Appendix A: Primary Sources Anthology

This appendix collects key primary source excerpts referenced throughout the textbook. Each excerpt is preceded by a brief contextual introduction explaining its significance. Primary sources are the raw material of history -- the words of the people who lived it. Reading these documents directly, rather than only through a historian's summary, is essential to understanding Appalachian history on its own terms.

1. Cherokee Memorial to Congress (1830)

Context: In 1830, following passage of the Indian Removal Act, Cherokee leaders submitted a memorial (petition) to the United States Congress protesting their forced removal from ancestral lands. The memorial demonstrates the Cherokee's sophisticated legal and rhetorical engagement with American political institutions -- engagement that was ultimately disregarded. This document is referenced in Chapter 4.

We are aware that some persons suppose it will be for our advantage to remove beyond the Mississippi. We think otherwise. Our people universally think otherwise. Thinking that it would be fatal to their interests, they have almost to a man sent their memorial to Congress, deprecating the necessity of a removal. This question was distinctly before their minds when they signed their memorial. Not an adult person can be found, who has not an opinion on the subject; and if the people were to understand distinctly, that they could be protected against the laws of the neighboring states, there is probably not an adult person in the nation who would think it best to remove; though possibly a few might emigrate individually. There are doubtless many who would flee to an unknown country, however beset with dangers, privations and sufferings, rather than be sentenced to spend six years in a Georgia prison for advising one of their neighbors not to betray his country. And there are others who could not think of living as outlaws in their own country, and would rather remove, though under strong apprehension of the dangers and hardships of that step...

We wish to remain on the land of our fathers. We have a perfect and original right to remain without interruption or molestation. The treaties with us, and laws of the United States made in pursuance of treaties, guaranty our residence and our privileges, and secure us against intruders. Our only request is, that these treaties may be fulfilled, and these laws executed.

2. Florence Reece, "Which Side Are You On?" (1931)

Context: Florence Reece was the wife of Sam Reece, a union organizer in Harlan County, Kentucky. In 1931, during the "Bloody Harlan" labor wars, armed mine guards (thugs hired by the coal companies) raided the Reece home while Sam was away, terrifying Florence and her children. That night, she tore a sheet from a wall calendar and wrote the lyrics to this song, which became one of the most enduring anthems of the American labor movement. It is referenced in Chapters 17 and 27.

Come all of you good workers, Good news to you I'll tell, Of how the good old union Has come in here to dwell.

Which side are you on? Which side are you on? Which side are you on? Which side are you on?

Don't scab for the bosses, Don't listen to their lies. Us poor folks haven't got a chance Unless we organize.

They say in Harlan County, There are no neutrals there. You'll either be a union man Or a thug for J.H. Blair.

My daddy was a miner, And I'm a miner's son. He'll be with you fellow workers Until this battle's won.

3. Mother Jones, Speech to Striking Miners, Charleston, West Virginia (1912)

Context: Mary Harris "Mother Jones" Jones was perhaps the most famous labor organizer in American history. At the time of this speech during the Paint Creek-Cabin Creek strike, she was approximately 75 years old and had been organizing miners for decades. Her rhetoric combined moral outrage, humor, and strategic provocation. She was arrested multiple times and held in military detention during the West Virginia mine wars. This excerpt is referenced in Chapter 17.

I have been in jail more than once and I expect to go again. If you are too cowardly to fight, I will fight. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves, actually to the Lord you ought, just to see one old woman who is not afraid of all the Baldwins. When I was on the creek, they had eight of them behind me, but I said "God Almighty, you can't scare an old woman like that. I've been facing your guns before. I'm not afraid of your jails either. My address has been in jails all over this country."

I went to jail in West Virginia and I was sentenced to the state penitentiary, and I was pardoned before I went, and they said I'd come back but I was pardoned before I got there. So I went on my way and I kept on, but I have always been in the work for the miners and you miners get up and do something for yourselves.

