Our Southern Highlanders

by Horace Kephart

Three or four men, haggard from sleepless vigils, strike out into pathless forest through driving rain. Within five minutes the wet underbrush has drenched them to the skin. They climb, climb, climb. There is no trail for a long way; then they reach a faint one that winds, winds, climbs, climbs. Hour after hour the men climb. Then they begin to descend. They have crossed the divide, a mile above sea-level, and are in another State. Hour after hour they “climb down,” as they would say. They visit farmers’ homes at dead of night. Each man shoulders two bushels of shelled corn and starts back again over the highest mountain range in eastern America. It is twenty miles to the little mill. They carry the corn thither on their own backs. They sprout it, grind it, distill it. Two of them then carry the whiskey twenty miles in the opposite direction, and, at the risk of capture and imprisonment, or of death if they resist,