Oral History Interview with Marvin Gullett

MARVIN GULLETT May 12, 1977

[Begin Interview]

Interviewer: This is May twelfth, and we’re talking with Mr. Gullett in (Vizzy?), Kentucky.

Gullett: Yeah, mountain way of life, the Old Regular Baptists. People, you know, in the early times did, you know, at one time, had a strong taste for religion. Most everybody come in here, they’d kill you at the drop of a hat, but at the same time, they, they believed the old preacher could help them get repentance. So like they said, the devil lost a good right arm the day I was baptized in Cedar Creek, you know. The old feudists, you know, they’d kill a man like Devil John Wright, but before he died, he got religion. And many was a great crowd that was there, you know. He lived up near the head of the river, around Jenkins. Well, he’d had the feuds with Clay Jones, the different ones, you know. He finally was forced to flee into Virginia and died there, in southwest Virginia. Well, his old friend, Todd Hall, was hung there at Coburn, you know, for shooting the sheriff there. But back to all these people now that come in there, they was wild and reckless people, and lived a wild life. But that’s before the coal mines was opened up. The first mine was open to Jenkins. See, Devil John forced some of his neighbors to sell their land to the coal companies that they might have the royalties and, and the leases, you know. He got five thousand dollars for his, for his part, even at a dollar an acre. If he had bought, he owned thousands of acres of land. Well, that was first, you know, the C & O finally served that country first before the L & N was built, you know, coming up from Lexington this way. We lived in the valley of the north fork, you know, that was the head of the river, Neon to Jenkins.

Gullett: Well, that Millstone Gap and Pine Gap is a very historical place. For in there was where the mountain people first come and settled at Cornich [?], you know, settled the big [?] woods. And before they even come [came] to live they, they brought their seed and, and planted it to see where it would sprout good, and whether they could grow stuff good in Kentucky or not. Well, the Combses come to Hazard, you know, the later called, named after Oliver Hazard Perry, you know. It was an old log town there many years ago. It’s the Eversoles and the, and the Combses was the first settlers in Perry County, a very ancient family. Well, the Eversoles were full stock Dutch. They’d come here, the first one, Jacob Eversole, couldn’t speak a word of English. But he become an old country preacher and a circuit rider. He started preaching when he was twenty-five years old, lived to be a hundred and eight. And during that time, he went through a great feud. He, he was a man of peace and didn’t want to fight. But many of his sons was involved in, like Young Jim, Jim was his oldest son. He had four sons. There was John, Pres, and Jim, and another one or two, I forget their names. Pres was one of them. And when he’d see the men coming, the man coming to kill him, you know, he’d be plowing in the fields. He handed his plow lines over to his son and said, “Jim, take the old mules, that I’ve got to run for my life.” And he’d run, hide out in the woods. The old preacher didn’t want to fight. But he was the head of the clan. Well, he lived through all that, and the killing got so bad, neighbors took sides so bad, that finally Clay Jones was appointed by the governor of Kentucky to come in settle the fuel. And he also settled up the Wright feud, also. But while he was in here, that was along about 8, 1896 or somewhere along there. Way back, you know. And the old man, Herb Eversole, would hide out in the woods and get his water out of a stump, live under cliffs back then. So, my wife tells me. That was her grandfather. Now this is, this is true history. He didn’t get much of a[n] education, Jim didn’t, because all the schools they got was under a cliff with an old country schoolteacher would pass through. And taught him how to, you know, sign his name, read, and write a little bit. And later on, though, as we was talking about, down there around Hazard, that was being developed all the time.

Gullett: The Civil War come along, you know, in eighteen and, eighteen and fifty, fifty-one, you see. Sixty-one, I mean. Well, out of that, they made a lot of grievances come up. What caused most of these feuds from the Civil War, you know. Most of the, most of the people in the mountains didn’t ever agree with the war. They, they believed in free men. Even colored men had a right, you know, as a human being. They said he had a soul, and they thought it was wrong to, to sell a man, a human being, like a horse and a mule, you know. They could understand that. They’d been indentured servants who come in here many years ago to get away from debts in England and Ireland. And they felt like a man’s life was his own. He had the right to the pursuit of happiness. So, when they came in here, they, they’s [they are] very warlike people. They had to subdue the Indians, like Jenny Wiley you know that lived at, there at Paintsville on the, on the Licking River. There, many years ago, on the Big Sandy, I mean, she lived on the Big Sandy. Well, the Indians made raids and they captured them, they [?] captive found out . That’s up in Whitesburg you know, where the Virginia line is. They kept her captive in caves a long time. She bore a child or two and finally escaped from the Indians and came back to her husband. Well, this is before the days of the feuds, before people come in and discovered what great, what great country this was, you know. So wild and free, and so much good timber, so much good land. They didn’t realize then exactly though all they had. They didn’t know was under the ground laid billions of dollars’ worth of coal. Ex-, extended by, beyond even any imagination. A person couldn’t imagine what lay underground. So later on these, after the feuds was all over, and, and, and these speculators come in, like John C. Mayo, but he lived at Ashland and come up buying coal leases, you know. And people thought well, we get fifty cents an acre, we’re rich. Maybe they have six to eight hundred acres of land, and maybe some of them had two, three thousand acres. Whole coals in hollers, we call them hollers. Well, they bought this land for fifty cents an acre for all that was under the ground for a hundred years. And there we get something that they refer to now as the right of eminent domain. The coal operators could exploit that land for a hundred years and take whatever they found under the soil.

Gullett: If it was coal, gas, or whatever it might be. Well, through these many years it’s been exploited. And that was a virgin land at that time. And a wonderful land. People can’t imagine. But the old timers I’ve talked with, my grandfather and people, said that never was a freer life ever known at that time. It was, everybody was self-sufficient. They didn’t depend on stores. They used to have everything they need, and they made their own clothes and everything. They had their sheep and their spinning wheels and their--and their looms, and they made their clothes and quilts, whatever they needed. Everything else, they raised on the farm. Well, there’s kind of a barter system back then. One farmer raised so much any, of anything, why he’d trade his stuff to something he needed, you know. See, he’d trade so much corn for a mule, or so much for a cow. And that way, everybody helped one another, you know. They lived pretty close harmony. Until the bad men come in. Some that was killers, you know, and exploiters of others. You always had bad men. Well people like that was called bad because they’d done lot of murdering. Most people shunned them, they were afraid of them, you know. Well, like, like Devil John, some was so mean, they called them “Devil,” you know. One they called Devil John Wright, another was called Devil John, Devil Anse Hatfield, that lived in Mingo County, in West Virginia. Well, the Hatfield-McCoy feud was raging pretty near about the time that Devil John was doing all his depredations. Some people said he killed as many as twenty, thirty men, but nobody knows the true number. For back then, people was killed on mountain trails and left lying there. They, they’s—[there is] no law in the mountains. He finally got himself appointed to something like a federal marshal or something like that, that, like out west you know, they killed with impunity.

Gullett: Well, some of the people, you know, back in those days, they, they didn’t want to sell their land to the operators. They, that is, the land buyers at that time, buying the leases for the coal. Why they would say, “John, I don’t want to sell my land.” And he’d force some of them, coerce some of them, into selling. Because he sold his land. And he’s made overseer over the land that operators had bought, you see. They made him overseer. Well in that way, all the first of the river that was called Elkhorn seam of coal, the best coal, was found on, on, in the (Agit?) field, was sold first. But they’d already worked on the Virginia side, and it had been sold out. And the railroad built the spurs to get the coal out. It was called the Chesapeake & Ohio, got that coal, and hauled it out. But there come [came] a panic along about the 1890s, and all the, the companies went broke and bankrupt. There’s where you find that, the sequel to it, in the “Trail of the Lonesome Pine.” The story of Jack Hale. The mining engineering surveyor. They come in and surveyed the coal. You know, got it staked off the land and learned how much they had. Now the coal operators knew, but the men didn’t know that later on, theys [they are] being financed from London, these coal companies was. London, England, Wall Street, New York. It was the capital financed it. Well, the men was in here, like John C. Mayo, the man that bought the land, and the speculators, they, they was financed from money from, from overseas, a lot of it was. But even they went broke, you know. They come a panic along about in the 1890s. And, and some of the, some of the coal mines just closed down and the tipples rotted away. Well, the old mining shacks they built for the workers, they rotted away. Just something kind of like got in the ‘30s, after 1929, the 1929 crash, was something like that. The coal business was always up and down, even in the first days of coal, when they needed it so bad. Now before this time, though, some, they’d learned to dig some coal, the settlers had. But most of the time, they burned wood, didn’t know what coal was worth. And they shipped it out with a bushel down the Kentucky River, the North Fork, down to Frankfort. And sold it for eight cents a bushel. But later on, you know when the railroads come, they hauled out millions of tons. By nineteen and twenty-six, they produced six million tons in the Hazard field.

Gullett: Because there’s so many little, small companies, you know, that just put up on a shoestring. And then when ’29 come, they, a lot of them went broke. They didn’t have any capital to back them. But some of the mines, like Blue Diamond, is a great corporation. They survived that. And (Julrie’s?) Mining Company in Letcher, and different big camps, they worked on, you know. But the small mining camps went under. Well that caused awful hard times on the miners, for all the way of life they’d had. They’d been farmers. Nearly all miners at one time or another had been a farmer. Some of them come though from the outside of the world, like Greeks and Italians, foreigners come in here to work. They’d come to the New World and thought well, when we get to America, we’ll find a paradise. But they found out that it’s hard labor like in the Old Country. And they come in here and settled, and, and this very hard life. Some of them even, even longed for the Old Country to go back. They couldn’t make enough money to get passage to go home. I’ve known many foreigners like that that lived around the camps and worked. And he’d talk of Romania, Bulgaria, somewhere, as being a wonderful country, but don’t go back. They had good government there then, it wasn’t like when he left, you know. But he said, “These mountains awful hard. Hard to make a living here.” Well back in those days, people got so hard up in the Hoover days, after the 1929 crash come, that the coal tipples rotted down and the men was naked and barefoot. Well along about that time, the union come along. For years, in the ‘20s, they’d been trying to organize a union to gain human rights. Well, I remember very well I went along to the union meetings and my dad, he’s a coal miner, he’d worked for many years in the mines. And he called it yellow dog contract work. People worked like dogs and slaves, (?) slaves. They can be industrial slavery as well as, as the colored people was before the Civil War, you know. Now the ones they’s [they are] in industrial bondage, you worked as many hours as the company wanted you, and if you dropped dead, they didn’t care. There’s always somebody to take their place. The Appalachian Mountains always had a great surplus of labor, always did have. And the people raised large families. Even though many of them mi-,migrate, you know, you never missed the people, somebody’s always taking their place.

Interviewer: [ ] One thing that, one guy who’s written a novel, I don’t know whether you know him, Sherburne Stand Like Men, have you ever seen that novel?

Gullett: What’s the name of it?

Interviewer: Stand Like Men.

Gullett: Stand Like Men. No, I’ve not seen that novel.

Interviewer: Okay, that’s one you ought to read. But this, it’s, it’s, the novel’s, the story takes place in 1932 or three.

Gullett: ’32, that was a hard year, I remember it.

Interviewer: It was extremely hard times.

Gullett: Yeah, I remember it. Starvation time.

Interviewer: The United Mine Workers Union...

Gullett: Yeah, I lived through it.

Interviewer: ...deserted the people. And a Communist-affiliated group came in, the National Mine Workers.

Gullett: I knew it well. Yes, yes, sure.

Interviewer: Ok, ok, I hope you do, because Sherburne says that there is what he calls a collective amnesia on this period, that people won’t remember that he says. He had...

Gullett: They wanna block some things. They do, yes, that’s right.

Interviewer: Okay. Tell us about it. Those were hard times. Awful hard.

Gullett: Oh, God, you can’t imagine, unless you lived through it. Uh, uh.

Interviewer: Tell us about it.

Gullett: I did. It’s a very hard upbringing I had. Well, at that time, I was about fifteen, sixteen years old, in ’32. That was, was speaking of, that was a very hard year. It was the year that Roosevelt was elected, wasn’t it. Well, people had their hopes set on Roosevelt. He said he’d remember the forgotten man and give the miners the right to organize. Well, John L. Lewis lead them, well, there was rival unions that did come in, they’s [there are] some company-dominated unions even put up their outfits, you know, nominated by the company. And some of them called themselves a labor union, that. They do this day, some, the United Mine Workers said it’s a company-dominated union. Although now, they pay just about as much as the other union does, to cut out the competition. But in our time, people was afraid to join the union. They’d been browbeaten so much by the companies that they’s [they are] afraid they couldn’t get another job. And the company had the power to blackball a person, blacklist a man. If he was too active in the union, he was a, he couldn’t get a job anywhere else. When the company fired him, he, he couldn’t get a job in the coal mine. I remember very well many men that was, like Granny Witt, was his name, they called him Granny. He worked at the Harvey Mining Company. My dad worked with him. And he was one of the committee members trying to organize a union, and they, he never could work anymore in the mines. Derrick Hall was another one. He lost his job, and he told me, told me later, said it’s the best service ever I had, said that I learned to do other work, left here, and got a good job and done well. But he said, “Now in the mines, I worked like a job, and nobody thanked me.” He said, “The men let me down. They wouldn’t stand by me. And, and I, and they blackball me from the union.” From the company, I mean. “They wouldn’t let me work. They blacklisted me.” The mining companies blacklisted him, you see. Couldn’t get a job anywhere else. He went to Tennessee and [ ] couldn’t get a job. Well, some of the men know how to, they know that as liv-, as a root hog’d [hog would] die, they had to organize, or they was all going to starve. So, I remember they’s getting Hoover relief back then, what they called it. Oh, it was bacon and, and cornmeal and flour and stuff like that, did keep them from starving, kindly.

