USA > Indiana > Historic Indiana : being chapters in the story of the Hoosier state from the romantic period of foreign exploration and dominion through pioneer days, stirring war times, and periods of peaceful progress, to the present time > Part 25
USA > Indiana > Historic Indiana : being chapters in the story of the Hoosier state from the romantic period of foreign exploration and dominion through pioneer days, stirring war times, and periods of peaceful progress, to the present time, centennial ed. > Part 25
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Another form of writing, among the very earliest publications which emanated from the State, were the contributions of the group of scientific men in the New Harmony community, mentioned elsewhere.
The collections of William Coggeshall, of Benjamin Parker and E. Hiney, coupled with Meredith Nichol-
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son's very interesting book on the literary performances of Indiana, entitled Hoosiers, makes any detailed mention of particular writers and their books un- necessary, except as illustrating the development of authorship within the State. Continuing to be a "scribbling and forth-putting people," so many authors have appeared that Wilbur Nesbit facetiously declared at the Sons of Indiana dinner in Chicago that "envious outsiders look up from their Hoosier books long enough to speak satirically of Indiana as the literary belt. They mention the dialect-poetry regions, and the historical-novel districts, and the counties wherein the ballad and rondeau flourish with the prodigality of commerce. They have even prepared maps showing by means of shaded and unshaded portions where the traveller must strike in order to find or avoid certain brands of literature."
It has been said that none of the literary work yet done in Indiana rises to the first magnitude; none has achieved the highest eminence; that no "greatest American author" may be claimed by that State. If this be true, it must be admitted that the average attained by the group has been high, and that the books published by the State's coterie of writers compare favorably with contemporaneous American literature. It might be asked, What other State, at the present time, can claim a poet who surpasses James Whitcomb Riley in expression of the humor, pathos, and experience of the lives about him? Who has written more interestingly and with more information on foreign affairs than John W. Foster or Alpheus H. Snow? Who tells a finer story than Beaucaire, or excels Evaleen Stein in delicacy of feeling and senti- ment in the description of wood, river, and sky ?
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What American has written more interesting essays and biography than Dudley Foulke or more convincing addresses than George W. Julian? What juveniles are awaited more eagerly by the children than the tales by Mrs. Catherwood, Evaleen Stein, or Annie Fellows Johnston?
While loyally enjoying the successes of its literary guild, the people of literary taste, within the State, have not lost their discrimination, and scarcely set too high a valuation on these publications. They are fully conscious that the work done by their neigh- bors must be measured by universal standards and not by current popularity. Ignoring then the recent trade announcement that "of the six best-selling novels of the season three of them were written by Indiana authors," it may still be claimed that where there are so many readers some measure of approval must be granted. A wit has termed the common- wealth "a state of mind," but sometimes the facetious- ness regarding the Hoosier's reputation of having a "monopoly of gray matter" turns out very droll. George Ade tells the story of meeting in New York a gentleman who said: "At last we have found here in New York a native humorist who is just as keen as any of those fellows out West. He is as droll as Riley, as quaint as Mark Twain, and as fanciful as Bill Nye. You ought to meet Simeon Ford." A short time after that I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Ford, and during the conversation I referred to him as an Eastern man, whereupon he said: "I am living here because I have interests in New York City, but as a matter of fact I was born in Lafayette, Indiana." "So what's the use?" inquires Mr. Ade. A New York wag was provoked into saying that the Boston pundits'
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plaint that "somebody somewhere was writing good literature which never gets into print," might be true, but not of Indiana.
People of culture within the State would be the last ones, simply from local pride, to blindly give promiscuous praise to everything that is published from their State. They would be much more apt to say of any poor writing, as Sidney Lanier once wrote of a very popular Southern novel emanating from his own section:
"From all I can hear 't is a most villainous, poor, pitiful piece of work, and so far from endeavoring to serve the South by blindly plastering it with absurd praises, I think all true patriots ought to unite in redeeming the land from the imputation that such books are regarded as casting honor upon the section. God forbid we should really be brought so low as that we must perforce brag of such works; and God be merciful to that man who boasted that sixteen thousand of these books have been sold in the South."
