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Sergeant York and His People · Sergeant York and His People

• 0:00
  A fight in the Forest of the Argonne. Just to the north of Chatel
• 0:05
  Chaeri in the Argonne Forest in France is a hill which is known to the
• 0:09
  American soldiers as Hill number two two three. Fronting its high wooded knoll on
• 0:15
  the way to Germany are three more hills. The one in the center is
• 0:19
  rugged, those to the right and left are more sloping, and the one
• 0:23
  to the left, which the people of France have named York's Hill, turns
• 0:28
  a shoulder toward Hill number two two three. The valley which they form is
• 0:32
  only from two to three hundred yards wide. Early in the morning of the
• 0:37
  eighth of October nineteen eighteen, as a floating gray mist relaxed its last hold
• 0:43
  on the tops of the trees on the side of those hills, the All
• 0:46
  America Division the eighty second poured over the crest of Number two two three.
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  Prussian guards were on the ridge tops across the valley, and behind the Germans
• 0:56
  ran the d Covilla railroad. The artery for applies to a salient still further
• 1:02
  to the north, which the Germans were striving desperately to hold. The second
• 1:06
  phase of the Battle of the Mouse Argonne was on As the fog rose,
• 1:11
  the Americans jumped off down the wooded slope, and the Germans opened fire from
• 1:15
  three directions. With artillery. They pounded the hillside. Machine guns savagely sprayed
• 1:21
  the trees under which the Americans were moving. At one point, where the
• 1:25
  hill makes a steep descent, the American line seemed to fade away. As
• 1:29
  it attempted to pass this slope, it was found was being swept by machine
• 1:34
  guns. On the crest of the hill to the left, which faced down
• 1:37
  the valley, the Germans were hastily planting other machine guns there. The Americans
• 1:42
  showered that hilltop with bullets, but the Germans were entrenched. The sun had
• 1:47
  now melted the mist and the sky was cloudless. From the pits, the
• 1:51
  Germans could see the Americans working their way through the timber to find a place
• 1:55
  from which the bosh could be knocked away from those death dealing machine guns,
• 1:59
  and to stop the digging of foxholes for new nests. A non commissioned officer
• 2:04
  and sixteen men went out from the American line. All of them were expert
• 2:07
  rifle shots who came from the support platoon of the assault troops on the left.
• 2:13
  Using the forest's undergrowth to shield them. They passed unharmed through the bullets
• 2:16
  swept belt which the Germans were throwing around hill number two two three, and
• 2:21
  reached the valley. Above them was a canopy of lead. To the north,
• 2:25
  they heard the heavy cannonading of that part of the battle. When they
• 2:29
  passed into the valley, they found they were within the range of another battalion
• 2:32
  of German machine guns. The Germans on the hill at the far end of
• 2:36
  the valley were lashing the base of number two two three for their own protection
• 2:39
  against the bullets that came with the whip of a wasp through the tree tops.
• 2:44
  The detachment went boldly up the enemy's hill before them. On the hillside,
• 2:47
  they came to an old trench which had been used in an earlier battle
• 2:52
  of the war. They dropped into it, moving cautiously, stopping to get
• 2:55
  their bearings from the sounds of the guns above them. They walked the trend
• 3:00
  an Indian file. It led to the left around the shoulder of the hill
• 3:04
  and into the deep dip of a valley. In the rear. Germans were
• 3:07
  on the hilltop across that valley, but the daring of the Americans protected them.
• 3:12
  The Germans were guarding the valleys and passes, and they were not looking
• 3:15
  for the enemy in the shadow of the barrels of German guns. As the
• 3:19
  trench now led down the hill, carrying the Americans away from the gunners,
• 3:22
  they sought the detachment, came out of it and took skirmish formation in the
• 3:27
  dense, entangled bushes. They had gone but a short distance when they stepped
• 3:30
  upon a forest path. Just below them were two Germans with red cross bands
• 3:35
  upon their arms. At the sight of the Americans, the Germans dropped their
• 3:38
  stretcher and turned and fled around a curve. The sound of the shots fired
• 3:44
  after them was lost in the clatter of the machine guns above. One of
• 3:46
  the Germans fell but regained his feet, and both disappeared in the shrubs to
• 3:51
  the right. It was killed or captured those Germans to prevent exposure of the
• 3:54
  position of the invaders, and the Americans went after them. They turned off
• 3:59
  the path where they saw the stretcher bearers leave it, darted through the underbrush,
• 4:03
  dodged trees and stumps and brushes, jumping through the shrubs and reeds on
• 4:08
  the bank of a small stream, the Americans and the lead landed in a
• 4:12
  group of about twenty of the enemy. The Germans sprang to their feet in
• 4:15
  surprise. They were behind their own line of battle. Officers were holding a
• 4:19
  conference with a major private soldiers and groups were chatting and eating. They were
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  before a little shack that was the German major headquarters, and from it stretched
• 4:29
  telephone wires. The Germans were not set for a fight. Out from the
• 4:32
  brushwood and off the bank across the stream, one after another came the Americans.
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  It bewildered the Germans. They did not know the number of the enemy
• 4:42
  that had come upon them. As each of the buddies landed, he sensed
• 4:46
  the situation and prepared for an attack from any angle. Some of them fired
• 4:49
  at German soldiers, whom they saw reaching for their guns. All threw up
• 4:54
  their hands with a cry of camarade. When the Americans opened fire about their
• 4:59
  prisoners, the Americans formed a semicircle as they forced them to disarm. At
• 5:03
  the left end of this crescent was Alvin York, a young six foot mountaineer
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  who had come to the war from the knobs of Tennessee. He knew nothing
• 5:12
  of military tactics beyond the simple evolutions of the drill. Only a few days
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  before he had seen the first flash of a hostile gun. But a rifle
• 5:20
  was as familiar to his hands as one of the fingers upon them. His
• 5:24
  body was ridged and laced with muscles that had grown to seasoned sinews from swinging
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  a sledge in a blacksmith's shop. He had never seen the man or crowd
• 5:32
  of men of whom he was afraid. He had hunted in the mountains while
• 5:35
  forked lightning flashed around him. He had heard the thunder crash in mountain coves
• 5:41
  as loud as the burst of any German shell. He was of that type
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  into which whose brain and heart the qualm of fear never comes. The Americans
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  were on the downstep of the hill, with their prisoners on higher ground.
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  The major's headquarters had been hidden away in a thicket of young undergrowth, and
• 5:58
  the Americans could see but a short distance head. As the semicircle formed,
• 6:01
  with Alban York on the left end, he stepped beyond the edge of the
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  thicket, and what he saw up the hill surprised him. Just forty yards
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  away was the crest, and along it was a row of machine guns,
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  a battalion of them. The German gunners had heard the shots fired by the
• 6:16
  Americans in front of the major's shack, or they had been warned by the
• 6:19
  fleeing stretcher bearers that the enemy was behind them. They were jerking at their
• 6:24
  guns, rapidly turning them around, for the nests had been masked, and
• 6:28
  the muzzles of the guns pointed down into the valley at the foot of hill
• 6:30
  number two two three to sweep it. When the eighty second Division came into
• 6:34
  the open, some of the Germans in the gun pits, using rifles,
• 6:39
  shot at York. The bullets burned his face as they passed. He cried
• 6:43
  a warning to his comrades, which evidently was not heard, for when he
• 6:46
  began to shoot up the hill, they called to him to stop. As
• 6:49
  the Germans had surrendered, they saw only the prisoners before them. There was
• 6:55
  no time for parley. York's second cry look out could carry no excellence of
• 7:00
  the danger to those whose view was blinded by the thicket. The Germans had
• 7:03
  their guns turned Hell and death were being belched down the hillside upon the Americans.
• 7:09
  At the opening rattle of these guns, the German prisoners as if through
• 7:12
  a pre arranged signal, fell flat to the ground, and the streams of
• 7:15
  lead passed over them. Some of the Americans, prevented by the thicket from
• 7:18
  seeing that an attack was to be made upon them. Hearing the guns,
• 7:23
  instinctively followed the lead of the Germans, but the onslaught came with such suddenness
• 7:28
  that those in the line of fire had no chance. The first sweep of
• 7:31
  the guns killed six and wounded three of the Americans. Death leaped through the
• 7:35
  bushes and claimed Corporal Murray Savage, Privates Marian Demwalski, Ralph Wheeler, Fred
• 7:42
  Waring, William Wine, and Carl Swanson crumpled to the ground. Wounded were
• 7:46
  Sergeant Bernard Early, who had been in command, Corporal William B. Cutting,
• 7:51
  and Private Merry O. Musey Yorke. To escape the guns he saw
• 7:56
  sweeping towards him, had dived to the ground between two shrubs. The fire
• 8:00
  of other machine guns was added to those already in action, and streams of
• 8:05
  lead continued to pour through the thicket, but the toll of the dead and
• 8:07
  wounded of the Americans had been taken. The Germans kept their line of fire
• 8:13
  about waist high so they would not kill their own men, some of whom
• 8:16
  they could see grobbling on the ground. York had seen the murder of his
• 8:20
  pals in the first onset. He had heard some one say, let's get
• 8:24
  out of here. We are in the German line. Then all had been
• 8:26
  silence on the American side. German prisoners lay on the ground before him,
• 8:31
  in view of the gunners on the hilltop. York edged around till he had
• 8:35
  a clear view of the gun pits above him. The stalks of weeds and
• 8:39
  undergrowth were about him. There came a lull in the machine gun fire.
• 8:43
  Several Germans arose as though to come out of their pits and down the hill
• 8:46
  to see the battle's result. But on the American side the battle was just
• 8:50
  begun. York, from the brushes at the end of the thicket let fly.
• 8:56
  One of the Germans, sprang upward, waved his arms above him as
• 8:58
  he began his flight into eternity. The others dropped back into their holes,
• 9:03
  and there was another clatter of machine guns, and again the bullets slashed across
• 9:05
  the thicket, but there was silence on the American side. York waited more
• 9:11
  cautiously German heads began to rise above their pits. York moved his rifle deliberately
• 9:16
  along the line, knocking back those heads that were the more venturesome. The
• 9:20
  American rifle shoots five times and a clip was gone before the Germans realized that
• 9:26
  the fire upon them was coming from one point. They centered upon that point.
• 9:30
  Around York. The ground was torn up. Mud from the plowing bullets
• 9:33
  besmirched him. The brush was moved away above and on either side of him,
• 9:37
  and leaves and twigs were falling over him. But they could only shoot
• 9:41
  at him. They were given no chance to take deliberate aim. As they
• 9:46
  turned the clumsy barrel of a machine gun down at the fire sparking point on
• 9:50
  the hillside, a German would raise his head above his pit to sight it.
• 9:54
  Instantly backward along that machine gun barrel would come an American bullet crashing into
• 9:58
  the head of the bosch whom manned the gun. Prisoners on the ground squirmed
• 10:01
  under the fire that was passing over them. Their bodies were in a tortuous
• 10:05
  motion, but Yorke held them there. It made the gunners keep their fire
• 10:09
  high. Every shot York made was carefully placed as a hunter stops in the
• 10:15
  forest and gazes straight ahead, his mind receptive to the slightest movement of a
• 10:18
  squirrel or the rustle of leaves in any of the trees before him. So
• 10:22
  this Tennessee mountaineer faced and fought that line of blazing machine guns on the ridge
• 10:28
  of the hill before him. His mind was sensitive to the point in the
• 10:31
  line that at that instant threatened a real danger, and instinctively he turned towards
• 10:35
  it. Down the row of prisoners on the ground, he saw the German
• 10:39
  major with a pistol in his hand, and he made the officer throw the
• 10:43
  gun to him. Later, its magazine was found to have been emptied.
• 10:46
  He noted that after he shot at the gun pit, there was a break
• 10:50
  in the line of flame at that point, and an interval would pass before
• 10:54
  that gun would again be manned and become a source of danger to him.
• 10:58
  He also realized that where there was a so break of ten or fifteen feet
• 11:01
  in the line of flame, and the trunk of a tree rose within that
• 11:03
  space, that soon a German gun and helmet would be peeking around the tree's
• 11:07
  trunk. A rifleman would try for him. Where the machine guns failed in
• 11:13
  the mountains of Tennessee. Alvin York had won fame as one of the best
• 11:16
  shots with both rifle and revolver that those mountains had ever held, and his
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  imperturbability was as noted as the keenness of his sight. In the mountain,
• 11:24
  shooting matches at a range of forty yards, just the distance the row of
• 11:28
  German guns were from him, he would put ten rifle bullets into a space
• 11:33
  no larger than a man's thumb nail. Since a small boy, he had
• 11:37
  been shooting with a rifle at the bobbing heads of turkeys that had been tethered
• 11:41
  behind a log, so that only their heads would show. German heads,
• 11:45
  and German helmets loomed large before him. A battalion of machine guns is a
• 11:50
  military unit organized to give battle to a regiment of infantry. Yet one man
• 11:54
  a representative of America on that hillside on that October morning, Oake the morale
• 12:00
  of a battalion of machine gunners made up from members of Germany's famous Prussian guards.
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  Down in the brush below the Prussians was a human machine gun they could
• 12:09
  not hit, and the penalty was death to try to locate him. As
• 12:13
  York fought, there was prayer upon his lips. He was an elder in
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  a little church back in the valley of the three Forks of the Wolf in
• 12:22
  the mountains of Tennessee. He prayed to God to spare him and to have
• 12:26
  mercy on those whom he was compelled to kill. When York shot and a
• 12:30
  German soldier fell backward or pitched forward and remained motionless, York would call to
• 12:35
  them, well, come on down. It was an earnest command in which
• 12:39
  there was no spirit of exultation or braggadocio. He was praying for their surrender
• 12:45
  so that he might stop killing them. His command come down. At times
• 12:50
  above the firing was heard in the German pits. They realized they were fighting
• 12:54
  one man, and they could not understand the strange demand. When the fight
• 12:58
  began, York was lying on the ground, but as the entire line of
• 13:01
  German guns came into the fight, he raised himself to a sitting position so
• 13:05
  that his gun would have the sweep of all of them. When the Germans
• 13:09
  found they could not get him with bullets, they tried other tactics. Off
• 13:13
  to his left, seven Germans, led by a lieutenant, crept through the
• 13:18
  bushes, when about twenty yards away they broke for him with lowered bayonets.
• 13:22
  The clip of York's rifle was nearly empty. He dropped it and took his
• 13:26
  automatic pistol. So calmly was he master of himself, and so complete his
• 13:31
  vision of the situation that he selected as his first mark among the uncoming Germans,
• 13:37
  the one farthest away. He knew he would not miss the form of
• 13:41
  a man at that distance. He wanted the rear men to fall first,
• 13:45
  so the others would keep coming at him, and not to stop in panic
• 13:48
  when they saw their companions falling and fire a volley at him. He felt
• 13:52
  that in such a volley his only danger lay. They kept coming and fell
• 13:56
  as he shot. The foremost man, and the last a toample did not
• 14:00
  get ten yards from where he started. Their bodies formed a line down the
• 14:03
  hillside. York resumed the battle with the machine guns. The German fire had
• 14:09
  eased up while the Bannet charge was on The gunners paused to watch the grim
• 14:13
  struggle below them. The major from among the prisoners crawled to York with an
• 14:18
  offer to order the surrender of the machine gunners. Do it was his laconic
• 14:22
  acceptance, but his vigilance did not lessen to the right. A German had
• 14:26
  crawled near by. He rose and hurled a hand grenade. It missed its
• 14:31
  objective and wounded one of the prisoners. The American rifle swung quickly, and
• 14:35
  the grenade thrower pitched forward with the grunt of a man struck heavily in the
• 14:39
  stomach pit. The German major blew his whistle out of their gun pits.
• 14:43
  The Germans came around from behind trees up from the brush on either side.
• 14:50
  They were unbuckling cartridge belts and throwing them and their side arms away. York
• 14:54
  did not move from his position in the brush about half way down the hill.
• 14:58
  As they came to him, he halted them, and he watched the
• 15:01
  gun pits for movement of anyone left skulking there. His eye went cautiously over
• 15:05
  the new prisoners to see that all side arms had been thrown away. The
• 15:09
  surrender was genuine. There were about ninety Germans before him with their hands in
• 15:15
  the air. This gave him over a hundred prisoners. He arose and called
• 15:18
  to his comrades, and several answered him. Some of the responses came from
• 15:22
  wounded men. All of the Americans had been on York's right throughout the fight.
• 15:28
  The thicket had prevented them from taking any effective part. They were forced
• 15:31
  to protect themselves from the whining bullets that came through the brush from unseen guns.
• 15:35
  They had constantly guarded the prisoners and shielded Yorke from treachery. Seven Americans,
• 15:41
  Percy Beardley, John Konotski, Thomas G. Johnson, Fyodor Sak,
• 15:46
  Michael A. Secchina, Patrick Donahue, and George W. Wills came to
• 15:52
  him. Sergeant Early, Curpal Cutting, and Private Musy, though wounded,
• 15:56
  were still alive. He lined the prisoners up by twos. His own wounded,
• 16:02
  he put at the rear of the column and forced the Germans to carry
• 16:04
  those who could not walk. The other Americans he stationed along the column to
• 16:08
  hold the prisoners in line. Sergeant Early, shot through the body, was
• 16:12
  too severely wounded to continue in command. Yorke was a corporal, but there
• 16:18
  was no question of rank, for all turned to him for instructions. The
• 16:21
  Germans could not take their eyes off of him, and instantly complied with all
• 16:25
  his orders given through the major, who spoke English, Stray bullets kept plugging
• 16:30
  through the branches of the trees around them. For the first time, the
• 16:33
  Americans realized they were under fire from the Germans on the hill back of them,
• 16:37
  whom they had seen when they had come out of the deserted trench.
• 16:40
  The German station there could not visualize the strange fight that was taking place behind
• 16:45
  a line of German machine guns, and they were withholding their fire to protect
• 16:48
  their own men. They were plugging into the woods with rifles, hoping to
• 16:52
  draw a return volley and thus establish the American's position. To all who doubted
• 16:56
  the possibility of carrying so many prisoners through the fore forest or spoke of reprisal
• 17:00
  attacks to release them, Yorke's reply was, let's get him out of here.
• 17:06
  The German major, looking down the long line of Germans, possibly planning
• 17:10
  some recoup from the shame and ignomy of the surrender of so many of them,
• 17:14
  stepped up to York and asked, how many men have you got?
• 17:18
  The big mountaineer wheeled on him. I got up plenty, and the Major
• 17:22
  seemed convinced that the number of Americans was immaterial, as York thrust his automatic
• 17:26
  into the Major's face and stepped him up to the head of the column.
• 17:30
  Among the captives were three officers. These York placed around him to lead the
• 17:36
  prisoners, one on either side and the major immediately before him, and Yorke's
• 17:40
  right hand swung the automatic pistol with which he had made an impressive demonstration in
• 17:45
  the fight up the hill. The officers were told that at the first sign
• 17:48
  of treachery, or for failure of the men behind to obey a command,
• 17:52
  the penalty would be their lives, and the major was informed that he would
• 17:55
  be the first to go. With this information, no German skulking on the
• 17:59
  hill or in the bushes could fire upon York without endangering the officers. Similar
• 18:03
  protection was given all of the Americans acting as escort up the hill. York
• 18:07
  started the column from the topography of the land he knew there were machine guns
• 18:12
  over the crest that had had no part in the fight, straight to these
• 18:15
  nests. He marched them. As the column approached, the major was forced
• 18:19
  by York to command the gunners to surrender. Only one shot was fired after
• 18:25
  the march began. At one of the nests, a German, seeing so
• 18:29
  many German as prisoners and so few of the enemy to guard them. All
• 18:33
  of them on the German firing line with machine gun nests around them, refused
• 18:37
  to throw down his gun and showed fight. York did not hesitate. The
• 18:41
  remainder of that man's crew took their place in line, and the major promised
• 18:44
  York there would be no more delays in the surrender if he would kill no
• 18:48
  more of them. As a great serpent. The column wound among the trees
• 18:52
  on the hilltop, swallowing the crews of German machine guns. After the ridge
• 18:56
  had been cleared, four machine gun nests were found down the hillside. It
• 19:00
  took all the woodcraft the young mountaineer knew to get to his own command.
• 19:03
  They had come back over the hilltop and were on the slope of the valley
• 19:07
  in which the eighty second Division was fighting. They were now in danger from
• 19:11
  both German and American guns. York, listening to the firing, knew that
• 19:15
  the Americans had reached the valley, and that some of them had crossed it.
• 19:18
  Where their line was running, he could not determine. He knew if
• 19:22
  the Americans saw his column of German uniforms, they were in danger. Captors
• 19:26
  and captives alike of being annihilated at any moment. The Germans from the two
• 19:30
  hilltops down the valley to check the eighty second Division's advance might lay a belt
• 19:34
  of bullets across the course they traveled, winding around the cleared places and keeping
• 19:40
  in the thickly timbered section of the hill slope whenever it was possible. Sergeant
• 19:44
  York worked his way towards the American line. In the dense woods. The
• 19:48
  German major made suggestions of a path to take. As York was undecided which
• 19:52
  one to choose, the major's suggestion made him go the other one. Frequently
• 19:57
  the muzzle of York's automatic dimpled Major's back, and he quickened his step,
• 20:02
  slowed up, or led the column in the direction indicated to him, without
• 20:06
  turning his head and without inquiry as to the motive back of York's commands.
• 20:11
  Down near the foot of the hill, near the trench they had traveled a
• 20:12
  short while before York answered the challenge to halt. He stepped out so his
• 20:18
  uniform could be seen, and called to the Americans challenging him and about to
• 20:22
  fire on the Germans that he was bringing in prisoners. The American line opened
• 20:27
  for him to pass and a wild cheer went up from the dough boys when
• 20:30
  they saw the column of prisoners. Some of them called to him to know
• 20:34
  if he had the whole damned German army. At the foot of the hill.
• 20:38
  In an old dugout, an American PC had been located, and York
• 20:41
  turned in his prisoners. The prisoners were officially counted by Lieutenant Joseph a Woods,
• 20:48
  assistant division inspecter, and there were one hundred and thirty two of them.
• 20:52
  Three of the number were officers and one with the rank of major.
• 20:56
  When the eighty second Division passed on, officers of York's regiment visited the scene
• 21:00
  of the fight, and they counted twenty five Germans that he had killed,
• 21:03
  and thirty five machine guns that York had not only silenced, but had unmanned,
• 21:07
  carrying the men back with him as prisoners. When York was given his
• 21:12
  receipt for the prisoners, an incident happened that shows the true nightliness of the
• 21:17
  character of this untrained mountaineer. It was but a little after ten o'clock in
• 21:22
  the morning. The Americans had a hard days fighting ahead of them. Somewhere
• 21:26
  out in the forest. York's own company company g and his own regiment,
• 21:30
  the three twenty eighth Infantry, were fighting. He made an inquiry, but
• 21:33
  no one could direct him to them. He turned to the nearest American officer,
• 21:37
  saluted, and reported ready for duty. What he had done was to
• 21:41
  him but a part of the work to be done that day. But York
• 21:45
  was assigned to the command of his prisoners to carry them back to a detention
• 21:48
  camp. The officers were held by the PC for an examination and grilling on
• 21:52
  the plans of the enemy whenever they could. The private soldiers among the prisoners
• 21:57
  gathered close to York, now looking to him for their personal safety. On
• 22:02
  the way to the detention camp, the column was shelled by German guns from
• 22:04
  one of the hilltops. York maneuvered them and put them in double quick time
• 22:08
  until they were out of range. Late in the afternoon, back of the
• 22:12
  three hills that faced Hill number two two three, the All America Division cut
• 22:18
  the Dakoviy railroad that supplied as salient to the north that the Germans were striving
• 22:22
  desperately to hold. As they swept on to their objective, they found the
• 22:26
  hill to the left of the valley that turns the shoulder towards number two two
• 22:29
  three, which the people of France have named York's Hill, cleared of Germans
• 22:33
  and on its crest silent and unmanned machine guns. Americans returned and buried on
• 22:38
  the hillside, beside a thicket near a shack that had been the German officers
• 22:42
  headquarters six American soldiers. They placed wooden crosses to mark the graves, and
• 22:48
  on the top of the crosses swung the helmets the soldiers had worn out of
• 22:52
  the forest. Came the story of what York had done. The men in
• 22:55
  the trenches along the entire front were told of it, not only in the
• 22:59
  United States, but in Great Britain, France, and Italy. It electified
• 23:02
  the public from the meager details the press was able to carry. For the
• 23:06
  entire Ontante firing line was ablaze and a surrender was being forced upon Germany,
• 23:11
  and York's division was out in the Argonne, still fighting its way ahead.
• 23:15
  The people could but wonder how one man was able to silence a battalion of
• 23:18
  machine guns and bring in so many prisoners. Major General George B. Duncan,
• 23:22
  commander of the eighty second Division, and officers of York's Regiment knew that
• 23:26
  history had been made upon that hillside. By personal visits of the regiment's officers
• 23:32
  to the scene, by measurements, by official count of the silent guns and
• 23:34
  the silent dead, by affidavits from those who were with York, the record
• 23:38
  of his achievement was verified. Major General C. P. Smarole before the
• 23:44
  officers of York's regiment, said to him, your division commander has reported to
• 23:48
  me your exceedingly gallant conduct during the operations of your division in the Meuse Argonne
• 23:53
  battle. I desired express to you my pleasure and commendation for the courage,
• 23:57
  skill, and gallantry which you displayed on that occasion. It is an honor
• 24:03
  to command such soldiers as you. Your conduct reflects great credit not only upon
• 24:07
  the American Army, but upon the American people. Your deeds will be recorded
• 24:11
  in the history of this great war, and they will live as an inspiration
• 24:15
  not only to your comrades, but to the generations that will come after us.
• 24:19
  General John J. Pershing in penning the Congressional Medal of Honor upon him,
• 24:23
  the highest award for valor the United States Government bestows, called Yorke the
• 24:29
  greatest civilian soldier of the war, Marshall Falk, bestowing the Qua Deguier with
• 24:34
  palm upon him, said his feet was the world war's most remarkable individual achievement.
• 24:40
  A deed that is done through the natural use of a great talent seems
• 24:44
  to the doer of the deed the natural thing to have done. A sincere
• 24:48
  response to appreciation and praise made by those endowed with real ability usually comes cloaked
• 24:53
  with a genuine modesty. At his home in the Valley of the Three Forks
• 24:57
  of the Wolf, after the war was I asked Alvin York how he came
• 25:02
  to be Sergeant York. Well, he said, as he looked earnestly at
• 25:06
  me. You know, we were in the Argonne Forest twenty eight days and
• 25:10
  had some mighty hard fighting there. A lot of our boys were killed off.
