Mythology Of Appalachia

RIP Luke Pewk

Lacy Hale designed "No Hate in My Holler" in 2017 in response to a neo-Nazi rally in Pikeville. The image has become a rallying cry for tolerance in Appalachia.

I interviewed her for Inside Appalachia last year, when she'd finished a mural of an SWVA midwife.

in “How to Hide An Empire,” author Daniel Immerwahr examines the United States’ expansion outside its states, beginning with its push west from the original 13 colonies. The opening chapter traces Boone’s travels west from his home on North Carolina’s Yadkin River, through the Cumberland Gap to Boonesborough, in what became Kentucky. “So rich a soil we had never seen before; covered with clover in full bloom,” wrote one of Boone’s axmen. “The woods were abounding in wild game.” Yet these settlers had plunked down in Shawnee hunting ground, and the town’s residents gave up and returned east before the end of the year.

The ill-fated expedition and settlement, however, was “an early drop from a faucet that was about to be turned on full blast.” Boone was celebrated in European circles as “man in his natural state...a refugee from civilization,” but never saw the acclaim in his home U.S. — largely because the British had set the ridge of the Appalachians as the boundary for white settlement. 

Once the U.S. attained independence, its founders also looked down upon frontiersmen as “refuse” (Ben Franklin), “no better than carniverous animals” (J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur), “white savages” (John Jay) or “banditti, who will bid defiance to all authority” (George Washington). Besides the cultural stuff, Boone and other early settlers’ incursions into the Appalachians were technically an invasion of Native lands.

Plus, Washington and other speculators held paper claims on large tracts of land, and the settlers were considered squatters. Washington even crossed the Appalachians himself “on a sort of landlord’s vengeance mission.”

The mission turned out to be an early iteration of how he responded to the Whiskey Rebellion in the 1790s, in what Joseph Ellis called “the first and only time a sitting American president led troops in the field.”

Boone + other squatters + pushed the Republic’s early leaders to agree settlement should play out in a more “compact” way and brokered agreements by which none of the Atlantic states would extend to the Mississippi River. In 1784 Virginia gave up its claims to land north of the Ohio River. 

These new territories weren’t guided so much by the U.S. Constitution as by early land laws, including the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. The law opened the door for the founding of new states “on an equal footing with the orginal States in all respects whatever,” but leaving decisions on statehood to Congress — who subsequently denied the petitions of Lincoln, West Dakota, Deseret, Cimarron and Montezuma.

The process of settling territories and then converting them slowly into states became the nuts’n’bolts behind “manifest destiny,” a phrase coined in 1845 by “United States Magazine and Democratic Review.”