Volume 35, Number 1 - Summer 1995
Baughmans in the Ozarks: 1840-1880 (Part II)
by J. Ross Bauglunan
Nuts, Candies and Goodies
Even the darkest shadows of Ozark life could never wipe out the sunnier memories. A Christmas tradition that persists around Crooked Creek today is known to date back at least to the folks and times described by cousin LaVonna Wood: "On Christmas morning each year, you try to be the first to say ‘Christmas gift!’ to anyone and everyone upon first sight that day. It is a big achievement to catch a person unaware with the cry, ‘Christmas gift!’ I think that it must have started when they had no other gifts, and a person’s love was what they could offer to their loved ones."
Walsie Baughman Ruble painted a picture of Christmas Past from the early 20th century that was probably little changed from the 100 Christmases before it. "You wondered how your grandmother Baughman bedded down all the young ones that came to her house for Christmas Eve and for Christmas dinner the following afternoon. I can tell you, Mother had two rent houses on the place, and there was always in one of them the last child that had married.
"In those days, your parents lived in the rent house across the hollow from us. The week before Christmas, which ever of the children that lived closest by helped mother to make pies and place them in containers, and hang them up on the back porch to freeze, to be baked on Christmas Eve.
"A bigham was boiled in the wash kettle outside; the biggest Tom turkey mother raised was ready for the oven; and if weather permitted, mother bought a big beef roast in Harrison, as to cook for this group, was like having the thrasher crew to cook for.
‘This year, the men folks stayed in the home of your parents, in the rent house across the hollow. They were left food and coffee to make at midnight, as they played cards all night, the sons and sons-in-law. The host, your father, had a quart of Old Crow whiskey, and they played ‘Drink or Smell.’ The winners got a sup of liquor; the losers only got a smell of the bottle.
"Father did not allow liquor in the house, or card playing. It was a hold-over from his Baptist father, who was a religious and prayful man. Mother kept this rule after he died. No one was to mention the things that went on in the rent house, as the children might hear it. "As to bedding the little ones, each person that came brought a feather bed [mattress], which served to keep
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the children riding in the wagon bed, full of straw and quilts and pillows. These feather beds were placed on the carpet in the parlor, the boys in one, the girls in the other. The women folks, after getting the children to bed, chose a bundle of oats, and four ears of corn for Santa’s goats that pulled his sled, and tWo nice apples for Santa.
"Gifts was brought out and put in a box and hidden on the back porch. After the children was quiet and asleep, the women folk put together all the nuts, candy and goodies they had brought and stirred them up. Each child got the same amount in their stockings hanging on their chair backs. Mother bought oranges for each stocking; and the gifts to each one was placed in their stock and on the chairs. The women folks would no more than get to sleep, when a tiny voice would call out, ‘Has Santa come?’ and the reply was ‘No, go back to sleep!’
"Finally, all the children woke up, andlogs was piled on the heaps of coals in the fire place, and when the room was warm, they come running in to see what Santa had brought them. The children were dressed, the feather beds taken from the floor, and breakfast was soon on the way--bacon and eggs, hot biscuits with jam and honey. The men folks came in, without a wink of sleep. Every one went home Christmas afternoon, dead on their feet, stuffed like toads."
Make Do In the early 19th century, a few fussy Europeans ventured west of the Mississippi and claimed that early American pioneers could not distinguish between "dine" and "feed." They encountered the "frenzied manner of the hunter’s appetite," among people who seemed to expect a food shortage to be declared at any moment. The pioneer style of eating with a knife frightened outsiders, especially when "the whole blade seemed to enter the mouth." Some said they lost their appetite entirely when the Americans used their handkerchiefs at the table instead of napkins.
"None seem to stay at the table more than five minutes," observed the traveler Van Orman, and only so they could head for the front porch to whittle and trade stories before bedtime.
The English writer Charles Dickens visited the American South in 1842 and was astonished by the variety and volume of food, counting the results of 14 recipes spread on the table at the same time. In a bountiful season, Ozark fare could include venison steak, bass fried in corn meal, hickory-cured bacon, chicken, dumplings, biscuits, gravy, snapbeans cooked with green corn, hominy, pone bread from the skillet on the hearth, and cider.
