The handsome brochure, on the other hand, closes by stating, “Land is being restored to a desirable contour, water pollution is being minimized, successful planting of affected areas is being accomplished, and the strip-mining industry is enjoying a far better public image.”
The kind of reclaimed mines pictured in the brochure are known by critics of the program as “Grim’s Garden Spots,” after Elmore Grim, director of the reclamation program; the severest critics, including Caudill, say that the objective of a better image for strip miners is really what the program is about. Talking privately, Caudill takes a bleak, fatalistic view of the future in store for Kentucky, or any portion of the American land beneath which coal can be found. Indeed, he takes a dark view of the drift of American life in general and what, if anything, can be done about it.
Others, however, point to him as a shining example of just how much one man can do, and for all his private moments of despair, he “sallies forth,” as he would say, all the same, a sort of Kentucky-style combination of John Muir, Mark Twain, and Don Quixote, doing battle in his own way, on his own terms, and he is hands down the most eloquent and effective voice for conservation in all Appalachia.
Like most mountaineers, Caudill tends to be independent, obstinate, and at heart a fighter. Though a member of such conservation organizations as the Sierra Club and the National Audubon Society, he never presents himself as, say, “a Sierra Club man.” He prefers to be his own man. Often he has no other choice, for the “conservation issues” he gets involved with in Kentucky are seldom disputed in quite the way they would be in other parts of the country. As he remarks, “It should be remembered that we have in this section a decided inclination to settle our differences with dynamite.”
Caudill makes his living as an attorney in Whitesburg (population eighteen hundred). His offices are on the ground floor of the Daniel Boone Hotel on Main Street. He is forty-seven years old, married, and the father of three children, one of whom, another James Caudill, has already made his own mark in the community by being the first boy from Letcher County ever to go to Harvard University.
Caudill himself attended the University of Kentucky on the GI Bill and received his law degree there. He is president of the Letcher County Bar Association, a former state legislator, a Democrat with grandfathers who fought on opposite sides during the Civil War. He is a tall, spare, bookish, long-legged man who dresses neatly, talks with a deep, musical mountain accent, walks with a limp caused by a German bullet in Italy, and goes about with a rather long look on his long face except when he is telling stories. Except for his time at college and the war years, he has spent his whole life in Letcher County (“dear old Letcherous County,” he calls it). His father, Cro Carr Caudill, was a coal miner who lost an arm in a mining accident and was later elected clerk of the court in Whitesburg. “Cro Caudill? Sure I remember him,” says an elderly mountaineer. “He only had the one arm, but he’d give you a good big hug with it—especially when he was lookin’ for a vote.”
Much of Harry’s boyhood was spent in and about the courthouse listening to stories told by the “eminent citizens who congregated there.” The high importance placed on the storytelling art in eastern Kentucky Caudill explains with a story (naturally) about an old friend, Judge L. Hayes, who had no regular Christian name, only the letter “L,” and who used to say, “‘Bout all we have got to do down here is chew ‘baccer, drink liquor, and tell lies.”
Caudill has collected stories of his mountain country for as long as he can remember, and he tells them magnificently, lovingly, in the rolling, rhetorical style of Kentucky’s old-time country lawyers. Many of his stories come from “old characters” he has “hunted up”. (“You know, those old people just love to talk,” he says, at the conclusion of a yarn he may have taken fifteen minutes to tell.) And many were included in his first book, Night Comes to the Cumberlands, widely recognized as one of the finest studies of Appalachia and its history ever written. Published in 1963, it had a profound effect on the long-standing, popular impression of life in “hillbilly” country, and particularly in Washington during the Kennedy administration. Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall compared it to John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath as a call to the American conscience. Soon after the book appeared visitors from Washington and New York—reporters, magazine photographers, government officials, representatives of the large foundations—began arriving in Whitesburg to meet Caudill and set off on what his wife, Anne, calls “Harry’s horror tours.” Some visitors were astonished to discover that whenever Caudill spoke it was in the same cadences as the book, as though he were speaking from a prepared script. But the reverse was the case: Caudill had dictated the entire book. “He had been out walking in the woods one afternoon,” his wife says, “and when he came in he told me he had been thinking about where all these people [in and around Whitesburg] came from originally and about what had happened to their country; so I began taking down what he was saying, and when we were finished we had just this big pile of typed pages, no chapters or anything, and we weren’t at all sure anyone would want to publish it.”
