The Rutlands  –

a kind of dynasty --

          Around 1690 a man possibly named Og Smith robbed a coach in wild country in England’s northernmost county, Northumberland. He came away with ‘several bars of gold’.

          History does not recount the size of the bars. Family lore had it that he spent money on new and grand suiting, a passport with the name William (royal) and Rutland (a county of particularly rich aristocratic seats). He added the number so that he became William Rutland I. He sailed to the ‘Indies’, and settled in Barbados.

          Rutland prospered as a land speculator and begat William Rutland II.

Each father had a son and the family moved from Barbados to the USA, to Macon, Georgia, banking centre of the Old South… Rutland III, IV. V. VI… Declaration of Independence came and Civil War to stop slavery.

William Rutland VII (our subject) was born at the low point of the family fortunes in  1900. He was born in Macon, grandly ‘septimus’ for seventh. Rutland VII dropped the VII as soon as he could and the lanky boy with the hawk like face and whose fair hair grew vertically became ‘Bill’ and then, when he prospered as journalist and forgot about his family – or tried to, or half tried to – he became Travis Rutland, also ‘GreenScarf Rutland’. GreenScarf, always one word, was what he wore and the trademark for his column in the newsweekly NOW!  

Rutland was born a southerner and, for all he might try to shed it, was both recognised as one and often ostracised by the east coast and Washington news establishment. 

          Until his father’s generation the family had prospered in the plantation era South.

They never owned the cash crops, tobacco and cotton which were the basis of the plantation (and slave) economy. They bought old growth forest land, sold some of this for clearance, notably for tobacco farming. They cut trees and milled and sold lumber into the economy, were rich in terms of the land holdings, but lived at a middle class level. 

          The Rutland forestry business used some slave labour and had house slaves. Never forgiving about this, or papering it over, he came to see how the woodlands his family had cut sustainably were now being destroyed by northern capital which moved in and took over all that his father owned when Federal reconstruction programs proved to be a chimera. He was a child when he made his first major protest.

               William Rutland VI – father to Travis -- was born at the start of the Civil War and grew up in the 1880s to declining fortunes. By 1905 this William Rutland was bankrupt as the mills had no customers. To pay debts he sold the Rutland forest for cents on the acre – this to Home Lumber of Pennsylvania, one of several northern companies who, in the view of Rutland VI – sixth generation -- were pillaging the south.

          The Rutland forest  tradition had been unusual in an America which talked of ‘conquering’ the land and in which clear felling made the survival and old ways of Native Americans impossible. The Rutland way had been to fell selectively and protect the forest as a long term asset.

Well, the asset was gone, William Rutland VI, living modestly, did at least hope for a continuance of the dynasty – dynasty in his eyes. His wife, Mary, delivered a baby girl, Miss Mary Junior, in 1897 and a son, William Clayton Rutland VII, in 1900. By now he was working as a foreman in one of the mills he had previously owned. The trees were never left long to dry and settle. Every tree was cut and part of his job to hide the second rate planks among the first rate. To the Pennsylvania Lutherans, God gave the right to clear fell and God gave the right to maximize profit.

Cut, move on and leave. This disgusted him the most. Christian men from the north cut everything and left a tangle of branches and blocked streams. In the Rutland ethos they killed the land.

Rutland VI could do little about this. His wife would not leave. Stories about ostracising southerners in the Yankee north circulated. William Rutland  needed wages and he had a job doing what he loved to do, working with lumber. Home Lumber paid fairly and hired African Americans, ex slaves and paid them fair money too. In this they resisted the protest of poorer whites. His boy, William VII, grew up into a lanky child with fair hair that had habit of pointing skyways and resisting the brush but which gave the boy the look of an experienced older man. With the help of a neighbour’s collection of Lydeker and Bartrum, adult nature books,  the intense boy – William VII, now Bill -- became, still only ten, expert in recognising tree and plant species, birds and insects.

His father told him not to go too far and he went too far. As said, part of the Home Lumber mission was to clear the land of ‘useless’ trees, useless in monetary terms. The logic was impossible to grasp to a young boy who saw these ancient relics as the most useful in the forest, part rotting and so home to a myriad of micro- organisms on which insects fed and on which birds then fed. One particular four hundred year old hickory tree was home to woodpeckers to whose nest he had climbed, been so close he could touch the precious clutch of eggs.

