Folks with an uncommon taste are flocking into the greening hills these days.For it is ramp digging time and ramp-eating time.Mountain folks are so fond of them they would not swap a mess for all the caviar in Russia!
To those unfamiliar with ramps, however, this is a warning to either take on a bait in self defense or stay upwind on meeting with a ramp eater.
The ramp grows in profusion in the high, cool hills of Graham County.Folks in the highlands have been eating ramps since the first white settlers moved in some 250 years ago.They were introduced to the strong smelling vegetables by the Cherokee.
The ramp is a sort of wild onion which grows in buckeye flats high up in the mountains.Now a buckeye flat is a rich mountain cove, and when it is occupied in dogwood time by tender ramps it is a favorite rendezvous of mountain folk.
The ramp has a root about the size of a walnut.Its two broad leaves are about eight inches long.
There are dozens of ways to eat ramps and twice as many ways to fix them.Ramp lovers insist that they are good with just about anything – eggs, ham, bear meat, or you just name it.
Some of the mountain women make what they call ramp pudding.Their recipe is to take ground beef, three pints of ramps, a can of tomato soup, Worcestershire sauce, six to eight eggs, season heavily with salt and pepper, mix it all up and top with butter, and bake in an oven for about 70 minutes.
Dedicated ramp eaters say that ramps should be eaten only from the time they ripen in late March or early April until about the middle of June.After that, supposedly they get tough and the tops die and they are not fit to eat.
Right now, ramps are mighty tender.And that’s why folks with an uncommon taste are flocking into the hills!
April…It is a new world in the making on these old, old hills. It’s the sights and sounds and smells of spring creeping over the land. It’s a time when folks want to get their feet on the ground and their hands in the soil.
April is service trees starring the high mountain forests with their creamy white bloom.
It’s ferns uncurling their fiddleheads in woodsy places where anemones and bloodroot grow.
It’s the tops of the maples kindling their fires.
It’s spring beauties and trout lilies and bluets.
It’s violets blooming beside a brook and trilliums sprinkling the forest floor with clusters of pink and yellow and white.
It’s the green reach toward the sun and daffodils making the day golden.
April is the smell of fresh turned earth and the pungent odor of wild onions.
It’s combed fields pregnant with the seed of life.
It’s the mating season for earth and sky.
It’s she-rain come down from the clouds to cleanse the earth.
It’s clouds towing their shadows over the hills.
It’s the stars still glittering with winter’s brilliance.
April is a robin chattering and scolding and whistling in the dawn.
It’s a field lark darting out of the woods and a crow speaking huskily from the edge of a field.
It’s a song sparrow jingling his sunny silver in a roadside pocket.
It’s a mourning dove, walking pigeon-like about a freshly raked patch of earth and pecking away in search of food.
It’s a male grouse strutting before his lady-love, his tail feathers spread and held erect and his neck feathers ruffled.
It’s a woodchuck, careless at last of sun and shadow, wandering from his hole to feast upon the greening things.
April is a fisherman wading in a stream with a fly-rod.
It’s a hills-man walking behind his plow.
It’s a country woman gathering a mess of wild greens.
It’s a brook singing a new song.
It’s a woodpecker drumming on a dead tree.
It’s a hound dog proclaiming his challenge to the mysteries of the night.
It’s a horse nibbling away in a meadow green with spring new-come.
It’s a rooster raisings his wings in the sunlight and uttering his clarion call.
It’s chickens scratching in the yard for worms.
It’s peepers piping in the afternoon and butterflies on the wing.
It’s rabbits scampering in the moonlight.
It is a time of rising sap and swelling buds, of blossom and new leaf.
The family reading hour was once a custom.The mountain folk put a heap of store in meter and rime as aids to memory.There was a wonderful storehouse of practical, down to earth knowledge in rimes that were learned and recited around the hearth fire.
Rimelore sessions took place along with telling riddles and playing games, sessions in which both young and old participated.Such gatherings, here in the mountains, are a thing of the past, with the advent of television and the internet.
Many weather rimes are still fresh in the minds of old timers.They are so familiar to be proverbial but their underlying purpose was informational and served the farmer and travelers as guides to planning and pursuing his occupation.Such as :Year of snow, fruit will grow.Or Rain before seven, clear before eleven.
Tricks of many trades and epitomized conclusions of long observations are buried in these how to know verses.Will the fishing be good?What is the wind?
When the wind is in the east, then the fishes bite the least.
When the wind is in the west, the fishes bite the best.
When the wind is in the north, then fishes do come forth.
When the wind is in the south, it blows the bait in the fishes mouth.
Should you buy this horse?
One white foot – buy him.
Two white feet – try him.