Another book, Dark Hills to Westward, was published in 1969. Part fiction, part history, it is a spine-chilling tale about a young woman named Jennie Wiley, who was carried off by Indians in 1789, saw her children murdered, and later made an epic escape through the Kentucky mountains. But there are still other stories, full of hilarious episodes and characters, and it is these he tells with the greatest zest, often slapping his knee with one big hand, and at the finish tilting back his head and muttering, “Oh my, oh my!”
Caudill’s stories nearly all deal with the same themes—the harsh, uncertain life of the mountaineer from pioneer times to the present, the kind of courage engendered by such a life, and the particular variety of politician that Kentucky has home-grown down the years. In one way or another, all the stories are related to the land. For it would be hard for Caudill, as for most people from his section of Kentucky, to imagine the course of human affairs disassociated from rivers, creeks, draws, mountains, hollows, bottomlands, and all that grows or lives in, on, or near them, or that may lie buried beneath them. And it is this kind of vision, this attitude toward the place where he lives, that gives Caudill’s kind of conservation a special significance. He is not simply dedicated to saving scenery. For him the scenic wonders, the ecology, the people and their stories, are all part of the land and in total represent a heritage only a vandal would degrade or destroy. And so it is that he finds the desecration of his small portion of America an unconscionable, unacceptable outrage.
Caudill’s part of Kentucky is neither the gracious bluegrass-and-blooded-horses Kentucky of legend nor the bustling, modern, industrial Kentucky of the state’s western half. He lives in the other Kentucky, set in the rugged Cumberland uplands to the east, where steep, wrinkled mountains, lush in spring and summer, extravagantly colorful in the fall, bleak as can be in winter, cover some ten thousand square miles and are sliced into a bewildering tangle of narrow, twisting valleys that shelter something like half a million people and what appear to be at least ten thousand hulks of abandoned automobiles. “The old cars from Cincinnati and Dayton all come down here to die,” one man told me.
Until the latter part of the nineteenth century it was country that had changed little since pioneer times. Then timber buyers began arriving with what seemed fancy offers for the immense stands of trees, most of them hardwoods, to be found nearly everywhere they looked.
The eyes of the “furrin” timber hunters must have popped with amazement [Caudill writes in Night Comes to the Cumberlands]. The great poplars and white oaks grew, for the most part, near the base of the hills and in the coves, while the lesser oaks and chestnuts predominated on the sharper points and near the hilltops. Countless walnuts dotted the forest, thousands of them without blemish and a yard or more in diameter. The Goliaths were the superb, pencil-straight poplars, some of them towering 175 feet and achieving a diameter of se
ven or eight feet.
There were enormous hickories, maples, beeches, ashes, black gums, pines, and hemlocks, an abundance and variety of trees such as could be found in few places on earth by then. The buyer was offering cash money in amounts seldom dreamed of in the mountains; the seller usually thought he was getting the better of the bargain. The going price was fifty to seventy five cents a tree, and from about 1870 on, thousands of mountaineers were busy with cross-cut saws. By the 1930s nearly all the virgin timber was gone; another supreme natural treasure had been destroyed.
Today the hardwoods are only beginning to come back. In all Kentucky there is but one sizable stand of virgin woodland, some 550 acres in Letcher County known as Lilly’s Wood. The late Lilly Cornett, former owner of the property, loved trees and turned down all offers from the timber buyers. (Along Line Fork Creek he is remembered as “the most peculiar man you ever saw…carried his money in an old Buffalo tobacco bag and dressed all raggedy.”) For the past few years, it has appeared that Lilly’s Wood, too, was headed for the sawmill. But Caudill and others, including the Louisville Courier-Journal, mounted such a concerted drive to rescue the trees that the state, with the help of the U.S. Bureau of Outdoor Recreation and the Nature Conservancy, finally stepped in and bought the property. The last remnant of the immense forest that once covered the whole of eastern Kentucky has been saved.
