CHAPTER II
THE RURAL TYPE AND THE DIALECT
THE origin of the term “Hoosier” is not known with certainty. It has been applied to the inhabitants of Indiana for many years, and, after “Yankee,” it is probably the sobriquet most famous as applied to the people of a particular division of the country. So early as 1830, “Hoosier” must have had an accepted meaning, within the State at least, for John Finley printed in that year, as a New Year’s address for the Indianapolis Journal, a poem called “The Hoosier Nest,” in which the word occurs several times. It is a fair assumption that its meaning was not obscure, or it would not have been used in a poem intended for popular reading. “Hoosier” seems to have found its first literary employment in Finley’s poem. Sulgrove, who was an authority in matters of local history, was disposed to concede this point.[8] The poem is interesting for its glimpse of Indiana rural life of the early period. Finley was a Virginian who removed to Indiana in 1823 and had been living in the State seven years when he published his poem. He was an accomplished and versatile gentleman, and his verses, as collected in 1866, show superior talents. One of his poems, “Bachelor’s Hall,” has often been attributed to Thomas Moore. The “Hoosier Nest” is the home of a settler, which a traveller hailed at nightfall. Receiving a summons to enter, the stranger walked in,—
“Where half a dozen Hoosieroons
With mush-and-milk, tin cups and spoons.
White heads, bare feet and dirty faces
Seemed much inclined to keep their places.”
The stranger was invited to a meal of venison, milk, and johnny-cake, and as he sat at the humble board he made an inventory of the cabin’s contents:—
“One side was lined with divers garments,
The other spread with skins of varmints:
Dried pumpkins overhead were strung,
Where venison hams in plenty hung;
Two rifles placed above the door;
Three dogs lay stretched upon the floor,—
In short, the domicile was rife
With specimens of Hoosier life.”
“Hoosieroons” is never heard now, and was probably invented by Finley for the sake of the rhyme. Both Governor Wright and O. H. Smith were of the opinion that “Hoosier” was a corruption of “Who’s here” (yere or hyer) and Smith[9] has sought to dramatize its history:—
“The night was dark, the rain falling in torrents, when the inmates of a small log cabin in the woods of early Indiana were aroused from their slumbers by a low knocking at the only door of the cabin. The man of the house, as he had been accustomed to do on like occasions, rose from his bed and hallooed, ‘Who’s here?’ The outsiders answered, ‘Friends, out bird-catching. Can we stay till morning?’ The door was opened, and the strangers entered. A good log fire soon gave light and warmth to the room. Stranger to the host: ‘What did you say when I knocked?’ ‘I said, Who’s here?’ ‘I thought you said Hoosier.’ The bird-catchers left after breakfast, but next night returned and hallooed at the door, ‘Hoosier;’ and from that time the Indianians have been called Hoosiers.”
This is the explanation usually given to inquirers within the State. The objection has sometimes been raised to this story, that the natural reply to a salutation in the wilderness would be “Who’s there?” out of which “Hoosier” could hardly be formed; but careful observers of Western and Southern dialects declare that “Who’s hyer?” was, and in obscure localities remains, the common answer to a midnight hail.