• 25:14
  Every company asked to have so many sergeants. They needed a sergeant,
• 25:18
  and they just took me. In the summer of nineteen seventeen, when Alvin
• 25:22
  York was called to war, he was working on the farm for twenty five
• 25:25
  dollars a month and his midday meal walking to and from his work. He
• 25:30
  was helping to support his widowed mother with her family of eleven, when he
• 25:33
  returned to this country to be mustered out of service. He had traveled among
• 25:37
  the soldiers of France the guest of the American Expeditionary Force, so the man
• 25:41
  in the lions could see the man whose single handed had captured a battalion of
• 25:45
  machine guns, and he bore the emblems of the highest military honors conferred for
• 25:49
  valor by the governments composing the Allies. At New York, he was taken
• 25:55
  from troopship when it reached the harbor, and the spontaneous welcome given him there
• 26:00
  and at Washington was not surpassed by the pre arranged demonstrations for the nation's distinguished
• 26:04
  foreign visitors. The streets of those cities were lined with people to await his
• 26:08
  coming, and police patrols made way for him. The flaming red of his
• 26:12
  hair, his young, sunburned, weather ridged face with its smile and its
• 26:18
  strength, the Warren service cap and uniform all marked him to the crowds as
• 26:22
  the man they sought. On the shoulders of members of the New York Stock
• 26:26
  Exchange, he was carried to the floor of the Exchange, and business was
• 26:27
  suspended when he appeared in the gallery of the House of Representatives at Washington,
• 26:33
  the debate was stopped and the members turned to cheer him. A sergeant in
• 26:37
  rank, he sat at banquets as the guest of honor, with the highest
• 26:40
  officials of the Army and Navy, and the government on either side. Wherever
• 26:45
  he went he heard the echo of the valuation which Marshall Falk and General Pershing
• 26:48
  placed upon his deans. Many business propositions were made to him. Some were
• 26:52
  substantial and others strange. The whimsical offerings of enthused admirers. Among them were
• 26:59
  cool fortune. He could never earn at labor. Taking as a basis the
• 27:03
  money he was paid for three months on the farm in the summer before he
• 27:06
  went to France, he would have had to work fifty years to earn the
• 27:08
  amount he was offered for a six weeks theatrical engagement for the rights to the
• 27:12
  story of his life, a single newspaper was willing to give him the equivalent
• 27:15
  of thirty three years. He would have to live to be over three hundred
• 27:19
  years of age to earn at the old farm wage the sum motion picture companies
• 27:23
  offered as a guarantee. He turned all down and went back to the little
• 27:27
  worried mother who was waiting for him in a hut in the mountains, To
• 27:30
  the gazelle like mountain girl, whose blue eyes had haunted the shades of night
• 27:34
  and the shadows of trees, To the old seventy five acre farm that clings
• 27:38
  to one of the sloping sides of a sun kissed valley in Tennessee. He
• 27:42
  refused to capitalize on his fame, his achievements that were crowded into a few
• 27:47
  months in the army of his country. There was one influence that was ever
• 27:51
  guiding him. The future had to square with the principles of thought and action
• 27:55
  he had laid down for himself, and that he had followed since he knelt
• 27:57
  four years before at the rough boarded altar in the little church in the valley
• 28:02
  of the three Forks of the Wolf, whose belfry had been calling appealing to
• 28:06
  him since childhood. Admiral Albert Gleaves, who commanded the warship convoy for the
• 28:11
  troopships himself a Tennesseean, made a prediction which came true. The guns of
• 28:17
  are gone, and the batteries of welcome of the East were not to be
• 28:19
  compared to those to be turned loose in York's home state. The people of
• 28:23
  Tennessee filled depots, streets, and tabernacles to welcome him. Gifts awaited him,
• 28:29
  which ranged from a four hundred acre farm raised by public subscription by the
• 28:33
  rotary clubs and newspapers, to blooded stock for it, and almost every form
• 28:37
  of household furnishings that could add to a man's comfort. It took a war
• 28:41
  room at Nashville and the courtesies of the barns of the State Fair Association to
• 28:45
  hold the gifts. He was made a colonel by the Governor of Tennessee and
• 28:48
  appointed a member of his staff. He was elected to honorary membership in many
• 28:52
  organizations as far away as Spokane. The Red Headed Club thought him worthy of
• 28:57
  their membership by virtue of the color of his hair, and in recognition of
• 29:02
  his services to this our glorious country. The nations of Europe, for whom
• 29:06
  he had fought had not forgotten, nor had they ceased to honor him.
• 29:10
  After he had returned to the mountains of Tennessee. Another citation came from the
• 29:14
  French government for a military ward that had been made him in a ceremony at
• 29:18
  the capital of Tennessee. The Italian government conferred upon him the Italian Cross of
• 29:22
  War. The Valley of the Three Forks of the Wolf, where Alvian York
• 29:26
  was born and lives, which has been the home of his ancestors for more
• 29:30
  than a hundred years, is a level, fertile valley that is almost a
• 29:33
  rectangle in form. Three mountains rising on the north, south, and west
• 29:37
  enclose it. But to the east four mountains jumbled together forming a fourth side.
• 29:42
  Seems that each of these is striving for a place by the valley.
• 29:47
  It is down the passes of these mountains on the east that the three branches
• 29:51
  of the Wolf River run, and it is their meeting and co mingling that
• 29:53
  gave the quaint name to the valley. The forks of the Wolf rushed down
• 29:57
  the passes, but the river it runs lazily through the valley. It flows
• 30:02
  beside a cornfield, then wanders over a meadow of clover or into a patch
• 30:06
  of sugar cane, turning the while from side to side as the varying mountain
• 30:11
  vistas come into view. At the far end, where it is pushed over
• 30:14
  the mill dam and out of the valley, the Wolf roars protestingly, then
• 30:18
  rushes on to the Cumberland River, a silver line between the mountains pow Maow.
• 30:22
  The village is co extensive with the valley of the three forks of the
• 30:26
  Wolf. As a stranger first sees Powmow, it is but a half mile
• 30:30
  of the mountain roadway that runs from Jamestown, the county seat of Fentress County,
• 30:34
  to Birdstown, the county seat of Pickett. The roadway comes down from
• 30:38
  the top of the knobs a thousand feet above, and it comes over rocks
• 30:44
  of high and low degree, a jolting, impressive journey for its traveler.
• 30:48
  It reaches the foot of the mountain along one of the prongs of the Wolf,
• 30:52
  crosses them at the base of the eastern mountains, and passes on to
• 30:56
  the northern side of the river at the post office of pow Maw, which
• 31:00
  which is also the store of Pastor Pyle, a frame building upon stilts to
• 31:03
  allow an unobstructed flow of the Wolf when on a winter rampage. The road
• 31:08
  turns at right angles to the west through fields of corn. It goes across
• 31:12
  a stretch of red clover to the clump of forest trees which is the schoolhouse
• 31:17
  grounds and in which nestles the little church that has played such a prominent part
• 31:22
  in the life of the village. Then the road goes beside the graveyard and
• 31:25
  again through corn to the general store of John Marion Rains, which, with
• 31:29
  five houses in sight, and one of these the York Homb, marks the
• 31:33
  western confine of pow Maw. One can be in the center of pow Maw
• 31:37
  and not know it, for the residents live in farmhouses that dot the valley
• 31:41
  and in cabins on the mountain sides. The little church, which sits by
• 31:45
  the road with no homes near it, is the geographical as well as the
• 31:48
  religious center of the community. It is the heart of pow Maw. Passing
• 31:52
  the rain store, the roadway tumbles down to the York's Big Spring, a
• 31:56
  brook and volume. The stream flows clear, cool from a low rock ribbed
• 32:00
  cave in the base of the mountain. Across the spring branch up the mountain
• 32:05
  side, in a clump of honeysuckle and roses and apple trees, is the
• 32:08
  home to which Sergeant York returned. It is the two room cabin. The
• 32:14
  boxing is of rough boards, as are the unplaned narrow strips of batting covering
• 32:19
  the cracks. There is a chimney at one end, and in one room
• 32:22
  is a fireplace. The kitchen is a lean to, and the only porch
• 32:27
  is on the rear the width of the kitchen dining room. The porch is
• 32:30
  for service and work, railed partly with a board for a shelf which holds
• 32:35
  the water bucket, the tin wash basin, and burdens brought in from the
• 32:38
  farm. Parts of the walls of the two rooms are papered with newspapers and
• 32:43
  catalog pages. The rough rafters run above the uncovered floor is of wide boards,
• 32:49
  worn smooth in service, chinked to keep out the blasts of winter.
• 32:53
  The porch in the rear is on a level with the mountain side. To
• 32:57
  care for the mountain slope, a front stoop was built. The sides of
• 33:00
  it are scantlings, and the steps are narrow boards. The house has been
• 33:05
  painted by poverty, but the home is warmed and lit by a mountain mother's
• 33:08
  love. The front stoop is a wooden ladder with flat steps, but the
• 33:13
  entrance to the home is an arbor of honeysuckle and roses. On summer nights,
• 33:17
  the York boys sat on that stoop and sang. Their voices floated on
• 33:22
  the moonbeams out over the valley. The little mother pottered about with ever a
• 33:27
  smile on her face. For her boys they were happy. It was from
• 33:30
  this home that Alvin went to war, and it was to it he returned.
• 33:35
  Visitors know, and it is well for others to realize that pall Mall
• 33:37
  and the valley of the three Forks of the Wolf are back among the rising
• 33:42
  ranges of the Cumberland Mountains, forty eight miles from the railroad. Alvin York
• 33:46
  came from a line of ancestors who were cane cutters and Indian fighters. The
• 33:51
  earliest ancestor of whom he has knowledge was a long hunter, who, with
• 33:55
  a rifle upon his shoulder, strode into the Valley of the Wolf and homesteads
• 34:00
  the river bottom lands. Here as people lived far from the traveled paths,
• 34:05
  marooned in their mountain fastnesses, they clung to the customs and traditions of the
• 34:08
  past. Their life was simple and their sports quaint. They held shooting matches
• 34:14
  on the mountain side, enjoyed log rollings and corn huskings. Strong in their
• 34:20
  loves and in their hates, they feared God, but feared no man.
• 34:23
  The Civil War swept over the valley and left splotches of blood. Friends of
• 34:28
  Sergeant York, knowing that the history of his people was rich in story,
• 34:31
  and that the public was waiting wanting to know more of the man, the
• 34:36
  German army could not make run nor make surrender, and instead had to come
• 34:40
  to him urged that his story be told. He had been mustered out of
• 34:45
  the army and come back to the valley, wanting to pick up again the
• 34:47
  drop thread of his former life. He was striving earnestly and prayerfully to blot
• 34:52
  from recurrent memory that October morning seen on York's Hill in France. His friends
• 34:59
  and neighbors at Palma now waited eagerly for his return. They wanted to hear
• 35:01
  from his own lips the story of his fight. No man of the mountains
• 35:06
  was ever given the home coming that was his. It was made the reunion
• 35:09
  of the people with the neighbors, the component parts of one great family.
• 35:15
  When home again, Alvin wanted no especial deference shown him. He wished to
• 35:19
  be again just one of them, to swing himself upon the counter at the
• 35:22
  general store and talk with them. As of old. He had much to
• 35:25
  tell from his experience, but always it was of other incidents than the one
• 35:30
  that made him famous. Months passed. He lived in that mountain cabin with
• 35:35
  his little mother, whose council had ever influenced him, and yet not once
• 35:38
  did he mention to her that he had a fight in the forest of Argonne.
• 35:43
  His consent was gained for the publication of the story of his people,
• 35:45
  but it was with the pronounced stipulation that it be told right weeks afterwards,
• 35:52
  for I had gone to live a while among his people. The two of
• 35:54
  us were sitting upon the rugged rock facing to the cliff above the York Spring,
• 35:59
  talked thinking about the fight in France. He told of it hesitatingly,
• 36:04
  modestly. Some of the parts was simply the confirmation of assembled data, much
• 36:07
  of it denial of published rumor and conjecture. Before the story came out as
• 36:13
  a whole. I asked the meaning of his statement that he would not mind
• 36:16
  the publication if the story were done right well, he said, with his
• 36:21
  mountain drawl, I don't want you bearing down too much on that killin part,
• 36:25
  tell it without so much of that. A rock was picked up and
• 36:29
  hurled down the mountain side. I then understood why the little mother was just
• 36:34
  so waitin til Alvin gets ready to talk. I understood why the son did
• 36:37
  not wish to be the one to bring into his mother's mind the picture of
• 36:42
  that hour in France when men were falling before his gun. I saw the
• 36:45
  reason he had for always courteously avoiding talking of the scene with anyone. But
• 36:51
  and he turned with that smile that wins and friends. I just can't help
• 36:54
  chuckling at that German major. I sure had him bluffed, according to the
• 36:59
  Code Mountain conversation. There followed a silence. Another rock bounded off a sapling
• 37:04
  down the cliff. You should have seen the major. He resumed moved down
• 37:08
  that hill whenever I pulled down on him with that old Colt goose step it
• 37:13
  I think they call it. He was so little, his back was so
• 37:16
  straight and all huffed up over the way. He had to mind me.
• 37:20
  I had watched the rocks as they went down the cliff, and it seemed
• 37:22
  nearly every one of them bounced off the same limb. I commented on the
• 37:27
  accuracy of his eye. Oh, I wasn't throwing at that sapling but at
• 37:30
  that leaf he straightened up and threw more carefully, and the leaf floated down
• 37:36
  to the waters of the York Spring. Down by the spring, I met
• 37:38
  the little mother bringing in a tin bucket to the stone milk house which nature
• 37:43
  had built. Her slender, drooping figure, capped by the sunbonnet she always
• 37:46
  wore, reached just to the shoulder of her son, as he placed his
• 37:51
  arm protectingly about her. I asked if she were not proud of that boy
• 37:54
  of hers. Yes, she answered, with pride in every line of her
• 37:58
  sweet, though wrinkled face. I am proud of all of them, all
• 38:01
  of my eight boys. End of chapter A long Hunter comes to the valley.
• 38:08
  The valley of the three Forks of the Wolf is more than a fertile
• 38:12
  space between two mountain ranges. It is a rectangular basin of verdure and beauty
• 38:17
  in the glow of a southern sun, around which seven mountains have grown to
• 38:22
  their maturity generously. For uncounted years, this family of the hills has given
• 38:28
  to the valley the surplus products of their timbered slopes, and the Wolf River
• 38:32
  has gone through the valleys, distributing the wealth the mountains brought in brightening and
• 38:37
  adding touches of beauty here and there, ever singing as she came down to
• 38:42
  her daily task. The mountains and the river have worked unceasingly together to make
• 38:46
  the spot a place of comfort and beauty. On the bare rock shoulder of
• 38:51
  one of these mountains, in the closing years of the eighteenth century stood one
• 38:55
  of the last of the long hunters, that race of stout hearted, sturdy
• 39:00
  legged men, who, when the Atlantic coast was dotted with sparsely settled British
• 39:06
  colonies, climbed the mountains and went down the western slopes on the long hunts
• 39:10
  in the unknown land that lay below. They were the pioneers of the pioneers,
• 39:15
  who, in their wanderings found a spot rich in game, in nuts
• 39:20
  and soil, such a home as they had wished, and they beckoned back
• 39:23
  for their families and their friends. The figure upon the rock ledge rested upon
• 39:29
  a long muzzle loading flintlock rifle as he looked out over the valley. His
• 39:34
  legs were wrapped in crudely tanned hides made from the game he had killed.
• 39:37
  His cap was of coonskin. His search for adventure and game had carried him
• 39:43
  across the crest of the Cumberlands, and along many weary, lonely miles of
• 39:46
  the western wooded slopes of those mountains. Years afterward, he is known to
• 39:52
  have said that the view from the crag that day was the most appealing in
• 39:55
  its calmness and its beauty that he had seen upon his hunts. Below him
• 40:00
  stretched a grove of trees. Their waving tops told of their size, and
• 40:05
  to his trained woodsman's eye, the quivering oval leaves were the leaves of the
• 40:08
  walnut. It was assurance that the soil was rich, and through the length
• 40:14
  of the valley, twisted irregularly, lay a wide ribbon of saffron cane,
• 40:17
  from which at times the silver surface of a stream showed a further evidence of
• 40:23
  the soil's fertility. Over the western edge of this table land of green and
• 40:28
  yellow and silver, the mountains cast a shadow of purple, and the sun
• 40:31
  filtered slanting rays through the forest slopes on the north and east down the mountain
• 40:37
  side. He came and into the valley, never to leave it, except
• 40:40
  when in bartering with the Indians he went to their camping places for firs,
• 40:45
  or in the years of prosperity that followed he was upon a trading mission.
• 40:50
  He first made his way through Walnut Grove in search of the caned banks of
• 40:53
  the river. As he pushed through the reeds that swayed above him, he
• 40:58
  came suddenly upon a well. Beaten in its dust were the prints of deer
• 41:01
  hoofs, and he followed them. The path threaded the length of the valley
• 41:06
  beside the river's winding course, but he knew from the crest of the mountains
• 41:09
  above him the direction he was taking. It led him to the base of
• 41:14
  one of these mountains, to a spring which flowed clear and cool. A
• 41:17
  brook and size from a low rock ribbed cave by the spring, he cooked
• 41:22
  his meal. His bread was baked upon a hot stone, and he drank
• 41:27
  water from a terrapin shell. As he ate his meal, there came the
• 41:30
  sound of breaking cane, a familiar welcome vibration to the hunter. A stone
• 41:36
  that is still by the spring side was used as a shelter and a resting
• 41:39
  place for the rifle, and a deer fell as it stopped, astonished at
• 41:44
  the curling smoke that rose from its watering place. This was the first meal
• 41:47
  of the white man at the York Spring, or in the Valley of the
• 41:52
  Three Forks of the Wolf, and for more than fifty years the hunter lived
• 41:55
  within a hundred yards of where he camped that day. He was Jonrad Pile,
• 42:00
  or Old Coonrod, as he is known the descriptive adjectives, and by
• 42:05
  name ever coupled as though one word. He was the great great grandfather of
• 42:09
  Sergeant Alvin Cullham, York, and the earliest ancestor of which he has account
• 42:15
  Above the spring in the rock facing of the cliff is a large cave.
• 42:19
  Here Coonrod Pile spread a bed of leaves and made his home. The camp
• 42:23
  fire was kept burning, and its smoke was seen by other hunters, and
• 42:28
  person Miller, Arthur Frog, John Riley and Moses Poor came to Coonrod in
• 42:34
  the valley, and they too made their homes there, and pal Maw was
• 42:37
  founded. And the descendants of these men are to day eighty percent of the
• 42:42
  residents in the Valley of the Three Forks of the Wolf. This is but
• 42:46
  one of the many valley settlements made by long hunters in the Appalachian Mountains adventurous
• 42:52
  families in the last days of the colonies and in the years that came after
• 42:55
  the Revolution. Followed the hunters and log cabins and clear its spaces appeared in
• 43:00
  the valleys and on the mountain sides, and from them sprang another race of
• 43:05
  long hunters, who went out from the mountains down into the valleys of the
• 43:08
  Ohio and the Mississippi, returning to tell of the land and the game they
• 43:13
  had found. Not far from pow Mall as the Crow would rise and journey
• 43:17
  is a carving upon a tree that is believed to historically mark the path of
• 43:22
  the most noted of long hunters, And it says d Boone killed a bar
• 43:27
  on tree in the year seventeen sixty. Immigrants of those days settled as Kunrod
• 43:32
  Pyle and his companions took up their squatter's rights in the valley of the Wolf.
• 43:37
  As canvas covered mountain schooners carrying families of the settlers moved westward. They
• 43:43
  followed the trails of the hunters and stopped where it appealed to them. Wagon
• 43:46
  tracks grew into roads as the travel increased, and the roads, unvaryingly led
• 43:52
  to the passes and the gaps in the mountains that offered the least resistance to
• 43:55
  progress, So scattered throughout the ranges of the Appalachians are many homes and settlements
• 44:00
  off from the old beaten wagon trails, far distant from the railroads of to
• 44:05
  day, reached only over rocky, rarely worked roadways. Those who dwell there
• 44:09
  are the direct descendants of pioneers. Here they had lived for generations, unmolested
• 44:15
  by the rush and hurry for homes to the more fertile west. Often in
• 44:20
  those days, a mountain neighbor was forty miles away, and they were long
• 44:23
  rugged miles. To day, a traveler distant on the mountain side can be
• 44:28
  recognized by the mountaineers, while the man's features are still untraceable by the droop
• 44:32
  of a hat or a peculiar walk or amble of the mule he rides.
• 44:37
  In the case of any traveler along those remote roads, the odds are long
• 44:40
  that the man, his father, his grandfather, as far back as anyone
• 44:45
  can remember, all were born and raised in the neighborhood. And the neighborhood
• 44:50
  is the valleys and the cleared spaces on the sides of all the mountains near
• 44:52
  a round So the mountaineer of to day is the transplanted colonist of the eighteenth
• 44:58
  century is the the backwoodsmen of the days of Andrew Jackson. His life has
• 45:02
  the hospitality, the genuineness, and simplicity of the pioneer. It has been
• 45:07
  said of the residence of the Cumberland Mountains that they are the purest Anglo Saxons
• 45:12
  to be found today, and not even England can produce so clear a strain.
• 45:16
  The mountain families have intermarried, and because of the inaccessibility of their homes,
• 45:22
  have remained marooned in their mountain fastnesses. They are Anglo Saxon in their
• 45:25
  blood and their customs. They are Colonial Americans in their speech and credences.
• 45:31
  They have a love for daring that comes from the wilderness and freedom of their
• 45:35
  surroundings. They have a directness of mind that is the result of unconscious training.
• 45:40
  They must be sure of the firmness of each footstep they take, and
• 45:44
  it is through and past obstructions that they locate their game. They are keen
• 45:49
  of observation, for the movement of a shadow, or the swaying of a
• 45:52
  weed may mean the presence of a fox, or a dropping hickory nut indicate
• 45:57
  the flight of a squirrel. They are physically brave, for it is the
• 46:00
  inheritance of all who live in the mountains. Their word is accepted, for
• 46:05
  they wish the good will of the few among whom they must spend their lives,
• 46:08
  and to them, lying is a form of cowardice. They are sensitive
• 46:12
  because they are observant and realize they have been criticized and misunderstood, misclassed as
• 46:17
  a rare race of moonshiners and feudists. Quickly and clearly, they see through
• 46:22
  any veneer of democracy. The stranger may assume to conceal an assumption of superiority.
• 46:28
  Yet for the stranger on the road side, in answer to the halloo
• 46:30
  at their gait, the mountaineers are willing to go out of their way to
• 46:35
  do a favor, and they will cheerfully share such food and comforts as they
• 46:37
  may have with any man. But they give their confidence only in proportion to
• 46:43
  demonstrations of manhood and genuineness, And as humanists, they are not in a
• 46:47
  hurry. If there is an aura of caste, the distinctions must be created
• 46:52
  by those who have come as strangers into the mountains, and not by the
• 46:54
  mountaineer. They know they are not ignorant, except as everyone is ignorant who
• 47:00
  lacks contact with new customs and changes in world progress. They are fully cognizant
• 47:05
  of their lack of that knowledge which comes only out of a book. But
• 47:08
  whatever their educational shortcomings, no one has ever laid at their door the charge
• 47:14
  of stupidity. Raised in nature's school, they are masters of its non elective
• 47:17
  course. They know by the arc the baying hounds make, the size of
• 47:22
  the circle the fox will take, and where to intercept him. They can
• 47:25
  tell by the distance up the mountain side where the dogs are running whether the
• 47:30
  fox is red or gray. They know by the sound a rock makes as
• 47:34
  it is dropped into a stream the depth of the ford. They have even
• 47:37
  a classical finish to their woodland schooling, and they find a pleasure in noting
• 47:40
  that the bullfrog sits with his back to the water as the moon rises,
• 47:45
  and faces it as the moon sets. They know the signs of changing weather
• 47:49
  that will affect their crops. The tints of the clouds that float above them
• 47:52
  convey a meaning. There are cause and effect in the wind that continues in
• 47:57
  one direction. They watch the actions of animals and fowls, and they are
• 48:00
  wise enough to attribute to beast and bird an intuitive, protective sense superior to
• 48:06
  their own. They note when the moss has grown heavier on the north side
• 48:09
  of the tree. The steadiness of their poise and their silence in the presence
• 48:14
  of strangers is not due to moroseness or the absence of active thought. They
• 48:19
  have learned in the woods. If they are to be successful in their hunts,
• 48:22
  to be personally as unobtrusive as possible, often, to remain motionless,
• 48:27
  and all the while to watch and listen alertly whenever they can be of real
• 48:30
  assistance. No one can more quickly or more generously respond. They have their
• 48:36
  own standard of values in personal intercourse, and they can wait patiently and in
• 48:40
  impressive silence. They are always willing for someone else to hold the spotlight on
• 48:45
  their rural stage about themselves. They are naturally taciturn and public and unfriendly criticism
• 48:51
  has been proved to be a hazardous diversion. If the thought and comment of
• 48:54
  the stranger upon the mountaineer could be compared with the keen and often humorous analysis
• 49:00
  of the stranger, the score would be found in surprising frequency on the side
• 49:04
  of the calm and silent mountaineer. They give but little heed to the clothes
• 49:07
  a man wears, but look clear eyed at the man within the clothes.
• 49:13
  They have no criticism for the way a man says his say so he has
• 49:15
  something to say. A noted college professor, himself a mountain boy, maintains,
• 49:22
  I would rather hear a boy say I seed when he had really seen
• 49:25
  something, than to hear a boy say I saw when he had not seen
• 49:30
  it. Old Coonrod Pile lived in the valley until his life span from the
• 49:35
  days when it was a hunting ground of the Indians to the time when he
• 49:37
  can be remembered by some of the men and women now living in pow Maw,
• 49:42
  who knew him as the most influential man of his time in the section.
• 49:45
  The owner of the river Bottom farm land, fast acres of hardwood,
• 49:50
  timber, a general store, and a flour mill worked by his slaves,
• 49:53
  A man grown to such enormous size and weight that in his last days he
• 49:58
  went about his farm and to oversee his workers in a two wheeled cart pulled
• 50:02
  by oxen. Those of the valley who now remember him were children when he
• 50:07
  died. For he was born on March sixteenth, seventeen sixty six, and
• 50:12
  his death occurred on October fourteenth, eighteen forty nine, he saw his valley
• 50:16
  home changed from a part of the state of Franklin to a part of the
• 50:21
  state of Kentucky, then to Tennessee, and the abstracts to the deeds for
• 50:24
  land he owned show that pall maugh was first in Granger County, later in
• 50:30
  Overton, and finally in Fentras County. As the state of Tennessee developed,
• 50:35
  pall mall is but seven miles from the Kentucky line, and for many years
• 50:38
  Coonrod thought he had taken up his residence within the Kentucky border. Settlers of
• 50:43
  those days, in leaving the Carolinas and Virginia, traveled usually due west and
• 50:47
  searched for a new home. It was this belief that he had settled in
• 50:51
  Kentucky that has led many to the opinion that Coonrod's former home was in Virginia.
• 50:57
  Others, without more definite knowledge for foundation, maintain that as he settled
• 51:01
  in Tennessee, he had lived in North Carolina. The written word was rarely
• 51:06
  used, and the stories of the earlier days in the valley of the Three
• 51:09
  Forks of the Wolf are tradition. In a newly settled territory, a man's
• 51:14
  birthplace and antecedents are facts immaterial to the community's welfare, and many incidents historical
• 51:21
  in nature concerning Old Coonrod have been lost in the waste basket of forgetfulness.
• 51:25
  And no one now at pall Maou has heard tale of just where he come
• 51:30
  from. Yet some readily say that he came from over yonder, and they
• 51:35
  pointed back across the mountains toward North Carolina. In the first map of Tennessee
• 51:39
  made by Daniel Smith, there is a dip in the northern boundary of the
• 51:43
  state line where Fentris County is located, but this was found to be an
• 51:47
  error of survey and later corrected. The surveyors of those days were men of
• 51:52
  courtesy and accommodation, for in the establishment of the Tennessee Virginia line, they
• 51:57
  surveyed around the southern boundary of the farm of a hospitable host and left his
• 52:01
  lands in Virginia. Because the old fellow maintained he had never had any health
• 52:07
  except in the mountains of Virginia, that Coonrod was of English descent, there
• 52:10
  seemed scarcely room for doubt, and pile or pile with a why and poll
• 52:17
  maw stands mute testimony, and York too, is a component part of Old
• 52:22
  England. I was never able to learn why the village was given its unique
• 52:27
  name, and there is no tradition that associates it with the noted street in
• 52:30
  London, though even to day paw Maw in Fenters County is but a single
• 52:35
  road. I asked a white haired mountaineer how long the place had been known
• 52:39
  as pow Maw, with a memory reviving shake of his head that ended in
• 52:44
  a convinced nod. His answer was quite a whit, and that is the
• 52:49
  nearest I ever came to accuracy. But seeing his reply did not contain the
• 52:52
  information wanted, he looked at me thoughtfully and said, he's just lack old
• 52:58
  crow. Every morning forreenty two years I had looked up at the rocks of
• 53:01
  that mountain in the hate changed a bit. The government records show that paw
• 53:07
  Maw was made a post office on April third, eighteen thirty two. Old
• 53:10
  Coonrod was a man of big business for his time, one of force of
• 53:15
  character who dominated his community and who sized his man by standards that were peculiarly
• 53:21
  his own. A man would come to him to buy a poke of corn
• 53:24
  or flour, or for a favor. To the surprise of the stranger,
• 53:29
  the favor might be over granted, or the corn given without cost, Or
• 53:32
  upon the other hand, he would be brusquely dismissed without the least effort at
• 53:37
  explanation. Unknown to the stranger, the condition of his breeches had probably given
• 53:43
  him his credit rating with Old Coonrod, for he held that patches upon the
• 53:46
  front of trousers, if the seat were whole, were decorations of honor,
• 53:52
  showing that the man had torn them doing something going forward. But if the
• 53:57
  front of the trousers were good, and the seat of them patched, no
• 54:00
  dealings of any nature were to be had with the dictator of the valley.
• 54:04
  For to Old Coonrod, it meant the man was like a rabbit. He
• 54:07
  could not stop without sitting down. But the residents of the valley, many
• 54:12
  of them Methodists, claim this estimate works a hardship upon members of their faith,
• 54:15
  for a good Methodist could wear the knees out at prayer and the sea
• 54:20
  out in backsliding. Old Coonrod's trading with the Indians was a series of successes.
