Our Southern Highlanders. Horace Kephart
come upon novel topography. Instead of wave following wave in orderly procession, we find here a choppy sea of small mountains, with hollows running toward all points of the compass. Instead of Chinese walls, we now have Chinese puzzles. The innate perversity of such configuration grows more and more exasperating as we toil westward. In the two hundred miles from the Greenbrier to the Kentucky River, the ridges are all but unscalable, and the streams sprangle in every direction like branches of mountain laurel.
The only roads follow the beds of tortuous and rock-strewn water courses, which may be nearly dry when you start out in the morning, but within an hour may be raging torrents. There are no bridges. One may ford a dozen times in a mile. A spring “tide” will stop all travel, even from neighbor to neighbor, for a day or two at a time. Buggies and carriages are unheard of. In many districts the only means of transportation is with saddlebags on horseback, or with a “tow sack” afoot. If the pedestrian tries a short-cut he will learn what the natives mean when they say: “Goin’ up, you can might’ nigh stand up straight and bite the ground; goin’ down, a man wants hobnails in the seat of his pants.”
James Lane Allen was not writing fiction when he said of the far-famed Wilderness Road into Kentucky: “Despite all that has been done to civilize it since Boone traced its course in 1790, this honored historic thoroughfare remains to-day as it was in the beginning, with all its sloughs and sands, its mud and holes, and jutting ledges of rock and loose boulders, and twists and turns, and general total depravity. … One such road was enough. They are said to have been notorious for profanity, those who came into Kentucky from this side. Naturally. Many were infidels—there are roads that make a man lose faith. It is known that the more pious companies of them, as they traveled along, would now and then give up in despair, sit down, raise a hymn, and have prayers before they could go further. Perhaps one of the provocations to homicide among the mountain people should be reckoned this road. I have seen two of the mildest of men, after riding over it for a few hours, lose their temper and begin to fight—fight their horses, fight the flies, fight the cobwebs on their noses.”
Such difficulties of intercommunication are enough to explain the isolation of the mountaineers. In the more remote regions this loneliness reaches a degree almost unbelievable. Miss Ellen Semple, in a fine monograph published in the Geographical Journal, of London, in 1901, gave us some examples:
“These Kentucky mountaineers are not only cut off from the outside world, but they are separated from each other. Each is confined to his own locality, and finds his little world within a radius of a few miles from his cabin. There are many men in these mountains who have never seen a town, or even the poor village that constitutes their county-seat. … The women … are almost as rooted as the trees. We met one woman who, during the twelve years of her married life, had lived only ten miles across the mountain from her own home, but had never in this time been back home to visit her father and mother. Another back in Perry county told me she had never been farther from home than Hazard, the county-seat, which is only six miles distant. Another had never been to the post-office, four miles away; and another had never seen the ford of the Rockcastle River, only two miles from her home, and marked, moreover, by the country store of the district.”
When I first went into the Smokies, I stopped one night in a single-room log cabin, and soon had the good people absorbed in my tales of travel beyond the seas. Finally the housewife said to me, with pathetic resignation: “Bushnell’s the furdest ever I’ve been.” Bushnell, at that time, was a hamlet of thirty people, only seven miles from where we sat. When I lived alone on “the Little Fork of Sugar Fork of Hazel Creek,” there were women in the neighborhood, young and old, who had never seen a railroad, and men who had never boarded a train, although the Murphy branch ran within sixteen miles of our post-office. The first time that a party of these people went to the railroad, they were uneasy and suspicious. Nearing the way-station, a girl in advance came upon the first negro she ever saw in her life, and ran screaming back: “My goddamighty, Mam, thar’s the boogerman—I done seed him!”
But before discussing the mountain people and their problems, let us take an imaginary balloon voyage over their vast domain. South of the Potomac the Blue Ridge is a narrow rampart rising abruptly from the east, one or two thousand feet above its base, and descending sharply to the Shenandoah Valley on the west. Across the Valley begin the Alleghanies. These mountains, from the Potomac through to the northern Tennessee border, consist of a multitude of narrow ridges with steep escarpment on both sides, running southwesterly in parallel chains, and each chain separated from its neighbors by deep, slender dales. Wherever one goes westward from the Valley he will encounter tier after tier of these ridges, as I have already described.
Photo by U. S. Forest Service
“The very cliffs are sheathed with trees and shrubs”—Linville River and Falls, N. C.
The walls of one gorge are from 500 to 2,000 feet high.
As a rule, the links in each chain can be passed by following small gaps; but often one must make very wide detours. For example, Pine Mountain (every link has its own distinct name) is practically impassable for nearly 150 miles, except for two water gaps and five difficult crossings. Although it averages only a mile thick, the people on its north side, generally, know less about those on the south than a Maine Yankee does about Pennsylvania Dutchmen.
The Alleghanies together have a width of from forty to sixty miles. Westward of them, for a couple of hundred miles, are the labyrinthine roughs of West Virginia and eastern Kentucky.
In southwestern Virginia the Blue Ridge and the Alleghanies coalesce, but soon spread apart again, the Blue Ridge retaining its name, as well as its general character, although much loftier and more massive than in the north. The southeast front of the Blue Ridge is a steep escarpment, rising abruptly from the Piedmont Plateau of Carolina. Not one river cuts through the Ridge, notwithstanding that the mountains to the westward are higher and much more massive. It is the watershed of this whole mountain region. The streams rising on its northwestern front flow down into central plateaus, and thence cut their way through the Unakas in deep and precipitous gorges, draining finally into the Gulf of Mexico, through the Tennessee, Ohio and Mississippi rivers.
The northwestern range, which corresponds to the Alleghanies of Virginia, now assumes a character entirely different from them. Instead of parallel chains of low ridges, we have here, on the border of North Carolina and Tennessee, a single chain that dwarfs all others in the Appalachian system. It is cut into segments by the rivers (Nolichucky, French Broad, Pigeon, Little Tennessee, Hiwassee) that drain the interior plateaus, and each segment has a distinct name of its own (Iron, Northern Unaka, Bald, Great Smoky, Southern Unaka or Unicoi mountains). The Carolina mountaineers still call this system collectively the Alleghanies, but the U. S. Geological Survey has given it a more distinctive name, the Unakas. While the Blue Ridge has only seven peaks that rise above 5,000 feet, the Unakas have 125 summits exceeding 5,000, and ten that are over 6,000 feet.
Connecting the Unaka chain with the Blue Ridge are several transverse ranges, the Stone, Beech, Roan, Yellow, Black, Newfound, Pisgah, Balsam, Cowee, Nantahala, Tusquitee, and a few minor mountains, which as a whole are much higher than the Blue Ridge, 156 summits rising over 5,000 feet, and thirty-six over 6,000 feet above sea-level.
In northern Georgia the Unakas and the Blue Ridge gradually fade away into straggling ridges and foothills, which extend into small parts of South Carolina and Alabama.
The Cumberland Plateau is not attached to either of these mountain systems, but is rather a prolongation of the roughs of eastern Kentucky. It is separated from the Unakas by the broad valley of the Tennessee River. The Plateau rises very abruptly from the surrounding plains. It consists mainly of tableland gashed by streams that have cut their way down in deep narrow gulches with precipitous sides.
Most of the literature about our Southern mountaineers refers only to the inhabitants of the comparatively meagre hills of eastern Kentucky, or to the Cumberlands of Tennessee. Little has been written about the real mountaineers of southwestern Virginia, western North Carolina, and the extreme north