Sulgrove related the incident of an Irishman, employed in excavating the canal around the falls at Louisville, who declared after a fight in which he had vanquished several fellow-laborers that he was “a husher,” and this was offered as a possible origin of the word. The same writer suggested another explanation, that a certain Colonel Lehmanowski, a Polish officer who lectured through the West on Napoleon’s wars, pronounced Hussar in a way that captivated some roystering fellow, who applied the word to himself in self-glorification, pronouncing it “Hoosier.” Lehmanowski’s identity has been established as a sojourner in Indiana, and his son was a member of an Indiana regiment in the Civil War. The Rev. Aaron Woods[10] is another contributor to the literature of the subject, giving the Lehmanowski story with a few variations. When the young men of the Indiana side of the Ohio crossed over to Louisville, the Kentuckians made sport of them, calling them “New Purchase greenies,” and declaring that they of the southern side of the river were a superior race, composed of “half-alligator, half-horse, and tipped off with snapping turtle!” Fighting grew out of these boasts in the market-place and streets of Louisville. An Indiana visitor who had heard Lehmanowski lecture on “The Wars of Europe” and been captivated by the prowess of the Hussars, whipped one of the Kentuckians, and bending over him cried, “I’m a Hoosier,” meaning, “I’m a Hussar.” Mr. Woods adds that he was living in the State at the time and that this was the true origin of the term. This is, however, hardly conclusive. The whole Lehmanowski story seems to be based on communication between Indiana and Kentucky workmen during the building of the Ohio Falls Canal. The original canal was completed in 1830; and as the Polish soldier was not in this region earlier than 1840, ten years after the appearance of Finley’s poem, it is clear that those who would reach the truth of the matter must go back of “The Hoosier Nest” to find secure ground. No one has ever pretended that Finley originated the word, and it is not at all likely that he did so; but his poem gave it wide currency, and doubtless had much to do with fixing it on the Indianians. Bartlett, in his “Dictionary of Americanisms,” gives the novel solution of the problem that the men of superior strength throughout the early West, the heroes of log-rollings and house-raisings, were called “hushers” because of their ability to hush or quiet their antagonists; and that “husher” was a common term for a bully. The Ohio River boatmen carried the word to New Orleans, where a foreigner among them, in attempting to apply the word to himself, pronounced it “Hoosier.” Sulgrove may have had this meaning in mind in citing his Irishman, though he is not explicit. Hoosier as a Christian name has been known in the Ohio Valley; it was borne by a member of the Indiana Methodist Conference in 1835. A Louisville baker named Hoosier made a variety of sweet bread which was so much affected by Indiana people that they were called “Hoosier’s customers,” “Hoosier’s men,” and so on; but no date can be found for this. The Rev. T. A. Goodwin, first heard the word at Cincinnati in 1830, where it described a species of gingerbread, but without reference to Indiana.
It is clear that the cultivated people of Indiana recognized the nickname in the early half of the century. Wright and Smith, as mentioned above, had sought to determine its genesis; and Tilghman A. Howard, when a congressman from Indiana, writing home to a friend in 1840, spoke casually of the “Hoosier State.”[11] The word occurs familiarly in Hall’s “New Purchase” (1855), and it is found also in Beste’s rare volume, “The Wabash; or, Adventures of an English Gentleman’s Family in the Interior of America,” published at London in the same year, and in Mrs. Beecher’s “From Dawn to Daylight” (1859). And when, in 1867, Sandford C. Cox published a book of verses containing the couplet,—
“If Sam is right, I would suggest
A native Hoosier as the best,”—
the word was widely known, and thereafter it frequently occurs in all printed records touching the State. It is reported from Tennessee, Virginia, and South Carolina by independent observers, who say that the idea of a rough countryman is always associated with it. In Missouri it is sometimes used thus abstractly, but a native Indianian is usually meant, without reference to his manners or literacy.
No reader of Hoosier chronicles can fail to be impressed by the relation of the great forests to the people who came to possess and tame them. Before they reached the Indiana wilderness in their advance before civilization, the stalwart pioneers had swung their axes in Pennsylvania or Kentucky, and had felt the influence of the great, gloomy woodlands in their lives; but in Indiana this influence was greatly intensified. They experienced an isolation that is not possible to-day in any part of the country, and the loss of nearly every civilizing agency that men value. These frontiersmen could hardly have believed themselves the founders of a permanent society, for the exact topography of much of their inheritance was unknown to them; large areas were submerged for long periods, and the density of the woods increased the difficulty of building roads and knitting the scattered clearings and villages into a compact and sensitive commonwealth. Once cleared, the land yielded a precarious living to the pioneers in return for their labors and sacrifices; after the first dangers from beasts of prey, the pestiferous small animals anticipated the harvest and ate the corn. One ear in four acres remained after the gray squirrels had taken their pleasure in a Johnson County field.[12] Sheep were out of the question on account of the wolves; and always present and continuing were the fevers that preyed on the worn husbandmen and sent many to premature graves. The women, deprived of every comfort, contributed their share of the labor, making homes of their cabins; dyeing the wool, when they had it, with the ooze of the walnut, carding, spinning, and weaving it, and finally cutting the cloth into garments; or if linen were made, following the flax from the field through all the processes of manufacture until it clothed the family.