An Eastern reviewer has said: "Whether Hoosiers have or have not a right to set up as literateurs, a lusty lot of them have successfully assumed the respon- sibility and against the tide of adverse influence made their way to distinguished recognition." Maurice Thompson, in writing of this development, said that
" the preposterous legend which somehow has linked Indi- ana's name with illiteracy and ill-breeding is a legend, and nothing more. The fact is that Indiana has always been a leader in literature among the Middle West States, just as she is now, and her literary people have won recognition strictly on the merits of their work. We have the best schools in the world-not universities and great colleges indeed, but schools for the people in which our entire popu- lation is trained to love books. We create a demand for all
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sorts of good literary wares. As Indiana goes, so goes the Union, may yet be as true in literature as in politics-time alone is the arbiter of quality in all book-making. Even the Indianians themselves, in their pitch of honest pride, are not yet venturing to boast that this remarkable vogue of their local writers has drawn around Indianapolis the sacred circle of literary primacy, or that their capital dome is the axis of the universe."
On the contrary, most of the men and women of In- diana who have published are students with an ever- receding ideal, to which they never attain, thinking lightly of what they have produced, in comparison to that which they have in mind.
When Edward Eggleston wrote his stories of Indiana in 1871, portraying the Hoosiers of the backwoods district, in the southern counties, as he had known them "back in the fifties," many people in the State resented their publication. They declared that the life delineated, and the local coloring of the tales, was a libel on the community. Even at that time, which was more than thirty-five years ago, many native-born Hoosiers had never seen the type of squat- ters that Eggleston depicted, had never even heard the dialect spoken, and in long residence within the towns had not encountered the lean, gaunt type of people who had come thither and squatted on lands in the back districts of Indiana. These citizens felt that outrageous grammar and a drawling dialect would be eternally associated, in the minds of the out- siders, with their State, and that it would bring dis- credit upon all the people. They maintained that it misrepresented the large contingent of its educated population.
As Mr. Nicholson says, "this criticism has come
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largely from a new generation that does not view these tales as instructive foot-notes to the history of education in Indiana."1 It is true that outside people did come to associate the dialect with the State. This is unfortunate; but they may learn that the class of people delineated in those stories was never large, and has diminished before the illuminating influence of public schools. The dialect bears the same relation to the speech of educated Hoosiers that Yorkshire or Cockney dialects do to the language of educated English residents of Great Britain. At all events, the lives of these settlers afforded picturesque material for verse and story, and it is a fact that such people were in the State, although never much wanted. The backwardness and inertia of these people was an element which always had to be contended with, in every progressive movement in southern Indiana in the last century.
This class was made up of three streams of im- migration: the mountain whites from the South; the well born, but uneducated frontiersmen from the same sections; and people of foreign parentage, from east of the Alleghanies. The first of these three classes and its presence in Indiana makes a study of its origin interesting. The peculiar character and speech of these poor whites, and the taint of their illiteracy within the State, make a passing mention necessary.
Three or four generations before the first settlement of southern Indiana, there had been brought into the tide-water colonies, from England, a class of debtors, derelicts, and political offenders. It was before the days of negro slavery. These people were indentured for service to the planters, and after a few years of
1 Nicholson, Meredith, Hoosiers. New York, 1900.
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labor they were freed and many drifted to the western frontiers, belonging to Virginia. Convicted criminals were sent over in great numbers. Kidnapped boys and girls from the streets of London, Bristol, and other seaports were huddled on board ship and brought to the Southern colonies to work as house servants and on the farms. There was also a fair proportion of white servants there, who had sold themselves into slavery for a brief term, to defray the expense of the voyage over. The latter were known as re- demptioners and many of them became the respectable small farmers of Virginia.