Gullett: But some men was so ragged, I remember, in those days, that they didn’t, clothes wouldn’t hardly cover their body. And some of them made jokes about it, patches on top of patches. And they’d take anything they could find. Some people only had gravy and bread to take in the mines for their lunch. A few mines that was working, 70 percent of the mines was closed down in the Hazard field. There’s only a few, some of the great corporations had plenty of money back, and they worked on. The ones that had the best coal. At that time, they could sell only block coal for theys [that they] used up north for heating purposes, you know, where they burn gas and oil now. And the great iron mills, you know, at Cleveland, and the Great, the Great Lakes states, they depended on that. To ship the coal, they got the lake trade, you know. Every spring, when the ice thawed up on the lakes, the, the ore boats come down, you know, from the Mesabi Range. Brought the iron ore down from Minnesota. Well, the coal had to meet the iron there. And, and the Hazard field sup-, supplied the, the coal to make the steel at that time. They made all the coal. Well, the great coal ovens in Virginia furnished a lot of the coal. They had a good kind of coke and coal. They didn’t coke so much coal when they had the field, they sent it in raw form. But com-, company like Blue Diamond they become a, a big conglomerate. You see, they had different companies. They didn’t go broke at all. They had capital. Old William Bondman was the president of the company. He’s a good man, according to his men, and let them organize a union. But after they got the union, they brought in company doctors the men wouldn’t accept. And they, and they had to bell some, and put cowbells around their neck, and send them out of the country with a cowbell. Old Dr. Payne, I’ll never forget him, he become a good friend to me later on. Some the men that put the bell on me, saved your lives later on. He come back. He wouldn’t stay away. They sent him into Breathitt County, going along the road, that cowbell jingling.

Gullett: And, but he was a nervy man. He come back and still work and the men finally accepted him. And I never will forget, when I got sick, he said, “I’ll, I’ll wait on you for nothing.” Said, “I’ve known your family all my life. And your daddy was a good man.” Said, “I won’t charge you a penny.” He’s good to the poor, made a good man out of him after his bells. But during the war, he had to go off to the war, and they got a man, this place, he sold his practice out to a man named Dr. Knox, a one-eyed doctor. Well, he had pity on all the disabled man, cause he’s one eye. He let a lot of men work the mines. At that time, you had to about pass the army examination to work in the mines. Only the, only some of us could survive, because a disabled man didn’t have a chance. Well, as I remember well, times got better after, along about ’35, the mines picked up. And there was a great demand for coal. We got the defense effort, you know, to fight Germany. We, we realized in a vague sort of way, the American people realized, they’d find that fight Germany. And next is Paris. So, I remember well when the great defense effort was going, you could go up through the Middle West, and all the great factories was belching smoke, you know, from that coal. That was the main product. Coal was king then. Well, it went on to the miners, they put out, they put out a billion tons a year, that was their goal. And they reached that goal. Every man was able to work, they hired even crippled men, finally, to take them in the mines. They’s [They are] so much loss, you know, from the death rate, so many got killed and injured. [coughs] but the union was a lifesaver. After they got the union, they could, they had any grievance against the company, they presented it, you know, in the union meetings. But some of the men was traitors, even among the union. They’ve always been traitors on earth, the Judas you know. One’d be a spy. He’d go to those union meetings; he’d run to the company boss. I knew men like that. My dad’s brother-in-law was like that, his mine foreman. He got to be what we call a jackleg foreman, little old small fellow, you know. Kind of the overseer.

Gullett: He’d go there and he’d, what went on union meeting, he’d go and tell the boss what was said, the superintendent. Well, that way, you know, the union couldn’t keep a secret. And the men, some of them would say, yeah, they’d back down when they’d all stick together. If it comes to a national strike, they did have to stick together. And many of the strike I’ve seen in the spring, the mines would close down, John L. Lewis say, “No contract, no work.” The mines’d [mines had] close down, every one of them. And we’d have to go through starvation nearly while waiting to get some money. They’d give you just enough money, the union could, they didn’t have too big a treasury. That’s before they got this royalty on coal, you know. They’d give you just enough to keep you from starving to death. Well, I seen one old man one time was watching for the supply truck to come in. He says, “Boy,” says, “I see ‘visions coming.” He meant provisions. Says, “We’ll have something to eat tonight.” The strike got settled, you know, in time. But the men, the miners, you know, back at that time, there’s many a company land, you know, round about where they mine in the mining camp. And they’d tell the men you can farm all the land you want, clear up the land. And a lot of people made little gardens. What did the miners. They start this during Depression days. People went to farming up the, clearing up the hillsides, you know, and planting little gardens. And that kept them from starving. But they, the lazy ones, and the shiftless ones, finally had to leave out of this country. Some of those was for the betterment. The hoboes caught trains, freight trains. And went, some of them went up north, and never did come back. It was a great migration, outgoing at that time. Some people said as, theys [they are] high as ten thousand people left the Hazard field. Well, they had to leave because there’s nothing here to work at. The mines were all closed down, and they didn’t know whether they’d ever work again, you know. Some people was hopeless. But some of the brave men, the braver ones, had always had they, was raised in the mountains here, and they didn’t want to leave their native country. They’s[ They are] something about the Appalachian man that he loves the soil like, like the Russian loves Holy Mother Russia.

Gullett: Just like the German loves the fatherland, something like that. The native soil. It’s not that it’s worth that much to the outsider, but to him, that is home and kin. That was where he was born, and where he wanted to die, die, and be buried at, see. [phone rings] And a lot of people can’t understand that. [phone ringing] And, well I mean, some people, you know, like people in the Middle West, they’re always used to a good living, they, they didn’t quite live the country that good. Some of them would be abstainers, [ ], they’d say, “Well, we’ve always had plenty, and we conquered this land, we subdued it and made the good farming land. Why should we worry about it?” It wasn’t anything like the Appalachian Mountains. That is their birthplace, and they valued it high. Although it was the poorest country at, at one time in the world. My grandfather used to say it was poor man’s country. But he said, “There’s one thing we got here is independence.” Says, “We have more freedom from the law. We have more freedom from interference.” But way back, he’s an old hard-shell Republican. He’d say, “Roosevelt’s ways are going to get us in a, going to take away the people’s rights, the mountain people lose their rights.” Well, nobody did believe it at that time. But finally, they got the state income tax, and then their social security tax come in, and all these taxes on the miners, cut off. Well, the company always had, had a cut-off system that they made them pay for their house and lights and everything, energy, you know. The coal, had to paid for it just like they did on the outside. Lots of times be a higher rate. The rate, the coal mined they had to buy it. The company didn’t furnish anything that way free; you paid for everything. They called it the cut-off system. Well, they took out the taxes, the miner didn’t have much left when he got his payday, you see. Because until the union come along, he’d barely make ends meet. I’ve known Daddy work sixteen, eighteen hours at a time without stopping. Double shifting, they called it. Work night and day both. Well of course, if he hadn’t been a strong man and a brave man and a, and a very nervy one, he’d have broke[n] down under strain. But he always told us to never go in that black hole. I know, he didn’t, stygian blackness [ ]. You can’t imagine, unless you go in a coal mine, how dark it is in there. How gruesome it is.

Interviewer: Except you went in.

Gullett: Yeah, but I don’t come [ ] because I had to live, had to make a living. First time I went in that mine, I, it was awful. It wasn’t enough air in there. Had that carbon monoxide gas, you know, that, or dioxide, you might call it. That, not methane gas, but the kind of black damp you’d get down on, see. And they caught you by stealth, you know. You couldn’t tell it was there, and first thing you know, you get weak in your legs. Well, the mine was so big, they didn’t have enough ventilation system. But many of a man had to be hauled out passed out, you know. Well, as long as he had his friends in there, had enough food to eat, we could work, you know, and hold up good. But when that black damp hit you, you didn’t last long. I felt myself getting weak many of a day. I know I couldn’t stand it. Daddy was cut out to be a miner, but I said I’m getting out of here as soon as I can pay off the mortgage on my home. I’m leaving it. But Daddy stood it thirty-two years. And up until he died, he, he said, “Oh, if I could go back to the good old days, when I first went to work at Bonnemann. How happy people was at the mining camp at that time. How close they were. Like brothers. All these men seemed like brothers. Many a one I’ve helped put away the clays that took him up to the hillside and helped bury them.” He lived through the 1917 flu, or 1918, when the great flu came around. So many miners died, they couldn’t, they had to close the mines down. They had to bury people every day. Whole families died. But, he said, some of them was the dearest people and the best people he’d ever known, for they was the frontier type. Unless you’ve seen these rugged men, you can’t imagine what the first men was like that lived in here. Original settlers. Now I’ve seen some of them, the Kilburnes and the Crawfords and the Combs, some of them great, powerful men. Right big rangy men they was, not runty like us. They, they’d, they was descended from the first ancestors of, of ours that come in here, you see.

Gullett: All these men here. And they, they didn’t fear nothing that come, you know. But most of these old landowners, these, the old farmers, they stuck to farming. They never go in the mines, although they sold timber to the mines, and they sold the mineral leases. But they’d say, “The mines is not for me. I’ll, God meant for me to die on the outside and I’ll never go inside that hole.” They called it black hole, which it was. But the mining population to them, you know, that meant wages in their pocket. They’d work for a dollar a day, and fifty cents a day, on the farm, and that seemed pretty good to them. Well, Dad was raised in Magoffin County, but when you first come up here, it was all like a tribe. We all travel together. My mother was a Patrick, there’s the Patricks and the Haneys, different ones. And after Dad got a job in the mines, that whoever come in, you know, from the outlying counties, farming counties, he’d help him get a job, you know. Know the boss pretty well, and they liked him back then. There was a comradeship between the boss at that time. The ones who was good workers were rewarded. Compared to the others, Daddy was a good worker. He’d say, “[ ] don’t have to sign the yellow dog contract. Don’t tell the other men that you didn’t sign it, cause if you do, you’ll, I’ll have to blacklist you.” Well, Daddy said, “I’ll die before I’ll sign that yellow dog contract. I know what it means.” And he said, “Don’t tell this to none of the other men,” he come around and talk to him. Well, he’d get jobs for these farming people, they come up here. Some of them wouldn’t work long, you know, they was used to the farm. Slow and easy pace. You couldn’t get fifteen, sixteen ton a day in there, why the company would, you had to get tonnage. They wouldn’t keep you long.

Interviewer: Okay. Slow and easy pace. When you say, you, you spoke of the work of the miner as an art form.

Gullett: It is. It is.

Interviewer: Could you elaborate on that.

Gullett: Well, to become a good miner, the first thing on the wall when you went in the mine, if you’d been a farmer, never been inside a coal mine, which most the Appa-, Achi, Appalachian people had been subsistence farmers, what they called subsistence farming back then. But people don’t realize that they farm pretty heavy back then, they’d raise great crops. Clear to the tops of the mountains. And they fed their own stock and fed their own, their families that way. But when they come to the mines, even farm work was, was light compared to it, because as hard a drudge as the farm was, the industrial work was much harder. When they went in the mine, you know, there was the danger as well as the hard toil. If you weren’t learn[ing] the trade pretty quick, you wouldn’t last long, because he had to learn all the safety rules. They didn’t have too many back then, but you had to put your safety timber in first thing. The timber stood in the center of the mine, the, the face of the coal, right where you had to work. You had to work right up next to the face of the coal, they called it. The coal was drilled and shot back in the early days by black powder. Well, it near-, kindly cracked the coal. It didn’t entirely break it up in blocks. You had to pry at that with an iron bar after it was cracked.

Interviewer: Now I’m not talking about the technique. I’m talking about that rhythm that you had to get into, that art form, to survive, to, to make your work more restful. That’s what I want to...

Gullett: Oh, yeah. They was a, there was a slight, we called it a slight, the mountain people does, to do anything you do to get the, no wasted effort, no wasted movement. Well, you had to learn that. Otherwise, you’d work yourself to death and you couldn’t get any tonnage. Now some men had the knack of it. Some men could load fifty ton a day. I knew a man, and the old man’s been dead for years, his name was Bob Linden. He loaded fifty tons a day. And he could, as much as three men could load. But he had some art about it; he never stopped. He kept his shovel in a steady rhythm. And they loaded the mine cars back then, they, most of the coal they worked with high coal, about six foot high. You could stand up pretty well in that. But later on, they had to work the low veins, a man had to work on his hands and knees a whole lot, and he couldn’t get too much tonnage, unless you was an awful good loader. But there was one man named John Smedley, too. Some people called him Snowball. He was a great miner. He’d load fifty tons a day at Blue Diamond. But he couldn’t hold up long that. He soon broke his back. He get down and he was almost paralyzed. He couldn’t hold up at it. I’ve seen old Bob with his hand swelled up. Before he’d load coal, he’d come to our house and say, “Cal, this is a slave’s life. Look at my hands.” Hands’d [Hands would] be swell, swollen where he’d work so hard. He never stopped with a shovel. Now there’s a lot of men that they learn the slot at, what it was they got the [ ] as you say, just like on a factory job, an assembly line, you know. If you had to move fast, if you wasted effort in there, your time would get away from you. It’d soon be quitting time, and you wouldn’t have any coal loaded. Course you got paid by the car, by the ton, see? If you didn’t, lots of times it wasn’t more than twelve or fifteen cents a ton in Depression days. Got down as low as thirteen cents a ton. Well, if you wasn’t a good loader, there’s a whole lot of art to it, there was a[n] art to it, just like any other job. If I build a house, if I put up a barn or anything, and I’m an amateur, I’ve got to learn the slight of it or the art of it or I would do a bad job, always.

Interviewer: What...

