Backcountry Sport Ways: North British Origins of Southern Highland Games

The people of the backcountry also brought their own folk games which had long been popular on the borders of north Britain. These entertainments were often very violent—as many folk amusements had been throughout England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But the games of the border country had a special quality which derived from the endemic fighting in that region. “Scots and English,” for example, was a favorite game on both sides of the border. Two teams of boys faced each other with their hats and coats in piles behind them. The object was to make a raid across the line, and to plunder the other team of its possessions without being captured. The boys shouted the ancient war cries of their region.¹

Border folk-games, like so many other parts of its culture, not only reflected the insecurity of life in that region. They also prepared men to deal with it. More than other parts of England, the sports of the border were contests of courage, strength and violence.

Special importance was given to wrestling—an ancient sport on the borders, commonly pronounced “wrasslin” or “russlin.” There were two types of wrestling in this region. One was carefully regulated and elaborately staged in annual tournaments. The burly contestants commonly dressed in sleeveless vests, long tights tucked into stockings, and velvet trunks incongruously embroidered with delicate flowers. Each man stood facing the other, arms locked around the opponent’s body and chins tucked into each other’s right shoulder:

When both men have taken hold, the bout begins, slowly at first as competitors move crab-like, sizing each other up, but suddenly with a flutter of legs there is action as one man is thrown. If any part of his body other than his feet touches the ground, the bout is lost; similarly if a competitor loses his hold he forfeits the bout. Clearly such a sport calls for not only great reserves of strength but also for skill, stamina and physical fitness.²

This sport was brought to Appalachia where wrestling tournaments were regularly held. A North Carolina settler named Cyrus Hunter recalled that “wrestling and jumping [were] two of the most prominent sports” of that early period.³

The borderers also engaged in another sort of combat called “wrassling” or “fighting.” This was a wild struggle with no holds barred that continued until one man gave up—or gave out.⁴ These events often began with a contest in “bragging and boasting” between men who had been drinking heavily beforehand. In the Lake District of England, one gentleman justice witnessed such a happening, and put a stop to it. “On Thursday,” he wrote, “I went again to Ambleside … to see the wrestling. It was very good. A man from Cumberland with a white hat and brown shirt threatened to fling everybody, and fight them afterwards. The fighting I put a stop to.”⁵

The border sport of bragging and fighting was also introduced to the American backcountry, where it came to be called “rough and tumble.” Here again it was a savage combat between two or more males (occasionally females), which sometimes left the contestants permanently blinded or maimed. A graphic description of “rough and tumble” came from the Irish traveler Thomas Ashe, who described a fight between a West Virginian and a Kentuckian. A crowd gathered and arranged itself into an impromptu ring. The contestants were asked if they wished to “fight fair” or “rough and tumble.” When they chose “rough and tumble,” a roar of approval rose from the multitude. The two men entered the ring, and a few ordinary blows were exchanged in a tentative manner. Then suddenly the Virginian “contracted his whole form, drew his arms to his face,” and “pitched himself into the bosom of his opponent,” sinking his sharpened fingernails into the Kentuckian’s head. “The Virginian,” we are told, “never lost his hold … fixing his claws in his hair and his thumbs on his eyes, [he] gave them a start from the sockets. The sufferer roared aloud, but uttered no complaint.” Even after the eyes were gouged out, the struggle continued. The Virginian fastened his teeth on the Kentuckian’s nose and bit it in two pieces. Then he tore off the Kentuckian’s ears. At last, the “Kentuckian, deprived of eyes, ears and nose, gave in.” The victor, himself maimed and bleeding, was “chaired round the grounds,” to the cheers of the crowd,⁶

Sporadic attempts were made to suppress “rough and tumble.” Virginia’s tidewater legislators passed a general statute against maiming in 1748, and in 1772 added a more specific prohibition against “gouging, plucking or putting out an eye, biting, kicking or stomping.”⁷ In 1800 the grand jury of Franklin Country, Tennessee, in the manner of American juries, generally indicted the “practice of fighting, maiming and pulling out eyes, without the offenders being brought to justice.”⁸

But in the southern highlands, rough and tumble retained its popularity. During the War of Independence, and English prisoner named Thomas Anburey witnessed several backcountry gouging contests. “An English boxing match,” he wrote, “ … is humanity itself compared with the Virginian mode of fighting,” with its “biting, gouging and (if I may so term it) Abelarding each other.”⁹ Anburey described “a fellow, reckoned a great adept in gouging, who constantly kept the nails of both his thumbs and second fingers very long and pointed; nay, to prevent their breaking or splitting … he hardened them every evening in a candle.” Bloodsports have existed in many cultures, but this was one of the few that made an entertainment of blinding, maiming, and castration.¹⁰

