We've just arrived at Mr.
William Buckley's. Mr. Buckley is a long time resident of
Pocahontas County. His family acquired over 1,400 acres as land a grant from
the King. Mr. Buckley was educated at West Virginia University,
coached at Concord College. Was a first lieutenant in WWI and
during his college days worked at the Cass General Store earning
money for his college expenses.
ALEX.: Here's the
history of Pocahontas County. Now you told me I would have to
read Blackhurst's book. I've done that. These boys have
been reading these books.
BUCKLEY: Blackhurst knows
Cass pretty well. But you have to get Phillips.
(Blank space on paper) Greenbrier Valley, you know.
ALEX.: I know
that. We're going to approach it. They've written three
histories of Pocahontas County. We've read those. We've
read the census reports. We've taken this economic survey
Mrs. Price over here, Jane Price Sharp has done. We've
gone over that. Now we're going around to talk with
some of the fellas. I was telling these young fellas
about it and I thought you might want to sit here on the porch and tell them
about some of your experiences when
you worked over at Cass.
BUCKLEY: You mean my
experiences on the Cass job?
ALEX.: Oh, yes. Wonder
if we can sit down and talk for a while?
BUCKLEY: Don't have
anything else to do. Talk to you to death if you fool around
with me very long.
ALEX.: Well,
we like to talk and if you'd talk to us a while we'd certainly
appreciate it. Wonder if you'd tell these young fellas
what you told my son and daughter and wife about floating
the logs. Now I read his Riders of the Flood, Blackhurst's Riders of the
Flood, a most interesting
book, a fine book. I read his Sawdust in Your Eyes and
his Men and Mighty Mountains. They tell me he has another
one, Afterglow.
BUCKLEY: His wife is
putting his short stories together and told us (Blank space
on paper).
ALEX.: I've read all of
them. You told me I should read them. I've written a
proposal to the university and they've given me a grant
to write the business history of this county. We hope to write the
business histories of several of these
eastern counties and put them on file in Marshall University's library.
You could help us by relating some of
those experiences. Let's sit down and talk a while.
(Go through some
discussion of who will sit where)
ALEX.: Doing a little
plowing I noticed.
BUCKLEY: Well, I'm jot
doing very much plowing myself. I'm tired of working a
corn field. (Blank space on paper) lower end of the farm
last year.
ALEX.: You
told me you worked a short time there in the Cass store while you
were in college. Why don't you relate some of your
experiences to these fellas? I found it real amusing
when you were telling about cleaning out the potato bin over there. They'd
brought in a bunch of gum boots of
some kind.
BUCKLEY: This big store,
it was part of the West Virginia Pulp and Paper Company up at Cass. The
sawmill, it was West Virginia Pulp and Paper Company. The railroad was Greenbrier,
Cheat and Elk River Railroad. The farm and meat plant was
S. T.* ____ and Company. The store was Pocahontas Supply Company.
I guess for income tax purposes it was
different companies. When we were working in the store,
Pocahontas Supply Company if we sold the camp a
carload of oats to feed the horses we'd charge it to
West Virginia Pulp and Paper Company. And if we sold some goods that went
to the railroad, we charged that to
Greenbrier, Cheat and Elk River Railroad. Which made our
sales a way up there. There was a good old boy working
in the office. He was a grown man and lad, but he
didn't look like he was over 16 years old. At the end of
the year, he went to make the inventory on the adding
machine. The total was over a million dollars and the machine wouldn't
handle it. Had to stop everything and
order a new adding machine. There were twenty men and two women
working in the store. Of course, some of
them didn't sell anything, other than in the way of
____. There was a colored man who didn't do anything except
sweep up spilled oats or baled the hay or cleaned up
around there. Still, he was employed by the Pocahontas
Supply Company. One of the other fellas, an old boy who'd been there a
long time. Worked in the wareroom out there. They told me he
couldn't read or write but he never came in to sell anything or put in anything, unless
someone came in to a bag of sugar or something out of
the wareroom, he came in and told us who to charge it
to. They told me around there he couldn't read or write. Still he
was an old ____ and a good worker. In all, there were twenty men and two
women working in the
store.
ALEX.: Quite a crew.
BUCKLEY: It was quite a
crew and we had quite a lot to retail in a little place like Cass. A
million dollars worth of merchandise in a
year we had a lot of groceries. One big room, divided an
office, hardware store, post office, a grocery department, a drug department, a
men's furnishings
department, ladies department and a jewelry department.
They all came out into one front of the store. What was unusual was
everybody was working for the company and
nobody had any money. Everything that you would handle
there was charged. It was wrote down on a slip, put in
what was called a McCaskey system (blank space on paper) and
rang it up on the cash register as a sale and gave him a
slip and that way we were not handling any money but we
were making big sales. Now out on the mountain, there
were what were called American camps and what they called Bohunk camps,
Austro-Hungarian and Italian. In our
supplies, the supply days were Tuesdays and Fridays. We
sent to these camps. We'd put Camp 49 at one end of a
boxcar and Camp 52 at the other end. Some of them went to the Cheat River and some of them went to Elk
River. They had a hundred miles of railroad. Went up to
Spruce on the Cheat River and 55 miles down the Cheat River
to Bemiss where western Maryland crossed and then
across the state of Maryland toward Webster Springs from the
Elk River then east to a couple little coal mines. And there were five
little stores on the mountain like
commissaries and one slated for workers and one at Cheat Bridge and one at
Harper's mine and the other couple on
The Crick down Webster County. We sent supplies to
those stores, probably a half a boxcar full of things they'd
sent it and ordered from us. We didn't charge the
things we sent to the stores up to "Sale". We charged the things
going up to the camps to "Sale" because they
were going to West Virginia Pulp and Paper Company. Now, then they had
horses and took a lot of horse feed.
They had half a dozen teams that they had at camps.
(Problem on Tape)
BUCKLEY: I worked most of
the time in the grocery department. But, uh, a freight train
and 80 would shove in half a dozen or maybe
10 or 12 boxcars up beside the wareroom. Next morning,
when things would get a little slack and we'd be out of work, we'd go out
and open up these boxcars and
unload. Everything came in carload lots. Condensed milk,
canned corn, sugar, canned tomatoes, everything like that, flour, came in
carload lots and we'd take this little two-wheeled dollies and move it out.