Gullett: The more, the slight of it, it’s called. The mountain people call it to learn the slight of anything. Slight of hand, you know, learn how to do a thing fast. Slight. They call it slight of the job. Say if you was a good corn holer, you owed long, worked on the farm that they was slight knowing you could cover twice as much ground as another man. Cause you made every lick count, and didn’t fool along too much, you know. Make, cut more weeds with a swat than other men did, see. That man was always in good demand. He could get a dollar a day, maybe, where the other man’d [man would] get fifty cents. Because he’d do the work of two men. Well, the coal mines [are] the same way. Worked on the same system, see. The, the people that worked in the Appalachian Mountains was always a, a hearty breed, you know. You couldn’t get them down with work. The air was more pure[r] back then. Very few got sick. Not too many. A few old cripples. Some with [ ] diseases, they couldn’t work the mines. But most of the men were strong and able. And they had a nerve that went with it, too. Where they’d face death so much around the moonshine stills and the, and the hard life of feuding and fighting their neighbors that they wasn’t afraid, see? They weren’t afraid to face death, it meant a live-, a livelihood for the family. So, they went in these mines. They had the will to work, most of them did. But if he was a lazy guy, he didn’t last long. Because the boss would, would fire a man two or three days. Now my, my, my mother had a cousin come to work for us. He’s a bad man from Magoffin County, dangerous man. His name is Charlie Harvey. He’d killed two or three men and was sentenced to death one time and escaped. Well, he come to our house, and he had his face half shot away in a shotgun blast with, with some of the people he’s feuding with. And the boss wouldn’t hire him because half his face was shot away. He says, “I can’t work a man with half a face.” Well, Charlie got so mad he lay--laid him for a week, tried to kill that boss. But he never could get up with him. Well, he finally went back to Magoffin County and left him alone. But as we say, he probably would have worked the mines--no how [way], for he’s a natural born thief. See, he lived by making whiskey and moonshining. But the good workers would come in that wasn’t moonshiners and want to get back there and work hard. They made good workers. Well, they had a lifetime job, if they want, with the coal company. One old man, old Big Lige Caldwell, he worked thirty years for a mine, and then they bought him a suit of clothes to show their appreciation, at Blue Diamond. He’s a giant of a man, big man, you know, worked hard every day. Never missed a day’s work in all that time they’d go out and work. If you wasn’t a good worker and couldn’t get your cars, now, you know, in the, in the mines you had to get so many cars a day, or you wouldn’t last long. They’s—[they would]--you’d get fired. Or if you load too much slate, you was fired. You had to pick the slate out of the coal as you went. That’s one thing slowed the miner down a whole lot. But the men, those old miners are desperate for the family. A lot of them had ten, fifteen kids, and had to work hard. He had to go for the break of day to the mine and walk in the mine. They didn’t haul them back then. You walk to the face of the coal. When you went in, you had your breast auger before they got cutting machines. And you had to take that and some drill your coal, shoot your own coal. You had to have your own explosive. You had to buy your dynamite or Daddy used to use what they called monte bell way back. It’s a form of dynamite that, he was an expert shot for them and he learned how to make, make it bring the coal better, how to tap it in good till it had full force. If he’d have been living today, and been a tourist, he’d have been an expert dynamiter, he knows exactly how to make it, get the charge, how to make it go off good [well].

Interviewer: What is the monte bell?

Gullett: Monte bell was a form of, of TNT that was derived some kind of, almost like, like the burglars use. They call [ ]. It’s more powerful than that regular dynamite was. It’s some extract they made in the early days they learned in mining that brought the coal outwards, throwed the coal out more and had more force, you know. It had, it’s not that it’s any cheaper, just more effective. Later, toward the end of mining, Daddy shot Carduck shells. He use[d] to shot [shoot] what they’d called Carduck, Carduck’s gas. These great canisters like the shell they use in the army. Like an artillery shell. This canister was full of gas. And you had to, you shot it from a machine of a thing. Sit up there, and they did the face of the coal with a great crash. And it, it busted that coal in such force that it cracked the coal. Actually, been cut, undercut by a cutting machine. You know, what they call a mining machine that we called coal cutting machine in the mine, had cutter bars. It’d cut the top of the coal, even if it’s a bottom machine, it’d cut from the bottom, it was the top that mine the coal where, where they call it–

[End Tape One, Side A. Begin Side B.]

Gullett: Yeah. Well, a lot of the miners that was living, old miners back then, been, a lot of them died and passed on with that black lung stuff. They got occupational disease. [ ] shortened some of their lives. But some of them died not too old. Fifty-five and sixty. [ ] but some of the old timers passed out. They couldn’t remember well. Although I’m fifty-eight, soon to be fifty-nine, I can remember well when they had the trouble in Harlan, though. I was about eighteen years old, seventeen or eighteen, and I’m fifty-eight now. So, I remember that very well.

Interviewer: Didn’t you work in a small, dog coal type mine?

Gullett: Yeah, yeah, I did.

Interviewer: Tell us about that.

Gullett: Yeah, I worked at a pony mine. Yeah, I loaded, where they pull the coal out with ponies. I worked on Crawford Mountain, they called it. There’s a little small operation. And in that place, they used ponies. Had the little, small wooden car, mine car, and held about a ton. Well, the mine, the mine was a five-eight coal, we called it number five, you know. It’s, it’s about oh, fifty-eight inches high, something like that. It’s high enough so they take little ponies back in there, short ponies, and haul the coal out. I worked a while there. And I never will forget this awful hard money. I just got about eight dollars a day, I think it was. Eight dollars a day. A dollar an hour. That was back in, that was back along about in the, let’s see, I believe it was about forty, forty-six, somewhere back there. After the war was over. And I’d been up in Michigan, come back, broke up, you know and tried farming in Michigan, come back and tried the mines. And the only place I could get a job at, I was disabled, my eyes was bad, and I couldn’t pass the mine examination. So, I got a job at one of these little dog holes, you didn’t have to take the mine examination. They did have to pay insurance if you got killed, of course. But there was no union there or anything. The boss was all, you know. We didn’t have any mine committee or anything like that. Well, I didn’t work there long because the little mine closed down pretty soon. They couldn’t make any money much. They couldn’t compete with the big mines. And that was just about the time the truck mines got started. Opened up in Leslie County. That was a, there was a great frontier there of coal. Never been opened up that field over there for theys [has not] been no [a] railroad to Leslie. And had no spur lines run in there.

Gullett: The L &N, you know, [ ] field but in the, mostly followed the river, the north fork of the Kentucky as it went on up the line. And lot of these outlying places later to be mined, these was coal reserves left for the later time, what we [are] getting right now. Where there striping these mountains and taking the top off to get at that seam of coal. Nobody dreamed at one time they’d ever have machines that could do that. See, the mine [ ] was invented in Germany. First used augers. They’d come in and bore like a auger, round holes, and they’d get out and leave pillars between, you know, and take out the coal. But they could only go so far back, and there’s great waste in there. They didn’t get all the coal in the mountain. But now they’ve got it so, they’ve got a striping machine’s great Caterpillar tractors and things, bulldozers, and high lifts that they go in, and they blast the top of the mountain off with high explosive, and then they move the rock and, and debris all down in the valley. See, it all goes down the hollow. Well, they claim they going to reclaim that land now. The state mine laws, and the federal laws tried to enforce it, but not, not too much has been done. Now there’s a man named Perry Greer, the mine operator, he sold his holdings a little while back for six million dollars. A reliable source told me this. But he got rich and made a millionaire while he had these coal leases. He got all those [that] Dunraven territory down toward Krypton and down toward Buckhorn. Because they made all the roads everywhere they went in that, made truck roads. They’d go to the top of the mountain and get the coal. Truck it out with a big Max. Well, he got rich at that. He got right down and worked with his men. But he sold his holdings. He got disabled, hurt his back, and he quit. But he, he made, all he made show you want the coal brought, he made millions of dollars. Sold his holdings for six million dollars.

Gullett: Well, the same thing going on right now. They’re buying holdings on Big Willard now. Never been touched. A great territory. It runs over toward Leslie. Heads up against Grassy Branch. There was a pioneer country, nothing but house coal then they got out of these mountains. Solid mountains of coal. Well now, when they go into get it, they don’t bother to make a tunnel like they used to. They just take the top of the mountain off, and then they strip the coal, coal seams laid bare. But they can’t never restore that mountain hardly at all. Because the virgin beauty of it, and the trees, timber and all is destroyed forever. Because it, it’ll never sprout to grow anything unless it might be orchard grass or fescue grass. Well, they sow this old tough fescue it will hold the soil good, but it won’t even grow trees too good because there’s nothing but acid soil, yellow clay there. You, most places don’t even bother to do that. They make silt dams and holding dams. Keep from so much of it going down to rivers and creeks, but when big floods come, it all washes down anyhow and silts the creeks up and---and destroys the environment. It will always be that way. Because the ruin that’s made there, that God put there that mountain, they can never put it back. Man, it will not expend that much money to do that, and the government won’t finance it. Private capital can’t do it. So, it will always stay that way, a desert wasteland as far as the mountains is concerned. We used to think of the mountains as being eternal. Rock ribbed as the hills, and eternal. By I look under the hills and it’s cometh my strength, the old psalm says. But now in these days and times, the strength they’re getting out is the energy out of that hill, getting that coal. It ain’t [is not] going to help the poor people any, cause it never has. Well, the mining crews that works there, they make good wages. They’ll make, some of them, six hundred dollars a week. Six men get out more now than fifty to a hundred men could, years ago. But after all, it’s like it was in olden times. It all goes down the river and goes up, up north or someplace east. And the operators gets all the money, but the people live here is poor as ever. Some people say, “Well, you’re making six hundred dollars a month now, what do you do with it?” Well, the way inflation is, I guess I pay my bills and buy an old car and a TV and fix the house up, it’s all gone. Well, that’s the way it is with them all. You’ll die a poor man, no doubt, no money in the bank. You can’t put anything in the bank. Even in hard times the way, before the hard times hit in the ‘20s, people had bank accounts. And the bank crash come. But now they can’t lay up money on account of inflation. They do well if they have a burley insurance or something like that.

Interviewer: What about the people that are on welfare in the area?

Gullett: Oh, they fare terrible, the welfare people. Yeah, and, and there’s always been a misunderstanding about welfare. Some people think, you know, the law was passed in 1930, ‘35. It went in effect in ’37. The time social security did. It was a byproduct of social security. A lot of people don’t know that. And a lot of people don’t look back at the record enough. I remember well when it went into effect. It was for the widows and the orphans, disabled people that couldn’t work at that time, and, and couldn’t lift anything for social security, to draw anyhow out of a common, it wasn’t out, out of a general fund, federal fund. Didn’t come out of the social security funds at all. But it put up by the federal government, the states to administer. Well, it was a great lifesaver at one time, for the widows and orphans of the miners that was killed, you know, didn’t have anything to live on. Disabled people. But later on, the big cities and all across the United States had become a giant, mammoth thing. Now it’s eighteen million people on it. But wha-, the original purpose for it’s been forgot. It was for the disabled people. Not that one didn’t want to work and took it because it saved them from work, but because it would keep him from starving, educate his children and have a place, you know, to, so they might have a part of, of the good life, a little part of it, anyhow. With all, in the early beginning when money went so far, it was a good life. You could buy a whole lot with a dollar. Social Security as little as it was, the check, most people kept the children clean, sent them to school. But later on, they got hard restrictions on it. They got to where they took away people’s privacy and tried to throw a slur on it. Like if some of them was trying to get something for nothing. And they, they could get work, but they wouldn’t take it. You don’t realize in the mining country, there’s only one way you can work, and you have to be absolutely able. Now a lot of people don’t know that. They get the cream of the crop of the Appalachian labor surplus down here. Because if you can’t pass the mine examination, you absolutely can’t work, the insurance law, laws is real[ly] hard.

Gullett: The law is that, if there’s anything wrong with you, the doctor’s got to find that before you go to work, or they won’t pay insurance if you get hurt. See if a man has one eye, they won’t hire him because he might turn around later and sue the company for insurance, you see. So that’s what made these welfare people. A lot of them, they’re farms wore out, their mortgage is sold and passed out of the family. Thousands of families like that. Some of them, you know, had dependent children. Some unwed mothers or something, you know. Their---their husbands had deserted or something. Well, they got, they got welfare. Aid, Aid for Dependent Children, it’s called. But there are two or three different kinds of it. There’s one they need for the, for the blind and disabled. There’s a different branch of it that took care of the disabled and the blind. Another part was for the Aid for Dependent Children. Well, what this was all put out in the beginning for was adjunct to social security, for the people couldn’t work. They knew they were able-bodied all the time, you know, could work and be laying up there money draw later. Well, they never have took [taken any] no welfare funds out of social security funds. That’s separate branch, you, see? That’s a different thing to the government. What the people get, the federal government puts up two-thirds of it, and the state puts up a third. That’s the way it always worked in the past. Like on highway building, same way. The state put up a--one-third, and the federal government the other two-thirds. Well, that’s the way it was, order to be enrolled. [ ] vision of remember the forgotten man. When he said, “I’ll remember the forgotten man,” he meant that man never had been thought of. That is the lower classes. Like the vassals in Russia was, the serfs years ago, you know, that lived on the, on the estates and worked on the lord, the great barons, feudal barons of the state. Well, some of the Appalachian people were much better than they was in Russia. I remember well when Castro sent me, Russia sent men in here on these exchange programs. And they went through the Appalachians, and they said they saw poverty here. Said they had some poverty in Russia, but said there, the poverty here surpassed even that in Russia. He said even there, the very lowest of people, of the lowest incomes, lived better than the people here. But that isn’t the worst time. That was fifteen years ago. But now things has changed some since then. They built roads and the Appalachian Region Commission come into effect. Without that, we’d have had no highways and industry. Now that opened up ways they could take the coal out by truck better, you see. Truck the coal out of here. Well, that made times get better. It’s all built on coal. But it’s a transitory prosperity. It’s boomed and bust, just like logging.

Interviewer: Why should it be that way? Has it gotten that way?

Gullett: Well, it, no, it don’t have to be that way. But there’s have been no regulations. The coal barons. People say that we need, we need coal, and no matter what the cost, we must have it. Well now Carter, the president, the new president, says we have to turn back to coal. But if he thinks there can be the one gasification plant at Catlettsburg and have it ready to transfer that coal into gas and transform it into gas, well the country will go to wreck while theys [they are] doing that. It’d take years to transform over to coal. Still gas and, and oil is the cheapest fuel yet. You cannot, that’s what one man said in New England when he was trying to get coal plants there to make electricity. It’s the cheapest way in the, in the Appalachian field to make electricity, but guess you ship the coal out of here, you can’t do that. It’s shipped out and changed over into oil, why, it will be more cost than the oil was. The only thing that makes it turn to that is all the companies [ ] we’d have to pay that price in order to keep American industry going.

Interviewer: Back to this welfare...

Gullett: Yeah.