Home Lumber cut the forest towards this tree. In a fit of anger the boy took all his small savings, bought heavy chain at Granger’s Hardware and a padlock.

          They could not cut the tree where the woodpecker eggs were due to hatch. Bill Rutland tied himself, skipping school,  at dawn before the workday, to the wide girthed hickory, locked the padlock and threw the key into the underbrush.   

The cutting gang arrived. In theory they could simply have ignored the boy. The ‘good’ trees were not impeded by having the boy trained to this ‘rotten’ one. The red faced and big bellied supervisor, Bartholomew Brown, did not think like that. Even though they would not replant this land the old tree had to go and the boy trying to protect it was a sign of rotten southern values.

Who cared about damn birds? Brown, realizing there was no key in the boy’s pocket grew into blind fury. Stopping the gang from working on other trees, although this was unnecessary, he sent for heavy duty bolt cutters. He also sent for a bundle of bamboo stakes. It took an hour to break the chain during which time the boy’s damn father was sent for – pretentious southern bastard, calling himself Rutland VI like some damn king without a throne.

‘All right Mr Rutland,’ the pot bellied supervisor said. ‘You gotta whip the devil out of this boy of yours. You bend him down with his hand on the holy bible and you cut him with these canes thirteen times, one for each loyal apostle and two for the lord. I ain’t joking. I ain’t kiddin’. You look me in the eye Rutland. Thirteen cuts hard and you only stop if he goes unconscious. You teach this boy about what is a real tree or your loose your job, Rutland. Bend him over before a cross or image of God. Failing that the Holy Bible.  Naked. Twelve cuts with this….’ the bamboo…’Twelve for the twelve apostles of Christ. Hard as you can. Only if the boy expires do you stop. I’ll judge from the state of his flesh tomorrow if you did it right. If not hard enough, your are out.

The boy was laid in front of the saddle as his father rode him home. Rutland senior said nothing, nor did the boy. He had to be beaten. He was an idiot to risk his family livelihood. The father shook his head. He found strong secateurs and cut the bamboo cane into small pieces with Bill  VII pleading to be beaten.

No. The boy was right. Destroying such old trees in the name of God’s endorsement of human progress was a sin.  The sadist Brown would see no wheals.

The cane and two spares were cut into fragments while the father spoke. Under no circumstances was the father going to touch the boy. The father then  lost his job and, soon, while only in his forties, died of a heart attack. On a pittance – the original Rutland gold spent out – his mother, endlessly evoking the good days before the Civil War, brought up her son and daughter.

Then his New Orleans born mother, Eugenia Rutland, began to drink whiskey. The branded stuff might have been all right if she was moderate. She was not moderate and, to save money, drank moonshine. Her children watched her terrible decline and were only saved by an old doctor who impressed on them the real tragedy. If she seems no longer to be your mother or your friend, that is because on the bottle to which she is now addicted is her friend.

Some funds kept her two children being educated and paid the servants. What was founded on the Og Smith robbery on a wild dark night in Northumberland was about to end.

          Bill Rutland lived with the knowledge. His attempt to save the old tree led to the order that he be whipped. His father disobeyed and lost his job, did not live long after that.

          In 1916, Bill Rutland was 16, his beloved sister Mary 18. A military boarding school in North Carolina had kept him on even with the fees unpaid. Mary came to meet him – to run could have the police put on him. They met in the woods outside the school. She had clothes and a green scarf and money. She was going north to work as  a nurse of the Harvard Medical School detachment that were going to France. His idea was to escape on foot, cross the Smoky Mountains and walk through  the great forests of Tennessee, see if he could enlist in Nashville.

          They embraced, concerned that they would not meet on the battlefield in France and might never meet again. They were  of a generation that should be guiltless regarding the old south yet they could never not be Rutlands, never not have those parents who were so tied to s0mething that was both unjust and gone for ever. Bill walked off to hide his flood of tears and she did the same. He was clearly to young to sign up in Nashville, earned some money there as a hospital porter and then walked to the west, wearing the green scarf, knowing how close to entirely gone was the great canopy of trees that had lived down the centuries and were now fast going in the name of progress.