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 MuirThe Thousand Mile Walk

Narration #1In 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 AyersThe 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 AyersThis 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 ConstanzSalamanders...

Robert ZahnerSalamanders...

Chris BolgianoSalamanders...

Steve WallaceFrogs and Salamanders...

Barbara KingsolverSalamanders are — just wonderful....

E.O. WilsonThe 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. 3333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333Jim PetrankaThey'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 KingsolverThey'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 KingsolverThere 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 WolfeThe 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 SpringsIf 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 -- outSo 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 LewisSo 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 -- outAgriculture 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 GiardinaTo 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 EllerMountain 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 KingsolverBecause 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 WinchesterRaised corn, rye, wheat, and potatos--sweet potatos and Irish potatos.

Jerry WolfeAlways 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 native-American cultures in that way.

Beuna WinchesterYou 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 GiardinaPeople 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 WinchesterWhen 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 -- outEuropeans, 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 BolgianoPeople 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 BolgianoThey spun and wove. Of course, Appalachia is famous for its fabrics and its quilts.

Denise GiardinaMy 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 BolgianoAnd 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 WinchesterSay 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 EllerAn 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 JonesWe 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 WinchesterYou 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 GiovanniI was born in Knoxville, Tennessee. I am an Appalachian.

Ancilla BickleyI 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 McCrumbThe region was split between people who wanted to secede and people who didn't.

Judy BondsThe Civil War really divided families, really divided families.

John InscoeYou 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 MarshallMy 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 InscoeFor 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 InscoeOne 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 McCrumbOne 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 InscoeThat 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 McCrumbBut 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 InscoeGather 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 McCrumbThey 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 InscoeGet them out of view of their own community, and line them up and shoot them into very shallow ditch, trench.....

Sharyn McCrumbPeople 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 InscoeThis 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 McCrumbAnd 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 EllerThe 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 BolgianoDuring 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 LewisThe 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 EllerThe 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 LewisThey 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 BondsThe 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 BondsA 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 EllerLand 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 writerAppalachia 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 EllerBetween 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 KingsolverI have a lot of favorite trees. I'm partial to redbuds, for the obvious reason: beauty.

Jerry WolfA favorite tree? I think when you come right down to it, it's a -- I like a mullberry. A mullberry tree.

Buena WinchesterI 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 BolgianoI'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 WinchesterReally 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 12There’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 BolgianoIt was a half-century of absolute holocaust. Timber was wrenched out in any way they could:

George ConstanzBetween 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 BolgianoThe 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 AyersThis 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 BolgianoWhen 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 59It 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 ConstanzImagine 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 TaylorIt'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 TaylorWill-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 TaylorAn 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 18Sure, 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 14The 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 SouthworthNow 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 HatcherCoal is an accumulation of plants, deposited along with sand and mud, and the interlayered plant material, with the sand and mud, was buried...

Scott SouthworthAnd it's that compaction and lithification with depth, that all that organic material was converted to carbon and coal.

Robert HatcherThe 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 8Oh 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 15I 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 EllerLand 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 EllerIronically 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 18People 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 33You 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 23Another population pool was brought into the region: immigrants, who were pouring into the US from southern and eastern Europe. Italians, Poles, Czechs, Slavs,

Denise GiardinaLebanese, 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 GiardinaThe 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 GiardinaThe church was owned by the coal company. The school was owned by the coal company.

Helen LewisThey 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 GiardinaI’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 AyersThe 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 ConstanzIt'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