PART III
Opening statement
E.O Wilson
In the pure sense, ecology means the science of the study of the environment,
and especially the living environment--the organisms that make up the cruciial
part of the environment in which we live. So ecologists are people who study the
environment scientifically. The origin of that word is very interesting because it
comes from two Greek words: ecos means the home, the house, where you live;
and logos means a discourse or a study of. So it's the study of our home —
ecology.
Title Sequence:
APPALACHIA: A HISTORY OF MOUNTAINS AND PEOPLE
PART THREE -- Mountain Revolutions
Narrated by Sissy Spacek
John Muir — Voice Over
Once I was very hungry and lonely in Tennessee. I had been walking most of
the day in the Cumberland Mountains without coming to a single house, and
there is no place so impressively solitary as a dense forest with a stream passing
over a rocky bed. Feelings of isolation soon caught me, but one of the Lord's
smallest birds came out to me from some bushes at the side of a moss-clad rock.
And in one moment that cheerful, confiding bird preached me the most effectual
sermon on heavenly trust that I had ever heard through all the measured hours
of Sabbath.
And I went on not half so heartsick, nor half so weary.
John Muir
The Thousand Mile Walk
Narration #1
In the middle 1800's, the young naturalist, John Muir, hiked across Appalachia
from north to south. It was the first extended wilderness journey of his long life,
and he later named it The Thousand Mile Walk. Like nature writers William
Bartram and Andre Michaux before him, John Muir discovered in the
Appalachian mountains and forests an ever-changing world that filled his soul
with wonder and wild delight. Like his mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Muir felt
that in the woods, "a person casts off his years and returns to reason and faith."
"Nature," he wrote, "always wears the colors of the spirit."
In Appalachia John Muir reveled in a biological treasure unsurpassed in North
America.
Harvard Ayers
The biodiversity, for a temperate forest, is just utterly incredible.
Jim Petranka
And if you plot the distribution of species in maps, you find that many things
center right here in the southern Appalachians in terms of maximum diversity.
Harvard Ayers
This area here in the Southern Appalachians has the highest diversity of
salamanders and other related critters in the world.
Jim Petranka
The Appalachian Mountains are incredibly diverse. If you look at different
groups of organisms, look at snails, look at the fungi, look at the birds, look at the
salamanders.
George Constanz
Salamanders...
Robert Zahner
Salamanders...
Chris Bolgiano
Salamanders...
Steve Wallace
Frogs and Salamanders...
Barbara Kingsolver
Salamanders are — just wonderful....
E.O. Wilson
The southern Appalachians are the headquarters of salamanders. These are just
these beautiful little creatures. They look something like lizards. They live in
streams and pools and spring heads and in moist forests, and some of them have
brilliant colors--mottled green and gold or black with a red stripe on the body.
Of course, I grant you that becoming enamored of salamanders is an acquired
taste, but they are aesthetically beautiful.
Jim Petranka
They're gentle animals. They’re secretive. They don’t bite, they don’t sting,
they just live out there in the woods and do their thing. and they have these big
bulging soft eyes and sort of a smile to their face.
Barbara Kingsolver
They're these creatures with these skins that let water just pass through them.
There's something really miraculous about... They're really creatures of water.
They're sort of these little bodies of creekness. And there are more different kinds
of them here than anywhere else in the world.
We cut to Jim Petranka's field trip to study salamanders. "Salamander Field Trip
with Dr. James Petranka"
Jim Petranka V.O.
Salamanders have been around a long time. They evolved – we’ve got fossil
records that go back to 165 million years ago. The adults come down typically in
the springtime and they lay their eggs. The eggs hatch out. There’s a larval stage
that’s equivalent to the tadpole stage of the frog, the larvae lose their gills, lose
their fins. They metamorphose and they crawl up on land and live in the
surrounding forest.
One of the things we find is that we have remarkable densities of these
salamanders in the forest. Densities there that can be in the order of 7000 per
acre. That’s a lot of animals. Far more than the birds, far more than the
mammals and they’re out there every night, eating insects, removing insects
from the forest litter, you realize they can't be ignored ecologically. Most of our
species are toxic to some extent.
Here in the southern Appalachians, we have had really excellent conditions for
speciation. Very difficult for populations to move between major mountain
ranges, and the net effect is, when these populations become isolated in different
mountain ranges, they start to drift apart evolutionarily. They’re starting to
evolve into new species. So that insular nature, the island-like nature, associated
with these high mountains, helps in the evolution of new species. And the net
effect, after millions of years of these cycles, is that we have enormous
biodiversity here.
Barbara Kingsolver
There are more different kinds of them here than anywhere else in the world. So
I guess the salamander should be on our state flag. but I guess that would only
be possible if we had a state of Appalachia.
Narration #2 -- Water
The myriad communities of plant and animal were echoed by the diversity of
human communities taking shape in the early 1800's -- from town to village to
hollow to tiny church to family farm. They included skilled German farmers and
feisty Irish Presbyterians, low and high church Englishmen, African slaves,
free blacks, mysterious olive-skinned Melungeons, and persistent communities
of Native Americans who refused to abandon their mountain homes.
It has been written that “A mountain man loves his water as a rich man loves his
wine,” and the region of Appalachia has had plenty of water to love. Rainfall is
plentiful, and more importantly, it is spread evenly throughout the year.
There
are no dry seasons. In both the natural world and the human, the abundance of
life and the abundance of water have gone hand in hand.
