Visiting Our Past: Snakes, wolves, panthers part of rural legends

While doing research for the four-part series on Spruce Pine and North Toe, I came across the following story, which may be true, but which, because of its echo with similar stories found elsewhere, achieves the status of rural legend.

The wayward wife

Horton Cooper tells the story, in his 1964 book "History of Avery County, North Carolina," of an 18-year-old girl named Delilah Baird who left the home of her father, Col. Bedent Baird, in Valle Crucis, to elope with John Holtsclaw, a deacon at Three Forks Baptist Church in Boone.

Holtsclaw, already married and with children, told Delilah he was taking her to Kentucky. By a circuitous route, he took her to their new home place.

"He had already built their love-nest," Cooper writes —"a bark lean-to against a fallen tree." Their bed: dry leaves and grass. Their stove: an outdoor furnace. Their chairs: stones.

Eventually, he'd build her a home and they'd have children. The two wives would meet. In the end, Holtsclaw would bequeath Delilah the land they'd shared.

But in the early days, civilization was a remote concept, and Delilah, left alone, wandered the woods, collecting herbs. One day, going 'sangin' (collecting ginseng), she heard a familiar cowbell; and, following the sound, traveled two hours, "ran down a hollow, crossed a ridge and came upon Old Jers in her father's backyard at Valle Crucis!"

The ravenous wolves

The story is also told in John Preston Arthur's "Western North Carolina: A History, 1730-1913."

The characters are the same, but Delilah is 15. And Arthur adds details that connect to yet other rural legends.

For many years, Holtsclaw and Delilah "lived solitary and alone," Arthur relates, and she "was wont to tell how she had frightened away the wolves which prowled around when her husband was away by thrusting firebrands at them."

A similar story comes from Hickory Nut Gap, where Nancy "Ann" Ashworth, woman of the house that later became Sherrill's Inn and then the McClure residence, had, on one frigid night, been roasting a pig in the giant fireplace.

A ravenous wolf pack congregated outside, John Ager recounts in his McClure family history, "We Plow God's Fields."

Ann "grabbed the poker and placed it in the fireplace until it glowed red hot, and then she thrust it out under the door. One wolf bit at it, and burned his mouth so severely that the others smelled cooked meat," The ravenous wolves then snapped at each other, and ran off "howling with hunger and pain."

Panther at the door

Arthur underscores Delilah's pioneer-woman status by also pitting her against a panther (locally, a "painter;" taxonomically, an eastern cougar).

One night, after Holtsclaw had killed a deer, dressed it and brought it into the cabin he'd come around to building, Delilah, left alone with her baby, heard a panther looking for a way in and "screaming with all the ferocity of a beast brought almost to the point of starvation."

Arthur's story ends anticlimactically with Delilah hanging on until Holtsclaw came home. But in what is now Henderson County, Petal Richards, the narrator of Robert Morgan's folktale-filled story, "The Trace," delivers a heightened version.

Like Delilah, perhaps, Petal feels that "the things she liked best about living off in your own cabin was it was so romantic."

One cold night, Petal, though she was expecting, was alone; and her water broke. She heard a panther scream. Then, "something clawed on the side of the cabin and dropped like a sack of meal on the roof."

"The painter was scratching around the top of the chimney. Bits of sticks and dried mud kept dropping into the fire," where Petal was cooking beans. She threw lard into the fire and singed the painter, sticking its head down the chimney.

Over 14 dramatic pages, we see how an author builds a great fiction out of a folk fragment. Petal survives, but not before she gives birth and burns her last source of wood, the beautiful cradle her husband had crafted.

Rattlesnake days

Hooper, in his Avery County history, follows up on the Delilah story with mentions of "Uncle Billy" Davis, after whom Davis Mountain is named; and "Uncle" Jake Carpenter, Davis' brother-in-law.

Uncle Billy "killed bear, deer, wolves, panthers and copperhead snakes." Uncle Jake, a Battle of Kings Mountain veteran, made "the bar and wolf live hard," while his sister, Franky Carpenter Davis, "farmed, boiled maple sugar and sometimes threw firebrands at the howling wolves."

Let's talk snakes.

J. Myron Houston, Avery County story collector, told interviewer Warren Moore, in 1964, about the time (around 1899) that the Pittmans noticed a tenfold increase of rattlesnakes in their cornfield.

"About the year 1903," J. Myron said, his granddad, John Houston, "finally located the snake den" in a crack in "a big bald rock in the center of this bunch of beech bushes."

He saw "a pile of snakes as big as an oil barrel with their heads all turned the same way and ... every one of them was licking out its tongue at him at the same time.

"Well, he said that he had faced bullets during the War Between the States, but he said this was the first time that his knees ever shook from under him."

He eventually summoned the courage to shoot a slug from his Lancaster rifle at the snakes, whose singing almost blocked out the gun's thunder. Then, silence. "He said he got a stick and he raked and counted 37 snake heads that he shot off with that one shot." Many were crippled, and "there has never been another rattlesnake den on Henson Creek."

Stories I've heard from old Haw Creek residents relate how farmers had experienced a plague of rattlesnakes when the Blue Ridge Parkway was being blasted in the mid-1930s.

Snakes on the stone

The topper of all rattlesnake stories has to be the one that Richard Walser tells in his 1980 book, "North Carolina Legends," and that John Ehle turned into fiction in his novel, "The Landbreakers."

Walser describes the mid-December honeymoon of George Bolton and Mary Lawton in a house he'd built on a large, flat rock. In the middle of the night, after the fire he'd built had died down, George got out of bed to put on more wood, and "stepped upon something alive ... Looking down, he discovered himself surrounded by fifty or more wriggling rattlesnakes," aroused from hibernation by the foundation stone's warming.

The next day, neighbors found George dead on the floor, his body swollen. They killed the snakes and removed the blanket that Mary had protectively pulled over herself. She was alive, but "her dark hair had turned white, and her smooth, rosy complexion had become wrinkled and ashen."

In the Ehle story, the snakes emerge from the hole in the cabin floor where the young husband, Paul Larkins, had dumped hearth ashes. When Paul gets up to refuel the fire, and is bitten, he fights the snakes, collapsing just as he gets the cabin door open.

Nancy Larkins screams, her voice going out the door into the valley. A neighbor, Mooney Wright, is nudged by his wife, Lorry, who heard the scream.

"It's only the wind," Mooney says.

"Or a panther," she surmises.

Rob Neufeld wrote the weekly "Visiting Our Past" column for the Citizen Times until his death in 2019. This story originally published June 23, 2014.

This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Visiting Our Past: Snakes, wolves, panthers part of rural legends