My experience with the potato bin was on an occasion like that. I went out
to see over unloading a freight car. I
opened it up and there was a solid boxcar full of gum
shoes. They had about six pairs in a wooden box, and they were just packed
full. I think it was about April. I
thought, what in the world are we going to do with gum
shoes at this time of the year. No place to put them. So
I went back here and went in the office and the manager,
Hickman, was in there. I said to him, "I've got a
boxcar load of gum shoes out here. What on earth am I going
to do with them?" He said, "Bill, the potato bins are
about empty at this time of the year. Still down in
the basement. Take them down and put them in there. I got
them at a good price by taking them at this time of
year." Well, I could see Lambert Eilgbur Company, Lambert, New
Jersey. I could see why they'd give a good
price to unload a boxcar load of gum shoes in April. That was
the boss's way of buying. If it looked like a bargain
he bought it. And he didn't buy just a little bit, he
bought all you had. He was good to his customers though
because if the next flour he'd buy would be at a higher
price. So when the customers came in we'd tell them, better buy flour now because the next shipment going to be a
little higher price. That way he'd warn them and he
didn't overcharge them. Some of these people down with Senator Kennedy
said company store was a regular loan
shark. I never did consider the Pocahontas Supply Company was robbing
anybody. We charged everything and
everyone was working for the company. They didn't charge
anything extra for credit. It was just the same as cash, although they
took it off of a man's pay in the office. It was all handled between those different
companies. And because it was all Whitt* brothers up in
New Jersey (York).
ALEX.: Was it Luke
brothers?
BUCKLEY: ____. They
wanted to build a pulp mill on the Greenbrier River when they
first came and the state legislature down in Charleston
wouldn't let them ruin the fishing in the Greenbrier
River. So they went over the state line into Covington and
doggone taxes went over there and made a town out of
Covington, Virginia. (Blank space on paper) on the Cheat
now, that was Spruce Park. So after so long a time they found a new way of
making paper out of hardwood. So
the same thing they wanted to build a pulp mill there on
the . . . they wouldn't let them built it here on the
Cheat River so they went across to the north branch of the
Potomac to Luke, Maryland, just across from Gormania, West Virginia, there.
They shipped the hardwood down
the Cheat River and out on the Western Maryland to the Luke. Charlie Luke married a
Hanley girl from up at Arbovale and
lived there in Cass when I lived there. So he was one of the company but
he was there all the summer. E. P.
Shaffer was superintendent of the whole lumbering
operation. And now in your book, Blackhurst called him
Muldoon.
ALEX.: Called him who?
BUCKLEY: Muldoon. He's
talking about E. P. Shaffer. All through the book, he
mentions people that you can occasionally recognize because of the
descriptions he gives or the things they
did. There were loggers who come in off the mountain and Blackhurst gives them another name but if you were
acquainted with Cass you knew who he was talking about.
ALEX.: You're
saying his book is fairly factual, he just disguises the
names.
BUCKLEY: Yes, he changes
the names a little bit. One famous old cook on the mountain named Jimmy
Kirkpatrick. The loggers called
him Kirk, you know. Well, in his book, he talks about Jimmy Kirk.
(Laughter) He was a good cook, but some
of those cooks, well they had a downhill haul on the
whole job. If they quit, the whole outfit was tied up. So
they about bossed the whole thing. This old fella was
like that. He'd tell them, the foreman of the camp, what he'd do and what
he wouldn't do and so forth. The climate up there is unbelievable.
The difference
between Greenbrier Valley and Cheat Valley, eight miles from Cass up there.
It's hard to believe there is a place
up there in West Virginia that there is frost every month of the year.
When I was the only single man down
there in the store, when somebody from one of those
little stores went on vacation, from one of those little
stores on the mountain, they'd send me up there for a week
or maybe a month to take his place while he was gone.
Well, I went up to Spruce and the fella who was there said, "I've been here 48
months and there's been frost 47 of
those 48 months." Doc Hurst, when he was doing the doctoring for
the Cass train, often remarked, "There never had been a burial ground at Spruce.
Although those 500 people lived up there those many, many a
years, there never had been anybody buried up there." He
said, "The reason for that was the ground never thawed out
enough to dig a grave." (Laughter)
ALEX.: He had the
humor, didn't he?
BUCKLEY: Oh, yes.
His dad was like that. His dad was an old Methodist
preacher. I knew him quite well. He always saw the funny
side of everything and he always had a joke for anything
that was going on. Warren* had that same idea. Some of
these short stories were pretty risque stories that he
tells.
ALEX.: Well,
did the loggers like to buy certain types of clothes? You mentioned that
there were Italians and Hungarians and so on up there. I guess they all
had their special
types of clothes and you had to cater to those clothes.
BUCKLEY: Well, this old
foreman in the store knew them so well, he knew exactly
what they would buy and what they wouldn't buy. There were
certain things they would buy. Shoes were cutter
shoes. They had a cutter, made in Wisconsin. They had a
12-inch top shoe, cowhide, leather sole and a spool heel. And there were
four spikes, corks they called them. You couldn't sell one of those
loggers anything else. There was no use to talk to
him or anything else.
He knew what he wanted when he came in the store. I'd
go up in those camps up there and drove nails along up
like that back to the ceiling. The Number 9's all
tied to keep together and all put them up in the same
space, Number 10, Number 11, and like that. Hanging up like
that. A man'd come in and say I want a pair of shoes. I'd say, "What
size do you want?" "Number nine."
I'd set 'em down like that. He'd say, "I want a pair of socks." He
wouldn't even put his hand in them. He knew exactly what he's
buying. Just after the first World War they had a tax, a luxury tax.
