Ramp Hollow

by Steven Stoll

  One lifelong resident of the border between Virginia and West Virginia depicted these losses in homely fiction, constructed from a lifetime of hunting and fishing. “The Last Camp Fire” (1940), by G. D. McNeill, dramatizes the displacement and bereavement many felt. Zeke Miller owns a prosperous farm in Kansas, with a ten-room house and one thousand acres, but he feels out of place on the Great Plains. Depressed and recently separated from his wife, Zeke decides to return to Big Black, the mountain where he was born. He will meet up with two childhood friends, Dock and Tone, for a fishing trip.

  Entering his home ground on the train, Zeke counts seventy boxcars go by, their open doors revealing stacks of short spruce logs from the Cheat River, one hundred miles away. Pulpwood, a man informs him. “Zeke thought of asking whether there was any lumbering about the Gauley or Big Black, but he dared not make the inquiry.” The pulpwood, it turns out, is like a trickle of blood from an unseen wound. Before long he passes the home of old family friends. “The dwelling and the neatly built rail fences were gone. The railroad ran squarely through what Zeke reckoned to be the site of the McClune garden.” The farm has become a lumberyard. A band saw consumes a giant white oak at the moment Zeke passes by. The railroad through the garden emphasizes the totality of the violation, the utter destruction of house and home. “He had loved the mountains and the woods,” writes McNeill of Zeke. “The trees were personal friends of his, and it made him angry to see them cruelly used by these aliens who, for the sake of dollars, were come to destroy the mountain country.”

  The three friends pack up food and tackle and walk the trails of their youth. But nothing is as it was. They cannot escape the constant apprehension of what they will see over the next knob. In one scene, they confront a vanished grove. “The spruces were gone!” In their place they find scrub and briar and skid roads where trees as wide as kitchen tables had been dragged away. But nothing prepares them for the ascent that gives them a view of Big Black.

  “Boys, boys!” says Dock, at last. “What a shame! What a shame!”

  Where, in the other days, the boys had seen blue waves of spruce and hemlock, stretching away mile upon mile, the men now beheld desolation—bare hills, ribbed with shale, from which fire and erosion had swept every vestige of soil; long mountain ranges without a tree … a monotonous panorama of destruction, as far as the eye could run.

  “Well, fellers,” said Zeke, “I knowed it wuz bad; but if I’d dreamed it wuz like this, I’d never a asked ye tu come up here. I’m sorry I seen it.”

  There is powerlessness in Dock’s cry and defeat in Zeke’s apology. Though something of inestimable value has been taken from them, they don’t express anger. The few voices in the story that belong to lumbermen are anonymous, almost disembodied. It’s as though no one is reponsible and no public sphere or political process exists in which the aggrieved men might assert their interests against those of the companies. They have only their memories and each other.82

  Mountaineers subverted logging companies wherever possible, but companies developed a strategy to neutralize them. The lingering custom of the commons protected subsistence hunting and firewood gathering. The managers of the Elk River Coal and Lumber Company documented their attempts to gain control over trespassing and “undesirable parties,” though they knew that no county court would award them damages for browsing cattle, “nor can hunting on the property be stopped.” Companies also worried about adverse possession. Elk River Coal needed to prevent flagrant occupancy on tens of thousands of acres it might not log or mine for a decade. The solution companies favored was to lease land back to households. As tenants, mountaineers established occupancy for the companies. An internal report defined the practice: “We have about 100 tenants living through the mountains who pay but a small rental and are chiefly of value to us for holding possession of our land.” The tenants lived a vestigial existence. “In some cases the lease includes a house and cultivated land; in others it merely covers an old field or unimproved strip … None of the land covered by these leases can bring the tenant enough money when cultivated to pay any considerable amount.” Elk River Coal had about one hundred tenants in 1908, sixty in 1910. After 1912, the company didn’t mention them again.83