Jerry Wolfe
The Cherokees always had water. And they had water to use for rituals. Like
early in the morning, when you get up...of course, you didn't have running water
in the house, but you always went to the water. And you washed off. You
cleansed for the day. And if you had bad dreams and you went to the water, you
cleansed those bad dreams away. You washed them off, and they went
downstream, you know. They left you. And that was the reason for going to
those waters, and that's the reason for living close to a river
Barbara Kingsolver
This is the wettest, prettiest, soggiest land you're going to find in the country I
guess this side of the Everglades. . It's really spectacularly noticable to me
because I lived in Arizona for so much of my life. When we moved back here,
just the greenness of the forest would leave me speechless. You know, to look at
a hill side where there are as many colors of green as a dictionary has words was
so stunning to me, and I would think I grew up here and I never took time to be
thankful for rain and the color green.
Narration # 3 --- Appalachia and Water
In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Europeans quickly settled the
Appalachian river valleys with their rich ancient soils, often cultivating former
Native American farmland, which they called "The Old Fields." Later arrivals
were forced to follow Appalachia's ten thousand creeks high into the hills to find
available land. By the early 1800's Appalachian land holdings were well
established, and the bubbling waters of Appalachia were being celebrated
nationwide as excellent remedies for all manner of ailment.
In the 1840's the springs of Appalachia gave rise to an exotic form of new habitat
called the mountain spa! — a watering hole where one’s ills could be cured in
pleasant company. There, well-to-do families from the coast joined the new
Appalachian elite at dozens of delightful resorts like Warm Springs, Hot Springs,
Berkeley Springs, Capon Springs and White Sulphur Springs. Spas dotted the
mountains from Pennsylvania to Georgia, boasting waters rich in iron, sulphur,
magnesium and lithium.
The region became known as America’s Sanitarium.
Resident Physician, Berkeley Springs
If weather permits, rise about 6, throw your cloak on, and visit the
Spring. Take a small-sized tumbler of water and move about in a
brisk walk. Drink again at 7, and once more at half-past. After
breakfast, command a carriage and take a drive, or else a slow ride
on horseback. From 10 to 12 enjoy yourself in conversation , but eat
no luncheon — at 12 take a glass of water, at 1 take another. Exercise
at ten pins or billiards; then dine at 2. Amuse yourself until 5.
Drink a glass of water at 6; excercise until 7— take a cracker and a
cup of black tea and enjoy dancing in moderation until 9. — Then
quaff a final glass from the Spring and retire.
Ed Bernbaum -- out
So the early settlers how came here had // viewed the mountains as obstacles and
dangerous places that they had to overcome or conquer or suppress like a demon.
However, back in Europe, with the Englightenment and the Romantic Period in the 17th,
18th, and 19th centuries, there’s a transformation in the attitudes, in which mountains
were seen as places where you sent to for a sense of the sublime. It began with Rousseau.
We talked about the healing qualities of mountain air--of course, there are a lot of
sanitoria here and places to go to for your health here in the Appalachians. It comes out
of that tradition. And then you have poets like Geothe and Shelley and Wordsworth, who
started talking about mountains--especially the Alps--as symbols of the sublime in the
human spirit. So there’s this transformation in which the mountains become divine
again and attractive places you go to for inspiration.
Narration #4 --As frontier forts gave way to market villages, and small towns popped up along
the major rivers, human society in Appalachia began to assume the structure of
society elsewhere in America: merchants, lawyers, and prosperous valley
planters were the mountain elites. But in Appalachia there was a difference: the
Mountains — which twisted and turned through eleven states and stood like a
colossus in everyone's backyard.
Helen Lewis
So you always had the courthouse crowd, and the owners and merchant
class, and then you had the people who lived back in the woods, and up
the hollows, and the people who tried to make a living off the land.
Barbara Kingsolver -- out
Agriculture here, agrarian people here have managed to co-exist with the natural habitat
much better than anywhere else in the country... maybe because there wasn't a lot of
choice.
Narration #5 --- Jefferson's Dream
The topography of the mountains ensured that Thomas Jefferson's dream of
America as a nation of small, independent farmers persisted in Appalachia
longer than anywhere else in the country. By providing limits to the size of
farms and obstacles to human travel, the mountains both divided and unified the
Appalachian people. Like its humble salamanders, each Appalachian
community occupied a distinct parcel of landscape — separated from its
neighbors by a rim of mountains.
Family groups were tightly knit, and each
developed its own lively mode of self-sufficiency.
Denise Giardina
To have been one of those people before coal, I think would have been a very
wonderful thing in a lot of ways -- to live in the mountains...
I think it was probably hard in a lot of ways, but also very rich in a lot of ways.
They would have been able to hunt and farm, to swim in the rivers that when I
was a child we couldn’t even put our foot into because they were so polluted.
And they would have had a rich heritage--music and stories and neighborliness.
Ron Eller
Mountain farms were remote, but most American rural communities were remote
communities. I think we can overexagerate the isolation of Appalachian communities
and farms at this time. // In the 19th century most Americans lived in remote rural
communities.
Barbara Kingsolver
Because of the topography, a farm here consists of a lot of land that's sloped like
this and then what they call the bottom. And in earlier days they farmed, you
know, the slopes with mules,
Beuna Winchester
Raised corn, rye, wheat, and potatos--sweet potatos and Irish potatos.