• 54:24
  He is known to have had their confidence and friendship, and he was
• 54:29
  an arbitrator between them and his neighbors whenever disputes arose. Ventras County, lying
• 54:35
  on the western slope of the Cumberlands, was part of the great hunting grounds
• 54:37
  of the Shawnees, Cherokees, Creeks, Chickamongas, Chickasaws, and even the
• 54:44
  Iroquois of New York. The basin of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers that part
• 54:49
  now Tennessee and Kentucky was claimed by each of these tribes as its own,
• 54:53
  not as home, but as hunting ground, and when bands of hunters of
• 54:58
  rival tribes met in the territory, each fought the other as an invader,
• 55:02
  and their battles gave to Kentucky its Indian name, meaning in the Indian tongue
• 55:07
  the dark and bloody ground. But Old Coonrod kept peace with all of them,
• 55:14
  then prospered from their friendship, and an Indian trail turned and nud closed
• 55:17
  to where he lived. The last of the Indians passed through the valley in
• 55:22
  eighteen forty two. As Old Coonrod prospered, he bought land and slaves,
• 55:27
  and was a large owner of both. In his day. He was a
• 55:30
  cautious and judicious purchaser of realty. The court records show that at some time
• 55:36
  or other he was the owner of the most desirable parts of Fentras County.
• 55:39
  He held title to the land upon which Jamestown, the county seat now stands,
• 55:45
  which is the obudstown of Mark Twain's Gilded Age. He owned rock Castle,
• 55:52
  a tract of hardwood timber that is enclosed by mountains and can be reached
• 55:55
  by but one passageway, a place that became famous during the Civil War.
• 56:00
  He bought and sold much of the county's best farming land along Yellow Creek.
• 56:06
  Ventris was made a county of Tennessee in eighteen twenty three, and the first
• 56:09
  four pages of the new county's records of deeds show that within eighteen months Conrad
• 56:15
  Pywell had added, through a number of trades, over six hundred acres to
• 56:20
  his already large holdings. So cautious in land titles was he that at the
• 56:23
  time of his death he owned three rights to his home place, including the
• 56:28
  farming land along Wolf River. The first was his squatter's rights, which he
• 56:32
  had homesteaded, but against this North Carolina in ceding the territory of Tennessee to
• 56:37
  the United States government reserved title to the land grants the state had offered to
• 56:43
  her soldiers of the Revolutionary War, and one Henry Rowan of North Carolina entered
• 56:47
  warrants given him on March tenth, seventeen eighty. The Revolutionary soldiers had twenty
• 56:53
  years to locate their grants, and in seventeen ninety seven Rowan appeared with surveyors,
• 56:59
  claiming by his entry of seventeen eighty the valley of the three forks of
• 57:02
  the Wolf. He operated under two land warrants of three hundred and twenty acres
• 57:07
  each, and in his registry one of them he specified a track on the
• 57:10
  north side of Spring Creek now Wolf River, together with the improvements of Coonrod
• 57:16
  Pile. Old Coonrod traded with him, and Rowan took up his residence in
• 57:22
  what is now Overton County. As late as eighteen seventeen, there appeared one
• 57:27
  Vincent Benham with title under a conflicting grant dated in seventeen ninety three. Old
• 57:32
  Coonrod traded with him, and with ten dollars in hand, Benham went his
• 57:37
  way. But the deeds which Coonrod recorded were voluminous, with corners as explicitly
• 57:42
  marked as any land title of today. Up on one of the mountain sides,
• 57:46
  upon a rock, there is a crudely carved X which was made by
• 57:50
  Coonrod to mark a corner which called for a beech tree that has disappeared.
• 57:53
  And this mark and the forks of the Wolf River corners in Coonrod's titles stand
• 57:59
  today. A survey points for the boundaries of the farms now in the valley.
• 58:04
  Coonrod built his home beside the spring now known as York Spring. Its
• 58:08
  yard includes the spot where he made his first camp and where he killed his
• 58:13
  first deer. Characteristic of him, he built well. The house was hewn
• 58:17
  logs, large logs, some of them over fifty feet in length, and
• 58:22
  the dwelling is now owned and occupied by one of his great grandchildren, William
• 58:25
  Brooks, the only brother of the mother of Sergeant York. The house is
• 58:30
  today one of the most substantial in the valley. Just across the spring branch
• 58:36
  and up the mountain side is the York homb Old. Coonrod built one of
• 58:39
  the rooms without windows and with only one door. That door led into his
• 58:44
  own room and opened by his bedside. In this windowless room he kept his
• 58:49
  valuables and it was both a safe and a bank for him. Into a
• 58:52
  keg covered carelessly with hides, he tossed any gold coin that came to him
• 58:57
  in his trades. His rifle was kept there. He had the prongs of
• 59:00
  a pitchfork straightened and sharpened. The latter was his burglar insurance, and he
• 59:06
  felt amply able to take care of his savings. And in those days,
• 59:09
  men frequently passed through the valley whose occupations were unknown, and whose countenances were
• 59:15
  often evil to look upon. Poll Maw is not without its legend of the
• 59:19
  hidden keg of gold. It is known that old Coonrod had his keg and
• 59:22
  kept in it his gold pieces. It is not known just when and why
• 59:27
  this method of saving was abandoned by him, but after his death no trace
• 59:31
  of the keg was found, and it is said that upon his death bed
• 59:35
  he tried to give his sons a message which was never completed, and it
• 59:38
  is believed he wished to reveal where his gold was hidden. There are some
• 59:43
  who say he was seen to go up a ravine with a mysterious bundle,
• 59:45
  and to return without it. The ravine is pointed out it opens on the
• 59:50
  roadway about half way between the Rain's store and the old home of Coonrod.
• 59:54
  But there is no myth to the present day side of the story. More
• 59:58
  than squirrels and rabbits have been hunted up that ravine. But the legend of
• 1:00:01
  the hidden keg of Gold is popular in many of the valleys of the Appalachians,
• 1:00:06
  and it will even be found to have leap the valley of the Mississippi,
• 1:00:09
  and almost identical in form appeer an appeal to the impressionable imaginations of those
• 1:00:15
  who live in the Ozark Mountains to the west of that river. There was
• 1:00:17
  but one thing in which old Coonrod stood really in fear, something not made
• 1:00:22
  or controlled by man. It was lightning. Whenever a heavy thunderstorm broke over
• 1:00:28
  the mountains, Coonrod, even in the last years of his life, when
• 1:00:30
  he had grown so fat, ran with all the speed he could command for
• 1:00:35
  the cave above the spring. Here he would stay, muttering and unapproachable until
• 1:00:39
  the storm abated. Then he would come from the cave, swearing in that
• 1:00:44
  deep voice that carried both power and terror, and as the story goes,
• 1:00:49
  for hours, niggers would be hopping all over the valley. Coonrod had a
• 1:00:52
  genuine admiration for the man or beast, willing to fight for his rights.
• 1:00:58
  Once finding one of his jack eating his growing corn, he put his dog
• 1:01:01
  upon him. The jack was old and small and shaggy. He turned upon
• 1:01:06
  the dog sent after him, and, seizing the aggressor by the hare at
• 1:01:09
  his back, lifted him from the ground, and, maintaining his dignity,
• 1:01:14
  trotted out of the cornfield carrying the squirming dog. That jack was pensioned.
• 1:01:19
  He was given his full supply of corn in winter, and granted the freedom
• 1:01:22
  of the meadows and the mountain sides in summer. Old Coonrod would never sell
• 1:01:27
  him. John M. Clemens, Mark Twain's father, lived in Jamestown when
• 1:01:31
  his dwelling constituted one fifteenth of obed'stown. He and Coonrod Pile were close friends,
• 1:01:38
  Pyle helping elect Clemmens to be the first Circuit Court clerk of Fenters County.
• 1:01:45
  Both were firm believers in the future value of the timber, coal,
• 1:01:49
  iron, and copper to be found in the mountains. In the thirties,
• 1:01:52
  both acquired all the acreage their resources would permit. Mark Twain makes Squire sy
• 1:01:59
  Hawkins of the Gilded Age conceded to be drawn from the life of his father,
• 1:02:04
  struggled to keep the value or the land unknown to the natives. Squire
• 1:02:07
  Hawkins confides to his wife that the black stuff that crops out of the bank
• 1:02:12
  of the branch was coal, and tells of his effort to keep a neighbor
• 1:02:15
  from building a chimney out of it, why it might have caught fire,
• 1:02:19
  and told everything I showed him it was too crumbly. Then he was going
• 1:02:22
  to build it of copper ore, splendid yellow forty percent ore. There's fortunes
• 1:02:28
  upon fortunes upon our land. Scare me to death. The idea of this
• 1:02:31
  fool starting a smelting furnace in his house without knowing it and getting his dull
• 1:02:36
  eyes opened. And then when he was going to build it out of iron
• 1:02:39
  ore, there's mountains of iron here, Nancy, whole mountains of it.
• 1:02:44
  I wouldn't take any chance. I just stuck by him. I haunted him.
• 1:02:47
  I never let him alone until he built it of mud and sticks,
• 1:02:51
  like all the rest of the chimneys in this dismal country. Again. Squire
• 1:02:55
  Hawkins's appreciation of the speculative value of his lands is shown in a talk with
• 1:03:00
  his wife The whole track would not sell for even a third of a cent
• 1:03:04
  an acre now, but some day people will be glad to get it for
• 1:03:07
  twenty dollars, fifty dollars, one hundred dollars an acre. Here he dropped
• 1:03:12
  his voice to a whisper, and looked anxiously around to see there were no
• 1:03:14
  eavesdroppers a thousand dollars an acre. Today, many of the acres owned by
• 1:03:20
  coonrad Pile and John M. Clemens have passed the one hundred dollar mark and
• 1:03:23
  are climbing towards that whispered and seemingly fabulous figure. And this too before the
• 1:03:30
  coming of the railroad, for which Squire Hawkins could not wait. Twain delighted
• 1:03:34
  to have Squire Hawkins sit upon the pyramid of large blocks called the Style,
• 1:03:38
  in front of his home, contemplating the morning. But John M. Clemens
• 1:03:44
  had his practical side, and the specifications for the first jail for Fenters County,
• 1:03:47
  drawn by Clemens and in his own handwriting, made part of the county's
• 1:03:52
  records in eighteen twenty seven, show a very substantial strain to wit for a
• 1:03:58
  jail a house of logs to foot square twelve feet in the clear two stories
• 1:04:02
  high, and this surrounded by another wall precisely of the same description, with
• 1:04:08
  a space between the two walls of about eight or ten inches, and that
• 1:04:12
  space filled completely with skinned hickory poles. Ground floor to be formed of sills
• 1:04:17
  hewed about a foot square, and laid closely the logs to extend through the
• 1:04:23
  inner wall of the building, et cetera. And that jail was standing serviceable
• 1:04:28
  and strong until a few years ago, when the prosperity of Fincher's County called
• 1:04:31
  for an edifice of red stone. Clemmons and Pile remained friends in competitive landowners
• 1:04:36
  until with an activity and a suddenness that bewildered obed'stown and almost took away its
• 1:04:42
  breath. The Hawkinses hurried through their arrangements in four short months and flitted out
• 1:04:46
  into the great mysterious blank that lay beyond the knobs of Tennessee, to Missouri,
• 1:04:51
  where a few months afterward Mark Twain was born. Another friend of Coonrod
• 1:04:57
  Pile was David Crockett, the of the Alamo, had many hunts in Fentriss
• 1:05:01
  County, upon the Knobs and along the upper waters of the Cumberland. The
• 1:05:05
  old Crockett home still stands a few miles to the north of Jamestown, beside
• 1:05:11
  the road that leads to pal Maw. It was in a house upon land
• 1:05:14
  owned by Coonrod Pile that Deaf and Dumb Jimmy Crockett spent the last years of
• 1:05:18
  his life, and from which he made so many journeys to locate the silver
• 1:05:23
  mine of the Indians who had held him captive and who had pinioned him to
• 1:05:27
  the ground while they dug their ore, never allowing him to see where they
• 1:05:30
  worked, but using him to help carry the mined product. David Crockett,
• 1:05:34
  in his autobiography, tells the story of Deaf and Dumb Jimmy, but he
• 1:05:39
  places the scene in Kentucky, making probably the same mistake in the location of
• 1:05:44
  the state line boundary which Coonrod Pile had made. Coonrod Pile lived to the
• 1:05:47
  age of eighty three, and at the time of his death was the most
• 1:05:50
  powerful personality in Fentriss County. His business interests had grown to central proportions that
• 1:05:57
  he had economic problems to solve, and the simple all practical methods he used
• 1:06:00
  are followed in the valley to day. He dug only so much coal as
• 1:06:03
  he could use the transportation problem preventing its sale. He could only market the
• 1:06:09
  poplar, the cedar, and such woods as he could float on the rises
• 1:06:13
  of the Wolf to the Cumberland River to be rafted. He raised cotton,
• 1:06:16
  but only the mount the women needed for their looms. He grew wheat and
• 1:06:19
  corn, but no more than was necessary for flour and meal for the neighborhood,
• 1:06:24
  and to feed the stock he owned, laying aside a portion for use
• 1:06:28
  in time of need for the improvident and unfortunate. He was ready at any
• 1:06:31
  time to trade with anybody for almost anything. In the last score of the
• 1:06:35
  years of his life, the most successful financially, he found that the money
• 1:06:41
  he could accumulate came only from the sale of products that could move from the
• 1:06:44
  valley across the mountains by their own motive power, something that could go on
• 1:06:48
  foot. So he turned to stock raising, and with his own slaves,
• 1:06:53
  cut the present roadway from Palmow to Jamestown, there to join with the Old
• 1:06:57
  Kentucky stock Road, which ran from it Atlanta and Chattanooga along the Cumberland Plateau
• 1:07:02
  by Jamestown on to the north through Frankfort and Cincinnati. Old Coonrod was not
• 1:07:09
  a one price man on the realty he owned. If the purchase was for
• 1:07:12
  speculation, he was a trader with his sight set high. If the buyer
• 1:07:16
  wanted a home, he was generous. It meant the upbuilding of his community.
• 1:07:21
  So the people of that day lived in comradeship. There were few luxuries
• 1:07:26
  and no real want. If there was a farming patch to be cleared,
• 1:07:30
  the neighbors came from miles around, and there was a log rolling. If
• 1:07:34
  it was a home or crib to be built, it was a log raising,
• 1:07:39
  and everyone worked and made fun from it. The steeple of the church
• 1:07:42
  arose in the valley. It was built by those of the Methodist faith.
• 1:07:45
  But before that and even afterward, they held camp meetings and basket meetings,
• 1:07:50
  where a community lunch was served under the trees, where the service lasted through
• 1:07:56
  the daylight hours, allowing for a mountain journey home. Their religious fervor was
• 1:08:00
  so sincere and intense at these meetings that they were called melting sessions. Up
• 1:08:05
  the mountain side, above the York Spring, a space was cleared for shooting
• 1:08:10
  matches, where the prizes were beaves and turkeys, and where the men shot
• 1:08:14
  so accurately that the slender crossings of two knife blade marks was the bull's eye
• 1:08:18
  of the target. And everyone went on hunts, long hunts when crops were
• 1:08:24
  laid by, or winter had checked farm work. And as human nature is
• 1:08:27
  the same the world over, there were many an upright resident of the valley
• 1:08:30
  of the three forks of the Wolf, who left the plow standing in the
• 1:08:34
  furrow because the yelp and baying of the hounds grew warm upon the mountain side.
• 1:08:39
  The families of mountain men are usually large in number, and the estate
• 1:08:43
  of Kuonrod Pile has passed through a long division. He had eight children,
• 1:08:47
  and his son, Elijah Pyle, the branch of the family to which Sergeant
• 1:08:50
  York belongs, had eleven children. That portion of the estate which Elijah inherited
• 1:08:56
  passed into good hands. He conserved his part, handled well the talents left
• 1:09:00
  with him. But the second division by eleven, together with the ravages of
• 1:09:04
  the Civil War and the years that followed, left only seventy five acres,
• 1:09:10
  and far from the best of it to marry York, the truly wonderful little
• 1:09:14
  mountain mother, who gave to Alvin York those qualities of mind and heart which
• 1:09:17
  stood him in good stead in the forest of Argonne, who taught him to
• 1:09:21
  so live that he feared no man, and to do thoroughly and always in
• 1:09:26
  the right way, that which he had to do else, as she so
• 1:09:30
  frequently said to him, you'll have to do it over, or it'll cause
• 1:09:33
  you trouble. End of chapter The People of the Mountains. The log cabin
• 1:09:41
  of the Pioneer influenced architecture and gave to us the house of Colonial design.
• 1:09:45
  The first distinctly American type for the colonial home grew around the Pioneer's two rooms
• 1:09:51
  of logs, separated by an open passageway. The muzzle loading rifle, and
• 1:09:57
  it was the Pioneer's gun, with its long barrel and its fine sights,
• 1:10:00
  gave confidence to the American soldier who carried it, for he trusted the weapon
• 1:10:04
  in his hands. Progressive inventions finally displaced this rifle in military use, but
• 1:10:11
  for the accuracy of the shot, it has never been surpassed, and it
• 1:10:15
  is today a loved relic and a valued hunting piece. Men trained to shoot
• 1:10:19
  with it, used to the slender line of its silver foresight and to the
• 1:10:24
  delicate response of its hair trigger, have made rare records in marksmanship. The
• 1:10:29
  very difficulty of loading the time it took taught its users to be accurate and
• 1:10:33
  not to spend the shot. This rifle stopped the British at Bunker Hill and
• 1:10:38
  King's Mountain, and over its long barrel. Alvin York and some of the
• 1:10:42
  best shots of the American Army learned to bring their sights upward to the mark
• 1:10:46
  and tip the hair trigger when the bead first reached its object. It was
• 1:10:51
  training acquired in the forest, the same manner of marksmanship, the same self
• 1:10:56
  reliance and individual resourcefulness as a soldier gave to Sergeant York the power to come
• 1:11:01
  back over the hill in Argonne Forest, bringing one hundred and thirty two prisoners,
• 1:11:06
  and to the Army under Andrew Jackson at New Orleans more than one hundred
• 1:11:10
  years before the fighting resource to achieve victory with a loss of eight killed and
• 1:11:15
  thirteen wounded, while England's records show that about three thousand of the British were
• 1:11:19
  struck with rifle bullets. The man trained behind the muzzle loading rifle in all
• 1:11:25
  the wars Americas fought has been individually a fighter and a shot. Formerly but
• 1:11:30
  little skilled in military training, who, while obeying orders, fought along lines
• 1:11:34
  of personal initiative. In the earlier wars of the nation, this soldier was
• 1:11:39
  known as a rifleman. It was with this class that General Jackson fought his
• 1:11:43
  campaigns against the Indians and the British, and at New Orleans, the bone
• 1:11:47
  and sinew of his force were the riflemen of Tennessee and Kentucky. Against Jackson,
• 1:11:53
  England had sent the flower of Wellington's army, distinguished for famous campaigns on
• 1:11:58
  the Spanish Peninsula against the marshals of Napoleon. Wellington said of these men in
• 1:12:02
  his military memoirs, it was an army that could go anywhere and do anything.
• 1:12:08
  Late in life, when General Jackson had grown old, had twice been
• 1:12:12
  president, and was spending his declining days at the Hermitage, his home near
• 1:12:15
  Nashville, as calmly and peacefully as it was possible for the fiery old warrior
• 1:12:20
  to live, he was shown this appreciation by Wellington. Well He said,
• 1:12:27
  I never pretended that I had an army that could go anywhere and do anything.
• 1:12:31
  But in New Orleans I had a lot of fellows that could fight more
• 1:12:34
  ways and kill more times than any other fellows. On the face of the
• 1:12:38
  earth. Returning from the Indian Wars and from the War of eighteen twelve,
• 1:12:43
  the mountaineers and backwoodsmen who were then rapidly settling up the valley of the Mississippi,
• 1:12:47
  hung their rifles over their fireplaces or between the rafters of their cabin homes,
• 1:12:51
  and turned to the enjoyment of the peace they had won. In the
• 1:12:56
  valley of the three forks of the Wolf, Old Coonrod Pile was still the
• 1:13:00
  dominant figure. Those who had settled in the valley were prospering on its fertile
• 1:13:03
  soil. It was, then, as it is to day, remote from
• 1:13:06
  the popular highways, but the valley had grown into a community almost self supporting.
• 1:13:13
  The owners of the land had equipped their farms with such agricultural tools as
• 1:13:16
  were in use in those days, and the Wolf River had been dammed and
• 1:13:20
  a water driven flour mill erected. The houses, though built of logs and
• 1:13:25
  chinked with clay, were comfortable homes where in winter wood fires roared in wide
• 1:13:30
  chimney places, where there was no problem of the high cost of living,
• 1:13:33
  and few problems of any kind relating to living. The men of the valley
• 1:13:38
  farmed diversified crops, furnishing all that was needed for food and clothing, and
• 1:13:42
  the even raised tobacco for the pipes smoked at the general store run by Coonrod
• 1:13:46
  Pile in an end room of his home. It was the day when the
• 1:13:49
  weaving loom was the piano in the home, and all the women carted,
• 1:13:54
  spun, and wove the table garden. The care of the house, the
• 1:13:58
  preparation of the meals, and the making of the covering and the clothes were
• 1:14:00
  in the woman's division of the labor. The families usually were large, and
• 1:14:04
  every member of producer to the girls, fell shares of their mother's work.
• 1:14:10
  The boys helped in the fields, chopped the wood, and rounded up the
• 1:14:13
  stock that at times wandered far into the mountains. There were bells on the
• 1:14:16
  cows, on the sheep, and even the hogs, and the boys soon
• 1:14:19
  learned a distinguished ownership by the delicate differences in the browsing tong in the tone
• 1:14:26
  of the bells. Residents of the valley sold to the outside world the live
• 1:14:30
  stock they raised, and poultry, and feathers and furs and tar and resin
• 1:14:33
  from the pines on the mountain tops. They purchased tea, coffee, and
• 1:14:38
  sugar, a few household and farm conveniences, and little else. The balance
• 1:14:43
  of the trade was heavily in their favor, and they were prosperous and happy.
• 1:14:46
  They had no labor problems. They recognized without collective bargaining, the eight
• 1:14:50
  hour shift, eight hours again dinner, and eight hours after it if it
• 1:14:56
  don't rain, as one old mountaineer living there today interpreted the phrase a day's
• 1:15:00
  work, even when the home of the mountaineer was a one or two room
• 1:15:04
  cabin Accommendations for any stranger could be provided, and if he wished to remain,
• 1:15:09
  work could be found for him. They observed, without thought of inconvenience,
• 1:15:14
  the colonial idea of bundling. When the stranger proved worthy, there would
• 1:15:17
  be a log rolling and a space of ground cleared for him to till,
• 1:15:21
  and a log raising in which the community joined and made a merry occasion of
• 1:15:26
  it. To give him a home. The way was easy for his ownership
• 1:15:29
  of the land and the cabin. Prices for cleared land around the middle of
• 1:15:32
  the last century ranged from twenty five cents to five dollars an acre. In
• 1:15:38
  the valley, the father never talked to the son of the dignity of labor.
• 1:15:42
  Much was to be done, and everyone labored and thought of it as
• 1:15:45
  but the proper use of the sunlight of a day. Their life was primitive,
• 1:15:48
  rugged, but contented. Deer and bears were in the mountains, and
• 1:15:53
  wild turkeys were to be found in large flocks, while the cry of wolves
• 1:15:57
  added zest to the whine of a winter wind. A cook stove was an
• 1:16:00
  unknown luxury, and the women prepared their meals in the open fireplace. The
• 1:16:05
  men cut their small grain with a repook and threshed it beneath the hoofs of
• 1:16:10
  horses. The mode of life made men of strong convictions and deep feelings,
• 1:16:15
  but those feelings were seldom expressed, except under the influence of religious devotions.
• 1:16:19
  The ministers were all circuit riders and venerated leaders of the people of the mountain
• 1:16:24
  sides. They traveled the mountains on horseback, constantly exposed to hardships, and
• 1:16:29
  they labored devoutly without consideration of the personal cost. It was the custom for
• 1:16:34
  these itinerant ministers to give free rein to their horses and read as they rode
• 1:16:40
  the mountain paths, stopping for a prayer at every home they reached. Protracted
• 1:16:44
  meetings were held in almost every community they visited. For many months would pass
• 1:16:48
  before they returned. Funeral services would be held for all who had died during
• 1:16:53
  the absence of the minister. The meetings lasted so long as there was a
• 1:16:57
  hope of a single conversion. One of the preachers of those old days,
• 1:17:00
  who was borne in the valley of the three Forks of the Wolf and preached
• 1:17:04
  at pal Maw as part of his circuit when ordained, has left a record
• 1:17:09
  of one year's work. During the conference year, I preached one hundred and
• 1:17:13
  fifty two times, traveled one thousand, nine hundred and eighteen miles on horseback,
• 1:17:16
  and prayed with four hundred and twenty four families, witnessed eighty conversions to
• 1:17:20
  God, and received sixty seven persons into the church. I sold about forty
• 1:17:27
  dollars worth of books, baptized forty adults and eighteen infants, and received less
• 1:17:31
  than thirty dollars of salary for the same, and raised for benevolence thirty six
• 1:17:35
  dollars and twenty five cents. To God be all the glory I have toiled
• 1:17:41
  and endured as seeing Him who is invisible. However, when God has poured
• 1:17:45
  from clouds of mercy rich salvation upon the people, and when in religious enjoyment
• 1:17:49
  from the most excellent glory, I have been lifted to Pisga's top and have
• 1:17:55
  seen by faith the goodly land before me, and I would not exchange this
• 1:17:59
  work for a city. Against the worldliness of some of his people, The
• 1:18:03
  same old mountain minister recorded a protest. I have known families who have had
• 1:18:09
  three or four hundred dollars loaned out on interest, and not less than five
• 1:18:12
  hundred dollars worth of fat cattle on the range, who did not own a
• 1:18:15
  Bible, or take any religious newspaper nor any other kind, and did not
• 1:18:20
  have any books in their homes, and yet owned two or three fiddles and
• 1:18:24
  three or four rifle guns. The day of prosperity and religious contentment at palmou
• 1:18:29
  lasted until the coming of the Civil War. Fentris County had contributed its pro
• 1:18:33
  rata of volunteers to the conflict with Mexico, and Uriah York, the grandfather
• 1:18:39
  of Sergeant York, was among those who stormed the heights at Chapultepec. Though
• 1:18:44
  this war was declared by a president who came from Tennessee. The Mexican conflict
• 1:18:47
  did not reach to the firesides and into the hearts of the people of the
• 1:18:50
  mountains of the state as other wars had done. So years passed in which
• 1:18:56
  there was no outward evidence of the war spirit of Fenter's County that was soon
• 1:19:00
  to tear families asunder, leave farms untenanted, and to obliterate graveyards under the
• 1:19:04
  rush of horses hoofs. The Yorks had come to Fentriss County from North Carolina
• 1:19:10
  and settled on Indian Creek. Euryah York was the son of John York,
• 1:19:14
  and they came from Buncombe County in that old North State, the county which
• 1:19:18
  had the reputation like Nazareth so far as turning out any good thing was concerned,
• 1:19:24
  and the path of the cant derisive phrays all Buncom leads directly back to
• 1:19:29
  the affairs of that good old county on Indian Creek. The Yorks were farmers,
• 1:19:32
  but at his home Euriah started one of the few schools then in Fentriss
• 1:19:36
  County. His school began after crops were laid by and ran for three months.
• 1:19:42
  He used but two text books, the Blue Backed Speller and the Bible.
• 1:19:46
  There are men living to day on Indian Creek who went to school under
• 1:19:49
  Uriah York, and they recall the uniqueness of his discipline as well as his
• 1:19:55
  school curriculum. The hickory rod was the enforcer of school rules, but full
• 1:20:00
  opportunity to contemplate the delicate distinction between right and wrong was given to all.
