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Updated: June 27, 2025
"The motives of two centuries ago" are the motives of present-day Appalachia. Here the right of private war is not questioned, outside of a judge's charge from the bench, which everybody takes as a mere formality, a convention that is not to be taken seriously.
It is probable that second place among the peaks of Appalachia may belong either to Clingman Dome or Guyot or LeConte, of the Smokies, or to Balsam Cone of the Black Mountains. In any case, the Great Smoky mountains are the master chain of the Appalachian system, the greatest mass of highland east of the Rockies.
The Taconic range, uplifted partially at least at the close of the Ordovician, and the block mountains of the Triassic, together with the pre- Cambrian mountains of ancient Appalachia, had now all been worn to a common level with the Allegheny ranges.
There were but seven such cities in all Appalachia a region larger than England and Scotland combined and these owed their development to outside influences. Only 77 out of 186 mountain counties had towns of 1,000 and upwards. Our highlanders are the most homogeneous people in the United States. In 1900, out of a total population of 3,039,835, there were only 18,617 of foreign birth.
So in Appalachia, one steps shortly from the railway into the primitive. Most of the river valleys are narrow. In their bottoms the soil is rich, the farms well kept and generous, the owners comfortable and urbane. But from the valleys directly spring the mountains, with slopes rising twenty to forty degrees or more.
There are many blacks in the larger valleys and towns, but throughout most of Appalachia the population is almost exclusively white. In 1900, Jackson County, Ky. In many mountain settlements negroes are not allowed to tarry.
At the same time the western land was perhaps connected with the eastern land of Appalachia across Arkansas and Mississippi; for toward the south the Silurian sediments indicate an approach to shore. In this brief sketch it is quite impossible to relate the many changes of species and genera during the Silurian.
Here, then, is Appalachia: one of the great land-locked areas of the globe, more English in speech than Britain itself, more American by blood than any other part of America, encompassed by a high-tensioned civilization, yet less affected to-day by modern ideas, less cognizant of modern progress, than any other part of the English-speaking world. Of course, such an anomaly cannot continue.
Old scores were now to be wiped out in a reign of terror. The open combat of bannered war was turned into the secret ferocity of family feuds. But the mountaineers of to-day are face to face with a mighty change. The feud epoch has ceased throughout the greater part of Appalachia. A new era dawns. Everywhere the highways of civilization are pushing into remote mountain fastnesses.
We see here a survival, very real and widespread, in this twentieth-century Appalachia, of a condition that was general throughout the Scotch Highlands in the far past. "The great virtue of the Highlander," says Lecky, "was his fidelity to his chief and to his clan.
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