The "Valley of the Three Forks o' the Wolf" is more than a fertile space between two mountain ranges. It is a rectangular basin of verdure and beauty in the glow of a Southern sun, around which seven mountains have grown to their maturity. Generously, for uncounted years, this family of the hills has given to the valley the surplus products of their timbered slopes, and the Wolf River has gone through the valley distributing the wealth the mountains brought in, brightening and adding touches of beauty here and there, ever singing as she came down to her daily task. The mountains and the river have worked unceasingly together to make the spot a place of comfort and beauty.
On the bare rock-shoulder of one of these mountains, in the closing years of the eighteenth century, stood one of the last of the "Long Hunters," that race of stout-hearted, sturdy-legged men who when the Atlantic Coast was dotted with sparsely settled British colonies climbed the mountains and went down the western slopes on the long hunts in the unknown land that lay below. They were the pioneers of the pioneers, who in their wanderings found a spot rich in game, in nuts and soil—such a home as they had wished—and they beckoned back for their families and their friends.
The figure upon the rock-ledge rested upon a long, muzzle-loading, flint-lock rifle as he looked out over the valley. His legs were wrapped in crudely tanned hides made from game he had killed. His cap was of coon-skin. His search for adventure and game had carried him across the crest of the Cumberlands and along many weary, lonely miles of the western wooded slopes of those mountains. Years afterward he is known to have said that the view from the crag that day was the most appealing in its calmness and its beauty that he had seen upon his hunts.
Below him stretched a grove of trees. Their waving tops told of their size and to his trained woodsman's eye the quivering oval leaves were the leaves of the walnut. It was assurance that the soil was rich. And through the length of the valley, twisted irregularly, lay a wide ribbon of saffron cane, from which at times the silver surface of a stream showed—a further evidence of the soil's fertility. Over the western edge of this tableland of green and yellow and silver the mountains cast a shadow of purple and the sun filtered slanting rays through the forest slopes on the north and east.
Down the mountainside he came, and into the valley; never to leave it, except when in bartering with the Indians he went to their camping-places for furs, or in the years of prosperity that followed he was upon a trading mission.
He first made his way through "Walnut Grove" in search of the caned banks of the river. As he pushed through the reeds that swayed above him he came suddenly upon a well-beaten path. In its dust were the prints of deer-hoofs, and he followed them. The path threaded the length of the valley beside the river's winding course, but he knew from the crests of the mountains above him the direction he was taking.
It led him to the base of one of these mountains, to a spring which flowed clear and cool, a brook in size, from a low rock-ribbed cave.
By the spring he cooked his meal. His bread was baked upon a hot stone and he drank water from a terrapin shell. As he ate his meal there came the sound of breaking cane, a familiar welcomed vibration to a hunter. A stone, that is still by the spring side, was used as a shelter and a resting-place for the rifle, and a deer fell as it stopped, astonished at the curling smoke that rose from its watering-place.
This was the first meal of the white man at the York spring or in the "Valley of the Three Forks o' the Wolf," and for more than fifty years the hunter lived within a hundred yards of where he camped that day. He was Conrad Pile—or "Old Coonrod," as he is known, the descriptive adjectives and byname ever coupled as though one word. He was the great-great-grandfather of Sergeant Alvin Cullom York, and the earliest ancestor of which he has account.
Above the spring in the rock-facing of the cliff is a large cave. Here Coonrod Pile spread a bed of leaves and made his home. The camp-fire was kept burning and its smoke was seen by other hunters, and Pearson Miller, Arthur Frogge, John Riley and Moses Poor came to Coonrod in the valley, and they too made their homes there, and Pall Mall was founded and descendants of these men are today eighty per cent of the residents in the "Valley of the Three Forks o' the Wolf."