Fine silk shirts that sold for over $10 had a 20 percent tax on everything over
$10. Well, those old John Rich (Note: often referred to as Richie or Richy) shirts, that came down
about here, sold for about $18. We had to put a luxury tax on them. Those old cutter shoes that were more than $10
had a tax on them. Those old cutter shoes were $18.80. We put a
luxury tax on them. Those old cutter shoes that they wore out into the
woods and the snow and the mud
up to the top of them all the day long. But they turned
water, they did, they stood the traffic that they had
to. They bought those shoes. It wouldn't have made any
difference if I'd a had any other kind of shoe, they
wouldn't even look at them. If a man wanted a pair of shoes,
he wanted a cutter. The same way with those shirts.
Those John Rich from Norwich, Penn. The first loggers
who came and logged the white pine out of this side of the river, came from
Williamsburg and Lockhaven and up there, they had driven logs down the
Tuscawaras*.
They (Blank space on paper). They drove them out before the Cass
railroad came up here. They floated them to Ronceverte. They were
riders of the flood and
floated logs to Ronceverte. My dad was one of them and people
said, well he was supposed to be one of the best of them. The big one that
they cooked their meals on, slept on was one of dad's piles most of the time. He
mentions my daddy in that book, Riders of the Flood. They
floated the logs on down. Then they came here and they
built those (Blank space on paper) Richie clothes, socks,
and even underwear, pants, shirts, and even their caps. John Rich
made them all. Now their underwear was kind of a gray wool and down here,
they were opened with
a string. They put them around there and tied that
string on their underwear. The drawers had pockets in them.
ALEX.: What did they
keep in those pockets?
BUCKLEY: He kept his
tobacco most of the time because everything else would get
wet most of the time, out in the rain. They stayed out
in the rain. Most of the time, he was keeping his tobacco dry in
there. If he had a little money, he
probably had it in there. He couldn't leave it back in the
camp because somebody might get away with it. People came
and went at all times. There was a certain fella who'd come to this
camp today, stay overnight, eat
his breakfast then move to the next camp down the river.
He wouldn't ask for a job. He'd move on down toward Tennessee or
Louisiana. If you talked to him, he'd say,
"I'm going to Louisiana or Alabama. They have so many sawmills there.
Been everywhere, travel around. Tramps, that's what they were. They
didn't charge them
anything. They stayed all night. They ate at the table with the other
men. It was supposed to be nobody asked for a job. In the
morning, when the foreman came to open the door and turn the men
out to work, if a man had come in during the night he
just sat still, he never moved. The boss would say to him, "Do
you want to go to work? What can you do? Can you drive a
team, cut logs, or roll?" Or whatever needed done. They never would come in and ask the foreman for
a job. They felt that was beneath their dignity, to ask
for a job. The boss was supposed to ask them. He
usually did. He usually put them to work if he could use them
at all because a lot of them didn't stay but a little
while then they'd move on to someplace else. There were some,
it didn't matter how good a job it was, they wouldn't
stay. After a certain number of days he'd go to Rainelle
or to Parsons or somewhere else. Come fall, he'd
probably head for Louisiana.
ALEX.: Going south.
BUCKLEY: Go south with
the wild geese. They'd come back in the spring. There
were a few fellas up there who'd go down to Montgomery
and on down there and stay around the coke ovens in the
winter time and sleep around where the open coke ovens had a fire all night
long. A lot of those fellas would lie
around and do their sleeping around the coke ovens.
There were some of those fellas, the old boss in the
store knew them pretty well, who would come into the store to buy an outfit of
clothes. Shoes, socks, pants, shirt coat, everything. They'd go back
into the men's department and get a great stock of things, 50 to 75 dollars
worth. Then they'd say, "I haven't been on the mountain in
years. I don't have anything
coming." I'd say, "I can't charge it to you if you don't have
anything coming without seeing the boss." They'd say,
"Well, go see Mr. Hickman." I went in to Mr. Hickman. He'd
come out and say, "Why that's ____. He's all right.
He'll work it out." I've supplied a lot of them a whole outfit of
clothes who didn't have a cent coming. Though
some of them tried to beat him sometimes. Kinda got caught
that way. I remember one fella came to the pulp mill
where they were cutting pulp wood up at Spruce when I
was working at the store up there. Well, I didn't know
him at all, but he was working at the mill there and they
called him Willy. Well, I charged $50 or $60 of supplies and turned it in
to the office down there. They had
the name W. H. Ware in the office down there, so they didn't take it off and
sent him a full check. As soon
as he noticed that he had stuck us for that stuff, he
quit. Walked away or left. Well, I told them he worked
there going by the name of Willy Ware and everybody called him that and I
charged it to that. Said, "Well, that's all right. He'll come
back sometime."
About a year after that he came back and went to work as W. H.
Ware, again. As soon as I turned that in to the office down at Cass, the
boy down there recognized that
as the person who'd stuck 'em and they took it off of
his first check. Oh hey, He blew his top. He got so mad he
____. I said, "They've got a telephone there. They can
explain that down at the office, I don't know anything
about that." They said, "Well, that's the same fella who left without paying his store bill a year or two ago."
They caught a lot of them like that. They would go down on
Elk River and work under one name, then go down to Cheat
and work under another name. That was one way of
cheating the company and I guess they did lose some money, but
most of the time those old fellas did come back. It
was just a famous place up there.
ALEX.: What did they
call those? Richy, they had the hats. Did they have
gloves?
BUCKLEY: Mittens. With
leather palms and a little on the back. Richy mittens.
I have a pair. They were warm mittens. In the climate
up there you'd freeze your hands without gloves. You
just almost had to have mittens.
ALEX.: You say your dad
was one of those who piloted the logs, the arks down
the river during the float season in the spring. I guess
the river was full of logs then.
