One thing to be aware of when it comes to us traditional Appalachians is that we come from a long line of storytellers. It is our heritage. This means you rarely get just straight facts within any story we’re relating to you. We do use actual truth to create the overall structure for our tales, but then also weave in lots of exaggeration, superstition, fantasy, boasting, lore, and outright fabrications. This is part of the joy of it all.
This might create a situation at times where modern listeners could feel disappointed, or lied to, if finding out that certain details of a story were not completely true. (People desperately WANT to believe, for example, that Daniel Boone really did all of the legendary, impossible things that he is reported to have done. But on some level, we all know that in reality, a lot of those stories are founded on something real that happened, but then exaggerated.)
An example of me pulling this dirty trick on all of you can be seen in Ep 172 Horrifying BIGFOOT ...
The school textbooks tell you the settlers crossed the Atlantic for religious freedom.
Some of them did, partly. What the textbooks leave out is the thing that sits in the actual letters, in the sailors' accounts, in the merchant pamphlets circulating in English ports from the 1580s onwards: a major reason people came to America was the wild game. Meat you could take. Meat nobody owned. Meat that walked into camp.
For a population legally separated from the animal for five hundred years, this was the whole pitch.
Consider what they were leaving.
A family in a Devon cottage in 1618 eats pottage. Oats, barley, an onion, whatever greens grew near the back door. No meat in it this week. No meat in it last week. There will be meat in it on Christmas Day, God willing, if the chicken is still alive by then. The deer in the forest at the end of the lane have been the king's property under the Forest Laws since 1066. Taking one is a hanging offence. The father has never taken one. His father never took one. The institutional...
