People Of The Ruined Hills  

The word is terracide. As in homicide, or genocide. Except it’s terra. Land. 

It is not committed with guns and knives, but with great, relentless bulldozers and thundering dump trucks, with giant shovels like mythological creatures, their girdered necks lifting massive steel mouths high above the tallest trees. And with dynamite. They cut and blast and rip apart mountains to reach the minerals inside, and when they have finished there is nothing left but naked hills, ugly monuments to waste, stripped of everything that once held them in place, cut off from the top and sides and dug out from the inside and then left, restless, to slide down on houses and wash off into rivers and streams, rendering the land unlivable and the water for miles downstream undrinkable. 

Terracide. Or, if you prefer, strip-mining. 

It has become more and more common in the last fifteen years, in the South and the Southwest and the Far West, in Pennsylvania and Ohio and Texas. But the worst is in Appalachia. In West Virginia, and especially in Kentucky. Eastern Kentucky, in the mountains. 

There is where the people live right on the steep, proud mountains, on the mountains and all through them, and in the hills and along streams that form hollows and tiny valleys. They have lived there for five and six and seven and eight generations. The same homes in the same mountains. 

To the mining companies the mountains are large, green coal mines, just as they were timber forests to the men who first bought the rights a hundred years ago in questionable dealings for forty or fifty cents an acre, then sold those rights when they were through. 

The deeds are the same, infamous broad-form deeds that bought the rights to everything above and below the soil. Still being sold from company to company, and still held legal. The prize is different. Now it is coal, and the cost to the hills is greater than when they were cutting timber. But the attitudes of the companies are the same--they take and leave. 

And the people, they are much the same. 

Mountain people tend to be slow to change. Not that they are against progress. They are not. They have cars, or trucks, and television sets, some color. Few are paid for, of course, but that is not the point. They accept the decorations of the 1970s. 

But inside, deep inside where people decide who they are, they change very little. Men whose fathers and grandfathers were coal miners are coal miners, as are their sons. A man born and reared on Turkey Creek may have moved to Camp Branch or as far as Dry Fork, but the odds of his having left Letcher County by the time he dies are slim. 

Some do. Especially now, the younger ones are sifting away to the cities in greater and greater numbers, for school and work and for no reason other than that they now know another world exists out there. 

But their parents and their grandparents remain, in the same counties and the same hollows, and even in the same houses. It’s the mountains, they say--they hold a man. And of those who leave for a year or so, to go to Cincinnati to work in the soap factory or to Detroit to the car plants, most return to the mountains. 

Bert Caudill spent two years in Detroit back in the fifties, and Bessie Smith twice went north with her husband and children, but they came back. And Joe Begley worked for a while in Connecticut, but he came back. Most of them come back, back to the mountains. 

“I believe in this place,” Joe Begley told me on the front porch of his general store in Blackey. It was after lunch one day early in the summer. He likes to close for an hour or so just past noon, to work at his desk or just sit on the squeaking front swing and look across highway seven, past the creek and up into the hills. 

“I believe in the mountains and the streams. I think they’re Jesus Christ, or God maybe.” 

Those are not casual words; Joe Begley is not a casual man. He comes by his feelings honestly. His grandmother was a Cherokee Indian, and though his father wanted to raise him as a white man, the old woman taught her grandson to love the trees and the water and the hills as living deities. 

The lesson stuck, and has made the destruction he has witnessed in his 53 years in eastern Kentucky a repulsive sight, and it has helped him choose a path. 

He is a strange man, tall and lean and dark, with the dark eyes and black straight hair of an Indian. In his little office off the store are books on trees and animals and the land, titles like Nature and Wildlife, Environment and Cultural Behavior, and Yesterday’s People, and a dozen more stacked up on the desk and on the floor and against the door, along with copies of The New Yorker and Audubon. 

His formal education has been sparse, and he dresses in blue jeans, but he is defending his land against the army of machines with the tools of men whose walls are lined with degrees and who wear imported neckties and double knits, fighting with lawsuits and courts. 

From his store he has helped organize the people of the area, of Blackey and Elk Creek and Jeremiah and Caudill’s Branch, trying to help those who live in the hollows and the mountains fight the broad-form deeds, trying to make those who would sign new agreements aware that ten cents a ton is not worth what will follow, trying to keep the strippers off. 

“This strip coal is cheap, dirty coal,” he told me on the hard, metal porch swing, “and 70 percent of it’s bought by the TVA. The government. The government’s scalping our land.” 

And looking out across the two-lane road, up into the hills: “The game’s all gone, the streams is gone, the mountains is gone, all destroyed for just a little bit of money by greedy people.” 