When word of the good eating out West got back to the "frenchified" hotel restaurants in the East, menu specials appeared for antelope, bear and "ragout de prairie dog."
Although some later Baughman generations were totally against alcohol, Peter described his father, Henry, as among the first settlers on Crooked Creek to have a distillery for moonshine, that potent, clear corn whiskey. According to Peter, his father’s brew held rigidly to the use of pure water, grain and sugar. Some of the folks who angrily opposed hard spirits made from grain, quietly partook of dandelion, elderberry or blackberry wines--for medicinal purposes only.
The term "moonshiners" was coined to describe the long-ago Scotsmen who carted their illegal liquor to market by the light of the moon. In early Arkansas, it was not illegal to possess or transport moonshine, only to make or sell it. The decision to risk making moonshine was, in part, recreational, but also one of simple economics. When grains in the 19th century brought 40 per bushel, that same bushel could be distilled into three gallons of whisky and bring $1.20 at market. By century’s end the profit margin puffed up to five fold. Carting the bulk of whole grain over rough mountain roads was difficult, whereas moonshine was much more compact, and far cheaper to handle and store. The slow fermentation, cooking and filtering stages required that the still’s location remain the most sacred secret with families.
Later in the century, unscrupulous distillers tried to speed things up by using lye and fusel oil in the process, but were haunted by a disagreeable aftertaste. Chicken excrement hurried fermentation, but could also ruin a home label’s reputation. Instead of being achieved by aging in old oak barrels, a quick mellow look came from a few drops of iodine or a scoop of brown sugar. True, raw homebrew was nearly colorless; and it was this appearance and pure kick that earned corn whiskey nicknames such as "White Mule," "White Lightning," "Tanglefoot" and "Skull Buster."
Ozark farms were mostly self-sufficient as far as eating was concerned. To get some items, though, pioneers made the long trek to the trading post, to barter eggs, butter or coonskins for drygoods, coffee or rock-hard cones of sugar. Even when cash could be offered, the enduring expression was "I’ve got a little tradin’ to do at the store."
Buying supplies from outsiders was risky, since purity and safety often gave way to green. Sometimes, the coffee and tea had iron filings and dark sand sifted
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into it for a costlier weight; sugar was bulked up with ground starch; alum put into bread gave it a whiter look; cheese was made yellower with a touch of hemlock, and heavier with plenty of saltpeter. To counteract these sometimes deadly additives, one cure required a long drink of bacon grease.
When the correct ingredients could not be found, frontier cooks discovered other ways to "make do." Without salt, pioneers dusted gunpowder on their already cooked food, because the potassium in it could sting the tongue with aflavorthat satisfied salt cravings. Of course, it was also bad luck to spill this condiment, especially around the hearth.
If both the salt and the gunpowder ran out, it would still be possible to put a good dinner on the table, but at the sacrifice of Grampa’s moonshine:
‘To catch wild ducks, geese or birds alive, soak wheat in strong alcohol. Scatter where they are in the habit of feeding. Take them while they are drunk."
If the sugar disappeared from a family’s larder, honey was the best substitute. The talent for going into the forest and findingaprecious "bee tree" made formore than one legend in the Baughman family. A handwritten guidebook discovered in Arkansas reveals one method used in the early 19th century for hunting wild bees:
"Provide your self with a tin box that will hold about a pt, put into it a piece of dry honey comb, carry in your pocket, a phial of 112 honey & 112 water, go to piece ofnew ground... open the box, and pour some of the mixture, on the comb, & then hunt among the flowers for a bee, if a bee is found catch it by shuting the lid over it, wate untill it becomes still, then open the box, it will fly round the box a few times & fly away, wate & in a few minutes it will return with 2 or 3 others, & in 112 hour they will have a line formed between you & their tree... A pocket spy glass is usefull to see a bee from the top of a tree, the time for hunting them is in September or October or in the spring, if a bee cannot be found to commence operations with burn some honey on a stone & maby some wanderer may smell it."