Also very popular on the borders of North Britain were individual competitions in running, jumping, leaping, throwing axes and spears. An example in the Lake District of Cumbria were annual gatherings at Ferry, Ambleside and later Grasmere.¹¹ Some of these tournaments were very ancient. One of them was held in a ruined earthwork of great antiquity called Stone Carr near Greystoke. Wrestlers competed for a leather belt, leapers for a pair of gloves, and footracers for a handkerchief. These tournaments were great festivals, with large crowds, heavy drinking, food stalls, brandy booths, tambourine girls and accordion boys.¹²

These athletic contests were also brought to the American backcountry by emigrants from North Britain. The young Andrew Jackson first came to eminence for his skill in running and leaping. Other contestants competed in sledge-throwing and “long bullets,” in which young sportsmen hurled iron cannon-balls—sometimes at each other. Large crowds gave these contests the same carnival air that had existed in border tournaments.¹³

Athletic competitions of this sort were introduced to America mainly by borderers and Scots, whose traditional “Caledonian Games” became the ancestor of track and field in the United States. These meets commonly included the shot-put, hammer-throw, running broad jumps and high jumps, pole-leaping, hop-step-and-jump, hurdles, a “long race” of one mile, a walking match, sack races, wheelbarrow races, three-legged races, highland dancing, and tossing the caber. All of this activity occurred within a ring 500 feet in circumference.¹⁴

“Caledonian games” became very popular in America, and were gradually opened to non-Scottish competitors. As early as

1836 the New York Highland Society held a “sportive meeting” in the Elysian Fields across the Hudson River. Other athletic clubs, schools and colleges began to sponsor them, eliminating the competitions which were thought to be too strenuous for undergraduates (caber-tossing), or not strenuous enough (sack-races), or not in keeping with the ideology of masculine athletics (male dancing). The first college in North America to sponsor these games in a formal way was McGill University in Montreal. In the United States, the leader was Scots Presbyterian Princeton, with its Scottish president James McCosh and its sports-loving Scottish teacher George Goldie. By the mid-nineteenth century, Caledonian games were being held in 125 American cities, and the field sports of North Britain had become the foundation of track and field throughout the United States.¹⁵

Many other folk games were also carried from the border to the backcountry. An example was the ancient and primitive game called shinny.¹⁶ This ancestor of hockey had originally been played with the long bones of a sheep. The game was known throughout the British Isles. In the west of England, it was called not; in London it was named hockey; on the borders it was known as shinny. Of the Scots Irish it was said that “great numbers of men and boys resorted to the fields on this day to play at shinny.” The backsettlers preserved the northern name, and played the game in a ritual way at Christmastime. This custom persisted throughout Appalachia into the twentieth century. Here again, there were strong continuities from the borders of North Britain to the American backcountry, and to Appalachia in our own time.¹⁷

The sport ways of the back settlements were not a static set of inherited customs but a dynamic folk tradition. Amusements unknown to the British borderlands were invented in the American backcountry within the framework of an existing sport culture.

A case in point were games involving guns. “Shooting at marks was a common diversion among the men, when their stock of ammunition would allow it,” Kercheval remembered. Backcountry gunnery games were very different from the casual snap shooting of English country gentlemen who competed in the slaughter of prodigious quantities of half-domestic birds by offhand hip and shoulder shots at point blank range, with prodigious expenditures of ammunition. In the Appalachians, a marksman had to make every bullet count at great distances. Kercheval recalled that “shooting off-hand was not then in practice; it was not considered as any trial of the value of the gun, nor indeed as much of a test of the skill of a marksman.” The backsettlers achieved astounding feats of marksmanship by firing very carefully and slowly at distant marks, their rifles resting in a cushion of moss on a branch or tree trunk.¹⁸

Another backcountry amusement was throwing the tomahawk. Samuel Kercheval remembered that “a little experience enabled the boy to measure the distance with his eye, when walking through the woods, and strike a tree with his tomahawk in any way he choose.”¹⁹ Competitions were also held in imitating the cries of animals. “The bleating of the fawn brought its dam to death,” Kercheval recalled, “the cries of turkeys and owls were requisite as a measure of precaution in war.” Altogether, Kercheval observed that “the sports of the early settlers of this country were imitative of the exercise and stratagems of hunting and war.” In this respect, they were much the same as the war games of the British borderlands. Only the nature of war itself had changed.²⁰