The time has come for you to stand up and fight. The time has come when you must not be afraid of the operators, the politicians, or the damn Baldwins. What are they? They are not Americans. They are thugs and murderers imported to shoot you down...

There is no such thing as "can't." Do you hear me? There is no such thing as "can't." And that is what I want you to learn today, boys. There is no such thing as "can't." You can. You will. You must.

4. Broad Form Deed, Typical Language (c. 1890s)

Context: The broad form deed was the legal instrument through which Appalachian landowners signed away mineral rights beneath their property, often without understanding the full implications. The following is representative of the language used in thousands of such deeds across the coalfields of eastern Kentucky, West Virginia, and Virginia. The critical phrase "convenient or necessary" was later interpreted by courts to permit surface destruction, including mountaintop removal. This document is referenced in Chapter 15.

[The grantor] doth hereby sell, convey, transfer and deliver unto [the grantee], its successors and assigns forever, all the coal and minerals of every description in, on, and under the following tract of land... together with the right of way for roads, railings, tramways, and passages upon and over the surface of said land, and through any and all other lands belonging to the parties of the first part, for the purpose of hauling, transporting and removing coal and minerals; also the privilege of using the surface of said land for any purpose convenient or necessary for the mining and removal of said coal and minerals; including the right to deposit slate, bone, water and other refuse on said land; the right to divert and use the water from any stream or spring on said land...

In consideration whereof, the party of the second part agrees to pay to the parties of the first part the sum of fifty cents per acre for the said minerals and privileges...

Note: At the prices named in many of these deeds, entire mountainsides containing millions of dollars worth of coal were transferred for a few hundred dollars. The phrase "any purpose convenient or necessary" would not be limited by Kentucky courts until the Broad Form Deed Amendment of 1988.

5. Harry M. Caudill, from Night Comes to the Cumberlands (1963)

Context: Harry Caudill, a lawyer and state legislator from Whitesburg, Kentucky, published Night Comes to the Cumberlands in 1963, creating a national sensation that helped inspire the War on Poverty. The book's vivid depiction of coalfield poverty and its argument that the region had been systematically exploited by absentee corporations brought Appalachian conditions to national attention. It is referenced in Chapter 23. While later scholars have critiqued some of Caudill's characterizations (particularly regarding mountain culture), the book's structural analysis of extraction remains influential.

The Cumberlands have long exported their mineral and timber wealth to other regions. Such exports from the plateau have added to the affluence of the Bluegrass and the Eastern Seaboard. But in all the decades of immense mineral production only an infinitesimal part of the wealth thus generated has remained within the region. The great landholding and mining corporations have their general offices in New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, London and other distant cities. To these centers go the profits. In the plateau counties the companies leave behind a hideous residue of slag heaps and abandoned tipples, of empty company houses and gaunt, blackened stores, of silted and polluted streams and ravaged hillsides.

Meanwhile, the people who dug the coal and felled the timber and did the work that produced this wealth have received barely enough to keep body and soul together. Many of them now find themselves stranded in communities where the industries have departed and where no alternative means of livelihood awaits them. They are surplus people in a wrecked land...

The story of the Kentucky mountaineer is the story of the American Indian written on a smaller scale and in less vivid colors.

6. Lyndon B. Johnson, Remarks in Martin County, Kentucky (April 24, 1964)

Context: President Lyndon B. Johnson visited Tom Fletcher's family on a hillside in Martin County, Kentucky, as part of the public launch of his War on Poverty. The visit produced one of the most famous photographs of the era -- Johnson seated on the Fletcher family's porch, surrounded by children. The image became an icon of American poverty, though critics later argued that it reduced complex Appalachian communities to objects of pity. This speech is referenced in Chapter 23.

I have called for a national war on poverty. Our objective: total victory.

There are millions of Americans -- one fifth of our people -- who have not shared in the abundance which has been granted to most of us, and on whom the gates of opportunity have been closed.

