Borderlands, a bit of history

I read a lot of history and the one theme that seems to permeate all of history is that of barbarism.  It seems that one group was always preying on another and that the main cause that shaped the evolution of civilization was self preservation.  People banded together, ran to the hinterlands and resorted to all manner of contrivances to protect themselves from each other including weapons, fortified walls, armor, etc.

There is an area referred to as the Borderlands between England and Scotland that suffered an unusually brutal history over an unusually long period of time.  Added to the almost continual wars between Scotland and England, were the roving bands of thugs that used the wars or almost any excuse to take what they wanted, sometimes exterminating entire families in the process.  Mistrust was rampant, assassination and brutal murder were commonplace and families tended to band together and form clans for self protection.  Only two types of dwellings could be found in the Borderlands.  Those that were made of stone had three floors with animals kept on the bottom, living quarters on the second floor, and defensive battlements on the top; almost like a mini-castle.  Dwellings made of wood were crude and designed to be abandoned in case of trouble and could be rebuilt in a day or so.

The atrocities, slaughter, and violence persisted in the Borderlands for hundreds of years until, as one writer put it “This endemic violence caused heavy loss of life on both side of the border and often did as much killing in relation to the local population as the plague did nearly everywhere else.”  The net effect was that the Borderlands were in a state of anarchy for many generations.

These are the people who formed the fourth great migration to the New World in the late 1600’s and early 1700’s and populated the American Backcountry.  These are the Moonshiners of the Ozarks, the folks who populated the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Appalachians.  Uneducated, crude, and backward, these people were shunned by the immigrants who preceded them and directed toward settlement in, what was then, the frontier.  Like their home turf, the Backcountry was also a dangerous and harsh place, being populated by many Indian tribes, but these folks were used to danger and violence and they proliferated.  They named places like Bloody Rock, Cutthroat Gap, Killquick, and Lynch Creek.  They brought, from their homeland, words like Whar for Where, and Thar for There.  They also brought fixin (getting ready to do something), cute, bumfuzzled, scoot and used the word honey as a term of endearment.

The Backcountry immigrants from the Borderlands were a rough and hearty people, they had to be to survive in the areas that were open to them.  The relative few families that lived in the Backcountry tended to inter-marry and became very clannish, just like their ancestors in the Borderlands.  Also, like their ancestors in the Borderlands, they carried on feuds that persisted for generations and is epitomized in the saga of the Hatfields and McCoys.  They also produced such notables as Andrew Jackson, James Knox Polk, and Zachary Taylor.