  Displaced people often moved to company-owned camps. Dorie Cope told of the move her family made to a high-altitude lumber camp in 1912. “My childhood was over,” said Cope. “Never again would I have the freedom I had enjoyed here in this world of rounded hills and orchards.” The accretion of farmers into industrial workers took literary form in Hubert Skidmore’s novels. Skidmore was born in Webster County, West Virginia, in 1909. He grew up after the peak of the logging boom, among barren slopes. His novel I Will Lift Up Mine Eyes (1936) opens in the 1890s during a year of drought. Nat and Maw Cutlip realize that they will harvest and store less food for the winter than ever before. Maw remembers when the farm was new—the soil that turned out fat corn, the honey in the hives. Two years before, Nat “had found it imperative to clear out more land, to cut deeper into the woods at the top of the field.” But the work was hard, and Nat lacks the energy and optimism to do it again.

  Nat decides to look for work in order to buy the supplies that would make up for the dry and failing soil. After neighbors decline to take him on as a hired hand, he turns to the mill at the bottom of the valley. He follows the logic forced upon him. He sells his labor. The money opens another world to the family, and they feel happy and secure for the first time in years. Nat brings home fabulous things for Christmas. A golden-haired doll for the youngest daughter replaces the one made of rags. One son receives a pocketknife. There are calico dresses and candy canes. Maw gasps as she opens a box of shoes manufactured somewhere far away, Massachusetts or Philadelphia. But Nat doesn’t see the feedback loop he has entered. As more men like Nat asked for work, owners lowered the wages they offered. Once mill and mine replaced garden and forest as means of subsistence, the flush of abundance diminished.

  Dependency looked like a shack on a rocky shelf overlooking the Gauley River. Skidmore describes the shelter that the Cutlips called home as little more than a henhouse. “Maw walked slowly about the room, looking at the thin, wrapped walls and rafters, and feeling the floor give beneath her weight.” Aunt Binney had been in camp for a while already and told Maw that the houses weren’t meant to last. Once they all moved to a new camp, these would “rot an fall to the airth.” Maw disregards the house, at first. She tells a neighbor that she intends to return to the Knob. “Thet is the way with us all at furst!” says the neighbor, “hit’s bin six years come cold weather an we’re worser off then ever as fer as money is countable.” The promise of consumption and a dignified working-class standard of living eluded those on the industrial periphery. “The lumber companies had opened the door to the outside world,” wrote Dorie Cope. “We became aware of ‘things’—things that money could buy, things that made life easier (or harder), things to see, things to do. Our isolation had ended. They had opened a door—a door we were forced to use as an exit from our ancestral homes. Then, after the exit, the door was closed to us. We were given visitors’ rights to the land—to come and look, but not to stay.”84

  The end of the open woods brought an end to the old subsistence. Their forests and fields had always provided them with money, whether as whiskey, ginseng, cattle, or lumber. The makeshift world collapsed when it was no longer possible to create exchangeable value from the ecological base. As with any other enclosure, the assault against the Appalachian commons threw people into wage work. Alonza Brooks mourned: “During a comparatively few years nearly the whole population which originally earned its living from the ground has been pushed out from places of seclusion into a whirl of modern industry.”85 Through all these changes, even as they descended into that terrifying tomb-like deafening darkness, the homeplace remained a dimming possibility and an ideal. Those who hung on in the hills had their misfortunes thrown back at them. The basis of their autonomy gutted or sold, they
pecked and scrimped. The words of the engineer who condemned them in 1904 echo here: “forlorn and miserable … never having known anything better than the wretched surroundings of their everyday life.” Though they often insisted that they could make a living on remnants of the old commons, they had become poor. They had become the horrifying hillbillies that lowlanders had always assumed them to be.86

  5. Interlude: Agrarian Twilight

  THE ART OF DISPOSSESSION

  The farmer sows in faith, he toils in hope, but reaps in disappointment and despair.