Among the transported persons there were those who had been guilty of trivial offences, only; many were political offenders and prisoners of war. Cromwell ordered no less than two thousand over, and in turn the monarchists sold so many Nonconformists into servitude that it created an insurrection in England, in 1663. From which it follows that among all of the indentured whites who were "involuntary emigrants," many were upright and valuable settlers. -After the general introduction of negro slavery, manual labor became a mark of servitude. As a consequence of this, there came to be a class of shiftless white people, who must either move on or starve. In time, many of these withdrew from the settlements, and drifted to the frontier. Here in their mountain fast- nesses they became a peculiar people. Of unmixed English blood, retaining many of the forms of speech of the seventeenth-century British, gradually becoming a law unto themselves, bereft of all educational ad- vantages, they became half savage in their customs and passions. Their descendants may still be found, and are known as "moonshiners" in the mountains
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of Kentucky and Tennessee; as "corn-crackers" in Georgia, and in Florida they are "clay-eaters." All of the lowlanders seem to be of a lower type, morally, and were probably of a lower origin, than the moun- taineers. All are of the same gaunt, shiftless type; living on corn, pork, wild fruits, and crude whiskey. It is estimated that there are more than three millions of them in the Southern sections at the present time. Into these same mountainous districts there drifted nomadic characters, adventurers, hunters, escaped criminals, and stranded unfortunates, who joined their fortunes with the early immigration. A hardly credible isolation from all civilizing contact with the world has made this marooned element of the pop- ulation, what we find them to-day, the most distinct and neglected people in the States.
We do not associate this tribe of Ishmaelites with the section north of the Ohio, and there were com- paratively few of them that settled there permanently; but we know that many of these "movers," as they were called, did abide for a time in Indiana, and some stayed on after the others had journeyed toward the Missouri. These itinerant whites used to pass along the Kentucky roads toward the north in a listless way. They were lank, cadaverous, clay-colored vag- abonds, going overland in rickety wagons, drawn by raw-boned horses, and a raft of unkempt children and mongrel dogs were their only possessions. They were clad in homespun and wore dun-colored hats, that matched their visages. North they went in springtime to "Indeanny," and very often back to the South in winter.
It was these descendants of the "poor whites" of the South who brought into the North the language
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of the mountaineers of Tennessee, the Carolinas, and Kentucky. When they emigrated to the West, they seemed incapable of change and improvement. In Indiana they were known as renters, seldom acquiring land of their own, though there were rich acres all about them. Their methods of cultivation were shambling and haphazard; they neglected their meagre crops for hunting and fishing, in which they were tirelessly occupied. The tale of more game beyond would lure them from the clearing they had be- gun, and they would sell out for a pittance, and move on into the vanishing wilderness. They were a silent people unless they drank too much cheap whiskey, and then they were apt to be quarrel- some, but they were honest and generally inoffen- sive. Their language was that of the common people of England, which had been astray on the heights for generations. They were hopelessly super- stitious, a characteristic so well depicted in Dr. Taylor's very dramatic dialect verses entitled The Theng.
This emigrant drift was densely ignorant.
Their
democracy was absolute, and they were loyal to the Federal Government. These people have been strangely persistent in type wherever found, perpet- uating the more than conservative, the really negative qualities of their peculiar class.
Their history has been traced here, because, in ac- counting for the dialect found in the non-progressive districts of Indiana, these people must have first place. They were the people who tainted the language of the trans-Alleghany pioneers, from Tennessee to the Lakes. Besides these vagabond immigrants, there came into the new State decidedly larger numbers of people from the South who were descended from far better
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stock, but whose families had migrated westward each time new territory had been opened up, without waiting to teach their children to read. They were often persons of estate and substance at home, but it is to be remembered that educational opportunities for the English settlers on the Atlantic coast, in the seventeenth century, were meagre in the extreme. When we recall that the members of these families, however well born, journeyed over the mountains and settled in solitary clearings in Kentucky and Tennessee, and that their sons moved on to Indiana Territory, always seeing other frontier peoples, we can easily imagine that superior English speech was hardly more than a tradition by the time the third generation is encountered along the Ohio Valley. Most of the men could read and write, and their minds were keen, but they were not cultured. Many of these hardy pioneers settled in Indiana. As late as the end of the nineteenth century, fully 70,000 residents gave Ken- tucky as their place of birth, not to mention Virginia. North Carolina sent a large contingent, not only of good Huguenot and Quaker stock, but also the Hoosier dialect class. These Southerners were patriotic, hospitable people; but in letters they had the dis- advantage of three generations of poverty of learning. These were the Hoosiers who had that sense of humor and dry philosophy still so characteristic of Indianians. In severing the ties binding them to the home com- munities, the better Southerners often threw off the family traditions of culture and gentle life. Many a pioneer has retrograded on the frontier. Most of these last-mentioned people were of the slave-holding class, and had the Southern accent. The sayings, superstitions, and omens, as well as the expression
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and speech current among them, had been acquired by contact with the colored race, in infancy. The religion of these Southerners was largely Old School Presbyterian and "Hard Shell Baptist," and in politics they were with the South.