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In the same frontier spirit of "Make Do," the little Arkansas diary suggested homemade ways for women to beautify themselves. For a cologne, mix "12 gtts [drops] of bergamot 120 of leavender, 24 of lemon 60 gr musk, 1 pt of purest alkihol." "Curling liquid, for ladies, 5 oz of borax, 1 drachm gum senegal, 1 qt of hot water when desolved, add 2 oz of spts of wine strongly impregnated with campher." "Hare dye, 1 pt pkld herin liquor, 112 lb lamp black, 2 oz iron rust boil 2 mts stran it."
To prevent pregnancy, grannies back in hills of Virginia and Tennessee prescribed a glass of water containing ~ teaspoonful of seeds from the weed "Queen Anne’s lace." Frontier women were told to swallow it down immediately after intercourse, though no further explanation was available at the time. This particular bit of folk medicine dates back to Hippocrates in Ancient Greece, but only recently has its effectiveness been analyzed and appreciated. The seeds released a chemical block to the production of progesterone, a hormone necessary for pregnancy to be established. If mountain women were already unhappily pregnant, they turned to the Pennyroyal plant, but the necessary dosage could also permanently damage their livers.
Making the inside of log cabin safer than the world outside also tested the ingenuity of pioneer homemakers. Bedbugs thinned out after the bedstead legs were rubbed with a green tomato vine. Mosquitoes left a bed and its occupants alone if a thread had been strung across the top of the bedposts with a piece of flannel hanging midway wetted with camphor spirits.
The leading cause of death among American women in the 18 and 19th centuries was neither disease, childbirth nor hostile attack, but rather, what the genteel called "hearth death." Close to the open flames of a cooking fire, women and girls were in great danger because of their voluminous aprons and skirts.
‘The bottoms of our dresses are burnt full of holes now, and they will be soon burnt off," related Miriam Colt along the Missouri/Kansas border in 1856. In perhaps the only good that came out of the terrible death toll, Miriam mentioned a coming liberation in socially acceptable women’s attire. "If we stay here we must needs don the Bloomer costume," referring to the earliest pants worn by American women, which resembled culottes.
"The Best Coon I Ever Tasted"
Afew anonymous, early 19th century recipes save a taste of the pioneer’s diet south ofthe Mason-Dixon and west of the Mississippi. Southern cooking was frequently over-sugared--when sugar was available--and for meat, sauces and breads, mostly pale. Vegetables got boiled, baked and creamed to such an extreme that they held littleresemblance in look or taste to their raw brothers.
Most early recipes were handed down in person from one generation to another, so that each cook knew firsthand justhow much Gramma meant for "a pinch of that." But if the frontier chef needed to translate a recipe in the other direction--guessing at a cup or an ounce without the right measuring device--clever women invented their own rulers. The volume of a cup was quite close to a closed woman’s fist; while her cupped palm held two ounces; and a teaspoon full of anything should have ended up the same size as a thumb tip. Cutting off a stick of cheese or butter about the same length as a thumb would yield an ounce.
Whether driving a wagon, plowing a field or giving the hunter’s chase, dried and jerked meat was the easiest way to catch a meal. Wild caraway was cut into "carrot sticks," and the nutty-flavored treats were downed like popcorn. Another favorite portable food was also adopted from the Indians: "Cold Flour" involved parched and pounded corn that was spiced with sugar and cinnamon. A traveler only needed to add a glug of water before eating the damp mix right out of its leather poke.
Sultry summers meant that fresh milk had to be converted into butter milk, which spoiled less quickly and served as a southern favorite. Also popular was Harvest Drink, made from one quart of water, a tablespoon of sifted ginger, three heaping tablespoons of sugar, and a half-pint of vinegar.
Dandelions gave double-service: "Dry the roots then grind to a powder. This can be added to boiling water for a refreshing hot tea... The tender leaves can serve as greens. They are fit for use until they blossom. Cut off the leaves, pick over carefully, wash in several waters, put into boiling water, boil one hour, drain well, add salted boiling water, and boil two hours; when done, turn into a colander and drain, season with butter, and more salt if needed."
From a mid- 19th century American cookbook: "This is the German style of making toast; but it is quite good enough for an American.