He says he isn’t asking much, only that the people not sell away the rights to their coal. But that is an odd request in these mountains, a foreign idea. If ever there were a one-industry area, that area is eastern Kentucky, and the industry is coal. That is the way it has been since the end of the nineteenth century and the coming of the railroad. 

Coal is everywhere. It is everybody’s business. 

In addition to the deep mines and the strip-mines there are thousands of truck mines, little mines by the side of the road and in people’s backyards. Coal lies in chunks by the side of every dirt road and highway, having fallen from or bounced out of the trucks that haul it. It lies by the endless miles of railroad track, and dots the streets of downtown Whitesburg and Hazard and Paintsville and a hundred other towns. 

It is coal country, plain and simple. Even the little children play with model dump trucks and bulldozers, making believe they are digging for coal in the yard, strip-mining under the front porch. 

In such an environment it is difficult to convince people that digging for coal is anything but the most natural of processes. Coal is a friend. It always has been and always will be. That is the reality in these mountains. No one entertains the notion that coal is an exhaustible resource, that mining--deep or strip--can only continue for so long, and that if the area is going to survive, alternate industries will have to be developed. 

That’s not smart talk in country where King Coal is everybody’s big brother. 

• • •

Whatever problems might result from an area being stripped, they are viewed as isolated phenomena, totally unrelated to any other area being stripped and certainly unconnected to the coal found deep in the ground and reached through conventional means. 

Bert Caudill certainly has nothing against coal. He has been a miner all his adult life, as was his father and are his sons. It is what he does--all he does. 

He spent two years working in a Detroit assembly plant and earned more money than in any other two years in his life, but he came back to the mines, back to the mines that took his father’s life and his brother-in-law’s life, the mines that have given him black lung disease and are slowly taking his life. 

“That’s the mines,” says Caudill. “Some gets killed in airplanes and some in cars.” 

But there was no philosophy in his voice when, after he sold the rights to his land for stripping, the side of the mountain came sliding down one night in a rainstorm, tore away his barn and fence and covered his spring. That was two years ago, and still the mountain shifts, sending rocks and boulders dangerously close to the house he bought from his two years’ work in Detroit, the first house he has ever owned. 

“Everytime after it rains I climb up to the top of the mountain,” said Ruby, Caudill’s wife, “just to see what’s slid down and what’s gonna be comin’ next.” 

Bert and Ruby Caudill are not the only two to sell the rights to their land, then regret it. Hundreds have done the same thing, even recently. Some only after being shown an old deed “Xed” by a long-dead relative and told the mining would go on regardless, that they might as well sign and get paid. Some without such pressure. But all thinking of bringing in a little extra money to pay the bills. 

Columbus Sexton didn’t think it was a bad idea to let them strip the coal above his house, and Bill Bates figured his property on Elk Creek might bring in something extra. Now Columbus Sexton has had to abandon his house and build a new one, and Bi 11 Bates swears they’I I never get another inch of his land. 

Both are intelligent, well-informed men holding responsible business positions, and both had seen what the strippers had done to other men’s land throughout the state. But, somehow, until it happened to them it meant nothing. 

“You want to know who’s to blame,” Joe Begley said from his porch swing. “It ain’t the government or the strippers. They’re crooked and you can’t expect no better of them. I blame the people, the good people around here that lets ‘em come and take their land.” 

In his way, Joe Begley has been fighting strip-mining for a long time. Like Tom Gish, editor of the Whitesburg Mountain Eagle, and Harry Caudill, lawyer and writer, he has been trying to stop the desecration of the mountains. It has been difficult, and every once in a while he gets impatient with those not so fervently committed as he, those who years ago did not hear the word. 

But Joe Begley would be the first to tell you that the mountains are a special place of special people. Things are not the same there as in the cities or even the plains. Thinking is different. 

Ever since the days when the Cumberland Plateau was part of America’s early frontier, its people have been staunchly independent, exercising a degree of privacy approaching isolation. Today, with pockets of civilization still formed only around select streams and creeks, much of that early attitude has remained. 

It is not that mountain people are unfriendly toward their neighbors. Mostly, in any particular hollow, everyone is related through one or a number of genetic channels. There are half a dozen Nieces on Camp Branch, twice that many Days on Cowan Creek, even more Sextons on Sandlick Road, and Caudills in groups and bunches all over. 

They exchange pleasantries on the road and will always offer a helping hand. But there is also a great deal of letting alone. Breathing room, some call it. The tendency is for a man to see to his own needs and problems without bothering to step back for a long look at what repercussions might result. 

For generations and generations, without interference from the outside, it was a good way. Strip-mining has made it a dangerous luxury. What is happening on Kingdom Come Creek tells it best. 