The pioneers could not see then, as their children see now, that the wilderness was a factor in their destiny; that it drove them in upon themselves, strengthening their independence in material things by shutting them off from older communities, and that it even fastened upon their tongues the peculiarities of speech which they had brought with them into the wilderness. But their isolation compelled meditation, and when reading matter penetrated the woodlands it was usually worth the trouble of transportation in a day of few roads and little travel. The pioneers knew their Bibles and named their children for the Bible heroes, and most of their other books were religious. There have been worse places in which to form habits of thought, and to lay the foundation for a good manner of writing our language, than the Hoosier cabin. Lying before the fireplace in his father’s humble Spencer County home during the fourteen years that the family spent in Indiana,—years that were of the utmost importance in his life,—Abraham Lincoln studied his few books and caught the elusive language-spirit that later on gave character and beauty to his utterances.
The social life of the first comers also drew its inspiration from their environment, and was expressed in log-rolling, house-raising, and other labors that could best be done by coöperation, and which they concluded usually, in a fashion quite characteristic, with a frolic. After the axe, the rifle was most important among their belongings; for they trusted largely to the fortunes of the hunt for food; and peltries became a valuable medium of exchange in their simple economy. Expertness in the use of the rifle and friendly rivalry in marksmanship among the settlers led to other social gatherings; and even professional men took pride in the sport and participated in these contests. The militia system in the early days was not an important feature of Hoosier life. The Hoosier’s sense of humor has always been keen, and where, as once occurred on muster day in the White Water country, a part of the officer’s duty was to separate wearers of shoes from those who appeared in moccasins, and bearers of cornstalks from those who carried rifles, there was nothing of the pomp and pageantry of war to captivate the imagination of the people.
The Hoosier fiddle was a factor in all the festivities of the country folk. The fiddler was frequently an eccentric genius, ranking with the rural poet, who was often merely a maker of idle rhymes; however, the country fiddler in Indiana has held his own against latter-day criticism and the competition of the village brass band. Governor Whitcomb enjoyed local fame as a violinist, and Berry Sulgrove and General Lew Wallace, in their younger years, were skilful with the bow. Dr. H. W. Taylor, a conscientious student of early Hoosier customs, connects the Hoosier fiddler with the Scotch Highlanders, and has expressed his belief[13] that the Highlander folk coming to the United States naturally sought the mountain country of Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia, and that the Scotch fiddle and its traditions survive principally in these mountainous countries. We are told that the fiddle of the Hoosiers is an exotic and cannot long survive, though fifteen years after this prediction a contest of Hoosier fiddlers was held in the largest hall at Indianapolis, and many musicians of this old school appeared from the back districts to compete for the prizes. The great aim of the old time fiddlers was to make their instruments “talk.” Their tunes enjoyed such euphonious names as “Old Dan Tucker,” “Old Zip Coon,” “Possum up a Gum Stump,” “Irish Washerwoman,” “Waggoner,” “Ground Spy,” and “Jay Bird.” Dr. Taylor discovered that the very Hoosier manner of bowing, i.e. fiddling, was derived from the Scotch, and he gives this description of it: “The arm, long, bony, and sinewy, was stretched forwards, downwards, and outwards from the shoulder, and at full length. There was absolutely no movement of the wrist, a very little at the elbow, and just a degree more at the shoulder.” Hall ironically observed that the country fiddler could, like Paganini, play one tune or parts of nearly two dozen tunes on one string; and like the great maestro he played without notes, and with endless flourishes. He gives this attractive portrait of one of the New Purchase fiddlers:—
“He held his fiddle against his breast—perhaps out of affection—and his bow in the middle, and like a cart-whip; things enabling him, however, the more effectually to flog his instrument when rebellious: and the afflicted creature would scream right out in agony! Indeed, his Scremonah bore marks of premature old age—its fingerboard being indented with little pits, and its stomach was frightfully incrusted with rosin and other gummy things, till it looked as dark and careworn as Methuselah! Dan was, truly, no niggard of ‘rosum,’ for he ‘greased’ as he termed it, between his tunes every time! and then, at his first few vigorous jerks, fell a shower of dust on the agitated bosom of his instrument, calling out in vain for mercy under the cruel punishment.”[14]
James Whitcomb Riley corroborates the impression of earlier writers in a characteristic poem, “My Fiddle:”[15]—
“My playin’s only middlin’—tunes I picked up when a boy—
The kind o’-sort o’ fiddlin’ that the folks calls ‘cordaroy’;
‘The Old Fat Gal’ ‘Rye-Straw,’ and ‘My Sailyor’s on the Sea,’
Is the old cowtillions I ‘saw’ when the ch’ice is left to me;
And so I plunk and plonk and plink
And rosum-up my bow,
And play the tunes that make you think
The devil’s in your toe!”