BUCKLEY: Oh, yes. They
didn't have . . . Stack them on the bank in what they called landings
while the ice was in the river. When the
ice went out of the river along about March, they broke the logs into the
river and brought them down to Knapps Creek or Sitlington Creek or Deer Creek, seven
miles away from the river. But some logs would be coming
all the time. Now we lived in a little ____ on the bank
of the river at that time. There wasn't any bridge but
we had boats. I can't remember what kind of boat. I was
only seven. The stores and the school were on one side
of the river and we were on this side. Dad would be
away with the drive. When the river was as high as it is
now the logs would travel right along, but sometimes the water would get down
low and they would have to stop
driving. Up little creeks, like Knapps Creek, they had what
they called splash dams. Take boards and built a dam across the creek and
back the water up a mile
or two. Then they'd roll all the logs down and put
everything in the creek. Then they'd pull the splash, the gate up, and
rush those logs three or four miles down
the creek until the water got away from them. Then
they'd stop, go back up and close the dam and splash them
again. Well, we down here could tell, the river would rise
four, maybe two feet, depending on where they were and
how large the splash was. Here would come along the logs and we would know
they were splashing, getting closer.
Dad had built these arks. Maybe one or two here to
carry the horse on, one for the men to eat and sleep on,
maybe a blacksmith's shop and an office on another. He'd
have those ready ahead of time before they came out to the railroad. He
took the big ark and somebody else
would take the smaller one. They carried about eight horses on the horse
ark. Some places, an island maybe, where it was too deep for the horses to
wade into, they'd tie up to this side of that and the horses would get on and
haul the logs back into the river. Then the horses would get back on and
they'd float them on
down the river. The river would get high in the spring and put the logs
way out away from the river. Then horses would haul them back out into the stream. Quite
interesting to watch them. Two men would go out into the river up about to
their waists. The teamster would
go out and get up on a log and pull out the team.
(Blank space on paper) One of these men with a grab hook
would catch the log to keep it from floating around and hold
it with the grab sticking up. So the other man had a grab skipper. He knocked the
grab out. Then that turned
the log loose and the team would swing around toward the bank. (Blank
space on paper) They worked out in
the water deep enough for a log to float away from them.
One man caught them with his gant* hook and turn the
grabs up and all the other did was dump the grabs up.
ALEX.: They cooked
right on those arks too, didn't they?
BUCKLEY: Cooked? Yes,
and slept on them, too. My dad, all he did was . . . They
had three to four men on the front oar and three to four men on the back oar,
one on each end to guide it. He
stayed on the front car and told them to go this way or
that way depending on the current. That was the trouble with an amateur,
he didn't understand what the current
would do. He'd get thrown onto a rock maybe and stuck up there and maybe
sink the ark. One fella went to
tie up and he got onto a leaning tree. Well, he hitched up to
this tree and it took the roof right off the
house, the cooking stove off the back of the ark, and
there . . .
ALEX.: Took the cook
out?
BUCKLEY: Took the cook
out. My dad was some place else at that time. They had
an old French cook and never again would he cook without
Dad on the ark. No amateur at the oar, or no
Frenchman. He had to have a certain man to run the cook ark. Dad
would get one of the cookees, that was what they called
the helpers in the cook room, Dad would get one of those cookees and they would catch a dry log and pull it up
onto the ark and take a cross-cut saw to it and cut it up
for stove wood. You saw pictures of how those things were built, taken up
about where Cass is now. You may
have noticed an old lady standing out on the back of one of the arks.
Dad is standing there pressing down on
the blade of the oar to lift it up so it wouldn't hit the
other ark. He is standing there next to old Mrs.
Gardner. That was Blackhurst's grandmother.
ALEX.: Blackhurst's
grandmother? When would that picture have been taken?
BUCKLEY: Well, they
started Cass in 1901 and it was before Cass was there. You can see
there were no houses there at all. So it was
taken before 1900. During the summer, when they wanted to haul logs,
Dad would build a raft out of the cherry or
oak. They would stack the logs up, he would build a
raft and when the river would rise he would take it down to Ronceverte, then they would ship the lumber out.
That was the way they got their lumber to the railroad.
Dad would be doing that all summer long, floating like
that. He knew every crook and turn in the river, and he
knew if the water came this way to swing a certain angle. That's what made
him so valuable on getting those big cook arks over the rough places and reckoning. I
think it was that book of his, Riders of the Flood, that
talked about . . . Water was getting low down river, the
river was full of logs and there was no place for the
arks to get through. They wanted to try to get down to
where they could get to the road where they could get horses
and groceries and things (Small blank space on paper) while they were waiting
for the next flood to come.
They said they couldn't get through. The logs were piled up across the
river, the water going through between
the logs. Dad got out and walked across the top of the
logs. He told the old foreman, "Why, if you pick a hole
down the middle of these logs wide enough for the arks to
go through, the logs over here and the logs over there
will dam the water up and there will be enough water for
the arks to go through." Well, there were two or
three horse flats up there and they went down and didn't hit
the channel at just the right angle and got on top of
the logs. They had to get the horses off. The men went in
with long ropes to pull the horse flats through the hole
there. An old fella told me, he's from old Virginny,
"I'll never forget John Buckley. Everybody respected him. Down
there everyone pulled and worked those arks for
hours. The old boss said, 'Well, that did it, you can go ahead now.'
'Oh,' somebody said, 'that big old cook ark's still back up there.' 'Oh,'
they said, 'Buckley
will get that through there without ever wetting an oar.'" Sure enough, he
came down there floating kind of corner ways. Somebody said, "He's coming
sideways. He'll never get that big ark through there." The
water was hitting the logs and coming across and going through that place.
It caught the front of that thing and
kind of straightened it out. Sure enough, he never wet the
oar.
ALEX.: He must have
known his stuff. I went down to Ronceverte and saw the
tie-offs, looked like pillows in the middle of the river.
Apparently, they used to tie the logs off there.
BUCKLEY: No, no. Those
were what they called booms.
ALEX.: Booms?
BUCKLEY: Cherry
River Boom and Lumber Company. St. Lawrence Boom and
Manufacturing Company. (Blank space on paper) They drove
grabs in logs, attacked a string like this, they were
anchored to those piers, angled towards the sawmill. They would
catch these logs and through them to where the chain
was taking them up into the sawmill. I remembered when
you were here before with a boy or girl, maybe both of them, and I thought
afterwards what do those kids know
about a mitten? (Blank space on paper)
ALEX.: That's well
made, isn't it?
BUCKLEY: It had to be.
Couldn't stand the work it had to do if they weren't
made to stand up to rough work.