This is but one of the many valley settlements made by "Long Hunters" in the Appalachian Mountains. Adventurous families in the last days of the Colonies and in the years that came after the Revolution, followed the hunters, and log cabins and "cleared spaces" appeared in the valleys and on the mountainsides. And from them sprang another race of long hunters who went out from the mountains down into the valleys of the Ohio and the Mississippi, returning to tell of the land and the game they had found. Not far from Pall Mall, as the crow would rise and journey, is a carving upon a tree that is believed, to historically mark the path of the most noted of the "Long Hunters," and it says:
"D Boon CillED a BAR On Tree in ThE yEAR 1760."
Emigrants of those days settled as Coonrod Pile and his companions took up their "squatter's rights" in the Valley o' the Wolf. As canvas-covered mountain-schooners carrying families of the settlers moved westward they followed the trails of the hunters and stopped where it appealed to them. Wagon-tracks grew into roads as the travel increased. And the roads unvaryingly led to the passes and the gaps in the mountains that offered the least resistance to progress. So scattered throughout the ranges of the Appalachians are many homes and settlements off from the old, beaten, wagon-trails, far distant from the railroads of to-day, reached only over rocky, rarely-worked roadways.
Those who dwell there are the direct descendants of pioneers. Here they had lived for generations unmolested by the rush and hurry for homes to the more fertile West. Often in those days a mountain neighbor was forty miles away, and they were long rugged miles. To-day a traveler distant on the mountainside can be recognized by the mountaineers while the man's features are still untraceable, by the droop of a hat or a peculiar walk, or amble of the mule he rides. In the case of any traveler along those remote roads the odds are long that the man, his father, his grandfather—as far back as anyone can remember—all were born and raised in the neighborhood, and the neighborhood is the valleys and the cleared spaces on the sides of all the mountains near around.
So the mountaineer of to-day is the transplanted colonist of the eighteenth century; he is the backwoodsman of the days of Andrew Jackson; his life has the hospitality, the genuineness and simplicity of the pioneer. It has been said of the residents of the Cumberland Mountains that they are the purest Anglo-Saxons to be found to-day and not even England can produce so clear a strain.
The mountain families have intermarried and because of the inaccessibility of their homes have remained marooned in their mountain fastnesses. They are Anglo-Saxon in their blood and their customs. They are Colonial-Americans in their speech and credences.
They have a love for daring that comes from the wildness and freedom of their surroundings. They have a directness of mind that is the result of unconscious training. They must be sure of the firmness of each footstep they take, and it is through and past obstructions that they locate their game. They are keen of observation, for the movement of a shadow or the swaying of a weed may mean the presence of a fox, or a dropping hickory-nut indicate the flight of a squirrel. They are physically brave, for it is the inheritance of all who live in mountains. Their word is accepted, for they wish the good will of the few among whom they must spend their lives; and to them lying is a form of cowardice.
They are sensitive because they are observant and realize they have been criticized and misunderstood—misclassed as a rare race of "moonshiners" and "feudists."
Quickly and clearly they see through any veneer of democracy the stranger may assume, to conceal an assumption of superiority. Yet for the stranger on the roadside, in answer to the halloo at their gate, the mountaineers are willing to go out of their way to do a favor, and they will cheerfully share such food and comforts as they may have, with any man. But they give their confidence only in proportion to demonstrations of manhood and genuineness, and as humanists they are not in a hurry. If there is an aura of caste, the distinctions must be created by those who have come as strangers into the mountains and not by the mountaineer.
They know they are not ignorant, except as everyone is ignorant who lacks contact with new customs and changes in world progress. They are fully cognizant of their lack of that knowledge which "comes only out of a book." But whatever their educational shortcomings, no one has ever laid at their door the charge of stupidity.
Raised in nature's school they are masters of its non-elective course. They know by the arc the baying hounds make the size of the circle the fox will take and where to intercept him. They can tell by the distance up the mountain's side where the dogs are running whether the fox is red or gray. They know by the sound a rock makes as it is dropped into the stream the depth of the ford. They have even a classical finish to their woodland schooling and they find a pleasure in noting that the bullfrog sits with his back to the water as the moon rises and faces it as the moon sets.