Jerry Wolfe
Always had cattle. Not a lot of cattle, but enough to live on. And then planted
corn and planted beans. Also, a big apple orchard. Sell maybe a couple of
bushels...
Denise Giardina
People didn’t need cash for much--that they pretty much made things they grew
what they needed. It was a very corn-based culture--probably like nativeAmerican cultures in that way.
Beuna Winchester
You eat what was put on the table, and you was glad to get it. You eat your
breakfast or you give out before dinner. You knew you had to eat before you
went to the field or where you went out to work. Staples was beans and
potatoes and meat, and cornbread. And always had biscuits for breakfast.
Denise Giardina
People raised their own pigs to slaughter, and they raised their own chickens,
and that was true right up through my mom’s generation. They milked their
cows and that’s how they got their dairy products.
Beuna Winchester
When you learn to saw with a cross-cut saw and chop with an ax and drive a
team of mules and haul timber out of the woods, you learn to get comfortable.
You can climb a tree, you can shoot a squirrel or anything you need to do.
Ron Eller
Mountain agriculture was woodlands agriculture. There wasn't a lot of cultivated
land. The land that was cultivated was usually fenced in for the family garden.
A variety of vegetables and produce to sustain the family through the year was
raised in the garden, but most of the farm was still in woods.
Hill Craddock -- out
Europeans, of course, brought with them a north European, Scotch-Irish agriculture
model, a pastoral model, they were grazers. They brought their herds, sheep and cattle,
and grazed those mountains. In the fall surely the animals were grazing mostly on
chestnut.
Chris Bolgiano
People would let their hogs and cattle run loose on the mountainsides to eat the
chestnuts and the acorns and fatten up, especially in the fall, on that good rich
mast.
The Cherokee knew the use of between 400 and 500 different medicinal plants,
and the settlers learned a lot of that, and the tradition of the Granny Woman in
Appalachian culture, knowing all these different herbs. .
About the only things they would have to buy would be ammunition for their guns,
sugar, salt, some of which was mined locally and for that they would have bartered.
Beuna Winchester
They'd trade labor. You work for them and they work for you, and they'd trade
you things that they had for what you had. And if you had a middlin' meat that
you // didn't need, you could go trade it for some honey that the other fellow
had. // It was a trade and barter life.
Chris Bolgiano
They spun and wove. Of course, Appalachia is famous for its fabrics and its
quilts.
Denise Giardina
My grandmother made all the clothes in the family, and if you look at family
pictures of my great-grandparents’ family, all them, including the boys, clearly
are wearing home-made clothes.
Wilma Dykeman Every once in a while, they would come together to cut the cane and make the
molassas. They would come together to harvest a crop...to do an essential task,
but also make it a task that would bring them together.
Chris Bolgiano
And the community was very strong. People tend not to associate that with
Appalachia. You tend to think of the independent farmer, the sturdy yeoman,
the Jeffersonian stereotype, but communities were very strong. People helped
each other. Barn raisings, when people needed to put up a new barn, the
community would come together. In illness people would help each other.
Beuna Winchester
Say somebody got sick and they needed helping hoeing out their corn. Hoe it
out for them. Everybody worked for everybody else. You'd have corn
shuckings. You'd have people come in shuck corn maybe all day.
Ron Eller
An additional value is something I call an egalitarian spirit. The idea that
everybody is as good as everybody else, and it doesn't matter how many degrees
you have or how big a car you drive or how big your house is, that everybody is
just as good as everybody else.
Loyal Jones
We have a saying: I wish I could buy him for what he’s worth and sell him for
what he thinks he’s worth. That would be the worst thing you could say about
some mountain people, because they value this leveling situation and this
modesty.
Beuna Winchester
You can not live a rich man's life in the mountains on a mountain man's pay.
You've got to live a mountain life on a mountain man's pay. And you can do that
if you respect it and do it like it's supposed to be done.
Narration #6 -- A Gift
For the mid-19th century highlands farmer, life was back-breakingly hard, but
life was also very good. And all of the natural world of Appalachia --- the soil,
the water, the plants, the animals --- seemed a boundless gift from the Creator
— to be simply brought under control for the uses of humankind.
In 1850, the
forest seemed so vast, the trees so large, the water so pure, the flocks of birds so
uncountable .....
Nikki Giovanni
I was born in Knoxville, Tennessee. I am an Appalachian.
Ancilla Bickley
I suspect that when people close their eyes and summon up a vision of an
Appalachian, that they never see a black person, because we are kind of the
invisible people, almost, in Appalachia. Though the music that we play may not
be the same; the food we eat may be a little bit different. Nevertheless we are
long-term residents of the area, and I think have an attachment to place that is
similar to any other Appalachian.
Narration #7 -- Slavery in Appalachia
The first African-Americans to come into Appalachia arrived as slaves.
They
constructed the iron furnaces, worked the salt mills, staffed the health spas, and
carved out the first railroad beds. Where the farms were large enough, they
worked those too. Whenever possible, they travelled Appalachia’s
Underground Railroad and slipped across the river into free Appalachian states
like Pennsylvania or Ohio. Overall, slaves made up about six percent of the
population.
A barebones mountain life, however, did not lend itself to the practice of
slavery, and by mid-century America was realizing that slavery was a
contradiction to its founding principals. By the time the Civil War erupted in
1861, the Appalachian backyard of every southern state was torn to pieces.
Sharyn McCrumb
The region was split between people who wanted to secede and people who
didn't.
Judy Bonds
The Civil War really divided families, really divided families.
John Inscoe
You can find people in the very same neighborhood, very similar backgrounds,
might even live next door to each other, in which one household would be
Unionist, the other would be Confederate.
Lamar Marshall
My great-grandpa Robert Henry Marshall, fought for the North. He was way up
into the mountains. Nobody had slaves there. Many others fought for the
South, and I’ve had a lot of great-great-grandfathers that died. Families that lost
6 sons out of one family. The most brutal war imaginable.
Sharyn McCrumb
Most of the people in Appalachia did not have anything in common with
flatlanders. They didn't own slaves. They had that Braveheart attitude. If you're
going to make fun of us and call us hillbillies, now suddenly you want us to go
out and die for your cause? Why?
Narration # 8
-- Civil War Background ---
From 1861 until 1865 Appalachia was, in fact, the site of two wars
simultaneously.
The first was the official Civil War --- fought between large
armies of Union and Confederate soldiers. They clashed in the mountains
around Chattanooga, Tennessee, and chased each other up and down the
Shenandoah Valley of Virginia for four bloody years, --- the deadliest war in
American history. But the second war in Appalachia was more immediate and
intimate and had by far the more disastrous consequences.
John Inscoe
For so much of the mountain areas it's an internalized war. It's neighbor fighting
neighbor, guerilla bands, these bushwhackers that are wreaking havoc on
neighborhoods, on farms, taking advantage of the vulnerability, of the isolation
of the farms and the families that they are preying on.
Narration # 9 -- Summary of Civil War
So divided were loyalties during the Appalachian Civil War that no one could be
sure who was on his or her side. Churches split in half. With the menfolk off at
war, mountain farms were victim to plunder by whichever army or guerrilla unit
happened to pass nearby.
In many communities, chaos reigned.
The Massacre of Shelton Laurel --John Inscoe
One of the more notorious incidents in the Civil War in western North Carolina
comes in the remote community of Shelton Laurel in Madison County just north
of Asheville, in which raids by bushwhackers, Unionists, leads to an attempt to
get salt. Salt is very important for the preservation of meat.
Sharyn McCrumb
One winter night they went into the town of Marshall and they broke into the
warehouse and they stole some salt, and the Confederacy realized they were
going to have to make an example of these people.
John Inscoe
That leads to Confederate units moving in, up into the mountains, the remote
community of Shelton Laurel, where they round up these 13 men who range
from very old men to very young, including a 13 year old boy.
Sharyn McCrumb
But they didn't get the right ones, the ones that actually stole the salt. They got
little boys, sick men, and the elderly. But they got about a dozen of them, and
told then they were going to take them for trial to Knoxville.
John Inscoe
Gather them up, torture their wives and mothers before rounding them up, but
once they found them, pretend like theyíre heading them off to east Tennessee to
turn them over as prisoners,
Sharyn McCrumb
They round them up and marched them down to the creek there, and told them
they could take a break, and then they shot them, one by one, just executed them,
without a trial, without anything, just murdered them.
John Inscoe
Get them out of view of their own community, and line them up and shoot them
into very shallow ditch, trench.....
Sharyn McCrumb
People were angry about that for generations. And Davey Shelton, who was 12,
was one of the last ones killed. In Appalachia you could live through the four
years of the Civil War, have your livestock stolen, your crops destroyed, your
barn burned, your kinfolks killed, and through the whole four years never meet
someone whose name you did not know. It was a very personal war. I think
that makes it a war that's much harder to get over.
John Inscoe
This becomes a cause celebre in the extent to which the war is seen now as totally
ruthless, as totally out of bounds in terms of the guidelines and rules of warfare
and prisoners and so forth.
Sharyn McCrumb
And I think that makes it a war that's much harder to get over.
Music and image
Narration # 10 -- A weakened region
The Civil War deeply wounded Appalachia — politically, economically, and
spiritually. In 1860 it was a region unified by three generations of common
mountain culture, with a prospering economy, and a satisfying way of life,
comfortably nestled into a forest ecosystem. Five years later, the region was
internally divided, impoverished, and ripe for plucking.
Ron Eller
The Civil War was an important watershed era in the history of the region. Not
only did the War disrupt the mountain communities and economy and way of
life in many serious ways, it also introduced outsiders to the natural resources
and wealth of the region,
Chris Bolgiano
During the Civil War soldiers came into the mountains that had never heard of
the Appalachian Mountains, never knew anything about the geography, but
when they came into the mountains they saw this incredible stand of timber.
And when the war was over, some of those men who were affluent and well
connected, came back into the mountains to get those resources.
The largest tree I've read about was a chestnut tree that was 17 feet in diameter,
not circumference but diameter. It's almost incomprehensible. Because the soil
was virgin soil in the sense that it had never been cleared off by any huge
catastrophe or disturbance. The soil was very productive, and our temperate
climate in the Appalachians lends itself to good growth. So the trees were
enormous.
Narration #11 -- The tree: one of the world's dominant forms of life
At the close of the American Civil War, Appalachia still retained 90 percent of
the ancient forest that had covered its mountains for eons. Indeed, for more than
280 million years, seed-bearing trees were among the most dynamic, aggressive
participants in the planetary survival contest and had become one of the world's
most dominant forms of life. Trees were able to adapt gracefully to changing
conditions and to provide for offspring in a dazzling variety of ways. For its
part, the human species evolved in close conjunction with trees, and for
thousands of years humans and trees were intimately connected — but never
more so than in 19th Century America, when everything from roads to furniture
to houses to wagons to tools to railroad ties was made from wood — the new
Appalachian treasure.