Kingdom Come is a truly beautiful little hollow that runs for ten or twelve miles along the creek from the point where it leaves route 588, crosses under the red metal bridge, and climbs to the headwaters deep in the mountains. It is green and lush and thick, very cool and very quiet, the only regular sounds the gurgling of the creek and the chirping of birds, the only dissonant sight the old scavenged car bodies so common to Appalachia that line the creek bed and peek out from deep in the brush. 

This is the place where, at the turn of the century, John Fox Jr. came to write his novel about a young mountain man in the Civil War, The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come. Aside from the changing models of abandoned cars, it is hard to believe that the hollow is very different from what Fox saw as he traveled the dirt road that parallels and crosses and occasionally becomes the creek. 

Thirty-eight families live in the hollow, a large percentage of them lsons or related to Isons. And for years coal companies have been trying to buy the rights to the mountains at the head of the creek, the rights to strip them for coal, but no one would sell. Not until last year, when a family that once lived near the head but had moved sold the rights. Then a second family, also moved, sold. 

Still no stripping began, because the company needed more land. Then, after several months of trying, the company convinced Sally Ison to sell her rights to the coal. A large section of one mountain was left to Sally by her father, who had inherited the same section of mountain from his father. 

She became the first person actually living on the creek to sell. 

“They were after me for a long time to sell,” Sally told me from her wheelchair. A woman in her sixties, she is crippled with arthritis, so severely crippled that she requires the assistance of a wheelchair or walker to get around. “I kept telling ‘em no, but last October they said the rest of it was theirs so I let ‘em go ahead.” 

She used her arms to shift position in the chair. Then, again settled, she looked from me to the bare, wooden floor where her five children, all grown now and gone from the hollow, once played. 

“I didn’t see how it would affect us,” she said. “We weren’t using the mountain.” 

Sally Ison is as far from being a villain as one could imagine. A sweet, lovable woman who wheels herself around the house, cleaning and cooking for her husband and two grandchildren spending the summer, she did what seemed logical with land she could see serving no immediate use, land for which no children or grandchildren were waiting. 

Then it began. “They said they had to build a dam on the bottornland,” she said. “They hadn’t said anything about that bottomland, not till after I signed.” 

She tried to stop them, but apparently they had a legal right. The bottomland, considered to be among the best for planting in the hollow, immediately became useless. They also changed the course of the creek, and when they began moving in big machinery and blasting the following month, the once clear water of Kingdom Come Creek was ruined. 

And all because a mining firm from California convinced Sally she deserved some income from her land. 

“I tried to stop her from selling, but it’s her land,” Sally’s husband, Marion, told me as we drove to the head of the creek in his old pickup, bouncing along the creek bed. He and Sally had known each other all their lives, both having grown up in the hollow. 

“They put up a pitiful tale about getting that coal,” he said, holding tight to the jerking steering wheel. “Just kept on and kept on, telling her what it’d look like after it was over and what she’d get out of it. Said she’d rather have it that way· than before. Said they’d fix it back up, sow grass and put in trees.” 

He spit out the open window, as if to comment on their promises. “Even if they did fix what’s ours, the rest of the hollow’II never be the same.” 

We went as far as we could by truck, then pulled up on a level piece of land and walked up to the head of the creek. We climbed to a wide canyon, recently dug out of the hillside, flat on the bottom and lying at the base of high, straight walls. It was the bottomland, he said, where they were going to make their dam to catch the silt from mining. 

“They cut it out and everything,” he said, pointing to the scooped-out walls nearly sixty feet high on each side, “then they run into clay and had to tear up some other land above.” On three sides the mountains loomed around us, the mountains that had just begun to be strip-mined. Slides had already scarred the face of one, ripping off trees and bushes as they came. 

“I told her I didn’t figure it would bother me and her,” Marion Ison said as he stood where his freshly cultivated field once stood. “We ain’t got many more years, but later on, well ... “ 

On the way back down toward the red metal bridge I stopped to talk with Dewey Ison, cousin of Sally and Marion. A former miner nearly seventy, he had lived all his life on Kingdom Come Creek, as had his father and father’s father, on back for five generations. He told me about the blasting, every evening about five o’clock, that shakes the windows and knocks jars off the shelf, and about the crystal-clear water that just isn’t any more. But when I asked him about Sally selling the rights to the land he stopped, thought a minute, and pushed the hat back on his head. 

“Her land,” he said, “but I wished she hadn’t done it.” 

And thinking another minute: “Not her fault. They didn’t read her the fine print. And they didn’t say nothing about that bottomland. Best bottomland round here.” 

He pulled his hat back down over his eyes, told me again how it wasn’t Sally’s fault, but that he doubted the hollow would ever be the same. 

