The wood-yards on the Mississippi were sometimes of a size corresponding with the magnitude of their surroundings. Sometimes twenty thousand cords of wood would be in one pile, the value of which as it lay upon the ground was seventy thousand dollars. It is hard to comprehend what was the aggregate amount of all the fuel consumed by the river traffic of the great Western waters. The large yards resulted from a combination of capital and enterprise and were exceptions rather than characteristic.

It was quite a relief to the traveler, after days of confinement, to get out at one of these temporary landing-places, and if the chief woodchopper was at leisure, valuable information was often obtained. It was a singular fact that when a steamer hailed a wood-yard no direct answer to any question was ever obtained. There was no exception to this rule in the memory of the oldest steamboat captain on the river. The steamer is desirous of obtaining ash wood provided it is seasoned . The captain, as his boat approaches the Arkansas shore, places his hands to his mouth forming a kind of tube and calls out,

“What kind of wood is that?” The reply comes back,

“Cord wood.”

The captain, still in pursuit of information under difficulties, and desirous of learning if the wood be dry and fit for his purpose, bawls out,

“How long has it been cut?”

“Four feet,” is the prompt response.

The captain, exceedingly vexed, next inquires, “What do you sell it for?”

“Cash,” returns the chopper, replacing the corn-cob pipe in his mouth, and smiling benignly on his pile.

Wood-yards are apparently infested with mosquitoes—we say apparently infested. Such is the impression of accidental sojourners; but it is a strange delusion, for though one may think that they fill the air, inflame the face and hands, and if one of the Arkansas species, penetrate the flesh through the thickest boot, still upon inquiring of any permanent resident if mosquitoes are numerous, the inevitable answer is,

“Mosquitoes—No! not round h'yar; but a little way down the river they are plum' awful—thar they torment alligators to death and sting mules right through thar hoofs.”

The popular belief about, but not of, the mountain people in Arkansas and other Southern States contain many misconceptions. According to fiction, the Hillman is a seven-foot combination of malnutrition and hookworm, asleep on his front porch with the dogs. His great bare feet, dangling off the porch, flap from time to time when the flies get too pesky, but nothing awakens him except a hound's salute to a stranger. Then he shoots up his astounding neck to its full length, ogles the visitor, and on his hunting horn blows a series of long and short blasts that means, “Hide yore stills and oil yore guns; they air a stranger h'yar.” This feat of mountain Morse is all the more remarkable because he can neither read nor write, and, indeed, cannot count well enough to enumerate his hogs, but must identify them by name. Should one be missing for a day or two, he musters all his kin down to second cousins and step-uncles and goes across the “mounting” for a feud. While the menfolks shoot out one another's eyeballs at artillery distances, the “chillern” go down in the valley and throw rocks, it being considered unmanly to kill women and children except in a fit of anger.

At the height of the fighting, the hog in question reels in, red of eye, and the feudists deduce that he was not killed at all, but merely knocked over somebody's barrel of mash and subsequently went off down the valley, hunting wolves. The patriarchs and their relatives regretfully suspend the fighting and repair to a clan stronghold for a square dance. Between sets they hold spitting contests in the moonlight or mournfully intone Elizabethan ballads in purest Shakespearean idiom. When every keg of white lightening has been emptied, each man gathers up a rifle that saw service at Kings Mountain, and, followed by his twelve-year-old bride carrying a tub of clothes and two buckets of water, walks nine miles up the holler to his cabin.

Downing such an exaggeration is difficult, because there really is a rugged, homespun quality about the hill people. They appreciate a good pocketknife, a true rifle, and a cold-nosed coonhound. They look upon exceptional skill with an ax or a gun as an art. They take for granted an ability to “read sign” along creek banks, or to find a mule that has strayed in the woods.