The mountains and their inhabitants are a numerous and significant part of the population in all the upper tier of the Southern States, including Oklahoma; and though they are much less numerous in the lower South, they furnish a large body of voters, and their slow progress is in itself a difficult problem. The Appalachian range, from Canada to Alabama, is made up of belts of parallel ridges; in a few places, such as Mount Washington in New Hampshire, and Mount Mitchell in North Carolina, they rise above 6,000 feet, but they include comparatively few elevations over 3,000 feet, and no lofty plateaus. Between the ridges and in pockets or coves of the mountains are lands that are easily cultivated, and in many places the mountains, when cleared, are fertile to their summits. The scenic culmination of the Appalachians is Blowing Rock in North Carolina, 3,500 feet above the sea, where the rifleman without stirring from one spot may drop his bullets into the Catawba flowing into the Atlantic, the New, which is a head water of the Ohio, and the Watauga, a branch of the Tennessee. Above this spot rises, 3,000 feet higher, the mass of Grandfather’s Mountain; and below is an enchanting series of mountains, range after range, breaking off to the eastern foothills.
Within the Appalachians, south of Pennsylvania, dwell about two and a half million people of whom but a few thousands are of African or European birth. These are true Americans, if there are any, for they are the descendants of people who were already in the country as much as a century and a half ago. In a Kentucky churchyard may be found such names as Lucinda Gentry, John Kindred, Simeon Skinner, and William Tudor. Side by side stand Scotch-Irish names, for many of that stock drifted southwestward from Pennsylvania into these mountains; and in the oldest burying ground, on the site of Daniel Boone’s Watauga settlement, the first interment seems to have been that of a German. Just as in central Pennsylvania, and the Valley of Virginia, the English, Scotch-Irish, and Pennsylvania Dutch were intermingled. It is an error to suppose that these highlanders are descended from the riffraff of the colonial South; they have been crowded back into the unfavorable parts of the mountains because, as the population increased, there was a lack of good land; and the least vigorous and ambitious of them, though sons or grandsons of stalwart men, have been obliged to accept the worst opportunities.
The life of the Mountain Whites is not very unlike that of New England in the seventeenth century, New York in the eighteenth, and Minnesota in the nineteenth century. The people are self-sustaining in that they build their own houses, raise their own food, and make their own clothing. There have been instances where in the early morning a sheep was trotting about wearing a pelt which in the evening a mountaineer was wearing, it having been sheared, spun, woven, dyed, cut, made, and unfitted in that one day. Abraham Lincoln, as a boy in Indiana and a young man in Illinois, lived the same kind of life that these people are now going through; for here is the last refuge of the American frontier. These conditions seem not in themselves barbarous, for there are still thousands of Northern people who in childhood inhabited intelligent and well-to-do communities with good schools, in which most of the families still made their own soap and sugar, smoked their own hams, molded their own candles, and dyed their own cloth, where the great spinning-wheel still turned and the little wheel whirred.
The Mountain Whites, however, are more than primitive or even colonial, they are early English; at least among them are still sung and handed down from grandmother to child Elizabethan ballads. Lord Thomas still hies him to his mother to know
Whether I shall marry fair Elender,
Or bring the brown girl home.
Local bards also compose for themselves such stirring ditties as “Sourwood Mounting.”
Chickens a-crowin’ in the sourwood mountain,
Ho-de-ing-dang, diddle-lal-la-da.
So many pretty girls I can’t count ’em,
Ho-de-ing-dang, diddle-lal-la-da.
My true love lives up in the head of a holler,
She won’t come and I won’t call ’er.
My true love, she’s a black-eyed daisy,
If I don’t get her, I’ll go crazy.
The most unfavorable mountain conditions are fairly illustrated by eastern Kentucky, a veritable back country. Along the roads the traveler passes a number of one-room houses, without glass windows, and is told many tales of the irregular or no-family life of the people. Perhaps along a creek he chances on a traditional Mountain White family, such as Porte Crayon drew fifty years ago, when these people were first described as a curiosity. Below a dirty and ill-favored house, down under the bank on the shingle near the river, sits a family of five people, all ill-clothed and unclean; a blear-eyed old woman, a younger woman with a mass of tangled red hair hanging about her shoulders, indubitably suckling a baby; a little girl with the same auburn evidence of Scotch ancestry; a boy, and a younger child, all gathered about a fire made among some bricks, surrounding a couple of iron saucepans, in which is a dirty mixture looking like mud, but probably warmed-up sorghum syrup, which, with a few pieces of corn pone, makes their breakfast. A counterbalance to the squalor is the plump and pretty girls that appear all along the way, with the usual mountain headdress of the sunbonnet, perched at a killing angle. Such people have their own peculiarities of speech like the mountain woman’s characterization of a forlorn country-seat: “Warn’t hit the nighest ter nowhar uv ary place ever you’s at?”
The miserable family described above are a fair type of what a writer on the subject calls the “submerged tenth among the mountaineers”; but they belong to the lowest type, to which those who know them best give no favorable character; they live in the remotest parts of the mountains, in the rudest cabins, with the smallest provision of accumulated food. Most of them are illiterate and more than correspondingly ignorant. Some of them had Indian ancestors and a few bear evidences of negro blood. The so-called “mountain-boomer,” says an observer, “has little self-respect and no self-reliance.... So long as his corn pile lasts the ‘cracker’ lives in contentment, feasting on a sort of hoe cake made of grated corn meal mixed with salt and water and baked before the hot coals, with addition of what game the forest furnishes him when he can get up the energy to go out and shoot or trap it.... The irregularities of their moral lives cause them no sense of shame.... But, notwithstanding these low moral conceptions, they are of an intense religious excitability.... They license and ordain their own preachers, who are no more intelligent than they are themselves, but who are distinguished by special ability in getting people ‘shouting happy,’ or in ‘shaking the sinner over the smoking fires of hell until he gets religion.’” They are all users of tobacco—men, women, and children. They smoke and chew and “dip snuff.”... Bathing is unknown among them.... When a garment is put on once it is there to stay until it falls to pieces. The washtub is practically as little known among them as the bathtub....
The same authority has abundant praise for the better type of the mountaineer, who loves the open-air life, cares nothing for luxury, and “has raised the largest average families in America upon the most sterile of ‘upright’ and stony farms, farms the very sight of which would make an Indiana farmer sick with nervous prostration. He has sent his sons out to be leaders of men in all the industries and activities in every part of our country.”