  —Leonidas Polk, Agricultural Depression. Its Causes—the Remedy (1890)

  THE HARVESTER SWINGS A SCYTHE through a forest of grain almost as tall as he is. He has set aside his Union coat and canteen to bring in his first crop. We cannot see his face, a point of view that renders him no particular veteran but rather every veteran. He is the people as a whole. He gathers into himself all those who yearn for the security of peace and the sufficiency of a quarter section. Winslow Homer’s transporting Veteran in a New Field (1865) relies on a common Union image, emblazoned on envelopes during the war, of wheat in abundance. As Abraham Lincoln said, “Out of eight bushels of wheat, seven are raised by those men who labor for themselves, aided by their boys growing to manhood, neither being hired nor hiring, but literally laboring upon their own hook, asking no favor of capital, of hired laborer, or of the slave.”

  Twenty-five years later, Thomas Hovenden painted another young man and another farm in Breaking Home Ties (1890). He stands in a drab dining room with his coat on, hat in his hand, bags packed. He looks west with mystical stoicism. The ceiling is dirty. The carpet is worn. The china cabinet is empty. His pale mother stands before him, trying to gain his attention, but his mind is already far away. The family has just finished breakfast when the coach arrives. His sisters wilt, nearly in tears. Grandmother sits motionless, as the young man’s father carries his carpetbag out the door. The two men stand with their backs to each other, facing opposite directions.

  Sons always went their own way. This is what it meant for the household to reproduce itself. But this young man is not leaving for marriage and his own farm in the next county. He is leaving because nothing his father has is worth owning. We can imagine the young man on a train to San Francisco or Chicago. In the next scene he enters a boardinghouse for working men. He apprentices as a department-store clerk or assembles reapers in the McCormick factory or keeps timetables for the Union Pacific Railroad. He struggles for working-class respectability, like the protagonist in any story by Horatio Alger, Jr. His parents sell to the owner of a neighboring farm and move to town. One sister becomes a teacher and marries a more prosperous farmer. The other marries a mechanic.

  The two paintings bracket an era of unrelenting ejectment, seizure, bankruptcy, and loss. They tell a story bigger than Appalachia, about other peoples and places in the United States, so that we might see the southern mountains as connected to other events. And yet, ejectment and loss seem averse to the predominant fact of this period. Between 1870 and 1900, the number of acres in farms more than doubled. Farmers cleared as much land in those thirty years as they had in the previous two hundred. But if we look a little deeper, another trend emerges. Farms of fewer than three acres fell 37 percent between 1870 and 1880, 47 percent by 1910. Yet farms of one hundred to five hundred acres increased almost 550 percent. Those over a thousand acres increased by over 1,000 percent. The fate of farmers also differed by region. California entered a flush of growth, while South Dakota and Nebraska lost small and midsized farms and gained giant ones. Agriculture did not falter. Wheat, corn, and cattle boomed. But those households with little money strained under drought and debt, finally yielding to repossession by banks and the sale of their land to corporations. Those tillers neither hired nor hiring but literally laboring upon their own hook often gave up. They became the hired, working for wages on industrial farms or in factories.

  The losses I consider in this chapter include agrarians whose suffering and defeat the government did not quantify. The golden quarter section harvested by Winslow Homer’s veteran had been the hunting grounds of the Lakota, Cheyenne, Comanche, Crow, Apache, Pawnee, or Shoshone. Possession and dispossession were locked together, impossible to extricate from each other. Former slaves with tenuous provision grounds found themselves manipulated into sharecropping. They were farmers by occupation, but as indebted tenants they owned nothing, often earned nothing, and existed more like serfs than smallholders. Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson tried to come to terms with the cultural irrelevance of Yankee farmers, many of whom no longer lived within their means or the limitations of their environments and yet, as farmers, no longer reflected the commercial impulse of the United States in 1850. What follows is an exploration of painting and writing that depicted this moment of change.1

  * * *

  THE ENCLOSURE OF THE BUFFALO COMMONS did not unfold like the seizure of village fields in England. It came about in a manner similar to what happened in colonial ventures: by warfare. The Civil War should be understood as a conflict with two Union fronts, one in the South and the other in the West. The Plains nations had their own confederacy. Like the other one, the Sioux and Cheyenne did not want to be part of the United States. The defeat of the Confederate States of America closed one front but not the other. Ulysses S. Grant ordered Phil Sheridan to the Department of the Missouri in 1867. There, along with William Tecumseh Sherman, Sheridan applied all he had learned in the Shenandoah Valley about subsistence warfare to defeat a different enemy.2 Warfare ended ten years later, when Crazy Horse and Red Cloud surrendered, but the United States had not won a military victory. Add up the bodies dropped on both sides, and the Indians destroyed the invaders by nearly two to one.3

