Pilgrimage of Joy. . .

IN THE BEGINNING
by W. Carl Ketcherside

I was born early in the morning of May 10, 1908, in a little two-room miner’s cabin in a poverty-stricken village called Cantwell, nestled in the eastern foothills of the Missouri Ozarks. My advent was at a very inauspicious time during the presidential tenure of Theodore Roosevelt, for I made my debut on the heels of the great financial panic of 1907, a matter to which I gave little thought at the time. My father was William Ketcherside and he had married Anna Marguerite Hansen some eighteen months before I entered the scene as “a howling success.” There were five other children to follow to compose a family circle of three boys and three girls. All of us are still alive as I write these words.

All of the Ketchersides (or Ketchersids, for some dropped the final “e” about the year 1800) are descended from one progenitor, Thomas Ketcherside, who came over from Scotland shortly before the time of the American Revolution. His family settled in Virginia and North Carolina. Our branch of the clan emigrated to Missouri after it became United States territory as part of the Louisiana Purchase, and took up land in the then wild country called the “Black River region.” The third highest peak of the Missouri Ozarks appears on our state map as Ketcherside Mountain.

Like a lot of pioneers, the men were hard and tough. They prided themselves on the amount of raw whiskey, called rot-gut, which they could gulp down and upon their ability to settle brawls with their fists in bare-knuckle fighting. My great grandfather deserted his family and “shacked up” with a Cherokee Indian woman who had been abandoned when her family died on the frightful “Trail of Tears” march in which many thousands perished while’ crossing Illinois and Missouri enroute to the Oklahoma Territory.

My great-grandmother was, so I am told, a gentle Scotswoman who still retained the dialect of “Auld Scotia.” She kept the family together, and although none of them ever went to school, or learned to read or write, she invested them with a degree of integrity and a reasonable sense of respect. My own grandfather, Woodson Ketcherside, even as a lad, demonstrated qualities which later endeared him to all who knew him. When he first saw my grandmother, Lavina Moses, she was a mere girl, working barefoot in a rocky hill field and wielding a heavy hoe.

As an orphan, she had been indentured to a man for whom she was required by law to work for her “board and keep” until she became eighteen. The lot of such “bound children” in the days before orphan homes was often a difficult one. Taking compassion upon her when she was fifteen, my grandfather-to-be paid off the sum assessed for the final three years and obtained her release. He bought her a pair of shoes and a simple dress and they were married when he was seventeen and she was still but fifteen. I think their union was one of the happiest and most contented I have ever seen. With the opening of the deep shaft lead mines near Bonne Terre, they moved to a rugged hill farm some three miles from that struggling town, built a log cabin and began to rear their growing family in a kind of wilderness setting where hardship was a way of life and the wolf of hunger was seldom far from the rude door swung on leather hinges.

There was but little chance for an education and the Coonville school, a couple of miles distant, was in session only sporadically as a wandering teacher came through and arranged to teach a few weeks for a meager pittance while “boarding around” a week at a time in the homes of the scholars in the area. Since the chief aim of the community rowdies was to “run the teacher off” and they felt a sense of abject failure if one remained more than six weeks, opportunities for intellectual development were decidedly limited. The rustic homes were utterly devoid of reading materials. There were no newspapers, magazines or books. Only an occasional Bible was to be found and it was regarded with superstitious awe, as containing a passage which would instantaneously stop nosebleed when read by someone who knew its location in the sacred text.

There were no churches and no regular meetings for religious devotion or instruction. Only when an itinerant Methodist or Baptist preacher rode in along one of the trails and announced “preaching in the schoolhouse” did the folk gather to be exhorted to flee from the wrath to come. A boy was sent on a mule to inform the dwellers in remote cabins about the great event and all came, more for the diversion than for the spiritual uplift. The preachers were hardy, with faces deeply tanned and hands that were calloused. They worked in the fields or in the timber side by side with those who “put them up for the night” and prided themselves that they could lay out a row in the field or hew a beam as straight as “the best of them:” They were also fearless and had no qualm about stepping off of the platform to walk back and grab a disturbing ruffian by “the nape of the neck and the seat of his breeches” and throw him unceremoniously into the schoolyard. Then dusting off their hands they would invite anyone else who wanted “some of the same” to step forward and request it before they resumed preaching.

