ject to entry by anyone who
discovered them. Our old frontier always was notorious for
happy-go-lucky surveys and neglect to make legal entry of claims. Thus
Boone lost the fairest parts of the Kentucky he founded, and was
ejected and sent adrift. In our own time, overlapping boundaries have
led to bitter litigation and murderous feuds.

As our territory was sparsely occupied, there were none of those
"perpendicular farms" so noticeable in older settlements near the river
valleys, where men plow fields as steep as their own house roofs and
till with the hoe many an acre that is steeper still. John Fox tells of
a Kentucky farmer who fell out of his own cornfield and broke his neck.
I have seen fields in Carolina where this might occur, as where a
forty-five degree slope is tilled to the brink of a precipice. A woman
told me: "I've hoed corn many a time on my knees--yes, I have;" and
another: "Many's the hill o' corn I've propped up with a rock to keep it
from fallin' down-hill."[1]

Even in our new region many of the fields suffered quickly from erosion.
When a forest is cleared there is a spongy humus on the ground surface
that is extremely rich, but this washes away in a single season. The
soil beneath is good, but thin on the hillsides, and its soluble,
fertile ingredients soon leach out and vanish. Without terracing, which
I have never seen practiced in the mountains of the South, no field with
a surface slope of more than ten degrees (about two feet in ten) will
last more than a few years. As one of my neighbors put it: "Thar, I've
cl'ared me a patch and grubbed hit out--now I can raise me two or three
severe craps!"

"Then what?" I asked.

"When corn won't grow no more I can turn the field into grass a couple
o' years."

"Then you'll rotate, and grow corn again?"

"La, no! By that time the land will be so poor hit wouldn't raise a
cuss-fight."

"But then you must move, and begin all over again. This continual moving
must be a great nuisance."

He rolled his quid and placidly answered: "Huk-uh; when I move, all I
haffter do is put out the fire and call the dog."

His apparent indifference was only philosophy expressed with sardonic
humor; just as another neighbor would say, "This is good, strong land,
or it wouldn't hold up all the rocks there is around hyur."

Right here is the basis for much of what strangers call shiftlessness
among the mountaineers. But of that, more anon in other chapters.

In cl