Interviewer: ...we’ve, we’ve been out a couple of days, three or four days, talking to people...

Gullett: Yeah.

Interviewer: ...and one thing we, that has impressed us greatly is the lack of jobs in the area.

Gullett: Ain’t [There is not anything] nothing to work at.

Interviewer: Speak to, what does welfare do to people?

Gullett: Now you’ve found the key there. It don’t, it don’t, it don’t rob them of their will to work. Now that’s where they got the wrong impression. We must go back to the will of the people. Now the will of the people has not been lost in here. That’s where people don’t understand. Ninety percent of them, now ten percent might be loafers. Now I’m talk--talking, these so many deadbeats in any country, you know that. But I’ll say 90 percent that I know and have met, and I’ve met a lot of people. And I used to be a strong spoke[s]men among them, and talked with many people in the food, in the food stamp lines and in the commodities lines. I’ve stood in line all day and got commodities. And I’ve got the stamps. Now I talk with all these people, and I know their problems. Most of them lives way out in the head of a hollow somewhere, and their lands wore out and growed [grown] up in briars, and they’re too old to clear and cultivate it. The only hope they had was their children, it was time to high school or college, even get a grade school education, was to get welfare. Otherwise, their children would turn out to be loafers, sure enough, and roughnecks, and trouble all the time with the law. Well, the school kept them out of trouble, you see. Well, they kept bread on the table, too. Cause when the mountain people gets desperate, gets hungry, you steal. That’s always been their way. As long as they can get an honest living, though, they’ll work for it. But when you try to starve them, put them on a small [ ], expect them to survive on that, they won’t. Because they’ve, they’ve got a nerve and a disposition about them that finally turned to violence. That’s what caused the wild-, wildcat strikes of the ‘60s, you know, when–

Interviewer: Roving pickets.

Gullett: Roving pickets. That’s what caused it, men fighting for jobs. Not to, to get higher wages. Most of them was unemployed. Unemployed miners and welfare people.

Interviewer: Middle-aged people.

Gullett: Yeah, middle-aged, too, old workers. Well, they’d been mis-, misplaced by the mechanical inventions that come in here.

Interviewer: All right. What do you think about, you’re, you’re a union man, right?

Gullett: Oh, I’d always be union, yeah.

Interviewer: What did you think about John L. Lewis’ decision to mechanize the mines and provide a better salary, but yet creating a lot of unemployed.

Gullett: John L. Lewis was an opportunist. He even turned into a mine operator before he died. He bought coal holdings. He was a great operator himself. But in the early days, he was the strong arm of the union. He was the backbone of it, the one that made it what it was, a powerful union. He always said no contract, no work. And he was a hard man. Even the president couldn’t [ ] him, President Roosevelt, during the war, he struck, you know. But later on, though, he did. He thought, he seen that finally the mines would have lasted longer on the old way of mining. You see what cut the jobs out, he made them go out faster. But he thought, too, in time, it’d finally happen anyway, and they might as well innovate it so that they get some skilled miners, young miners, that will go in for higher wages. They got higher wages on the machine. That they’d be a new class of miners come out that could produce more coal to the nation so they couldn’t grumble and say they didn’t have enough coal. They always said in more, John L. Lewis let them down, United Mine Workers. But right then, when the cost of living got so high, and the rest of the people couldn’t get a raise, he’d strike. Well, that made it look pretty hard. The miners is [has] always been a desperate race of men. Because he works under such desperate conditions, you know, that when they think they’re getting a fair deal, they’ll strike. Well, he, he appealed to them, John L. Lewis did, well he was a reckless man. Well, after all, in the end, though, he was an opportunist like all people gets to be, most of them, where they, they get, they see a chance to get rich their self, you know, have control of that great union. And it’s said, I don’t know how true it is, he become a coal operator himself, had, had some mine leases.

Interviewer: Well, there certainly was a lot of collusion between them.

Gullett: They was collusion. Yeah, they finally had a union–

Interviewer: They call for strike...

Gullett: The union and the company finally come together in a secret collusion. Absolutely did. Some of the field workers didn’t try to organize where they could have organized. Like Leslie County. Theys [They are the] people, they was [were] bought out, the union was over there. And, and I know a fieldworker, I knew him well, but man told me that every payday he was over there to get his pay from the operators. He was getting paid not to, not to bring the union in there. And members working for six to eight dollars a day, five dollars a day, when the union mines was paying twelve and fifteen. Well later on, they finally got down to five dollars a day, some little mines, when there being no demand for coal fell out. They begin to bring so much fuel oil and stuff in, you know, for fuel. And heating purposes. They got down to where they could pay just whatever they want to. For the men were so desperate to work, they’d work for five dollars a day. People lost some of their pride. But most of them, they was broken down men. The old men that had been cast out of the big mines after they mechanized, see. They couldn’t, they couldn’t get work. So, they, some of them had to work for whatever they could get. Five dollars a day. I worked for five dollars a day and was glad to get it. But like I, like I say, though, I’m just one of hundreds like that, a thousand. A lot of the old men, absolutely the, after the big mines quit the hand loading, they, they just lost heart. They walked around, some of them become drunkards, alcoholics. And the family was growing, of course. But it seemed like they just restless men, unemployed and nothing to do. Well–

Interviewer: Okay. You, you say you can’t remember too well because of [ ] reasons. You probably weren’t too old when National Miners Union–

Gullett: No, not when that come around. No, not too much.

Interviewer: How about the roving picket period?

Gullett: Oh, I remember it well, yeah.

Interviewer: Talk about that.

Gullett: Well, along about, that is in the ‘60s, ‘62–

Interviewer: ’59, ‘60

Gullett: ’59, ’60, somewhere along there, I know some of my neighbors here, I got welfare and they come to me and said, “We’re all going out on the picket line.” Said, “Do you want to go along?” I said, “No,” I said, “I’m not that much of a miner.” I said, “If I was working the mines like some of you, and had a stake what you got, I’d go along with you.” But I said, “If I was to do that, they’d stop my check. They’d say I was, I back to work and was a miner again.” All they wanted is an excuse to cut your check out, see? Very hard in this county about that, and parts of eastern Kentucky. Very hard about it. They’ve got some notion that the men that they was blind, crippled, whatever, and still work, you know, as long as you can walk on a crutch, why you can get a job. That’s their argument. So, I said, “Well, you fellows go along. I’ll give, I’ll give you my moral support, but I can’t go along the picket lines.” I knew every one of them. A lot of them was accused of dynamiting. I knew some of them personally. But I wasn’t along on the rage they made when they bombed and destroyed the tipples. When they blowed [had blown] up bridges, attempted to. But some of them was caught. There was two men caught at Daisy, near Whitesburg. Then that TNT blew up all Whitesburg, it went off. But the federal men caught them right there. Well, I knew a few workers. One of my close neighbors, Chief Felton, he lived right close to them. He’s now running for president of the international union. He used to live right up in the hollow where I live up here. He passed up my house every day while that strike was going on. He’d been working for the Blondell Coal Company the minute that strike started. He was making eighteen dollars a day or something like that. He quit to become a union leader. And a massive man he become. Very strong man. He wasn’t afraid of hell nor high water. I know Chief well. And you couldn’t pick no better man for a labor leader. When I first knew him, I knew that he’d be, he’d make a good labor leader. Well, he’s aggressive, big man who wasn’t afraid of anything. Well, his father says well he made a mistake, said he’d just be blacklisted, can’t never get a job again. I said, “Well, maybe so,” I said, “but he’s making a move for the better, I believe.” We went on, he did, you know. Well now he’s running for the international president for the union. But at one time, I remember when he was poor like me, didn’t have anything, hardly. And when I first got acquainted with him twenty, twenty-one years ago. And I never...

Interviewer: What was the strategy of these people? They rode around in cars and–

Gullett: Yeah.

Interviewer: –went mine to mine to shut them down.

Gullett: They’d go there to keep the, they’d go there to keep the people from working, had to work at the mines, yeah, they did. Because they wasn’t hiring. They’d go up to the mines, a great caravan of cars, say twenty, thirty at a time, a cavalcade of them, you might call it. Or a band, I call them roving pickets, because roved the highway, in cars. Well, the state police they follow right along on the trail wherever they’d go. But they such strong resolve about them, they couldn’t stop them from it, you know. Freedom of the highways, they’d go, and you know, Governor Chandler at that time was governor. And he sent the troops in here at one time to, to restrain them. But they fought the troops at Combs. Women went out and fought with the men. They fought with rocks, bottles, and everything. They had riots there at Combs. I rememb---and tried to shut down a coal tipple or two there. Sunflower Coal Company, they struck there. I remember very well, and you’d go along roads and see these pickets. They’d stop near a mine, you know, and they’d say, “You can’t work today, boys. We ain’t [are not] going to let you go in. We can’t get a job, and you ain’t [are not] going to work either. The coal company won’t hire us, and we ain’t [do not have] got no [a] job, and we’re doing this to gain attention to our needs.” What it was all about...

Interviewer: These were older, these was mainly older men that–

Gullett: Well, some of them, yeah, most of them. They’d all worked in the mines before, most of them had. Now I say most of them had. But some of them, you know, would, had to go back to farming or something, some other way of making a living, because they couldn’t get a job. Their age could let them, some were fifty and sixty years old.

Interviewer: All this was related to mechanization.

Gullett: Yeah, a lot of it was displaced, yeah, when they brought the loading machines in. See, they brought the joy loader in, they called it. That took away the, the strong back and the weak mind, as they called it, the miner had. They used to say it took a strong back and a weak mind and number four redhead shovel to make a good miner. That’s what they said. It took a strong back and a weak mind. It did, too. It took a crazy man to go in there, and it took a strong back to stand it, see. Well, there they was replaced by the machine. [laughs]

Interviewer: That’s beautiful. [laughter]

Gullett: That’s, that’s poetic, but it’s the true. [laughs]

Interviewer: A lot, lot of things you’ve said have been very poetic.

Gullett: Yeah. Well, cause I’m bored I can’t help but talk that way. Some people think well he’s a, he lays grandiose, likes to put on. But I don’t. Really that’s my natural way of talking. But some of the mountain people like some of the old Indian tribes was. The chiefs very poetic. The Indians spoke in a poetic language. They said, “White man speaks with a forked tongue.” The reason he did because all he spoke was lies. You know, he’d say one thing and do something else. But the honest man, he spoke with his straight tongue. He was all right. But you know, among savage tribes, even among the mountaineers, they some of the most poetic people ever you saw. Listen to some of the old timers tell the tales of old about the feuds and the way people lived way back and the--the old rustic way of living, and you’ll know then that they’re true poets and don’t know it. A lot of them don’t, see. In their mind, they speak just plain simple language. But it’s the old language brought over from England. Like I said the other day, the Elizabethan English. And they call a spade a spade or whatever it is, you know, in their way of saying it. But now speaking about the mines that way, some of the miners, they never quite, they never, some of them didn’t never want to go back to the mines. It got in their bloods. Now Daddy used to say mining was in his blood. Once you got started a miner, as long as you could work, you’d want to stay on till you retired. But when the mechanization come along, see, it cut out thousands of workers.

Gullett: Well, these people was thrown out of work, and they’d go to the rat holes, the little scab mines, they called it, that hadn’t been organized. Well, there’s truck mines of Leslie County. I remember going to the Highlight Mine with Dad. He went out to Michigan. He couldn’t work anymore. Went out there to farm, you know. And he come back, “Well I’ll go back to Hardburly somewhere, and I’ll get a job, and I’ll take up mining again. I can still use a shovel.” He went there and he found out that it’s mechanized. So, he said, “Hell, I don’t know about them machines.” He said, “Let’s go over to Leslie County.” And I went with him. Said, “Let’s go and see if we can get a job over there.” We went, and they used ponies over there, was that primitive when they started out. I know a theys [there is] a fellow he known all his life, rode one of them old time trucks, you know. An old army truck, haul coal in it. His name was Strunk. We got a ride over there with him in the old truck, and he says, “Boy,” says, “I’ve got to work awful hard. My family’s mighty hungry,” he says. “I’ve got to work night and day almost to make a living.” He got paid by the ton hauling that coal over to the ramps over here in Perry County. Well at that time, the man, we needed a job, we walked around different mines. But there’s so many people out of work over there, and the native people, you know, they got jobs there. I remember when the Old Liberty Mine was first opened up there in Leslie County. It was a large mine. At one time worked I guess around a hundred and fifty men. But it was all pick and shovel work. See, they, they finally got the mine motors. But at first, they started out with ponies and mules. You know, some of the coal was so high, they could use mules. Well, the mine mule, you know, pulled two or three tons on the track with wheels, you know, take them right on out. Well, they had these ponies and mules trained so good that when they went out to dump the load, went to tipple and knowed [knew] just exactly how far to go to let car go over the dump. And he went off to one side, the pony did, didn’t go with it. Boy, you know it took some training to do that. But the, the men that handle the mules and the ponies knowed [knew] their business, too. They was expert miners. Well, what I mean, back then, they, they used the old-time way of mining. Some, in some places, the breast auger. The old-time way (??), where you had to dig your own holes and shoot your own coal, see. But later on, they got modernized. Now they’re modernized in Leslie, and they got the big [ ]. But this was twenty years ago. A lot has changed since then.

Interviewer: Just twenty years.