As a little lad I used to listen spellbound as my grandfather, who was a master story teller, recounted incidents related to school and church in the backwoods. Always reverential, while being as courageous as a wildcat, he told about the times he had pitched in to help the preacher, and with the aid of a stick of stove wood or a window prop had converted a lot of toughs from an upright to a prone position. He liked best to tell of a Methodist preacher who was very small in stature and who rode his jaded horse into the community after the last three meetings had been “busted up” by a gang of roughnecks.

The wiser heads tried to dissuade the short, thin man from announcing a meeting but “he allowed as how he could handle it with the help of the Lord.” The schoolhouse was crowded to capacity the first night with the better element in fear and trembling, while the boorish louts were scuffling with and pawing at each other in the back. The little preacher stepped behind the teacher’s desk and called for silence in order to begin a song to the praise of God. The noise in the rear became louder and more raucous. Nervous tension filled the air.

The preacher calmly said, “We will adjourn to the schoolyard. Follow me please!” As he walked down the aisle he was followed by the wondering audience, some of whom whispered that he was scared out and giving it up. Without saying another word, when he reached the schoolyard, the preacher stooped down and picked up three walnuts from under a tree, and then yanked a six-shooter out of his hip pocket. One by one he threw the walnuts into the air and without a miss shot them to bits. Then he picked up three more and threw them high into the air at once and cracked all three. The fragments of the walnut shells rained down on the heads of the gaping crowd.

Taking six bullets out of his side pocket the preacher again loaded his gun. His fingers did not tremble. He looked up and said, “We will return to the house. Follow me, please!” The awe-stricken rustics all trooped in behind him. It was still as a morgue when the preacher took his place again. Not a sound disturbed the deathly quiet. Laying his trusty six-shooter on top of the Bible he announced, “I propose to discourse with you tonight about the Prince of peace and I will tolerate no interruption.” There was no interruption to tolerate. If someone shuffled his feet the preacher merely glanced at the gun and the shuffling stopped. The meeting lasted three weeks and “the mourners” were all over the place when “the altar call” was made.

In this kind of rural environment my father finished the third McGuffey Reader and mastered the first part of Ray’s Practical Arithmetic. It had to be done “in hitches” as someone later explained it. While still a child he contracted smallpox during an epidemic, and due to lack of proper care, since there were no doctors to summon for advice, one of his eyes was permanently impaired and the muscle in one leg shriveled away and left that limb shorter than the other. This did not interfere with his hunting or “frolicking” as the old-timers referred to almost any activity except hard work. He became a crack-shot with a gun and regularly carried off every prize from the shooting-matches. He also became a fiddle-player of note and this made him extremely popular at the hoedowns which generally continued all night or until someone got “likkered up” and started a “knock-down-and drag-out.”

He got a job underground when he was not yet sixteen years old and this meant working ten hours per day, six days per week, for eleven cents an hour. Every day, at a time depending upon which shift he worked, he went to the changing-room where he took off his street-clothes, hung them up on hooks, and then put on his wet, dirty, slimy miner’s garb. He went to the large can of carbide, filled his lamp, hooked it on the front of his cap, stepped on the cage and made his descent into the bowels of the earth.

Perhaps because he was so young, and felt the need to prove himself among the older hard-bitten miners, he developed a vocabulary of profanity which would have shocked people in almost any other part of the world. When I was grown and returned to “the Lead Belt” as the area came to be called, grizzled old-timers would search me out and say, “I knowed your Pap when he first went to work underground. He could out-cuss a mule skinner.” They said it with a note of envy such as one uses when he speaks of another who has achieved a degree of proficiency in a coveted art which the speaker has not been able to reach.

The young William Ketcherside, if one may judge by the posed photographs taken by wandering photographers, was a rather handsome swaggering young specimen of manhood. When he was “on top” he smoked a pipe filled with Bull Durham, always allowing the string of the tobacco sack to hang from his shirt-pocket in the latest style. When he was underground he could not smoke because of the danger from powder and dynamite, so he took up chewing Brown Mule, and practiced spitting through his front teeth. He was a foul-mouthed and obscene product of a place and a time where you had to be as tough as a hickory sapling to survive.

When the Spirit of God got through to him and transformed him it was one of the most thorough and traumatic changes I have ever known. It is also one of the first things I remember and, of course, it affected my whole future on earth. I must tell you about it, but before I do I want to tell you about my mother, whose parents came to this land as immigrants from the “old World” as Europe was then designated.