Seedtime on the Cumberland

by Harriette Simpson Arnow

Harriette Arnow’s roots ran deep into the Cumberland River country of Kentucky and Tennessee, and out of her closeness to that land and its people comes this remarkable history. The first of two companion volumes, Seedtime on the Cumberland captures the triumphs and tragedies of everyday life on the frontier, a place where the land both promised and demanded much. In the years between 1780 and 1803, this part of the country presented tremendous opportunity to those who endeavored to make a new life there. Drawing on an extensive body of primary sources—including family journals, court records, and personal inventories—Arnow paints a stirring portrait of these intrepid people. Like the midden at some ancient archaeological site, these accumulated items become a treasure awaiting the insight and organization of an interpreter. Arnow also draws on a medium she believed in unerringly—oral history, the rich tradition that shaped so much of her own family and regional experience. A classic study of the Old Southwest, Seedtime on the Cumberland documents with stirring perceptiveness the opening of the Appalachian frontier, the intersection of settlers and Native Americans, and the harsh conditions of life in the borderlands.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

497 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1960

About the author

Harriette Simpson Arnow (July 7, 1908 – March 22, 1986) was an American novelist, who lived in Kentucky and Michigan.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Kathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quotable:
Most settlers in the new world hated the Scotch-Irish; his ideas were held to be subversive for he believed in the individual conscience, and the heresy of complete separation of Church and State, views proscribed in most of the colonies save Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, and the southern colonies.

He [Col. William Byrd] could not quite accept the independence of the North Carolinians he met along the line; even those of English origin didn’t seem to worry too much whether their babies were baptized or no. They could live in good content without priests, lawyers, or physicians and this amused him. Byrd realized he was meeting a new breed; a people who could with only Bibles to read, keep their self-respect and feel properly religious without ministers.

It was in these years [1754-56] that women learned to fear the calm and beautiful weather that came after frost and most leaves had fallen, but before the deep snows of winter, the last weather suitable for long journeys; it was then the Shawnee came for scalps and horses, and so the frontier settler called the season Indian Summer.

Another Scotchman from Ireland was James Dysart, an orphan who had come the America when he was seventeen in 1761. He like many immigrants had come first to Philadelphia, and then gradually worked his way south and west to the Holston, He may have on this trip carried a few books; in his old age after service at Kings Mountain he moved into a remote region in the Rockcastle Country, but when a friend commented on his solitude answered, “I am never lonesome when I have a good book in my hand.” He in time collected quite a library and lived to enjoy it, dying when he was seventy-four.

Most Indians enjoyed a high degree of civil liberty, including freedom of speech, and the right the use of individual conscience. The Cherokee, like most other tribes, had no word in their language to express despotic power or obedient subject. They seldom acted on impulse, but only after long deliberations, with the braves allowed to listen and have a voice in council, so that the great chiefs, and vice or half chiefs such as Attakullakulla, were leaders, not totalitarian despots ruling through fear and force.

[T]here were the camp fires; [James] Robertson we can be certain had a good one; he was a good woodsman and so was Edmund Jennings. If the younger man built it, nobody indulged in that disease that affects so many around an open fire – constant rearrangement. Jennings hated people who kicked his fires, just as he disliked men who wore broadcloth or rode in carriages; his chief love continued to be Kentucky, but he never got and land there.

The Green brothers… heeded the weather but little. During the winter they heard of the Donelson party bound for French Lick, and decided it would be nice to pay them a little visit. They made the usual poplar dugout and when the ice went out – February 12th at Canoe Camp – they started on their swift journey down the swollen Cumberland. At Cumberland Falls all except one got out of the boat and climbed down the craggy bluffs and waited by the river below the full fury of the falls; the one above took the canoe out into the middle of the current and left it to go over the falls; a man below swam out and brought the canoe to shore. The boat was reloaded and they went on their way.

Next to gunpowder, feathers were about the most expensive things on the Cumberland; in 1792 Joseph Bishop sold feathers from the breasts of swans and wild geese he shot for a dollar a pound in Middle Tennessee, and up the river in Pulaski County, years later, a pound of feathers cost more than a gallon of whiskey.

[Jud Barry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Encyclopedist as novelist: this is a rich book in every respect, from minutely detailed descriptions of the flora, fauna, technology, techniques, and chores all the way up to sweeping accounts of social structures and attitudes of the first white settlers in the Cumberland River watershed (primarily in the area that today is Nashville), all of it told in the unhurried manner of an epic poet whose life is in the telling and to whom spoilers are the whole point.