But the destruction of Kentucky’s trees was a minor tragedy beside what happened after the railroads came in and made it possible to take coal out. Coal was known to exist in the mountains by the earliest white explorers. Yet it was not until the end of the nineteenth century that the railroads began penetrating the Kentucky highlands and thereby put an end to the way of life that had existed so long undisturbed. Even by the turn of the century, Whitesburg had no telegraph, no telephone. Its only connection with the rest of the world was a narrow road twenty miles over the mountains. But with the arrival of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad, Lexington became a “daylight ride” from Whitesburg. A Seth Thomas clock was installed in the courthouse cupola and set to standard time. Things began to change rapidly. As a little history of the town written at the time states proudly, “The Romance of these hills—heart of these noble old Mountains should be Dig, Dig, Dig—The Open Door—The Open Sesame, To Old Midas’ Mints. Here all one has to do is to tickle the sides of Old Mount with a pick and an avalanche of ‘gold’ rushes down.”
Into Kentucky, close on the heels of the timber buyers, came the mineral buyers, affable, storytelling agents representing northern bankers and businessmen. Their purpose was not to purchase land, only the rights to whatever minerals lay beneath it, and they found the pickings better even than had the timber buyers. Thousands of mountain landowners put their X to the so-called broad-form deed, the now infamous legal document that not only gave the coal companies title to whatever “mineral and metallic substances” might lie beneath the soil, but authorized the grantees to do whatever was “convenient or necessary” to extract those same substances. To insure against further troubles with the owner of the property, a final clause absolved the coal company of all liability for any damages resulting from its mining operations.
The price generally paid for such rights was fifty cents an acre. On the average, over the years, an acre would yield a minimum of five thousand tons of coal, worth today about twenty thousand dollars. But the truly tragic consequences of all this would not be felt for another generation or more. No one back then had any reason to imagine anything like strip mining.
By 1912 or so the railroads had been built, and, as Caudill has written, the vast, backward Cumberland Plateau was tied inseparably to “the colossal industrial complex centering in Pittsburgh, and a dynamic new phase in the region’s history had begun.” The coal companies put up houses, whole towns; doctors, teachers, coal miners, and their bosses began moving in. The coal began rolling out in endless carloads. A ten-hour day in the mines was routine. Men died of “black damp” (methane gas), cave-ins, explosions; or, like Caudill’s father and his older brother, they were crippled for life. Still, wages were good by standards of the day, extraordinary by Kentucky standards, and nobody complained much until the Depression struck. Then followed years of suffering in the coal towns. The dole and the first chronic despair made themselves known in the mountains, and as Caudill likes to remind people, it was then, too, that the mountaineer, traditionally clean in his personal habits, began making garbage dumps of his streams, many of which had already been ruined by silt and sulfuric acid draining out of the mines.
With the Depression also came John L. Lewis and his United Mine Workers, a massive W.P.A. program, and in time, the war. Coal became a cash crop again and stayed that way until 1947 and 1948, when coal production hit its peak in Appalachia. In the 1950s came automation, more hard times in the mountains, and the start of one of the most important migrations in American history. Between 1950 and 1960 something on the order of one and a quarter million people left the mountains to find work in the cities, to become part of what would be labeled “the urban poor.”
It was at this same time that strip mining began. If anyone objected, out came the old mineral deeds. A property owner would one day be informed that the bulldozers were about to arrive to rip open the land, and there was not a thing anyone could do to stop it. The owner’s father or grandfather or someone years before had put his or her mark to a broad-form deed. When such cases were taken to court, the courts decided in favor of the coal companies.