• 1:20:05
  A three inch circle was drawn upon the schoolroom wall, and the offending pupil
• 1:20:10
  was compelled to hold his nose within the penal mark until penitent. Young and
• 1:20:14
  active, he took part in all the school sports in the long recess periods
• 1:20:17
  for his school lasted all day learning. At the end of one school term
• 1:20:23
  that the pupils had planned as part of the simple commencement exercises to duck him
• 1:20:27
  in Indian Creek, he exposed their plot, playfully defied them, left the
• 1:20:31
  schoolroom with a bound through an open window, and led them on a chase
• 1:20:35
  through the mountains. He circled in his course so he could lead the run
• 1:20:39
  back to the schoolhouse as evidence of good fellowship and as an example of the
• 1:20:44
  spirit of generosity. In the celebration of victory he gave to each of the
• 1:20:47
  boys as they came in a drink of whisky from a clay demijohn he had
• 1:20:51
  concealed in the school room. But in those days, whisky and apple brandy
• 1:20:56
  were considered a necessary part of household supplies, and there was but little drunkenness.
• 1:21:01
  Whiskey and brandy were medicine, used as first aid, regardless of the
• 1:21:05
  ailment, while awaiting the arrival of the doctor with his saddle bags of pills
• 1:21:10
  and powders. Their social value too was recognized, and the gourd and demijohn
• 1:21:15
  appeared almost simultaneously with the arrival of any guest. But it was bad form
• 1:21:20
  evidence of a weak will for anyone save the old men, to show the
• 1:21:26
  influence of what they drank. This was, however, a perquisite and one
• 1:21:30
  of the tolerated pleasures of old age. In the records of a lawsuit tried
• 1:21:34
  in Fentress County in eighteen forty one, the price list of some necessaries and
• 1:21:40
  luxuries are shown. Two gallons of liquor one dollar, one court of whiskey,
• 1:21:45
  and six pounds of pork eighty cents one deer skin, seventy five cents,
• 1:21:49
  two kegs of tar two dollars, two ounces of indigo forty cents,
• 1:21:56
  one gallon of whiskey fifty cents, five and one hund pints of apple brandy
• 1:22:00
  thirty one and a quarter. Since they were almost uneventful years at pall Maou
• 1:22:05
  from the days of Coonrod Pile until the Civil War, less than a score
• 1:22:11
  of years lapsed from the death of the pioneer in eighteen forty nine until over
• 1:22:15
  the Mountains broke the war storm in a fury that has no parallel except in
• 1:22:19
  wars where father has fought son and brother fought brother, where the cause of
• 1:22:25
  war and the principles for which it is fought are lost in the presence of
• 1:22:29
  cruelties created in personal hatred and deeds of treachery perpetrated for revenge. A third
• 1:22:34
  generation had grown to manhood at pall Maou in Fentras County. The polling of
• 1:22:40
  the vote upon secession was marked with bloodshed. The county was on the military
• 1:22:45
  border between the free and slaveholding states. Coonrod Pile had been a slaveholder,
• 1:22:49
  but few of the Mountaineers were owners. Slavery as an institution did not appeal
• 1:22:56
  to their Anglo Saxon principles poverty. It prevented slavery advance into the mountains.
• 1:23:00
  As a custom, and as racial distinction was not to be clearly defined into
• 1:23:04
  master and worker, the negro's presence in the mountains was unwelcomed. A war
• 1:23:11
  to uphold a custom they did not practice did not appeal to them. So
• 1:23:15
  as a great wedge the Allegheny Mountains, extending far into the slave owning states,
• 1:23:20
  was peopled with Union sympathizers. Fenter's County, on the slope of the
• 1:23:25
  Great Mountain Range and on the border between the territory firmly held by the North
• 1:23:29
  and by the South, became a no man's land, subjected successively to marauding
• 1:23:34
  bands from each side, a land for plunder and revenge. Before the war,
• 1:23:40
  the county had been sharply divided politically, and with few exceptions, that
• 1:23:44
  alignment held. Those who were Union sympathizers went north into Kentucky and joined the
• 1:23:49
  Federal forces. Those on the side of the South went for enlistment in the
• 1:23:54
  armies of the Confederacy. The men who remained at home were compelled by public
• 1:23:58
  sentiment to take so sidneides and the bitterest of feelings was engendered. The raids
• 1:24:03
  of passing soldiers was the excuse for the organization by both sides of bands who
• 1:24:09
  claimed they were home guards, the Federals under Tinker Beatie and the Confederates under
• 1:24:14
  Champ Ferguson. These bands, each striving for the mastery, soon developed into
• 1:24:18
  guerrillas of the worst type. The war produced, and anarchy prevailed. Churches
• 1:24:23
  were closed for religious services were invaded that the bushwhackers could get the men they
• 1:24:28
  sought. Homes were burned, civil courts suspended, post offices and post roads
• 1:24:32
  were abandoned. No stores were kept open, and the merchandise they formerly held
• 1:24:38
  was concealed, and there became a great scarcity of the necessaries of life.
• 1:24:43
  Many homes were deserted by entire families, and their land turned out as common
• 1:24:46
  ground. There was waste and ruin on every hand, and no man's life
• 1:24:50
  was safe. Each deed of cruelty was met with an act of revenge,
• 1:24:55
  until men were killed in retaliation, the only charge brought against them being a
• 1:24:59
  Norther sympathizer or a Southern sympathizer. There is not a road in the county
• 1:25:04
  not marked with the blood of some soldier or non combatant. No section of
• 1:25:09
  the Great Civil War suffered so enduringly as that which was the boundary line between
• 1:25:14
  the sections, and no part of the boundary suffered more from devastations of war,
• 1:25:18
  in the passing to and fro of armed forces, and from the raids
• 1:25:21
  of marauding bands steel hearted in the quest of revenge, than did Ventris County.
• 1:25:27
  At the outbreak of the war, Uriah Yorke went north into Kentucky and
• 1:25:30
  joined the Federal forces. Ill he had returned to the home of his wife's
• 1:25:34
  father at Jamestown, and while in bed, learned of the approach of a
• 1:25:39
  band of Confederates. He arose and fled for safety to a refuge shack his
• 1:25:44
  father in law had built in the forest of rock Castle. His flight was
• 1:25:47
  made in a storm that was half rain and half sleet, and from the
• 1:25:51
  exposure he died in the lonely hut three days afterward, only forty years of
• 1:25:57
  age. He had served his country in two wars. The Valley of the
• 1:26:00
  Three Forks of the Wolf paid its tribute of blood and money. Elijah Pyle
• 1:26:04
  had grown old, and years before had succeeded his father Konrod Pile as head
• 1:26:09
  of the family. All his sons had grown to manhood. He was a
• 1:26:13
  non combatant but a Union sympathizer. His four sons were divided in their allegiance,
• 1:26:17
  two upon each side, and two of them paid the supreme price,
• 1:26:20
  and they paid for their convictions as they rode along public highways. Conrad Pile,
• 1:26:27
  Junior, Rod, as he was known, like his father Elijah Pyle,
• 1:26:30
  was a non combatant but sympathized with the North. In the autumn of
• 1:26:34
  eighteen sixty three, for some cause unknown to his relatives, he was taken
• 1:26:40
  prisoner by Confederate troops members of champ Ferguson's band. As they rode along the
• 1:26:45
  road with him, shots were fired. They left him there. In June
• 1:26:48
  of the following year, Jeff Pile, a brother of Rod, was riding
• 1:26:53
  along the road beyond the mill that creeks in the water of Wolf River.
• 1:26:56
  He was going to visit a brother. He had taken no active part in
• 1:26:59
  the World War, but was a Southern sympathizer. Some of Tinkerbette's men galloped
• 1:27:03
  into sight, fired galloped on mountain men fire but once but the murder of
• 1:27:10
  Jeff Pyle threw a red shadow across the years that were to come after the
• 1:27:14
  war was ended. The war feuds of Fincher's County did not end with the
• 1:27:16
  ending of the war. There was lawlessness for years. Some of the union
• 1:27:20
  men and Union sympathizers in the majority of the county during the hostilities assumed to
• 1:27:27
  the full the new power that came to them by the war's outcome. Conservative
• 1:27:30
  civic leaders sought to re establish a condition of peace, but the lawless and
• 1:27:35
  desperate element prepared personally to profit from the situation. Farms had been deserted,
• 1:27:41
  and many of the owners of these lands, who had fought on the side
• 1:27:43
  of the Confederacy were kept away through the threats of death should they return,
• 1:27:47
  and some who had remained throughout the war were forced to flee to protect their
• 1:27:50
  lives from those who coveted their property. A series of land frauds sprang up
• 1:27:56
  under the cloak of law. Upon vacant farms, false deanses were levied,
• 1:28:00
  fake administrators took charge of lands whose owners had died during the conflict. Other
• 1:28:04
  property was hastily forced under sale for taxes that the proceedings should appear legal.
• 1:28:10
  The foreclosures were by due process of law. But if quietly circulated warnings against
• 1:28:15
  a general bidding for property when offered at court sale were not effective, some
• 1:28:19
  well known desperate character would appear at the sale and threaten anyone who dared bid
• 1:28:24
  against him. The bitterness of the feelings of the two sides subsided slowly,
• 1:28:29
  but there was ever present the realization that old alignments could be quickly and bloodily
• 1:28:33
  revived. Champ Ferguson, sought by the federal authorities, appeared suddenly upon the
• 1:28:39
  streets of Jamestown that day. His old rival Tinker was there. It was
• 1:28:44
  a personal battle. The two leaders fought while Jamestown looked on silently, fearful
• 1:28:47
  of the outcome. Beatty received three wounds but escaped on horseback. A short
• 1:28:53
  time afterwards, Ferguson was hanged at Nashville by order of court martial. The
• 1:28:58
  charge against him was at he had entered the hospital at Emory and Henry College
• 1:29:02
  and shot to death a wounded Federal lieutenant. Ferguson claimed justification as the federal
• 1:29:08
  lieutenant under orders to escort a war prisoner, a Confederate officer and personal friend
• 1:29:13
  of Ferguson's, to head quarters had instead stood his prisoner against a tree by
• 1:29:18
  a roadside and ordered a firing squad to kill him, and the court martial
• 1:29:23
  indictment of Ferguson read and for other crimes. One of Tinker Beattie's men was
• 1:29:28
  Press Huff, who lived in the valley of the Three Forks of the Wolf.
• 1:29:31
  It was generally believed that he was the leader of the band who had
• 1:29:34
  ridden out of the woods and killed Jeff Pile as he traveled unarmed along Birdstown
• 1:29:40
  Road. Huff's father had been shot. The scene of his death was where
• 1:29:43
  the branch from the York Spring crosses the public road at the Pile home.
• 1:29:47
  The deed was done by a band of Confederates who had taken the elder Huff
• 1:29:50
  prisoner, and neither Jeff Pile nor his brothers were to be connected with it
• 1:29:56
  except in the quickly prejudiced mind of the victim's son. The The desperate character
• 1:30:00
  of Press Houff is evidenced by the records of the United States Circuit Court for
• 1:30:04
  the Middle District of Tennessee in the suit of the McGuinness heirs for land in
• 1:30:09
  Fentras County. Their bill recites armed men who were led and controlled by one
• 1:30:14
  Preston Huff, who was a brigand of the most desperate character, forced complainant's
• 1:30:18
  father and themselves to leave the county to secure their lives and cap them from
• 1:30:24
  the county by threats of most brutal violence. The history of these men and
• 1:30:28
  the times proved clearly that these threats were not idle, nor those who opposed
• 1:30:32
  them survived their vengeance. At the foreclosure on the McGinnis property, press Huff
• 1:30:38
  rode his horse between the court officers and those attending the sale, and pistol
• 1:30:42
  in hand, declared the land his by right of possession. The bill continues
• 1:30:46
  as follows. Preston Huff, who was the desperado heretofore referred to, publicly
• 1:30:51
  proclaimed that he had fought for the land, had run the Mcginnises from the
• 1:30:56
  county, and if anyone bid for the land against him, he would kill
• 1:30:59
  him on sight. Even his co conspirators would not brook his displeasure. The
• 1:31:03
  land was sold on his bid. No one dared oppose him. The history
• 1:31:06
  of his career shows it was wisdom to shun him. Many had been killed
• 1:31:11
  by him in the most cold and brutal manner. There came to pall Maw
• 1:31:15
  when General Burnside was moving his federal forces southward. A young man by the
• 1:31:18
  name of William Brooks. He had joined the Union Army at his home in
• 1:31:23
  Michigan. He was a daring horseman, handsome fair, and his hair was
• 1:31:27
  red, a rich copperesque red. The army moved on, but young Brooks
• 1:31:30
  remained in the valley. He claimed that as a private soldier he had done
• 1:31:34
  more than his share in the conquest of the South, and that the conquest
• 1:31:38
  that should ever go to his credit was the conquest of Nancy Pyle. When
• 1:31:42
  they were married, his father in law, Elijah Pyle, gave him a
• 1:31:45
  farm, and he tilled it, and he smiled his way into the favor
• 1:31:48
  of the community. He lived in the valley about two years, and a
• 1:31:53
  baby had been born to them. The feeling between the children of Elijah Pile
• 1:31:57
  and press Huff was silent, but tense. Over it, there fell constantly
• 1:32:00
  the shadow of the murder of Jeff Pile. Meeting down at the old mill,
• 1:32:04
  one day, press Hoff and Willie Brooks engaged in an excited argument between
• 1:32:11
  the dark, browned, sullen mountaineer and the slender gay young man. A
• 1:32:15
  contest seemed uneven and was prevented. Huff told Brooks that the next time they
• 1:32:19
  met, he would kill him. They met the next day on the mountain
• 1:32:23
  side, on the road that leads by the Brooks home, on across the
• 1:32:27
  Spring Branch, up beside the York homb and then up the mountain. Huff's
• 1:32:31
  riderless horse galloped on and stopped in front of a mountain cabin. His body
• 1:32:35
  lay dead in the road. There was a hurried consultation at the home of
• 1:32:40
  Elijah Pyle, Huff's friends. It was realized would not be long in coming.
• 1:32:45
  Young Brooks went out of his house down by the spring and up the
• 1:32:47
  mountain back of it. He was never seen in the valley again. Huff's
• 1:32:51
  friends waited. Weeks afterwards, Nancy Brooks, carrying her baby, went to
• 1:32:57
  visit a friend. She evaded the watchfulness of her husband's enemies, succeeded in
• 1:33:01
  crossing the Kentucky Line, and disappeared in the mountains to the north of it.
• 1:33:05
  The friends of Press Huff knew she would write home. Months elapsed,
• 1:33:10
  but finally a letter came and it was intercepted. She and her husband were
• 1:33:14
  at a logging camp in the northern Woods of Michigan. Secretly, extradition papers
• 1:33:18
  for Brooks were secured, and Huff's former partner in a mercantile business, fully
• 1:33:24
  equipped with warrant, appeared with a sheriff before the door of the cabin in
• 1:33:27
  the Michigan Woods. Brooks was brought back to Jamestown and put into the log
• 1:33:31
  ribbed jail that John and Clemens Mark Twain's father had built, but there was
• 1:33:36
  no trial by law. The next night, through the moonlight and the pines,
• 1:33:41
  a little body of men rode up the valley across the plateau. They
• 1:33:44
  went and Jamestown was sleeping. Taking Brooks from the jail, they carried him
• 1:33:48
  three miles down the road towards Palmow. Here they bound a rope around his
• 1:33:51
  feet, unbridled a horse, and tied the other end of the rope to
• 1:33:56
  the horse's tail. They taunted Brooks, but they could not make him break
• 1:34:00
  his silence until he asked to be allowed to see his wife and baby.
• 1:34:02
  Rough men laughed, and there was a report of a gun. The horse
• 1:34:06
  frightened, galloped down the road, and bullets were fired into the squirming body
• 1:34:11
  as it was dragged over the rocks. The wards stealed men for the coming
• 1:34:15
  of death and crime. But at the manner of the death of Willie Brooks,
• 1:34:17
  a shudder passed over the mountain sides to Nancy. Brooks was born a
• 1:34:21
  son a short time afterwards, and he was named after his father. A
• 1:34:26
  silent, broken hearted woman, Nancy Brooks took up again her life at her
• 1:34:30
  father's home. To the little girl she had carried on her flight to Michigan,
• 1:34:33
  and to the boy whose hair had the copper red of the father she
• 1:34:36
  devoted herself. The girl had been named Mary, and she inherited the piquancy
• 1:34:42
  and the wit that had made her mother the belle of the valley. And
• 1:34:45
  as she grew to womanhood, the mountaineers saw again the Nancy Brooks they had
• 1:34:48
  loved before war had come with its cold, blighting fingers of death. At
• 1:34:53
  the age of fifteen, Mary Brooks met William York, the son of Uriah
• 1:34:58
  York, and they were married. A home was built for them beyond the
• 1:35:00
  branch beside the spring, and Alvin York was their third son. End of
• 1:35:06
  Chapter The Molding of a Man. The first year after the marriage of William
• 1:35:12
  York and Mary Brooks. They lived at the old Coonrod Pile home, and
• 1:35:16
  William York worked as a cropper securing the farm that had been given the bride.
• 1:35:21
  They modeled into a one room home, the corn crib of Elijah Pile
• 1:35:27
  that stood across the spring branch and up the mountain side. It was a
• 1:35:30
  long crib, and they chinked it with clay, and using split logs from
• 1:35:35
  the walls of the old shed, a punch and floor was made. The
• 1:35:40
  coming of spring brought the blossoms of flowers the girl wife had planted. Honeysuckle
• 1:35:45
  and roses have bloomed around that cabin each succeeding summer, and it proved the
• 1:35:49
  foundation of a home that was to withstand the troubles of poverty in many winters.
• 1:35:55
  It was a home so rare and real that it pulled back to the
• 1:35:58
  mountains. A son who had go out into the world and won fame and
• 1:36:01
  the offers of fortunes for the deeds he had done as a soldier. William
• 1:36:06
  York, in his simple philosophy of life, disciplined himself and later his boys,
• 1:36:12
  to the theory that contentment was to be found in the square deal and
• 1:36:15
  honest labor. He was so fair and just in all his relations with his
• 1:36:19
  neighbors that the people of the valley called him Judge York. And his honesty
• 1:36:25
  was so rugged and impartial that not infrequently he was left as sole arbiter,
• 1:36:30
  even when his own interests were involved in talks by the roadside. At the
• 1:36:33
  gate of his humble home, seated on the rocks that surround the spring,
• 1:36:38
  many a neighborhood dispute has been settled that prejudice could have fanned into a lawsuit.
• 1:36:44
  Yet William York never prospered, as prosperity is measured by the accumulation of
• 1:36:47
  property, and it has been said of him that he just about succeeded in
• 1:36:53
  making a hard living. He was a farmer, blacksmith, hunter, a
• 1:36:58
  man of the mountains who found pleasure in his skill with his rifle. But
• 1:37:01
  the memories of him that linger in the valley, or those that are revived
• 1:37:04
  at the mention of his name, are of him in the role of husband,
• 1:37:08
  father, and friend. The Civil War had scattered much of the wealth
• 1:37:12
  that old Coonrod Pile had accumulated, and Elijah Pyle had conserved. The number
• 1:37:17
  of heirs brought long Division to the realty, and most of those who had
• 1:37:20
  benefited by the inheritance were all left land poor. To Nancy Brooks as her
• 1:37:27
  part came the home the old long Hunter had built with such thoroughness and care,
• 1:37:32
  together with seventy five acres of land. This she left to her boy,
• 1:37:38
  who had been named after his ill fated father, and he lives there
• 1:37:41
  to day. To Missus York had been given seventy five acres, part level
• 1:37:45
  and part hilly. That was the share of her aunt Polly Pile in the
• 1:37:50
  cave above the spring, which was Coonrod Pile's first home. William York built
• 1:37:56
  a blacksmith's shop where he mended log wagons and did the work in wood and
• 1:38:00
  metal the neighborhood required. He farmed and worked in the shop, but in
• 1:38:04
  his heart always was the call of the forests that surround him, and it
• 1:38:09
  was his one great weakness. A blast from his horn would bring his hounds
• 1:38:13
  yelping around him, and often unexpectedly he would go on a hunt that at
• 1:38:17
  times stretched into weeks of absence. His hounds were the master pack of those
• 1:38:23
  hills. On his hunts, when he built his camp fire at night,
• 1:38:27
  he gathered the dogs around him and singled out for especial favors those whose achievements
• 1:38:31
  had merited distinction during the day, Following a custom that in those days prevailed
• 1:38:36
  among owners of hunting hounds, the dog that proved himself the leader of the
• 1:38:41
  pack while on a hunt was decorated with a ribbon or some emblem upon the
• 1:38:45
  collar. Small game was abundant in the mountains that made the valley of the
• 1:38:49
  three Forks of the Wolf, but the deer and bear had withdrawn to the
• 1:38:53
  less frequented hills. The hunts were for sport, and there was no real
• 1:38:57
  recompense in the value of the pelts. Alvin was born in the one room
• 1:39:00
  cabin on December thirteenth, eighteen eighty seven, and there were two older children,
• 1:39:05
  Henry and Joe. Alvin's early life was different in no way from that
• 1:39:11
  of other children of the mountains. He lived in touch with nature and without
• 1:39:15
  ever knowing when or how the information came to him. He could call the
• 1:39:18
  birds by their names, and knew the nests and eggs of each of them,
• 1:39:23
  knew the trees by their leaves and their bark, and was familiar with
• 1:39:26
  the haunts of the rabbit and the squirrel, the land and the water turtle.
• 1:39:30
  While still too small for the rough run of the mountains, he has
• 1:39:33
  stood red eyed by the gate of his home and watched his father and the
• 1:39:36
  hounds go off to the hunt. And as he grew his hair took on
• 1:39:41
  that color, that trace of him while at play could be lost in the
• 1:39:44
  red brush that grew upon the mountain side. There was one part of the
• 1:39:47
  routine of the week at pall Mall that has interested Alvin York from early boyhood.
• 1:39:53
  It was the shooting matches held on Saturday on the mountain side above the
• 1:39:57
  spring, just where a swell of the slow hope made a table land,
• 1:40:00
  and where a space had been cleared for the tests of skill. The clearing
• 1:40:04
  was long and slender, such a glade through the trees as the alley of
• 1:40:09
  the mountain bowlers which Rip van Winkle found in the Catskills, only the shooting
• 1:40:13
  range was longer. A hundred and fifty yards were needed for one of the
• 1:40:16
  contests. This isle had been cut through a forest of gray beech and brown
• 1:40:21
  oaks. At the points where the targets were to be set, the clearing
• 1:40:26
  widened so that the sunlight, filtering through the leaves and flickering upon the slender
• 1:40:30
  carpet of green could fall full and clear. Each Saturday, the mountaineers were
• 1:40:34
  there, and William Yorke and Alvin were among the regulars. Often there were
• 1:40:40
  fifty or more men, and they came bringing their long rifles, horns of
• 1:40:44
  powder, pouches made of skin in which were lead and bullet molds, cups
• 1:40:47
  of caps, cotton gun wadding, carrying turkeys, driving beaves and sheep which
• 1:40:53
  were to be the prizes. And when the prizes gave out, some of
• 1:40:56
  the men remained and shot for money. Pony persons, they were called the
• 1:41:00
  turkey. Shoots were over two ranges, some forty yards and one one hundred
• 1:41:05
  and fifty yards. At the latter range, the turkey was tied to a
• 1:41:09
  stake driven in the center of the opening. At the further end of the
• 1:41:13
  glade. A cord about two feet in length was fashioned to the stake and
• 1:41:16
  to one leg of the gobbling, moving target. It was ten cents a
• 1:41:20
  shot tossed to the man who offered the prize. Often the bird fell at
• 1:41:25
  the first trial, and a hit was any strike above the turkey's knee.
• 1:41:30
  But the long distance turkey shoots were the opening events, and the marksman had
• 1:41:33
  his gun to warm up, his eye detests, and his shooting nerve to
• 1:41:38
  be brought to calmness. So frequently it would happen that the entrance money ran
• 1:41:42
  into a sum that gave a prize value to the turkey. As prices ran
• 1:41:45
  for turkeys in those days, there was the element of chance for the man
• 1:41:49
  offering the prize that was always alluring. The second turkey shoot was held at
• 1:41:55
  the forty yard range, but the bird was now tethered behind a log,
• 1:41:58
  so that only his head and red wattles could appear here too. The turkey
• 1:42:02
  was given freedom of motion and granted self determination as to how he should turn
• 1:42:06
  his head in wonder at the assemblage of the men before him, or if
• 1:42:11
  he should elect He could disappear entirely behind the log if he found something that
• 1:42:15
  interested him upon the ground near by, and the marksmen must wait for the
• 1:42:19
  untimed appearance of the bobbing head. It took prompt action and a quick bead
• 1:42:24
  to score a hit, and it was years afterward that Alvin York had become
• 1:42:28
  the most expert rifle shot that those mountains had ever held that he sat in
• 1:42:31
  the brush on the slope of a hill in the forest of Argonne, and
• 1:42:34
  watched for German helmets and German heads to bob above their pits and around trees
• 1:42:41
  just forty yards away. The event in which center the interest of all gathered
• 1:42:45
  at those Sunday matches, was the shooting for the beef. Each man prepared
• 1:42:48
  his own target, a small board which was charred above a fire built of
• 1:42:53
  twigs and leaves. On this black surface was tacked a piece of white paper
• 1:42:58
  about two by three inches in size, and in the center of the bottom
• 1:43:01
  margin of the white paper was cut a notch, an inverted V not over
• 1:43:06
  a half inch in height. This permitted the marksmen to raise the silver foresight
• 1:43:12
  of his rifle over a black, charred surface until the hairline of the sight
• 1:43:16
  fit into the tip of the triangle cut into the white paper. It was
• 1:43:20
  a pinpoint target that left to the ability of the marksmen the exactness of his
• 1:43:25
  bead. The tip of the triangle in the paper was not the bull's eye.
• 1:43:29
  It was simply the most delicate point that could be devised upon which to
• 1:43:32
  draw a bead. The bull's eye was a point at which two knife blade
• 1:43:36
  marks crossed. When the target was in position, this deliberately marked bullseye could
• 1:43:42
  not be seen by the shooter. With practice shots, they established how the
• 1:43:45
  gun was carrying and the direction in which the nerves of the marksman's eye were
• 1:43:49
  at the time deflecting the ball. Finally, the marksmen drew his bead on
• 1:43:53
  the tip of the triangle, and where the shot punctured the white paper,
• 1:43:57
  the bull's eye would be located. This was done by moving the white paper
• 1:44:00
  until the knife blade cross showed just through the center of the hole the bullet
• 1:44:04
  had made in it. The paper in this position was retacked upon the board,
• 1:44:10
  and underneath was slipped a second piece of paper, making the paper target
• 1:44:14
  appear as if no hole had been torn through it. The bull's eye,
• 1:44:16
  so located, was usually within half an inch radius of the triangle tip.
• 1:44:21
  So exact was the marksmanship of these men that they recognized that neither gun nor
• 1:44:27
  man shot the same day after day. They knew a man's physical condition changed
• 1:44:30
  as these contests progressed, and that the gun varied in its register when it
• 1:44:35
  was hot and when cool. The range for the beef shot was forty yards
• 1:44:40
  if he shot from a chunk twenty seven yards, or about two thirds the
• 1:44:44
  distance if the shot was off hand. A chunk was any rest for the
• 1:44:48
  rifle, a bowed limb cut from a tree, the fork of a limb
• 1:44:53
  driven firmly into the ground, a part of a log, anything that was
• 1:44:57
  the height to give the needed low level to the rifle barrel when the shooter
• 1:45:00
  lay sprawled behind the gun. The permission to shoot from the rest was a
• 1:45:04
  concession to poorer marksmanship. Shooting off hand required nerve and steadiness of nerve to
• 1:45:11
  put it there and hold it. The science of marksmanship they learned through experience.
• 1:45:15
  The rifle ball forced down through the muzzle, was firmly packed, and
• 1:45:18
  the cap carefully primed to prevent a long fire. In taking aim. In
• 1:45:24
  the off hand shots, the gun barrel was brought upward so the target was
• 1:45:28
  always in full view, and as the bead was drawn, the body was
• 1:45:31
  tilted backward until an easy balance for the long barrel was found. The elbow
• 1:45:36
  of the arm against which the butt of the rifle rested was lifted high,
• 1:45:41
  awkwardly high, but this position prevented any nervous backward jerk. Or muscular movement
• 1:45:45
  of the arm that might sway the barrel. Only the way to the forefinger
• 1:45:49
  was needed to spring the hair trigger. When the gun sights were nearing the
• 1:45:53
  tip of the black triangle, the marksmen ceased breathing until the shot was fired.
• 1:45:58
  So accurate were they, and when the bullet tore out the point where
• 1:46:00
  the two knife blade marks crossed, it was simply considered a good shot.