Here, for example, is Arnow on whittling: "All farmers gouged, and scotched, and chopped, and rived, and drew, and bored, but more than anything they whittled, and like generations of borderers before them they never got caught up with their whittling. The first things whittled would have been handles for the extra axes, hoes, mattocks, broadaxes and tother tools brought. Night in and night out while the wife and daughters spun and carded or sewed by the fire the settler and his older sons must whittle -- pegs of many sizes, a button for the barn door, gears of some good hardwood, oak or beech for the horse mill, dasher for the churn, spinning stick, powder funnel, or some intricate thing such as a wooden door lock, complete with turning key ... ¶ He could never stop whittling; he worked with knife and wood while sitting up with the sick or the dead, or waiting for a turn of corn to be ground or is horse to be shod, or the auction to begin." (p. 279)

Against this mundane background is the more-or-less continuous possibility -- during the long initial period of exploration and settlement -- of death by Indian attack. There runs a continuing refrain of settler lives violently foreshortened in the course of harvesting pumpkins or milking cows. But Arnow's interpretation of this is that the threat of such violence was an acceptable risk. The settler believed that perseverance would prevail.

Grim though it seems, Arnow believes their outlook to have been brighter than ours: "[T]he fifteen years of forted life and Indian warfare most knew changed their lives far less in all aspects than does the cold war direct our lives. The blood-tested and tagged young city child of today, who lives knowing what road he should take in case of an attack, never permitted to forget the atom bomb, and carefully reared to hate the name of all ideologies his elders believe might limit his job opportunities when he grows up, certainly suffers more emotional scarring and mental terror than did little Polly Dunham of Freeland's Station, showing the scars on her scalp. She knew the taste of victory. She could always boast that though the Indians ringed her head for scalping she still had her hair. Her mother had, on hearing her screams, rushed out and in spite of being badly wounded, had driven the Indians off with a hoe. ¶ We talk today of preservation, of survival, and of destroying things that seem to threaten our way of life. The ones writing their memories to Mr. Draper never spoke of survival; they would, I think, have scorned a life that offered nothing more. They were not even determined to destroy the Indian; this came later. They were determined to live, Indians or no. This meant having, or being part of, a home." (p. 346)

What gave them this fortitude? There was, certainly, a "collective land passion" of farmers inspired by the mere existence of a vast, unsettled continent. As full and complete as Arnow's treatment is, she never gives a conclusive answer. She does, however, beat around the (burning) bush of what must be the answer: that these largely-Reformed-Protestant people were driven by the belief that God would shower their enterprise with success. She understands that the reflex of self-government (along with the cooperation that supported the "long learning" of living techniques on the frontier) came from their experience in the Old Country, and now in the new one "[n]o tax money built their churches, no officials chose their ministers, no government prescribed prayers, or rules for worship, or told them what to believe. Acting as individuals and without coercion men had learned to work together to form the various units of society needed to supply a lack the individual was incapable of supplying. They had in addition to churches, built schools, formed parties for protection against the Indians, choosing their leaders by popular vote, disregarding colonial laws with their suffrage qualifications." (p. 193) The very last sentence of the book alludes to a faith-imbued engine unique to the times and distinct in its character: "Pavlov's dog had not yet salivated, and the Reformation was still a vital force." (p. 427)

Arnow says of this transplanted people that the adaptations contributing to their success were not of their own devising. Arnow says (p. 413" "I have never found anything -- food or custom -- that I could, with complete confidence, say was purely white American. Most activities from growing corn to building log houses were adaptations of things either learned from the Indians or brought to America." They either continued or borrowed; they did not themselves create. I'm willing to bet that this is not entirely the case: if nothing else, the existence of the mountain (lap) dulcimer argues against it.

Furthermore, one set of participants in the story is almost entirely silent (and absent) in this account, and that is the African-Americans. The settlers were not bark-grubbing survivalists. They -- perhaps to a surprising degree -- started out from a prosperous place on one frontier and moved to another one that they made equally prosperous. Their dwellings were made with wood floors, and glass windows were not rare. Along the way and from the very beginning was another marker of non-poor status: slaves. A footnote on p. 425 indicates that in 1801 -- past the worst Indian violence, but still by no means completely beyond it -- the Middle Tennessee counted 30,000 people, "and a third of these slaves." How much does the image of the tireless settler family fashioning their own wealth on the land need to be fleshed out to include non-family members doing much of the labor? What was the nature of their contribution to that list of vital ephemera that Arnow so lovingly details?

[Kristie Helms · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dense, but a good overview of the Cumberland plateau area. Particularly loved the sharp descriptions of people and place.

[Covenant Presbyterian Springfield Ohio]

Call Number: 976 ARN

Available.