The hills of far west Austin sport some of the metropolis's most prestigious addresses. This is a very recent phenomenon. Seventy years ago, this dry, rough country sold for $4 an acre; now lots sell for that much a square foot. But then, today's settlers of the Hill Country aren't trying to scratch a living out of its thin soil. In 1932, a Dallas newspaper reporter visited the isolated western half of Travis County, the land of his ancestors, and wrote about what he found.
A district of Texas which equals in primitiveness the Cumberland region of Kentucky; where the quaint idioms of a bygone day are still heard on the lips of the inhabitants; where telephones are practically unknown and rural mail delivery extends for only a few miles; all of this is within less than ten miles of the Texas capital. Impossible, some may reply. But, surprising as this may seem, the western portion of Travis County is just such an environment, and in it live just such a people.
The Austin hill country was settled during the days of the Texas Republic by emigrants from the mountain regions of Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia. Tall, raw-boned Anglo-Saxons and Scotch-Irishmen from the Cumberland and Blue Ridge Mountains, they came to Texas for various reasons. One family, which had been almost exterminated in a Tennessee feud, came for a fresh start in life. It is now one of the largest clans in the region. My great-grandfather heard about Texas and left Pike County, Kentucky, because it was settling too rapidly for a pioneer who liked plenty of breathing space. Free land, however, was the lure that attracted the majority of the original settlers.
Their descendants populate the region to this day, leading an existence which is fundamentally unchanged. The Austin mountaineers still reside in rough frame cabins, rearing sturdy children to hew posts and dance the time-honored Virginia reel. It seems almost incredible that students of Texas folkways should have overlooked such a picturesque portion of the State.
The hill people are not prosperous in a material sense, although it is a matter of pride with them that they have never been forced to appeal for aid to any charitable agency. They derive their livings mainly from wood hauling, charcoal burning, and the cultivation of their rocky acres.
And here exists a certain flavor of life, a pastoral freshness and innocence not to be found in those mechanized incongruities we call cities. One detects this flavor when he sees giant men playing marbles with the enthusiastic naivete of 12-year-old boys. He becomes further aware of it when he hears these same men calling their cattle and hogs and the sound of their voices echoed from the hillsides. Still more vividly, he realizes the unspoiled charm of their lives when he listens to them speaking in their homely, yet rich, vernacular.
Surely no one but an intellectual prig would object to "seed" for "saw," "ort" for "ought," "year" for "ear," or "holped" for "helped," when those expressions symbolize historic and picturesque folkways. The dialect spoken in the hills is a fusion of Elizabethan English with the rough and ready lexicon of the frontier. The Elizabethan influence is apparent in such expressions as "a york-mouthed feller," commonly used to describe a talkative person. I believe that the citizens of York, England, were once distinguished for their conversational propensities. The frontier element reveals itself in the designation of unbranded cattle as "mavericks," or in the dubbing of a lively young man as a "buckaroo."
A prominent citizen once told me that "he reckoned they would have a skeery time gittin' money for to teach the school." I have heard elderly people say "shew" for "show" and "fetch" for "bring." When a mountaineer is offered some refreshment or favor, he replies, "I don't keer" in acceptance. This quaint use of the negative for the "assertive" has a touch of the spontaneous if unpolished gentility that one finds in people living close to the soil.
The mountain folk have their peculiar superstitions as well as speech. A charcoal "kill" or "mound" must never be started on Wednesday; why, no one seems to know. Water from a creek or spring should be carried in a tin rather than in a wooden bucket. The fetish of nailing a horseshoe to a fruit tree is easily traceable to the pagan fertility rites.
The widespread belief in the personal appearance of the devil to wicked persons is, of course, a survival of primitive demonology. One man, formerly a notorious drunkard, swears he saw Satan emerge from the ground. He has not touched intoxicating liquor since. Another mountaineer claims to have encountered the devil while hunting one night. "His eyes war a-blazin' and his mouth a-smokin'," the man declares. "I left pronto, as I don't wanta hev any dealin's with the old boy."
Modern styles of dress mean very little to the people of the hills. The average mountain girl recalls Paris only as a name in her school geography. The women generally wear loose-fitting sunbonnets and calico dresses. A wide-brimmed hat, a cotton shirt, a pair of jeans trousers, and cowhide shoes or boots comprise the typical costume of the men. The children are clad in "hand-me-downs," with the little boys sometimes wearing overalls.
But there are dandies of each sex. Those who like to dress, especially young people who are "sparking," buy clothes of flaring colors. The merchants of East Sixth street, in Austin, always get out their most showy goods when dealing with customers from Bull Creek, Travis Peak, or any other of the mountain communities. At a square dance, I remember seeing a boy with a shirt that rivaled Joseph's coat in diversity of color. His sweetheart was attired in a dress rampant with red poppies. A shiny brass ring reposed on the third finger of each.
The archaic square dance still remains the principal form of entertainment among the mountain people. Modern jazz is as absent from their amusements as it is from the course of their everyday lives. Young and old, they congregate in the clapboard cabins to go through the measures of "Money Musk" and "Turkey in the Straw."
The Austin hills can not wholly escape the ever-increasing impact of civilization. The building of the Bull Creek scenic highway has encouraged many of the mountaineers to buy automobiles and trucks on the installment plan. The automobiles, of course, mean more travel and less isolation in the lives of their owners. More wood can be hauled into the city on a truck than on a wagon, more money necessarily accruing to the individual as a result. This extra money is being spent for radios, phonographs, and modern furniture.
A great many of the mountain folk are abandoning wood-hauling and charcoal burning altogether. The rough country is admirably adapted for goat and sheep ranching, which is proving a lucrative occupation. In spite of the present depression, an economic readjustment seems to be slowly taking place. From a social standpoint, this is all very encouraging. But, an incurable sentimentalist, I deplore the modernizing of my people. May the day never come when I shall see the homely mountain cabins replaced by imitation California bungalows. I sincerely hope that I shall never hear the irritating chug of tractors drown out the tinkle of the cowbells or raucous jazz substituted for the fine old mountain ballads.