Our Southern Highlanders

by Horace Kephart

one of Poe’s minor tales, written in 1845, there is a vague allusion to wild mountains in western Virginia “tenanted by fierce and uncouth races of men.”

homespun,

Let us admit that there is just enough truth in this caricature to give it a point that will stick.

Our typical mountaineer is lank, he is always unkempt, he is fond of toting a gun on his shoulder, and his curiosity about a stranger’s name and business is promptly, though politely, outspoken.

John Fox, Jr.,

Alice MacGowan,

The Southern highlands themselves are a mysterious realm.

When I prepared, eight years ago, for my first sojourn in the

Great Smoky Mo...

which form the master ch...

Appal...

system, I could find in no library a guide ...

The most diligent research failed to discover so much as a magazine article, written within this generation, that d...

Teneriffe

Timbuctu,

hou...

Harz

Toxaway,

macadamed

metes

emigrants

Our backwoodsmen of the Blue Ridge

are still thinking essentially the same thoughts, still living in much the same fashion, as did their ancestors in the days of Daniel Boone.

They are a people of keen intelligence and strong initiative when they ca...

They are belated—ghettoed in the midst of a civilization that is as aloof from them as if it exi...

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.

near Richmond and proceed along the line of 37° 50′. The Blue Ridge is not especially difficult:

The hollows between them are merely deep troughs.

In the next thirty miles we 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.

“tow sack”

James Lane Allen

Wilderness Road

sloughs

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.

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 Mo...

is practically impassable for nearly 150 miles, except for two water gaps and f...

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

transverse

Jane Barlow

boreen,

So in Appalachia, one steps shortly from the railway into the primitive.

The back country is rough.

woodcraft

A mountain settlement consists of all who get their mail at the same place. Ours was made up of forty-two households (about two hundred souls) scattered over an area eight miles long by two wide.

Fifteen homes had no wagon road, and could be reached by no vehicle other than a narrow sled.

Quill Rose

Medlin