where the bee hunters stayed. Lick-log denotes a notched log used for
salting cattle. Still-house Branch was a moonshiners' retreat. Skin-linn
Fork is where the bast was peeled from young lindens. Big Butt is what
Westerners call a butte. Ball-play Bottom was a lacrosse field of the
Indians. Pizen Gulch was infested with poison ivy or sumach. Keerless
Knob is "a joyful place for wild salat" (_amaranthus_). A "hell" or
"slick" or "woolly-head" or "yaller patch" is a thicket of laurel or
rhododendron, impassable save where the bears have bored out trails.

The qualities of the raw backwoodsmen are printed from untouched
negatives in the names he has left upon the map. His literalness shows
in Black Rock, Standing Stone, Sharp Top, Twenty Mile, Naked Place, The
Pocket, Tumbling Creek, and in the endless designations taken from
trees, plants, minerals, or animals noted on the spot. Incidents of his
lonely life are signalized in Dusk Camp Run, Mad Sheep Mountain, Dog
Slaughter Creek, Drowning Creek, Burnt Cabin Branch, Broken Leg, Raw
Dough, Burnt Pone, Sandy Mush, and a hundred others. His contentious
spirit blazes forth in Fighting Creek, Shooting Creek, Gouge-eye,
Vengeance, Four Killer, and Disputanta.

Sometimes even his superstitions are commemorated. In Owesley County,
Kentucky, is a range of hills bearing the singular name of Whoop fer
Larrie. A party of hunters, so the legend goes, had encamped for the
night in the shelter of a bluff. They were startled from sleep by a
loud rumble, as of some wagon hurrying along the pathless ridge, and
they heard a voice shouting "Whoop fer Larrie! Whoop fer Larrie!" The
hills would return no echo, for the cry came from a riotous "ha'nt."

A sardonic humor, sometimes smudged with "that touch of grossness in our
English race," characterizes many of the backwoods place-names. In the
mountains of Old Virginia we have Dry Tripe settlement and Jerk 'em
Tight. In West Virginia are Take In Creek, Get In Run, Seldom Seen
Hollow, Odd, Buster Knob, Shabby Room, and Stretch Yer Neck. North
Carolina has its Shoo Bird Mountain, Big Bugaboo Creek, Weary Hut, Frog
Level, Shake a Rag, and the Chunky Gal. In eastern Tennessee are No Time
settlement and No Business Knob, with creeks known as Big Soak, Suee, Go
Forth, and How Come You. Georgia has produced Scataway, Too Nigh, Long
Nose, Dug Down, Silly Cook, Turkey Trot, Broke Jug Creek, and Tear
Breeches Ridge.

Allowing some license for the moun