Helen Lewis
The area was, has always been part of almost a global economy. I think that
maybe the people got isolated, but the area itself and its resources were never
isolated. From the time after the Civil War with the huge lumber companies that
came in. I mean the enormous resources that this region has provided for the
building of the whole country is incredible.
Ron Eller
The first thing to happen in many communities was when outside timber and
mineral buyers could come into a mountain community and buy up large parcels
of land from local people.
Helen Lewis
They tell the story in McDowell County. The Philadelphia lawyers came down.
And so you had these land speculators and land buyers. And they recruited
local folks like John C. Mayo in eastern Kentucky. So you had local folks who
made it rich by being the agents for the coal companies and for the timber
companies, and buying up from their relatives, knowing the land. They might
have been local lawyers, or entrepreneurs, in the small towns. And sometimes a
mountain man might feel that if he sold off the mineral rights he could still raise
his corn. This wouldn't affect him, so he made a good deal, he thought, maybe a
dollar an acre wouldn't be bad, not knowing the worth of what was there.
Others, I think, were tricked into it.
Judy Bonds
The people that lived here had no idea about what the worth of their land was,
had no idea how much their land was worth.
Denise Giardina
The attitude was the same attitude that you see toward the Native Americans.
Oh they're not doing anything with that land, you know.
Judy Bonds
A lot of courthouses were burned down in the late 1800's, and that was to hide
ownership. Our ancestors were told, you can't prove it's your land, get off. A
lot of women became widows because their husbands refused to sell. It was a
very pitiful time. And that's the time I would like to try to tell everyone: don't
sell, don't sell.
Denise Giardina
Well, what you basically had was a land rip-off. You can look at the land books
in a county like the county where I grew up, say for 1875, you can see this list of
individual land owners and small farms, and you can look at the same land
books 20 years later, and you’ll see a list of corporations.
Ron Eller
Land was transformed in the region from a place to live to a commodity to sell
by the growth of American industrial capitalism.
Narration # 12 -- ownership and voice-over
Voice-over by local color writer
Appalachia is a region that appeals to the imagination of the capitalist. While
there, I saw why eager purchasers are buying the forests and the mining rights,
why great companies, both American and English, are laying the foundations of
cities, and why the gigantic railroad corporations are straining every nerve to
penetrate the mineral and forest heart of the region. A dozen railroads are
pointed toward this centre — It is a race for the prize.
Charles Dudley Warner, 1889
Ron Eller
Between 1870 and 1900 thousands of miles of railroad track were laid throughout
the Appalachian region in almost every county of the region.
Helen Lewis
It was never isolated. There were railroads to take this stuff out. There were not
railroads for people... You might have to walk the tracks to get where you
lived.
Narration # 13 -- local color, strange people
As the railroads tore into the mountains of Appalachia in the late 19th Century,
national journalists tore into the character of the Appalachian people. Once
admired as courageous, industrious, self-sufficient and proud, the descendants
of the heroes of King's Mountain had seemed to embody an American ideal.
Following the Civil War, however, travel writers began to emphasize the
Strangeness of the Land and the Peculiarity of a People who would live in such a
land. They noted "unusual facial contours" and "disproportionate extremities"
reminiscent of the late President Lincoln. They vilified the mountaineers as
ignorant hillbillies; violent and lazy, little better than barbarians who had
relapsed into witchcraft, practically starving in a land that time had passed by.
As the industrial takeover of the mountains took firm hold, the Appalachian
people were defined as "Uncivilized," much as the Native Americans had been a
century before.
But, said one writer, "They will make wonderful millhands,
miners and woodticks."
Voice-over
Two men faced one another on opposite sides of an ancient titan from the
old growth forest and swung long-handled axes in slow, deliberate
rhythm until about a third of the trunk had been cut away. The axes were
then laid aside and a long cross-cut saw was applied to the opposing face,
gnawing slowly into the thick wood of the centuries-old oak or hickory or
sycamore or cedar, for an hour, or even two. Suddenly, when only a few
inches of unsevered wood remained, the swaying giant crashed to the
earth in a quick, thunderous roar, its high branches ripping a swath
through the lesser timber below. As the echoes subsided, a stillness,
almost mournful, lay across the forest.
— Harry Caudill
Narrator # 14 -- Timbering
As the great naturalist John Muir wrote, "The forests of Appalachia, although
slighted by man, must have been a great delight to God, for they were the best
He ever planted."
For 200 million years the great hardwoods and evergreens of
Appalachia had grown and evolved into what one naturalist called "the gayest,
most colorful, most livable and bountiful forest in the world." All of that,
however, was about to change.
Barbara Kingsolver
I have a lot of favorite trees. I'm partial to redbuds, for the obvious reason:
beauty.
Jerry Wolf
A favorite tree? I think when you come right down to it, it's a -- I like a
mullberry. A mullberry tree.
Buena Winchester
I say a maple. Because the leaves -- they're so pretty when they come out. And
it seems like they hang on so long and they're a pretty shape. They look like
your hand.
Chris Bolgiano
I'm really very fond of chestnuts oaks. Now that's quite different from the
chestnut tree. Chestnut oaks also have a way of getting very gnarly. They
become these wonderful speciman trees. And they also become hollow, so
they're great wildlife trees.