"Bakers’ bread 1 loaf, cut into slices or half an inch in thickness; milk 1 qt; 3 eggs, and a little salt; beat the eggs and mix them with the milk, and flavor as for custard, not cookingithowever. Dip the sliced bread into the mixture; then fry the pieces on a buttered griddle. Serve for dinner, with sugar syrup, flavored with lemon."
Similar rewards for those with a sweet tooth were
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Baptist Cakes:
"DOUGH: This bread is made with beef suet cooked with a mashed potato with water, plus sugar, yeast powder and flour.
"Place the dough on a board or flat surface and knead a little flour into it. Pat and stretch out the dough on afloured surface. Careful not to tear the dough or roll it too thin.
"When the dough is three-eights of an inch thick, cut into strips, judging by the eye. Fry in plenty of salt pork grease, quickly. When the tops pop up, turn and fry on the other side. Serve with maple syrup, or sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon, or crab apple jelly, or eat them plain."
A sure taste from the Baughman kitchen of the 1800s was supplied by Teresa Baughman, wife of Norvin, and daughter-in-law to George Washington Baughman:
‘This candy recipe is an old Baughman one. I call it ‘Baughman Candy.’ Is a little hard to make but everyone sure likes it.
3 cups white sugar
1-112 cups whipping cream
3/4 cup white syrup
"Cook until soft ball stage [between 234-240 degrees Fahrenheit on a candy thermometer]. It will turn a pretty tan color. Then add 1 teaspoon vanilla. Beat until it gets thick & add 2 cups chopped pecans or walnuts. Pour on buttered pan. Takes a lot of beating. Sure Good. Don’t many people know this one."
Thriftiness meant that every part of the hog--"except the oink"--made its way back into the economy of the frontier cabin. Even bacon grease that had been used and reused was saved, turning into a soothing ointment on the "chapped heels" of horses and oxen. Besides her eggs for breakfast and her meat on the dinner table, every chicken gave up her very marrow for suppertime’s soup, as well as the feathers off her back for the master’s bedtime. If the chicken soup could be kept bubbling overnight, and thereafter without interruption, it would
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remain tasty and unspoiled for weeks, without the need for cold storage of any kind.
Even with all of this scrimping going on, Ozarkers only wanted coffee that was "strong enough to get up and walk." According to one Arkansas farmer, "Lots of people don’t know how little water it takes to make good coffee."
From an old Shenandoah Valley recipe for cooking a turtle, comes instruction to place one in "boiling water for a quarter of an hour. Pull the outer shell off then boil it again until the claws are tender. Remove the turtle from the inner shell, (care must be taken to remove the gall and the spongy parts). The remainder should be cut into small pieces and placed in a stewing pan. Add salt, black pepper and butter and stew for a short time. Add about a half cup of water and continue simmering a quarter of an hour. Blend in a mixture of melted butter and flour and serve after the gravy thickens.
Amountaineer named Sprague complained that bad weather and a disappointing harvest forced him to have "racoon for breakfast, coon for dinner and the same for supper." For a change ofpace, Sprague loved Coon Cake:
"Take what flour you have, mix with water, shorten with coon oil and fry in coon fat."
Jim Featherstone recalled his own favorite recipe from Ozark cuisine in his column "Notes from the Old River Place."
"I asked Lester to save a coon carcass for me to Bar-B-Q... [with] a recipe given to me by Old Buck, who claims that a properly cooked coon tastes like duck, and a coon is whole lot easier to hit. The recipe involves lots of spices, pickle juice, roots and herbs. The cooking takes all day. I took a portion to Lester to show my gratitude. He tasted it but didn’t have any trouble controlling his enthusiasm. I was a little bit hurt when he didn’t ask for seconds.
"Wildlife cooks are a jealous bunch and will knock themselves out to show up another wildlife cook. Mack pulled out all the stops.
"On New Year’s Day, Mack appeared at Lester’s semi-public kitchen-dining room bearing a steaming platter, heaped with coon, ste aming with a nose wrenching aroma. The meat was browned to the color of a new saddle and about as shiny.
