WE DON’T KNOW HIM, BUT we know his story: the man who lives in the woods and goes a little bit crazy. He lives too far from the civilizing forces of law, commerce, and family, so he goes too far with his own body, his own impulses, and his own power. He lives off the land but is too close to it—he gets dirty, wet, unpredictable; he drives a monster truck, or he walks. He doesn’t trust outsiders and will do anything to them in order to maintain his freedom. He is Frankenstein and Wolf Man and Grendel and Rumpelstiltskin and the Cyclops; he is the rough honky-tonker who tries to rape Thelma in Thelma and Louise, the trucker who rapes Aileen Wuornos in Monster, the rural kids full of hatred who murdered Brandon Teena, and the rural kids full of hatred who murdered Matthew Shepard. He is the psycho killer of Deliverance, and of I Spit on Your Grave, The Last House on the Left, Rest Stop, Vacancy, Wrong Turn, Eden Lake, Joy Ride, and many others. He is chaos, anarchy, and wretchedness. He must be punished or killed if we are to live any kind of life.
“Monsters do not emerge out of a cultural void,” writes scholar Tina Marie Boyer. “They have a literary and cultural heritage.” In other words: he does not come from nowhere.
The hick monster story has deep roots in the history of West Virginia and is wound around the story of American industrialization and capitalism. Before you can dispossess a people from their own land, you must first make them not people.
The end of the Civil War and West Virginia on the winning side should have meant fat times aplenty, but it didn’t. West Virginia found itself in an odd in-between space: not yet quite the North and too recently untethered from the South. It was uniquely poised, and thus uniquely poised for suffering. Unlike many Northern territories, it was not fostered for growth during Reconstruction, and like many Southern territories, it was punished.
West Virginia hadn’t been a state long enough to have its own leadership and public infrastructure, so to rebuild, it ceded control of its railroad systems to Northern companies, which would operate them as subsidiaries—forever, it would turn out. Ditto with industries that had been nascent before the war—the oil fields near Parkersburg, for example—which would eventually flourish only when a Northern firm acquired and operated them. Gone were the wealthy plantation owners in Virginia who would buy agricultural products from West Virginia and patronize its resorts and taverns. Gone were the livestock, plucked by roving Union and Confederate soldiers alike. Congress gave away free land to those who wanted to homestead west of the Mississippi, thus subsidizing the competition in the agricultural markets that had been mainstays of West Virginia’s prosperity before the war.
But a new force did arrive in West Virginia: writers. In the 1880s and 1890s, their sharp eyes flicked over the forested landscape and created a new genre, “local color” novels that capitalized on the nostalgia and curiosity people in the South and North alike felt for fast-disappearing regional differences. Stories of “simple people” in country villages and hollers called back the free life many white people had lived in the South before the war came. Pieces in Harper’s and the Atlantic Monthly sold at a healthy clip, as well as later books like John Fox Jr.’s The Trail of the Lonesome Pine and Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders, marking West Virginia and other mountainous regions as the home of “backwards,” “strange,” and “childlike” people.
“This was the period when Appalachia was discovered and named by observers for whom the differences that separated Appalachia from the rest of the nation were more compelling than the factors that united them,” writes John Alexander Williams in Appalachia: A History. This period gave us two portrayals of Appalachia and two alone, Williams writes: “the Appalachian mountaineer, noble and stalwart, rugged and independent, master or mistress of the highlands environment; and the profligate hillbilly, amusing but often also threatening, defined by deviance and aberration.”
Scholars, educational reformers, and lawmakers hardened the ideas espoused by these novels into the idea of Appalachia as a place with a singular and strange culture. This was not a coincidence, for it is far easier to dominate a people that many regard as “other.” These simplistic stories played a key role in allowing absentee corporations to gain control of the region’s natural resources.