ALEX.: That's a fine
mitten, a real fine mitten.
Boy*: Smells like a
baseball glove. It's made about as thick.
ALEX.: Now, this
Hickman's quite a manager?
BUCKLEY: He was a good
man for the job.
ALEX.: You were telling
me he looked out for the people on the mountain, didn't
he?
BUCKLEY: He looked out
for the people at Cass. Cass was quite a town. Over
across the river there belong to the company (Blank space on
paper) they were independent. He treated them all well.
He knew who would pay their debts and who wouldn't. He'd tell them . . .
They had a two-horse wagon and a mule to deliver groceries. They'd take orders one day
and deliver them the next. He'd tell those boys who
did that. Those fellas over there, you can't trust them. Some
of those old ladies were prostitutes,
some of them paid and some of them didn't. He'd tell them
you can't trust people like that, you have to collect from them. There was
an old tannery over there. They
called it the Bowery.
ALEX.: The Bowery.
That was across the river. Blackhurst talks about that
in Sawdust in Your Eyes. He talks a lot about that.
BUCKLEY: The boarding
house I stayed in was across there, up the hill, on the
company's side. It used to be at night you'd hear a
"whir, whir, whir" from a pistol across the river. Now and then
somebody got shot over there. Bootlegging and
everything else going on. A poker game and everything
going on in that Bowery* over there.
ALEX.: A lot of
business over there, too, you say?
BUCKLEY: A different of
kind of business, different customers they dealt with on
that side. That's where Blackhurst's father lived,
out of town but on that side of the river. Blackhurst's
brother, Alan, worked in the foundry. They had a foundry up
in the machine shop up on the mountain. Alan Blackhurst was one of the main
hands at that foundry. They could make one of those Shay engines up there in that
machine shop. Old Number 5 that ran over the hill and
turned over, rolled down the hill and turned over two or three times. Took
them less than three months and it
was back on the rails hauling logs. They fixed it right up there in the
foundry. They had 100 miles of
railroad, 13 of those Shay engines, and I don't know how many of
those cars, boxcars and flatcars to haul logs. Any crooked logs or ones that had knots in them were brought in
to Cass to the sawmill. The ones that had knots in them were split
then cut into blocks and sent to Covington to the paper mill. This
mill at Spruce, they
called a pulp mill, but all they were doing was cutting blocks for the
Covington mill. They cut them in about
two-foot blocks, put a big ____ end turned them that way
and took the bark off. They put them in a car, looked like
a cattle car, just dumped them in the top. Fifteen or
twenty cars a day went to Covington to the paper mill.
The hardwood pulp, birch, beech and wood like that went
down river to Luke, Maryland. They had a hardwood mill
down there. Now they called that a pulp mill up at
Spruce.
ALEX.:
Several railroads went out over the hill there. I suppose a lot of people
came in on the train, maybe workers came in
on the train. When you were working down at Cass did you
see any of that?
BUCKLEY: Oh, yeah. There
were no roads built within miles of Spruce. They
couldn't get a wheelbarrow without it came on the train.
Women, men, anything else had to ride that coal train. I remember
the woods were full of blackberries in
the fall of the year up there. They had regular standard
gauge flatcars, the women and children were as thick as
blackbirds on top of those cars. They'd come up in the
morning, go into the woods and come out with big buckets
of blackberries. There were so many of them I remember
several times the conductor would back up to one of the empty flatcars, load up
the women and children and
take the pickers back off to Cass, again. When the loggers
came off the mountain, they'd get up on the logs and ride off. When I came
off, I'd get up behind the engineer and ride off the mountain. Piney Williams, the
engineer who hauled most of the stuff down the mountain to
Cass, I used to ride up behind Piney. Someone had
bitten a half-circle out of one of his ears. You could just
see teeth prints of what happened to him. He'd come in the store and every time
he came in he wanted a bag of fine-cut tobacco, fine-cut like cigarettes are
made of. He had a corn-cob pipe. He's stuff the
tobacco in that and he'd buy a box of matches, old kitchen
matches and set them up there like that. He had a steam
brake and a tredle brake. He'd start down the mountain and every once in
a while he'd reach up there and get one of those matches and put it in that pipe. He
wouldn't smoke enough to keep it going. He'd light it,
again. He wouldn't talk to you or look at you all the way
down. He kept his eye right on that engine all the way
down, until he went into switch backs, then he'd turn around
and tell me how he'd seen a bear cross the road and talk like that. Coming
down that steep part, he didn't pay attention to anything but that engine. He guided it all right. I used to sit right behind him where
I could see those teeth marks where somebody had
bitten a whole half-circle out of his ear. Everybody
thought he killed one of the brakemen but they didn't do
anything about it. This brakeman, they thought, he was
going to see his wife. He thought he'd gone to work but
he probably hadn't. The next morning they found him
shot dead in Piney's backyard. They arrested Piney.
The superintendent and everybody else came along.
When it was time to arraign him, bond was already fixed so
he never missed a turn on the mountain. When the trial
came up, there wasn't any evidence except that Piney wasn't on the job.
But everybody thought Piney must have
slipped back when he was supposed to be at work and shot
this fella, Hull*, and had gotten away with it. Well,
I guess he did, but no one blamed him for it. The old
superintendent and everybody else went along with the sheriff
when he went up there to try to bring Piney to law.
ALEX.: About
how many loads of logs would they bring off the hill a day?
Two, three?
BUCKLEY: Well, about
eight loads. Eight cars would make about all the engines
could haul back. They made about two trips a day, one in
the morning, one in the afternoon. That made 16 loads of
logs. That was about all the sawmill could cut in a day. That
would run around 100,000 to 125,000 feet a
day. That's a pretty good lot of lumber. In the lumber
business, 100,000 feet a day is a lot. On these drives
now, they carried up into the millions. My dad went up to
old Durbin and built an ark about the same time as that
picture was taken up at Cass. He had built some arks up above Cass and
they were starting out of there with 25
million feet of logs. That old fella I was telling you
about who said he always admired my dad, he came over from
old Virginia when the spring thaw came and they were going to have a big drive.