"I got there late and watched the diners as they would plop a forkful of meat into their mouths. Their eyes would open wide in appreciation and tears of joy would stream down their cheeks as they chewed and swallowed. Their mouths would open and they would give a hoarse bark before leaping up to dash for... water. "When I closed my lips behind the first bite, the heat
spread throughout my head. My lips went numb, so there was no turning back. I chewed and proclaimed, though my tears and between gulps of cold water, that this was the best coon I had ever tasted. Two helpings washed out all traces of ahead cold Ihad doctoredfor a week.
"I let myself out the back door. A muskrat was hanging by the tail from the clothesline in the back yard. Lester followed me out...
"Have you ever tried muskrat?"
"It’s too rich for me," I replied.
Mack’s coon recipe was offered for the curious, with the warning that competitive wildlife cooks have been known to leave out a key ingredient or two:
"Wash coon in cold water. Remove all fat between muscles and glands from under front legs.
"Boil in large pot with a handful of red pepper pods until all fat is boiled out meat and meat is tender. Care should be taken to avoid standing in steam from the pot.
"Drain and roast uncovered in medium hot oven. Baste with sauce and bake until brown. Serve with ample cold beverage. Water works fine."
Ozark cooks had to know how to recognize compliments to their meal. The greatest praise for one recipe was that it was "so good that I nearly swallered my tongue." Just so that none of another tasty dish would have to be shared, one appreciative child said,"It could make a boy push his daddy in the creek."
The end result of all this fine eating was reported in the Columbia, Missouri Statesman on 26 November 1880:
"Some months since the Herald published a list of3O fat men residing in Shelby County, Ky., taken from the papers of that county, whose aggregate weight was 7,285 pounds, or an average of 242 pounds. The Shelby newspaper boasted that no other county in the United States could furnish 30 men equalling them. Mr. C. B. Wells of this place, himself an old Kentuckian . . . has been patiently at work marshalling his fat brigade until he has the list complete... As will be seen, Kentucky is absolutely and completely vanquished... Our 30 men reach an average of over 266 pounds, beating the Kentucky boys some 24 pounds."
A sampling from the published list included these men, some of whom had a hint of German heritage:
John M. Maupin, 360 pounds; G. W. Coonce, 318;
John Shouse, 305; Jack Rummans, 260; Karl Kerr, 257;
Emmett Clinkscales, 252; Abraham Sublett, 247; and
William Fox, 249.
All together, the 30 Boone County men weighed 7,987 pounds, with the heftiest at 360, and the slimmestfour only 240 apiece, making for 266-114 pounds on average.
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"Having thus driven the Kentucky fat men to the wall, Mr. Wells now challenges her to a contest of fat women and promises to head the list with one maiden lady whose avoirdupois kicks the beam at 400 lbs. Now come on Kentucky with your fat women.~
Mary Collins Wolf, who was born in 1927 as one of Rhoda Ellen Baughman Collins’ younger daughters, recalled many impressions of Grandpa Pete she had not been old enough to form on her own, but that were passed down in family conversation:
"He could make or do just about anything. He made chairs and coffins. He even made shoes for his family.
"About my Baughman grandparents, Mother said I got my curly hair (I had long curls--never had a hair cut until I was 12 years old) from her father.
"A story she told, as I recall: At home one evening, during the last winter of the Civil War, Grandpa Pete was half- soling his shoes and had one on the cast and the other still on his foot. Some men came looking for him, and he managed to light out just in the knick of time, but with one foot still bare. He ran off aways to an empty little cabin and hid. There was snow on the ground, and Gramma Jane knew that to save his life she would have to go out before daybreak with a cedar branch. If the men returned, to make sure that they couldn’t track him down, she brushed away every last bare foot and boot track.
"Whenhis daughters were married, his weddinggift to each one of them was a five-foot-high spinning wheel. I still have my mother’s, with the big old wheel [43" diameter], that he had given her on her wedding day, Christmas Eve, 1901. My husband doesn’t much care for old things and so I gave it recently to my son Harold, up in Wisconsin, who does."