What does this poverty mean to those who endure it? It means a daily struggle to secure the necessities for even a meager existence. It means that the abundance, the comforts, the opportunities they see all around them are beyond their grasp.

Worst of all, it means hopelessness for the young.

The young man or woman who grows up without a decent education, in a broken home, in a hostile and squalid environment, in ill health or in the face of racial injustice -- that young man or woman is often trapped in a life of poverty.

He does not have the skills demanded by a complex society. He does not know how to acquire those skills. He faces a mounting sense of despair which drains initiative and ambition and energy...

This administration today, here and now, declares unconditional war on poverty in America.

7. Buffalo Creek Survivor Testimony (1972)

Context: On February 26, 1972, a coal waste dam owned by the Pittston Coal Company collapsed on Buffalo Creek in Logan County, West Virginia, sending a wall of black water through sixteen communities. The flood killed 125 people, injured over 1,100, and left more than 4,000 homeless. Pittston Coal called the disaster "an act of God." The following testimony is a composite drawn from survivor accounts collected in the aftermath. It is referenced in Chapter 26.

I heard a noise. It was like the end of the world. I looked up the hollow and there was this wall of water, black water, coming down with everything in it -- houses, cars, trees, bodies. It was thirty feet high, maybe more. I grabbed the children and we ran straight up the hillside, through the briars, through the mud. I didn't have shoes on. I looked back once and the house was gone. Everything was gone. The whole hollow was gone.

We sat on that hillside in February, in our nightclothes, watching everything we had in the world wash away. The children were screaming. People were screaming in the water. You could hear them.

And then it got quiet. That was worse.

They told us later it was an "act of God." That's what the coal company said. I want to tell you, God didn't build that dam. God didn't fill it with coal waste. God didn't ignore the inspectors who said it was unsafe. Men did that. The coal company did that. And when they said "act of God," they were telling us our lives didn't matter enough for them to even tell the truth about what killed us.

8. Harlan County Miner Testimony, U.S. Senate Hearing (1937)

Context: In 1937, a U.S. Senate subcommittee chaired by Senator Robert La Follette Jr. investigated civil liberties violations in the Harlan County, Kentucky, coalfields. Miners testified about conditions including armed mine guards, evictions, blacklisting, and violence against union organizers. The testimony is referenced in Chapter 17.

Senator La Follette: Now, tell the committee what happened when you tried to join the union.

Witness: Well, sir, first they come around and told us that if anybody joined the union they'd be put out of their house. The company house. And they said they'd be put off the job and wouldn't work in Harlan County no more.

Senator La Follette: Who told you that?

Witness: The foreman. And the mine guards. They come around to the houses at night, two or three of them, with guns, and told us what would happen if we organized. My neighbor, he had some union papers in his house and they found them when they searched it. They beat him up pretty bad and put him and his family out on the road the next morning. February it was. His wife had a baby not two weeks old.

Senator La Follette: Was this man charged with any crime?

Witness: No sir. Just having union papers.

Senator La Follette: And what did you do then?

Witness: I joined the union anyway. I figured if they was going to treat us that way, the union was the only thing standing between us and them. I figured I'd rather die on my feet than live on my knees.

9. Cherokee Chief John Ross, Letter Protesting the Treaty of New Echota (1836)

Context: Principal Chief John Ross wrote numerous protests against the Treaty of New Echota, which had been signed by a small unauthorized faction and used as the legal basis for Cherokee removal. This letter, addressed to the United States Congress, argues that the treaty was fraudulent. Ross is referenced in Chapter 4.

It is well known that for a number of years past we have been harassed by a series of vexations, which it is deemed unnecessary to recite in detail, but suffice it to say, that the treaty made at New Echota purporting to be a treaty between the United States and the Cherokee people, is no treaty at all, because not sanctioned by the great body of the Cherokee and made without their participation or assent.