They paid extra wages cause
those fellas had to go into the river in February or
March right up to their waists all day long.
(Static on tape)
BUCKLEY: The old boss
said, "Fellas, we'll have to stop a little early, we'll
have to walk back to the ark." Well, John Buckley hasn't
come yet and he's supposed to pilot the ark. He said,
"Well, I'd like to help him, I've logged on this river
with him for years but I wouldn't want to tie the ark up
here, the river's fast. I'd like to help him on the ark,
but I wouldn't want to tie up here, the river's crooked
and swift." The next morning they said, "We'll go out
and walk up to it, again. If Buckley doesn't come,
then I don't know what we'll do except untie that ark up in this country.
About noon, a man came in a little boat and brought their lunch to them. Said, no,
Buckley hadn't come yet. We don't know where. The boss said,
"Hang her up," when dark come and we'll walk back to the
camp, to the ark. About three o'clock in the
afternoon, he heard "Whoee!" and a big shout. He looked across
the river, thought someone was drowning. Everyone seemed
to be in a big grin. He looked up the river and along came the ark
around the bend. Then everybody on his
side of the river whooped and hollered. He said, "It
came down about as far as they were going to get that evening
and tied her up against the bank." That boy looked
around, he wanted to see that John Buckley, thought he must
be some man. Said, "Some man!" He was the most unassuming
man he'd ever seen, he didn't act anymore like
he'd done anything. Wasn't excited. Wasn't bragging about
it, throwing out his chest or anything. Everything was
all right. He'd just come down and tied up where he'd
always tied up. That time was at the same time I was
telling you about when he went through that channel there at
Reading, when the water got away from them and they
had to tie it up down there.
ALEX.: When they sawed
that lumber over at Cass, they shipped that out on the
C & O didn't they?
BUCKLEY: On the C & O,
yes. That was before the day of trucks or anything. That
was why I was telling you the delivery boy up around
Cass had a pair of mules and a wagon. There were a few
cars. One of the fellas that worked at the store had a
pump out there that you turned with a crank and it
pushed the gas in the car. You'd unlock it and pull the crank. I
remember Deer Creek mill down below Cass. I
went with Stickidiller*, worked at Durbin, to a lodge one
time in a Stanley Steamer. And going over Cheat Mountain a
rock flew up and broke a pipe. All the gasoline in the
Stanley Steamer would have run out. He got out and
crawled under and cut the threads with a file and connected it back up.
We got in and went on to Clarksburg. You've probably never heard of a
Stanley Steamer.
ALEX.: Oh, yes. I've
seen pictures of them.
BUCKLEY: I went in
that and I never will forget. I thought we were stuck for
good there now on the top of Cheat Mountain. But
he crawled in under there with a file with a flint on the
end of it and fixed it. You know they had a flow of water
there on a plate that created the stream. Then over at
Elkins, he stopped and ate at a restaurant. When we came out
there was a crowd standing all around watching, you
know. Just lounging (loafing) on the corner. There
were no chairs around or anything.
ALEX.: You've been here
a good many years. You told me you're family's been
here a good many years.
BUCKLEY: I haven't been
here all my life but I was born here, my father was born here, my grandfather
was born here, my great-grandfather was born here. So we've been here quite a long
time.
ALEX.: When we look at
the maps, we've been studying the maps of the area, we
notice the maps show a hill back here, call it Buckley
Mountain.
BUCKLEY: Buckley
Mountain, yes. From Knapps Creek that comes in at Marlington to
Beaver Creek that comes down from Watoga Park, that whole
country back in there, 25,000 acres, is called Buckley
Mountain. The Buckleys came here, the first old Buckley came before it was
the United States. It was England, you know. He surveyed and marked
it on both sides of the
river. That was my great-great grandfather, and he left it
to my great-grandfather. He'd give one of his children a farm here and a
farm over there, some place like
that. He gave it practically all away. At the time of the Civil
War, my grandfather went on the sheriff's bond.
When he broke up, they sold the sheriff out and they sold my grandfather out.
And so my dad, when he was married, didn't inherit anything. My grandfather had
had everything sold out. My dad had a deal with a man
who owned a store to buy the land where the house stood
with a strip of land. Dad rolled logs and sawed lumber
to pay the old man back for the piece of land up to the
mill, and when I was a boy we used to have that 60 acres of
land. My brother and I roamed to the road up there
and to the road over there and back that way. My father
(Blank space on paper).
ALEX.: How many acres
here now?
BUCKLEY: One thousand two
hundred fifty in this tract here now and two hundred over
there on the other side of the river, about.
ALEX.: Wasn't
this settled under treaty with the Indians, somehow?
BUCKLEY: Yeah.
Governor of Virginia made a treaty with the Indians that the
white people wouldn't settle west of the Alleghenys. The old Virginians
came across from Virginia over to
the Greenbrier here and took up land, like my
grandfather did, and reported back to Williamsburg
that they were settled over here along the Greenbrier
River, which was a part of the James River and that they were still east of the
mountain. That they were not violating the treaty. The people over
in Williamsburg did
not know the Greenbrier did not flow into the James
River. You talk about Back Mountain, between Cass and
Durbin. There were a people up there called Back
Allegheny. That mountain on that side was higher up there
than the mountains between Virginia and West Virginia so
they thought that was the back side of the Allegheny Mountains. It was
Cheat Mountain, you know. All
together on the Greenbrier River was a Polish camp. That's
where Jonathan Ammon* and the Greathouse* girl went up
there.
ALEX.: Barbara?
BUCKLEY: She's on
that flat that goes around the side of that mountain, that
big Mississippi limestone that crops out from down at
Snowflake and down there comes out of this mountain, all the way from Durbin up
there. It's the bluegrass region
of West Virginia. There's a lot more bluegrass there than there is in
the whole state of Kentucky.
ALEX.: You told me
earlier about a skirmish some of the family or people had
when they were going to the fort. Some of them, a little
hunting party, had gone out to get a deer.
BUCKLEY: I told you, the
house was on this side of the river. I told you the
Indians had made a raid up at Marlington and killed the school teacher up at the
fairgrounds at Marlington.