Near the end of the nineteenth century, two-thirds of West Virginia was still covered in forest, mostly ancient-growth hardwood. Soon the lumbering companies that had been in the region multiplied, establishing larger milling operations. Then came the railroads, rendering the method of floating logs down the river obsolete and allowing production to explode. Railroads needed huge amounts of cash—a commodity that was still scarce in the mountains. Enter absentee owners who lived in cities. As a girl, the poet Louise McNeill watched the trains stream over Gauley Bridge just outside Charleston. Her people toasted, she writes, “To the biggity bugs of the N&W/Who sent regrets they can’t be here.”
Most West Virginia officials and judges welcomed these out-of-town investors and promoted the growth of industry as progress that would create jobs. They bent laws, wrote new ones, and interpreted the constitution in favor of industrialists at every turn. With this influx of capital, lumbering exploded in the 1890s. Now equipment could be transported into, and lumber out of, territory that was previously considered too remote and craggy. More track was laid down. Jobs were abundant, and people were arriving every day to fill them, including African Americans, who flocked west from Virginia in search of greater equality and better pay.
If change had been slow to come to West Virginia directly after the Civil War, by 1900 the lumber industry was cooking with gas. To turn a profit, companies needed to harvest the timber from enormous tracts of land—and fast. For this kind of productivity, they needed lots of capital and took on heavy debt. To remain solvent in the face of all this debt, they had to be constantly producing; it was often cheaper for them to continue cutting even at a loss than to stop production for a single day.
As the machine of big lumber churned, reaching its peak in the first decade of the twentieth century, the result for West Virginians was the slashing and burning of their forests without the benefit of any lasting economic infrastructure. The land of West Virginia was skinned at a staggering pace. This was not a lumber industry, in which trees were cultivated as a crop and cut as more were planted; this was mining. A company stayed a few months, extracted the trees, and moved on.
Jobs followed the decimation—once a forest had been cut, those holding the axes and operating the mills were out of work. Some West Virginians became migratory, following the work; others would spend their lives trying to match the wages they’d made for a few months. Some tried to turn back to the farms they’d worked before, but they were gone—the forests where farmers had let their livestock roam and from which they’d drawn wood, water, and food were wastelands now. From 1880 to 1920, many West Virginia families who had previously made a good living from their farms were forced off their land and into wage labor. Or they left.
Enter coal. Of the 24,230 square miles that make up West Virginia, a total of 9,500 square miles, or 39.2 percent, is underlaid with coal—forty-three of the fifty-five counties, in whole or in part. Small-scale coal mining had been happening sustainably in pockets of the state since before the Civil War, but as the logging industry died, perfectly good railroad track was left behind, and coal rose up to take its place. Out-of-state industrialists began approaching local mining companies and offering to expand their operations, or they stole their methods and drove them out of business. Soon the great coal fields of southern West Virginia were accessible by rail, and coal towns sprang up, consisting of a mine, whatever housing the coal company decided to provide for its workers, and a store where they were obligated to buy all their goods. From 1880 to 1917, the number of miners in West Virginia grew from about four thousand to ninety thousand; the state had swapped one extractive economy for another.
“Today,” say the writers of the 1941 West Virginia: A Guide to the Mountain State, “the State has no self-sufficient communities.”
The lumber and mining booms would not be the last times Appalachia was “rediscovered” by outsiders; there were several more such occasions. When the Mine Wars raged in West Virginia from 1912 to 1922, the sophisticated organizational tactics of the coal miners and the violence of the Battle of Blair Mountain, called “the largest insurrection in US history outside the Civil War,” attracted national attention. In the mid-1960s, President Kennedy’s trip to the region and Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty meant photographs of real or perceived Appalachian destitution blanketed kitchen tables across America. Finally, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, as reporters and pundits sought to explain the surging enthusiasm for Donald J. Trump, writers and cultural critics, me included, considered Appalachia with renewed interest. Again, reporters zoomed in and out and had days to construct a totalizing story. If Appalachia was “the heart of Trump country,” as it was called in a flurry of articles and think pieces in 2016, it was suddenly urgent for us to understand its beating. Yet, as has been true all along, whatever blood pumps through Appalachia pumps through all of us. “The nation awoke on November 9,” writes Elizabeth Catte, author of What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia, “to the news that we were all now residents of Trump Country.”