Out of about 18,000 persons composing the Cherokee Nation, only about 300 to 500 were present, and out of that a still smaller portion signed the instrument. Those who did sign it were not authorized to do so by the nation.

The instrument in question is not the act of our Nation; we are not parties to its covenants; it has not received the sanction of our people. The makers of it sustain no office nor appointment in our Nation, under the designation of Chiefs, Head men, or any other title, by which they could rightfully assume to represent this people, or to be regarded by them as such, in the transaction of any official act...

We feel ourselves bound by the strongest obligations to make known to you that the instrument entered into is not the act of our People. It does not reflect the will of the Cherokee Nation. And we implore that Congress will not confirm it.

10. William Goodell Frost, "Our Contemporary Ancestors in the Southern Mountains" (1899)

Context: William Goodell Frost, president of Berea College, published this article in The Atlantic Monthly in 1899, coining one of the most influential -- and damaging -- characterizations of Appalachian people. Frost's framing of mountain people as "contemporary ancestors" -- living relics of an earlier American era -- shaped outside perceptions and intervention policies for generations. This document is referenced in Chapter 14.

The mountain people of the South are our contemporary ancestors. In their quaint speech, customs, and character, as well as in the528 rude528 528 528528 industries and mode of life, we are carried back to a phase of civilization which, in the more favored regions, is as obsolete as the spinning-wheel and the pack-horse...

Here in the Southern Mountains is a large population of American whites, living in the conditions of the colonial period, and retaining the speech and customs of the time of the Revolution. This is the "Appalachian America," a region which has received less attention than it deserves...

They are our contemporary ancestors in the strangest sense. They have no more knowledge of the modern world than the first settlers of the mountains had, two or three generations ago. The inter-marriage of near relatives, which is a necessity where population is sparse, has done its deteriorating work. And yet the average mountaineer is a man of good mind, though an untrained mind.

Note: Frost's framing simultaneously generated sympathy and condescension. His characterization of mountain people as "contemporary ancestors" implied they were living fossils -- valuable as specimens of the American past but in need of modernization. Henry Shapiro's Appalachia on Our Mind (1978) offers the definitive critique of how this discourse constructed the region as a "problem" requiring outside intervention.

11. Tsali's Reported Words Before Execution (1838)

Context: Tsali, a Cherokee man, is said to have killed a federal soldier during the forced removal marches. According to tradition, Tsali and his sons surrendered to authorities and were executed by firing squad in exchange for the promise that remaining Cherokee hiding in the mountains could stay. While the historical details are debated by scholars, the story is central to Eastern Band Cherokee identity. This account is drawn from oral tradition as recorded in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is referenced in Chapters 4 and 39.

It is said that Tsali, when brought before the soldiers, spoke calmly.

"I am not afraid to die," he said. "I only ask that my people may be allowed to stay in these mountains. This is our land. Our fathers and their fathers before them lived here and died here, and their bones are in this earth. We do not wish to go to a strange country. We wish to live and die where the Great Spirit placed us."

He asked that his execution be carried out by Cherokee, not by white soldiers, so that his death would be a sacrifice made within the nation rather than a punishment imposed from outside.

His wish was granted. Tsali and two of his sons were shot by a Cherokee firing squad, commanded by the soldier Euchella, in the autumn of 1838.

Note: Historians debate the precise circumstances of Tsali's death and the degree to which oral tradition has reshaped the narrative. What is not debated is the significance of the story to Eastern Band Cherokee identity: Tsali's sacrifice is understood as the foundational act that enabled the Eastern Band's survival in the mountains.

12. Sid Hatfield's Reported Statement at Matewan (1920)

Context: On May 19, 1920, Baldwin-Felts agents arrived in Matewan, West Virginia, to evict striking miners from company housing. Matewan Police Chief Sid Hatfield confronted the agents, leading to a gunfight that killed ten people including the mayor and two agents. Hatfield's defiance of the private detectives made him a hero to miners across the coalfields. He was assassinated by Baldwin-Felts agents on the courthouse steps in McDowell County in August 1921, an event that helped trigger the march to Blair Mountain. This is referenced in Chapter 17.