They know the signs of changing weather that will affect their crops. The tints of the clouds that float above them convey a meaning. There are cause and effect in the wind that continues in one direction. They watch the actions of wild animals and fowls, and they are wise enough to attribute to beast and bird an intuitive protective sense superior to their own. They note when the moss has grown heavier on the north side of the tree.
The steadiness of their poise and their silence in the presence of strangers is not due to moroseness or the absence of active thought. They have learned in the woods, if they are to be successful in their hunts, to be personally as unobtrusive as possible, often to remain motionless, and all the while to watch and listen alertly. Whenever they can be of real assistance, no one can more quickly or more generously respond.
They have their own standard of values in personal intercourse, and they can wait patiently and in impressive silence. They are always willing for someone else to hold the spotlight on their rural stage.
About themselves they are naturally taciturn, and public and unfriendly criticism has been proved to be a hazardous diversion. If the thought and comment of the stranger upon the mountaineer could be compared with the keen and often humorous analysis of the stranger the score would be found in surprizing frequency on the side of the calm and silent mountaineer.
They give but little heed to the clothes a man wears but look clear-eyed at the man within the clothes. They have no criticism for the way a man says his say, so he has something to say. A noted college professor, himself a mountain boy, maintains:
"I would rather hear a boy say 'I seed' when he had really seen something, than to hear a boy say 'I saw' when he had not seen it."
Old Coonrod Pile lived in the valley until his life spanned from the days when it was a hunting-ground of the Indians to the time when he can be remembered by some of the men and women now living in Pall Mall, who knew him as the most influential man of his time in the section, the owner of the river-bottom farm land, vast acres of hardwood timber, a general store and a flour mill worked by his slaves—a man grown to such enormous size and weight that in his last days he went about his farm and to oversee his workers in a two-wheeled cart pulled by oxen.
Those of the valley who now remember him were children when he died, for he was born on March 16, 1766, and his death occurred on October 14, 1849.
He saw his valley home changed from a part of the State of Franklin to a part of the State of Kentucky, then to Tennessee, and the abstracts to the deeds for land he owned show that Pall Mall was first in Granger county, later in Overton and finally in Fentress county as the State of Tennessee developed. Pall Mall is but seven miles from the Kentucky line, and for many years Coonrod thought he had taken up his residence within the Kentucky border.
Settlers of those days in leaving the Carolinas and Virginia traveled usually due west in search for a new home. It was this belief that he had settled in Kentucky that has led many to the opinion that Coonrod's former home was in Virginia. Others, without more definite knowledge for foundation, maintain that as he settled in Tennessee he had lived in North Carolina. The written word was rarely used and the stories of the earlier days in the "Valley of the Three Forks o' the Wolf" are tradition.
In a newly settled territory a man's birthplace and antecedents are facts immaterial to the community's welfare and many incidents historical in nature concerning Old Coonrod have been lost in the waste-basket of forgetfulness and no one now at Pall Mall has "heard tell of jes' where he come from." Yet some readily say that he came from "over yonder," and they point back across the mountains toward North Carolina.
In the first map of Tennessee, made by Daniel Smith, there is a dip in the northern boundary of the state line where Fentress county is located. But this was found to be an error of survey and later corrected. The surveyors of those days were men of courtesy and accommodation, for in the establishment of the Tennessee-Virginia line they surveyed around the southern boundary of the farm of a hospitable host and left his lands in Virginia because the old fellow maintained he had never had any health except in the mountains of Virginia.
That Coonrod was of English descent there seems scarcely room for doubt, and "Pile," or "Pyle" and "Pall Mall" stand as mute testimony. And "York" too is a component part of old England.
I was never able to learn why the village was given its unique name and there is no tradition that associates it with the noted street in London, though even to-day Pall Mall in Fentress county is but a single road. I asked a white-haired mountaineer how long the place had been known as Pall Mall. With a memory-reviving shake of his head that ended in a convinced nod, his answer was, "quite a-whit."
And that is the nearest I ever came to accuracy.
