The Whiteys, and Other Highlights of the White Tail Woods · 6:30pm Apr 6th, 2015
West of Ponyville the hills rise wild, and the tame little extension of the White Tail Woods that Ponyville uses as a park becomes rugged forest country, wooded heights cut by ravines and threaded by a network of trails connecting small villages, farmsteads, and isolated little farms. These trails conform to the contours of the land -- some of them are very old, dating back before the Age of Discord and laid down by the Deer who ruled these lands before the coming of the Three Tribes. They form a confusing labyrinth to any unfamiliar with the area; even the locals sometimes get lost.
The inhabitants of the White Tails -- known familiarly as the "Whiteys" -- are for the most part dirt-poor, extremely rustic, fiercely independent and sometimes astonishingly proud. They are farming marginal lands, using equipment often decades to centuries out of date, and for the most part grow their own food and meet many of their other needs working in their own farmhouses during the winter months. Most do produce some surplus, which they market in the nearest town in return for bits to buy the occasional store-bought goods as what passes amongst them for luxuries.
They are very rural. From their point of view, South Dunnich is a small town, Nickerlite a large town, and Ponyville a small city. Some have traveled to true cities, returning with tall tales of urban vice and splendor, scarce-credited amongst their stay-at-home family and friends. They can be very crude -- to them, the rock-farming Pies are prosperous middle class and the landowning Apples virtually aristocrats; upper-class to upper middle class Ponies such as Twilight Sparkle or even Rarity Belle would be figures out of fairy tales in comparison.
They can also be loyal and loving, and incomparably courageous in defense of their own. They can be violent by Pony standards, and they are greatly valued by the Guards Militia units for their fieldcraft, fighting spirit, marksponyship and overall toughness. They make highly-effective scouts and skirmishers. In the Great Changeling War, in which the Eastern White Tails are overrun, the Changelings learn to their dismay how good the Whiteys are as guerillas, and many a ling Warrior ends his life at the point of a Whitey arrow, bolt or spearhead.
They are prone to drinking too much and getting into fights, but they also have a rough sense of fairness and are rarely cruel; they mistrust but are nevertheless frequently kind to strangers, as their homes can be few and far between, and nopony wants to be caught out in the woods at night. Those who scorn them may meet hard-bucking hooves, but those who show them respect will usually find themselves the recipients of home-spun hospitality and a rustic courtesy, in which may sometimes be detected the survivals of antique customs long-since superseded by newer manners amongst Pony townsfolk.
They are mostly decent Ponies, and while they can be blunt about matters which more civilized Ponies would cover with euphemisms, they have their own crude sense of honor. One way to get into trouble with fast is to treat them as so many brutes and hussies -- though such can, of course, be found among their numbers. Their lives are very isolated by town or even most rural standards, and some of them can be quite depraved. On some remote farms, incestuous unions are not uncommon, in part because of the difficulty of meeting suitable outsiders with whom to mate. Certainly, marriages to -- or less regular arrangements between -- mere first and second cousins are quite common in the hill country. Most of the Whiteys are however -- by their own standards -- reasonably respectable.
These woods are not the hell-forest of the Everfree, but they can be dangerous enough, especially to outsiders. As intimated, the Whiteys rarely harm travelers, but it is easy to get lost on the winding trails, and one must keep one's eyes sharp and one's hooves sure-footed lest one stumble off the trail into an unexpected crevasse. These trails themselves are but indifferently and maintained, mostly by the efforts of local farmers and the effects of frequent usage. Almost none of these rural roads are paved, or even properly widened or graded for anything other than a small cart, or a large vehicle as tough and all-terrain as a Cownestoga Wagon. Needless to say, few coaches, and no steam-powered road engines existing yet in the YOH 1505 could hope to navigate such twisting and poorly-surfaced trails.
There is some danger from predators, though not much -- there are feral dogs, coyotes, and in the mountains one may meet the occasional (normal) wolves, puma or even bear. But the Whiteys are well-armed; they hunt to defend their farms; some actually have taken up meat-eating; and for the most part the beasts fear the Ponies, rather than the other way round.