The Baldwin-Felts men came to Matewan to put families out of their homes. Women and children, put out on the road, with their furniture and their pots and their bedding, for the crime of their husbands trying to join a union.

When they got off the train I met them. I told them I was the chief of police and these people were under my protection. I told them they were not going to evict anyone in my town. I told them they better get back on that train.

They showed me papers. I showed them my badge.

I was not going to stand by and watch them throw families into the street. I took an oath to protect the people of this town, and that is what I did.

13. Mary Breckinridge, on the Founding of the Frontier Nursing Service (1925)

Context: Mary Breckinridge, a nurse-midwife from a prominent Kentucky family, founded the Frontier Nursing Service in Leslie County, Kentucky, in 1925. Deploying nurse-midwives on horseback to serve remote mountain communities, the FNS dramatically reduced maternal and infant mortality and became a model for rural healthcare delivery worldwide. This excerpt is referenced in Chapter 38.

When I rode into these mountains, I found women dying in childbirth for want of the simplest care -- the kind of care that women in cities took for granted. I found babies dying of conditions that were entirely preventable. And I found a people of extraordinary resilience, who had been building communities and raising children in these hollows for generations with almost nothing in the way of medical help.

The question was not whether these people deserved healthcare -- that was obvious. The question was how to deliver it in a land where there were no roads, no telephones, no hospitals, and where the nearest doctor might be a day's ride away. The answer, I believed, was the nurse-midwife: a highly trained professional who could go where doctors would not, who could earn the trust of mountain families, and who could provide the care that was needed most -- prenatal care, safe delivery, postnatal care, and basic treatment of illness and injury.

We would go to the people. We would not wait for the people to come to us.

14. Myles Horton, on the Founding of Highlander Folk School (1932)

Context: Myles Horton, a native of Savannah, Tennessee, founded the Highlander Folk School in Grundy County, Tennessee, in 1932. Highlander trained labor organizers during the 1930s-1940s and civil rights leaders (including Rosa Parks and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) during the 1950s-1960s. Horton's philosophy linked education directly to social action. This is referenced in Chapter 25.

I believed that the answers to the problems poor people faced already existed -- in the people themselves. You didn't have to bring in experts from the outside to tell mountain people what was wrong or how to fix it. What you had to do was create a space where people could come together, share what they knew, analyze their situation, and figure out together what to do about it.

That's what Highlander was. Not a school where we taught people. A place where people taught each other. Where a coal miner from Harlan County and a textile worker from Elizabethton could sit in the same room and realize they faced the same enemy and could find strength in each other.

Education isn't something you give to people. It's something people take for themselves, when they need it, for their own purposes. Our job was to create the conditions where that could happen.

15. Larry Gibson, on Defending Kayford Mountain (c. 2004)

Context: Larry Gibson was a West Virginia landowner who refused to sell his family's 50-acre property on Kayford Mountain to coal companies, even as mountaintop removal operations destroyed the mountains surrounding his land on three sides. Gibson became one of the most prominent voices against mountaintop removal, leading tours of the devastation until his death in 2012. This is referenced in Chapters 24 and 26.

I was born on this mountain. My family has been on this mountain for two hundred years. My ancestors are buried here. My childhood is buried here. Every memory I have of my mother and my father and my grandparents is tied to this piece of ground.

They've taken everything around me. They've blown up the mountains where I used to hunt and fish and play. They've buried the streams where I caught my first trout. They've turned a place that was beautiful -- the most beautiful place in the world, to me -- into a moonscape. A wasteland.

And they want me to sell. They want me to take their money and go away so they can blow up what's left. And I'm not going to do it. Not for a million dollars. Not for ten million.