Gullett: Twenty years. And they’ve got most of the coal in Leslie County. But at that time, that was a, that was a new country. Oh, there’s MacIntosh Creek. All that country back over there toward London, Manchester, was all solid in coal. Never been touched. But just think, millions of tons has been hauled out by the truck since then. Well, a lot of people don’t realize that even coal is a dwindling reserve, and they don’t tell the truth about it, hardly, what we’ve got left here. What they’re getting out is scrap coal that they couldn’t get years ago. That, that little patch that was left when the big mines work didn’t get it all. Now they tried it here and they didn’t find any coal, hardly. When the silver mine company got slick, there wasn’t much left there. They tried to go in there and cut into the old workings, there wasn’t no coal there, hardly. And they didn’t pay them for their work and trouble. Where they go where it’s never been mined, they just take the top of the mountain off now, and, and get this seam. It’s quicker, you know. Where it’d take years to get it the other way by the old tunnel method, you know, going in and slope mine, going in and getting the coal. Now they, they strip mine’s the worst thing ever come in here. Now years ago, we used to think well after the mine’s all done, we’ll still have the old hills. Maybe go back to farming the little patches again, and we’ll live some way. But everybody knew, fatalistic about it years ago. They realized that someday the coal would give out, it’d have to give out. Even in the Depression days, some companies, it worked out that early time. Old William Bondman, the founder of the Blue Diamond Coal Company’s first mine was called Bondman, after him. He was subsidiary of Blue Diamond. He owned his own land where that camp was. Well, after it worked out, they didn’t tear the houses down and sell it. But the land that the main Blue Diamond Property was on, by the Kentucky River Land Company, they owned that land. Well, when the miners had to have the houses torn down and move out. After the company worked out, they had to, every house was torn down. At one time there was about two thousand houses there. They sold them out to the people, you know, to build, the poor people, new homes out of them.

Gullett: Well, that’s old lumber, I mean, the houses are fifty years old. For-, we come to the river in 1917. And that was just a new camp then. Just been built, Blue Diamond was. And the war, the Great War, we call it the Great War, the war of the nations, World War I, made many coal operators rich. That’s where they got their start in here. Because great demand for coal. But by 1926, some of the mines was almost worked out. Because some of them were small operations. And even with hand loading, it’d take too long to get the coal. But the way they got it now, they’d go in and work out a whole territory in, in six months or a year. [coughs] Well, they don’t give no, no long livelihood to the people in here, because it’s, it’s too short a duration. Now Blue Diamond started in nineteen, nineteen and sixteen and lasted until along the ‘50s somewhere. About, come to approximately fifty years. They got that coal by hand loading. Well, they didn’t quite get it all, because some of it, they got so far away from the coal tipple that they couldn’t haul it and make any money. So, they had to, and they never, they was good, though, about it. They never would put in machines there. They loved their own men that worked so long. That’s the best company of all, Blue Diamond was. They treated their men with respect. Cause they had humble beginnings at one time, the coal operator had. He come out of Tennessee and Virginia. He owned Bonnie Blue Virginia belonged to him. And he had the holdings in Coal Creek, Tennessee. Now it’s several operations. He finally bought out the Jewel Ridge operation there near Virginia. And he had great holdings. And William Vaughnman was a good old man. He lost his son in the first, second world war. His name was William Vaughnman. I used to look at the picture of all the miners’ boys that went off to the war, and so many hadn’t come back. And I thought, well I longed when I young man to work in the mines. Who knows what was better. There I lived, and they was dead and gone. And among them was the coal operator’s son, William Vaughman. He died, too, you know. But he was merciful enough to the men that he would never have coal machines put in, coal loading machines. He gave them work right up till they, they closed the mine down. Well, the strange thing about it now, they’ve come back again. The Island Creek Coal Company in consolidation, and there opening up new openings at Blue Diamond now again. A man, a reliable source told me the other day, Earl Deaton. County Court Clerk said he’s, I ought to go over there and see Blue Diamond. He said they had dug all the pieces there. Said they’re going along, and going to look, looks like they’re going to make a shaft mine there. There’s this great seam there that lays down under the ground that’s, eighteen inch-, eighteen feet high in places. That’s something, it’s unlimited, it goes for miles through this country. It’s, it’s never been opened. Just a short way down, not too far down. Sometimes it runs along where the riverbed is, almost. Wouldn’t take much to reach it. And they talk like someday go down so far and strip it. Find a new way of mining. That they could keep that from being a hot mine, keep the methane gas out. Well, I told Earl, I said, “Well, Earl,” I said, “how in the world can they get that coal when we don’t have no miners trained for the, for shaft mining?” Well, he says–

Interviewer: That’s unusual for this area, isn’t it?

Gullett: Yeah, it is. We never did have; we never did have shaft mining. Never had any hot mines. We had what they call the black dent mines, where enough flare was pumped in to–

Interviewer: Yeah, Scotia, though, that was hot.

Gullett: Ah, Scotia, now, yeah, it was slope mine. Went in kind of, that shaft sloped, see. It went down like that. Well, [ ]give it gas so deep in the bowels of the earth, you know, the gas [ ], and we call methane gas. Well, they’re even talking now about popping some of that gas out of the mines and using it for heating purposes. It could be used, some of that bottle gas like you buy, you know, from the gas companies. It could be used.

Interviewer: They’re talking now about burning the coal out.

Gullett: Well, they can burn it out and get the heat under the min-, under the ground. They could, yes, it’d be confined down there and might not bother people on top of the soil too much. I remember the Hocking Valley Coal Field in Ohio. We lived there in 1925. We had to live in a great coal field, although it was farming country. Daddy striked [was in the strike] there back at that time and tried to organize a union. And the men set fire to some mine cars, and run it down in the shaft, set fire to that mine, and it burned till every block of coal underground burned up. Some of the houses sunk, where they were sitting on the ground above this coal field. Now that’s true. If anybody wanted to check it, they go there and in the Hocking Valley and people could tell you that houses subsided because all the coal burned up from under the ground and it just left what earth you know was holding the houses up, and it finally subsided and went down. But as we say, you can burn it under the, under the, just give enough ventilation to burn and not let the fumes escape too much, the sulfuric acid up from down under, and they could do that. It might be practical. There’s all manner of ways of getting earth’s energy yet. That’s one way. They talk about getting thermal energy from the hot springs and geysers under the earth, you know. Like we have in Hot Springs National Park and places like that. You know, bring, using that gas for heating homes and things. Well, they could, you know. Norway and Sweden have things like that, you know. They heat from thermal, thermal power a whole lot. And parts of Europe, they do. But America’s never practiced that much. And one thing, it is a terrible disaster. Coal would be, could turn to atomic energy. Because atomic energy’s too dangerous to the environment, the people. They never did have a [ ] the great explosion that killed no, un-, unnumbered people. They don’t have many. Miles around, the great area. Even now, we, we can’t raise tomatoes or anything here for the blight that comes from that, where they got that plants [plant] at Paradise, Kentucky. We get some of it in here. Tomatoes will die, something like the blight. Now, didn’t used to do that. And you’d plant beans, they tas-, they caught the blight. It’s nothing but the emanations from the air, the radiations where it falls, and it’s invisible and you can’t see it, tiny particles. See, a lot of people didn’t know that. For years, the mountain people, there’s more cancer rates here in this part of eastern Kentucky than anywhere else according in, in the United States. We always did have too much direct sunlight. It was always, back in my growing up I’ve seen it to 102 in, in the, in the shade at one time in the ‘30s. One summer, it was that hot. Springs all went dry, wells and everything. We have cycles of hot years, you know. Well, the heat was so great that people, you know, get out and take their clothes off and they sun blister. A lot of them took skin cancer from it. People didn’t realize that. Well, now it’s, it’s atomic radiation we get. Well people says you get, if you get sunburned, you take skin cancer. What it is, you leave your body open to take in that radiation more. Well, I’ll, I’ll say coal is a better thing, but it’s impossible, it’s impractical to do that. But if we use the coal in the right way, there’s still always be work for the miners. We’d always have the, the coal mine culture. But it, but it’d be better for a byproduct...

[End Tape One, Side B. Begin Tape Two, Side A.]

Gullett: you do from books. Cause you read better than books. And there it’s just black and white letters. You don’t understand unless you lived through it. But the man who can tell the most true [truest] tale is the man that experienced it. But if you’ve got enough native cunning and native intelligence, you don’t need to learn from college or books, cause it comes to you. It ain’t [Not] everybody who--can write a story, and it ain’t [not] everybody that can, can write poetry, either. Cause that’s, that’s inspiration. You’ve got to have some kind of intelligence; you can’t do it. But there’s something strange about that. Some mountaineers is gifted. Some is expert carpenters and, you take a mountain man, anything you put him at, he learn good. You take him in shipbuilding, and factories, or wherever he goes, he adapts to the job real[;y] quick. We learned that in Vietnam, the natives over there, the Russians armed them with their weapons, and they shot down planes of ours and went across the speed of sound, and they just learned to use an aircraft gun [gun]. Well, they learned to use every weapon the Russians give them, [ ] quick. They’s [They are] rice farmers. They didn’t know a thing, like the native mountaineers in here. They bring this machine in here, they learn to use it, and to operation in no time at all. They didn’t learn it out of books.

Interviewer: Why is that? Why would a farm boy catch on so fast?

Gullett: Well, the farm boy learns through necessity, necessity is the father of invention, as an old saying goes. And the man that builds the be-, best mousetrap, people will beat a path to his door. But what it is, its--necessity teaches him this. But he has a, he also has the inbred native cunning. Which a lot of people don’t realize, that’s kind of the shocking story. That a man that’s born in here that never even went to school, can’t sign his name, can learn any job you put him at. He always was that way. But that’s that native cunning. It seems like I said a while ago, I knew a man one time that couldn’t, that, he couldn’t count to twenty, I don’t guess, but he became a great capitalist, a rich man, because he just knew how to make money. It’s that gift of it, see? He’d get people to work for him for nothing, be lousy wages, he’s such a persuasive fellow. And when he got in court about any lawsuit or anything, he’s his own lawyer. He learned law that way. His name was...

Interviewer: Have you ever heard of J.P. Dalton?

Gullett: Seem like I have, I’m not sure. Richard Haney is this man that I’m talking about. He’s first cousin of my mother. He couldn’t read and write. But he went up to Indiana and he built a string of apartments and stuff and got rich up there. And he got all that built now, with free labor. Nearly just by persuasion. He get one, he’d go up one old stonemason here to build him a fine stone home here for he left for four thousand dollars. He never did pay that man. Beat, beat the old Italian out of his wages. But later on, he become brother-in-law to him and died in his home, the old Italian did, after he retired. Had to keep him until he died. [laughs] and he lived to be about ninety. Never was such a rascal. But you know, we’ve got mountain people like that, the, that’s mark the devil. Old Devil John Wright was like that. He was real[ly] intelligent.

Interviewer: What was the role of a man like Devil John Wright?

Gullett: Devil John was, well now, well I’ll tell you about these bad men now. What we call the bad men, the modern society call them bad. But in their time, they was guardians of the land a whole lot. Now I want to explain to you what the Appalachian culture means. In the early culture, if a man wasn’t bad, he couldn’t hold his own among his neighbors. Cause if he didn’t learn to use a squirrel rifle pretty good, or a hog rifle, and a feud started, he was quick meat. He soon got killed, you see. But if you impressed your fear on your fellow men, they’d leave you alone. Otherwise, he, he made it put his fear into everybody’s heart, see? He was a volunteer in the Civil War, and he’d enlist in the army, and he got bounties, you know, for enlisting. He enlisted sometimes on the rebel side, and sometimes on the Union side. He saved his money. He’s smart. Now his son Kid Wright tells about how smart he was. He said, “My father was one of the smartest men in the mountains. Except he couldn’t read and write, neither. But he’s real smart.” I’m talking about this native cunning. When John C. Mayo and all these land buyers come in, coal lease buyers, he saw that sooner or later they was going to get it anyhow, so he decided to sell while the time was right. He didn’t care that much about the land. He was kind of a speculator himself. He owned about five, ten thousand acres. Whole hollows and creeks. Well, he sold it out to them for five thousand dollars. And he got in trouble, some of his neighbors all sent somebody mad at them, so we had to turn around and kill some of them. Some of them was trying to take his life. But he carried two guns all the time. He carried one of the best pistols made at that time, a Navy Colt dragoon. We called them an old horse pistol. And he carried a, he carried a, one of the early .45s. Well, he never missed very much. But when it come [came] to using the rifle, he was a crack shot with a rifle, for he’d learned as a young boy, squirrel hunting.

Gullett: Well, most every boy that growed [grew] up on the farm in the mountains then, they made the best sharpshooters in the Civil War. If you ever get one of them to use the mini ball rifle, he never missed much. Some of them did, you know, went out that could go over to the Union, some for the rebels. And they had many, many guerilla raids down through this country while the war was going on. Even the mountain country. Clay Jones was a Union leader. He was a, after the war was over, he worked kindly as a guerilla in here. They called him a peacemaker. He just a man that had opportunities like Devil John, that took advantage of it and was appointed a, a marshal, you know. He had the right to come in here and settle disputes. Well, they was always somebody like that even a way back that could get all the lands, you know. But he wouldn’t develop it, he’d just hold it, see. Thousands of acres of timber. Well, later on the Moby Robinson Lumber Company come in here, and they made millions of dollars off that timber. They bought it from the, got it for a dollar a tree, you see. Well, the people when they sold it didn’t know what it was worth. The old landowners, they had the timber left, after they’d sold the mineral leases. They made some money from it, and still was cheated out of it, the Appalachian mountaineer was. Well, it’s that way from the head of the river on down as far as Lexington. Lexington is at the foot of the mountains, you might say, but we’re, we’re very close to the Lexington people. Many mountaineers went there to work and settled there. They speak the same language we do. It was called Little Dixie back then because they had a lot of slaves down there. Well, they was on the, on the rebel side. John Hunt Morgan, you know, that, that great rebel leader, was, was one of their natives. Well, a lot of people up here, you know, a few of them now, like the Caudills and, that’s one of the old mountain families. And the Hertz. And different people, they’s [they are] rebels.