• 1:46:05
  It was called cutting center. But to decide the winning shot from among those
• 1:46:10
  who cut center, it was necessary to ascertain how much of the ball lay
• 1:46:14
  across the center. Each contestant who claimed a chance to win brought his board
• 1:46:18
  to the judges for award. For each one of them, a bullet was
• 1:46:21
  cut in half, and the half with the flat side up was forced into
• 1:46:26
  the bullet hole in the target until level with the board's surface. With a
• 1:46:30
  compass, the exact center of the face of the half bullet was marked a
• 1:46:33
  dent, as if made by a pin point. Then across the surface of
• 1:46:36
  the bright newly cut lead, the knife blade marks of the original bull's eye,
• 1:46:42
  partly torn out by the shot, were retraced. The distance between the
• 1:46:45
  pin dent center and the point where the knife. Marks crossed could then be
• 1:46:49
  exactly measured. When the cross passed directly over the dented center, the shot
• 1:46:55
  was perfect, and the mountaineers called it laying the seam of the ball on
• 1:46:59
  center. In the beef shots, it was a dollar a shot. Each
• 1:47:02
  man could purchase any number of shots. When the pot contained the number of
• 1:47:05
  dollars asked for the beef, the contest began. The prize was divided into
• 1:47:11
  five parts. The two best shots got each a hind quarter of the beef,
• 1:47:15
  the third and fourth, the four quarters, the fifth of the winners,
• 1:47:19
  the hide, and tallow. The beef was slain at the scene of
• 1:47:23
  the shoot, each winner carrying home his part. William York has been known
• 1:47:28
  to carry the prize home on hoof having made the five best shots, but
• 1:47:31
  this was unusual for all the mountaineers grew up with a rifle on their hands
• 1:47:35
  and they knew how to use it. At the shooting matches, it was
• 1:47:39
  again Judge York. He always handled the compass in making the awards to the
• 1:47:44
  shooting matches. Still held at pall Mall, Sam York, Alvin's brother,
• 1:47:47
  brings the compass and the rifle which his father had used. The contest for
• 1:47:53
  the sheep was under the same conditions that surrounded the beef matches, only the
• 1:47:57
  entrance fee was smaller. Usually it was six shots for a dollar. This
• 1:48:00
  odd division of the dollar made to fit their term a shilling a shot shows
• 1:48:05
  the people of the valley clinging to their English customs and still influenced by the
• 1:48:10
  colonial period in America. In colonial days, in many parts of the country,
• 1:48:15
  the shilling's value was placed at sixteen and two thirds cents. Contests for
• 1:48:18
  the pony purses were consolation shoots for those who had made no winning and to
• 1:48:24
  gratify that element who, for the love of the sport, would keep the
• 1:48:27
  matches going until in the day's dimming light the sights of the gun could not
• 1:48:30
  be used. One day, at one of these shooting matches at paw Maw,
• 1:48:33
  I witnessed a demonstration of the imperturbability of these mountain men. One of
• 1:48:39
  the contestants had cut center and about a third of the ball lay across it.
• 1:48:43
  When Ike Hatfield, a cousin of Alvin's, took his place at the
• 1:48:45
  line. He was young, over six feet in height, slender and erect
• 1:48:49
  as a reed, and only his head drooped as his rifle came into position.
• 1:48:55
  Someone said to the man whose shot so far was the winning one,
• 1:48:59
  get is nerve, else he'll beat you. There are no restrictive rules on
• 1:49:02
  the comments or actions of the contestants or spectators. There is usually a steady
• 1:49:06
  flow of railery towards the one at the shooting post. To get Hatfield's nerve,
• 1:49:12
  the man ran forward, waving his hat, offering his services to get
• 1:49:15
  a fly off Hatfield's gun. The rifle barrel continued slowly to rise. There
• 1:49:20
  was no recognition of the incident, no movement seen in the tall figure.
• 1:49:25
  Then his opponent talked and sang, and as this produced no noticeable effect,
• 1:49:30
  he danced and, stooping, began to cut the pigeon wing directly under the
• 1:49:34
  rifle barrel. At this a soundless chuckle swept over Hatfield's shoulders. With a
• 1:49:40
  face motionless, he drew back his gun and, turning quietly, spat out
• 1:49:44
  a quid of tobacco, as if it were all that interfered with his aim.
• 1:49:47
  He again slowly raised his rifle and fired. Despite continued efforts to disconcert
• 1:49:53
  him, he walked leisurely back to the crowd, rested his gun against a
• 1:49:57
  tree and took his seat on the ground. His The only comment was I
• 1:50:00
  think I pestered him. The judges found that Hatfield had laid the seam of
• 1:50:05
  the ball on center and won. In these contests, a mountain marksman will
• 1:50:10
  shoot eight or ten times, and often so closely will each shot fall to
• 1:50:15
  the knife blade cross that the whole cut by all of them in the white
• 1:50:17
  paper target would be no larger than a man's thumb nail. One of the
• 1:50:21
  favorite methods of warming up used by John Solders, the closest competitor that Alvin
• 1:50:28
  York had in hundreds of matches, was to drive fifteen carpet tacks halfway into
• 1:50:32
  a board, then step off until the heads of the tax could just be
• 1:50:36
  seen, and with his rifle Sowders would finish driving twelve or thirteen out of
• 1:50:42
  the fifteen. It was not astuteness on the part of the German major,
• 1:50:45
  as he lay flat upon the ground in that Argonne forest under the swaying radius
• 1:50:49
  of Alvin York's rifle, that caused the major to propose when he found his
• 1:50:54
  men were given no time to get a clear shot at the American sergeant that
• 1:50:58
  if Alvin York would stop killing them, he would make the Germans surrender in
• 1:51:01
  the shooting matches back in the mountains of Tennessee. That American soldier had been
• 1:51:05
  trained to the minute for the mission then before him. But there were more
• 1:51:09
  powerful influences than his marksmanship that gave to Sergeant York the steadiness of nerve,
• 1:51:14
  the coolness of brain, and the courage to fight to victory against such overwhelming
• 1:51:18
  odds. Back in the mountains, in the days of William York, there
• 1:51:23
  were other forms of amusement than the shooting matches. The log rollings, the
• 1:51:28
  house raisings, which always ended in a feast or barbecue, continued popular with
• 1:51:31
  the people, and they had corn huskings to which all the neighbors came.
• 1:51:36
  The corn husking was a winter's sport. These at times were held at night
• 1:51:42
  under the light of hand held lanterns the mountaineers used to guide themselves with over
• 1:51:46
  the rough roads and along mountain paths. But day or night, the husking
• 1:51:51
  ended with a feast. The ears to be husked were piled in a cone
• 1:51:56
  on the corn crib floor, and usually at the bottom and in the very
• 1:51:59
  sense of the cone, a jug of whiskey plugged with a corn cob stopper
• 1:52:03
  was hidden with songs and jokes. They made sport of the work, each
• 1:52:08
  trying to be the first to reach the jug. Once the jug was secured,
• 1:52:12
  the husking ceased, and it was a fair contest between the corn's owner
• 1:52:15
  and his guests to see how much or how little could be done before the
• 1:52:19
  jug shaped goal was reached. Seated on the floor around the pile, each
• 1:52:24
  of the huskers sought to make a narrow cut into the corn before him and
• 1:52:28
  reach the prize more quickly. It was the farmer's part to have the corn
• 1:52:31
  piled in such a toppling cone that the ears above would roll down as fast
• 1:52:35
  as the inroads could be made, and often the sliding ears entirely buried a
• 1:52:40
  husker. He must then draw back to the edge of the pile and start
• 1:52:44
  again. The shout of victory that went up when the prize was pulled forth
• 1:52:47
  warned the women folk at the house that they must make ready for the coming
• 1:52:50
  of hungry men with appetites well wetted on a product of corn. The next
• 1:52:56
  day, the farmer host, without help, shucked the ears that were left
• 1:53:00
  upon his corn crib floor, Alvin, with the mountain sides as his playground,
• 1:53:04
  grew sturdy and resolute. He had been put to work by his father
• 1:53:08
  when first old enough to hold a hoe to help about the house, pack
• 1:53:13
  water and bring in wood. The sparks that bounced from the anvil and the
• 1:53:15
  shadow of the cave fascinated him, and he hung around the blacksmith's shop and
• 1:53:20
  learned how to blow the bellows for his father and keep the fire hot.
• 1:53:25
  He soon grew large enough to swing the sledge, and he turned the shoes
• 1:53:29
  and made them ready. All of this wrapped hard muscles over a body that
• 1:53:32
  was unusually large for his age. His companions began to call him the Biggin,
• 1:53:38
  and the by name still clings to him. This, together with a
• 1:53:42
  calmness and an unmatched reserve, gave him the prestige of a leader among his
• 1:53:46
  boy associates. At the age of fifteen, he swung the sledge with either
• 1:53:50
  hand and was a man's match in wrestling bouts. One of his neighbors gave
• 1:53:56
  this view of him. Alvin was a quiet, straight going boy. When
• 1:54:00
  he started to shoe a mule, he always did it, no matter how
• 1:54:03
  troublesome the mule. He was so quiet about what he was doing that we
• 1:54:08
  never noticed much of that side of his character before he went away, but
• 1:54:12
  now we see it. In a season of prosperity, William York moved from
• 1:54:16
  the cave and built a blacksmith's shop beside the road where at Forks, where
• 1:54:20
  one of the forks turns down the middle of the spring Branch bed on its
• 1:54:26
  way to the mill and to Birdstown, and he and Mary remodeled their home,
• 1:54:30
  making a two room cabin of it. Eleven children were born to them,
• 1:54:33
  eight boys and three girls. Most of the winters of the thirty years
• 1:54:38
  of married life pressed privations upon them. Much of the seventy five acres was
• 1:54:43
  poor soil, and the earnings from the shop were small. Charge of William
• 1:54:46
  York for blacksmith's work was always made in full realization that it was something done
• 1:54:51
  for a friend and neighbor. Seldom was a job done for cash. Instead,
• 1:54:57
  at some time that was convenient to the custom, he would call and
• 1:55:00
  ask the amount he owed, and usually from William Yorke's book of memory,
• 1:55:04
  the account was made out, and not in thirty years was it disputed or
• 1:55:09
  held to be exorbitant. There have been winters of privation in the valley for
• 1:55:13
  all those dependent upon small acreage and uncertain crops, but there was no real
• 1:55:17
  want or suffering from the lack of the necessaries of life. Then, as
• 1:55:21
  it is today, the community spirit in the valley of the three Forks of
• 1:55:26
  the Wolf stood guard at the mountain passes, and no real poverty could enter.
• 1:55:30
  The farmers bins were open to any neighbor in need. The store keeper
• 1:55:34
  willingly waited until some livestock were sold, or even until the next crop came
• 1:55:39
  in. For the once of his family. There was credit for the man
• 1:55:43
  who lived in the valley and worked. He could not speculate on the wealth
• 1:55:45
  of his neighbor, but there was never the need of real need. Old
• 1:55:49
  Kunrod Pyle's theory of the distinctive difference in the location of the trouser patches is
• 1:55:56
  still regarded as a sound basis for business transactions. Those who have tried to
• 1:56:00
  live there upon as little work as they could do have sooner or later followed
• 1:56:03
  the path of the setting sun, and from the valley that in densed the
• 1:56:06
  western slope of the Great Mountain Range. That path leads downward. A visitor
• 1:56:12
  from the city once asked missus Yorke if she did her own work. Sure
• 1:56:15
  enough, the little lady said, and part of other peoples. We had
• 1:56:20
  to to raise so many children and keep them right is a great big job.
• 1:56:26
  A number of years went by in the period of Alvin's boyhood when no
• 1:56:29
  school was held that he could attend. The school term was only for three
• 1:56:32
  months, beginning in early July. It was found impractical to hold sessions in
• 1:56:38
  the winter, for many of the children lived long distances away, and the
• 1:56:42
  branches from the mountain springs that crossed the roadways and fed the river Wolf would
• 1:56:46
  go on rampages that could hold the pupils water bound overnight. The schools and
• 1:56:51
  the mountains received no aid from the state, and in the remote districts it
• 1:56:56
  was difficult to secure teachers except in the pleasant summer months. The school term
• 1:57:00
  could not begin earlier than July, for it must wait until crops were laid
• 1:57:04
  by, for the students ranged in ages from six to twenty years, and
• 1:57:09
  the larger boys were needed on the farms. Then it was the time for
• 1:57:13
  the potatoes to be gathered and tomatoes hung red upon the vine and were ready
• 1:57:17
  for polling. The fall period of the farm was on. The progress which
• 1:57:23
  Sergeant York was able to make in all the years of his school life would
• 1:57:26
  be about equal to the completion of the third grade of a public school.
• 1:57:30
  He was not sufficiently advanced to become interested in reading and self instruction. Before
• 1:57:34
  he was called to the army. He had been but a few miles away
• 1:57:38
  from the valley where the men, as do other men of the mountains,
• 1:57:42
  live in the open of the farm and forest, and think in terms of
• 1:57:45
  their environments. The need of an education had not come home to him.
• 1:57:48
  It was thus equipped that Sergeant York came into the presence of the generals of
• 1:57:53
  the Allied Armies and sat at banquet boards with the leading men of this country
• 1:57:57
  in politics and business. Ever, in the experiences that have been crowded into
• 1:58:01
  the past two years of his life, has he met a situation he could
• 1:58:04
  not command, or one that broke his calmness and reserve. Clearly and quickly
• 1:58:10
  he thinks, but those thoughts flow slowly into words. He is keenly appreciative
• 1:58:15
  of his own limitations, and quietly observes everything around him. From early childhood
• 1:58:20
  he has been taught to be swift and keen in observation. The rustling of
• 1:58:25
  a leaf might be related to a squirrel's presence, and behind each moving shadow
• 1:58:29
  there is a cause and a meaning. When he came to Protois, France,
• 1:58:33
  the soldiers sought to honor him by having him carry the division flag in
• 1:58:36
  the horse show. All was new to him, and he was told but
• 1:58:40
  little the routine expected of him. He had become the man whom all the
• 1:58:45
  American soldiers wished to see, and his presence was the feature of the occasion.
• 1:58:49
  The officers of his own regiment watched him closely, and not a mistake
• 1:58:54
  did he make in all the days of maneuvers. A comment of one of
• 1:58:57
  the officers was, he seems always in distinctively to know the right thing to
• 1:59:00
  do. Came from a cabin in the backwoods of Tennessee, but he was
• 1:59:04
  raised under influences that make real men. A boy's ideal in his early life
• 1:59:11
  is the father who guides him, and Sergeant Yorke had before him a character
• 1:59:15
  that was picturesque in its rugged manhood and honesty, and inspiring in its devotion
• 1:59:20
  to right and justice. The very privations he endured and that he saw influencing
• 1:59:26
  his home throughout his childhood, were due to principle. For William Yorke would
• 1:59:30
  owe no man beyond the period of his promise to pay. In the light
• 1:59:33
  of the sparks from the anvil and the shop in the cave, sparks that
• 1:59:38
  burned brighter even than the light of day, the comradeship between father and son
• 1:59:42
  was formed, and they were companions until the boy reached manhood, when the
• 1:59:45
  death of the father separated them. There was nothing pretentious about the home in
• 1:59:49
  which he was raised. It was but a cabin, yet the chairs the
• 1:59:54
  tables were of seasoned oak, handmade solid. The punch and floor was worn
• 1:59:59
  smooth with use, and over it was a polished glow from the care of
• 2:00:02
  cleanliness, showing purity was there. The walls were papered with newspapers, that
• 2:00:09
  was to keep out the winter's wind. But over the windows were curtains of
• 2:00:12
  white muslin, and a scarf of it ran the length of the simple bored
• 2:00:15
  mantel shelf, and in season the blossom of some flower swayed there. Within
• 2:00:20
  the home, no angry words were heard, but often there was laughter and
• 2:00:25
  song, and when the formulas for conduct were not followed. Even the words
• 2:00:29
  of correction were affectionately spoken, as the boy's first steps were guided by tender
• 2:00:34
  hands, so the proper way to walk through life was pointed out with gentle
• 2:00:38
  words and simple truths. The mother's teachings were the products of an untrained mind,
• 2:00:44
  but her philosophies came from a brain that has the power to think clearly
• 2:00:46
  and quickly, and is never influenced by either anger or excitement, qualities transmitted
• 2:00:53
  eminently to her son. This little mother in the mountains, unread and untutored,
• 2:00:58
  with only the dictates of her her own heart to guide her, had
• 2:01:00
  early adopted as her guiding philosophy the belief that the greatest thing in life is
• 2:01:04
  love. So the impressionable, observant boy realized that life in the rugged mountains
• 2:01:10
  around him called for strength and endurance, but in his home, or wherever
• 2:01:15
  his mother was concerned, there must be gentleness and love, and she had
• 2:01:18
  been the greatest influence in his life. He has always listened to her counsels,
• 2:01:24
  except in a brief period of wildness in young manhood, as his standard
• 2:01:28
  of life was formed under her teachings. It may be again said of him,
• 2:01:31
  But this time from the moral standpoint, he seems always instinctively to know
• 2:01:36
  the right thing to do. It was the love for his mother, his
• 2:01:40
  love for his home life in paw Maow, and the sweetheart who was waiting
• 2:01:44
  for him there. They called him back to the valley of the three Forks
• 2:01:46
  of the Wolf, after he had gone out into the world and won fame
• 2:01:49
  among men. The very sunlight falls gently on the verdant beauty of that valley,
• 2:01:55
  and the seven mountains rise around it as though they would shield it from
• 2:01:58
  the contending currents of the world. Over the valley there comes a long gray
• 2:02:02
  dawn, for the sun is high in the heavens when its slanting rays first
• 2:02:06
  fall in the silver waters of the Wolf. And through this dawn the men
• 2:02:10
  are moving, feeding stock, harnessing their teams, and many of them sing
• 2:02:15
  as they ride to their work in the fields, for they are content.
• 2:02:17
  The tinkling of the bells on the cows grow fainter as the cows browse along
• 2:02:21
  the paths that lead to their mountain pastures up and down the road in companionable
• 2:02:27
  groups. The pigs are moving audibly, condoling with each other over the lack
• 2:02:30
  of business methods that cause the loss of the location of the entrance to the
• 2:02:34
  field of corn. A crow flaps lazily across the valley and over the crest
• 2:02:40
  of the mountain. The sun comes up in the summer twilight there is long,
• 2:02:44
  and as it dips into night, a drowsiness rises, fog like over
• 2:02:47
  the valley. When a half moon hangs between the mountains, its light is
• 2:02:53
  that of drooping, drowsy lids. The lamps in the cabins on the mountain
• 2:02:57
  sides gleam but a brief time and go out. The descending of the shade
• 2:03:00
  of night is the universal bedtime of the mountain people. An occasional swinging light
• 2:03:05
  may still be seen, but it is the mountaineer giving attention to some trouble
• 2:03:10
  among his stock. Then there is silence over the valley except for the chorus
• 2:03:14
  of katy DIDs and the whistle of the gray owl to his mate in the
• 2:03:16
  woods. Now and then there comes the soft, faint clank of a cowbell,
• 2:03:21
  different from its sound as the cows run the road or feed in the
• 2:03:26
  pasture. It is a slow and sleepy tang that soothes the ear. But
• 2:03:30
  the mountain curfew is the bark of a dog. Somewhere up on the range,
• 2:03:34
  a hound will call to another that all is well with him in his
• 2:03:39
  watch of the night, and the family he guards are all abed. The
• 2:03:42
  aroused neighbor calls to the dog at the cabin next to him, and the
• 2:03:45
  message that all's well sweeps on the voices of the hounds on down the valley
• 2:03:49
  until it ends in an echo in the crags end of chapter. People of
• 2:03:56
  paw Maw, they are a tranquil people who pass us their days as do
• 2:04:00
  those who now live in the valley of the three forks of the Wolf.
• 2:04:04
  They are free from invidious jealousies and the blight of avarice toward each other,
• 2:04:10
  free from doubt of the rectitude of their daughters, and relieved from solicitude that
• 2:04:14
  the future of their sons, if they remain in the valley, will be
• 2:04:17
  influenced by dissipation or dishonesty. A people who find in the changes of the
• 2:04:23
  weather and its effect upon crops their chief cause for worry. Through the gray
• 2:04:28
  dawn, the farmer looks up to the skies for his weather report for the
• 2:04:30
  day. As he works, he watches the clouds scurrying across the mountain tops,
• 2:04:35
  and when he notes they are banking against the unseen summit of the blue
• 2:04:40
  mountains that rise to the east, he knows that rain is soon to come.
• 2:04:45
  Some local, unknown bard, watching those banking clouds, has left a
• 2:04:48
  lyric to his people. And I heard a gray bearded mountaineer singing it as
• 2:04:53
  he predicted the break of a summer drought. The sun rose bright, but
• 2:04:58
  hid its head, soon to a rain of night if it don't rain.
• 2:05:00
  Aforeenoon with their homes back in the mountains, nearly fifty miles from the railway,
• 2:05:06
  with a journey before them over rocky roads and up mountain sides to the
• 2:05:11
  other communities of Fincher's County. The people of paw Mau live in the communion
• 2:05:15
  and democracy of one great family. Children call old men by their Christian names.
• 2:05:19
  In it is not the slightest element of disrespect, and it is instead
• 2:05:24
  an appreciated propriety which the old men recall as the custom of their boyhood.
• 2:05:29
  Reverend R. C. Pyle, the pastor of the Church of Christ in
• 2:05:31
  Christian Union, the Church of the Valley, is rosier to everyone. All
• 2:05:38
  worshiped together in the same church, all toil alike in the fields in the
• 2:05:42
  predial, peaceful routine of their days. There is a positive similarity. A
• 2:05:46
  farmer will ride direct to the cornfield or the meadow of a neighbor, knowing
• 2:05:50
  the neighbor will be found at work there, and as through the gray dawn
• 2:05:55
  of the day they look up to the skies, the wish of one for
• 2:05:58
  rain will be found to be the community desire. The social meeting point of
• 2:06:02
  the people of the valley is the general store of John Marion Rains. The
• 2:06:06
  storehouse sits by the roadside at the foot of a mountain in the western end
• 2:06:11
  of the valley, just where the road tumbles down to the solid log cabin
• 2:06:15
  old Coonrod Pile had built to the spring and the York home. One end
• 2:06:19
  of the long porch of the storehouse, as it runs with the road,
• 2:06:23
  is but a step from the ground, and the mountain falls away until the
• 2:06:27
  floor is conveniently up to the height of a wagon's bed. Then the road
• 2:06:30
  dips again until the porch is on a level with the saddle stirrups, and
• 2:06:34
  the women dismount with ease from their high backed, tasseled side saddles as they
• 2:06:39
  come in sun bonnets and ginghams. The men of the Mountains seldom hurry on
• 2:06:44
  any mission. Their walk is a slow and foot shore tread. When they
• 2:06:48
  come to the store, if only for a plug of tobacco, they remain
• 2:06:51
  with John Marion for a social hour or more. Their purchase is an incident
• 2:06:57
  the last act before they depart. It is rare during the daylight hours that
• 2:07:00
  someone is not sitting on the porch or in one of the chairs of the
• 2:07:03
  row that skirts the showcased counter, just within the door, or somewhere upon
• 2:07:09
  the open horseshoe kegs that border the floor of the counter opposite. They are
• 2:07:13
  waiting to hear if anything new has happened. For all the news of the
• 2:07:15
  neighborhood comes to the store, the storekeeper is sure to know whether the stranger
• 2:07:19
  seen passing along the road in the morning stopped at the Yorks or went on
• 2:07:24
  to Possum Trot or to Birdstown. The very commodities upon the shelves and counters
• 2:07:29
  of that store are in friendly confusion. Canned meats, pepper, candy,
• 2:07:32
  soap, and chewing tobacco may be found in one partition, while next to
• 2:07:36
  them groceries, shotgun shells, powder and chinaware are in a position of prominence
• 2:07:42
  according to the needs of the past purchaser. In the rear, piled high
• 2:07:46
  are overalls and store clothes, hats and shoes. But the counter facing the
• 2:07:51
  shells of dress goods for the women, is free of obstructions, and its
• 2:07:56
  surface is worn smooth and polished by the years of unrolling of bolts of cloth.
• 2:08:00
  While at every quarter yard along the counter's rear edge is the shining brass
• 2:08:03
  tackhead. The yardstick of the department. A pair of large shears swing prominently
• 2:08:09
  from an upright partition. The department is orderly and neat, a mute tribute
• 2:08:15
  to those who patronize it. Into the showcases has crept every article of small
• 2:08:18
  dimension that had no habitat or kind. Upon the shelves around, from laces
• 2:08:24
  to lead, pencils, upon nails, and the rafters of the ceiling swing
• 2:08:26
  buckets and dippers and lamps, current combs and brushes. Off In an l
• 2:08:33
  that runs at a right angle from the main store are bacon and tires for
• 2:08:35
  wagon wheels, country cured hams and brooms, flour kerosene and plows. Under
• 2:08:41
  the counter by the door is an open wooden box of crackers, and its
• 2:08:46
  exact location and the volume of the supply are known to every child in the
• 2:08:50
  mountains around. Out of it comes their land yap from making a journey to
• 2:08:54
  the store. Beside the door, upon a shelf sits the water bucket,
• 2:08:58
  kept cool by frequent repleashing from the York spring. Here, every man who
• 2:09:03
  enters stops, and after he has shifted his quid of tobacco, looked around
• 2:09:07
  and made his cheerful greeting a hearty one with howdy people. He lifts the
• 2:09:11
  dipper filled with its pleasing refreshment, and the surplus goes accurately in a crystal
• 2:09:18
  curve to the back of some venturesome chicken that has come upon the store porch.
• 2:09:22
  Above the door as you enter, hangs a stenciled, uneven, unpunctuated
• 2:09:26
  sign no credit, cash or barter. But that sign has lost its potency.
• 2:09:31
  It is yellow with age, and no longer is there anyone who believes
• 2:09:35
  in it. It was hung when John Marian first opened his store, and
• 2:09:39
  before he knew his people and wanted cash or barter for his wares. There
• 2:09:43
  is trading every day that is barter, but it is the women bringing chickens
• 2:09:46
  under their arms, or a basket of eggs. The eggs are deposited in
• 2:09:50
  a box, the store keeper counting them aloud as he packs them for shipment,
• 2:09:54
  or one of the eleven reins as kids is bestirred to the barn with
• 2:09:58
  the chick pickens, where they remain in semi captivity until the egg and poultry
• 2:10:03
  man in an old canvas covered schooner comes on his weekly rounds, and the
• 2:10:09
  cash value to the barter is traded to ascent. A poke of flour,
• 2:10:13
  or of sugar, or a cut of tobacco usually evens the transaction. It
• 2:10:18
  is many a journey around the store that John Marion makes in a day.
• 2:10:22
  The decision to purchase each article is announced slowly, as though it were the
• 2:10:26
  only thing desired. The plump and genial storekeeper goes leisurely for it, and
• 2:10:31
  with a smile of satisfaction, places it before the customer. There is a
• 2:10:35
  moment of silence, then a journey for the next need, and it is
• 2:10:39
  only in balancing the barter that the merchant makes a suggestion. A small glass
• 2:10:43
  showcase is refuting testimony that the sign over the door of no credit had been
• 2:10:48
  discredited long ago. The charge account is open to everyone. A memorandum of
• 2:10:54
  the purchases is made upon a strip torn from a writing tablet or upon a
• 2:10:58
  piece of wrapping paper, and tossed into the showcase among many others of its
• 2:11:03
  kind, until the customer comes around to settle up. Then, with an
• 2:11:07
  unerring instinct, John Marian can pull from the tumbled pile of memoranda the records
• 2:11:11
  of the charges he seeks. If the charge account is to remain open until
• 2:11:16
  the next crop comes in or some rainy day, he will transcribe the charge
• 2:11:20
  into his day book. The clocks of the valley are not controlled by the
• 2:11:24
  governments or the railroad's standard of time. They go by sun time and are
• 2:11:28
  regulated by the hour the almanacs say the sun should rise. John Marion winds
• 2:11:33
  the store clock after it is run down, and he sets it by no
• 2:11:35
  consultation with anything but his feelings as to what hour of the day it should
• 2:11:39
  be. At least once a week, every man who lives in the valley
• 2:11:43
  is at the store, but Saturday is the popular meeting time. When the
• 2:11:46
  chairs and the row of horseshoe kegs are occupied. The men rest their hands
• 2:11:50
  behind them on the counter and swing to a place of comfort upon it,
• 2:11:54
  Or they sit upon the window sills, keeping well within the range of raillery
• 2:11:58
  that welcomes the coming and speeds the parting guest. It is a good natured
• 2:12:03
  humor that these mountaineers love, quick as the crack of a rifle, and
• 2:12:07
  as direct as its speeding ball. There is never an effort to wound,
• 2:12:11
  but always there is the open challenge to measure resource and wit. Many a
• 2:12:15
  trade in mules that owners have ridden to the store has resulted from the defense
• 2:12:18
  against the mule wise critics, who several times outnumber the man who rode the
• 2:12:22
  mule. The mount is a newly acquired one. The special pleasure is found
• 2:12:28
  in a seemingly serious pointing out why any sort of trade was a bad one
• 2:12:31
  for that particular animal. A mule trade is a measure of business capability.
