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Our Home and Heritage.--Our home is a very small part of that vast region known as the southern Appalachians, which a recent writer, Horace Kephart, has aptly called Appalachia. This elevated section covers parts of eight States, all of which are south of Mason and Dixon's line. It is in the middle of the temperate zone and, for climate, is unsurpassed in the world. The average elevation is about two thousand feet above tidewater. Blue Ridge is the name of the range of mountains which bounds this highland country on the east, though the western boundary is known by many names, owing to the fact that is is bisected by several streams, all of which flow west, while the Blue Ridge is a true water-shed from the Potamac to Georgia. The various names of the western ranges are the Stone, the Iron, the Bald, the Great Smoky, the Unaka and the Frog mountains. the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey has, however, of recent years, given the name Unaka to this entire western border, leaving the local names to the sections which have been formed by the passage of the Watauga, the Doe, the Toe, the Cane, the French Broad, the Pigeon, the Little Tennessee and Hiawassee rivers. With the exception of a few bare mountain-tops, which are covered by a carpet of grass, these mountains are wooded to the peaks. Between the Blue Ridge and the Unakas are numerous cross ranges, separated by narrow valley's and deep gorges. Over the larger part of this region are to be found the older crystalline rocks, most of which are tilted, while the forests are of the finer hardwoods whichm when removed, give places to luxuriant grasses. The apple finds it's home in these mountains, while maize, when grown, is richer in proteids than that of the prairie lands of Illinois.

Character of the Inhabitants in 1752. --Bishop Spangenberg, in the Colonial Records (Vol. IV, pp. 1311-1314), Wrote from

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Edenton, N. C., that he found everything in confusion there, the counties in conflict with each other, and the authority of the legislature greatly weakened, owing largely to the fact that the older counties had formerly been allowed five representatives in the general assembly; but, as the new counties were formed, they were allow buy two. It was not long, however, beforethe newer counties, even with their small representation, held a majority of the members, and passed a low reducing the representation of the older counties from five to two. The result of this was that the older counties refused to send any members to the assembly, but dispatched an agent to England with a view to the having their former representation restored. Before any result could be obtained, however, there was "in the older counties perfect anarchy," with frequent crimes of murder and robbery. Citizens refused to appear as jurors, and if court was held to try such crimes, not one was present. Prisons were broken open and their inmates released. Most matters were decided by blows. But the county courts were regularly held, and whatever belonged to their jurisdiction received the customary attention.

People of the East and West. --Bishop Spangenberg, in the same letter, divided the inhabitants of the eastern counties into two classed --natives, who could endure the climate, but were indolent and sluggish, and those from England, Scotland and Ireland and from the northern colonies of America, the latter being too poor to buy land there. some of these were refugees from justice, had fled from debt, or had left wife and children elsewhere--or, possibly, to escape the penalty of some crime. Horse thieves infested parts of this section, but he adds in a postscript written in 1753: "After having traversed the length and breadth of North Carolina, we have ascertained that towards the sestern mountains there are plenty of people who have come from Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and even from New England." Even in 1752 "four hundred families, with horsed, wagons and cattle have migrated to North Carolina, and among them weregood farmers and very worthy people". These, in all probability, were the Jersey Settlers.

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The Great Pennsylvania Road. --On the 15th of February, 1751, Governor Johnston wrote to the London Board of Trade that inhabitants were flocking into North Carolina, mostly from Pennsylvania, and other points of America "already overstocked, and some directly from Eruope," many thousands having arrived, most of whom had settled in the West "so that they had nearly reached the mountains." Jeffrey's map in Congressional Library shows the "Great Road from the Yadkin River through Virginia to Philadelphia, Distance 435 Miles." It ran from Philadelphia, through Lancaster and York counties of Pennsylvania to Winchester, VA., thence up the Shenandoah Valley, crossing Fluvanna River at Looney's Ferry, thence to Staunton River and down the river, through the Blue Ridge. Thence southward, near the Moravian Settlement, to Yadkin River, just above the mouth of Linville Creek, and about ten miles above the mouth of Reedy Creek. It is added that those of our boys who followed Lee on his Gettysburg campaign in 1863 were but passing over the same route their ancestors had taken when coming from Youk and Lancaster counties to this State in the fifties of the eighteenth century. (Col. Rec. Vol. IV, p. xxi.)