The issue was litigated anew in 1968 in the Kentucky Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, with the judgment going again in favor of the coal industry. Until then the strip mining proceeded unchecked, quickly becoming an intensely emotional, dangerous issue, with no shortage of abusive language on either side. With feelings mounting, the bulldozers soon became targets for more than just invective. Snipers began firing from nearby wooded hills—sometimes using armor-piercing bullets. (“Where those bullets hit the steel,” Caudill says, “it looks just like somebody dragged his fingers across the butter.”) Operators and sheriffs returned the fire, and at least one man, Tom Fuson of Pineville, was killed. Then, one night in the fall of 1968, a watchman for the Round Mountain Coal Company in Cowfork was captured by four unidentified men who proceeded to blow up (with the company’s own store of explosives) nearly $750,000 worth of equipment. A giant Number 9 “dozer,” the biggest made by Caterpillar, was destroyed, as well as a truck, a jeep, a coal auger, three rubber-tired high-lifts, three generators, and a giant diesel shovel. In another such after-dark strike a bulldozer was blown completely in two, a feat that left a lasting impression on everyone who saw it, since such work, it is said in tones of great respect, could only have been handled by an expert. No one was arrested.
“And just suppose we did make an arrest,” a state police detective told Tom Bethell, a reporter for the Mountain Eagle. “Try getting a Knott County jury to convict the guy. They never would.”
With so much going against them, why, one might wonder, do the strip miners keep gouging away? The answer, aside from money, is that there are significant attractions to strip mining that must not be overlooked or underestimated if one is to understand the problem.
Importantly, with strip mining it is possible to work with much bigger equipment than with ordinary underground mining. In simplest terms, this means fewer workers can mine more coal faster. A strip miner can produce about thirty tons a day, more than twice the output of a miner below ground. In an auger strip mine, where huge boring machines with steel bits sometimes seven feet in diameter are used, production is greater still.
Strip mining is also much safer. Men do get killed in strip mines—from falling rock or overturned equipment—but the risks involved on the job are nowhere near as serious as in a conventional mine. There are no slate falls to contend with; no deadly gas; no silicosis or “black lung” caused by inhaling coal dust. Nor is there any of the psychological fear of going underground.
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nbsp; Perhaps the most important appeal of the whole business of strip mining is that it is so simple. One need not even be a miner to run a strip mine, a fact that scornful “true” coal miners are quick to emphasize. An ability to handle heavy earth-moving equipment is about the only expertise required. With the proper machinery—bulldozers, chiefly—the operator simply scrapes off the topsoil, then the subsoil (which generally includes a lot of rock and requires blasting) down to the coal seam. He then scoops up the coal and dumps it into trucks, which haul it away to a coal tipple. There the coal is transferred to railroad cars, which carry it out of the mountains.
And added to all that, the strip miners still have the law on their side. In June of 1968 a broad-form deed was contested before the Kentucky Court of Appeals, and the court upheld the deed. The case involved LeRoy Martin and his wife, who owned a ten-acre parcel of land in Knott County, the mineral rights for which were held by the Kentucky River Coal Corporation under a broad-form deed. It was a historic test case. No other state in the union still honored broad-form deeds for strip mining. The decision was a tremendous blow for the small landowners, for conservationists, and for Harry Caudill, who was the Martins’ counsel.
Caudill, however, hopes to contest the broad-form deed again. He would like to take it to a federal court. All that is needed, he says, is a client who is willing, and financially able, to stick with the case all the way to the Supreme Court, if necessary. In the meantime, court fights of other kinds continue.
There is, for example, the illustrative case of Vernon Barnett. Seven years ago Barnett bought a house on an acre of ground on Yellow Creek in Knott County. He had spent thirty-six years down in the mines, lived always in a company house, knew nothing but mining, and was now disabled by black lung. But for once he had a place of his own. In the time since, the mountainside behind his house has been strip-mined, and now a huge spoil bank hangs over his head like a volcano. At one point two men from the mine came down to advise him, “unofficially” they said, not to sleep in any room facing the mountainside. There was no telling what might let go and come crashing through his windows.
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