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One might have expected that prohibition would be bitterly opposed in Appalachia, in view of the fact that here the old-fashioned principle still prevails, in practice, that moderate drinking is neither a sin nor a disgrace, and that a man has the same right to make his own whiskey as his own soup, if he chooses.
The anemic element thus introduced is less noticeable in Kentucky than in Virginia and the States farther south for the reason, no doubt, that it took at least two axles to reach Kentucky but it exists in all parts of Appalachia. Moreover, the vast roughs of the mountain region offered harborage for outlaws, desperadoes of the border, and here many of them settled and propagated their kind.
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.
Many other old-fashioned terms are preserved in Appalachia that sound delightfully quaint to strangers who never met them outside of books. A married woman is not addressed as Missis by the mountaineers, but as Mistress when they speak formally, and as Mis' or Miz' for a contraction. We will hear an aged man referred to as "old Grandsir'" So-and-So.
To the east lay a land which we may designate as APPALACHIA, whose western shore line was drawn along the site of the present Blue Ridge, but whose other limits are quite unknown. The land of Appalachia must have been large, for it furnished a great amount of waste during the entire Paleozoic era, and its eastern coast may possibly have lain even beyond the edge of the present continental shelf.
The immense deposits of coarse sandstones and sandy shales of the Chemung, which are found off what was at the time the west coast of Appalachia, prove an uplift of that ancient continent. The Chemung series extends from the Catskill Mountains to northeastern Ohio and south to northeastern Tennessee, covering an area of not less than a hundred thousand square miles.
The United States topographers report that in Appalachia, as a whole, the mountain slopes occupy 90 per cent. of the total area, and that 85 per cent. of the land has a steeper slope than one foot in five. So, as the years passed, a larger and larger proportion of the highlanders was forced back along the creek branches and up along the steep hillsides to "scrabble" for a living.
Our aim is not only to relieve the symptom of poverty, but to cure it and, above all, to prevent it. No single piece of legislation, however, is going to suffice. We will launch a special effort in the chronically distressed areas of Appalachia. We must expand our small but our successful area redevelopment program.
Such feuds are by no means prevalent throughout the length and breadth of Appalachia, but are restricted mostly to certain well defined districts, of which the chief, in extent of territory as well as in the number and ferocity of its "wars," is the country round the upper waters of the Kentucky, Licking, Big Sandy, Tug, and Cumberland rivers, embracing many of the mountain counties of eastern Kentucky and adjoining parts of West Virginia, Old Virginia, and Tennessee.
With an inborn taste for the wild and romantic, I yearned for a strange land and a people that had the charm of originality. Again, I had a passion for early American history; and, in Far Appalachia, it seemed that I might realize the past in the present, seeing with my own eyes what life must have been to my pioneer ancestors of a century or two ago.
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