Peter’s son-in-law, Tom Collins, was never much impressed with the rest of his wife’s family. Whenever his children did something that he didn’t like, he’d say ‘That’s the Baughman side comm’ through." These ill feelings traced back, in part, to Tom’s hunch about Peter’s blacksmithing talents, and his ability to craft rifles and shotguns. Tom, an ardent Democrat and sympathizer with the Confederate cause, always felt that his father-in-law must have sold such weapons "to the other side." He never stopped to wonder why the well-armed Federal forces would have been interested in home-made weapons.
Rhoda Baughman, Mary’s mother, was raised by Peter with very definite ideas about the right way to live. Mary’s older sister, Gertrude, remembers several of these rules well:
"She wasn’t afraid of anything. One night late there was a suspicious noise outside, and instead of just worrying, she grabbed the old rifle that was kept hanging on the wall and marched right out there.
"On the other hand, I remember she believed in the saying: ‘A whistling woman and a crowing hen will always come to some bad end.’
"Even when times were rough, she could make a meal out of anything. She taught us to take care of ourselves, and to be neat. No matter how poor a body might be, there’s no excuse not to be clean and neat. ‘Soap’s cheap!’ she was always telling us."
Rhoda had kept a close relationship with Peter right up until his death, and so was much more in touch with the facts of his burial, and final possessions, than the families of Peter’s older children. Two rough fleldstones,
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with no readable lettering, show where he and his last wife, Jane Angeline Kysar Lewis Greenwood, are resting. Gertrude remembers how as a young girl she had decorated her grandparents recent gravesites with fresh flowers. The exact spot can be recognized since they are immediately to the side of one of the daughters’ graves, clearly reading "Margaret Brown," in Cedar Creek’s McCarty Cemetery, next to the old Loafers’ Glory school house. Anew markerfor Pete andJane was carvedbythe Snapp’s Branson Monument Company and added between their original stones in time for Memorial Day, 1989.
At the top of the front page of the Taney County Republican, a newspaper published weekly in Forsyth, Missouri, the following article appeared on Thursday, 15 June 1950, without a byline:
‘Tentative Contract Made For New Court House."
A tentative agreement has been made between the County Court and George Brown to build the court house. The sum agreed upon is $66,912.50. Bond is to be given in the sum of $50,000.00
George Brown is a Taney County son. His father was Bob Brown, a farmer and later merchant in the Cedar Creek community. But in this tradition, George Brown has another link to the past that commands attention. His maternal grandfather was Pete Baughman. Though his grandfather has been dead more than forty years, the memory of his genius remains. Hardy Compton, who is well past the eighty mark in years, says Pete Baughman was the best blacksmith ever known in Taney County.
But his work was not confined to iron. He was an expert woodworker. He made spinning wheels, looms, and other things needed by pioneers when only the home supplied all of a family’s requirements. He built the old time chimneys with such skill that his fame remains with each one. A house that had a fireplace built by him carried a recommendation that made it most desireable. He built houses. One memory from Hardy Compton is that Pete Baughman, in the long ago of the last century, built a school house at Bald Knob for $50.00.
Pete Baughman’s versatile genius extended to the making of high grade rifles. It was the day of muzzle loaders. A gunsmith of ability waswell known at that time. A local man would have to take a bar of steel, drill it, rifle the barrel, put on lock and stock and set on sights. County Judge Bill Manes tells an instance that Pete
Baughman had reported to him. He had made a gun but had not had time to "train it," as the expression of the day was. That meant setting the sights after careful testing. A hunt for deer was planned for the Caney Creek vicinity, which at that time had few settlers and many deer. In reporting the trip, Baughman said he got more deer than expected because he broke the back of every one. The sight was set a little too high.
Pete Baughman could take only native products, and if need required, build a wagon. He had been dead nearly haIfa century, but the worth of his labor remains to testify to his genius and applied skill. He built what was formerly known as the McCarthy house where Austin Brown now lives. The integrity of the man was so faithfully built into the house that it remains today a testimonial to the workmanship of Pete Baughman. So as we turn from the past to the present, we stand a moment with bowed head, in the spirit presence of the grandfather, before we turn to wish the grandson good speed on his endeavor. May the grandchildren oftomorrow turn back to our court house, as a monument and a testimonial to the grandson of Pete Baughman.
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