There are small herds of Deer living deep in the White-Tails. These would be very dangerous to any Pony foolish enough to antagonize them, as their woodscraft is superior even to that of the Whiteys, and the Deer have nature magics ill-understood even by the savants of Canterlot University. Goldie Pie, residing in an outbuilding of the Pie Rock Farm at South-Dunnich, is rumored to be their friend and know some of their secrets, but the old mystical midwife does not betray them to casual questioners.
Fortunately, the Deer are not very aggressive, and only through crass arrogance and stupidity would anypony be likely to provoke an actual attack; far more often, lost Pony travelers have found them generous with supplies and willing to guide them out of the woods. One is advised to treat any Deer encountered with good manners, and be aware that at any moment, a Deer may be watching unobserved. The Deer do not often attack, but neither must they necessarily assist, an obnoxious Pony found wandering in their woods.
As is well known, there are ruins in the White Tails. Some are mundane, merely old pre-Equestrian Pony-built structures. During the Age of Discord, not a few Ponies took refuge in these wooded hills, hoping to escape the notice of the mad tyrant-god. Some were even protected by the Draconequus, for his own unknown and probably whimsical reasons. The earliest settlements of these woods actually predates Discord; the Nickerlite area, for example, was first colonized by the Old Crystal Empire.
Some of the ruins are older still. The Deer had crude civilizations before the Crystal-Imperials came so far south, and indeed the earliest Crystal-Imperial towns here were founded as trading-posts to treat with them. Most of their construction was in wood and has since rotted away, but they had strange and in those days stronger spells than they do today, and there are rumors of Hidden Deer Villages that yet survive in the deep hills, far from Pony habitations and screened from Pony eyes both by terrain and powerful unequine magicks.
Some are known to date from the Age of Wonders. Archaeologists and treasure-hunters alike have come back from these hills with artifacts made of imperishable plastics or moonsilvers, unrusted and still-gleaming as if they were forged yesterday rather than four millennia ago. The altitude of these hills are such that they were unaffected by the great tsunamis caused by the Cataclysm, and their rugged conformation protected them from the hell-storms of the actual detonations, though wrenching earthquakes still toppled many large structures, and the passage of time and weather has eroded them to low, queerly-regular hills.
And some are even older than that. It is said that the anthropoid, bipedal High Eldren settled these hills, over a hundred millennia ago, when Ponies themselves were but barely-sapient savages, roaming the Primal Plains, fending off predators and fighting for mates in a manner little-better than that of wild beasts. Here, their eldritch and alien civilization attained strange heights, and it is whispered that some of their ancient bases and machines survive almost intact, and that some of the queerly-regular mountains are actually Eldren artifacts.
But it is also said that the High Eldren cast almost-impenetrable glamors over their settlements, and only gifted and sensitive mages, or those especially lucky (or unlucky) can hope to find them. They may even have left active defenses or other traps. What is certain is that Ponies exploring too deeply into certain parts of the hills have vanished, and neither the Whiteys nor even the Deer have been able to find their remains, as if they vanished entirely from mortal ken into some unknown half-world. It is advised that Ponies not venture into the deep White Tails save in large and well-equipped parties.
Such are the White Tails -- rustic, homespun, and yet containing both danger and mystery. Do not go too deeply into them, and if you do, bring a journal in which one can leave increasingly bizarre and cryptic entries, eventually to be found by the search parties -- as is traditional.
Have you ever heard of the Foxfire Books? The first six represent a decade long effort by students in the Appalachian mountains to engage their elders to talk about their culture and way of life through oral history. Since it started in the '60s, they managed to get some stuff from the real old-timers. What comes through is that, though the mountain-folk are not rich, worldly, well-educated or generally sophisticated, they are nevertheless intelligent, resourceful, kind, thoughtful, friendly and definitely very independent.
Don't know about any ancient structures left behind by otherwordly beings, though they say there's a lot of ghosts in the Great Smoky Mountains.
Huh. The other kind of fantasy forest. Not the feral, primordial wood, but the mystical one, full of elves—er, elk—and mysterious ruins. Very cool.