But seeing his reply did not contain the information wanted he looked at me thoughtfully and said:
"Hit's jes' like 'Old Crow!' Every morning for eighty-two years I ha' looked up at the rocks o' that mountain 'en they h'aint changed a-bit."
The government records show that Pall Mall was made a post-office on April 3, 1832.
Old Coonrod was a man of Big Business for his time; one of force of character who dominated his community and who "sized his man" by standards that were peculiarly his own.
A man would come to him to buy a "poke" of corn or flour, or for a favor. To the surprize of the stranger the favor might be over-granted or the corn given without cost; or, upon the other hand, he would be bruskly dismissed without the least effort at explanation. Unknown to the stranger the condition of his "britches" had probably given him his credit rating with Old Coonrod, for he held that patches upon the front of trousers, if the seat were whole, were decorations of honor, showing the man had torn them doing something, going forward. But, if the front of the trousers were good and the seat of them patched, no dealings of any nature were to be had with the dictator of the valley, for to Old Coonrod it meant the man "was like a rabbit; he could not stop without sitting down."
But the residents of the valley, many of them Methodists, claim this estimate works a hardship upon members of their faith for a good Methodist could wear the knees out at prayer and the seat out in "backsliding."
Old Coonrod's trading with the Indians was a series of successes. He is known to have had their confidence and friendship, and he was arbitrator between them and his neighbors whenever disputes arose.
Fentress county lying on the western slope of the Cumberlands was part of the great hunting-grounds of the Shawnees, Cherokees, Creeks, Chickamaugas, Chickasaws, and even the Iroquois of New York. The basin of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, that part now Tennessee and Kentucky, was claimed by each of these tribes as its own, not as home but as a hunting-ground, and when bands of hunters of rival tribes met in the territory each fought the other as an invader, and their battles gave to Kentucky its Indian name, meaning in the Indian tongue the "Dark and Bloody Ground."
But Old Coonrod kept pace with all of them and prospered from their friendship, and an Indian trail turned and led close to where he lived. The last of the Indians passed through the valley in 1842.
As Old Coonrod prospered he bought land and slaves, and was a large owner of both in his day. He was a cautious and judicious purchaser of realty. The court records show that at some time or other he was the owner of the most desirable parts of Fentress county. He held title to the land upon which Jamestown, the county seat, now stands, which is the "Obedstown" of Mark Twain's "Gilded Age." He owned "Rock Castle," a tract of hardwood timber that is enclosed by mountains and can be reached by but one passageway, a place that became famous during the Civil War. He bought and sold much of the county's best farming-land along Yellow Creek.
Fentress was made a county of Tennessee in 1823 and the first four pages of the new county's records of deeds show that within eighteen months Conrad Pile had added, through a number of trades, over six hundred acres to his already large holdings.
So cautious in land titles was he that at the time of his death he owned three rights to his home-place including the farming-land along Wolf River. The first was his squatter's rights, which he had homesteaded. But against this, North Carolina in ceding the territory of Tennessee to the United States Government reserved title to the land grants the state had offered to her soldiers of the Revolutionary War, and "one Henry Rowan" of North Carolina entered warrants given him on March 10, 1780. The Revolutionary soldiers had twenty years to locate their grants, and in 1797 Rowan appeared with surveyors, claiming by his entry of 1780 the "Valley of the Three Forks o' the Wolf." He operated under two land warrants of 320 acres each, and in his registry of one of them he specified "a tract on the north side of Spring Creek (now Wolf River), together with the improvements of Coonrod Pile."
Old Coonrod traded with him, and Rowan took up his residence in what is now Overton county. As late as 1817 there appeared "one Vincent Benham" with title under a conflicting grant dated in 1793. Old Coonrod traded with him and with "$10 in hand" Benham went his way.
But the deeds which Coonrod recorded were voluminous, with corners as explicitly marked as any land title of to-day. Up on one of the mountainsides upon a rock there is a crudely carved "X" which was made by Coonrod to mark a corner which called for a "beech tree" that has disappeared, and this mark and the forks of Wolf River, corners in Coonrod's titles, stand to-day as survey points for the boundaries of the farms now in the valley.
