Our Southern Highlanders. Horace Kephart
it was terra incognita.
On the map I could see that the Southern Appalachians cover an area much larger than New England, and that they are nearer the center of our population than any other mountains that deserve the name. Why, then, so little known? Quaintly there came to mind those lines familiar to my boyhood: “Get you up this way southward, and go up into the mountain; and see the land, what it is; and the people that dwelleth therein, whether they be strong or weak, few or many; and what the land is that they dwell in, whether it be good or bad; and what cities they be that they dwell in, whether in tents, or in strongholds; and what the land is, whether it be fat or lean, whether there be wood therein or not.”
In that dustiest room of a great library where “pub. docs.” are stored, I unearthed a government report on forestry that gave, at last, a clear idea of the lay of the land. And here was news. We are wont to think of the South as a low country with sultry climate; yet its mountain chains stretch uninterruptedly southwestward from Virginia to Alabama, 650 miles in an air line. They spread over parts of eight contiguous States, and cover an area somewhat larger than England and Scotland, or about the same as that of the Alps. In short, the greatest mountain system of eastern America is massed in our Southland. In its upper zone one sleeps under blankets the year round.
In all the region north of Virginia and east of the Black Hills of Dakota there is but one summit (Mount Washington, in New Hampshire) that reaches 6,000 feet above sea level, and there are only a dozen others that exceed 5,000 feet. By contrast, south of the Potomac there are forty-six peaks, and forty-one miles of dividing ridges, that rise above 6,000 feet, besides 288 mountains and some 300 miles of divide that stand more than 5,000 feet above the sea. In North Carolina alone the mountains cover 6,000 square miles, with an average elevation of 2,700 feet, and with twenty-one peaks that overtop Mount Washington.
I repeated to myself: “Why, then, so little known?” The Alps and the Rockies, the Pyrennees and the Harz are more familiar to the American people, in print and picture, if not by actual visit, than are the Black, the Balsam, and the Great Smoky Mountains. It is true that summer tourists flock to Asheville and Toxaway, Linville and Highlands, passing their time at modern hotels and motoring along a few macadamed roads, but what do they see of the billowy wilderness that conceals most of the native homes? Glimpses from afar. What do they learn of the real mountaineer? Hearsay. For, mark you, nine-tenths of the Appalachian population are a sequestered folk. The typical, the average mountain man prefers his native hills and his primitive ancient ways.
We read more and talk more about the Filipinos, see more of the Chinese and the Syrians, than of these three million next-door Americans who are of colonial ancestry and mostly of British stock. New York, we say, is a cosmopolitan city; more Irish than in Dublin, more Germans than in Munich, more Italians than in Rome, more Jews than in nine Jerusalems; but how many New Yorkers ever saw a Southern mountaineer? I am sure that a party of hillsmen fresh from the back settlements of the Unakas, if dropped on the streets of any large city in the Union, and left to their own guidance, would stir up more comment (and probably more trouble) than would a similar body of whites from any other quarter of the earth; and yet this same odd people is more purely bred from old American stock than any other element of our population that occupies, by itself, so great a territory.
The mountaineers of the South are marked apart from all other folks by dialect, by customs, by character, by self-conscious isolation. So true is this that they call all outsiders “furriners.” It matters not whether your descent be from Puritan or Cavalier, whether you come from Boston or Chicago, Savannah or New Orleans, in the mountains you are a “furriner.” A traveler, puzzled and scandalized at this, asked a native of the Cumberlands what he would call a “Dutchman or a Dago.” The fellow studied a bit and then replied: “Them’s the outlandish.”
A Family of Pioneers in the Twentieth Century
Foreigner, outlander, it is all one; we are “different,” we are “quar,” to the mountaineer. He knows he is an American; but his conception of the metes and bounds of America is vague to the vanishing point. As for countries over-sea—well, when a celebrated Nebraskan returned from his trip around the globe, one of my backwoods neighbors proudly informed me: “I see they give Bryan a lot of receptions when he kem back from the other world.”
No one can understand the attitude of our highlanders toward the rest of the earth until he realizes their amazing isolation from all that lies beyond the blue, hazy skyline of their mountains. Conceive a shipload of emigrants cast away on some unknown island, far from the regular track of vessels, and left there for five or six generations, unaided and untroubled by the growth of civilization. Among the descendants of such a company we would expect to find customs and ideas unaltered from the time of their forefathers. And that is just what we do find to-day among our castaways in the sea of mountains. Time has lingered in Appalachia. The mountain folk still live in the eighteenth century. The progress of mankind from that age to this is no heritage of theirs.
Our backwoodsmen of the Blue Ridge and the Unakas, of their connecting chains, and of the outlying Cumberlands, are still thinking essentially the same thoughts, still living in much the same fashion, as did their ancestors in the days of Daniel Boone. Nor is this their fault. They are a people of keen intelligence and strong initiative when they can see anything to win. But, as President Frost says, they have been “beleaguered by nature.” They are belated—ghettoed in the midst of a civilization that is as aloof from them as if it existed only on another planet. And so, in order to be fair and just with these, our backward kinsmen, we must, for the time, decivilize ourselves to the extent of going back and getting an eighteenth century point of view.
But, first, how comes it that the mountain folk have been so long detached from the life and movement of their times? Why are they so foreign to present-day Americanism that they innocently call all the rest of us foreigners?
The answer lies on the map. They are creatures of environment, enmeshed in a labyrinth that has deflected and repelled the march of our nation for three hundred years.
In 1728, when Colonel William Byrd, of Westover, was running the boundary line between Virginia and North Carolina, he finally was repulsed by parallel chains of savage, unpeopled mountains that rose tier beyond tier to the westward, everywhere densely forested, and matted into jungle by laurel and other undergrowth. In his Journal, writing in the quaint, old-fashioned way, he said: “Our country has now been inhabited more than 130 years by the English, and still we hardly know anything of the Appalachian Mountains, that are nowhere above 250 miles from the sea. Whereas the French, who are later comers, have rang’d from Quebec Southward as far as the Mouth of Mississippi, in the bay of Mexico, and to the West almost as far as California, which is either way above 2,000 miles.”
A hundred and thirty years later, the same thing could have been said of these same mountains; for the “fierce and uncouth races of men” that Poe faintly heard of remained practically undiscovered until they startled the nation on the scene of our Civil War, by sending 180,000 of their riflemen into the Union Army.
If a corps of surveyors to-day should be engaged to run a line due west from eastern Virginia to the Blue Grass of Kentucky, they would have an arduous task. Let us suppose that they start from near Richmond and proceed along the line of 37° 50′. The Blue Ridge is not especially difficult: only eight transverse ridges to climb up and down in fourteen miles, and none of them more than 2,000 feet high from bottom to top. Then, thirteen miles across the lower end of The Valley, a curious formation begins.
As a foretaste, in the three and a half miles crossing Little House and Big House mountains, one ascends 2,200 feet, descends 1,400, climbs again 1,600, and goes down 2,000 feet on the far side. Beyond lie steep and narrow ridges athwart the way, paralleling each other like waves at sea. Ten distinct mountain chains are scaled and descended in the next forty miles. There are few “leads” rising gradually to their crests. Each and every one of these ridges is a Chinese wall magnified to altitudes of from a thousand to two thousand feet, and covered with thicket. The hollows between them are merely deep troughs.
In