Our Yankee Ancestry. --Our Yankee Ancestry.-- As, to Southerners, all people north of Mason and Dixon's line are Yankees, there seems to be no doubt, if the best authorities can be trusted, that we are the sons of Yankee sires. Roosevelt (Vol. I, p. 137) tells us that as early as 1730 three streams of white people began to converge towards these mountains, but were halted by the Alleghenies; that they came mostly from Philadelphia, though many were from Charleston, S.C., Presbyterian-Irish being prominent among all and being the Roundheads of the South. Also that Catholics and Episcopalians obtained little foothold, the creed of the backwoodsmen being generally Presbyterian. Miss Morley says that so many of the staunch northerners --Scotch-Irish after the events of 1730, and Scotch Highlanders after those of 1745--"came to the North Carolina mountains that they have given the dominant note to the character of the mountaineers" (p. 140). Kephart says that when James I, in 1607, confiscated the estates of the native Irish in six counties in Ulster, he planted them

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with Scotch and English Presbyterians, giving long leases, but that as these leases began to expire the Scotch-Irish themselves came in conflict with the Crown, and then he quotes Froude to the effect that thirty thousand Protestants left Ulster during the two years following the American evictions and came to America. Many of these finally settled in our mountain, among them being Daniel Boone and the ancestors of David Crockett, Samuel Houston, John C. Calhoun, "Stonewall" Jackson and Abraham Lincoln. He might have added, also, those of Cyrus H. McCormick, Admiral Farragut, Andrew Johnson, James K. Polk, John C. Breckenridge, Henry Clay, John Marshall and Parson Brownlow.

Huguenots, Germans and Swedes. --But others came also: French Huguenots, Germans, Hollanders and Swedes, who settled the British frontier from Massachusetts to the Valley of Virginia, the mountain men who counted more coming from Lancaster, York and Berks counties, Pennsylvania. "That was true in the days of Daniel Boone and David Crockett, and also in the days of John C. Calhoun and William A. Graham, of these of Zeb Vance and Jeter C. Pritchard. There has not been one whit of admixture from any other source. Blood feuds have always been absent. The Tiffanys have been able to draw on these mountains for some of their most skillful wood-carvers--a revival of their ancient home industries. I have heard in Pennsylvania within the last thirty years every form of expression with which I am familiar in Western North Carolina, and some of them occur today around Worcester, Mass." (note 1) Hence, we have in these mountains the sauerkraut of Holland and the cakes of Scotland.

Scum or salt? -- So much has been written in detraction of the Southern mountaineers that ignorant people conclude that they are the very scum of the earth. In all the admirable things Horace Kephart had to say in his "Southern Highlanders," the Northern reviewers found but a few sentences worthy of their notice, and these were, of course, of an unfavorable nature.

Note 1 - Dr. Collier Cobb in an address before the National Geographic Society, in New York City, in April, 1914.

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These were quoted and commented on by a reviewer in the Review of Reviews for July, 1914. In the same number of this periodical (p. 49) there is a picture under which is printed: "Center Peak of Grandfather Mountain, in Pisgah Forest, recently acquired by the Government from the Estate of George W. Vanderbilt." As the Grandfather mountain is at least ninety miles north of Pisgah Forest, the ignorance of the publishers of this magazine of conditions in our mountains is apparent. Kephart's few remarks which caught the eye of Northern reviewers were that "although without annals, we are one in speech, manners, experiences and ideals, and that our deterioration began as soon as population began to press upon the limits of subsistence." An examination of the statistics of population and wealth of Buncombe, Haywood, Jackson, Swain and Cherokee counties in 1880, before the railroad was built, and of 1910, will convince anyone that "population has not yet pressed upon the limits of production." Kephart also said that our "isolation prevented them from moving West . . . and gradually the severe conditions of their life enfeebled them physically and mentally." As opposed to that, Archibald D. Murphey says (Murphey Papers, Vol. II, p. 105) that North Carolina "has sent half a million of her inhabitants to people the wilderness of the West, and it was not until the rage for emigration abated that the public attention was directed to the improvement of their advantages." This was written prior to November, 1819. Besides, anyone who will read the "Sketches of Prominent Families" in this volume will be convinced that Watauga County at least contributed its quota to the winning of the West. Miss Morley graciously records that, instead of deteriorating, the late George W. Vanderbilt put his main reliance on the native mountaineer in the development of his fairyland estate, Biltmore (p. 149). "They were put to work, and, what was of equal value in their development, they were subjected to an almost military discipline. For the first time in generations they were compelled to be prompt. Methodical and continuous in their efforts. And of this there was no complaint. Scotch blood may succumb to enervating surroundings, but at

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the first call to battle it was ready. Not only did the men do the manual labor, but, as time went on, the most capable of them became overseers in the various departments, until finally all the directors of this great estate, excepting a few of the highest officials, were drawn from the ranks of the people, who proved themselves so trustworthy and capable that in all these years only three or four of Biltmore's mountaineer employees have had to be dismissed for inefficiency or bad conduct."