Coonrod built his home beside the spring, now known as "York Spring." Its yard includes the spot where he made his first camp and where he killed his first deer. Characteristic of him, he built well. The house was hewn logs, large logs, some of them over fifty feet in length. And the dwelling is now owned and occupied by one of his great grandchildren, William Brooks, the only brother of the mother of Sergeant York. The house is to-day one of the most substantial in the valley. Just across the spring branch and up the mountainside is the York home.
Old Coonrod built one of the rooms without windows and with only one door. That door led into his own room and opened by his bedside. In this windowless room he kept his valuables and it was both a safe and a bank for him. Into a keg covered carelessly with hides he tossed any gold coin that came to him in his trades. His rifle was kept there. He had the prongs of a pitchfork straightened and sharpened. The latter was his burglar insurance and he felt amply able to take care of his savings. And in those days men frequently passed through the valley whose occupations were unknown and whose countenances were often evil to look upon.
Pall Mall is not without its legend of the hidden keg of gold. It is known that Old Coonrod had his keg and kept in it his gold pieces. It is not known just when and why this method of saving was abandoned by him. But after his death no trace of the keg was found and it is said that upon his deathbed he tried to give his sons a message which was never completed, and it is believed he wished to reveal where his gold was hidden.
There are some who say he was seen to go up a ravine with a mysterious bundle and to return without it. The ravine is pointed out. It opens on the roadway about halfway between the Rains' store and the old home of Coonrod.
But there is no myth to the present-day side of the story. More than squirrels and rabbits have been hunted up that ravine.
But the legend of the hidden keg of gold is popular in many of the valleys of the Appalachians, and it will even be found to have leaped the valley of the Mississippi and almost identical in form appear and appeal to the impressionable imaginations of those who live in the Ozark Mountains to the west of that river.
There was but one thing in which Old Coonrod stood really in fear, something not made or controlled by man. It was lightning. Whenever a heavy thunder-storm broke over the mountains Coonrod, even in the last years of his life when he had grown so fat, ran with all the speed he could command for the cave above the spring, Here he would stay, muttering and unapproachable, until the storm abated. Then he would come from the cave swearing in that deep voice that carried both power and terror, and, as the story goes, "for hours 'niggers' would be hopping all over the valley."
Coonrod had a genuine admiration for the man or beast willing to fight for his rights. Once finding one of his jacks eating his growing corn, he put his dog upon him. The jack was old and small and shaggy. He turned upon the dog sent after him and seizing the aggressor by the hair at his back lifted him from the ground and maintaining his dignity trotted out of the corn-field carrying the squirming dog. That jack was pensioned. He was given his full supply of corn in winter and granted the freedom of the meadows and the mountainsides in summer. Old Coonrod would never sell him.
John M. Clemens, Mark Twain's father, lived in Jamestown when his "dwelling constituted one-fifteenth of Obedstown." He and Coonrod Pile were close friends, Pile helping elect Clemens to be the first Circuit Court Clerk of Fentress county. Both were firm believers in the future value of the timber, coal, iron and copper to be found in the mountains. In the 30's both acquired all the acreage their resources would permit.
Mark Twain makes "Squire Si Hawkins" of "The Gilded Age,"
conceded to be drawn from the life of his father, struggle to keep the value or the land unknown to the "natives." Squire Hawkins confides to his wife that the "black stuff that crops out on the bank of the branch" was coal, and tells of his effort to keep a neighbor from building a chimney out of it.
"Why it might have caught fire and told everything. I showed him it was too crumbly. Then he was going to build it of copper ore—splendid yellow forty per-cent ore. There's fortunes upon fortunes upon our land! It scared me to death. The idea of this fool starting a smelting furnace in his house without knowing it and getting his dull eyes opened. And then he was going to build it out of iron ore! There's mountains of iron here, Nancy, whole mountains of it. I wouldn't take any chance, I just stuck by him—I haunted him—I never let him alone until he built it of mud and sticks, like all the rest of the chimneys in this dismal country."
