American history is replete with unknown pastor heroes who braved the wilderness and brought the light of the gospel to wild and brutal areas. One fascinating example is mountain man Bob Childress.

Buffalo Mountain in Virginia's Blue Ridge rises to 3972 feet, a thousand feet above the surrounding hills. The early settlers thought the summit looked like a charging buffalo, with its head lowered and its hump bulging. The early settlers on the Buffalo were Scotch-Irish, but the God-fearing ways of those earliest pioneers had long died out on the mountain. There were few roads, and those living on the mountains had no schools and often no churches. They lived the lives of remote pioneers, even retaining some of the early English speech Shakespeare would have recognized -- saying sallet for salad, sech for such, and being afeard rather than afraid.

Everyone who lived on the Buffalo and the surrounding region was desperately poor. Besides a few vegetables, some chickens, hogs, and a couple of cows, the people grew apples and corn. Brandy made from the apples and whiskey from the corn was easy to transport across the mountains to sell. Most families had their own stills, and drunkenness was rampant on the mountains.

Tough Start
Bob Childress' family, which lived in The Hollow across from the Buffalo, was poorer than most. Born January 19, 1890, when a mountain blizzard was howling across the mountains, Bob grew up in a one-room cabin with his four brothers and four sisters. His earliest memory was from the Christmas he was three. He got drunk and woke up with a hangover the next morning. The grownups told him it was fine to be drunk; they thought being drunk made life bearable. Both of Bob's parents drank heavily; they also quarreled constantly.

When Bob was about six the Quakers at Guilford College in North Carolina started a school in The Hollow, and Bob's older brother Hasten encouraged all the children in the family to attend. Bobs parents were against it, but Hasten's encouragement prevailed. Bob loved school and walked five miles each day to attend. When he was fourteen, the teacher married and left The Hollow, and the school closed. There wasn't much to do in the mountains, so Bob joined the other boys in their wild times. Drinking, playing poker, and “rocking” (throwing rocks at) houses and churches, became a way of life. Killings often occurred during the drinking bouts and poker games. With his first $5 bill Bob bought his first pair of long pants and a .32 caliber revolver.

Though now a part of the wild life of the mountains, Bob couldn't figure out the constant fighting and killing. In fights his jaw was broken; once he was shot in the leg and once in the shoulder: Time and again I saw men kill each other, men without hate in their system, but drunk and with guns and knives always handy. . . . The year I was twenty I was hardly ever sober, not even in the morning. I was miserable and sick to my soul . . . .

Bob even hoped someone would kill him in a shooting; twice he thought about shooting himself but didn't. One Sunday after playing cards and drinking, Bob found himself outside a Methodist church and went in during a revival. He continued attending the revival the entire week, and for the first time “felt a power stronger than the power of liquor and rocks and guns.”

Carnage in the Courtroom
The Hillsville Massacre in 1912 helped Bob Childress realize that the drinking, fighting, and killings, so much a part of the mountain peoples' lives, were not normal. On March 14, 1912, twenty mountaineers galloped into the Hillsville Courtroom to release Floyd Allen, who was being sentenced to prison for beating up a deputy sheriff. Shots rang out everywhere. By the time the mountaineers retreated with Allen, the judge, prosecuting attorney, a sheriff, a witness, and a juryman lay dead. News reporters from across the country flocked to Hillsville. Bob had joined the posse to catch the mountaineers. As he talked to the visiting reporters, he was surprised to learn that such fights and shootings weren’t common outside of the mountains. Bob decided then and there to give up drinking; his friends called him womanish. In his new fight against drinking, Bob became a deputy to help catch bootleggers in the mountains, but when he saw sheriffs and deputies often drinking up the captured evidence, he realized the law was not the force to bring change to the people of the Blue Ridge.