Gullett: Well, they got their houses burned down after the war’s over and had some of them was murdered. Well, Devil John, he was, the way he stayed smart, see, he wasn’t too much on either side. But he, he worked in a way that he could run his moonshine business and sell the coal leases. If he make somebody mad, he could wipe them out, and they wasn’t no opposition. Another word, now some people might say slander now. His son, I used to know his son, Frank Wright. He had many sons. He lived with a lot of women up in there, and had children by a lot of people, rumor said and. His, his boy said that many of a day he would stay housed up in the log house. That the old man go off on some kind of business. He’d come in about dusk and he’d fire his rifle three times, so they’d know it was him. But he wouldn’t allow nobody to open the door. It was barred and bolted. Had a big homemade bolt on that cabin door, made out of rough lumber. Shortly after the camp was built, though, they got kindly too high and mighty for him at Jenkins. He had a big bunch of wild hogs that fed on the beech mash, you know and he, now this is a true stories [story], and they, they put up a stray pen for these hogs, you know. The mine boss, the superintendent thought the camp was getting nasty, hogs and cattle running around through the camps. And they put up a stray pen to catch all the strays, you know. Old Devil John, he had, oh, I guess a hundred head of wild hogs running loose and fattening on the beech mash. They called it the mash, the chestnut, and beechnuts back then. You’d fatten your hogs that way. Turn them loose in the woods, and they’d fatten on the nuts. Acorns and beech and chestnut. The chestnuts, wild chestnuts, growed [grew] in great abundance back then. Well, they come in, you know, he heard, some of his hogs he went to round them up to kill them in the fall and he couldn’t find them. He went into the mining camp, he come and took his rifle, put it on his shoulder, it was an old 30/30. He walked into the mining camp, and he come up to the mine boss and he says, “I hear you got some hogs in the pen here, stray pen.” He says, “Yes, we have.” Said, “We had to do that. The camp was getting pretty filthy.” He says, “You may have some of mine.” He said, “I’ve come to get them.” He says, “No,” says, “you can’t, unless you pay a fee.” Says, “Actually, we have to be paid for a feed bill,” says. “They had to be, we put them up, we have to have pay before we turn the hogs loose.” Said, “You know who I am?” And he said, “No,” said, “who?” He said, “I’m Devil John Wright.” The man’s face turned pale when he heard his name though. Said, “Yes, brother.” Said, “You can have your hogs.” [interviewer laughing] And he turned them loose, at once, after he found out who he was.

Gullett: For that, that man was going to get them if he had to kill him to get them, see? That was the first kind of mountaineer we had. When we talk about the freedoms they lost in here, the reason they had freedom back then so much, it wasn’t that much law enforcement. You take down where the Eversole feud was going, why, people was killed and found along the trail. French hired many of a man to kill a, a Eversole for a, a suit of clothes, a brand-new serge blue suit, and a 30-, .45 pistol. Or a .38. He’d kill a man for a suit of clothes and a pistol. Well, he didn’t have that many [ ] on his side, but he hired gun men, see. But the Eversoles depend on the kinship and the blood and the kin. And many of them was killed. An awful lot of them would be found that way, and they couldn’t prove who killed them, you had to have eyewitness. Most mountain law was that you had to be right there and see it done, or there’s no proof of who done the killing, see? Like the corpus delicti had to be produced. Well, they’d find the corpse, but they couldn’t never prove who killed him. So later on, they finally killed one another out so bad that you find it nearly died out itself. And French went back to the bluegrass, back down to Lexington. He’d come from Lexington. Well, they tried to force him out of business up there, but he wouldn’t be forced out. He said, “I’ve come here to make money, and I’m going to stay.” Well, Eversole, fellow Joe Eversole, had a store right close to him. And, and they got into it over that store business. And they couldn’t run French out of town. Well, that’s there at Hazard. Well, they finally got to where they brought a judge in here to try these people from Lexington. And that old circuit judge, he come up here and rode a mule back then, that’s the only way you could get in here, you know. He come up there at Hazard, stayed at the old D.Y. Combs Hotel there in Hazard. And that night, some, they had some of the Eversoles in jail there, an old log jail at that time. And they was going to try him on the morning. The judge going to hold court. They went up there and they shot that hotel all to pieces, the Eversoles did. And that old judge got scared. The next morning, he grabbed his mule and said, “This is the damnedest country ever I saw.” He said, “I’m going back where people civilized.” He said, “To hell with that trial. I’m not going to try them men.” He took off, went back down to Lexington. [laughs] the people had to settle it on their own, you see. There was no law. Law hadn’t come to the mountains at that time much. Well, they had their own jury, but most of the time, they [are] so partisan, the jury was, on both sides, they’d, they’d, they’d say hung jury. Nearly every time, they have to turn the man loose. Mom said when she was a little girl, Grandpa sat on the jury. And he come in one evening, said, well, said, “How did the trial go?” She said, “Hung jury.” He said, “Hung jury.” She thought they’d got mad and hung the jury. [laugher] “Oh, did they kill the jury?” [laughing] Hung jury! Now that’s true. I’ve heard tell it many of a time.

Interviewer: Was it Devil John that was hung? Hanged? Hung?

Gullett: Devil John–

[pause in recording]

Interviewer: There’s two of them up there at the gap.

Gullett: Yeah, at the gap.

Interviewer: Tell us that story. The two bad men.

Gullett: The two bad men, now the way it all goes, now my descendants, some of them, that’s why that later on, why, my great uncle was kin to old Talt Hall. He was killed at the Jenkins Mining Camp, fighting this, the camp guards and mine guards. Some of them called them the home guards. You know that Civil War, they had John Fox Junior speaks of it there in Devil John’s time. Now he told us the Lonesome Pines, all modeled after Devil John Wright, that’s who it’s modeled after. Only they call him in there Devil John Tolliver. Well, there wasn’t no people named Tolliver lives there. What it was, was the Wrights and the, and the, and some other families. Salyers and different people, you know. He killed Frank Salyers, Talt Hall did, over his wife. Well, Clay Jones writes about--about it in his stories a lot. Old Clay Jones. There’s one man, only man, one man who can get the best of him, that’s Clay Jones. Clay come out of the Civil War. He’d been a Union captain, you know. And he, and he, he wanted to show his worth. He’s a great patriot and an American citizen.

Gullett: So, he, he had a band, people rode with him. Well Devil John had a crowd that he called his own men. Said, “The devil takes care of his own.” So, he did, you know. Said, “Join my crowd. Whoever rides with me, nobody can touch him.” Well, they got some kind of falling out up the head of the river there, you know, in the Halls. The Halls is only, this great tribe of the Halls. Well, they was good buddies with him, you know. They went along with everything Devil John done. Well, theys [they] was [were] in the bootleg business. People sold moonshine even back then, transported it there. And they made a living that way. It was easier to turn the corn into whiskey than it was to try to fatten hogs and, and then sell them, you see. Because they had to march their hogs overland down to the market, and it’s a long, hard drag, you know. Some of them drove geese all the way overland on foot, to where they could sell them. Ducks and geese. Now that’s true. Back at that time, they did. And the only way they’d go, was by an old wagon road or a sled road, they followed the river all the way. You had to go over the river. Well at that time, the mountain [ ] was so strong, when a man built a log house, none of the rifles they had at that time could penetrate the walls, because they was made very thick of poplar [ ] logs, squared and huge, you know. Sawed logs. Some of them, two feet thick. Well, it’s called Wright’s Fort there where he lived. He had a big log house. [ ] here down this part of the country, there’s a lot of people from Perry County went up there and fought against Devil John.

Gullett: Well, he get up a bunch of fellows from down here, Clay did you and said, “I’m going to run Devil John out of the country. I’m commissioned by the government to stop the feuding that’s been going on.” So, he went up the line, you know, and he attacked him in his fort. He besieged it several days, but they couldn’t take the fort. They finally, they, through hunger, starvation, they finally give up, you know. Devil John had to give up. Talt Hall staggered out and, and he had, the one he called Old Champy, his rifle, was Clay Jones’ rifle. He’d had it since he was a boy. First man he killed at thirteen years old. And he always used it for a squirrel rifle. He cracked down and struck Talt Hall in the shoulder and wounded him. Well, they heaved him into court, but nothing come out of it. They turned him loose. But Devil John saw, he struck a man, struck a man about his own mettle, in Clay Jones. So, he moved away for a while. Sold his holdings out and moved over to Virginia, across, across Pound Mountain, over that way. Or Millstone Gap in there, where there’s all that now, there’s two or three gaps that crossed over into Virginia. See he lived right there at the foot of the gap, where you come down. Millstone. Really the source of the Kentucky River, the North Fork rises there. Starts, it used to be a great, gushing spring, sprung up the foot of that mountain, Millstone Gap. It welled up like a fountain, and there’s the source of the Kentucky River. It has three forks: north and south fork, and the middle fork. They all come together, make the Kentucky. But the main source of the Kentucky is right up here at the head of this river. Jenkins. Neon, Jenkins. Well at that time, it’s pretty thin settled. They had some fields cleared, and formed the bottoms, but most of them hills is covered with timber. You can’t imagine what great trees they had back in them days. You’d get lost in the woods. Well, that old fellow, old Doc, I forget what his name, his enemy is Devil John’s, he was kind of a spiritual something. They believed he was a witch or something. He’s the one they call the Old Red Fox in that story, “The Lonesome Pine.”

Interviewer: Yeah. Right.

Gullett: He’d, they’d turn his shoes around this way, you couldn’t tell what way he’s going. Fixed himself that way so the devil couldn’t track him. He claimed you couldn’t tell what direction he was going in. He ambushed a lot of men, you know. Well, Devil John resorted to ambush a whole lot. But he’s the one that broken up with Clay Jones. He had the commission for the government to settle up, settle the feuds. But we say, they, we called, theys [they are] called bad men back in them days. And we’ve had some in modern times. I remember a lot of bad men in here that lived in, in my lifetime, that have been called bad. But if you didn’t kill like Devil John killed, maybe ten, fifteen men, maybe as much as Billy the Kid did. But couldn’t, some of it’s just mostly legend. And, and no, nobody knows how many he killed. Some people even say they killed a hundred. Some of them was done by his men, you see, his gang that run with him. Well Talt Hall was the--- his old buddy, and Talt, they both went, when one left, the other one left. And my Aunt Jenny, now she was a Hall that married my, my, my grandmother’s mother, that’s my great-grandmother. She was a Hall, and she lived through the Civil War days. And she married a man named Adams up there. And they moved to Morgan County. I can remember Aunt Jenny. She lived to be ninety or a hundred years old, nearly. She was kin to old Talt Hall now. And we are kin to the Halls, but I didn’t know it until late years, till some Halls told me that. Well, Talt died by hanging. He was always a desperate man. When he went to Virginia, he met pretty tough people over there. And sheriff come to arrest him, had a warrant, you know. And the sheriff was a rascal, too, a moonshiner and everything, you know. And he refused to give up. So, they, he killed the sheriff, and they hung him there in [ ], Virginia. He was the closest crony, he was first lieutenant, now, of Devil John, was the Hall fellow, Talt. Then there’s old Black Hawk Sizemore, was another one of his cronies. He was a Cherokee Indian, almost...he was descended from Chief Goldenhawk, one of the Cherokees that mixed with the whites in here. Now a lot of people don’t know the ancestor people in here, but I do. I know where a lot of them come from. That’s part of my [ ] power. Some people say, “Well, how do you know where I come from?” I said, “I can tell by your name where you come from, because I know how the first immigrants come in here.” The record of them.

Gullett: Well, all the Caldwells that you see in this country, is mixed with Cherokee. All Sizemores, you sees, is half Cherokee. As long as there’s a drop of Mongolian blood in that, Indian blood in them, it will show. Either in meanness or sadistic tendencies, or the level of hunting and drinking moonshine. Now, now they’s never no people loved whiskey like the Indians did. They called it “firewater.” You never see a Sizemore, but he’s a drunkard. Hardly [ ] one time or another. You never see a Caldwell, what he’s a drunkard. But they’re the best hunters in the world. They go out and if there’s any fish to be caught in the river, they’ll catch it. If there’s any squirrels to be killed in the fall, they’ll get them. That’s that native trait. Now we’re talking about heredity. The mountain people’s so strong, people says their spirit’s broke, don’t know what they’re talking about. That heredity’s so strong that the gift of welfare or anything won’t take away that spirit. They might have to swallow their pride for a little while, but the spirit wasn’t broke, you see. A lot of people don’t know about psychology. The psychology of the mountain man is he’ll take a lot from me with dignity, until you push him too far. But when you do, he’ll kill you then. He won’t have no [ ] judge. He say, “I’ll shoot first, and tell questions after. I’ll answer questions later.” That’s the way he puts it. “I’ll shoot first and answer questions later.” Well, I seen a man one time, and they backed off, and he’s a bad man, Bad Beech Noble. And that’s back in the, in the, in the ‘20s. It’s about, long about ’28. [The] sheriffs come [came] to arrest him in the camp, and he wouldn’t give up to the law. He, he killed four or five men. One of them he killed at a wedding one time. Went to a wedding and the, the enemies made up to kill them. And he told Dad that, he got down under the table.

Gullett: He knowed [knew] the only way he could defeat them is to get down under the table. They couldn’t hit him. They had a big fight right there at the wedding dinner, you know. After they cut the wedding cake. He got down there and he shot every one of them fellows, trying to kill...Killed four of them. And then the sheriffs come to arrest him there at the mining camp, he’d been drinking some. He drunk his moonshine, carried a flask in his pocket all the time. And he told them, he said, “Men, don’t come no further,” says, “unless you want to die.” Well, they knowed [knew] his reputation. They wouldn’t come no further. They turned back. Said, “No, we don’t want to die.” I’ll tell you another story. I know it’s absolutely true. I remember when they rode the horses back then, the deputies did in here. They was like the Western stories. Now you talk about people out West, they didn’t have half the killing we have. The only thing of any note that made the Western stories famous was Billy the Kid, the Lincoln County Cattle War. Well, the feuds in here, there was much more men killed than there was in that. And I, in my lifetime, I’ve seen killings turn into a feud [ ]. And I’ve seen a lot of people killed on account of it. Like in the story of Ed Days, one of them, I remember that very well. It happened back in the ‘60s. And John Y. Brown was his lawyer. And I got to talk with the high sheriff, knew him well, Bill Cornett. John Y. Brown the lawyer from Lexington was knocked out in the courthouse up here. I talked to Bill about it, and he said, “When I hit that–” He called him an S.O.B., he said, “I seen [saw] his feet fly out in front of me, that’s all I saw.” Said, “I lost my temper.” Said, “I broke my fist, though. I’ll never be able to use that hand anymore.” He, he knocked that lawyer out and had to go to jail instead of going to the hospital. John Y. Brown. But he won his case. We had such bad law courts up here that they transferred it down to Winchester. The man come [became] free.

Gullett: I remember old big Jack Fields [ ], was the one that he killed, he’s a bully. One of these deputies goes around, wants to make a reputation, you know, a bad man. Well, he carried something like a bandolier of cartridges across his shoulder here and had a gun belt stuffed with bullets and guns, one or two guns, big ’45, all the time. And he almost got me one day. I was a little boy around here, grow up with me, and kids used to like me, come, liked to hear me talk. Well [ ] Fields, he was just sixteen years old. He said, “Let’s go in the old bar there,” in Hazard, said, “I want to get a beer to drink.” Well just come into mankind, I thought well I’ll do it, they won’t never catch me at it. I didn’t think about big old Jack watching me all the time, you know. And I stepped in there and I said, I said, “Give me two beers.” The bartender’s a little hunchbacked fellow, you know. He’s a good boy, though. He set, set them out. He knows I was getting for that young kid; you know. Well, old Big Jack’s peering over my shoulder all the time and I didn’t know he was standing there. I turned around, and there he was, big as a house. Big old white fellow, looked like a brute or something from Mars. And the bartender told me, says, “Big Jack,” says, “this boy bought this beer for himself. He didn’t get it for the boy.” He just sidled around and walked out. Hell, I wanted to see that man killed. But I [ ] native people does in here. They long for revenge. But it went on, you know, not long after this, he got in a gun battle. He chased this man Ed Day, I forget we called [ ] and the top of the hill up here, Captain Jim Wooten’s place. He was a big stone builder in there, right where you cross the Leslie County line. They talked at him, cornered from Leslie and Perry both, they’d shoot him down. Four or five deputies firing at him, and he hit old Big Jack, though. They couldn’t never prove it was his bullet killed Jack, though. While they got him up for trial, show you how it runs into a feud now, this went on, and he got clear of that murder scrape. John Y. Brown got knocked out, his lawyer did. And old dirty old Courtney Wells, I call him dirty, he’s a Democrat, but I turned against him, helped beat him later, for circuit judge. He was against, he was against Ed Day, the judge was, you know. And he called the judge an old lying S.O.B. And he called them deputies jack legged deputies, you know, talking about Bill Cornetts deputies.

Gullett: Well when he said that, Bill said he insulted the judge, and he knocked him out, see? Well, after he got out of all that, he went fishing one day over in Leslie County. He shot down the streets of Hyden. A Lewis fellow shot him down, another deputy sheriff, shot him down there in Hyden. His little boy with him. He was walking on crutches then, kind of recovering from that wound, you know. But the Days was such a strong clan that they wouldn’t, one wouldn’t let the other one die without avenging his death. He had two nephews. His nephews was crack shots with rifles. They kept 30-30s. Now my brother, my uncle by marriage, was riding in the very truck where, where Lewis got killed in. He, he worked in the mines, Lewis did, part time, as part-time deputy. He was going home from work one evening, riding a pickup truck, Kurt said, Kurt Campbell, he was riding right by him. He said that a gun crack from the woods and, and they was going along the highway and struck him right center in the forehead there. He heard the spatter of the bullet when it struck him. Well, somebody was driving the truck, had to stop the truck. There’s three in the cab, I think. And he brought the truck under control. Now they tried this, these two boys for the murder. They never could prove it on them though, who killed him exactly. But they was avenged for Day’s death, you see, because he shot down the Lewis. Well, there’s a lot of Lewises over there in Leslie County. Some, there’s some families like a tribe branches out, you know. We have a lot of Lewises here, and a lot in Leslie County. Some of them come over here to live. And they always have pretty tough name. Although some of them is educated, pretty smart people, you know. Now among the Appalachian Mountain people, what you got to realize, a lot of them has come great educators. Some of them went to other states and become administrators of colleges. Has become governors, even. But you know, they produce a lot of smart people in here. But that flow, the best people left here along about the time the mining industry got bad. When they begin bringing so much oil and gas in. I remember United Mine Workers generally used to get it, and they complained all the time about the imports of oil, what it’s doing to the coal industry.

Gullett: Well, they didn’t realize at that time, the operators didn’t either, that the mines was about to work out anyhow. That they got all the easy coal they could get. Well Blue Diamond had the last territory, big Leatherwood that was, had never been worked, you know. Great territory in there. If they hadn’t opened that up, Blue Diamond would be out of business in here. But see, they opened that up, I went there when the mine was just being opened up. It’s been thirty-six years ago. I went there when they had the first shafts, start, first opening started on both sides of the mountain, they faced one another. And the people sits in the valley, right between these two openings. They work both sides of the mountain that way. But they didn’t have no count built in, but they had great stacks of lumber. As far as the eye could see, to build that camp with. And the [ ] Lumber Company, sawed up, they had a big band mill there, sawed up all its lumber. Well, they was getting ready to put the machines in there then, because from the start they used machines there. They had, they opened up the mines with these–

Interviewer: What year was that? Do you remember?

Gullett: That was, I’ll tell you when it was, if I can think. Now just a minute. It was 40, 1940. I married in ’41, the year after that. I went up there and come back from Ohio hitchhiking and come through West Virginia through that way. Stayed overnight in Huntington. I come through that Route 23, up that way a whole lot. You can head in up there near Hindman, you know, and come out there at Big Leatherwood. I come through that way. Well, they didn’t have no way on down to Hazard, but the power company was putting in the lines, transmission lines up there. And I rode down with the power man up there to Hazard. I remember that well. Well, they said, “In a few days, said, said, six months, come back and you might get a job here.” But says, “We’ve got to, to build territory first.” To be [ ], you know, it takes so long when you open up a mine to develop territory. Well later on, they worked a big bunch of men, five, six hundred men. You know, even with the machines. But at the best now, they’ve got the most of that coal, bound to have, because they take it out fast, you know. Although they bought Jewel Ridge and Four Seam, and different companies, you know. And they still got a lot of territory yet. I see enough for another ten, fifteen years, maybe twenty. But finally, getting around to the coal question again, it’s finally going to work out. He’s talking sometime, sometime back, I was talking to Earl Deaton, the county court clerk. I seen [saw] him up at the clinic. I was up there. We got on the subject of mining, and all these deeds that the coal company [has] got. Had it been falsified, and people been beat out of their, their rightful deeds. And he said that the, we got to talking about Blue Diamond. And they’re trying to open up a new mine over there, and they actually got out old coal there. And he said that they’d would be coal here for another hundred years. I said, “What makes you think that?” “Well,” he says, “they got a big seam down under they going to open up.” Said, “And they’ll be working here a hundred years.” I said, “What are they going to do when the last black coal’s gone, the mountain’s all stripped? What’s going to be left? Can they make it on the tourist trade?” “Well,” he said, “we won’t have to depend on the tourist trade.” Said, “There will always be coal.”

Gullett: Well, I can’t see it that way, hardly. They finally get to where they, if they ever do get some other form of energy, the coal’s out of it. The only thing it would be a byproduct, kindly. But that would be good if they could. The need for coal would stop pretty soon, so the mountains could be saved. If it goes on, the great demand, the hullabaloo they’ll make about needing energy now, Carter, cause he’s a Southern man, he wants to see all that coal go to do that big project, to build it through, the Tom Bigbee River. Where it will go by barge, the coal will, right to Birmingham, Alabama, where the steel mills are. It left the South a lot. See, the West and Middle West has awful bad cheated now. South is getting all the attention. We’ve got the raw materials and the cheap labor. So, the factories move from the North to, to the South. And the peoples moving kindly with, the colored people’s coming back to, to Georgia and different places, where years ago they, they had to leave, you know, they couldn’t live down there. Sharecroppers and the slave labor, almost. And the white people weren’t much better off. The cotton didn’t bring anything. Our lands wore out. White people finally, like old Carters did, turned to peanuts. They make better mak-, raising peanuts than cotton, as we all know. But the greatest thing about the South that’s development of the great herds industry. It’s a great cattle country now. Alabama is great. And Kentucky’s about first or second in the Union now, in cattle production. Well, they turned the land to good production at least it wouldn’t out so bad, the grass. That helps the soil, you see. The cotton land is wore [worn] out. Well, that, one thing that made the South more attractive, they go there now and it’s a great tourist country. All parts of the South is attracting, the Appalachians stretches all the way from the Ohio River as far as Maine. And it has different branches and spurs runs off it. It’s all part of the Appalachians. Takes you in thirteen states. What I mean, that all, that Appalachian group is got a little government aid in late years. That’s what’s helped a lot. They called it a handout. But if you’re making a great nation, you can’t count the cost.

Interviewer: Excuse me. One other thing. Let me go out and let Mr. Gullett read that article that–

[pause in recording]

Gullett: [reading] “That our face stood the test, and we weren’t saved by works. The burden must rest on the weak, those less able to bear. The cross imposed upon the meek, trampled upon, trampled upon down here. The ancient long awaited never comes to why we’re here. For this life, sometimes, ill-fated, tells us little but woe, woe, and care. The place worn daily; we know well. Those are two places shun. Through fidelity, at last, will tell. One does well when your friend just won. And we consider, let us think, what shall, what should be our next move? Life is more than food or drink, and there is nothing we must prove.”

The burden, that’s the burden, laid upon the weak. Yeah. Something about the–

Interviewer: Yeah, I wanted you to read this. This is the first lawyer that has written Carter.

Gullett: Yeah. [pause] and the [ ] are copying Russia. That [ ] there in Tennessee. Wasn’t worth a damn, just like up in [ ], and a big [ ], but it was useless, it wasn’t honest. Well, that give us markets for the coal [ ] out here, went to TV. It’s not water [ ] they made there. But it stopped the great flood. They tamed the wild river. Well, we do, as we say about this war in Vietnam now, Russia knew that, see, they’ve got the advantage. They’ve got us beat all the way around. We’d do better joining hands with them than trying to fight them, because we can’t win. Now I don’t have a problem them, you can call whatever you want to, but I foresee this country going under the yoke or Russia someday, because their leaders is all madmen. We ain’t [have not] had a strong leader in a long time. We had the appeasement leaders. Now I’ll tell you who they was, was Nixon and Ford. They tried to make rapprochement. He made rapprochement with China, tried to get friendly with them, and also Russia. But that’s a false policy. You see, ones, ones mad at the other one, Russia and China is, and one gets mistrustful. So, Chinese broke off when we got too friendly with Russia. The SALT talks is nothing. They’ll never get nothing worked out there, no matter how they talk. Russia’s always getting stronger. You read the history of what they’ve got, I mean, the data on what they got, and they are way ahead of us.

[End Tape Two, Side A. Begin Side B.]

Gullett: I don’t know about the [ ], no. Because for friendship, the (?) where I met don’t suit me. I don’t like nobody to get fresh, you know, and act smart. You’ve got to be civil with me. Anybody does. Or else they feel the weight of my face to a gun or something. I keep the weapons. [laughs] What I mean, now, listen–

Interviewer: Now, Martin–

Gullett: Yes, go ahead.

Female Interviewer: What do you think the future of the area could and should be? What do you think should be done that would be most beneficial to the people and the country?

Gullett: Well, what it should be, to stop all, all strip mining in the mountains, and stop so much destruction of timber. That, the main thing, to keep floods down and keep the country beautiful right on, to save the environment is the first thing. Next thing, they ought to have little, small factories or plants put in here that might use the wood products. Manufactured in the wood products. And another thing, though, to build it up as a tourist attraction. That is a great thing now. In late years, we’re getting, we’re getting good roads in here to what we used to have. And that, that draws the tourists in. Now the state’s working hard to woo the tourist industry. But the main thing is the people in here. A lot of people don’t realize that when you rob these mountains and these hills of its raw materials, you’re robbing the people of their farming ground. You’re taking away their timber in later years they might sell for money. In other words, the people ain’t [are not] going to have nowhere to live, even to rest, hardly. They can’t live down the valley when all this slag throwed off in the valley. Well, there ought to be some kind of work provided, I’ll say. Now they’re talking about welfare. That’s a stopgap thing, we understand that. It wasn’t meant to be a permanent thing entirely in here. But now there will always be some disabled people, and people dispossessed and disadvantaged that have to have some federal help. Our country’s got so big, and there’s no, they’re talking about the rugged individual going it alone, but in here, we don’t have nothing to turn to. A disabled man can’t get a job, see. Well, a lot of the able, able-bodied can’t.

Gullett: So, the main thing that they can provide some kind of public service jobs like, oh, maybe working around garages and little factories where they make soft drinks, or something like that. That’s all we’ve ever had so far is garage work, or hotels, or some little, small service job. There ain’t [are] no factories. Unless they bring some in and make something out of wood or something they could bring in here and import the materials, and make it here and sell out, like they do in Switzerland. See, they make gloves in Switzerland, the mountaineers do. And they ship that all over the world. Watches. Why couldn’t they do it in here, we’re something kind of like Switzerland. We, where the Appalachian country compares to something like the mountains of Yugoslavia, Switzerland. But in their countries, they developed their country, it’s a great country, see. People all got work. There’s no poverty in Switzerland. Because they make good use of natural products, what they had. And the people was a product, too, and they used them wisely. Put them all to work. Well, we never had a sensible plan. Some of them make a hare-brained plan, like, “Get all the coal you can now and ship it as far as Alabama, to Birmingham,” like a certain congressman said at Prestonsburg. Well, that’s just an old mountain man that’s got smart through going to college or something, he thinks that would solve all the problems, but it won’t. That won’t solve the problems of the people getting all the coal out. They took it out for years. And the coal’s finally going to be displaced, and they ought [to] have something take its place after it’s gone. But unless they do have a constructive program and somebody with a long-range vision, up, steps up and speaks what it should be done, has the power to do it, it will never be done. If we had a strong government push for that, for the saving of the mountain people. Eastern Kentucky makes up two-thirds of all Kentucky. It’s two-thirds of the territory. Bluegrass is small compared to either of the mountains. And there’s where the raw materials lies. We got limestone yet, we’ve got coal, we’ve got timber. Well, with all that, with all that’s been shipped out, they’ve made no way for the people. It’s called the most poverty-stricken part of Appalachia. Well, they ain’t [do not] got [have any] sensible answers but accept that private capital invested here and shipped all the wealth out. Didn’t leave, the people worked for wages, and they had nothing left when the, when it’s all worked out. That’s what goes, happens to the abandoned mining camps. Well one good thing’s happened, they tore down most of the old ugly mining camps. People are getting nice homes. But there’s millionaire’s homes.

Gullett: The people got rich off the coal and timber. You go out in the hollers and creeks and see how people lives. Some of them still lives in log houses. Some of them lives in shacks that’s ready to fall over. Well, these people go gets this welfare and their food stamps or some form of relief, they’d be, they’d be worse to charge on the state, they’d be, they’d just die of hunger, probably. Nobody knows what they’d do. They’d probably be trying to break in stores or something, the children would, the young ones that’s able. And there’s a great rate of crime in here, juvenile delinquency. A lot of it’s caused, and the people, like all the rest of the nation, they turn to dope. Young people have become corrupted through outside influences. Brought in drug traffic, and the young men don’t work anymore. A lot of them don’t. The boys don’t. They try to accuse the population at large of being lazy. But it’s mostly the young people growed [grew] up and wasn’t taught to work, see. But the old people works is able, but they wore out, and the lands wore out. So, what they need to do is to try, if they can, to have some kind of little factories put in. Or to use their coal as a byproduct, or to have nylon factories, rayon factories. Rayon could be made from coal. Well, there’s so many other ways. Coke ovens, to make coke, to build steel. Coke will have to take the place of oil and gas to melt steel in the future, everybody knows that. And also, to make electricity. There was a great market for coal when had that, they didn’t have to ship it overseas. They could use all the miners could mine. But as far as overseas coal goes, that’s the cheap way to save money, trading it in Vietnam, to restore Vietnam, letting them have coal. All it will do is exhaust, exhaust their coal reserves where it’s already available in the mountains, it’s easy to get. We mine any more coal; they can’t even get miners to work in the mines. Too dangerous an occupation. They have trained miners, very expensive. Well, if they go down to make shaft mines down in the valleys of, of the Cumberland Mountains, why, they will be, it’d be too costly and expense by the time they got it done. It would cost more than gas and oil would.

Interviewer: A lot more dangerous, too.

Gullett: Yeah. Far more dangerous. Many lives would be lost. And people, people on top of the ground would protest it because some fumes and things would have to escape. And even that destroys the environment, even down under. So, I’ll say that what they ought to do is drop off, have light mining. Work what’s available that’s inside work. Not take the tops of the mountains off. Stop strip mining. That’s the first thing. Get into it in a way that it don’t hurt the people. Go back under the mine and tunnel mine like they used to, and it don’t hurt the environment so bad, see. The cave’s sealed over, and nobody knows there’s ever been a mine there. But see, if you’ve got the augers and this other thing, why that’s what started the country. But they want to get swift production for the money, for the quick dollar. Boom and bust. That’s always been our policy. I’m not against capitalism, but when it going [went] too far, it exploits the people and the land too much. Takes away the natural resources until the people ain’t [do not got [have] nothing [anything] to work at.

Female Interviewer: Do you think there’s any way to reclaim the land after it’s been stripped–

Gullett: Yes, in some cases. If we had some private investors, somebody with, even the government, to finance it and set up grape arbors here. It’s a great grape country. Grows apple trees good. Perry County used to be a great apple growing country. They raised as many as 350,000 bushels of apples a year. I remember when there were apples everywhere.

Interviewer: Why aren’t people raising apples?

Gullett: Well, the people quit farming, you see. They all turned to mining and they quit, they didn’t keep up the trees. And they didn’t spray them, and they died of the blight.

Interviewer: Would you say that again about the apple orchards and things? I was talking to...

Female Interviewer: I got carried away.

Interviewer: I got carried away. [both talking] I will shut up. So, can you say again about the grapes?

Gullett: [laughs] That’s off the record, then.

Interviewer: And the [ ], because that was good. That’s true. [both talking]

Gullett: Well, I guess I talk so much I get nervous, I talk real[ly] fast, you know, it’s just the way I’ve got to talk. I’m not mad, you know.

Interviewer: Go through that again if you will.

Another Interviewer: Tell us about the–

Gullett: Well, I remember back in my growing up, but when we, we’d sulfur big barrels of apples. We’d sulfur apples. I bet Mom sulfured many a barrel, preserve them for the winter. People, you know, we had great [ ] we’d make pickled kraut in and pickled beans. I bet they make pickled beans. Gather sacks of beans, oh, they grow them great. [ ], the land was very fertile then. You could grow stuff without fertilizer. Now a lot of people don’t believe that. But they cut all these trees down to make mine property so much, and, and buried the hillsides, that now the soil’s all washed away. There ain’t [are] no leaves there to hold that water back, see. We have flash floods now. The first year of flash floods we ever had was 1927. People built down on the riverbanks, on the very bank, never had flood like that. It washed everybody away. Well, they thought that would be the last big flood. But along ’57 and ’63, they began coming in increasing regularity, you know. Reason it was, the apple orchards is all gone, and people planted all the hillsides up till the topsoil washed off. And they distilled the acid lands, good for apples, grow good apple orchards now and grapevines. Now back in my time, and you ask any old timer that knows can tell you, that people raised all the fruit they needed. They didn’t have to buy any apples. We raised everything we needed, used to buy them off peddlers that come around to camps with their old mules, you know. Buy fresh meat from the peddlers, beans. If you didn’t raise a garden, it was real[ly] cheap, you could get buttermilk for a quarter a gallon, eggs for fifteen cents a dozen. You could buy a bushel of apples for a dollar, good apples. You make cider out of it. Make sauce. Or use them every way, you know. Sulfured apples awful good fried, you know, preserved in sulfur. Sulfur kept them from spoiling. And they tasted just like, sweet, like candy. Candy, candy them up, you know. And a lot of people don’t know what, the old timers, there wasn’t no such thing as cancer back then. We didn’t buy nothing out of the store much.

Gullett: Even what come to the commissary didn’t have the preservatives now that causes cancer. There’s the secret the old mountaineers have. Nobody had heart trouble, for they’d go up and down the mountain so much carrying loads that their heart become muscular, and they didn’t have heart trouble. Took deep breaths of air, and that strengthened their lungs, you know. Well, late years they drive cars in, instead, instead of walking, back then, see, they walked back then, and now they ride. So that makes everybody get soft. See, the old retirees quit the mines, what made the black lung work over them so fast. They breathe a lot of that rot dust and that coal dust, and it settled in the lungs just like cement in there; it won’t come out. Well on top of, what make it worse, is they never expand their lungs. They just sit down and wouldn’t take deep breaths, see. And they finally just died from suffocation. Well, a lot of modern people’s that way. What makes them take TB, now it used to be TB in the mountains. But that’s inherited most time, TB, we call mountain consumption. I’ve seen many young men die at the age of twenty of consumption. It’s usually hereditary in the family. But now, what makes people weak, they don’t eat the old fruit like they used to raise of their own. No fertilizer to it. It come from organic matter, see what I mean? Everything you raised, you didn’t fertilizer now. I’ve seen, I, I took thirty tomato plants and set them out. And it keep you busy, carrying tomatoes, basket after basket full. They just laid in piles there, till frost. All you could gather. While the neighbors say, “Go get all the tomatoes you want. I’ve got more than I can handle.” And they farmed heavy back then. A lot of people don’t know that–

Interviewer: They farmed the hillsides.

Gullett: Oh, they farmed clear to the top of the mountains where you see trees here now. I can remember when that was cleared land thirty-five years ago. I, I farmed it. I can show you a forest right now, me and my wife hoed corn in thirty-five years ago. Timber grows so fast, it come back. It’s full of poplars and, and young oak, and, and the kind of timber grows in here. And like I say, you don’t re-, people don’t realize it, people back then wasn’t lazy. But they had to do it, [ ] forced them to, it’s subsistence farming. I know when the county agents first come in here, they call this marginal farming land of the Appalachians. They said this is called subsistence farming. They raised more than subsistence. Some people got wealthy at it. Now her daddy was a heavy farmer. He owned, he owned I guess, two thousand acres of land at one time, mountain land. Sold a lot of it to the railroad. Big bottoms along the river. And he’d, he’d raise two thousand bushels of corn a year in here. I bet you all of Perry County wouldn’t raise two thousand bushels now. And he worked as many as forty, fifty hands in the field when they was hoeing corn. It was a dollar, but these poor people living, you see. There were no welfare back then. Oh, if you didn’t go out and make it, it took a strong back and a weak mind, but that’s what it took now. And you learned to use old grubbing hoes and heavy hoes, and the goosenecked hoes. When men didn’t have mules to plow, I’ve dug in many a piece of ground where the land’s so steep, you had to dig foot holes. But it made, it made, it made corn, yes. This land is just, just straight up, and down steep.

Interviewer: Were there–

Gullett: And I learned to shuck corn on it You had to learn how to shuck it. When you cut your corn, you had to take four or five stalks that way, and [ ] them in together, and tie it good and tight. Set your fodder up around it. And you had to learn how to tie it though in a way that stood perfectly straight. And always setting part of it down the hill, one side of it was longer down the hill, because it’s steep ground. But you anchor that in a way, it would stand there till Christmas and not fall. Most time, though, toward spring it would finally cave over, that old fodder shuck would. I used to save blade fodder, you know, pull the blades, and cut the tops and mix the tops with it. [ ] Take that big core stalk out of it.

Interviewer: Were there grape orchards then?

Gullett: Yeah. I’ve got grapes here that was set up by an old man forty years ago. [ ]. I’ve got all kind of strawberries still grows here if you set out, and grape vines. It’d grow good grapes for the hanging pots. You could, you could can, spray them, you know. We don’t spray them in here. If you did, why, you’d raise all the grapes in that be a good thing. Now these [ ] mines, see. There’s one company down there that had the people, they set up grape vines. And they say they’re producing good now. A grape vine, once it gets started like it was in southern France a way back, the Romans first set them out two thousand years ago. And the same vine, the stalk of that vine, [ ] Once you get a grape vine established, it’s there now, and it appear like it will die, but it will come back from the roots, you know. Well, unless you live in a very northerly climate where it kills the root entirely through deep freeze, it will always come back, the stalk of the grape vine, will from, from the root. You can’t kill them out here, a wild grape vine. It’s impossible to kill it out. A possum grape, we call it, a little old sour grape. And then there’s another kind of wild grape we call a summer grape, good to eat. You find them, they’re sweet. The possums likes the little sour grape, though, that’s what they fatten on. But a way back, years ago, when I was a boy, we’d go out to hunt the summer grapes. They’s [They are] better than anything you can buy at the store. Sweet as honey. And papaws, we got the native pawpaws. They’re good when they get ripe. I’ve got a tree here now that’s barren, but I hope the frost ain’t [does not] got [have] it. But you know every year, we’d get that wild fruit. Go out and get the walnuts, pawpaws, chestnuts. The mountain people had their own living, in a way. You couldn’t starve them, hardly. But as they got dependence on the mines, now in some ways this, the people that studies Appalachian culture is some ways right, in some ways. Most of them that went to mining become, they wasn’t independent no more. They become dependent on industries, like they do in the city. They weren’t no better off than they was in town, cause they depend on the coal company for every bite they got out of the commissary. Well, they quit farming. They couldn’t farm and work the mines, too, you see. But the old farmer that lived right close by now, he still continued to [ ] I’ll say ’41. He continued his steady farming. But some phenomenon happened here, some strange thing about the mountains here. They’re blessed of God, always have been. But that’s the source or our strength. When the last strongholds fell in Appalachia, and the whole America, Appalachia still stands. It will be like the Urals was to the Russians. The last retreat. That’ll come someday. Here will be a place for them to come and hide, and good highways to get in here with refugees. And the government will have to build places for them to live.

Gullett: This would be a great refugee camp in here. Now a lot of people don’t know it, but it’s coming quicker than you realize. Now I’m a prophet, kind of, that way. I see, though. Some people say, “Oh, we’ll al-, America will always be number one.” No. Our planet, and our capitalism boom and bust, it’s going to ruin us. And it got to that where you’re fighting far away wars and other things, fighting the dirty methods of the communists. That’s going to break us. See, people lost faith in America. We lost faith in our own people, in our own president. Now I’m glad they shattered the image of the presidency. He’s not God, and he shouldn’t have had all that honor. He’s just an ordinary man, elected for four years. And some people, these old mountaineers that’s ignorant, some of them said, “When the president gets killed, what’s going to happen to the country? It’s likely to all fall apart.” Well, you got a bureaucracy set up, if everyone in the cabinets [were] to die, the country run on its bureaus it’s got now. Russia’s nothing but a bureau country, it’s a bureaucracy. If every commissar died, the bureaus set up so good, the company, the company would still operate, see, the country would. We’re the, modeled on Russia, and we’re a democracy. This all comes through, drift toward socialism in Roosevelt’s time. Somebody said the New Deals could lead toward socialism. It was. We been drifting more that all this time. And we try to hang the old, rugged individual, go back, to capitalism, but it won’t work. [phone ringing]

[pause in tape]

Gullett: The country ain’t [is not] rich enough now for a man to be in...

[pause in tape]

Gullett: [singing] “some dark hollow where the sun don’t ever shine, than for you to be some other man’s woman, oh, when you promised to be mine. Well, I was born and raised in East Virginia, and North Carolina I did roam. Oh, there I courted a fair young maiden, oh her age and name I did not know. Oh, her hair it was of a dark brown color. Her cheek it was a rosy red. And upon her brow she wore a lily, oh for the tears that I have shed. Oh, her Papa said that we might marry. And her Mama said it would not do. So come here, dear, and I will tell you, oh, I will tell you what we’ll do. Well, it’s some dark night we’ll take a ramble, and I will run away with you.” [end of singing] That’s, that’s all I know of it.

Female interviewer: That’s great.

[pause in tape]

Gullett: [singing] “Be in some dark hollow, where the sun don’t never shine, than to be here alone just knowing that you’re gone, it will make you lose your mind. So, blow your whistle, freight train. Take me far on down the track. Oh, I’m going away, I’m going to stay, well, I’m going but I ain’t [am not] coming back.” [end of singing] That’s old Jimmy Skinner’ way of singing.

[End of Interview.]