• 2:12:37
  No lie is ever told an answer to a direct question, but no information
• 2:12:41
  is relinquished unless the question is asked. No hand is passed over the mule's
• 2:12:46
  eyes, and there is no specific inquiry about the eyes before the trade is
• 2:12:48
  consummated and the animal proves blind. In one of them, fault lies in
• 2:12:52
  the mule swamping ability of the new owner. Over no question could two men
• 2:12:56
  be seemingly so widely apart as the two when both are anxious to trade,
• 2:13:01
  they are jockeying for that something to boot, which always makes at least one
• 2:13:05
  participant satisfied. In a mountain mule trade. There are pitfalls for the unwary
• 2:13:11
  in the conversations that pass across the store Aisle. Bill Sharp, who has
• 2:13:16
  spent eighty two summers in the valley and the winters as well, with seeming
• 2:13:20
  innocence, started a discussion as to how far a cow bell could be heard.
• 2:13:24
  He sat quietly as several compared their experiences while hunting cattle in the mountains.
• 2:13:28
  Finally, the old man said his hearing was not so good as it
• 2:13:31
  used to be, but he remembered once hearing a cowbell all the way from
• 2:13:35
  Overton County down the line. A rural statistician figured it must be seventy miles
• 2:13:41
  from pow Maw to the nearest point in Overton County, and the jests began
• 2:13:46
  to explode in the old man's vicinity. He conceded many changes since he was
• 2:13:50
  young, but so far as he could see, there was evidently no improvement
• 2:13:54
  in the man's hearing powers. When all his efforts to secure a side bet
• 2:13:58
  that he could prove his assertion were futile, he explained, well, boys,
• 2:14:01
  you got away, and once I won two gallons of whiskey on it.
• 2:14:05
  I was in Overton County. I bought a cow and as she had
• 2:14:09
  a bell on her and I drove her home, I heard that cow bell
• 2:14:13
  all the way from Overton County. On Saturday afternoon or a rainy afternoon,
• 2:14:16
  when Alvin Yorke and the right boys, and one of them will Wright,
• 2:14:22
  is president of the bank at Jamestown. Ab Williams grave, hair and bent,
• 2:14:26
  but vigorous of tongue. His son Sam Williams, tall and straight as
• 2:14:30
  an Indian, and equally upstanding for his opinions. John Evans, a local
• 2:14:33
  Justice of the Peace, Bill Sharp, who lives in the shadow of Old
• 2:14:37
  Crow T. C. Frog of Frog's Chapel, who farms, preaches or
• 2:14:43
  teaches school as the demand arises, Pastor Pyle, and his brother Virgil Pile,
• 2:14:48
  who has been county trustee. When any of these are among those gathered
• 2:14:52
  at the store, there is a tournament of wit with a constant change of
• 2:14:56
  program. Many a time, John Marion is compelled to retreat behind a they's
• 2:15:00
  in when in a lull a shot is taken at him, and his smile
• 2:15:03
  is his acknowledgment that he cannot be expected to add up a charge slip and
• 2:15:07
  at the same time defend himself against a carefree man upon a keg of horseshoes.
• 2:15:13
  But the storekeeper is never taken by surprise at the bandonage of his patrons.
• 2:15:18
  One afternoon, after a long wait and another day in the valley seemed
• 2:15:20
  sure to pass with no unusual incident, an old fellow arose from one of
• 2:15:26
  the chairs, stretched himself and said, John Marion, I want to shift
• 2:15:30
  of shirts else I got to go to bed to get this un washed.
• 2:15:33
  The storekeeper laid out several of dark color. Here's some you can wear without
• 2:15:37
  change till the shirt falls off. That's right, John, give it one
• 2:15:41
  that won't advertise that the old woman's neglected me. Another was uncertain about the
• 2:15:46
  size of a pair of overalls for his boy. Don't know, John Marion,
• 2:15:50
  one tight enough to keep the bees out. A kid show a waste
• 2:15:54
  energy when a bee gets in him when it is good dusk. The storekeeper
• 2:15:58
  closes the wooden shutter and fastens them by looping a small cotton string over a
• 2:16:03
  nail. All the mountaineers are on their way home, but they had not
• 2:16:07
  parted without an interchange of invitation. Home with me, boys home. If
• 2:16:11
  I can't feed you well, I'll be friendly. Or maybe the invitation is
• 2:16:16
  not so sweeping, and holds a reservation spend the night with me. I'll
• 2:16:20
  not stop you. I'll let you leave afore breakfast. Over any gathering of
• 2:16:24
  the store, a pall of silence descends when a stranger rides up. If
• 2:16:28
  the newcomer is a new drummer, unfamiliar with the ways of the mountains,
• 2:16:33
  if he comes imbued with the belief that the voice with the smile wins and
• 2:16:37
  talkatively radiates his individual idea of fellowship and democracy, one by one, his
• 2:16:41
  auditors silently drop away to them an insincere a false note of democracy has been
• 2:16:48
  struck. Perhaps around the door there will slinger some of the mountain boys,
• 2:16:52
  waiting to satisfy their curiosity over the contents of the drummer's cases. John Marion
• 2:16:58
  Rains always listens to the store worry of prices, but his shelves are really
• 2:17:01
  replenished by the drummers who drive to the barn instead of the store who unhitched
• 2:17:05
  their own horses and feed them from the storekeeper's supply of corn, who come
• 2:17:09
  into the center of the crowd only after they have unobtrusively lingered a while in
• 2:17:13
  the fringe of it. One afternoon, one of these mountaineers, who had
• 2:17:16
  withdrawn to the porch, unhitched without being solicited, a drummer's horse, and
• 2:17:22
  he had trouble in pulling off a loose shoe and renailing it. The drummer
• 2:17:26
  wanted to pay for the work, but the mountaineer shook his head. The
• 2:17:28
  deed had been done for the horse. The visitor insisted, and finally the
• 2:17:33
  price was fixed by a nickel. A mountaineer seldom asks questions. Instead,
• 2:17:37
  he makes a statement of that which appears to him to be the fact,
• 2:17:41
  and if unchallenged or uncorrected, it is accepted as the proper deduction. Early
• 2:17:46
  in my visit to pal Maw, I learned my lesson. Have you lived
• 2:17:50
  all your life in the valley? I asked an old mountaineer whom I met
• 2:17:52
  on the road, as he was carrying on his shoulder, a sack of
• 2:17:56
  corn to the mill. Into his eye, there came a light of playfulness,
• 2:18:00
  then pity, quickly to be followed by a twinkle of fun. He
• 2:18:03
  simply could not let the opening pass, not yet, he said. Later,
• 2:18:09
  I saw a little fellow of six years of age chasing a chicken barren
• 2:18:13
  of feathers, over a yard that was barren of grass. When I accused
• 2:18:16
  him of maliciously picking that chicken, his face was a spot of smiles as
• 2:18:20
  he vigorously denied it. Are you going to school? I asked him.
• 2:18:26
  The smile changed to a look of surprise at an inquiry so out of line
• 2:18:30
  with his immediate activities. When it starts, he called back, as he
• 2:18:33
  and the chicken disappeared under the cabin. I dropped questions and adopted the direct
• 2:18:39
  statement as a method of procedure in which there was less personal liability. Alvin
• 2:18:45
  Terry, dressed in a patched corduroy with a hunting pouch made of the skin
• 2:18:48
  of a gray fox, and with his long rifle in hand, stopped at
• 2:18:52
  the store and told how he got a bear. There was a hunter's pride
• 2:18:58
  in the achievement, with apparently little given to the bravery of the personal role
• 2:19:01
  he had played. He had been on a hunt back in the hills.
• 2:19:05
  His dogs had gone ahead of him, and he knowed they had something when
• 2:19:09
  he came in sight of them, and they rushed into a cave, and
• 2:19:13
  some came out yelping and bloody when they wouldn't go back in. Then it
• 2:19:18
  was he sized it were a bear. He looked at the mountains around him,
• 2:19:22
  but there was not a cabin in sight where he could get help.
• 2:19:24
  Is the dogs couldn't get it out what was in there and was only keeping
• 2:19:28
  it in. I sat down to think it over. I lowed I would
• 2:19:33
  tell someone, and folks would say, that's the man who had a bear
• 2:19:37
  in a cave and did not get him. If I went in and come
• 2:19:39
  out alive with scratches on me, folks would say a bear done that.
• 2:19:43
  But he got the bear. He cut a long pole, fastened a pine
• 2:19:48
  knot to the end of it, and set it afire. Getting to the
• 2:19:50
  side of the mouth of the cave, he began slowly to push in the
• 2:19:54
  burning knot, leaving the channel opened if anything wanted to come out. But
• 2:20:00
  the bear didn't come out, and the hunter grew afraid that the smoke would
• 2:20:03
  not move his prey, yet would prevent him from seeing around in the cave
• 2:20:07
  if he had to go in. The cave's mouth was low, a rock
• 2:20:09
  hung over it, and he could not crawl upon his hands and knees.
• 2:20:13
  I pushed the pine knot as fur as it would go. I set my
• 2:20:16
  rifle and pushed it ahead of me. I got my knock where I could
• 2:20:20
  get it, went down flat and begun to pull myself on my elbows.
• 2:20:24
  When I could just peep around the rock, I seed the bear. It
• 2:20:28
  was setting on his haunches. His head turned to looking at the pine knot,
• 2:20:31
  picked out a spot about three inches below his collar bone, and never
• 2:20:35
  drew such a bead on anything. Then I touched her off. You should
• 2:20:39
  have seen me come backward out of there. He waited, and there was
• 2:20:43
  no sound in the cave. He sent the dogs in, and they would
• 2:20:46
  not come out at his call. He reloaded his rifle and began to crawl
• 2:20:50
  in again. As soon as I seed him, I knowed he was dead.
• 2:20:54
  I got both my hands on his paw and began to pull. He
• 2:20:56
  was heavier than I was, so I slid to him I tried ketch him.
• 2:21:01
  I toes in the rocks, but I couldn't hold, and I never
• 2:21:03
  moved him. He went ten miles over the mountains to get help to pull
• 2:21:07
  his bear out of the cave. The language of the people of the Great
• 2:21:11
  Smokies and the Blue Ridge Mountains is filled with a quaintness of expression. Many
• 2:21:16
  of their words and phrases that attract through their oddity, were at one time
• 2:21:20
  in popular use and grammatically correct. These people are clinging to the dialect of
• 2:21:24
  their fathers, who were Anglo Saxons. The use of hit for it is
• 2:21:30
  not confined to the mountains, but the old English grammars give hit as the
• 2:21:33
  neuter of the pronoun he. Uns too had once a grammatical sanction for ewun
• 2:21:41
  or un was the early English for one, and uns was more than one.
• 2:21:46
  And many parts of the South are found the expressions ewuns and weuiyuns.
• 2:21:52
  The mountaineer says ewuns when he is addressing more than one person. It is
• 2:21:56
  one of his plural forms for you, and he is adopting an earl English
• 2:22:00
  ending. But the true mountaineer does not employ wian's, though we to him
• 2:22:05
  is plural. The suffix is superfluous in the same way. He says ye
• 2:22:09
  when speaking to more than one, but he uses U when addressing an individual.
• 2:22:15
  He seems too to make a distinction between ewan's and ye. The former
• 2:22:20
  is usually the nominative and the latter the objective. When he wishes to convey
• 2:22:24
  the idea of past tense, the ending ed is popularly employed, but when
• 2:22:30
  he may, he drops the e. While he will properly use the present
• 2:22:33
  tense of a verb, he goes out of his way to add the D,
• 2:22:39
  so he says node seed, But he's not always consistent. He prefers
• 2:22:45
  kilt the old form to killed. Generations pass in which they had little opportunity
• 2:22:50
  to attend school, and there are today a number of the older people of
• 2:22:54
  the valley of the three forks of the Wolf who cannot read nor write.
• 2:22:58
  Some of the younger generations have been away to college, but as with Alvin
• 2:23:01
  York, most of them grew to manhood with only a month or a month
• 2:23:05
  and a half at school during a year with many years no school in session.
• 2:23:11
  The church is in the center of the valley, at the edge of
• 2:23:13
  a grove of forest trees. It is a frame structure built by the Methodist
• 2:23:18
  during the past century. The board walls of the interior are unplastered and unpainted,
• 2:23:22
  and the pews are movable benches. The pulpit is slightly elevated, with
• 2:23:28
  a railing in front ending in two pillars, upon which rests the preacher's Bible,
• 2:23:33
  song books, and lamps. Along the entire front of the pulpit runs
• 2:23:37
  the mourner's bench. In the rear of the church, a ladder rests against
• 2:23:41
  the wall, and down toward it swings a rope from the open belfry.
• 2:23:45
  Every one in the valley attends church, and there are but few who do
• 2:23:48
  not go to every service, without regard to the denomination conducting it. They
• 2:23:52
  come on horse and mule, back on foot in wagons, in the beds
• 2:23:56
  of which are chairs for the entire family. In summer, many of the
• 2:24:00
  men wear their overalls, and all, excepting the young men acting as escorts,
• 2:24:05
  come in their shirt sleeves. Some of the women are in silks,
• 2:24:07
  but more of them are in Gingham's and many sunbonnets are to be seen.
• 2:24:11
  At the door of the church, the men and women part, and they
• 2:24:15
  sit in separate pews. I attended a service at the end of a revival
• 2:24:18
  that was being conducted by the Reverend Melvin Herbert Russell of the Church of Christ
• 2:24:24
  in Christian Union, the frail and eager Evangelists who three years before had brought
• 2:24:28
  Sergeant Yorke to his knees before the altar of that church. It was in
• 2:24:31
  August day, and the sun's rays fell into the valley without a single cloud
• 2:24:35
  for a screen. The little church was filled with worshippers, while many sat
• 2:24:39
  in the shade of the trees that sheltered it. Within the sound of the
• 2:24:43
  minister's voice down through the grove. The hitched horses stomped and switched, but
• 2:24:48
  this was the only evidence of restlessness. The minister conducted the services in his
• 2:24:52
  shirt sleeves, without collar, and with the sleeves rolled up. There is
• 2:24:56
  no organ in the church, and he played a guitar as he led the
• 2:24:58
  earth earnest singing. The Mountain Evangelist had but few of the pulpit arts of
• 2:25:03
  the minister, but he had the soul of a great preacher. His life,
• 2:25:07
  to him was a mission to the unconverted, to point out the imminence
• 2:25:11
  of death and its meaning. His belief had carried him beyond and above the
• 2:25:16
  pleading of the uncertainty of death to arouse fear in the hearts of his congregation.
• 2:25:20
  Instead, to him, the great clock of time was actually ticking off,
• 2:25:24
  an opportunity which the unconverted could not permit to pass. In his earnest
• 2:25:28
  bleeding, his voice would rise from a conversational tone until it rang penetratingly throughout
• 2:25:35
  the hall, and he would emphasize his words with a startling resound from his
• 2:25:39
  open palm upon the altar rail. The mountaineers had brought their entire families,
• 2:25:43
  and during the service, the smaller children would fall asleep, to awaken with
• 2:25:46
  a cry at the changing vibrations up and down the sounding Carpetleous aisles of parents
• 2:25:52
  would pass, carrying out some child to comfort it. But the incidents were
• 2:25:56
  unnoticed by the minister, nor did they break the chant of amen, or
• 2:26:00
  the growing number of repetitions of the minister's words by the devout worshippers. When
• 2:26:05
  the eyes of the auditors were turned from the evangelist, they reverently sought the
• 2:26:09
  face of some expected convert in the service. In the feelings of the people,
• 2:26:13
  there was real religion. Sundays pass when there is no preaching in the
• 2:26:16
  church. Pastor Pyle, the local minister, has several charges and can conduct
• 2:26:22
  the services at pall Mall but once a month. But each Sunday morning there
• 2:26:26
  is Sunday school and in the afternoon a singing class. Some one of the
• 2:26:30
  York boys leads the unaccompanied songs, and Alvin's leadership an interest in these services
• 2:26:35
  cause the catchy phrase a singing elder to be a part of nearly every newspaper
• 2:26:39
  story of him that went over the country. The singing class draws to the
• 2:26:43
  church on Sunday afternoon the younger element of the community. When the service is
• 2:26:48
  over, some go for a swim in the Wolf River which runs along the
• 2:26:52
  foot of the grove, or on a grassless space under a giant oak on
• 2:26:56
  the schoolhouse yard. There will be a game of marbles. It is the
• 2:27:00
  old fashioned ring men that they play, where five large marbles are placed in
• 2:27:05
  a small square marked in the dust, one marble on each corner and one
• 2:27:09
  in the middle. Over in France, when the officers of Sergeant York's regiment
• 2:27:13
  were trying to obtain all the facts of his wonderful exploit, they asked him
• 2:27:16
  what he did with the German officers he had captured. When he started to
• 2:27:20
  bring in his line of prisoners, his reply was a smile from his boyhood
• 2:27:24
  in the mountains, I just made a middler out of myself. Among all
• 2:27:28
  the American officers present, there was but one who recognized his reference to the
• 2:27:33
  old marble game. The death of his father when Alvin was twenty one,
• 2:27:37
  relaxed a hand that had protected and guided him more than he realized. His
• 2:27:41
  two older brothers were married, and he became the head of the family of
• 2:27:45
  ten that remained. He left to his younger brothers the care of the crops
• 2:27:48
  upon the farm, and he hired out on any job that brought an extra
• 2:27:52
  revenue. In summer, he worked on neighboring farms, and in winter hauled
• 2:27:56
  staves and merchandise when the roads could be traveled or law in the lumber camps.
• 2:28:01
  He formed new associates, and under the new influences, began to drink
• 2:28:05
  and gamble with his companions. On Saturday and Sunday he would go to the
• 2:28:09
  Kentucky line through the mountains. Along the state line between Tennessee and Kentucky,
• 2:28:13
  there were road houses or saloons that were so built that one half of the
• 2:28:18
  house would be in Kentucky and one half in Tennessee. The keeper paid his
• 2:28:22
  federal license and was free from the clutches of the United States government, but
• 2:28:26
  he avoided the licenses of the states by carrying a customer from Tennessee into the
• 2:28:30
  Kentucky side of the house for the business transaction, and the Kentuckian was invited
• 2:28:35
  into Tennessee. No customer of the state line saloons could swear before a grand
• 2:28:39
  jury that he had violated the liquor laws of his state, and he was
• 2:28:43
  not subject to a summons at his home by the grand jury of the county
• 2:28:46
  or state in which he made his purchase. Upon receipt of a grapevine signal
• 2:28:50
  that officers were approaching, the entire stock of liquids would disappear, and when
• 2:28:54
  the officers arrived, the saloon keeper would be at work in the fields of
• 2:28:58
  his farm. The nearest state line saloon to pall Mau was seven miles by
• 2:29:03
  the road, and but little over half the distance by paths on the mountains.
• 2:29:07
  This was the only period of Alban's life when the wishes of his mother
• 2:29:11
  did not control him. These week end sprees were relaxation and fun, and
• 2:29:16
  he worked steadily the remainder of the week. In them, he grew jovial,
• 2:29:18
  and the friends he drew around him were fun, not trouble makers.
• 2:29:22
  His physical strength and the influence of his personality were quickly used to check in
• 2:29:28
  incipiency any evidence of approaching disorder. His shooting up consisted of pumping lead from
• 2:29:35
  an old revolver he owned into the spots on the beech trees as he and
• 2:29:37
  his friends galloped along the road, and he became so expert that he would
• 2:29:41
  pass the revolver from hand to hand and empty it against a tree as he
• 2:29:45
  went by. When the eight Germans charged him in the fight in the Argonne,
• 2:29:50
  he never raised his automatic pistol higher than his cartridge belt. His mother
• 2:29:54
  knew the latent determination of her boy, and she was ever in dread that
• 2:29:56
  there might arise some trouble among the men when he he was away on these
• 2:30:00
  drinking trips. Alvin is just like his father, she said. They are
• 2:30:05
  both slow to stock trouble. But if either one would get into hit,
• 2:30:09
  they'd go through with the job and there'd be a hurtin'. But since the
• 2:30:11
  fistfights of boyhood. Alvian Yorke has never had a personal encounter. His intents
• 2:30:16
  and deeds do not lead him into difficulties, and in his eye there is
• 2:30:20
  a calm blue light that steadies the impulses of men given to explosions of passion
• 2:30:24
  and anger. At a basket dinner where he and his friends were drinking,
• 2:30:28
  he took his last drink. To these outings, the girls bring in a
• 2:30:33
  woven hickory basket a dinner for two. The baskets are auctioned, the proceeds
• 2:30:37
  are given to some church charity, and the purchaser and the girl have dinner
• 2:30:41
  together. They are often expensive parties to serious minded mountain swain who cannot surrender
• 2:30:48
  the day's privileges to arrival, or will not yield his dignity and rights to
• 2:30:52
  fun makers who enliven the biddings by making the basket brought by his girl cost
• 2:30:56
  at least as much as a marriage license. An His mother had often pleaded
• 2:31:01
  with her boy that he was not his real self, not his better self.
• 2:31:03
  While drinking. Something happened at a basket party in nineteen fourteen that caused
• 2:31:09
  the full meaning of his mother's solicitude to come to him. He left,
• 2:31:13
  declaring he would never take another drink, and his drinking and gambling days ended
• 2:31:16
  together. Late in the afternoons in the fall months, when the squirrels are
• 2:31:20
  out. So the story runs in the valley, but without confirmation from the
• 2:31:24
  sergeant, Alvin would be seen leaving home with his gun. He would cut
• 2:31:28
  across the fields to the west and pass along the outskirts of the farm of
• 2:31:33
  Squire F. A. Williams. Those who saw him wondered why he should
• 2:31:37
  take this long course to the woods, while on the mountain above his home
• 2:31:39
  the oak and beech masts were plentiful, and other hunters were going there for
• 2:31:43
  the squirrels. About this same time, the wife of Squire Williams noted with
• 2:31:48
  pleasure that Gracie, her youngest daughter, a girl of sixteen, with golden
• 2:31:52
  hair and eyes that mirror the blue of the sky, went willingly to the
• 2:31:56
  woodlots for the cows. When she returned with them, she was singing,
• 2:32:01
  and this too pleased Missus Williams. The road from Squire Williams's home to the
• 2:32:05
  church passes the Yorcombe, and after the service, as far as his gate,
• 2:32:11
  Alvin would often walk with them, as Gracie was silent and timid when
• 2:32:15
  any stranger was near, so diffident that when on their way home from church,
• 2:32:18
  she walked far away from Alvin. The neighbors for a long while had
• 2:32:22
  no explanation for Alvin's squirrel hunts along the base of the mountain instead of up
• 2:32:26
  towards the top of it, and Missus Williams at her home heard so many
• 2:32:31
  gunshots off in the woods in the course of a day that she attached no
• 2:32:35
  significance to them. But Alvin and Gracie's meetings along the shaded roadway that leads
• 2:32:39
  to the Williams home were discovered, and Missus Williams put a ban upon them,
• 2:32:43
  for Gracie was too young. She maintained to have thoughts of marriage.
• 2:32:48
  The real facts in that mountain courtship are known to but two, and even
• 2:32:50
  now they are carefully guarded, as though the romance had not become a reality
• 2:32:54
  and culminated happily. But the neighbors have fragments out of which they build a
• 2:32:58
  stone, and it varies with the imagination of the relator. The Big Sergeant's
• 2:33:03
  confirmation or denial is a smile and a playful, taunting silence that leaves the
• 2:33:07
  conclusion in doubt. There is a path that leads from the store around the
• 2:33:11
  side of the mountain that edges a shoulder between the store and the Williams home.
• 2:33:16
  A little off this path is a large flat rock. Around it,
• 2:33:20
  massive beech trees grow, and their boughs arch into a dome above the rock.
• 2:33:24
  There are carvings on the trunks of those trees that were not found until
• 2:33:28
  the rock was selected as the altar for a Woodland wedding at which the Governor
• 2:33:33
  of Tennessee officiated. When Gracie would come to the store, she passed the
• 2:33:37
  york Comb on her way. Often, when alone, she would return by
• 2:33:41
  the mountain path. It was longer than by the road, but it was
• 2:33:43
  shaded by trees, and as it bends around the mountain, glimpses of the
• 2:33:48
  valley could be seen. The rock ledge among the beech trees, was not
• 2:33:52
  half way to her home, but it was a picturesque place to rest,
• 2:33:56
  and down below was the roof of the york Comb and the spring branch as
• 2:34:00
  it wound its way to the Wolf River. It was their favorite meeting place.
• 2:34:03
  When the war broke in Europe. Those who lived in the valley gave
• 2:34:07
  little heed to it. When there was talk of the United States entry,
• 2:34:09
  there was deep opposition there, opposed to any war. The wounds of the
• 2:34:15
  Civil War had healed, but the scars it left were deep. The thought
• 2:34:18
  of another armed conflict meant more to the old people than it did to the
• 2:34:22
  younger generation. I did not know, Alvin said of himself why we were
• 2:34:26
  going to war. We never had any speakings in here, and I did
• 2:34:31
  not read the papers closely, and I did not know the objects of the
• 2:34:33
  war. I did not feel I wanted to go. He had given up
• 2:34:37
  his work on the farm and was making more money than he had ever made
• 2:34:41
  before. The short cut of the Dixie Highway, that part that runs from
• 2:34:46
  Louisville to Chattanooga, had been surveyed and was being graded through Fenters County.
• 2:34:50
  It runs through the valley of the Three Forks of the Wolf. He was
• 2:34:54
  driving steel on the pike for his days in the blacksmith shop had taught him
• 2:34:58
  to wield a sledge hammer, and many rocks were to be blasted to make
• 2:35:01
  a roadway. For this, he was receiving a dollar sixty five a day
• 2:35:05
  for ten hours work. While on the farm, he had not been able
• 2:35:09
  to earn more than twenty five dollars a month, working from can't see to
• 2:35:13
  can't see. When he joined the church, he had given himself to it
• 2:35:16
  unreservedly. They were holding many meetings and the church was growing. He'd become
• 2:35:22
  the second elder at the time, too, He was planning for the day
• 2:35:24
  when he could marry. In June. Following the country's entry into the war,
• 2:35:30
  Alvin registered for the draft, and in October at Jamestown took his examination.
• 2:35:35
  They looked at me, They weighed me, he told on his return,
• 2:35:39
  and I weighed one hundred and seventy pounds and was seventy two inches tall,
• 2:35:43
  So they said I passed all right. He was with Pastor Pyle and
• 2:35:46
  turned to him, This means goodbye for me, but I'll go after his
• 2:35:52
  registration. His mother never ceased to worry over his going to a war so
• 2:35:56
  far away from her. The situation troubled him times. He would see his
• 2:36:00
  mother looking steadily at him, and there was always a sadness in her face.
• 2:36:03
  He knew that she needed him for the next oldest of the boys of
• 2:36:07
  those who were at home was only seventeen, but his country had asked him
• 2:36:11
  to stand by and would call him if they needed him. The struggle within
• 2:36:15
  him lasted for weeks. Then he asked that they seek no exemption for him.
• 2:36:18
  In his presence. His mother never again referred to his going, but
• 2:36:22
  he would see her troubled face watching him. But she talked with the influential
• 2:36:26
  men in the valley, hoping there would be some suggestion that would honorably relieve
• 2:36:31
  Alvin from the duty of going. Pastor Pyle had gone ahead to see what
• 2:36:35
  he could do, and he learned that those who were conscientious objectors would not
• 2:36:39
  have to go. The tenets of his church, he held, were against
• 2:36:43
  all wars. Alvin was an elder, he had subscribed to and was living
• 2:36:48
  the principles of his religion. He hurried home to missus Yorke, but the
• 2:36:52
  soldier himself had to make the plea for exemption, and no one could make
• 2:36:56
  it for him. Alvin never made it. In the middle of November,
• 2:37:00
  his summons reached him. He had but twenty four hours to respond. He
• 2:37:05
  sent a note to Gracie telling her his little blue card had come, and
• 2:37:09
  he asked her to meet him at the church which always stands open by the
• 2:37:13
  roadside. As they walked towards her home. They arranged to meet the next
• 2:37:16
  morning at the rock under the beech trees, when she would leave to carry
• 2:37:20
  the cows to the pasture, and it was there she promised to marry him.