  Sheridan fought the Plains nations with subsistence adversity. He declared war on the bison. Speaking to Congress in 1875, he said of professional bison hunters, “Let them kill, skin, and sell until the buffaloes are exterminated,” calling this the way to a lasting peace. Three years later, the Plains nations were famished. When agents of the Bureau of Indian Affairs arrived at the Colorado River Reservation in 1878, they saw hunters returning “completely demoralized with fear.” The agents dispatched an emergency request for beef and flour, “to alleviate the sufferings of those starving creatures … for their bodies were so emaciated from want that they proved an easy prey to disease.” Those sturdy enough found plenty of work “cutting and hauling wood for funeral pyres to burn the bodies of those deceased.”4

  Dispossession did not end with military violence. Over the next fifty years, Congress created reservations and then picked away at them, finally attempting to compel Indians to undertake commercial agriculture. By the 1880s, self-appointed reformers argued that reservations encouraged collective rather than individual behavior, embodied by what they considered the archaic office of the chief. Allotment emerged as a vehicle for assimilation. Not only would people born to the chase enter the socializing relations of agriculture, they would become property owners. “Where everything is held in common,” wrote the commissioner of Indian Affairs in 1873, “thrift and enterprise have no stimulus of reward … The starting-point of individualism for an Indian is the personal possession of his portion of the reservation.”5

  The General Allotment Act of 1887 (known as the Dawes Act) extended surveyors’ lines across reservations. The law granted 160 acres to every head of household, 80 acres to anyone over the age of eighteen, and 40 acres to each child. Any adult male who worked his allotment into a farm qualified for citizenship. But most of the land Indians received was ill-suited for agriculture, making their task even more arduous, if not impossible. Even worse, the turn from homeland to real estate opened every targeted reservation to a Trojan horse. Any land not allotted went up for sale, allowing whites to infiltrate and speculate. Senator Henry Teller of Colorado orated against the bill in 1881, condemning it as a legalized scheme “to despoil the Indians of their lands and to make t
hem vagabonds on the face of the earth.” The Dawes Act appealed to reformers as a mechanism for moving Indians to a further stage of social evolution, but Teller proclaimed its true purpose. “The provisions for the apparent benefit of the Indians are but the pretext to get at his lands and occupy them … If this were done in the name of Greed, it would be bad enough; but to do it in the name of Humanity … is infinitely worse.”6

  By the 1890s, the Plains nations were in despair. But their resistance did not cease. They continued to argue for their sovereignty even as the United States denied them citizenship and declared their religious practices illegal. The Indian Citizen Act of 1924 finally recognized their rights after thousands served in the armed forces during the First World War. A new generation of reformers and Indian leaders secured passage of the Indian Reorganization Act (1934), which restored unallotted land to tribal ownership. Throughout the twentieth century, various nations launched legal challenges on the basis of violated and neglected treaties. The struggle of first nations against false narratives of progress continues.

  This is how the veteran in Winslow Homer’s painting ended up swinging a scythe on the Great Plains. By the time the bison population collapsed and the Dawes Act threw reservations open, farmers like the veteran had been moving into Kansas, Nebraska, and Dakota Territory for nearly twenty years. The Homestead Act of 1862 transferred 100 million acres from the hunting grounds of the Plains nations to the public domain. Thousands of farmers, many of them immigrants from Scandinavia, Poland, Bohemia, and Hungary, arrived in the 1870s to raise wheat—not for their own food but for greenbacks. Many of them endured a different process of dispossession from that of the Plains nations. The small-scale commodity producers who acquired that droughty land did not hold on to it for very long. Within little more than two decades, a confluence of factors removed thousands of them and consolidated their homesteads into giant agricultural holdings.