GENERAL TOPICS

“We be a’needin’ better government in this area.” The words still rang in Lige’s ears as he turned his mule and headed up the holler. Chick Allen had just told him the constable had sent word for them to, “Cut the ropes and let Rosco loose. That they weren’t aiming to carry him halfway across the state.” Why, they hadn’t had Rosco tied up and ready for the law to pack off, and they wouldn’t do a thing. Seven months later Lige was summoned to court over to Jackson, fifty miles away, because of the murder case. There was too much fussing and feuding in these rugged hills of Kentucky in the late 1800’s to leave a man sitting easy. It was paining Lige to leave Clarie with the six children and it being planting time. At best, it would be five days for going out and back and a day for court. To top it off, Lige knew there was trouble brewing in their home. What was a man to do?

The year was 1949 . and for those who called the Appalachian Mountains home, it would be a year filled with unforgettable events. Not only was it one of the hottest summers on record--which was cool compared to the upcoming sheriff's election--it was the year Ida Mae Duncan came of age. The restless daughter of a sharecropper, Ida Mae was in search of a more exciting way of life. She just kept looking in the wrong places.

The late Harry M. Caudill saw the land and people of Appalachia with an unflinching eye. His classic, Night Comes to the Cumberlands, follows the long road traveled by the Southern mountaineer. His biography of the Cumberland Plateau begins in the violence of Indian wars and ends in the economic despair of the 1950s and 1960s. Two hundred years ago, the plateau was a land of promise. The deep, twisting valleys contained rich bottomlands; the mountainsides, teeming with game, produced mighty timber. Some of the people who settled this land in the eighteenth century may have come from the slums of England, but they became intrepid explorers like Simon Kenton and Jim Bridger. They lived by scratch farming, hunting , and making moonshine whiskey. The Civil War ravaged their land, leaving in its wake a legacy of hate which erupted in the great Kentucky mountain feuds and continued in the "Moonshine Wars" of the Prohibition era. In the late nineteenth century, the coal men came into the isolated valleys and easily persuaded the mountaineers to sign away their mineral rights for pitifully smalls sums. The countryside was then systematically plundered in what constitutes one of the ugliest eras of exploitation in American history. At the time it was written, Night Comes to the Cumberlands framed an urgent appeal to the American conscience. Today it details Appalachia's difficult past, and, at the same time, presents an accurate historical backdrop for a contemporary understanding of the Appalachian region that Harry M. Caudill loved so dearly and served so well.

In a supplement to his The American Language, H.L. Mencken encapsulated the early history of Kentucky: "What is now Kentucky was the first region beyond the mountains to be settled. Pioneers began to invade it before the Revolution, and by 1782 it had more than 30,000 population. It was originally a part of Virginia, and the effort to organize it as an independent state took a great deal of politicking." Kentuckian and lawyer Harry M. Caudill grew up in the coal fields of Letcher County. His book Slender is the Thread reflects the history of a state whose citizens had to labor for their sustenance. Caudill's chapters reflect the mighty story of poor European immigrants struggling on primitive land and in wild mountains to survive, reproduce, and find sustenance for themselves and their households. Their frontier experience attuned the people to weak governments, self-help, quick wrath, and long memories, and revealed the influences that gave the state and its people their reputation for contented ignorance, colorful individualism, crankiness, self-reliance, contempt for court decisions, deadliness with gun and knife, and quirky and corrupt politics. Spun from the experiences of his law office, Caudill was one of the great storytellers with a keen eye for the unexpected detail and ear for the unique turn of phrase. He denounced scoundrels, praised courage and justice wherever he found it, and celebrated the frailty of the human condition. Time goes on and stories of Kentucky and its people accumulate, and Caudill's stories help shape the thoughts and inspire the actions of the Kentuckians of tomorrow.

In 1963, Harry M. Caudill published his now classic account of the reckless, deliberate despoliation of the Appalachian Plateau, "Night Comes to the Cumberlands." Thirteen years later, in "The Watches of the Night," Caudill continued the heartbreaking story of an incredibly rich land inhabited by a grindingly poor people whose problems, despite state and local aid and an unprecedented boom in coal, had worsened: the land was being stripped more rapidly than ever; the people's traditional relationship with the land was being uprooted, and their old customs eliminated by standardization. Both a narrative history and a polemic against greed and waste, "The Watches of the Night" hammers at "the profligacy growing out of the persistent myth of superabundance." The author ponders an even darker future if the cycle of boom and bust is not broken. He writes: "Americans have never understood or respected the finely textured, little-hill terrain of the Cumberland Plateau." Neither the farmers nor the miners who followed the early pioneers saw it as a place to cherish. Through decades that have lengthened to nearly two centuries the land has fought back, sometimes with savage floods and always with persistent efforts to reforest. "But now time runs out and our 'inexhaustible' resources have turned finite....The Kentucky Cumberlands are many things, but most of all they are a warning.

A regional love story set in the hills of Tennessee against a backdrop of mystery and racial misunderstanding. Dave, a young lumberjack, falls in love with Deutsia, a Melungeon girl. Her people are shunned by the valley people and the relationship splits the lifetime friendship of Dave and his best friend, Ben. Edited and preface written by John H. Spurlock and the afterword by Brent Kennedy.

A collection of short stories by Jesse Stuart, a novelist, poet, and short-story writer whose works focused on eastern Kentucky hill life. Head o' W-Hollow is Stuart's first book of short stories and remains haunting, powerful, and humorous.

The story of a young mountain girl who aspires to follow in her older sister's footsteps. This action-filled novel will lead you into a life of adventure that only a girl growing up in the Appalachian Mountains would encounter. You will surely enjoy the unpredictable escapades in this continuing saga of the Duncan family.

A dead psychic on Halloween night. Heroin filtering into the town’s schools. A sullen ex-con with a beef of his own, and a legislator with secrets to protect. Not what homicide detective Claudia Hershey expected when she moved to Indian Run, a smudge on Florida’s map. But there’s no turning back when the killer makes things personal.

JACONA is a story about the early years of the American Southwest - a beautiful but cruel land. It depicts life in early Santa Fe and tells about those heroic Spanish pioneers, men and women, who lived, rode with, and conquered the three pernicious horsemen of famine, pestilence, and war.