Sergeant York

An American Hero

David D. Lee

• Editorial: The University Press of Kentucky
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780813145884
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: World War I

A stirring account of the heroic World War I exploits and life of Tennessean Alvin C. York. "Reads like a good novel." — Southern Living In a brief encounter on October 8, 1918, during the Argonne offensive, Alvin C. York killed 25 German soldiers and, almost singlehandedly, effected the capture of 132 others. Returning to the United States the following spring, he received a tumultuous public welcome and a flood of offers from businessmen eager to capitalize on his acclaimed feat. But York, true to his character, went quietly back to his home in the Tennessee mountains, where he spent the remainder of his life working to bring schools and other services to those remote valleys where his neighbors lived. In this definitive biography, David D. Lee goes beyond that single wartime episode, however, to consider its consequences on York's later life—his efforts, not always successful, to better his mountain community; his involvement in making a motion picture of his life; his difficulties with money and taxes. But Sergeant York is better known as a symbol than as an individual, and in this study Lee connects the man and his life to an American heroic ideal. With his rural background, his refusal to take commercial advantage of his fame, and his simple piety, Alvin York exemplified the traditional values of an agrarian America that was in his own day already receding into the past. He claimed a special place in the hearts of his countrymen, Lee concludes, because his life seemed to show that the virtues of the common man continued to be a vital part of American society.

1. In the Wolf River Valley

Home for Alvin York was the Valley of the Three Forks of the Wolf River nestled in the Cumberland Mountains of Tennessee just a few miles from the Kentucky border. Here in Fentress County he lived virtually all his seventy-six years (1887-1964), in a stern and demanding land that his forebears had inhabited since the 1790s when his great-great-grandfather Conrad (Coonrod) Pile wandered into the valley and decided to stay. One of the “Long Hunters” who traipsed the mountains pioneering white settlement, Pile looms large in the folklore of the region. According to oral tradition, Pile built a cabin in the Wolf River valley and then went back to Virginia to secure a bride, a red-haired woman known as Pretty Mary. Her family opposed the match, followed the couple to the valley, and “kidnapped” Pretty Mary while Pile was out hunting. The determined Pile overtook the party and returned his wife to the Wolf River where they raised a large family and had many descendants, several of whom, including Alvin York, had red hair. In testimony to his spirited ancestry, York liked to joke that red-haired people such as he might end up in prison but never in an insane asylum.¹

Usually prosperity bypassed the mountains to bless the flatter, more fertile meadows further west, but Conrad Pile thrived in the Wolf River valley. He became a successful Indian trader and merchant thanks to a crude yet unerring common sense. For example, he based credit on the supplicant’s patches, reasoning that if they were on the front of his clothes the customer was a hard worker, but if they were on the back the man sat a great deal and was therefore not industrious. Prominent in the community, Pile numbered among his acquaintances an occasional hunter in the valley named Davy Crockett, and John Clemens, local politician, land speculator, and the father of humorist Mark Twain. Legend has it that Pile accumulated considerable wealth in the form of a keg full of gold coins which he kept hidden in his cabin. After his death in 1849, however, no keg was found, and the mystery of Pile’s lost gold endures in Fentress County.²

The sound of gunfire echoed throughout the valley’s history as the settlers killed to feed themselves and to destroy their enemies. Looking back on the early struggles with the Indians, York once remarked, “I calculate most every acre around those mountains was stained with human blood,” but the Civil War fueled an even greater crescendo of killing in the Cumberlands. As former congressman and Fentress County historian Albert R. Hogue has written, “If there is such a thing as the fortunes of war, it certainly meant nothing to this county.” On the border between unionist East Tennessee and secessionist Middle Tennessee, Fentress County became a kind of no-man’s-land where bushwhackers and guerrillas wrote some of the most grisly chapters of the war. The fighting disrupted the local economy and plunged the Yorks, the Piles, and many other families into hard times that did not end with Lee’s surrender.³