Won the Revolution and Saved the Union.-- Line Tennyson's "foolish yeoman," we have been "too proud to care from whence we came," and it is a singular fact that in spite of all that has been written against us, no Southern mountaineer has taken the trouble to answer our detractors. And, when it is said that we have no annals, Mr. Kephart merely means that we have not written them, for he proceeds to prove that we have annals of the highest order. He credits the mountaineer with having been the principal force which drove the Indians from the Alleghany border (p. 151) and formed the rear-guard of the Revolution and the vanguard in the conquest of the West. He says: "Then came the Revolution. The backwoodsmen were loyal to the American government -- loyal to a man. They not only fought off the Indians from the rear, but sent many of their incomparable riflemen to fight at the front as well. They were the first English-speaking people to use weapons of precision -- the rifle, introduced by the Pennsylvania Dutch about 1700, which was used by our backwoodsmen exclusively throughout the war. They were the first to employ open-order formation in civilized warfare. They were the first outside colonists to assist their New England brethren at the siege of Boston . . . They were mustered in as the first regiment of the Continental Army (being the first troops enrolled by our Congress and the first to serve under a Federal banner). They carried the day at Saratoga, the Cowpens and King's Mountain. From the beginning to the end of the war, they were Washington's favorite troops." As to the Civil War, he says (p. 374): "The Confederated thought that they could throw a line of troops from Wheeling to the Lakes, and Captain Garnett, a West Point

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graduate, started, but got no further than Harpper's Ferry, when mountain men shot from ambush, cut down bridges, and killed Garnett with a bullet from a squirrel rifle at Harper's Ferry. Then the South began to realize what a long, lean, powerful arm of the Union it was that the Southern mountaineer stretched through its very vitals, for that arm helped to hold Kentucky in the Union, kept East Tennessee from aiding the Confederacy and caused West Virginia to secede from Secession!" There was no Breed's Hill nor Bull Run panic among them in the Revolution or in the Civil War period! Has New England, which has a superabundance of annals, any that will compare with these? And yet, it took an outsider to tell us of them!

"Not the Poor Whites of the South". --According to Kephart (p. 356), the poor whites of the South descended mainly from the convicts and indentured servants which England supplied to the Southern plantations before the days of slavery. The cavaliers who founded and dominated Southern society came from the conservative, the feudal element of England. "Their character and training were essentially aristocratic and military. They were not town dwellers, but masters of plantations . . . These servants were obtained from convicted criminals, boys and girls kidnaped from the slums, impoverished people who sold their services for passage to America (p. 357). It was when the laboring classes of Europe had achieved emancipation from serfdom and feudalism was overthrown, that Africa slavery laid the foundation for a new feudalism in the Southern States. Its effect upon white labor was to free them from their thraldom; but being unskilled and untrained, densely ignorant, and from a more or less degraded stock, these shiftless people generally became squatters on the pine barrens, and gradually sank lower in the scale till the slaves themselves were freed by the Civil War. There was then and still is plenty of wild land in the lowlands and they had neither the initiative nor the courage to seek a promised land far away among the unexplored and savage peaks of the western country."

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McKamie Wiseman's View. --This shrewd old mountaineer of Avery County, who is a wise man not only by name, but by nature also, had the true idea of the settlement of these mountains. He said that as population drifted westward from the Atlantic and downwards from western Virginia and Pennsylvania between the mountain troughs, the game was driven into the intervening mountains, and that only the bravest and the hardiest of the frontiersmen of the borders followed it and remained after it had been exterminated. Tradition and early documents bear out this view, the first settlers of the mountains having been almost without exception the men who lived on the mountain-tops, at the heads of creeks and in out-of-the-way places generally, disdaining the fertile bottom lands of the larger streams, preferring the most inaccessible places, because of the proximity to them of the game. Others, with more money and less daring, got the meadows and fertile valleys for agriculture, while the true pioneers dwelt afar in trackless mountains, in hunting camps and caverns, from which they watched their traps and hunted deer, bear and turkeys. The shiftless and disheartened poor whites would soon have perished in this wilderness, but the hunters waxed stronger and braver, and their descendants still people the mountain regions of the South. And he thought, also, that many came down from the New England States because of the religious unrest and dissensions which marked the earlier history of that region, and came where men might worship God in their own way, whether that way were the way of Puritan or Baptist. To use his words, "It was freedom that they were seeking, and it was freedom that they found in these unpeopled mountains." Kephart puts it in another form only when he says (307), "The nature of the mountaineer demands that he have solitude for the unhampered growth of his personality, wing-room for his eagle heart." As another said of the Argonauts, "The cowards never started, and the weaklings died on the way." Mr. Wiseman died in July, 1915.

No Festering Warrens for Them. --Mr. Kephart also tells us (309) that "our highlanders have neither memory nor tradition of ever having been herded together, lorded over, persecuted

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or denied the privileges of free men," and that, "although life has been one long, hard, cruel war against elemental powers, nothing else than warlike arts, nothing short of warlike hazards could have subdued the beasts and savages, felled the forests and made our land habitable for those teeming millions who can exist only in a state of mutual dependence and cultivation." And, more marvelous still, he adds, "By compulsion their self-reliance was more complete; hence, their independence grew more haughty, their individualism more intense. And these traits, exaggerated as they were by the force of environment, remain unweakened among their descendants to the present day."