George Constanz
To walk up to big old white oak and hug it is really a .... quite an affirming
experience.
Buena Winchester
Really the trees are our best friend. Without the trees, we couldn't even suervive.
If you just look at the things that's made from trees... But if they're respected and
used in the nature that god's meant them for, they'll be here for a lifetime.
They'll re-furnish themselves -- for our benefit.
Chris Bolgiano
Until the industrialized logging of the late 1800's, when the railroads came in, the
mountaineers tended to be very selective and very small scale. They would pick
a tree that they needed for a particular purpose and they would haul it out with
oxen or horses. A scale that the forest could easily absorb and recuperate from.
George Constanz (in forest)
But starting in about 1880, a lot of these areas that formerly had not been cut now
were vulnerable because of the tracks being laid up every hollow and the Shay
engine that could negotiate thse tight turns and steep grades. // This small
locomotive that had a small turning radius that could turn on these tight
railroads that go up these mountain hollows. //The railroad was able to build
spurs up these side hollows, and then that allowed commercail logging, the
clearcutting all the way up to the crest.
Bob Zahner 12
There’s a logging railroad right here in the valley below us, and they // would
cut down the trees with cross-cut saws, and with oxen, they would haul them
over to the railroad, and the railroad would take them over to the saw mill, and
they would cut up the boards and haul them away.
Harvard Ayers
There was a cutting of the forests in the east that occurred over maybe a 40-50
year period around the 1900 period and 95 percent of the forests were cut in the
East at that time.
George Constanz (in Kilmer forest)
So between 1880 and 1920, literally the last of the virgin forest, except for a few
postage stamp stands, was clearcut.
Chris Bolgiano
It was a half-century of absolute holocaust. Timber was wrenched out in any
way they could:
George Constanz
Between 1880 and 1920 basically the entire Appalachian chain was clear-cut.
And the way it was cut in those days wasn't selective trees here and there. It was
cutting down every tree on a given parcel.
George Constanz (in Kilmer forest )
And the slash, the left-over cutting, was left on the ground. Because the canopy
no longer shielded the ground, the ground dried out, and the slash dried, and so
it became tinder.
Chris Bolgiano
The steam equipment being used at the time gave off lots of sparks. There was
fire after fire after fire.
George Constanz (in Kilmer forest)
The sparks would come out of the smoke stack of the locomotive, and also the
sparks from the steel wheels on the rails, would ignite the tender near the tracks,
and they would take off, and vast areas of this slash would burn. Sometimes the
heat was so intense// , the organic level of the soil, that foot and a half of soil
would burn, literally, all the way down the the minealized layer.
Harvard Ayers
This was an amazingly bad thing, because if you have a forest fire, and you have
heavy rains come along, you're going to get erosion. You're gong to get increased
flooding.
Chris Bolgiano
When the forest is clear-cut, what you lose first of all is the root structure that
holds the soil. You also have this huge open hot sunny area where it was before
shady and moist, so you lose all those plants and animals that depend on the
shady, moist environment: salamanders, soil organisms. You lose the basic
forest composition.
al soil is restored.
Constantz 59
It devastated everything.
Narration #15 -- Conquerers
It was an era that celebrated conquests and glorified conquerers. Loggers,
railroaders and absentee owners alike posed proudly alongside or on top of
their fallen titans, which had required so much technological innovation, capital
investment and physical effort to bring down. Few noticed the wholesale
destruction taking place. It was a busy, almost frantic time and drastically
altered the Appalachian way of life forever.
George Constanz
Imagine what it did to human communities. Small communities living in a
hollow in a forest setting had a very different life than a logging camp in a bare
exposed hillside, in a factory housing. Those are two very different kinds of life.
PAUSE
Bo Taylor
It's kind of a yin/yang situation because it's good and bad. For one thing, it kept
our people alive. People could say bad things about the fact that that happened.
What it did is it fed families. Back in the early part of this century, or the last
century, if you wanted to see a Cherokee, he would have been wearing logging
boots and overalls.
Narration # 15A -- The Cherokee nation returns
Throughout the 19th Century the Eastern Band of the Cherokee nation struggled
just to stay alive. Although their land was stolen and never returned, they were
held together by a common language, an ancient culture, and a generous,
resourceful spirit. They also found one true friend in the white world.
Jerry Wolfe
Will Thomas who was white, he was raised by a Cherokee family.
Bo Taylor
Will-usdi. Little Will. They say he was short in stature.
Jerry Wolfe
And he learned to speak the language, you know, with Drowning Bear.
Bo Taylor
An old man that adopted him, put him under his wing and taught him things,
taught him how to speak. As he grew up he had a love for the Cherokees. But he
was also a very smart guy. He was an entrepreneur. He was one of the richest
men in North Carolina before the Civil War.
Narration 15B
As chief Drowning Bear was dying, he asked Little Will Thomas to become the
new chief of the tribe, which at that time was not even allowed to own land.
Freeman Owle
And so he began to buy land and the Cherokees began to buy land and they put
it in Will Thomas's name in the thousands of acres.
Jerry Wolfe
He;d buy it up from the white people because he could deal with them He was
a lawyer. So he could go talk to them, and he could get the land, and he'd bring
it back and then turn it over to the Cherokee people. And that's the reason we're
on this land now, you know....
Narration 15C -- home again
Eventually, the Cherokees collected more than 50,000 acres of forests and
woodlands and put it all in Will Thomas's name. When his creditors threatened
to gobble it up after the Civil War, the Cherokees went to court and won.
