasant time of the hunt is the evening of the hunt, when darkness has fallen, all the party is within the same doors, a rousing fire roars and leaps in the great, open chimney, and flings its light in every face, the faucet of the cider-barrel is turned at intervals, chestnuts are bursting on the hot hearth-stones, and after every man in his turn has recounted his day’s experience, the oldest hunter of the group tells his most thrilling “varmint” stories, till the flames die down to glowing coals, and midnight proclaims the end of the day in which we were after the antlers.

NATURAL RESOURCES.

“I’d kind o’ like to have a cot Fixed on some sunny slope; a spot, Five acres, more or less, With maples, cedars, cherry-trees, And poplars whitening in the breeze.”

buildings are mostly of brick, and substantial, while the residences show thrift and taste on the part of their owners.

Shelby is the second town in size in the piedmont belt, having a population of 990 in 1880. It is pleasantly situated in the valley of First Broad river, and is surrounded by good lands. An experienced planter ranks Cleveland county, of which it is the capital town, first in the belt in adaptation to the culture of tobacco. Shelby is likely to be visited by all who review the historic field on Kings mountain. There is near the town, one of the oldest health and pleasure resorts in the state.

Rutherford and Polk counties, drained by the Broad river, on the west and northwest, are elevated to the summit of the Blue Ridge, and are cut by its projecting spurs, and by the straggling chain of the South mountains. Their southern portions are level, and contain many acres of good land.

The valley of the Catawba, in Burke and McDowell, is unexcelled in the piedmont region for corn, wheat, oats, and vegetables. The soil is a clay loam, mixed with sand. The sub-soil is an impervious clay, which prevents the filtration of applied fertilizers. Better improvements than are found in most localities bespeak thrift. The trade of the upper Catawba, and its tributaries, goes to Morganton and Marion. Alexander, Caldwell, and Wilkes, are fast taking high rank as tobacco producing counties, though it is probable Catawba will maintain the lead in this industry.

A few words to the intending immigrant may not be amiss. It is not wise to select “old field land,” with a view to raising it to a good state of cultivation. Most of those footprints of desolation are beyond recovery. Those which are not, it will not pay to attempt to recover as long as soils less worn remain purchasable at reasonable figures. A Philadelphia colony made the experiment, against which we warn, in Burke county, near Morgantown, a few years since. Like most Northerners who come south, they brought with them the ideas of northern farm life, and the methods of northern agriculture. With characteristic egotism, they never, for a moment, doubted their ability to build up what the native had allowed to run down and abandon as worthless. They purchased, at a round price, a large tract of old fields, built comfortable frame houses, and furnished them expensively. But much use and abuse had exhausted the clay of its substance, and, in spite of deep ploughing and careful seeding, it yielded no harvest. Their furniture was sold at a sacrifice, and they returned, to Pennsylvania, disheartened. If they had selected the best lands, instead of the worst, and been content to live economically, as poor people must live, the result might have been different. The folly which has made old fields, makes trying to resuscitate them none the less foolish, though buyers are frequently made to believe the contrary. The question naturally comes up: why are there so many of these ugly blots, marked by scrubby pines, upon the face of an otherwise fair landscape? The answer is, indifferent farming, resulting, in a great many cases, from the ownership of too much land. There was no object in saving manures, and ploughing deep, when the next tract lay in virgin soil, awaiting the axe, plough, and hoe. The writer remarked to a farmer, in Burke county, that his corn looked yellow and inquired the reason.

“Waal,” said he, “I gin hit up. I’ve worked that thar patch in corn now nigh onto forty year, and hits gin worster and worster every year. I reckon hits the seasons.”

To an intelligent planter in Catawba, I explained my inability to understand how soil, originally good, could be made so absolutely unproductive.

Evidently taking my question to imply some doubt as to the virginal fertility of which he had been telling me, he pointed significantly to an adjoining field, where a woman was plowing, or, more properly speaking, stirring the weeds with a little bull-tongue plow, drawn by a fresh cow, while the calf, following after, with difficulty, kept in the half made furrow. “You see what kind of work that is,” said my friend, “but in spite of it, they will harvest 15 bushels of wheat to the acre.” When, a little further along, I saw a wooden-toothed harrow in the fence corner, I was ready to give nature considerable credit.

During the same ride, while crossing a sand ridge, we came where some men were making a clearing. The prevailing growth, standing close together, was a species of pine, uniformly about one foot stumpage, and reaching, mast-like, to the altitude of sixty feet. Between these were scrub oaks four to six inches in diameter, making the thicket so dense that to ride a horse through it would have been difficult.

“It strikes me,” said I, “as rather a strange fact, that those pines are all the same size. What species are they?”

“Those,” replied my friend, “are what we call old field pine. You asked me back there how land could be so completely worn out; here we have an example. That piece of land was cleared, may be, 100 years ago. It was then worked in corn, corn, nothing but corn, for may be twenty years, or more; not a drop of anything put on. It was then completely worked out, and turned public to grow up in timber again. Now it has been shaded and catching leaves for many a year, and has got some nutriment on top. They will work it in corn or wheat till there’s no substance left. The bottom was all taken out by the first working, and there will be nothing left to make a growth of trees a second time. When they get it worked out this time, it’s gone forever; over here on this side is a specimen. That field was cleared a second time ten years ago; now you see it won’t hardly raise Japan clover, and never will.”

“Don’t you try to sell these old fields, and old field forests, to men who come in here from abroad to make purchases?” I inquired.

“Well, it’s natural for us to get something out of this waste when we get the chance. But you’ve traveled in these parts, and seen large bodies of good land to be bought at low figures, and you may say that anybody that comes here will be treated right.”

“Suppose,” said I, “that on these better tracts Yankee methods should be adopted--after every few years of cultivation, seed the land down to grass, which feed to stock in barns; feed your corn fodder steamed, and use your wheat and oats straw for stable bedding. In that way almost all the vegetation taken off the soil is returned in a decomposed and enriched form.”

“Generally speaking,” said my companion, “I have little faith in Yankee ways in the South. I used to have a plantation in the low country, and have seen lots of those fellows come down with nickel-plated harness and steel plows. Most of them would begin to cultivate our friendship by telling us we didn’t know anything about our business. But we noticed that they all had to come to our ways, or sell out. The idea of Northern newspapers, that our plantations before the war were not worked systemically, is a mistake. Still I think your idea of farming in this elevated country is correct. You see here, with the exception of long, rigid winters, the climate is essentially northern, owing to our elevation. Every experiment at improved farming has been successful, though very few have been made.”

We were reminded by this of a story told by General Clingman, of Asheville, at the expense of an intelligent citizen of Buncombe county, whose residence was on Beetree creek, a branch of the Swanannoa. “As the surface of the stream was almost level with the surface of the ground, my fellow-citizen,” says Clingman, “being of good intellect and general reading, saw on reflection that he could with little trouble utilize its waters. He constructed his stable just as near to it as possible, and then cut a slight ditch to the stream, and with the aid of a hastily made gate of boards, he could at will let the water into his stable. When, therefore, his stable became rather full of manure, he had only to turn his horses on the pasture for a day, raise his little gate, and in a few minutes the stream of water was carrying everything away, and left the stable much cleaner than it would have been had he used a mattock and spade. His neighbors all admired his ingenuity in being able to devise such a labor-saving operation.”