• 2:37:24
  When he returned from the war. Men at the store saw Alvin come
• 2:37:28
  down from the mountain, and he could not escape some bantering over the success
• 2:37:31
  or failure of his early morning tryst. Just left it to her, he
• 2:37:35
  has said to have frankly confessed, she can have me for the taken when
• 2:37:39
  I get back. He and his mother were alone in their home for several
• 2:37:43
  hours. When he left, he stopped at the brooks porch, where relatives
• 2:37:46
  and neighbors had assembled. As he walked away, he turned unexpectedly up the
• 2:37:52
  path towards the rock on the mountain side is now known. He went there
• 2:37:54
  to kneel alone in prayer. When he came down to the store to the
• 2:37:58
  men waiting for him, he spoke with an assured faith he had not shown
• 2:38:03
  before. I know now that I'll be back, he told them. His
• 2:38:07
  mother, weeping, though hiding it from him, had slowly followed as far
• 2:38:11
  as the Brook's porch, Alvin, looking back towards the old coonrod pile home,
• 2:38:16
  saw her and waved to her, then hurried to the buggy that was
• 2:38:20
  to take him to Jamestown. As the grating of the moving buggy wheels on
• 2:38:24
  the road reached the Brook's porch, Missus York gave a cry that went to
• 2:38:28
  responsive hearts in every home in that part of the valley, and she secluded
• 2:38:31
  herself and sobbed for days. End of chapter Sergeant Yorke's own story. When
• 2:38:39
  Alvin went to war, he carried with him a small red cloth covered memorandum
• 2:38:43
  book, which was to be his diary. He knew that beyond the mountains
• 2:38:48
  that encircled his home there was a world that would be new to him.
• 2:38:52
  He kept the little volume, now with broken back, and warn constantly with
• 2:38:56
  him, and he rode in it while in camp, on shipboard, and
• 2:39:00
  in the trenches in France. It was in his pocket while he fought the
• 2:39:03
  German machine gun battalion in the forest of Argonne. The book, with its
• 2:39:07
  records was intended for no eyes but his own. Yet painstaking, using ink,
• 2:39:13
  he had headed the volume a history of places where I have been as
• 2:39:16
  a whole, the volume would be unintelligible to a reader, for while it
• 2:39:20
  records the things he wished to remember of his camp life, the trip through
• 2:39:24
  England, his stay in France, and tells in order the places he had
• 2:39:28
  been, it is made up of swift moving notes that enter into no explanatory
• 2:39:33
  details. But to him the notations could, even in the evening of his
• 2:39:37
  life, revive the chain of incidents in his memory. His handling of his
• 2:39:41
  diary is typical of his mind and his methods. To him, details are
• 2:39:46
  essential, but when they are done carefully and thoroughly, their functions are performed,
• 2:39:50
  and thereafter they are uninteresting. They are but the steps that must be
• 2:39:54
  taken to walk a given distance. His mind instead dwells upon the object of
• 2:40:00
  the walk. When he left his home at Palmow, he reported to the
• 2:40:03
  local recruiting station at Jamestown, the county seat. He was sent to Camp
• 2:40:07
  Gordon, near Atlanta, Georgia, and reached there the night of November sixteenth,
• 2:40:13
  nineteen seventeen. His diary runs. I was placed in the twenty first
• 2:40:18
  Training Battalion. Then it was called the first morning of my army life.
• 2:40:20
  To police up in the yard all the old cigarette butts, and I thought
• 2:40:24
  that was pretty hard as I didn't smoke, but I did it just the
• 2:40:28
  same. His history tells in one sentence of months of his experience in training
• 2:40:33
  with the Awkward squad and of his regiment assignment. I stayed there and done
• 2:40:39
  squad's right and squads left until the first of February nineteen eighteen, and then
• 2:40:43
  I was sent to Company G three, twenty eight Infantry, eighty second Division.
• 2:40:48
  This was the All America Division, made up of selected men from every
• 2:40:52
  state in the Union, and in its ranks were the descendants of men who
• 2:40:56
  came from every nation that composed the Allies that were fighting German. In his
• 2:41:01
  notes, Alvin records temptations that came to him while at Camp Gordon. Well,
• 2:41:05
  they gave me a gun, and oh my, that old gun was
• 2:41:09
  just full of grease, and I had to clean that old gun for inspection.
• 2:41:11
  So I had a hard time to get that old gun clean. And
• 2:41:15
  oh those were trying hours for a boy like me trying to live for God
• 2:41:18
  and do his blessed will. Then the Lord would help me bear my hard
• 2:41:22
  tasks. So there I was. I was the homesickest boy you ever seen.
• 2:41:28
  When he entered the army, Alvin York stood six feet in the clear.
• 2:41:31
  There were but few in the camp physically his equal. In any crowd
• 2:41:35
  of men, he drew attention. The huge muscles of his body glided littlely
• 2:41:39
  over each other. He had been swinging with long, firm strides up the
• 2:41:43
  mountain signs. His arms and shoulders had developed by lifting hay laden pitchforks in
• 2:41:48
  the fields and in the swing of the sledge in his father's blacksmith shop.
• 2:41:52
  The military training coordinated these muscles, and he moved among the men, a
• 2:41:56
  commanding figure whose quiet reserve seemed never fully called into action by the arduous duties
• 2:42:03
  of the soldier. The strength of his mind, the brain force he possessed,
• 2:42:07
  were yet to be recognized and tested, and even to day, with
• 2:42:11
  all the experiences he has had in the advancement he has made, that force
• 2:42:15
  is not yet measured. It is in the years of the future that the
• 2:42:18
  real mission of Sergeant Yorke will be told. He came out of the mountains
• 2:42:22
  of Tennessee with an education equal to that of a child of eight or nine
• 2:42:26
  years of age, with no experience in the world beyond the primitive, wholesome
• 2:42:30
  life of his mountain community, with but little knowledge of the lives and customs,
• 2:42:33
  the ambitions and struggles of men who lived over the summit of the Blue
• 2:42:37
  Ridge and beyond the foothills of the Cumberlands. But he was wise enough to
• 2:42:41
  know there were many things he did not know. He was brave enough to
• 2:42:46
  frankly admit them. When placed in a situation that was new to him,
• 2:42:48
  he would try quietly to think his way out of it, and through inheritance
• 2:42:52
  and training, he thought calmly he had the mental power to stand at ease
• 2:42:56
  under any condition, and await sufficient developments to justify him to speak or act.
• 2:43:03
  Even German bullets could not hurry nor disconcert him. He was keenly observant
• 2:43:07
  of all that went on around him in the training camp. Few sounds or
• 2:43:11
  motions escaped him, though it was in a seemingly stoic mien that he contemplated
• 2:43:16
  the things that were new to him. In the presence of those whose knowledge
• 2:43:20
  or training he recognized as superior to his own, he calmly waited for them
• 2:43:24
  to act. And so accurate were his observations that the officers of his regiment
• 2:43:28
  looked upon him as one by nature a soldier, and they said of him
• 2:43:31
  that he always instinctively knew the right thing to do. Placed at his banquet
• 2:43:37
  board the guest of honor with a row of silver by his plate, so
• 2:43:41
  different from the table service in his humble home, he did not misuse a
• 2:43:45
  piece from among them, or select one in error. But throughout the courses
• 2:43:48
  he was not the first to pick up a needed peace. His ability to
• 2:43:52
  think clearly and quickly under conditions that tried both heart and brain was shown in
• 2:43:56
  the fight in the Argonne. With eight men not twenty yards away charging him
• 2:44:01
  with bayonets, he calmly decided to shoot the last man first, and to
• 2:44:05
  continue this policy in selecting his mark, so that those remaining would not see
• 2:44:09
  their comrades falling and in a panic stop and fire a volley at him.
• 2:44:13
  Military critics analyzing the tactics York used in this fight had been able to find
• 2:44:18
  no superior way for removing the menace of the German machine guns that were over
• 2:44:22
  the crest of the hill and between him and his regiment. Then, to
• 2:44:26
  form the prisoners he had captured in a column, put the officers in the
• 2:44:30
  front and marched directly to each machine gun nest, compelling the German officers to
• 2:44:33
  order their gunners to surrender and to take their place in line. Calm and
• 2:44:37
  self controlled, with a hair of copper red, and face and neck browned
• 2:44:41
  and furrowed by the sun and mountain winds. Inured to hardships and ready for
• 2:44:46
  them, this young mountaineer moved among his new found companions at Camp Gordon.
• 2:44:50
  Reticent he seemed, but his answer to an inquiry was direct, and his
• 2:44:54
  quiet blue eyes never shifted from the eyes of the man who addressed him.
• 2:45:00
  Friendships were formed, his moods were noted by his comrades. At times he
• 2:45:03
  was playful as a boy, using cautiously, even gently, the strength he
• 2:45:07
  possessed. Then again he would remain in the midst of the sports, thoughtful
• 2:45:13
  and as though he were troubled. Back in the mountains, he had but
• 2:45:16
  little opportunity to attend school, and his sentences were framed in the quaint construction
• 2:45:20
  of his people, and nearly all of them were ungrammatical. There were many
• 2:45:24
  who would have regarded him as ignorant by the standards that hold that education is
• 2:45:28
  enlightenment that comes from acquaintance with books, and that wisdom is a knowledge of
• 2:45:33
  the ways of the world. He was, but he had a training that
• 2:45:37
  is rare, advantages that come to too few from his father. He inherited
• 2:45:41
  physical courage from his mother moral courage, and both of them spent their lives
• 2:45:46
  developing these qualities of manhood in their boy. His father hiked him through the
• 2:45:50
  mountains on hunts that would have stoutened the heart of any man to have kept
• 2:45:54
  the pace, and he never tolerated the least evidence of fear of man or
• 2:45:58
  beast. He taught his boy to so live that he owned apology or explanation
• 2:46:03
  to no man. While I was at Palmow, one of his neighbors,
• 2:46:07
  speaking of Alvian, said, even as a boy, he had his say
• 2:46:09
  and did his due, and never stopped to explain a statement or tell what
• 2:46:13
  prompted an act, left those to stand for themselves. And the little mother,
• 2:46:18
  whose frail body was worn from hard work and racked by the birth of
• 2:46:22
  eleven children, was before him the embodiment of gentleness, spirit, and faith.
• 2:46:28
  When he came from the hunt into the door of that cabin home and
• 2:46:31
  hung his gun above the mantle or came in from the fields where the work
• 2:46:33
  was physical. He put from him all feelings of the possession of strength.
• 2:46:37
  When he was with her, he was as gentle as the mother herself.
• 2:46:41
  She too wanted her son to live in such a way that he would not
• 2:46:43
  fear any man. But she wanted his course through life to be over the
• 2:46:48
  path her Bible pointed out, so that he would not have the impulse to
• 2:46:52
  do those deeds that called for explanation or demanded apology from her. He inherited
• 2:46:56
  those qualities of mind that gave him at all times the full possession of himself.
• 2:47:01
  Her simple, home made philosophy was ever urging her boy to think clear
• 2:47:07
  through whatever proposition was before him, and when in a situation where those around
• 2:47:11
  him were excited, to slow down on what he was doing and think fast.
• 2:47:16
  I have heard her say, there hain't no good in gettin excited.
• 2:47:20
  You can't do what you ought to do. She had not seen a railroad
• 2:47:22
  train until she went to the capital of Tennessee to the presentation of the medal
• 2:47:26
  of honor given her son by the people of the state. She came upon
• 2:47:31
  the platform of the tabernacle at Nashville wearing the sunbonnet of stays, she wore
• 2:47:35
  to church in the Valley of the Three Forks of the Wolf. The Governor,
• 2:47:39
  in greeting her, lifted off the sunbonnet. His possession was momentary,
• 2:47:43
  for missus Yorke recaptured it in a true York style. Her smiling face and
• 2:47:48
  nodding head told that the governor had capitulated. It was pantomime, for the
• 2:47:52
  thousands were on their feet, waving to her and cheering her. Calm and
• 2:47:56
  still smiling, she looked over the demonstration in the vast auditorium, more as
• 2:48:01
  a spectator than the cause of the outburst of applause. Later, at the
• 2:48:05
  reception at the Governor's mansion, guests were gathered round her, and she held
• 2:48:09
  a levee that crowded one of the big drawing rooms. Those who sought to
• 2:48:13
  measure wit with her found her never at a loss for a reply, and
• 2:48:18
  woven through her responses were many similes drawn from her mountain life. Under her
• 2:48:22
  proctorship, the moral courage of her son had developed in her code of manhood.
• 2:48:26
  There was no tolerance for infirmity of purpose, and mental fear was as
• 2:48:31
  degrading and as disintegrating as physical cowardice. He had been a man of the
• 2:48:37
  world, in the miniature world that the miles of mountains had enclosed around him.
• 2:48:41
  He had lived every phase of the life of his people, and lived
• 2:48:43
  them openly. When he renounced drinking and gambling, he was through with them
• 2:48:48
  for all time. When he joined the church, his religion was made the
• 2:48:52
  large part of the new plan of his life. It was while at Camp
• 2:48:56
  Gordon that he reconciled his religious convictions with his patriotic duty to his country.
• 2:49:01
  The rugged manhood within him had made him refuse to ask exemption from service and
• 2:49:05
  danger on the ground that the doctrine of his church opposed war, but his
• 2:49:09
  conscience was troubled that he was deliberately on the mission to kill his fellow man.
• 2:49:13
  It was these thoughts that caused his companions to note his moody silences in
• 2:49:18
  behalf of his mother, who, with many mothers of the land, was
• 2:49:22
  bravely trying to still her heart with the thought that her son was on an
• 2:49:26
  errand of mercy. The pastor of the church in the valley made out the
• 2:49:28
  strongest case he could for Alvin's exemption and sent it to the officers of his
• 2:49:33
  regiment, Lieutenant Colonel Edward Buxton Junior and Major E. C. B.
• 2:49:39
  Danford, who was then the captain of York's company, sent for him.
• 2:49:43
  They explained the conditions under which it were possible if he chose to secure exemption.
• 2:49:48
  They pointed out the way he could remain in the service of his country
• 2:49:50
  and not be among the combat troops. The sincerity the earnestness of York impressed
• 2:49:56
  the officers, and they had not one but a number of talks in which
• 2:50:00
  the scriptures were quoted to show the Saviour's teachings. When man seeth the sword
• 2:50:05
  come upon the land. They brought out many facts about the war that the
• 2:50:07
  Tennessee mountaineer had not known. York did not take the release that lay within
• 2:50:13
  his grasp. Instead, he thumbed his Bible in search of passages that justified
• 2:50:16
  the use of force. One day before the regiment sailed for France, when
• 2:50:20
  York's company was leaving the drill field, Captain Dandford sent for him. Together
• 2:50:26
  they went over many passages of the Bible which both had found. If my
• 2:50:30
  kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight. They were together
• 2:50:33
  several hours at last, York said, all right, I'm satisfied. After
• 2:50:39
  that there was no reference to religious objection. From the first he had seen
• 2:50:43
  the justice of the war. Now he saw the righteousness of it. York's
• 2:50:46
  abilities as a soldier were soon revealed. He quickly qualified as a sharpshooter,
• 2:50:52
  both as skirmisher and from the top of the trench. In battalion contest formation,
• 2:50:56
  where the soldiers run and fall and fire shooting at moving targets, it
• 2:51:01
  was not difficult for him to score eight hits out of ten shots, and
• 2:51:05
  with a rifle that was new to him. This too over arrange that began
• 2:51:09
  at six hundred yards and went down to one hundred yards, with the targets
• 2:51:11
  in the shape of the head and shoulders of a man. In these maneuvers,
• 2:51:16
  he attracted the attention of his officers. The impressive figure of the man,
• 2:51:20
  with its ever present evidence of reserved force. The strength of his personality,
• 2:51:24
  uneducated as he was, made him a natural leader of the men around
• 2:51:28
  him. Officers of the regiment have said that he could have received a promotion
• 2:51:33
  while in the training camp, but for the policy of not placing a command
• 2:51:35
  a man who might be a conscientious objector. The All America Division passed through
• 2:51:41
  England on its way to France, and the first real fighting they had was
• 2:51:45
  in the Saint Mihel Salient. From there they went to the Argon Force,
• 2:51:48
  where the division was on the front line of the battle for twenty six days
• 2:51:52
  and nights without relief. It was in the Saint Mihel Salient that York was
• 2:51:54
  made a corporal, and when he came out of the Argonne Forest he was
• 2:51:58
  a sergeant and the armistice was signed a fortnight later. The war made Yorke
• 2:52:03
  more deeply religious. The diary he kept passed from simple notations about places he
• 2:52:07
  had been to a record of his thoughts and feelings. In it are many
• 2:52:11
  quotations from the Bible, many texts of sermons he heard while on the battlefields
• 2:52:16
  of France. With the text were brief notes that would recall the sermons to
• 2:52:20
  his memory. The book is really a history of his religious development. When
• 2:52:24
  he would kneel by a dying soldier, he would record in his diary the
• 2:52:28
  talk he had with his comrade and would write the passage of scripture that he
• 2:52:31
  or the dying man had spoken. It was upon this his interests centered to
• 2:52:37
  others. He left the task of telling of the battle's result. He wrote
• 2:52:39
  in his diary this simple story of his fight with the battalion of German machine
• 2:52:43
  guns. On the seventh day of October. We lay in some little holes
• 2:52:48
  on the roadside all day. That night we went out and stayed a little
• 2:52:52
  while and came back to our holes the shells bursting all around us. I
• 2:52:56
  saw men just blown up by the big German shells which were bursting all around
• 2:53:00
  us. So the order came for us to take Hill two two three and
• 2:53:03
  two four zero the eighth. So the morning of the eighth, just before
• 2:53:07
  daylight, we started for the hill at Chateau che Ari. Before we got
• 2:53:11
  there, it got light and the Germans sent over a heavy barrage and also
• 2:53:16
  gas, and we put on our gas masks and just pressed right on through
• 2:53:18
  those shelves and got to the top of Hill two two three to where we
• 2:53:22
  were to start over at six ten am. They were to give us a
• 2:53:26
  barrage. Time came and no barrage, and we had to go without one.
• 2:53:31
  So we started over the top at six ten am and the Germans were
• 2:53:35
  putting their machine guns to work, and all over the hill in front of
• 2:53:37
  us, and on our left and right. I was in support, and
• 2:53:41
  I could see my pals getting picked off until it almost looked like there was
• 2:53:43
  none left. So seventeen of US boys went around on the left flank to
• 2:53:48
  see if we couldn't put those guns out of action. So when we went
• 2:53:52
  around and fell in behind those guns, we first saw two Germans with red
• 2:53:54
  cross band on their arms. Some one of the boys shot at them and
• 2:53:58
  they ran back to our right. So we all ran after them. And
• 2:54:01
  when we jumped across a little stream of water that was there, there was
• 2:54:05
  about fifteen or twenty Germans that jumped up and threw up their hands and said,
• 2:54:09
  comrade, the one in charge of US boys told us not to shoot.
• 2:54:13
  They were going to give up anyway. By this time the Germans from
• 2:54:16
  on the hill was shooting at me. Well, I was giving them the
• 2:54:18
  best I had. The Germans had got their machine guns turned around. They
• 2:54:22
  killed six and wounded three. That left just eight. And then we got
• 2:54:26
  into it right. So we had a hard battle for a little while.
• 2:54:30
  I got a hold of a German major and he told me if I wouldn't
• 2:54:33
  kill any more of them, he would make them all quit fighting. So
• 2:54:35
  I told him all right, if he would do it now, So he
• 2:54:39
  blew a little whistle and they quit shooting, came down and gave up.
• 2:54:43
  I had about eighty or ninety Germans there. They disarmed, and we had
• 2:54:46
  another line of Germans to go through to get out. So I called for
• 2:54:50
  my men and one answered me from behind a big oak tree, and the
• 2:54:52
  other men were on my right in the brush. So I said, let's
• 2:54:56
  get these Germans out of here. One of my men said it's impossible,
• 2:55:01
  so I said, no, let's get them out of here. When my
• 2:55:05
  men said that, this German major said how many have you got? And
• 2:55:09
  I said I got a plenty and pointed my pistol at him. All the
• 2:55:13
  time in this battle I was using a rifle or a forty five colt automatic
• 2:55:18
  pistol. So I lined the Germans up in a line of twos and I
• 2:55:20
  got between the ones in front and had the German major before me. So
• 2:55:24
  I marched them right straight into those other machine guns and I got them.
• 2:55:28
  When I got back to my major's PC, I had one hundred and thirty
• 2:55:33
  two prisoners. So you can see here in this case of mine, where
• 2:55:35
  God helped me out. I had been living for God and working in church
• 2:55:39
  work some time before I came to the army. I am a witness to
• 2:55:43
  the fact that God did help me out of that hard battle. For the
• 2:55:46
  bushes were shot off all around me, and I never got a scratch.
• 2:55:50
  So you can see that God will be with you if you will only trust
• 2:55:52
  him. And I say He did save me. By this time, he
• 2:55:56
  wrote, the Germans from on the hill shooting at me, Well, I
• 2:56:01
  was given them the best I had. That best was the courage to stand
• 2:56:05
  his ground and fight it out with him, regardless of their number, For
• 2:56:07
  they were the defilers of civilization, murderers of men, the enemies of fair
• 2:56:13
  play, who had shown no quarter to his pals, who were slain unwarned
• 2:56:16
  while in the act of granting mercy to the men in their power. That
• 2:56:20
  best was the morale of the soldier who believes that justice is on his side
• 2:56:24
  and that the justness of God will shield him from harm. And in physical
• 2:56:28
  qualities, it included a heart that was stout and a brain that was clear,
• 2:56:33
  a mind that did not weaken when all the hilltop above flashed in a
• 2:56:37
  hostile blaze, when the hillside rattled with the death drumbeat of machine gun fire,
• 2:56:41
  and while the very air around him was filled with darting lead. As
• 2:56:46
  he fought, his mind visualized the tactics of the enemy in the moves they
• 2:56:48
  made, and whether the attack upon him was with rifle or machine gun,
• 2:56:52
  hagrenade or bayonet, he met it with an unfailing marksmanship that equalized the disparity
• 2:56:58
  in numbers. Another page in his direct and simple story shows the character of
• 2:57:01
  this man who came from a distant recess of the mountains with no code of
• 2:57:05
  ethics except a confidence in his fellow man. Those of the Americans who were
• 2:57:11
  not killed or wounded in the first machine gun fire had saved themselves as Yorke
• 2:57:15
  had done. They had dived into the brush and lay flat upon the ground
• 2:57:18
  behind trees among the prisoners, protected by any obstruction they could find, and
• 2:57:22
  the stream of bullets passed over them. York was at the left, beyond
• 2:57:26
  the edge of the thicket. The others were shut off by the underbrush from
• 2:57:31
  a view of the German machine guns that were firing on them. York had
• 2:57:33
  the open of the slope of the hill, and it fell to him to
• 2:57:37
  fight. The fight he wrote in his diary when he could find time,
• 2:57:41
  and the story was written in foxholes in the forest of ar Gone in the
• 2:57:45
  evenings after the American soldiers had dug in. Though his records were for no
• 2:57:48
  one but himself, he had no thought that raised his performance of duty above
• 2:57:52
  that of his comrades. They killed six and wounded three. They just left
• 2:57:56
  eight, and we got into it right. So we had a hard battle
• 2:58:01
  for a little while. Yet in the height of the fight not a shot
• 2:58:03
  was fired but by York in their admiration for him and his remarkable achievement,
• 2:58:09
  so that the honor should rest where it belonged. The members of the American
• 2:58:11
  Patrol who were the survivors of the fight made affidavits that accounted for all of
• 2:58:16
  them who were not killed or wounded, and showed the part that each took.
• 2:58:20
  These affidavits are among the records of Lieutenant Colonel G. Edward Buxton,
• 2:58:24
  Junior official historian of the eighty second Division. At the time of the fight,
• 2:58:30
  Sergeant York was still a corporal. From the affidavit by Private Patrick Donaghue.
• 2:58:35
  During the shooting, I was guarding the mass of Germans, taking prisoners
• 2:58:39
  and devoted my attention to watching them. When we first came in on the
• 2:58:43
  Germans, I fired a shot at them before they surrendered. Afterwards, I
• 2:58:46
  was busy guarding the prisoners and I did not shoot. I could only see
• 2:58:50
  Private Wills, Secchina and Soak. They were also guarding the prisoners as I
• 2:58:54
  was doing. From the affidavit of Private Michael A. Secchina, I was
• 2:59:00
  guarding the prisoners with my rifle and bayonet on the right flank of the group
• 2:59:03
  of prisoners. I was so close to these prisoners that the machine gunners could
• 2:59:07
  not shoot at me without hitting their own men. This I think saved me
• 2:59:09
  from being hit. During the firing, I remained on guard, watching these
• 2:59:13
  prisoners and unable to turn around and fire myself. For this reason, I
• 2:59:18
  cannot see any of the other men in my detachment. From this point,
• 2:59:22
  I saw the German captain and it aided my rifle at him when he blew
• 2:59:24
  his whistle for the Germans to stop firing. I saw Corporal York, who
• 2:59:28
  called out to us, and when we all joined him, I saw seven
• 2:59:31
  Americans beside myself. These were Corporal York, Privates Beardsley, Dunhue, Wills,
• 2:59:37
  Sok, Johnson, and Konatsky. From the affidavit by Private Percy Beardsley.
• 2:59:43
  I was at first near Corporal York, but soon after thought it would
• 2:59:48
  be better to take cover behind a large tree about fifteen paces in the rear
• 2:59:52
  of Corporal York. Privates Demwwski and Waring were on each side of me,
• 2:59:56
  and both were killed by machine gun fire. I saw Corporal York fire his
• 3:00:00
  pistol repeatedly in front of me. I saw Germans who had been hit fall
• 3:00:03
  down. I saw the German prisoners who were still in a bunch together,
• 3:00:07
  waving their hands the machine gunners on the hill as if mosting for them to
• 3:00:11
  go back. Finally, the fire stopped, and Corporal York told me to
• 3:00:16
  have the prisoners fall in columns of twos and to take my place in the
• 3:00:20
  rear. From the affidavit by Private George W. Wills. When the heavy
• 3:00:24
  firing from the machine guns commenced, I was guarding some of the German prisoners.
• 3:00:28
  During this time I saw only Privates Downey, Hue, Sichina, Beardsley,
• 3:00:33
  and Musy. Private Swanson was right near me when he was shot.
• 3:00:37
  I closed up very close to the Germans with my bannet on my rifle and
• 3:00:41
  prevented some of them who tried to leave the bunch and get into the bushes
• 3:00:43
  from leaving. I knew my only chance was to keep them together and also
• 3:00:48
  keep them between me and the Germans who were shooting. I heard Corporal York
• 3:00:52
  several times shouting to the machine gunners on the hill to come down and surrender,
• 3:00:56
  but from where I stood I could not see Corporal York. I saw
• 3:00:58
  him, however, when the firing stopped and he told us to get along
• 3:01:01
  sides of the column, I formed those near me in columns of twos.
• 3:01:07
  The report which the officers of the eighty second Division made to General Headquarters contained
• 3:01:11
  these statements. The part which Corporal York individually played in this attack the capture
• 3:01:16
  of the De Cave railroad is difficult to estimate. Practically unassisted, he captured
• 3:01:22
  one hundred and thirty two Germans, three of whom were officers, took about
• 3:01:26
  thirty five machine guns, and killed no less than twenty five of the enemy
• 3:01:28
  later found by others on the scene of York's extraordinary exploit. The story has
• 3:01:33
  been carefully checked in every possible detail from headquarters of this division and is entirely
• 3:01:39
  substantiated. Although Corporal York's statement tends done to estimate the desperate odds which he
• 3:01:43
  overcame, and has been decided to forward to hire authority. The account given
• 3:01:48
  in his own words, The success of this assault had a far reaching effect
• 3:01:52
  in relieving the enemy pressure against American forces in the heart of the Argonne Forest.