Finally, in 1882, a half century after the devastating Trail of Tears, the
Cherokees won a Supreme Court victory that returned their proper right to a
mountain homeland.
Bo Taylor 18
Sure, Will Thomas made some money on us because he negotiated for us. But if
you'd seen all the time and effort that he did, and the fact that we're still here,
Will Thomas is a hero.
Jerry Wolfe -- Out -- For DVD "special features"
My dad used to say, trees are very sensitive. Plants are very sensitive. They
understand when you're coming after them. Like a big oak tree, and you're going to cut
it for lumber to sell. He said, " You know that tree knows that you're coming after it,"
and he said, " He don't feel too good about it, I don't think." He'd say it like that, you
know. And then the plants,... Of course, all the forest, the way he used to explain it
was... connected.
Narration #16 -- End timbering/Begin coal
In the late 19th Century, as the ancient old-growth forest was being relentlessly
chopped down and hauled away, a second, far more ancient, far more valuable
Appalachian forest was being discovered — hidden even more deeply in the
mountains. And bankers, railroadmen and industrialists from Philadelphia,
New York, Baltimore, Amsterdam, and London were scrambling furiously to
concoct plans to get at it. When geologists had completed their surveys, the
worth of Appalachia's coal was estimated in the trillions of dollars.
Robert Hatcher 14
The coal in the Appalachians, all the way from Pennsylvania to Alabama, was
formed on the west side of the Appalachian mountain chain as it was being
uplifted. In the interior.
Scott Southworth
Now as the continents migrated around through time, beginning about 300
million years ago, they were up closer to the Equator. So at that time we were
in an equatorial zone. There were swamps, rivers. It was extremely humid, a
moist climate. There were forms of dinasaurs. But a lot of plant and tree
material. There were a lot of ferns, and palm-looking trees. It was almost
tropical jungle, if you will.
Robert Hatcher
Coal is an accumulation of plants, deposited along with sand and mud, and the
interlayered plant material, with the sand and mud, was buried...
Scott Southworth
And it's that compaction and lithification with depth, that all that organic material was
converted to carbon and coal.
Robert Hatcher
The time of formation of coal is on the order, again, of hundreds of thousands to millions
of years. This is deep time.
Narration #17 --- The flowers of darkness
Deep in the interior of the coal mines could be found signs of petrified plants, white on
the black slate or black coal. Illuminated by the faint light from a coalminer's helmet, the
miners called them The Flowers of Darkness.
Mary Lee Settle 8
Oh I love that name. The “flowers of darkness” were sometimes fish, sometimes
swamp plants, sometimes flowers. And they're beautiful. And they're
irreplaceable. It takes another million years. Farming is different, because you
can take out of the land and put back in the land. But in the coal business, you
can't put anything back.
Denise Giardina 15
I think people have known about coal since people have lived here. There’s a river near
where I live here called the Coal River and it’s named because there’s outcroppings of
coal that people used to go get to put on their hearth fire in their cabin or something. So,
in that sense, it’s always been here and people have always known about it. In terms of
the kind of transformational devlopment of coal that made this a coal field that
produced billions of dollars worth of coal, that fueled the industrial revolution, you had
a total transformation of this society from an agrarian Appalachian community to an
industrial, coal-camp society in just a period of 10, 15 years. It’s hard for me to imagine
what it would have been like to live through that kind of wrenching change.
Ron Eller
Land was transformed in the region from a place to live to a commodity to sell
by the growth of American industrial capitalism.
Narration #19
-- Tranformation
For most Appalachians during the first half of the 19th Century, the word "land"
meant place — usually a specific place -- a mountain, a valley, a hollow -- to be
treasured, looked after, worked and tended, loved. The land was personal. The
land was home. As humans applied the tools and methods of industrialization
to the mountains, however, the land came to be considered an object -- to be
manipulated, controlled, and sold to the highest bidder. So great was this
contradiction between ways of looking at land that speculators contrived a legal
device to persuade reluctant farmers to sell. They called it the Broad Form Deed.
Ron Eller
Ironically the Broad Form Deed was developed by a native Appalachian, a
schoolteacher named John C C Mayo. Mayo realized he could acquire personal
wealth by going around to his neighbors and buying up land from them,
especially at tax time, when people needed cash to pay their taxes. Eventually,
Mayo realized he could acquire the mineral rights that outside capitalists wanted
without acquiring the surface rights, leaving the surface to the local farmer, but
selling the mineral rights to the absentee corporation....
Narration #20 --The fine print of the Broad Form Deed, however, gave to the mineral owner the
right to use the surface for any purpose useful for mining, including the right to
build roads, cut timber, pollute creeks, and cover the surface with toxic wastes.
For all these privileges the outside corporation paid less than a dollar per acre,
knowing that an acre would yield from 5000 to 20,000 tons of coal.
Denise Giardina 18
People thought, well, I’ll sign over the mineral rights and make $50 and pay my
taxes, and they said I could stay on the the land--they did think they could stay,
but they ended up being kicked off about 80% of the land in many areas of
Appalachia.
Narration #21 --- Coal and Labor
At the turn of the 20th Century coal was king of the industrialized world, and
central Appalachia contained 50 million acres of coal land. Soon it would
produce 80 percent of the nation's output, and mine owners began far flung labor
recruitment campaigns in places wherever there was already deep poverty.