There were people gathered up going to Mill Point, to the
fort. They came over land and called on Mrs. Buckley and
she took her children and went across the river and
took the road to Mill Point, to the fort. The Bridger boy lived up over
the mountain and was going with
them. They decided they would go on up and camp on the
mountain to where they could kill a deer or a turkey that
they could take into the fort with them. She said they
were going around the bottom of the hill, they heard shots
up on top of the hill. The bridger boy didn't come
in. They went up and found they'd killed and scalped the
bridger boy up there. Their brother, Jim, swore a
vengeance on the Indians and followed them to Golden Gate.
If you'll read Teddy Roosevelt's Winning of the West
about Jim Bridger, he was a leading scout for the army. Well,
he came from up there on that hill from what's called
Bridger Mountain, back of the golf course.
ALEX.: That's
interesting. The rest of them made it on into the fort then?
BUCKLEY: The rest of them
made it in. The Indians didn't attack the fort.
ALEX.: What was that
fort?
BUCKLEY: Just Mill Point.
ALEX.: Just called Mill
Point?
BUCKLEY: Right
between Route 39 that goes into Richwood and 219. Route 219
goes into Lewisburg, there's a house sets upon the
point there right where the fort used to be.
ALEX.: That's
an interesting story. Now you've found some Indian relics
around in this area?
BUCKLEY: I've found five
skeletons on the cliff down here. Arm bones, leg
bones, skulls, teeth. I've found 500 bones of at least five different
people. Axes, tomahawk, everything of
that kind. Did I show those?
ALEX.: You showed those
to me. The axes, tomahawk in very nice shape. You
showed those to me. This was great hunting country for the
Indians in this area then?
BUCKLEY: Oh, yes. The
creek over there, Swego Creek, they have it. That's the
pronunciation of the Scotch-Irish who settled here. The Indians up
around New York state around Lake
Oswego, which means pouring out. The water from Lake Oswego
poured out. Well, the water comes out at the limestone cave, poured out so
they called it Oswego. Well, when the Scotch-Irish came, he wasn't going to say
that so he called it Swego Creek and it's called that
yet. That's where they got that name, from the Indians.
BOY: What tribe of
Indians were around here? The Shawnee?
BUCKLEY: I don't know.
They talk about the Seneca trail. There may have been Iroquois.
There were a lot of Indian tribes that traveled back and forth through here from Tennessee
because it was good hunting country. And it was easier to
travel these river valleys than going cross country like
they would in central West Virginia. The streams over
there don't go anywhere. It's like a hill of potatoes, you go around one
hill and you're back almost where you started. These Indians, when they wanted to go
somewhere, would take one of these river valleys. This
valley goes north to join on to the south branch of the
Potomac and goes to Maryland. Down here they'd go up
Bluestone River to the Tug River and follow it to the Ohio down Point Pleasant.
The Indian was woodman enough
to know where the easy traveling was and where he wanted
to go.
ALEX.: You know you
told me that some of the people who came up into this
country to settle it came up from Mingo County, where they'd
lived back in the hills. You told us some stories about
those people.
BUCKLEY: Well, now those
people down there were squatters on coal company land down there in McDowell and
Mingo County, West Virginia,
and Taswell County, Virginia. When the N & W Railroad
was built and they started operating the coal, they moved them out. They
came up here being almost froze.
They (Blank space on paper). They go back in those hollows
like this and build a little log cabin and hunt and
fish. They'd come out and work for a farmer then they'd go
back in. People around here called them Tugs. They were
supposed to be second-class citizens, if you were a Tug.
This Buckley Mountain had three or four colonies of
them. I have a favorite story about one of the families
back there. Those Messers. They lived back in
the hill country about two miles. The father, Granville Messer, was
a big tall fair-haired man, had a family back there. And he had horses
that he'd take out a
road job. Slippery people. Cleared out a lot of country back there
and made peach brandy and made apple
brandy and so on, and no one bothered them. About the time
the railroad came up here, there was an old fella named
Colley. I don't know where he came from or anything about him. He was down there close to . . . He was
supposed to be a moonshiner, too. He was supposed to be a
thief, too. Those fellas over at Hillsboro,
he'd work all day for them. Then at night he'd slip back
and steal a sack of flour or a ham or meat or something
like that. Called him Stagecoach Colley. Colley borrowed
a gun from McComb, and he wouldn't bring it back. So McComb went to the
law and swore out a warrant for
Colley for his gun. Messer happened to be up there and heard about that,
so he went into the courthouse and volunteered to serve this warrant on Colley.
Well, the train went down about four or five o'clock and came
back about eleven. He took two men who helped him with
his moonshining and logging as deputies. They went down
and stayed all night down at Watoga. The next morning they walked up to
arrest Colley. They walked up to
Colley's shanty. They went up and rapped on the door.
Colley opened the door. He was left-handed and he opened
the door like that. Messer said, "You're under arrest."
He pulled out a pistol and shot Messer. Just as he shot, Messer shot.
Messer had a six, a 38 pistol with six
shots. He emptied that into Colley. Colley kept
moving his hand up and down but most of the bullets went
through into his body. Colley shot Messer four times through his shirt.
The old woman, was in there with
Colley, got down the rifle from the wall. She jumped by these
two fellas who were shooting each other and grabbed
the gun. Colley just turned the gun and shot him right
in the middle of the back. But he had a big leather scabbard to carry his
pistol in and it brought a big
blood blister right in the middle of the sheriff's back,
right there. Messer had put 11 bullets into Colley's
chest. Colley had put four into Messer and the blister on
the sheriff's back. Colley just turned around and fell
over the bed dead. Messer went out into the yard and dropped his pistol
down on the chopping block. Neither
of them bled any. At the inquest the doctor said both
of them had been shot right through the heart, first
shot. No blood came out or anything. They buried Colley there.
They took Messer on a wagon to Marlington. The
undertaker fixed his body up and they took it back in
to Buckley Mountain and buried him there. Man told me he
was there the other day. Had a big family dinner, and he
told me that before they buried Messer, had the preacher
there and the casket open, a fella walked up there
and put his rifle in. They buried Messer with his gun.
