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The mountains, to those who ever heard of them, suggested nothing but laborious climbing amid mysterious and portentous perils. The poor whites were not highlanders by descent, nor had they a whit of the bold, self-reliant spirit of our western pioneers. They never entered Appalachia until after it had been won and settled by a far manlier race, and even then they went only in driblets.
Evidently subsidence was in progress where these rocks were deposited. The eastern border of Appalachia was now depressed. The oldland was warping, and long belts of country lying parallel to the shore subsided, forming troughs in which thousands of feet of sediment now gathered.
We must bring the spark of private enterprise to every corner of America, to build a bridge from Wall Street to Appalachia to the Mississippi Delta, to our Native American communities, with more support for community development banks for empowerment zones, for 100,000 more vouchers for affordable housing.
This was a necessity in the old Indian-fighting days, and throughout the kukluxing and white-capping era following the Civil War. Such a habit, once formed, is hard to eradicate. Even to-day, in all parts of Appalachia that I am familiar with, most of the young men, I judge, and many of the older ones, carry concealed weapons.
'Jim's got the skins of a lot o' varmints up in the loft. Mebbe you can find one up thar." The first settlers of Appalachia mainly were Presbyterians, as became Scotch-Irishmen, but they fell away from that faith, partly because the wilderness was too poor to support a regular ministry, and partly because it was too democratic for Calvinism with its supreme authority of the clergy.
The deed done, he flies to the maquis, the mountain thicket, and there he will hide, dodging the gendarmes, fighting off his enemies an outlaw with a price upon his head, but pitied or admired by all Corsicans outside the feud, and succored by his clan. It is a far cry from the Mediterranean to our own Appalachia: so why this prelude? Our mountaineers never heard of Corsica.
After Wolf-Pen Gap and its vicinity had been left behind, the unspeakable wildness of the country gave way abruptly, as it so often does in Appalachia, to higher grounds where for a little way the roads run through almost parklike stretches, now silver and cobalt under a high moon.
In my own county and all those adjoining it there has been only one case of highway robbery and only one of murder for money, so far as I can learn, in the past forty years. The mountain code of conduct is a curious mixture of savagery and civility. Anyone of tact and common sense can go as he pleases through the darkest corner of Appalachia without being molested.
A neighbor said to me of another: "He has a gredge agin all creation, and glories in human misery." So would anyone else who ate at the same table. Many a homicide in the mountains can be traced directly to bad food and the raw whiskey taken to appease a soured stomach. Every stranger in Appalachia is quick to note the high percentage of defectives among the people.
So, too, in the rudest communities of Appalachia, among the most trifling and unmoral natives of this region, among the illiterate and hide-bound, there still is much to excite admiration and good hope.
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