• • •

Every hollow in eastern kentucky is not Kingdom Come Creek. Men like Tom Gish and Joe Begley have alerted enough people to the horrors of strip-mining so that many have resisted. 

When they came onto John Caudill’s land he met them with his .38 and escorted them off, and the exploits of Dan Gibson holding 49 strippers at gunpoint on Hardburly Ridge in Knott County are legend. 

And in this year’s Kentucky primary, Bessie Smith, a poorly educated mother of nine, challenged incumbent U.S. Representative Carl Perkins to his seat on the issue of strip-mining. Mrs. Smith, a fiery welfare recipient who last January led twenty-one women onto a strip-mining site and closed it down for fifteen hours, collected nearly three thousand votes, votes she feels will give her some leverage when the November election comes. 

“Welfare and food stamps keeps the people quiet while the strippers take their land,” the chunky blond told me in a makeshift office in Hazard. And straightening up in her chair: “I have been asked for my support in the fall campaign, but before I give it I must hear the word on banning strip-mining.” 

There are others who have tried to stop the devastation, both in the courts and at their own property lines, but not enough, not nearly enough. Mostly, like Sally Ison, they give up. · 

Each story is more depressing than the last, with neighbor selling mining rights for a couple of hundred dollars, only to ruin an entire community. It happened in Johnnie Collins Hollow, where half a dozen families besides Bert and Ruby Caudill were affected. And over on Elk Creek, Bill Bates sold the rights to his land at the head of the creek, land behind the house he had been renting to Tiny Walters and her seven children for sixteen years. 

“They started working up there in April,” said Tiny, a large, blond woman who says she has no idea how she got her name. “I’d already had my garden cleaned up, and I wasn’t about to leave.” But then they started to blast, and the first boulder came crashing through Tiny’s garden, and she packed up her kids and left. “I never thought Bill’d do me like he did,” she said, “but you never really know people till you comes down to a point.” 

Everybody loves Sally Ison, and except for Tiny Walters and maybe three or four of her kids, nobody really hates Bill Bates. But both sold the rights to their land, and the damage can never be repaired. 

Both are sorry now, but it’s late for that. The crime has been committed. In California and Texas and Florida, where it’s flatter land that is being stripped, reclamation at least is possible. In these mountains it is not; they are simply too steep. 

They could be helped, certainly. New topsoil brought in, permitted to settle, the entire area seeded, and new trees planted. It would not undo the damage, but it would help. It would also be a monumentally expensive operation, requiring more time and money than any mining company now in Appalachia has suggested spending. 

What is left now when the strippers move on? Not much. Vast tracts of land, restless land. Sliding, always sliding. Great mountains stripped of everything living, left barren and naked, once as permanent as time itself, now less steady than a child’s sandpile. 

And what of the water? Clear, pure wells and streams are now contaminated with mud and minerals, enough sulfur to alter the taste and cause rashes and infections in the people who drink it and chase away the wildlife that used to. 

Not just at the source, not just where they are mining, but for miles and miles downstream, far from Letcher and Perry and Knott counties, down the Kentucky River, down Russell Fork and Poor Fork, down into the Ohio and beyond. 

And for how long? No one can telI that. 

But there is no need to wait to see the effects of a land destroyed. Not here, not in the Cumberlands. The mountains and the people are too closely allied. Already in a severely depressed area, with massive welfare rolls and one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation, the people of eastern Kentucky are in growing trouble. 

Walking down the streets of Whitesburg, seat of Letcher County, I was struck by the absence of vital life signs. A dearth of children playing on the sidewalks, of the sound of young voices. And no music. 

Old men stand on the street corner near the post office and in front of the New Daniel Boone Motel, congregate in the coffee shop and on the steps of the courthouse. After dark there is nothing. No cars on the main street, no lights in the shops. No restaurant is open past nine any night, and none past midafternoon on Sunday. 

No amusements are planned for the young, no place for roller skating or dancing. Of the town’s two theaters, one is now a laundry and the other, only recently reopened, does not seem confident enough to advertise its programs on its own marquee. 

It is an area that is losing its youth to the cities. And in those who remain there is an immense lethargy and lack of enthusiasm. Nothing much is happening, and nobody seems to care. 

“A lot of us are just wore out,” Joe Begley told me. “Wore out worrying about the government and lawsuits, wore out worrying about if the mountain’s gonna sweep away our house.” 

And the stripping goes on. At the current pace over 60,000 acres of Letcher County alone will be “disturbed” by strip-mining by 1990, leaving less than 700 acres of farmland. 

Eighteen years from now, in 1990. 

But this is the Cumberland Plateau—Daniel Boone country. 

These are mountain people, and the mountains hold a man in place. They always have. But what happens when the mountains are gone? 

The word is genocide. As in terracide.