Besides these two classes of settlers from the South, who influenced the speech of Indiana, and the Scotch- Irish people, there was another vein of immigration. In the uncultured strata of the State there were people of foreign descent who came over the Alleghanies into the richer lands of the Ohio Valley, within the three States of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. They made good settlers for the border States, because they were laborious and dependable, but they spoke the English language in a most barbarous way; much of it incorrectly bunched together by American people as Pennsylvania Dutch. Large numbers of the early settlers, also, had the broad Scotch-Irish dialect. These foreign people added another element to the "folk-speech" of the new West, and a few of them came into Indiana. It was the opinion and prejudices of some of these classes which it was so difficult to counterbalance, by the efforts of the educated people of clear English descent, who came into the State from the East and South. As late as 1850, there were fifty thousand of them who voted against free schools.
It was the speech of these people which came to be known as the Hoosier dialect and it vitiated the English of those about them. They had little learning and scarcely knew how little. They all came from other States and brought their characteristics of speech with them; few, if any, were coined on Indiana soil.
Mr. Hayworth and his collaborator O. G. S., writing in the Indianapolis News, five or six years ago, and
.
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discussing folk-speech in Indiana in the most interesting manner, said many true things, from which we make the following extracts:
"Not only has folk-speech never been uniform through- out Indiana, but exact geographical bounds cannot be given to the Hoosier dialect. The fact is, it has always been true, and never more so than in these days of rapid communication and shifting population, that in nothing is the student of folk-speech so liable to error as in assigning geographical limits to a phrase or word. Our local dialects, as well as the local English dialects from which we get many of our folk words and phrases, are pretty thoroughly mixed. Probably some if not all of the following words and phrases are more frequently used in the benighted regions of Indiana than elsewhere: 'Heap-sight,' as in 'more ground by a heap-sight'; 'juberous,' as in 'I felt mighty juberous about crossin' the river'; 'jamberee,' in the sense of a 'big time'; 'flabbergasted,' i. e., exhausted; 'gangling,' i. e., awkward; 'I mind that,' for 'I remember that.' But the individuality of a dialect is, in fact, far more a result of accent, or of pronunciation, than of the possession of expressions peculiar to itself. As has just been pointed out, Indiana has but few provincialisms that are peculiarly her own. But where else than among these settlers would one hear the long-drawn flatness of the 'a' in such words as 'sasser,' 'saft,' 'pasnips,' etc .? . . . One would hear such a sentence as 'I swum straight acrost the crick, an' kep' agoin' right ahead through the paster, an' clim plum to the top of yan ridge over yander, an' wus consid'rable tired-like comin' down t'other side, but at last got to that air road,' pronounced as a citizen of 'Hoopole kyounty, Injeanny,' would have pronounced it forty years ago. 'Between you and me and the gate-post' is a formula used in impressing the necessity of secrecy. 'When he gits a dollar it's got home' is an admirable description of a stingy man. An old woman from the hills
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of Brown County once expressively described to one of the writers the feelings experienced after a night spent in dancing by saying, 'When I 'us goin' home in the mornin' both sides of the road 'ud belong to me." 1
Mr. Nicholson very truthfully observes that
"it may be fairly questioned whether, properly speaking, there ever existed a Hoosier dialect. A book of colloquial terms could hardly be compiled for Indiana without in- fringing upon prior claims of other and older States, and the peculiarities that were carried westward from tide- water early in the century. The distinctive Indiana countryman, the real Hoosier, who has been little in contact with the people of cities, speaks a good deal as his Pennsylvania or North Carolina or Kentucky grand- parents did before him, and has created nothing new. His speech contains comparatively few words that are peculiar to the State." 2
The origin of the very name of Hoosier, as applied to the settlers of Indiana, is lost in the twilight of the wilderness. Whether it came from a drawling pro- nunciation of "who's-heyer?" or was a corruption of "Hussar," as applied to deserters from the ranks of the hirelings in the British army of the Revolution, is not known. At all events the word has always been used by trans-Alleghany pioneers as a general term to designate a verdant or uncouth person, and later to the outlanders, living across the Ohio River. In time it became attached to the extreme border territory of that period; which happening to be In- diana and Southern Illinois, it clung to that section. The dialect by that name was used by the border