Co-operation Has Ceased. --In the early time, co-operation was the watchword of the day. Neighbor helped neighbor, freely, gladly and enthusiastically. But, according to Kephart, all this has ceased, and we have become non-sociable, with each man fighting for his own hand, recognizing no social compact. Each is suspicious of the other. "They will not work together zealously, even to improve their neighborhood roads, each mistrusting that the other may gain some trifling advantage over himself, or turn fewer shovelfuls of earth. Labor chiefs fail to organize granges or unions among them because they simply will not stick together . . ." He quoted a Miss Mills as saying, "The mountaineers must awake to a consciousness of themselves as a people." Including all the Southern highlanders, we constitute a distinct ethnic group of close on to four million souls, and with needs and problems identical. The population is almost absolutely unmixed, and completely segregated from each other (p. 311). The one redeeming feature is a passionate attachment for home and family, a survival of the old feudal idea, while the hived and promiscuous life in cities is breaking down the old fealty of kith and kin (p.312). "My family, right or wrong" is said to be our slogan, and it is claimed that this is but the persistence of the old clan fealty to the chief and clansmen.

Moonshining an Inheritance?. --Kephart seems to have made a study of blockading and moonshining, and to have reached the conclusion that they are really an inheritance, coming down to

Page 10 us from our Scotch and Irish ancestors, who resented the English excise law of 1659, which struck at the national drink of the Scotch and Irish, while the English themselves were then content to drink ale. Our forebears killed the gaugers in sparsely settled regions, while the better-to-do people of the towns bribed them. Thus the Scotch-Irish, settled by James I in the north of Ireland, to replace the dispossessed native Hibernians, learned to make whiskey in little stills over peat fires on their hearths, calling it poteen, from the fact that it was made in little pots. Finally, these Scotchh-Irish fell out with the British government and emigrated, for the most part, to western Pennsylvania, where they brought with them an undying hatred of the excise laws. When, therefore, after they had helped to establish a stable government, an excise law was adopted by Congress, these Scotch-Irish were the very first to rebel. And it was to George Washington himself that the task fell of suppressing their resistance to the United States!

The Pennsylvania Whiskey Rebellion. --Owing to bad roads and the want of markets, there was no currency away from the seaboard. But, condensed into distilled spirits, a ready sale and easy transportation were found for the product of the grin of the mountaineers. For they could carry many gallons and a single horse or in a single wagon and get a fair price from people living where money circulated. When, therefore, they were required to pay a heavy tax on their product, they rebelled. When the Federal excisemen went among them, they blackened themselves and tarred and feathered those intruders on their rights. These "revenuers" then resigned, but were replaced by others. If a mountaineer took out a license, a gang of whiskey boys smashed his still and inflicted bodily punishment on him. All attempts to serve warrants resulted resulted in an uprising of the people, and, on July 16, 1794, a company of mountain militia marched to the house of General Neville, in command of the excise forces, and he fired on them, wounding five and killing one. The next day a regiment of 500 mountain men, lead by Tom the Tinker, burned Neville's house and forced him to flee, one of his guard of United States soldiers being killed and several

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wounded. On August 1, 1794, 2,000 armed mountain men met at the historic Braddock Field, and marched on Pittsburg, then a village. A committee of Pittsburg citizens met them. The mob of 5,400 men were then taken into town and treated to strong drink, after which they dispersed. The Governor of Pennsylvania refused to interfere, and Washington called for 15,000 militia to quell the insurrection. He also appointed commissioners to induce the people to submit peacefully. Eighteen ring-leaders were arrested and the rest dispersed. Two of the leaders were convicted, but were afterwards pardoned. Even a secession movement was imminent, but as Jefferson soon became President, the excise law was repealed and peace restored. There was no other excise tax until 1812, when it was renewed, only to be repealed in 1817. From this time till 1862 there was no tax, and after that time it was only twenty cents a gallon. In 1864 it was raised to sixty cents a gallon and later in that year to $1.50, to be followed in 1865 by $2.00 a gallon. The result was again what it had been in Great Britain -- fraud around the centers of population and resistance in the mountains, the current price of distilled spirits even in the North being less than the tax. In 1868 the tax was reduced to fifty cents, and illicit stilling practically ceased, the government collecting during the second year of the existence of this reduced tax three dollars for every one that had been collected before (p. 163). Since then every increase has resulted in moonshining in the mountains and graft in the cities. The whiskey frauds of Grant's administration invaded the very cabinet itself. So it seems the spirit of resistance makes moonshiners of us all, just as Shakespeare said that conscience makes cowards of us all.