Not surprisingly, students of the region have found the Civil War to be the source of the largest single body of folklore in the area. “The people of this border country,” one scholar has written, “were touched during the war years as no other people in the nation.” Claiming token allegiance to one side or the other, marauding bands preyed endlessly on the civilian population, often with tragic consequences. The most notorious of leaders of these were Confederate raider Champ Ferguson and Union sympathizer Tinker Dave Beaty. A military court in Nashville convened in mid-1865 found Ferguson guilty of fifty-three killings, although he admitted the actual number was much higher. Beaty, a Fentress County native, was Ferguson’s chief nemesis and himself responsible for dozens of killings during the conflict. After the war, some of Beaty’s men known as the Wolf Gang continued to plunder the countryside until the state government intervened.⁴

Born barely twenty years after the war ended, York grew up in a society where the atrocities of Ferguson, Beaty, and others were still a vivid memory. The stories of those days were especially meaningful for York because the hatred spawned by the war had claimed the lives of both of his grandfathers. Uriah York joined the Union Army in Kentucky but soon fell ill and returned home to recuperate. Warned of the approach of Confederate troops, he fled through a winter storm to a remote cabin where he died a few days later of exposure. York’s maternal grandfather, William Brooks of Michigan, came to the valley with the Union Army and stayed to marry Nancy Pile, granddaughter of Conrad. With his marriage, he became involved in the feuds of the Tennessee hills, particularly one between the Piles and the nearby Huffs, each family blaming the other for the death of relatives in the fighting. Brooks and Preston Huff, a member of the Wolf Gang, accidentally met at a grist mill one day shortly after the war and fell into a heated argument that climaxed in a shooting that left Huff dead. Brooks escaped to a Michigan lumber camp where his wife subsequently joined him. When the Huffs discovered their whereabouts by intercepting a letter, they succeeded in having Brooks extradited to Tennessee and lodged in the county jail at Jamestown. Before he could be tried, night riders abducted him and, as Alvin York told it, “tied him to the tail of a horse and galloped him through the streets of Jamestown and shot him to pieces.” Typical of the folklore of the period wherein an innocent victim is horribly murdered, the story is the kind that people of York’s generation would have heard often as they grew to maturity.⁵

Beyond the human toll it claimed, the Civil War also slowed the development of the mountains, and a half century after Appomattox, Fentress County was still remote, homogeneous, and poor. A fellow mountaineer claimed York’s native community of Pall Mall was “jest as far up in the Cumberland mountains as you can get without starting back in another direction.” The railroad stopped ten miles short of Jamestown, the tiny county seat, and the York house was another forty miles by horseback over bad roads. Not until the eve of World War I did the first electric lights glimmer in a few Jamestown windows. Of the 7,776 people who lived in Fentress County in 1910, roughly 80 percent were descended from the original white settlers, while only ninety-eight blacks and thirty-eight people of foreign birth lived there. Because educational opportunities were limited, one man in five was illiterate, and one child in three did not attend school. Acutely aware of such problems, the editor of the Fentress County Gazette spoke for many when in 1916 he wrote wistfully of the day Fentress would “be in touch with the world and will be able to prove we have something worthwhile in this old county.”⁶

Alvin York’s youth was shaped by the difficult conditions of mountain life. Born in a one-room log cabin on December 13, 1887, he was the third of eleven children in a family that survived on hard work and firm discipline. William York squeezed a meager living out of seventy-five acres of farmland, did some blacksmithing, and kept order among his large brood with generous servings of what he called “hickory tea.” Mary Brooks York did neighbors’ laundry, often taking payment in old clothes which she then altered to fit her children. Because poverty forced responsibility on the children at an early age, Alvin was hoeing the cornfields before he was six, and even on days when his father excused him from that tedious chore, he was expected to help his mother with the housework.⁷