Three white feet – look well about him.
Four white feet – go without him.
Names of the evangelists were memorized by this rime:
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John
Saddle the cat and I’ll get on
Gimme a stick and I’ll lay on
Open the gate and I’ll be gone
Alphabet rimes were still very popular until the mid-forties.The idea of this device was to assist children in learning the letters of the alphabet, incidentally, is at least as old as the 119th Psalm, which consists of 22 eight verse sections corresponding to the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet.
Chaucer’s “A.B.C.” a poem in honor of the Virgin Mary and written in 1375 is the extant alphabet rime in English, but it was taken from a French original written half a century earlier.
The most famous tongue twister, “Peter Piper”, which is the sole stanza now familiar from a merry alphabet rime popular in England and America in the 18th century beginning: “Andrew Airpump Ask’d his Aunt her Ailment,” and running through such exciting adventures as that of “Matthew Mendlegs” who “Miss’d a Mangl’d Monkey” and “Needy Noodle” who “Nipped a Naybour’s Nutmeg”.And just in case you don’t remember “Peter Piper Pick’d a Peck of Pickl’d Peppers.”
Then there were the counting-out rimes.One of the most famous was “William A Trembletoe” and goes like this:
Cracking riddles was a popular pastime on nights here in these hills. It was a superfine exercise for stretching the mind and whetting a body’s wit. Like so many of the old traditions, cracking riddles has become a lost art. Riddles rank with myths, fables, folktales and proverbs as one of the earliest and most wide spread types of formulated thought.
Ones like…
There was a little green house,
And in the little green house,
There was a little brown house,
And in the little brown house,
There was a little yellow house,
And in the little yellow house,
There was a little white house
And in the little white house
There was a little heart
The answer is “a nut”
Or this one:
Round the house and round the house,
And there lies a white glove in the window
The answer is “snow
Or this one:
A hill full, a hole full, but you cannot catch a bowlful
The answer is “smoke”
And then there is this one:
From house to house he goes,
So sure and yet so slight,
And whether it rains or snows,
He sleeps outside all night.
Can you guess…it’s a path.
How about…
What flies forever
And never rests?
The answer: the wind.
It can run and can’t walk,
It has a tongue and can’t talk
Give up…a wagon.
Going back to a time when nights were spent around a fire with a riddle cracking session, it seems a shame that they have disappeared. For they were the times when cracking riddles stretched a body’s mind and whetted a body’s wit.
The site of the ancient Cherokee town of Cowee is in a hollow among the hills a dozen miles north of Franklin.There is a whisper of a path leading down from the valley road to a swinging bridge over the Little Tennessee and into a flat green plain out of which rose a lofty mound carpeted with grass.
On a spring day, over 200 years ago, William Bartram, the botanist stood waist high among its unplucked flowers and looked out across a town of some one hundred dwellings.The settlement, he wrote later “is esteemed the capital town” of the Cherokee and is “situated on the bases of the hills on both sides of the river, near to its bank”.
Now, as then, “ridges of hills rise grand and sublimely one above and beyond another, some boldly and majestically advancing into the verdant plain, their feet bathed with the silver flood of the Tanase, whilst others far distant veiled in blue mists, sublimely mounting aloft with greater majesty life up their pompous crests, and overlook vast regions.”
Nobody knows when the Cherokee built their first town here, but it was recognized as an important settlement when Hernando DeSoto came this way in 1540 on a mad search for gold.Juan Pardo, another Spanish adventurer, visited it in 1567.
Before the day of the long hunters and the pioneer settler, this was the frontier of the traders.Among the first of the traders to come to live among the Cherokee was Ludovick Grant, a Scot of a ruined Jacobite family, who chose the highlands of the Cherokees as a wilderness substitute for his own lost highlands, and became a man of great influence among the Cherokees.It was Grant who introduced the Cherokee of Cowee to Sir Alexander Cuming, a Scottish baronet, who caused the Cherokee to sign their first treaty with the white man in 1730.
Another visitor to Cowee a few years later was Christian Gottlieb Priber, a utopian socialist, who tried to establish a communist empire, the first in the world, among the Cherokee.
Not all of the strangers came in peace.Such a man was Col. John Sevier, who led his army of Over-Mountain Men into the valley in 1781 and burned the town of Cowee.But the Cherokee built back upon the ashes, continuing to live here until they were forced by the white man to cede their land around 1817.Now there is only pastureland where the town of Cowee once stood.
The only description of the town of Cowee is one Bartram wrote down in his book of “Travels”.The people of Cowee, like all the Cherokee lived where they had mountains at their back and a river in their front.The town of Cowee itself lay in a flat green valley between the high ground and the river.It blended unobtrusively into its surroundings.It made no great display of its presence.
