Backcountry Work Ways:
Border Attitudes toward War and WorkWhere the warrior ethic is strong, the work ethic grows weak. This was so among the borderers and backsettlers, on both sides of the water. A traveler in North Britain remarked that the inhabitants were "indolent in high degree, unless roused to war."134 In the American backcountry, other travelers frequently made similar observations.... Crop farming remained very primitive in Appalachia. It was mainly a system of hoe-husbandry that was also introduced from North Britain. In the 1730s, the tools for each hand in one settlement were "one axe, one broad hoe and one narrow hoe," with very little use of the plow.135 Except for the abandonment of the plow, this system of farming had been followed very generally throughout the English border counties, the Scottish lowlands and northern Ireland. It was introduced to the American backcountry at an early date.136 A traveler in the backcountry noted, "A fresh piece of ground . . . will not bear tobacco past two or three years unless cow-penned; for they manure their ground by keeping their cattle . . . within hurdles, which they remove when they have sufficiently dunged one spot"137
At some seasons of the year, large herds of grazing animals were allowed to browse freely in the forests and canebreaks of the old southwest, and later on the open range of Texas. In 1773, a surveyor for South Carolina described this system in detail. He reported that vast herds of cattle, often more than a thousand animals, were raised in the woods throughout the backcountry between the Savannah and Ogechee rivers. They were tended by "gangs under the auspices of cow-pen keepers, which move (like unto the ancient patriarchs or the modern Bedouins in Arabia) from forest to forest in a measure as the grass wears out or the planters approach them." Once a year, these animals were rounded up, penned and driven to market on the hoof.138
This system of herding had also been practiced in the North British borderlands, and was transferred to the American backcountry. A few important changes were made necessary by the new environment. Sheep, which had been the main support of British animal husbandry, became an easy prey for predators in the American wilderness. They were replaced by swine which were allowed to breed freely on the range, rapidly reverting to the wild species from which they had descended. This process of devolution produced the backcountry razorback, which was more like a wild boar than a barnyard pig. It became so wild that it was hunted with a rifle....
The backsettlers also kept...temporal customs of high complexity. Their culture assigned many fixed seasons for doing things. Their folklore told them, for example: