Backcountry Gender Ways: Border Rituals of Love and Violence

In his account of backcountry marriages, Samuel Kercheval recorded another curious custom called the wedding toast. After dinner, as Black Betty passed from hand to hand, each male guest raised the bottle in his right fist and cried: “Here’s to the bride, thumping luck and big children!” Kercheval explained:

Big children, especially big sons, were of great importance, as we were few in number and engaged in perpetual hostility with the

Indians, the end of which no one could foresee. Indeed many of them seemed to suppose war was the natural state of man, and therefore did not anticipate any conclusion of it; every big son was therefore considered a young soldier.¹

Here was the basis of gender relationships in the backcountry. The first principle was that men were warriors. The second was that women were workers. These ideas had long flourished on the borders of north Britain. When they were combined with the ethics of Christianity, the result was a gender system of high complexity which might best be described as a bundle of paradoxes.

One paradox concerned gender distinctions. In the backcountry, work roles were not as sharply divided by sex as in other English cultures. But at the same time, the people of the back-country had exceptionally clear-cut ideas of masculinity and feminity in manners, speech, dress, decorum and status.²

Travelers in the backcountry often reported that women and men routinely shared the heaviest manual labor. Both sexes worked together in the fields, not merely at harvest time but through the entire growing season. Women not only tended the livestock but also did the slaughtering of even the largest animals. Travelers were startled to observe delicate females knock down beef cattle with a felling ax, and then roll down their sleeves, remove their bloody aprons, tidy their hair, and invite their visitors to tea. Females also helped with the heavy labor of forest-clearing and ground-breaking. William Byrd noted that women in the back settlements were not merely “up to their elbows in housewifery,” but also busy with what other English cultures took to be a man’s work.³

Those customs have sometimes been explained as a response to the frontier environment. But they did not exist in quite the same way on the Puritan frontier, and the same patterns had long been observed by travelers in the borderlands of North Britain. One anonymous visitor to the counties of Cumberland and Westmorland wrote that wives of even landowners were expected to share equally in the heavy farm work. “These petty landowners work like slaves,” one traveler observed in 1766. “They cannot afford to keep a manservant, but husband, wife, sons and daughters all turn out to work in the fields.”⁴ An historian of Galloway wrote that on women “devolved almost every task of mean and painful drudgery.”⁵

In other respects, there was very little equality between husbands and wives in the British borderlands or the American back-country. The historical myth that the frontier created a spirit of equality among the sexes could not be farther from the truth. Backcountry families were decidedly male-dominant—much more so than in New England or the Delaware Valley. The male was expected to be the head of the household; his consort was required to do his bidding quietly, cheerfully and without complaint. This was a traditional folkway among the border people. Of a woman’s place in Ulster, Leyburn writes, “the status of women, whether legal or actual, improved not a whit during the seventeenth century. … they were disciplined in the churches, but their life must otherwise have been the traditional one of subordination to men in a patriarchal society.”⁶ Precisely the same patterns appeared in the American backcountry families. Arthur Calhoun remembered from the experience of his own Appalachian childhood that “the Scots-Irish … were marked by family loyalty. The women led hard lives but were patient and submissive. The person familiar with the backcountry of western Pennsylvania today [c. 1917] will note apparent survivals of the last two primitive features.”⁷

More than in other English-speaking cultures, the identity of backcountry women was submerged in the status of their husbands. An example appeared on a gravestone. When Patrick Calhoun erected a memorial to his wife, the name he placed at the top was not hers but his. The inscription read:

Patk Calhoun Esq

In memory of Mrs. Catherine Calhoun

Aged 76 years who with 22 others

was here murdered by the Indians, the

First of February 1760.⁸

George Gilmer remembered many similar vignettes of gender relations in this society. He told one such story about John Marks and his pretty bride Mary Tomkins. One day the husband was building a log cabin:

His wife came to the place, and began objecting to the manner in which he was fashioning what he was doing. He listened to her for some time, and reasoned the matter with her; but she still insisted upon having the house made according to her own notions. He pulled off his breeches, and threw them down to her, telling her to put them on and wear them.”⁹

There was yet another paradox in the tone of these relations—which were filled with love and violence both at the same time. Gilmer told another tale of a hard-drinking backsettler who called himself Colonel Nicholas Johnson. One day, Colonel Johnson got drunk and assaulted his daughter and wife:

Col. Johnson threw one of his daughters on the floor, and made such a plausible feint that he intended to take her life, by sticking his knife into the floor near her head, that his wife interfered to save her child. He immediately let go his daughter, and attempted to seize his wife. She fled from the house to Broad River, about half a mile distant. Whilst seated over the water, considering the question whether it were better to be or not to be, she was suddenly precipitated into the river, and turning her head, saw that her husband’s hand had done the deed. As soon as he perceived that his wife’s life was in imminent peril, his whole nature underwent a sudden revulsion. He was sober in a moment. Unable to swim, to have jumped into the water would have been certain destruction to both. He looked around with the quickness of thought for means to save her. He found nothing at hand, but a long weed. Extending it at once towards her, he spoke gently, and begged her to take hold. The voice of love never fails to find a vibrating chord in a woman’s heart. Her clothes held her up for a moment. She saw the change in her husband’s feelings, and did as she was implored to do.¹⁰

Love and violence together were common ingredients of back-country marriages—both expressed with an emotional intensity that rarely appeared in Massachusetts or the Delaware. Gilmer told another tale of love and violence in the backcountry family of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Meriwether:

His love for his wife was without intermission, and … his gallantry equalled his love. When she tired of sleeping on one side, and turned on the other, he always crossed over, if awake, that they might be ever face to face.

But Thomas Meriwether did not hesitate to use violence to dominate the woman he loved so deeply. Once he and his wife attended a camp meeting, and she began to be caught up in the process of conversion. “Tom Meriwether,” we are told, “became alarmed, lest his wife’s love might be drawn away from him, and placed upon what he took no interest in. He seized her by the arm, and led her forcibly away,” dragging her violently from the camp meeting.¹¹

Despite these expressions of love, there was a great distance between men and women of the backcountry. A mountain woman wrote from hard experience of her own marriage:

A rift is set between the sexes at babyhood that widens with the passing of the years, a rift that is never closed even by the daily interdependence of a poor man’s partnership with his wife. Rare is a separation of a married couple in the mountains; the bond of perfect sympathy is rarer. … The pathos of the situation is none the less terrible because it is unconscious. They are so silent. They know so pathetically little of each other’s lives.

Of course the woman’s experience is the deeper; the man’s gain is in breadth of outlook. His ambition leads him to make drain after drain on the strength of his silent wingless mate. Her position means sacrifice, sacrifice and every sacrifice, for her man first, and then for her sons.¹²

Gender relations in the backcountry, like those of the borderlands, combined elements which have often coexisted in warrior cultures—clear-cut ideas of men as fighters and women as workers; exceptionally sharp distinctions between masculine and feminine roles; extreme male domination and female dependence within the family; intense expressions of love and violence between wives and husbands; and sometimes a great aching silent distance that kept them apart.

One is occasionally tempted to abandon the role of the historian and to frame what social scientists call a theory. Whenever a culture exists for many generations in conditions of chronic insecurity, it develops an ethic that exalts war above work, force above reason, and men above women. This pattern developed on the borders of North Britain, and was carried to the American backcountry, where it was reinforced by a hostile environment and tempered by evangelical Christianity. The result was a distinctive system of gender roles that continues to flourish even in our own time.