The Coming and Going > 1 > 2

The semi-benevolent, romantic gesture Scottish Americans had made toward the living roots of their history wasn’t blossoming as they had hoped, and soon the disgruntlement found its way into the papers.

“The press printed statements like, ‘If the drunken Skyemen don’t like it here, they can go back home,’” Caudill says. “‘There are no fish to be had here, 100 miles from the sea.’”

The disillusionment cut both ways.

“The Highlanders were evidently sold down the river, so to speak,” Caudill says. “They were enticed under false pretenses about what they were going to find when they got here.”

Caudill has found accounts of immigrants sharecropping and being housed in former slave cabins—evidence of the lack of both work and accommodations for the new arrivals. “Many of the people that came here were quite dissatisfied with what they found and made their way back, one way or another,” he says.

How is it possible to research this, when the people have come and gone, record keeping wasn’t as thorough as historians would like, and the events took place generations ago?

“That was part of my challenge,” Caudill says. “So I was going from basically two newspaper articles that list all the immigrants by name, and going back and trying to find their families. I was able to find some of these people who, in turn, could lead me to another one.”

He did it the Scottish way—by telling stories. He received a grant and went to Scotland for a month to search for these descendants, to ask them questions and to listen. It wasn’t easy to extract this knowledge, even when he found the people he was looking for.

“Here I was, Caudill from North Carolina, knocking on your door, wanting to find out the deep, dark secrets about your past,” Caudill says. “It was quite an embarrassing thing for these people. Returned emigrants were not a usual thing.” Occasionally, he got close to what he needed only to discover that the path ended.

“I found the last daughter of one of the emigrants. She was 96 years old.” Here Caudill pauses to put on a realistic Scottish accent. “She said, ‘All I know is, they all went to Carolina, and they all came back.’”

But other times his searching paid off, as when he met the preeminent Gaelic poet of the time, Sorley MacLean, known as the Bard of the Highlands. Caudill found him in Peinichorran—a small township on the Isle of Skye—and heard the three-hour version of the originally two-night tale of a Highlander who traveled to North Carolina and left it unhappy. Through one mishap after another, the man eventually bumbled his way back to the Highlands via New York, a steamer, and finally a herring boat. He earned 50 pounds on the fishing boat, used the money to build a house, and thus became a hero.

“That was quite an experience,” Caudill says. “With MacLean, I’m dealing with the last of his kind.” MacLean died shortly afterward, making Caudill the last American to see him.

Caudill is still writing the final product. But he’s pleased with what he has collected.

“It’s a fascinating story,” Caudill says. “It says a lot about immigration, obviously, in the American South. It tells a lot about what was going on in the state at the time, about the state’s efforts to invigorate their economy and bring in new labor. The Scottish Americans were interested enough to sponsor this immigration, and yet they’d become Americanized enough and affluent enough to perhaps look down on these people.”

Article by Brady Huggett
© Copyright 2000 Endeavors magazine, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. All rights reserved.

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