Ancilla Bickley 33
You can look at the newspapers. You’ll find advertisements for miners coming
into West Virginia. Many came from Alabama. A great number came from
Alabama.
The wages that were being offered, the lifestyle that was being offered was certainly an
improvement over what was available to them in the Deep South. They were excellent
workers. Those miners prided themselves on being able to go into the deep mines and
bring the coal up. They could really get that coal.
Ron Eller 23
Another population pool was brought into the region: immigrants, who were pouring
into the US from southern and eastern Europe. Italians, Poles, Czechs, Slavs,
Denise Giardina
Lebanese, Russians, Czechs, Spaniards, Italians, French, British, Welsh, South
American, African-American, Chinese -- All these people came together and
actually made a unique culture -- an Appalachian ethnic mix that was pretty
unique.
Narration #22 -- Coal and wealth
Soon, thousands of mines were operating all over central Appalachia. In 1910
the Appalachian Trade Journal boasted: “There is probably no other area of its
size on earth capable of furnishing so broad a foundation for the creation of
wealth as this Appalachian region.” And for a time it was true: in the early
decades of the 20th Century, Appalachian coalmining was the most profitable
industry in America. The new coal barons flaunted mountaintop mansions, and
the tiny town of Bramwell, West Virginia, boasted the highest percentage of
millionaires in America. Unfortunately, most of the wealth, like the topsoil and
the timber, raced quickly off the mountains to New York, Cleveland,
Philadelphia, or London, with little regard for the land or people left behind.
Denise Giardina
The early coal camps were horrendous. The living conditions were terrible.
//Children dying of disease, people dying in the mines--terrible living
conditions.
Ron Eller
The company owned the land, the company owned the houses, the company owned the
roads, the company owned the water system and the sewer system, the company
owned the store.
Denise Giardina
The church was owned by the coal company. The school was owned by the coal
company.
Helen Lewis
They owned the town. They built the houses. They built the roads. They owned the
electricity. They owned the water company. And when they left everything fell apart.
Denise Giardina
I’ve seen birth records and death records in Catholic churches in the coal fields from tht
time period. You turn the death records--I would turn 5,6,7 pages of tightly packed
names and not find one person who had lived past the age of 50.
Narration # 23 --- Dangers of the work
Undercutting, dynamiting, sorting and loading was hard, lonely, dangerous
work, but miners developed a camaraderie that gave them the resilience
necessary to toil twelve hour days underground. Companies gave little thought
to safety, and miners were responsible for setting their own roof timbers and
minding their own dynamite. They were killed at the rate of three miners per
day by roof falls alone, and at least once a year, massive underground explosions
rocked the national consciousness.
Harvard Ayers
The Appalachians at that time became somewhat of a resource colony -- almost
the place where you could sacrifice the environment here for the good of the big
cities that were growing up in the East and Northeast especially, and to a lesser
degree in the Southeast. So you end up with demands being put on these
Appalachain mountains for coal resources, for forest resources, and others, that
really the people that were using them weren’t here to see how badly they were
being degraded.
Narration # 24 -- Floods and Faces
By the early decades of the 20th Century, Appalachia had developed a boom and bust
economy based on resource extraction.. The region became a study in contrasts. Railroad
tycoon, George W. Vanderbilt, chose the North Carolina mountains near Asheville to build
America’s most opulent 230 room estate, while nearby, the enormous copper mines of
Ducktown totally poisoned 23,000 acres of woodland for generations to come. Eventually,
when the timber ran out and the coal market crashed, the faces of the people began to
resemble the face of the scarred land, Guests at the mountain spas sometimes complained
that the treeless mountainsides were no longer pretty to look at, but no one paid much
attention until the spring floods of 1907, which swept across Appalachia inundating farms
and cities in Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Kentucky. With no trees or topsoil to
absorb the rain, the sudden, massive runoff lifted the Allegheny, the Big Sandy, the Ohio,
the Kanawha, and the Monongahela Rivers to terrifying heights. After forty years of
mountain industrialization, a time of crisis was at hand. And new answers were badly
needed.
Wilma Dykeman -- End statement
I wish I knew the answer to it. Why is it that some people, some countries will
preserve their rivers, or will preserve their woods, and that the ones who came in
here very often did not? As far as the general character came, it was usually to
eat up, use up, and this has been part of our great tragedy in Appalachia. Look
at the coal mines there. Look at this great resource we could have had if we had
used it wisely. But we had to go and we had to make fortunes out of it ... The
timber companies that came, caring nothing about the mountains, about the land
that was here. They simply came in to cut the timber, to ship it out, and then
they shipped out. It’s really greed ... either in the people who live here or the
people who come here for a purpose to gather something, more than they need.
As far as the general character came, it was usually to eat up, use up, and this has been
part of our great tragedy in Appalachia.
Narration #25 -
Fall shots
From the time the first humans arrived in Appalachia more than ten thousand
years ago, the ancient mountains have enticed visitors with their many
treasures: Coal, iron, gold, copper, trees, herbs, wildlife, water, stunning vistas
and rich land -- Appalachia has had it all. And has both challenged and tempted
the human spirit. Could we conquer this natural world? Or would we discover
a way to be a part of it?
It is an ancient, and still unanswered question.
George Constanz
It's pretty clear that we depend upon our environment, not for one but for
dozens of different goods and services. In fact, we even have a name. We call
them ecological goods and services. So to think that man is outside the concept
of ecology, or outside an ecosystem, I would say is folly.
End of Part III