The boy’s labor was rewarded with few luxuries. In the summer he wore a “linsey dress” and went barefoot, although for cold weather his father made ill-fitting pairs of stiff, brasstoed brogans, which Alvin softened in the heat of the fireplace before he wore them. Even then, the heavy leather “took the hide off my heels.” When he was sixteen, his mother bought him his first pair of dress shoes. Extremely proud of his finery, he donned a white cotton shirt and his new shoes to wear to Sunday School, but his plans of impressing potential girl friends collapsed when a sudden rainstorm drenched his shirt and turned the path to a sticky red mud that pulled the heels off both shoes. Since he had no coat, Alvin arrived at the church soaked to the skin, his pockets bulging with the muddy heels.⁸

Guns were a major part of York’s boyhood. William York was an avid hunter and quickly seized any chance to take his handmade muzzle-loader down from the rack. Since in the Valley of the Three Forks of the Wolf hunting was still more necessity than sport, Alvin began using weapons while he was yet very small. His earliest memories were of stalking snakes and lizards in the yard with a bow and arrow, and he could scarcely recall a time he did not own a gun. Because a poorly placed shot cost the family precious meat, his father demanded accuracy, and Alvin remembered that his father repeatedly “threatened to muss me up right smart if I failed to bring a squirrel down with the first shot or hit a turkey in the body instead of taking its head off.” As he grew older, Alvin frequently went night hunting in the summer and was gone for days on end during the slow winter months.⁹

Organized religion and formal education played relatively minor roles in his upbringing. The mountain terrain interfered with the growth of churches, just as it impeded most other human efforts, leaving great chunks of the Cumberlands poorly served by the clergy. Like some two-thirds of his fellow mountaineers, William York did not belong to a church, and his wife rarely attended services, partly because of the demands of raising eleven children and partly because the minister preached only once a month several miles away. Consequently, young Alvin was an irregular churchgoer at best. His schooling was similarly limited. Almost fifty years earlier, his grandfather Uriah had returned from service in the Mexican War to start one of the first schools in the valley. Uriah’s classes were in session for three months after the crops were “laid by,” and his instructional materials consisted of the Bible, “a blue-backed speller,” and a hickory rod. By the 1890s, the Fentress County curriculum had changed very little. Local classrooms, equipped with split logs that served as desks, were open just a few months a year and provided the mere rudiments of an education. Attending when his father could spare him, Alvin managed to reach only the third grade. Significantly, York, perhaps influenced by his grandfather’s example, dedicated his adult life to bringing both religion and education to the mountains.¹⁰

An important period in York’s life began in November 1911, when his father died of complications after being kicked by a mule. The oldest boy still at home, Alvin now assumed the enormous responsibility of supporting the rest of the family, and his life became an assortment of deprivations and disappointments. While the younger boys ran the farm, he operated his father’s blacksmith shop, until a fire destroyed the equipment and forced him to hire out as a day laborer on railroad gangs and nearby farms. In spite of his efforts, he could never earn more than a few dollars at a time. His best job was driving steel with the construction crew building U.S. 127 through Fentress County, work that paid $1.60 for each back-breaking day.¹¹

Seeking release from his frustrations, York “went all the gaits” as he “gambled, drank moonshine, and rough-housed,” the traditional vices of the mountain men. Even his mother admitted, “Alvin was kind of a wild boy.” A skillful stud poker player and card-flipper, his favorite hangouts were the bars dubbed “blind tigers” that straddled the Kentucky state line some seven miles to the north. There enterprising proprietors served their Kentucky customers in the Tennessee half of their establishments and their Tennessee customers in the Kentucky half. Thus a customer never violated the liquor laws of his own state and could therefore avoid a summons from his local grand jury. York and his cohorts staged spectacular moonshine drinking contests to see which man could consume the most and still stand, showdowns that York usually lost to his friend Everett Delk.¹²

