THE WILLIAMS RIVER COUNTRY 



What Is Left of the Wilderness in West Virginia — Its 

 People, Its Fishing and Its Hunting 



BY ANDREW PRICE 



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N THE Alleghany 

 Mountains there is a 

 wilderness of about a 

 thousand square miles 

 of the finest sort of 

 spruce woods, practi- 

 cally untouched, and in 

 which game and fish are 

 making a last stand. 

 Williams River drains 

 the best portion of this 

 country. The high 

 mountains and deep woods are not on the 

 main Alleghany. The Alleghany here is not 

 an impressive mountain. • It owes its su- 

 premacy only to the fact that it is the long, 

 unbroken ridge that marks the eastern 

 backbone of the continent. 



In West Virginia, the Fur (Far) Moun- 

 tains are the ones that rise to majestic 

 heights and are clothed in the sombre hues 

 of the spruce. Some idea of this wilderness 

 can be obtained from the experience of 

 Jesse Hammonds, a patriarchal hunter and 

 trapper living in this forest. 



When the war clouds began to lower on 

 his house in the fifties, Hammonds refugeed 

 from Kentucky, seeking a safe retreat, and 

 settled on Williams River, and for thirteen 

 years not a stranger darkened his door. The 

 great Civil War was fought without his 

 knowing anything about it. The county, 

 Webster, in which he lived, formed an inde- 

 pendent government, neither recognizing 

 the North nor the South, and elected a 

 governor, and is still referred to in State 

 conventions as "the Independent State of 

 Webster." 



Old Jesse raised a large family of sons, 

 who took to the woods and the life of the 

 Indian. Their wives and children raise a 

 little corn, but the men pride themselves 

 on the fact that they never worked and never 



will. They know the woods thoroughly, 

 and are the best of hunters and fishers, dig 

 ginseng and find bee- trees. They are a 

 thorn in the flesh of the sportsmen, for they 

 kill to sell, and last year, when the head- 

 waters of Williams River showed good 

 results from the planting of a hundred 

 thousand Government trout, they spent the 

 summer fishing for these small trout to sell 

 to the lumber camps. They owe their im- 

 munity to the fact that they have held pos- 

 session of the lands of a big land company 

 and know the corner trees and would be 

 invaluable were its titles ever attacked. 



Like the Indian the Hammondses of Bug 

 Run have been forced on until they are now 

 located in the fringe of woods in the south 

 side of the tract and can go no farther. 



I one time saw Neal Hammonds kill a 

 deer. We were walking down the river from 

 our camp at the mouth of Tea Creek deer 

 hunting. Just as we reached the stand at the 

 Big Island a fawn jumped into the river 

 in a panic of fear, fleeing from its step- 

 father, no doubt, and once on the other side 

 the little fellow hit the runway as fair as if a 

 pack of hounds were after it. I took no 

 action, but Neal threw his rifle into position 

 and shot the top of the fawn's head off as it 

 fan. It fell dead and proved to be an 

 unusually large buck fawn. 



The Hammondses are not educated, 

 except in woods lore. They may know that 

 there are such accomplishments as reading 

 or writing, but these they have never hank- 

 ered after. Yet one of the boys, Edn, is a 

 great musician. His artistic temperament 

 has made more or less of a dreamer of him 

 and detracted from his ability as a bear 

 hunter. He takes to the calmer joys of fish- 

 ing and "sang" digging, and he repudiates 

 the idea that his name is Edwin or, possibly, 

 Edmund, and gravely informs you that his 