Again "Squire Hawkins'" appreciation of the speculative value of his lands is shown in a talk with his wife:
"The whole tract would not sell for even over a third of a cent an acre now, but some day people will be glad to get it for twenty dollars, fifty dollars, a hundred dollars an acre." (Here he dropped his voice to a whisper and looked anxiously around to see there were no eavesdroppers—"a thousand dollars an acre!")
To-day many of the acres owned by Coonrod Pile and John M. Clemens have passed the hundred-dollar mark and are climbing toward that whispered and seemingly fabulous figure. And this, too, before the coming of the railroad for which "Squire Hawkins" could not wait.
Twain delighted to have "Squire Hawkins" sit upon "the pyramid of large blocks called the stile, in front of his home, contemplating the morning." But John M. Clemens had his practical side, and the specifications for the first jail for Fentress county, drawn by Clemens and in his own handwriting made part of the county's records in 1827, show a very substantial strain:
"To wit, for a jail, a house of logs hewed a foot square, twelve feet in the clear, two stories high, and this surrounded by another wall precisely of the same description, with a space between the two walls of about eight or ten inches, and that space filled completely with skinned hickory poles, the ground floor to be formed of sills hewed about a foot square and laid closely .... the logs to extend through the inner wall of the building"—etc.
And that jail was standing serviceable and strong until a few years ago when the prosperity of Fentress county called for an edifice of red stone.
Clemens and Pile remained friends and competitive land owners until "with an activity and a suddenness that bewildered Obedstown and almost took away its breath, the Hawkinses hurried through their arrangements in four short months and flitted out into the great mysterious blank that lay beyond the Knobs of Tennessee"—to Missouri, where a few months afterward "Mark Twain" was born.
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."
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."
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.
That the proceedings should appear legal, the foreclosures were by due process of law. But if quietly circulated warnings against a general bidding for property when offered at court sale were not effective, some well-known desperate character would appear at the sale and threaten anyone who dared bid against him.
The bitterness of the feeling of the two sides subsided slowly, but there was ever present the realization that old alinements could be quickly and bloodily revived. Champ Ferguson, sought by the Federal authorities, appeared suddenly upon the streets of Jamestown. That day his old rival, "Tinker," was there. It was a personal battle the two leaders fought, while Jamestown looked on silently, fearful of the outcome. Beaty received three wounds, but escaped on horseback.
A short time afterward Ferguson was hanged at Nashville by order of court martial. The charge against him was that he had entered the hospital at Emery and Henry College and shot to death a wounded Federal lieutenant. Ferguson claimed justification as the Federal lieutenant, under orders to escort a war-prisoner—a Confederate officer and personal friend of Ferguson's—to headquarters, had, instead, stood his prisoner against a tree by a roadside and ordered a firing-squad to kill him. And the court-martial indictment of Ferguson read—"and for other crimes."
One of "Tinker" Beaty's men was Pres Huff, who lived in the "Valley of the Three Forks o' the Wolf." It was generally believed that he was the leader of the band who had ridden out of the woods and killed Jeff Pile, as he traveled unarmed along the Byrdstown road.
Huff's father had been shot. The scene of his death was where the branch from the York Spring crosses the public road at the Pile home. The deed was done by a band of Confederates who had taken the elder Huff prisoner, and neither Jeff Pile, nor his brothers, were to be connected with it, except in the quickly prejudiced mind of the victim's son.
The desperate character of Pres Huff is evidenced by the records of the United States Circuit Court for the Middle District of Tennessee in the suit of the McGinnis heirs for land in Fentress county. Their bill recites:
"Armed men who were led and controlled by one Preston Huff, who was a brigand of the most desperate character, forced complainants' father and themselves to leave the county to secure their lives and kept them from the county by threats of most brutal violence. The history of these men and the times prove clearly that these threats were not idle, nor those who opposed them survived their vengeance."