In several of the Southern Indiana counties the least admirable traits of the ancestors of the “poor whites” who came in from the South have been continued into a third and fourth generation; but these do not appear prominently in any fair or comprehensive examination of the people. Much has been written of the lawlessness of Indianians, and lynching and white-capping have sporadically been reported from many of the southern counties. An attorney-general of the State who had brought all the machinery of the law to bear upon particular instances of lynching during his term of office, and who had given much study to the phenomena presented by these outbreaks, expressed his opinion that the right of way of the Baltimore and Southwestern Railway marked the “lynching belt” in Indiana. Statistics in confirmation are lacking, but it is safe to say that a large percentage of the lynchings reported in the State have occurred either in counties on the line of the road or in those immediately adjoining. Lynchings have also occurred in at least half a dozen counties north of Indianapolis, so that all the crimes of this sort perpetrated in Indiana cannot be charged to the descendants of the “poor whites” in the more Southern counties. Lynching has not been viewed with apathy, and every instance of it has been followed by vigorous efforts at punishment. In 1889 a drastic law was added to the statutes, defining lynching and providing severe penalties. It struck to the quick of the matter by making possible the impeachment of law officers who yield prisoners to a mob. But under any circumstances these people are so intensely clannish that even the sincerest prosecution usually fails for lack of witnesses. The Hon. W. A. Ketcham, State attorney-general, after heroic efforts to fix responsibility for the lynching of five men in Ripley County on the night of September 14, 1898, gravely stated in his official report that he had applied the Sherlock Holmes principle to the incident; that is to say, after excluding every other possible hypothesis he had assumed the correctness of the one remaining, and this he stated in his syllabus of the case to be: “That A broke jail and travelled across the country to the town where the revolver had been pawned, a distance of seven miles, broke into the store, stole the revolver, returned again, broke back into jail, shot himself, then killed B and C and hung their dead bodies to a tree, put the finishing touches to his crime by hanging D and E, and then in order that suspicion might be directed against innocent men, finally hanged himself.”[16] The milder form of outlawry, known as “white-capping,” has also been practised in Indiana occasionally, and sometimes with barbarous cruelty; but it, like lynching, is not peculiar to the State, and its extent has been greatly exaggerated by Eastern newspapers.
It has been insisted by loyal Indianians that the speech of the later generations of natives is almost normal English; that the rough vernacular of their ancestors has been ground down in the schools, and that the dictionaries are rapidly sanctioning new words, once without authority, that inevitably crept into common speech through the necessities of pioneer expression. It may fairly be questioned whether, properly speaking, there ever existed a Hoosier dialect. The really indigenous Indiana words and novel pronunciations are so few as to make but a poor showing when collected; and while the word “dialect” is employed as a term of convenience in this connection, it can only be applied to a careless manner of speaking, in which novel words are merely incidental. A book of colloquial terms, like Green’s “Virginia Word Book,” could hardly be compiled for Indiana without infringing upon the prior claims of other and older States to the greater part of it. The so-called Hoosier dialect, where it survives at all, is the speech of the first American settlers in Indiana, greatly modified by time and schooling, but retaining, both in the employment of colloquial terms and in pronunciation, the peculiarities that were carried westward from tide water early in the nineteenth century. The distinctive Indiana countryman, the real Hoosier, who has been little in contact with the people of cities, speaks a good deal as his Pennsylvania or North Carolina or Kentucky grandfather or great-grandfather did before him, and has created nothing new. His speech contains comparatively few words that are peculiar to the State or to communities within it; but in the main it shares such deviations from normal or literary English with the whole Southwest.