1 Hayworth, Paul L., and O. G. S. Indianapolis News, Aug. 15, 1900.
2 Nicholson, Meredith, Hoosiers. New York, 1900.
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people generally, not alone by the few of them who became residents of Indiana.
After this digression to determine the sources of the backwoods use of English as it was practised in Indiana, and allied districts, we return to the state- ment that the preservation of this passing form of speech, in story and verse, should not be resented by Indianians. The thought, the sentiments, and the environment of the early settlers had been embodied by them in the verses written, in more classic English, by many of the contributors to the "Poet's Corner" in the local papers, and have since been included in permanent collections; but none of them wrote in dialect. In fact, these very earliest writers used Addisonian phrases-the best of evidence that the Hoosier dialect was not universal.
The stories of Mr. Eggleston were the first to fully delineate the life in the hill districts. The dialect in Mr. Eggleston's tales was not so true to life as is that in Mr. Riley's poems, but he gave the true frontier setting in which it occurred, and his characterizations are generally faithful. The actual personalities of the backwoodsmen stand before you. Sometimes he verges on caricature, but in the main, he is true to the life that he is trying to portray. The schoolhouse with its puncheon floor and great fireplace, the scarc- ity of schoolbooks, the rough, unruly, uncouth boys, were the very scenes to which the barefooted pupils went for instruction in the three R's. Mr. Eggleston reproduces vividly the superstitiously religious life of part of the people, as contrasted with the rude royster- ing of their drinking neighbors, of whom they heartily disapproved. He pictures the drawbacks of the bad roads, and the poverty of life's conveniences, and
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necessities as well. He depicts the sensational ex- hortations of the itinerant preachers, and the effect of their hell-and-damnation preaching on their ignorant hearers. He shows the grovelling materialism of the toothless old crone as she smokes her cob pipe by the fireplace and reiterates, "While yur gitten git a plenty, sez I"; pictures the easy-going husband, chopping a handful of wood out in the weather, until the old cracker reappears in all his hereditary shift- lessness. Among these life-like reproductions, he does not neglect to bring out the occasional poetic soul, always found amongst the rudest people-a young girl, or youth, born amid such discouraging surroundings, trying to develop according to the longings within their isolated natures. All these are actual pictures of real neighborhoods, happily passing into oblivion, and even now only history.
"I call him the first of the Hoosiers," writes George Cary Eggleston, of his older brother, "because he was the first to perceive and utilize in literature the pic- turesqueness of the Hoosier life and character, to appreciate the poetic and romantic possibilities of that life, and invite others to share with him his enjoyment of its humor and his admiration for its sturdy man- liness."1 It may be regretted that untravelled people take Eggleston's stories of backwoods life, nearly extinct a half-century ago, as a reflection of present conditions in Indiana cities, just as Europeans do Fenimore Cooper's Indian stories of New York State- but that must pass. The grammar, the quaint terms, the peculiar pronunciations, the nasal drawl of all the dialect stories seem picturesque to a new gen- eration, but that dialect was a menace to the speech
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