At the foreclosure on the McGinnis property, Pres Huff rode his horse between the court officers and those attending the sale, and pistol in hand declared the land his by right of possession. The bill continues as follows:
"Preston Huff, who was the desperado heretofore referred to, publicly proclaimed that he had fought for the land, had run the McGinnises from the county, and if anyone bid for the land against him he would kill him on sight. Even his co-conspirators would not brook his displeasure. The land was sold on his bid, no one dared oppose him. The history of his career shows it was wisdom to shun him. Many have been killed by him in the most cold and brutal manner."
There came to Pall Mall, when General Burnside was moving his Federal forces southward, a young man by the name of William Brooks. He had joined the Union Army at his home in Michigan. He was a daring horseman, handsome, fair and his hair was red-a rich copperesque red. The army moved on, but young Brooks remained in the valley. He claimed that as a private soldier he had done more than his share in the conquest of the South—and that the conquest that should ever go to his credit was the conquest of Nancy Pile.
When they were married, his father-in-law, Elijah Pile, gave him a farm and he tilled it, and he smiled his way into the favor of the community.
He lived in the valley about two years, and a baby had been born to them. The feeling between the children of Elijah Pile and Pres Huff was silent but tense; over it there fell constantly the shadow of the murder of Jeff Pile.
Meeting down at the old mill one day, Pres Huff and "Willie" Brooks engaged in an excited argument. Between the dark-browed, sullen mountaineer and the slender, gay young man a contest seemed uneven, and was prevented. Huff told Brooks that the next time they met he would kill him.
They met next day, on the mountainside, on the road that leads by the Brooks home, on across the spring-branch, up beside the York home and then up the mountain. Huff's riderless horse galloped on and stopped in front of a mountain cabin; his body lay dead in the road.
There was a hurried consultation at the home of Elijah Pile. Huff's friends, it was realized, would not be long in coming. Young Brooks went out of the house, down by the spring, and up the mountain back of it. He was never seen in the valley again.
Huff's friends waited.
Weeks afterward, Nancy Brooks, carrying her baby, went to visit a friend. She evaded the watchfulness of her husband's enemies, succeeded in crossing the Kentucky line and disappeared in the mountains to the north of it.
The friends of Pres Huff knew she would write home. Months elapsed, but finally a letter came, and was intercepted. She and her husband were at a logging-camp in the northern woods of Michigan.
Secretly, extradition papers for Brooks were secured, and Huff's former partner in a mercantile business, fully equipped with warrant appeared with a sheriff before the door of the cabin in the Michigan woods, Brooks was brought back to Jamestown, and put into the log-ribbed jail that John M. Clemens, "Mark Twain's" father, had built.
But there was no trial by law. The next night, through the moonlight and the pines, a little body of men rode. Up the valley, across the plateau, they went, and Jamestown was sleeping.
Taking Brooks from the jail they carried him three miles down the road toward Pall Mall. Here they bound a rope around his feet, unbridled a horse and tied the other end of the rope to the horse's tail. They taunted Brooks. But they could not make him break his silence, until he asked to be allowed to see his wife and baby. Rough men laughed, and there was the report of a gun. The horse, frightened, galloped down the road, and bullets were fired into the squirming body as it was dragged over the rocks.
The war had steeled men for the coming of death and crime, but at the manner of the death of "Willie" Brooks a shudder passed over the mountainsides. To Nancy Brooks was born a son a short time afterward, and he was named after his father.
A silent, broken-hearted woman, Nancy Brooks took up again her life at her father's home. To the little girl she had carried on her flight to Michigan and to the boy whose hair had the copper-red of the father, she devoted herself. The girl had been named Mary, and she inherited the piquancy and wit that had made her mother the belle of the valley, and as she grew to womanhood the mountaineers saw again the Nancy Brooks they had loved before war had come with its cold blighting fingers of death.
At the age of fifteen Mary Brooks met William York, the son of Uriah York, and they were married. A home was built for them, beyond the branch, beside the spring. And Alvin York was their third son.