The popular beliefs about mountain people contain many misconceptions. According to fiction, the Hillman is a seven foot combination of malnutrition and bad breeding, asleep on his front porch with the dogs. His great bare feet, dangling off the porch, flap from time to time when flies get too pesky, but nothing awakens him except a hound’s salute to a stranger. Then he shoots up his astounding neck to its full length, ogles the visitor, and on his hunting horn blows a series of long and short blasts that means, “Hide yore still and oil yore guns; they air a stranger h’yar.” This feat of mountain mores is all the more remarkable because he can neither read nor write and indeed, cannot count well enough to enumerate his hogs, but must identify them by name. Should one be missing for a day or two, he musters all his kin down to second cousins and step-uncles and goes across the “mounting” for a feud. While the men folk shoot out one another’s eyeballs at artillery distances, the “chillern” go down in the valley and throw rocks, it being considered unmanly to kill women and children except in a fit of anger.
At the height of the fighting, the hog in question reels in, red of eye, and the feudists deduce that he was not killed at all, but merely knocked over somebody’s barrel of mash and subsequently went off down the valley hunting wolves. The patriarchs and their relatives regretfully suspend the fighting and repair to a clan stronghold for a square dance. Between sets they hold spitting contests in the moonlight or mournfully intone Elizabethan ballads in purest Shakespearean idiom. When every keg of white lightning has been emptied, each man gathers up a rifle that saw service earlier and followed by his twelve year old bride carrying a tub of clothes and two buckets of water walk nine miles up the holler to his cabin.
Downing such an exaggeration is not even necessary. In these hills, there really is rugged, homespun quality about these mountain folk. They appreciate a good pocketknife, a true rifle, and a cold-nosed hound. They look upon exceptional skill with an ax or a gun as an art. They take for granted an ability to “read sign” along creek banks, or to find a mule that has strayed in the woods.