In the center of the town, not far from the friendly river, rose the townhouse, pitched on its lofty mound, its one narrow door reached by steps cut in the earth or by a slanting path.It gave the general effect of a tower or rotunda, since it occupied most of the space on the top of the mound and was made of logs set upright in a circle, the plastered, roof and all, with earth.This was the community center.Within its firelit interior, warriors met in council, religious feasts were celebrated, and communal dances were held.
Bartran described the Cowee townhouse as being capable of accommodating several hundred people, standing on the top of an ancient artificial mount of earth, of about 20 feet perpendicular, and the rotunda on the top of it being about 30 feet more.“This gives the whole fabric” he wrote, “an elevation of about 60 feet from the common surface of the ground.”
The Little Tennessee flowing by Cowee was a roadway connecting them with neighbors and with distant nations.The made little use of the bark canoe favored by the northern Indians but preferred the “dugout canoe” which was hallowed and shaped by fire from a poplar log.
Now the river flows quietly through the valley.The dugout canoe no longer travels on its bosom.And the ancient town of Cowee is only ashes long turned under the sod by the plow.The only reminder that it ever existed is when somebody comes this way and turns up an arrowhead or a spearpoint or a shard of pottery.
The old house is only a memory, but the ghosts of a man and a maid – and a boy who became president – are still around to haunt historians.To those who knew the house, it was a part of the story of Abraham Lincoln and the myths that have grown out of his obscure boyhood.
For it was here in the Great Smokies, according to tradition that the story of the great American folk hero had its beginning.Some folks have argued that Abraham Lincoln was born, the son of a prosperous, prominent pioneer.
There is no argument that Nancy Hanks, his mother, lived in the house as a servant, leaving under a cloud of speculation and gossip to go to Kentucky where she married Tom Lincoln.For more than a hundred years a heap of folks have insisted that Abraham Enloe, in whose house Nancy Hanks was a servant, was the real father of the great American Civil War president.
The tradition that Lincoln was his illegitimate son has persisted down through the years.The folks who grew up with it are dead.So is the man who dared chronicle it for prosperity.Time was when the story was good country store gossip and warmed over in the chimney corner after the children had been put to bed.Like so much of the mountain folklore, the Lincoln tradition would now be only a vague sketch to tease the memory if the late James H. Cathey had not come along.
Cathey worked for years in documenting the tradition.And he spent his own money to finance publication of a book on it because he was convinced that Enloe was the father of Lincoln.An author and one-time representative in the State Legislature, Cathey wrapped up the tradition of Lincoln’s birth in a volume called “The Genesis of Lincoln or Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction.”It was first published in 1899.
The tradition as related by Cathey – and documented by dozens of letters and affidavits – is that Enloe was Lincoln’s father by Nancy Hanks, a servant girl in the Enloe household.According to Cathey, Nancy Hanks, at the age of eight, came to work for Enloe while he was still living in Rutherford County.When several years later he migrated to the Smokies, she was brought along.
Soon after moving here, Enloe became entangled with her and it was soon obvious that Nancy Hanks was going to have a baby. There followed a family quarrel and Mrs. Enloe insisted that the girl leave.Several persons quoted by Cathey claimed that the child was born in the Enloe household.Others insisted it was born in Haywood County, north of Waynesville, at the home of Felix Walker.But they all agreed that Enloe paid Tom Lincoln to take Nancy Hanks and her child to Kentucky.
“Confident and persistent have the keepers of this old testimony to the origin of Abraham Lincoln been, when plied with questions, that there is no opening for superstition,” Cathey wrote, “and the most one was inclined to be skeptical could do was wonder and say nothing.”
“One might hug his incredulity by imagining that the people who gathered the strange accounts of Nancy Hanks and Abraham Enloe and a child, and the wonderful story of the striking personal likeness of Abraham Lincoln and Wesley Enloe (a son of Abraham Enloe), are illiterate, fanatical folk who have conjured up a fragmentary fable…but this incredulity is all cleared when one learns that the custodians of the Lincoln tradition are numbered by the scores and hundreds of the first people of Western North Carolina.”
Cathey, in a statement from Wesley Enloe, quoted the son of Abraham Enloe as saying:
“I was born after the incident between father and Nancy Hanks.I have, however, a vivid recollection of hearing the name Nancy Hanks frequently mentioned in the family while I was a boy. No, I never heard my father mention it.Nancy Hanks lived in my father’s family.I have no doubt the cause of my father’s sending her to Kentucky is the one generally alleged.The occurrence as understood by my generation and given to them by that of my father’s, I have no doubt is essentially true.”