• 3:01:58
  In decorating Sergeant York with a qua de guere with palm Marshall, Falk
• 3:02:03
  said to him, what you did was the greatest thing accomplished by any private
• 3:02:07
  soldier of all the armies of Europe. When the officers of York's regiment were
• 3:02:11
  securing the facts for their report to General Headquarters and were recording the stories of
• 3:02:15
  the survivors, York was questioned on his efforts to escape the onslaught of the
• 3:02:18
  machine guns. By this time, those of my men who were left had
• 3:02:22
  gotten behind trees, and the men sniped at the bosh. But there wasn't
• 3:02:26
  any tree for me, so I just sat in the mud and used my
• 3:02:30
  rifle, shooting at the machine gunners. The officers recall his quaint and memorable
• 3:02:35
  answer to the inquiry on the tactics he used to defend himself against the Bosch
• 3:02:39
  who were in the gun pits, shooting at him from behind trees and crying
• 3:02:43
  for him through the brush. His method was simple and effective. When I
• 3:02:48
  seed a German, I just touched him off. In the afternoon of October
• 3:02:52
  eighth, York had brought in his prisoners by ten o'clock in the morning.
• 3:02:56
  In the seventeenth hour of that day, the eighty second Division cut the Cave
• 3:03:00
  railroad and drove the Germans from it. The pressure against the American forces in
• 3:03:05
  the heart of the Argonne Forest was not only relieved, but the advance of
• 3:03:07
  the division had aided in the relief of the lost battalion under the command of
• 3:03:11
  the late Colonel Whittlesey, which had made it stand in another hollow of those
• 3:03:16
  hills, only a short distance from the hillside where Sarvant York had made his
• 3:03:20
  fight. As the eighty second Division swept up the three hills across the valley
• 3:03:24
  from Hill two two three, the hill on the left, York's Hill was
• 3:03:28
  found cleared of enemy, and there was only the wreckage of the battle that
• 3:03:31
  had been fought there. York's fight occurred on the eighth day of the twenty
• 3:03:35
  eighth Day and Night Battle of the eighty second Division in the Argonne. They
• 3:03:39
  were in the forest fighting on when the story went over the world that an
• 3:03:41
  American soldier had fought and captured a battalion of German machine gunners. Even military
• 3:03:46
  men doubted its possibility until the All American Division came out of the forest with
• 3:03:50
  the records they had made upon the scene, and with a clear expression of
• 3:03:54
  the tactics in the remarkable bravery and generalship that made Sergeant York's achievement possible,
• 3:04:00
  Alvin York faced a new experience. He found himself famous end of chapter two,
• 3:04:07
  More Deeds of Distinction. Alvin was not prepared for the ovations that awaited
• 3:04:11
  him. The world gives generously to those who succeed in an extraordinary endeavor,
• 3:04:16
  where the resource and ability of men are in competition. For intellectual achievement,
• 3:04:22
  there is deference and wonder. For moral accomplishment, there is approbation and love.
• 3:04:26
  But for physical courage there are all of these, and an added admiration
• 3:04:31
  that burst in such fervor of approval that men shout and toss their caps in
• 3:04:35
  air. It has been true since the world began. The first honors came
• 3:04:39
  to him from his soldier associates. Then the men of other regiments and the
• 3:04:45
  regiments of other nations wanted to see the American who single handed had fought and
• 3:04:48
  forced a battalion of machine gunners to come to him. The people of France,
• 3:04:52
  too were calling for him. It was with a military yardstick the soldiers
• 3:04:58
  measured the deed, for they knew the guiding competency of a single machine gun,
• 3:05:01
  and had seen the destructive power of the scythelike sweep of a battalion of
• 3:05:05
  them. The civilian, in doubt and wonder, realized the magnitude of the
• 3:05:09
  achievement in visualizing the number of prisoners that had surrendered to one man. The
• 3:05:15
  only contact Alvignyork had had to the role of a man of prominence was to
• 3:05:18
  stand in line at attention as persons of importance passed before him. But when
• 3:05:24
  his regiment came out of the Argonne forest, where its almost unbroken battle had
• 3:05:28
  lasted twenty eight days, he was taken from the line and passed in review
• 3:05:33
  before the soldiers of other regiments, under orders from headquarters of the American expeditionary
• 3:05:37
  force, he traveled through the war zone. As a guest of honor,
• 3:05:41
  he was sent to cities in southern France. In Paris, he was received
• 3:05:45
  with impressive ceremonies by President Boonquerre and the government officials. It was during this
• 3:05:50
  period that many of the military awards were made to him, and brigade reviews
• 3:05:54
  were selected as the occasions for his decoration. Against this background of enthusiasm,
• 3:06:00
  the tall, reserved, silent mountaineer, in natural repose, moved through the
• 3:06:05
  varying programs of a day as all was new to him. He complied with
• 3:06:09
  almost childlike docility to the demands upon him, but he was ever watchful that
• 3:06:13
  his conduct should conform to that of those around him. If called upon to
• 3:06:18
  speak, he responded, and he stood before the cheering crowds in noticeable mental
• 3:06:22
  control. The few words he used did not miss fire nor jam. They
• 3:06:26
  ended in a smile of real fellowship that beamed from a rugged face that was
• 3:06:31
  furrowed and tanned, and always with the quaint mountain phrase of appreciation, I
• 3:06:35
  thank ye. In the months he remained with the army in France, he
• 3:06:39
  grew in personal popularity from his unaffected bearing. The letters written home to his
• 3:06:43
  mother during this period show him basically unchanged. These letters, usually two a
• 3:06:48
  week, were the same as those he had been writing all the while.
• 3:06:52
  In them were but few references to himself. Even in the privacy of his
• 3:06:56
  correspondence with his home. There was not a boastful thought over a thing that
• 3:07:00
  he had done, and only the vaguest reference to the homage paid to him,
• 3:07:03
  as though all of it were a part of a soldier's life. It
• 3:07:07
  was only through others that the mother learned of the honors given to her son
• 3:07:09
  in France. At the beginning of each letter, he quieted his mother's forebodings
• 3:07:15
  for him and turned to inquiries about home. Out of his pay of thirty
• 3:07:18
  dollars a month as a private soldier, he had assigned twenty five dollars of
• 3:07:22
  it to his mother. He wanted to know that the remittances had reached her.
• 3:07:28
  Two brothers had married and moved away. Henry, the eldest was living
• 3:07:31
  in Idaho and Albert in Kentucky. He wanted news of them. Two other
• 3:07:37
  married brothers, Joe and Sam, while still living in the valley, were
• 3:07:39
  not at the old home. He wanted every detail about their crops that told
• 3:07:43
  of their welfare. His most valuable personal possession was two mules. Were George
• 3:07:50
  and Jim and Robert, the younger brothers, keeping those mules fat. How
• 3:07:54
  much of the farm were they preparing to put in corn? Corn was sure
• 3:07:58
  to be scarce and would be worth two dollars and fifty cents by harvest time.
• 3:08:01
  Was missus Embry Wright, his only married sister. Staying with his mother
• 3:08:05
  to comfort her were Lily and Lucy, his little sisters still helping her with
• 3:08:11
  the hard work. Of course they were, and in every letter there was
• 3:08:13
  an inquiry about the sweetheart he had left behind. The mother, when each
• 3:08:18
  letter had been read, placed it upright on the board shelf, which was
• 3:08:22
  the mantle of the family fireplace. When a new letter came, she took
• 3:08:24
  down the old one and put it carefully away. So there was always some
• 3:08:28
  news from Alvin, which was accessible to all the neighbors. Will Wright,
• 3:08:33
  president of the Bank of Jamestown, received the first printed story that gave any
• 3:08:37
  description of the fight Alvin had put up in the forest of Argne, and
• 3:08:43
  mister Wright hurried to Missus Yorke with it with the family gathered around her in
• 3:08:46
  that hut in the mountains, and with tears running down her expectant face,
• 3:08:50
  she learned for the first time what her boy had done. She made mister
• 3:08:54
  Wright read the story not once, but seven times. America was ready for
• 3:08:58
  so Argant York when among the returning soldiers his troop ship touched port the harbor
• 3:09:03
  of New York in May nineteen nineteen. The story of the man had run
• 3:09:07
  ahead his fight in the forest that had added to the cubic stature of the
• 3:09:11
  American soldier, the artlessness of his life and the geniusness of his character,
• 3:09:16
  which as yet showed no alloy the modest becoming acceptance of illustrious honors paid to
• 3:09:22
  him in France. The people saw in this simple, earnest mountaineer the type
• 3:09:26
  of American that had made America. They thought of him as coming from that
• 3:09:30
  stratum of clay that could be molded into a rail splitter, and when the
• 3:09:33
  need arose, remodeled into the nation's leader, and quickly and unexpectedly, Sargeant
• 3:09:39
  York was destined to show, by two other deeds, prompted by an inborn
• 3:09:43
  eminence, that the esteem was not misplaced in New York and Washington. There
• 3:09:48
  were receptions and banquets in his honor, and around him gathered high officials of
• 3:09:52
  the Army and Navy, and the government, and men who were leaders in
• 3:09:56
  civilian life. It was with impetuous enthusiasm that the people crowded the sidewalks to
• 3:10:01
  greet him as he passed along the streets. The Warren service uniform, the
• 3:10:05
  color of his hair, the calm face that showed exposure to stress and hardships,
• 3:10:09
  set in the luxurious leathers of an automobile, surrounded by men so different
• 3:10:15
  in personal attire and appearance, marked him as the man they sought. There
• 3:10:18
  is something in the man that creates the desire and others to express outwardly their
• 3:10:22
  approval of him. At the New York Stock Exchange, business was suspended as
• 3:10:26
  the members rode him upon their shoulders over the floor of the exchange, where
• 3:10:31
  visitors are not allowed. In Washington, the House of Representatives stopped debate,
• 3:10:35
  and the members arose and cheered him when he appeared in the gallery. There
• 3:10:39
  were ovations for him at the railroad stations along his way to Fort Oglethorpe near
• 3:10:43
  Chattanooga, Tennessee, where he was mustered out of service, and in the
• 3:10:48
  midst of all these mental distracting demonstrations, Alban Yorke was put to the test.
• 3:10:54
  He was offered a contract that guaranteed him seventy five thousand dollars to appear
• 3:10:58
  in a moving picture play. They would be staged in the Argonne in France
• 3:11:01
  and would tell the story of his mountain life. There was another proposition of
• 3:11:05
  fifty thousand dollars. There were offers of vaudeville and theatrical engagements that ranged up
• 3:11:11
  to one thousand dollars a week and totaled many thousands. On these, his
• 3:11:16
  decision was reached on the instant they were offered. The theater was condemned by
• 3:11:20
  the tenets of his church, and all through his youth the ministers of the
• 3:11:22
  Gospel, whom he had heard preached against it. The theater in any form
• 3:11:28
  was, as he saw it, against the principles of religion to which he
• 3:11:31
  had made a vowel. Then up to the surface among those who were crowding
• 3:11:33
  around him, their wormed men, who saw on Sergeant York's popularity the opportunity
• 3:11:39
  for them to make money for themselves. Some of the propositions that were made
• 3:11:43
  to him were sound, some whimsical, others strangely balanced upon a business idea,
• 3:11:48
  but back of all of them ran the same motive. The past in
• 3:11:50
  Sergeant Yorke's life had been filled with hard work and hardships. The present was
• 3:11:56
  new, the future uncharted. But to him there was something in the voices
• 3:12:00
  of the people who were claiming him that was not for sale. When he
• 3:12:03
  left Fort Oglethorpe for his home, the people of his mountain country, in
• 3:12:07
  automobiles, on horseback, upon mules, whole families riding in chairs in the
• 3:12:11
  beds of farm wagons met him along the roadway as he traveled the forty eight
• 3:12:15
  miles over the mountains from the railroad station to pall Mall, and they formed
• 3:12:20
  a procession as they wound their way towards the valley. Only a few months
• 3:12:24
  before, when Alvin had returned home on a furlough which he had secured while
• 3:12:26
  in training at Camp Gordon, he had picked up a wagon ride over thirty
• 3:12:31
  six miles from the railroad station to Jamestown, and he had walked the twelve
• 3:12:37
  miles from Jimtown to pall Maow carrying his grip. His mother was among those
• 3:12:41
  who met him at Jamestown. They rode together, and the last of the
• 3:12:46
  long shadows had faded from the valley of the Three Forks of the Wolf when
• 3:12:48
  they reached their cabin home. The next morning, while it was not yet
• 3:12:52
  noon, the sergeant and Miss Gracie Williams met on the Big Road near Rains's
• 3:12:58
  store. Those sitting on the store porch, and there were to be but
• 3:13:01
  little work done on the farms. That day saw the two meet bow and
• 3:13:05
  pass on pow mall is, but little given to gossip. Yet there was
• 3:13:09
  a strange story to be carried back to the woman folk in the homes in
• 3:13:13
  the valley and on the mountain sides. Only the foxhound that moved slowly behind
• 3:13:18
  his newly returned master knew of an earlier meeting that day between Sergeant York and
• 3:13:22
  his sweetheart, and of a walk down a tree shaded path that had given
• 3:13:26
  the hound time to explore every fence, rail corner and verify his belief that
• 3:13:30
  nothing worth while had been along that road for days. But a quiet,
• 3:13:35
  uneventful life in the valley was not to return to Sergeant York. The Sunday
• 3:13:39
  following was Tennessee's Decoration day from the mountains for miles around. The people came
• 3:13:43
  to pall Mall during the ceremonies. While the flowers were being placed upon the
• 3:13:48
  graves in the little cemetery, they wanted Alvin to talk to them. He
• 3:13:52
  and Gracie were seated in the empty bed of an unhitched wagon down at the
• 3:13:56
  edge of the grove of forest trees that surrounds the church. He came to
• 3:14:00
  the cemetery and his talk was the untrammeled outpouring of his heart for all that
• 3:14:05
  had been done for him. The spirit of the day, with his own
• 3:14:07
  people around him, his experiences, and the changes that had come into his
• 3:14:11
  life since the last decoration services he had attended there seemed to move him deeply,
• 3:14:16
  and here was first displayed a power of oratory which was so rapidly to
• 3:14:20
  develop. The people of Tennessee began to gather gifts for him before he left
• 3:14:26
  France, and the Tennessee Society of New York City entertained him when he left
• 3:14:30
  his troopship. The people of the South had always remembered with added reverence that
• 3:14:35
  Robert E. Lee had declined to commercialize with his military fame, while some
• 3:14:39
  of the other generals of the Confederacy had sacrificed their reputations upon the altar of
• 3:14:43
  expediency. So when it became known that Sergeant Yorke, with no knowledge of
• 3:14:46
  history to guide him, but acting from principle, had refused to capitalize the
• 3:14:50
  record of a few brief months he had spent in the service of his country,
• 3:14:54
  there was nothing within the gift of the people he could not have had.
• 3:14:58
  His welcome home of the State date of Tennessee was to be held at
• 3:15:01
  the capitol on June ninth. But Sergeant York, before he went to war,
• 3:15:05
  had given an option, one over which he was showing deep concern.
• 3:15:09
  His mountains sweetheart was to have him for the taking when he got back.
• 3:15:13
  So it was mutually amicably arranged that the foreclosure proceedings should take place in Pallmou
• 3:15:18
  on June seventh, and their bridal tour would be to Nashville. It was
• 3:15:22
  an out of door wedding so that all of the guests in pall Maw for
• 3:15:26
  that day could be present, and they came not only from all parts of
• 3:15:28
  Tennessee, but from neighboring states. The altar was the rock Ledge on the
• 3:15:33
  mountain side above the spring, under the beech trees that arched their boughs into
• 3:15:37
  a verdant cathedral dome. It had been their meeting place when he was an
• 3:15:41
  unknown mountain boy and she a golden haired schoolgirl. As the sunlight flickered on
• 3:15:46
  the trunks of those trees, it showed scars of knife carvings that had carried
• 3:15:50
  the dates of other meetings there. The swaying boughs were draped with flags and
• 3:15:54
  flowers. The ceremony was performed by Governor Roberts of Tennessee, assisted by Reverend
• 3:16:00
  Rosier Pyle, the pastor of the church in the valley, and Reverend W.
• 3:16:03
  T. Haggard, Chaplain General of the Governor's staff. The bride'smaids were
• 3:16:09
  miss Ida Wright, Miss maud Brier, and Miss Adelia Darwin, and Sergeant
• 3:16:13
  Yorke's best man was Sergeant Clay Brier of Jamestown. Their friendship had been proved
• 3:16:18
  upon the fields of France. The wedding march was the wind among the laurels
• 3:16:22
  and the pines. The welcome home for him at Nashville by the people of
• 3:16:26
  Tennessee will long be remembered among the public demonstrations of the state. Tennessee has
• 3:16:33
  always been proud of the fact that the conduct of her sons in those times
• 3:16:35
  when the nation went to war had entitled her to the name of the volunteer
• 3:16:41
  state, that one of her sons should come back from the World War having
• 3:16:43
  done in the sum of its accomplishment, that which the commander of the Armies
• 3:16:48
  of the Allies called the greatest feat of valor, while finding solely on his
• 3:16:52
  own resources, of any soldier of all the armies of Europe, made the
• 3:16:56
  welcome one that sprang joyously from the hearts of the people, And that this
• 3:17:00
  soldier, while poor and still facing the possibility of a life filled with the
• 3:17:05
  deprivation of poverty, with no assurance but the continued labor of his hands,
• 3:17:09
  should turn down the offers of fortunes, because to him, they were prompted
• 3:17:13
  by a motive that was unworthy, opened the very inner sanctuary of their hearts,
• 3:17:18
  and the people came with gifts that he should sustain no loss of opportunity,
• 3:17:22
  and should never be in need. The offerings were not in money,
• 3:17:26
  They were presents from the people. They were fertile acres that he could till,
• 3:17:30
  as that was his selection for the life he wished to follow. There
• 3:17:33
  was a model modern house in which he could live, and furnishings for it.
• 3:17:37
  There were blooded fowls and stock and farming implements down to the files for
• 3:17:41
  his scythe The donors were individuals, organizations, and communities. Waiting for him
• 3:17:46
  was the State's medal, which bears the device service Above self. He was
• 3:17:52
  appointed a member of the Governor's staff, and upon him was conferred the rank
• 3:17:54
  of colonel. This was the wedding trip of Sergeant Yorke and his bride to
• 3:18:00
  Nashville in the bridal party to see and hear the honors to be paid.
• 3:18:03
  Her son went Missus York the mother. It was the first time she had
• 3:18:07
  ever seen a railroad train, and now it was Missus Yorke's turn. She
• 3:18:11
  too, faced a battalion. Wearing her calico sunbonnet. She came suddenly upon
• 3:18:16
  the gorgeous social battalion, so fully equipped with the bayonets of class and the
• 3:18:20
  machine guns of curiosity, and she captured it. As her son had never
• 3:18:24
  seen the man or crowd of men of whom he was afraid. She with
• 3:18:28
  her philosophy of life, looked upon everyone as worthy of friendship, and the
• 3:18:33
  meeting with them a pleasure and not an occasion for disconcertment. If they approached
• 3:18:37
  her with a greeting of wit, her answer was quick and gentle, and
• 3:18:41
  as playful as a mountain stream. If their mood was serious, she immediately
• 3:18:45
  impressed them with her frankness and her common sense. She went everywhere the programme
• 3:18:50
  provided and enjoyed every moment of it. As she was preparing to return home,
• 3:18:54
  her appreciation was expressed in her declaration that she intended to come again when
• 3:19:00
  she could go quietly and really see things, when policemen would not have to
• 3:19:03
  make a way for her. Alvin was beginning life anew decorated with the Distinguished
• 3:19:09
  Service Cross and the rare Congressional Medal of Honor, the highest award of his
• 3:19:13
  country to a soldier, the Medele Militaire and the Coua de Guierre with Palm
• 3:19:18
  of France, the Crocco de Guera of Italy, the War Medal of Montenegro,
• 3:19:22
  the Legion of Honor, medals for gallantry from Tennessee and the Methodists Centenary,
• 3:19:28
  and the Comoworth of Rhode Island was beckoning to him to decorate him with
• 3:19:31
  the medal the state's legislature had voted. There were the gifts the people of
• 3:19:35
  Tennessee had given him, and others that began to come from all sections of
• 3:19:39
  the Union. The mountaineers of the state of Georgia club together and sent a
• 3:19:43
  remembrance, and presents came from the far west. Several cities offered him a
• 3:19:48
  home if he would come and live among their people. Communities wanting him selected
• 3:19:54
  their most desirable farming sites and tendered them. But the valley of the three
• 3:19:58
  Forks of the Wolf was home to him, and while in France, he
• 3:20:01
  had said he wished to live nowhere but at palmou So. The rotary clubs,
• 3:20:05
  headed by the Nashville Organization, raised the fond for the York Comb through
• 3:20:11
  public subscription, and there has been given to him four hundred acres of the
• 3:20:15
  bottom land of the Valley of the Wolf and one of the timbered mountain sides,
• 3:20:18
  land that had been homesteaded and first brought into cultivation by old Coonrod Pile,
• 3:20:24
  his pioneer ancestor, land that had remained in the possession of his family
• 3:20:28
  until lost in the vicissitudes of the days following the Civil War, as his
• 3:20:31
  residence on his new farm was yet to be built for him, he carried
• 3:20:35
  his bride back to the valley into the little two room cabin that had been
• 3:20:39
  his mother's and his home. It was impossible for Sergeant York to accept all
• 3:20:43
  the invitations he received to visit cities and address conventions, and he had often
• 3:20:48
  to disappoint delegations who traveled a long, rough mountain road to urge in person
• 3:20:52
  his acceptance, and he could not, with a slow moving pen upon a
• 3:20:56
  table of pine answer. All the communications came before the war, two letters
• 3:21:01
  for him, and half a year was an occasion worthy of comment. Now,
• 3:21:05
  each day, over the mountains, upon a pacing roan, postmen came
• 3:21:09
  and the mail pouches swung, His saddle bags swayed in unison with the horse's
• 3:21:13
  step. Most of the letters were for the York homb The public mind pays
• 3:21:18
  tribute to its heroes in ways that are odd. In the growing mass of
• 3:21:22
  mail that was kept in a wide wooden box under the bed, letters that
• 3:21:26
  in number had gotten away from the sergeant's ability to answer, they were displayed
• 3:21:31
  many mental idiosyncrasies and an abundance of advice, and there were many strange requests.
• 3:21:35
  Some of them were pathetic begging letters, as though the sergeant were a
• 3:21:39
  rich man. Some came from prison cells asking his influence to secure a pardon,
• 3:21:45
  some from those still desirous of securing a business partnership with him. Among
• 3:21:48
  them were even belated matrimonial proposals describing the writer's attractive qualities. These the big
• 3:21:56
  Sergeant teasingly turned over to the golden haired girl, who herself had come but
• 3:22:00
  recently into that home, and they may be safely classed among those letters the
• 3:22:05
  sergeant could never answer while he was at home, which was now only for
• 3:22:09
  brief intervals between trips. In answer to the invitations he had accepted, it
• 3:22:13
  was noted that he was unusually quiet. Often he would sit for an hour
• 3:22:16
  or more upon the doorstep, looking out past the arbor of honeysuckle, over
• 3:22:22
  the acres of land that had been given him, gazing on to the mountains.
• 3:22:26
  But he kept his own counsel. Some of those who lived in the
• 3:22:28
  valley who saw him sitting thinking, wondered if there had come a longing into
• 3:22:33
  Alvan's heart to be out in the world again. But his problem was far
• 3:22:37
  From that, he had asked himself two questions, What was the great need
• 3:22:41
  of the people who live far back in the mountains. What, since the
• 3:22:46
  world had been so generous to him and lifted from his shoulders the trials of
• 3:22:50
  living, could he do for his people? He was trying to answer them
• 3:22:54
  subconsciously, A great and genuine appreciation of all that had been done for him
• 3:22:58
  was pushing him onward, unaided he had solved the first It was education.
• 3:23:03
  How keenly, within the few months that had passed, he had realized his
• 3:23:07
  own need, But at that time he did not appreciate how rapidly he was
• 3:23:11
  building for himself a bridge over that shortcoming. The second problem he found was
• 3:23:15
  more difficult. He recognized he could do a greater good, and his efforts
• 3:23:18
  would be more lasting and far reaching if he proved to be an aid to
• 3:23:22
  the younger generation. In his effort to reach a practical plan, he went
• 3:23:26
  as far as he could with his limited knowledge of organization before he sought counsel.
• 3:23:31
  Then he asked that no other gifts be made to him, but instead
• 3:23:35
  the money be contributed to a fund to build simple primary schools throughout the mountain
• 3:23:39
  districts. Where there was no state or county tax appropriations available for that purpose.
• 3:23:45
  Of the funds, not a dollar was to be for his personal use,
• 3:23:48
  nor for any effort he might put forth in its behalf. So again
• 3:23:52
  the form of Sergeant York rose out of the valley above the mountains, and
• 3:23:56
  the sunlight of the nation's approval fell upon it. Men of dominance volunteered to
• 3:24:01
  aid him in his efforts for the children of the mountains, and the result
• 3:24:03
  was the incorporation of the York Foundation, a non profit sharing organization that is
• 3:24:09
  to build schoolhouses and operate schools. Among the trustees are an ex Secretary of
• 3:24:13
  the United States Treasury, bishops of the churches, a state governor, a
• 3:24:18
  congressman, bankers, lawyers, and businessmen. The fund is already a substantial
• 3:24:24
  one, steadily growing, and its success is assured in connection with each school
• 3:24:28
  is to be land to be tilled by the students as a farm, and
• 3:24:31
  besides providing instruction and agriculture, the farm is to aid in the support of
• 3:24:37
  the school, and no child of the community is to miss the opportunity to
• 3:24:39
  attend through inability to pay the tuition charge. As each unit becomes self supporting,
• 3:24:46
  another school is to be established in a new district. In this new
• 3:24:48
  endeavor, Alvin wished to do what he could to shield the boys now at
• 3:24:52
  play among the red brush upon the mountain sides from being compelled to say,
• 3:24:56
  after they had grown to young manhood, what he himself had been forced to
• 3:25:00
  confess. I'm just an ignorant mountain boy, and he is making rapid strides
• 3:25:05
  of progress for himself. I saw him enter the great banquet room of a
• 3:25:09
  leading hotel in one of the country's largest cities. The hall was filled with
• 3:25:13
  men and women of refinement and culture. As Sergeant York and his young wife
• 3:25:16
  entered, the banqueters arose and cheered them. This demonstration was a welcome to
• 3:25:22
  Sergeant York, the soldier. He paused with a smile of appreciation as he
• 3:25:26
  looked over the vast assemblage, and he bowed with a grace and dignity far
• 3:25:31
  beyond that which was expected of him from what his audience had read and heard.
• 3:25:35
  Then, without turning his head, he reached for the hand of his
• 3:25:37
  bride and led her to the speaker's table upon a raised platform, and he
• 3:25:43
  was again to bring that assemblage to its feet and fill that hall with its
• 3:25:46
  cheers. This time it was for Alvin York the Man, as he talked
• 3:25:50
  to them about the boys of the Mountains. Three days afterward, he entered
• 3:25:54
  the store of John Marion Rain's at Palmow, as all the chairs and kegs
• 3:25:58
  of horseshoes were occupied. He put his hands behind him, swung himself up
• 3:26:01
  to a place of comfort upon the counter, took his part in the Battle
• 3:26:05
  of Wit as the firing flashed amid the tobacco smoke. Pal Maw was home,
• 3:26:09
  and there he permitted no distinction between individuals. This has wandered far afield
• 3:26:15
  as a biography of Sergeant Yorke. It is but a story of the strength
• 3:26:18
  and the simplicity of a man, a young man whom the nation has honored
• 3:26:22
  for what he has done with something in it of those who went before and
• 3:26:26
  left him as a legacy, the qualities of mind and heart that enabled him
• 3:26:31
  to fight his fight in the forest of Argonne. The biography, no doubt,
• 3:26:35
  will be written later. He has not planned for the long years that
• 3:26:37
  lie ahead, but is following after a principle with a force that can not
• 3:26:41
  be deflected or checked. The future alone will tell where this is to lead
• 3:26:45
  him. This is really a story of but two years of his life,
• 3:26:48
  a period of time that has elapsed since Alban York first found himself, a
• 3:26:52
  period in which he has done three things, and any one of them would
• 3:26:56
  have marked him for distinction. He fought a great fight, decline to barter
• 3:27:01
  the honors that came to him, and using his newfound strength, he has
• 3:27:05
  reached a helping hand to the children of the mountains who needed him. Palmum
• 3:27:09
  quy merruit ferat. Let him bear the palm who has deserved it. End
• 3:27:15
  of chapter and end of Sergeant York and his People by Sam Cowan