In his book “The Wabash” Beste describes his interview with an Indiana carpenter, who questioned whether the traveller was really an Englishman, because his speech was unlike that of the usual English immigrants whose trouble with the aspirate had evoked derisive comment among the Americans. This occurs in his chapter on Indianapolis, in which the carpenter is quoted thus:
“‘You do not say ‘ouse’ and ‘and’ for ‘house’ and ‘hand’; all the children, and all of you, pronounce all these words like Americans, and not as real English pronounce them. Their way of speaking makes us always say that we talk better English than the English themselves.’ I had, indeed, often heard the Americans laughed at for saying so; but now the matter was explained. My carpenter repeated with great accuracy various instances of provincialisms and vulgarisms which he and all of them had noticed more or less, in all the English emigrants who had come amongst them. Seeing none of any other class, they naturally supposed that all English people pronounced the language in the same manner, and so prided themselves upon the superiority of American English. For notwithstanding the disagreeable nasal tone and drawling whine in which most of them speak, and notwithstanding a few national phrases and the peculiar use and pronunciation of certain words, it must be admitted that the American people, in general, speak English without provincial dialect or vulgarisms. Whence, in fact, could they acquire such, since all the emigrants they see came from different parts of England, and the provincialisms of the one neutralize those of the other.”
Professor Whitney, in his “Language and the Study of Language,” expresses in academic terms much the same idea.[17]
Lapses in pronunciation have never been punishable with death on the Wabash, as at the fords of the Jordan, where the shibboleth test of the Gileadites cost the Ephraimites forty and two thousand. The native Indianian is not sensitive about his speech and refuses to be humble before critics from the far East who say “idea-r” and “Philadelphia-r.” James Whitcomb Riley has made the interesting and just observation that the average countryman knows in reality a wider range of diction than he permits himself to use, and that his abridgments and variations are attributable to a fear lest he may offend his neighbors by using the best language at his command.[18] This is wholly true, and it is responsible in a measure for contributions to the common speech of local idioms and phrases. In rural Indiana and generally in the Southwest the phrase “’s th’ fellah says” is often used by a rustic to indicate his own appreciation of the fact that he has employed an unusual expression. Or it may be an actual quotation, as, for example, “Come over fer a visit, an’ we’ll treat you ’n a hostile manner, ’s Uncle Amos use t’ say.” This substitution of hostile for hospitable once enjoyed wide currency in Indiana and Illinois. Sulgrove confirms Riley’s impression:—
“Correct pronunciation was positively regarded by the Southern immigration as a mark of aristocracy or, as they called it, ‘quality.’ The ‘ing’ in ‘evening,’ or ‘morning’ or any other words, was softened into ‘in,’ the full sound being held finical and ‘stuck up.’ So it was no unusual thing to hear such a comical string of emasculated ‘nasals’ as the question of a prominent Indiana lawyer of the Kentucky persuasion, ‘Where were you a-standin’ at the time of your perceivin’ of the hearin’ of the firin’ of the pistol?’... To ‘set’ was the right way to sit; an Indian did not scalp, he ‘skelped’: a child did not long for a thing, he ‘honed’ for it,—slang retains this Hoosier archaism; a woman was not dull, she was ‘daunsy’; commonly a gun was ‘shot’ instead of fired in all moods and tenses.”[19]
While the French settlements in Indiana made no appreciable impression on the common speech, yet it has been assumed by some observers that the inclination at the South to throw the accent of words forward, as in gentlemen, settlement, was fairly attributable to the influence of the French Catholics in Louisiana and of the Huguenots who were scattered through the Southeastern colonies, though this would seem a trifle finespun; but the idiosyncrasy noted exists at the South, no matter what its real origin may have been, and it has been communicated in some measure through Southern influences to the middle Western people. However, Southern Indianians sometimes say Tennes-sy, accenting the first syllable and slurring the last, illustrating again the danger of accepting any theories or fixing any rules for general guidance in such