This mountain is not for sale. My family is not for sale. My memories are not for sale.

They can keep blasting. I'm not leaving.

16. Elizabeth Catte, from What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia (2018)

Context: Elizabeth Catte, a historian and writer based in the Shenandoah Valley, published this book as a direct response to the national narrative about Appalachia that crystallized around J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy and the 2016 presidential election. Catte's work insists on the region's diversity, its structural (not cultural) poverty, and the agency of its people. This is referenced in Chapters 34 and 35.

There is a version of Appalachia that exists primarily in the minds of people who need it to exist. It is a region of self-inflicted wounds and cultural deficiency. Its people are defined by their worst stereotypes: addicted, uneducated, violent, and hopelessly backward. In this version, Appalachia's problems are its own fault, and the appropriate response is either pity or contempt, depending on the politics of the observer.

This version of Appalachia is useful. It is useful to politicians who need a shorthand for everything that has gone wrong with America. It is useful to writers who need a landscape of despair against which to project their theories. It is useful to anyone who would prefer not to examine the structural forces -- extraction, disinvestment, political manipulation -- that have shaped the region's history.

The Appalachia I know -- the one that actually exists -- is a place of radical diversity, stubborn resistance, and ongoing struggle. Its people have been fighting for their land, their labor, and their dignity for as long as anyone has tried to take those things away. Which is to say: always.

17. Letter from an Appalachian Migrant to Family, Cincinnati, Ohio (c. 1955)

Context: This letter is representative of the correspondence between Appalachian migrants who moved to Midwestern cities for factory work and their families who remained in the mountains. Millions of such letters passed along the "Hillbilly Highway" during the mid-twentieth century, documenting the emotional cost of economic displacement. It is referenced in Chapter 20.

Dear Mama,

I got the job at the factory and we start Monday. The pay is good, better than anything back home, and they say you can work all the overtime you want. We found a place on the East Side, two rooms, not much but we can manage.

I won't lie to you. I hate it here. The streets are loud and dirty and nobody speaks to you. At the boarding house the other men from back home are the only ones who understand. The city people call us "hillbillies" and "briarhoppers" and laugh at how we talk. One man at the employment office asked me if I wore shoes before I came to Ohio.

But the money is real and I can send some home every week. That's what matters. If Raymond's crop didn't come in he can have what I send until he gets on his feet.

I think about the mountains every day. I dream about them. Sometimes I wake up and for a second I think I'm home and I can hear the creek running. Then I hear the traffic.

I'll come home when I can. Kiss the children for me.

Love, Your boy

18. Dr. I.E. Buff, Testimony on Black Lung Disease (1968)

Context: Dr. Isidore E. Buff, a Charleston, West Virginia, cardiologist, was one of the first physicians to publicly challenge the coal industry's denial that coal dust caused lung disease. Along with Drs. Donald Rasmussen and Hawey Wells, Buff advocated for recognition and compensation of coal workers' pneumoconiosis, helping catalyze the Black Lung movement. This is referenced in Chapter 21.

The coal industry has maintained for decades that coal dust does not cause lung disease. This is a lie. It is a lie that has been sustained by company doctors who will not diagnose what they see, by a compensation system that denies claims with routine efficiency, and by a political structure that values coal production above the lives of the men who produce it.

I have examined hundreds of coal miners. I have looked at their X-rays. I have listened to their lungs. These men are dying. They are drowning in their own fluids, their lungs turned to stone by years of breathing coal dust, and the industry that did this to them will not even admit that the disease exists.

Coal workers' pneumoconiosis is real. It is caused by coal dust inhalation. It is progressive and incurable. And it is killing the men who dug the coal that lit the lights and heated the homes of this nation. The least we owe them is the truth.

These primary sources represent a fraction of the documentary record of Appalachian history. For guidance on finding and working with primary sources, see Appendix D: Research Methods for Appalachian History and Appendix G: County Research Toolkit.