Vaguely, though I do know enough about real "hillbillies" (my wife's family has some Appalachian kin) and similar groups such as the New Jersey "Pineys" (I once lived in a town adjacent to the Pine Barrens) to know that they can be kind folk, if one treats them with respect rather than approaching them with an attitude of urban arrogance. I of course modeled the "Whiteys" after real American mountain folk, both in their virtues and their flaws.
I modeled the more mystical elements of the White Tails after the works of H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, August Derleth, Manly Wade Wellman and F. Paul Wilson. As I'm sure Ardashir will realize, John the Balladeer, if equipped with the proper translation spells, would get along just fine with the Whiteys.
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Yes, precisely. The White Tail Woods isn't the sort of place where one risks being attacked by chimerae or manticores when one takes a walk in the woods, but the deep White Tails (rather than the tame parts right next to Ponyville) can be hazardous to uninformed outsiders. And there are places of mystery, if one ventures off the beaten trails. Some of these can be downright dangerous.
Is this just more amazing world-building from you, or are you going to incorporate it into one (or more) of your works?
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Both. I've been thinking about the White Tails as a location for adventures (why should all the fun happen in the Everfree?) for a while now. Also, the climax of All The Way Back is set in the White Tails, the Pie Rock Farm is on the outskirts of the White Tails (and right next to the site of a major ancient Eldren complex), both Pinkie Pie and Sensibility and Divine Jealousy and the Voice of Reason are in part set on the Pie Rock Farm, and there's going to be a scene in Fools and Drunks on the fringes of the White Tails as well (just west of Sweet Apple Acres). I've had headcanon about rustic ponies for a while now (IMO Goldie Delicious Apple is a Whitey, and thus much of Pinkie Apple Pie takes place in that forest), and I thought I should concentrate it in a single easy-to-reference published essay.
2953210 Vaguely, though I do know enough about real "hillbillies" (my wife's family has some Appalachian kin) and similar groups such as the New Jersey "Pineys" (I once lived in a town adjacent to the Pine Barrens) to know that they can be kind folk, if one treats them with respect rather than approaching them with an attitude of urban arrogance. I of course modeled the "Whiteys" after real American mountain folk, both in their virtues and their flaws.
I was going to say that a lot of what you wrote here reminds me of what I read about the Pine Barrens, and especially the 'Lost Tribe' of the Jackson Whites, supposedly descended from a mixture of runaway indentured servants, escaped black slaves, holdout Indians, and Hessian deserters.
Hmm, I wonder what sort of language these ponies speak? Maybe they take their anachronistic ways as far as some rumored southern Appalachian communities that supposedly spoke 'pure' Elizabethan English as late as the mid-20th century?
The bit about Discord defending some of these small communities amuses me as well, given that when I first saw him I wondered, "Why is the Jersey Devil in Equestria?'
I modeled the more mystical elements of the White Tails after the works of H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, August Derleth, Manly Wade Wellman and F. Paul Wilson. As I'm sure Ardashir will realize, John the Balladeer, if equipped with the proper translation spells, would get along just fine with the Whiteys.
I imagine John would at that.
Some of the comments about the lost 'fortresses' of the High Eldren also put me in mind of mountain stories about the Ancients, who supposedly made places like the Old Stone Fort and sunk mines that, when they were 'rediscovered', had trees over a hundred years old growing in front of the entrances. Or some old Pennsylvania stories about the things the early Dutch and Swedes and Scots-Irish saw back when the Alleghenies were the wild frontier, and the Mississippi river was the end of the world. Like the 'golden castles' that appeared on certain high mountaintops, but only at sunrise and sunset.
I really and truly hope you do something with the ideas listed here!
2953186 Have you ever read any of the books by Vance Randolph? He was a folklorist who went into the Ozarks back in the 1920's-40's, and wrote quite a few books about what he learned. I've read a few, and while some of it can be grating (like his idle comment in one that the hill folk were going to be 'dealt with' because civilization only advanced over the bodies of backwards people; and mind he considered this a good thing) you get the idea that Randolph often liked the hill folk, sometimes in spite of himself.
And like I told Jordan, up here in Pennsylvania there were legends told by the first whites in the back country about seeing stone forts and the like atop certain lonely mountains; and some valleys were supposed to be incredibly dangerous places to enter.