Unfortunately, alcohol brought out the violent side of York’s nature and often led him to confrontations involving fists or weapons. Standing over six feet tall and weighing 175 pounds, he had acquired the nickname “Big ‘Un” and insisted he was never once beaten or knocked down by an opponent. Mary York said her son was slow to anger but, if trouble started, he would “go through with the job and there’d be a hurting.” Although he always carried a knife and once tried to cut up a romantic rival at a church social, firearms remained his first love. Local tradition claimed that Frank and Jesse James were active in the Upper Cumberland after the Civil War, and the stories of their skill with weapons inspired York. The first book he ever read was an account of their exploits. Emulating his heroes, he began to practice with a six-shooter and quickly became effective with it. He could “crack a lizard’s head” with a single shot using either hand and was occasionally seen galloping the mountain roads shifting the pistol from hand to hand as he blazed away at the spots on beech trees.¹³

A taste for alcohol and a fascination with firearms became a troublesome combination for York. Riding home one night, “drunk as a saloon fly,” he saw six turkeys sitting on a fence some distance away and decided to test his sobriety by shooting at them. Six shots killed six turkeys, winning York a trip to court from their irate owner. On another drunken spree, he fell to arguing with Everett Delk about a white object floating in a creek. Delk insisted it was a pillow and York had no idea what it was; he shot it only to find it was a neighbor’s goose. More ominously, he once sprayed bullets around the feet of a frightened enemy and ordered him out of the community.¹⁴

York funded his escapades with his rifle skills. Shooting matches had been a popular sport in Fentress County since pioneer days. One of York’s favorites was the “pony purse” in which each man contributed a quarter or so and the man firing the most accurate shot won the money. The pots were occasionally as large as two hundred dollars and were supplemented by side bets that Delk often placed on his friend. In another type of contest, a turkey was tethered behind a log with only his head exposed, and the first man to take off the bird’s bobbing head from forty yards away won the meat. Competition was most intense when the men shot for “beeves.” The contestants bought shots at a target and used the money to purchase a beef, which was then divided into five parts with the best shot getting the first choice. Most mountaineers were extremely accurate, so careful measurements were usually needed to determine the winner, although on one memorable occasion, Alvin York had all of the five best shots and drove the animal away on the hoof.¹⁵

York’s rowdiness was tempered by the sense of duty he felt toward his mother and family. While he never allowed his escapades to interfere with his responsibilities, his mother was deeply concerned about both his physical and spiritual welfare. She often followed him to the front gate in tears begging him not to drink and was frequently unable to sleep until he was safely home at night. She especially dreaded the fate of his soul if he were killed in a brawl before he could be “saved” and told him she had begun to pray for his salvation. For his part, York began to fret about the impact of worry and sleeplessness on his mother’s health.¹⁶

York was also influenced by his growing attachment to a neighbor girl named Gracie Williams, whose family owned 150 acres adjoining the York place. Although the Williamses were somewhat more prosperous than the Yorks and were able to send their daughter through eight grades in a one-room school, Gracie’s upbringing was similar to Alvin York’s. Both were parts of large families—Gracie was one of thirteen children—which thrived on hard work. “We all worked,” she recalled years later; “We went to the field and worked just like men, like the men done.” Thirteen years her senior, York first saw the neighbor girl a few days after she was born and later insisted that he had immediately picked her as his future bride. When she started to Sunday School, he told his teenage friends that the “girl in pigtails” would eventually be his wife.¹⁷

Because both York and “Miss Gracie” were protective of the details of their courtship, it is almost impossible to say when their relationship became serious, but the two saw each other often by 1914. Her path to school took her by the York house, while Alvin’s hunting forays and farm chores frequently brought him into his neighbor’s fields. Still, the romance had a difficult beginning because the Williamses disapproved of York. Prominent in the community, Frank Asbury Williams supplemented his farm income with service as clerk of the circuit court. A deeply religious man who called his whole family ...