Before this, there wasn't any bridge. We had to take
people across and bring them back because we lived close to the river. My
dad was very well acquainted with
Granville Messer. One day Granville and a man came down
there and went across to go hunting. My dad took them
across and when they came back in a day or two brought them back across.
Some time after that, Granville was
going across and my dad said, "Granville, who was that man
with you the other time. The whole way across he never
took his eye off of me. Instead of facing the way
the boat was going, he faced me. When we got over to the
other side, he stepped out there, turned around and
watched me 'til I turned the boat around and went back across the river.
He never took his eye off me." Granville
said, "I don't often tell other people my business, but that was Cap
Hatfield," he said. "There's $5,000
reward on his head and he can't afford to turn his back on
people." (Laughter) I just assume that maybe Colley was
a McCoy. It was about the time it was breaking up in
that country down there and they were all on the run. I
don't see any other reason why he would go to the law and
offer to serve the warrant when he wasn't an officer of
any kind. He was prepared and Colley was prepared. They didn't
exchange words except, "You're under arrest."
They both shot at the same time according to witnesses
there. I don't know, but it might have been part of the
Hatfield-McCoy feud. But it would have been that they were
rival moonshiners. It could have been that.
ALEX.: Well, they're
not in this country anymore, most of them are out?
BUCKLEY: There are some
of them, Messer's people, in this country yet. They
aren't Messers. They were girls, he had some girls. One of them
married a Crook, lived down at Seabert and had
his son or grandson I guess, Tom Kulp* used to ride
with my wife back and forth to Concord and graduated. Last I heard of him
he was over toward Summersville someplace. He's a grandson or great-grandson of
Messer's.
ALEX.: When
the C & O took the lumber out of there where did they sell it,
where did they go to?
BUCKLEY: Most anywhere.
There was a sawmill in every hollow from here to Elkins, you know. My
oldest brother used to grade and ship
lumber. If he had an order from someone over in
Philadelphia or somewhere like that, they had a stack over there
like that, he'd go and grade up and ship a carload of
it. They had four freight trains a day, two up and two back,
taking lumber out of this country, going about
everywhere. This country back in here in Spruce, the old fellas
who had sawmills would haul lumber in on wagons. Stack
it up along the railroad here. My brother would cull it
out for them. Now most of that was going to Philadelphia. These
people up at Cass, they were doing such a
wholesale business up there. Those people were having
lumber by the carload.
ALEX.: Probably some of
that hardwood sent to Philadelphia found its way into
fine Chippendale furniture. In those days they were making
Chippendale in the late 1800's and early 1900's, I
believe.
BUCKLEY: I don't know
where it was going. Some of it was used for framing for houses, you know,
three and four and five inch stoves.
Pretty strong stuff.
ALEX.: You talked about
the McClaskey system of bookkeeping in the store.
BUCKLEY: McCaskey. That
was a fella, different account of benefits,
changed the whole slip certificates. Wrote, kept a copy and
put in this McCaskey system. The girl in the office would
come out and take the slips in and the next day charge
the accounts and credit you for the sales you had made. I
had a drawer and each one of the clerks had a drawer on the cash register, most
of them had a separate
drawer. Of course some of those fellas out in the wareroom didn't have
one, didn't make a sale of course, and
somebody else charged what they did. In all, the cash
register was six or eight feet tall.
ALEX.: You say the
girls couldn't make a sale in the store? Were all the men
acting as salesmen?
BUCKLEY: These women,
well some of the men, you know I told you about the one
who couldn't read and write.
ALEX.: Oh, yes. You
told me about him.
BUCKLEY: There was one
girl working there who was a widow, whose husband had
died, who worked in the grocery department with me. She
took it to light out and cleared up inside while we were
out unloading flour or sugar or something like that. And,
oh, she'd pile up half a dozen sacks of flour or
potatoes on that dollie and here she'd go back in that wareroom
like a man, you know, handling all that like it was
light. The other old lady stayed over in the buttons, lace, and ribbons
department. The ladies' department there. But Pearl stayed in the
grocery department where
I worked. She'd hurry to get cleaned up in there to get
out in the wareroom where the men were. Running those dollies around the
hall. Loading and unloading the
stuff with the men. Cans, you know. She'd run in there
with cans(canned)* goods and things like that. She did
anything the men did. Mrs. Slates over in the other end,
she had ribbons and lace and that kind of thing. That was a hard thing to
do. Now they'd come into your
grocery department and get potatoes and prunes that would be in a big box.
You'd weigh out so many pounds of prunes and get the juice on your hands and
they'd be as dirty as they could be. See I worked in ribbon ____.
(End of tape)
Tape 2
ALEX.: Testing.
BUCKLEY: (Blank space on
paper) into the Greenbrier River. My . . . he came
(blank space on paper) and old justice of the peace
there. He said, "Squire this man from the Natural
Resources Department wants to get a warrant." That old squire
looked up at him and said, "You want to get a warrant
for a man for killing a bear. Well, you don't get it."
"Oh," he said, "I want to get a warrant for the
International Soup Company for polluting the Greenbrier
River." "Oh, well you can get a warrant for that." My
boss said, "There's no way in the world to make a justice of the peace give
you a warrant if he doesn't want
to." The old justice was on safe ground. If he didn't
want to give him that warrant, you couldn't make him. He
said to back that up, if you want a warrant you can't have
it.
ALEX.: Well, let me get
back out of here, Mr. BUCKLEY, and I'll get back over
town.
BUCKLEY: I'll talk you to
death if you'll let me.
ALEX.: That's all
right. I'll sneak back over here and let you tell that story
to Lisa, my daughter, about the Tugs and that Bridger. (Blank space on
paper) Well, that's a nice stove
there.
BUCKLEY: It's just what I
need in the winter time. This time of year you need a
little fire but it's too hot for a sleep box. It's quite
a job to light it. You have to open all the doors and
change it like that.
ALEX.: Let the heat go
through.
BUCKLEY: Ilene sleeps
upstairs and the heat goes up through this register. Heats her room pretty
good. She says it's pretty good.