FINALLY getting back to "The Mountains"

Part Five of Porte Crayon's ten part series

I know, I know.

I promised “The Mountains” then failed to deliver. Probably missed a career in politics.

Thing is, I didn’t intentionally set out to play a shell game with you. I fully intend to read and share illustrations from all ten installments of Porte Crayon’s portrayal of the high mountains of my home state. Guess I just got lazy busy.

Getting back at it today and since it’s been a while since we visited with our good friend Porte, a refresher seems in order.

“The Mountains” was written and illustrated by the once-famous 19th century travel writer and artist, David Hunter Strother - who took his Porte Crayon nom de plume from the French name for a device artists use to protect their drawing pencils. A suitable pen name if there ever was one.

Strother was a native of Martinsburg, West Virginia who became the Bill Bryson of his day. He was known throughout the country for humorous travelogues of his journeys from New England to the American South. But it was his take on life in the high mountains of what is now West Virginia that first brought him fame. And the ten-part series “The Mountains” represented a return to form.

The series was published in the early 1870s by “Harper’s New Monthly Magazine.” It’s a largely fictional account taken from Strother’s true life experiences in the mountains, a bookend to a successful writing career that began in the 1850s with his account of a hunting and fishing trip to what is now West Virginia’s Blackwater River.

I finished reading the fifth part of the series this week. It includes my favorite Porte Crayon illustration - that of a lone hiker standing atop a mountain crag (I’m no geologist. Is “crag” the right word? Is “outcropping” better?).

The caption for this illustration is hard to make out, but Porte chose just one word - EXCELSIOR. I had to look it up because I was dumb enough to avoid high school Latin, not to mention other subjects the smart kids took. It translates into the motto “Ever upward!”

For me, this image says freedom - from the stress of the wider world and the pace of modern life. The type of freedom that thumbs its nose at the eight hour work day and the pressure to remain in a job you’ve come to dread because you need the health insurance. The freedom to get off the interstate, get out of the car and to slow down. The state division of tourism should find a use for it.

The image appears in the part of Porte’s narrative that tells the story of a young man from the lowlands who made it a habit to spend his summers wandering around the high mountains. He is portrayed as something of a mystery to the locals. They spot him from time to time and he becomes the object of speculation as no one knows exactly where he’s from or what he’s up to.

The mysterious young man keeps to himself, but eventually comes out of his shell and befriends a young mountain woman named Dilly Wyatt. They bond over fiddle music, and he becomes her teacher.

After one such lesson, he leaves to return to the surrounding forest. Although he promises to be back that evening, a violent storm hits. A couple of days pass before Wyatt sets off to look for him. Braving a raging river still swollen with rainwater, she finds him injured. He ends up spending a few weeks recuperating at the isolated cabin of her father, but then he leaves, seemingly for good, and dashing any notion of romance.

Years pass. He doesn't return.

Let that be a lesson about outsiders.

In his 2002 book, “Appalachia: A History,” John Alexander Williams cites this story of unrequited love while discussing gender roles in the region.

Consider the case of Dilly Wyatt, a young woman from the Cheat Mountains of (West) Virginia who astonished the popular mid nineteenth-century magazine writer Porte Crayon (David Hunter Strother) by her performance as a fiddler at a dance he attended in a backwoods schoolhouse. Crayon learned that Wyatt was accomplished in many other ways. "She could cook and keep house equal to any maid or wife on the fork. She could shear a sheep, card and spin the wool, then knit a stocking or weave a gown with a promptness and skill that were beyond rivalry. Besides these feminine accomplishments, she could fish, shoot with a rifle, ride, swim, or skin a bear, in a manner to challenge the supremacy of the other sex." He could only explain this by relaying a story about the girl's having been courted and jilted by a man from the genteel lowlands, upon which, her heart broken, she had thrown over feminine decorum and practiced her masculine pursuits as a kind of mourning.

Alexander goes on to say that Strother then suggests a better reason for Dilly Wyatt’s defiance of gender expectations - that her widower father “simply trained his only child in the skills he knew how best to teach.”

Part Five of “The Mountains” comes to a close at the dance party where Wyatt performed.

I’ll take my leave here as well.

Off to read Part Six.

And unless I get lazy busy, we’ll get back together with our friend Porte again next week.

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