Men From Wild Lands Always Become Fatalists: Spirit of the American Backcountry
This is a [fatalistic] attitude that commonly exists in the face of endemic violence. In the 20th century the same paradox of nescient fatalism—that is, of fatalism without foreknowledge—may be observed among men at war. It has also existed in entire culture, where sudden, violent senseless death was a constant fact of life—as in the British borderlands and American backcountry.
A woman of the Bell clan who understood this backcountry culture very well, tried to explain the special quality of its fatalism to outsiders:
“The fatalism of this free folk is unlike anything of the Far East; dark and mystical though it may be…it is lighted with flashes of the spirit of the Vikings. A man born and bred in a vast wild land almost always becomes a fatalist. He learns to see nature not as a thing of field and brooks, friendly to man and docile beneath his hand, but as a world of depths and heights and distances illimitable, of which he is a tiny part [the correct view]. He feels himself carried in the sweep of forces too vast for his comprehension, forces variously at war, out of which are the issues of life and death…Inevitably he comes to feel, with a sort of proud humility, that he has no part in the universe save he allies himself, by prayer and obedience, with the order that rules.”
Here was fatalism very different from those of Puritan Massachusetts, Quaker Pennsylvania and Anglican Virginia. Many backsettlers were stern Calvinists, and they shared a concern for salvation. But they rarely expressed the same obsessive angst which had appeared among the puritans, and did not engage in ‘daily dying’. Backcountry folk, like their border ancestors had no need of those spiritual calisthenics. They knew death intimately as the cruel and violent destroyer of life, and they also knew how capricious it could be. The main thing was to cultivate courage in the face of these cosmic uncertainties. One wrote, “Courage seems to me the keynote of our whole system of religious thought.” This was a courage that could triumph not only over danger, violence and evil, but most of all over the uncertainty of the world.
-Excerpt from “Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America” by David Hackett Fischer