matters. Dr. Eggleston remembers only one French word that survived from old French times in the Wabash country,—“cordelle, to tow a boat by a rope carried along the shore.” The most striking influence in the Indiana dialect is that of the Scotch-Irish, who have left marked peculiarities of speech behind them wherever they have gone. Notwithstanding the fact that both the English Quakers and the Germans contributed largely to the settlement of Pennsylvania and of the Southeastern colonies, the idiosyncrasies of speech most perceptible in the regions deriving their population from those sources are plainly Scotch-Irish; as, for example, the linguistic deficiency which makes strenth and lenth of strength and length, or bunnle of bundle, and the use of nor for than, after a comparative adjective. The use of into for in and whenever for as soon as are other Scotch-Irish peculiarities. These, however, are heard only in diminishing degree in Indiana, and many of the younger generations of Hoosiers have never known them. The confusion of shall and will and of like and as is traceable to North-Irish influences, and is not peculiar to the spoken language at the South and West, but is observed frequently in the newspapers, and is found even in books.
The anonymous writer of “Pioneer Annals” (1875), a rare pamphlet that contains much invaluable matter relating to the occupation of the White Water Valley, speaks of the prevalence of Carolina Quakers among the first settlers of that region, and remarks that when newcomers were asked where they came from, the answer would be “Guilford County, near Clemmens’s Store”; or “Beard’s Hatter-shop”; “Dobson’s Cross Roads”; or “Deep-River Settlement of Friends.” The same writer gives a dialect note which illustrates the ephemeral character of idiom. Sleys (slays) was a term applied by the Carolinians to the reeds used by them in their home-made looms. A Carolina emigrant bound for Indiana stopped at Cincinnati and offered to sell a supply of these. It was in August, and the storekeeper knew but one word having the same sound, sleighs, which were not used in Cincinnati in midsummer. His ironical comment almost led to a personal encounter before the Carolinian could explain. John V. Hadley states in his “Seven Months a Prisoner” that “Guilford County” and “Jamestown” (North Carolina) were household words in many families of Hendricks County (Indiana), where he lived. At Jamestown, on his way to Libby Prison, he was accosted by a citizen who asked whether a former neighbor who had moved to Indiana, but still owned property in North Carolina, had not enlisted in the Union army, the purpose of the inquiry being to obtain testimony on which to confiscate his estate.
The circulation of newly coined words has been so rapid in late years, owing to the increase of communication between different parts of the country, and to dissemination by the newspapers, that few useful words originating obscurely are likely to remain local. Lowell amused himself by tracing to unassailable English sources terms that were assumed to be essentially American; and if Chaucer and the Elizabethans may be invoked against our rural communities, the word-hunter’s sport has grown much simpler when he may cite a usage in one State to disestablish the priority claimed for it in another. There is risk in all efforts to connect novel words with particular communities, no matter how carefully it may be done, and it is becoming more and more difficult to separate real dialect from slang. Lists of unusual words that have been reported to the American Dialect Society afford interesting instances of the danger of accepting terms as local which are really in general use. The word rambunctious, reported from New York State as expressing impudence and forwardness, cannot be peculiar to that region,[20] for it is used in Indiana in identically the same sense. Other words, collected through the same agency and common in Indiana, are: scads, reported from Missouri, signifying a great quantity; and sight, meaning a large amount, noted in New England and New York. Great hand for, meaning a penchant, traced from Maine to Ohio, may be followed also into Indiana, but this, like druthers, for a preference or choice, belongs to the towns rather than to the country. Go like, in the sense of imitation, as “go like a rooster,” is reported from both Maine and Indiana; and foot-loose, meaning free and untrammelled, observed in Georgia, is used in the towns, at least, of Indiana. The natural disposition of Americans to exaggerate led to the creation by the Southeastern element in Indiana population of bodaciously,