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The scientists are able to tell us, with some definiteness, which came forth first. They say that on the continent of America the earliest born land was a mass of granitic rock in Canada, the Laurentian Hills. The next to peer above the surface and feel the warmth of the sun were peaks and ridges that made islands of themselves, in what are now known as the Rocky Mountains and the Appalachians.
The theory that the southern mountains were peopled mainly by outcasts or refugees from old settlements in the lowlands rests on no other basis than imagination. How the mountains actually were settled is another and a very different story. The first frontiersmen of the Appalachians were those Swiss and Palatine Germans who began flocking into Pennsylvania about 1682.
Of course Michaux was wildly mistaken in thinking Grandfather "the highest mountain in all North America." It is far from being even the highest of the Appalachians. Yet we scarcely know to-day, to a downright certainty, which peak is supreme among our Southern highlands. The honor is conceded to Mount Mitchell in the Black Mountains, northeast of Asheville.
Here in the south, even more clearly than in the north, the valley is bordered on the east by the sharply upstanding range of the crystalline Appalachians, while on the west with equal regularity it comes to an end in an escarpment which rises to the Alleghany plateau. This plateau, the third great band of the Appalachians, begins on the south side of the Mohawk Valley.
No European chain of mountains affords so remarkable an illustration of the persistency of such flexures for a great distance as the Appalachians before alluded to, and none has been studied and described by many good observers with more accuracy.
The high, forest-clad ranges of the Appalachians restricted and hampered their mercantile relations with the older States, and therefore with the Europe which lay beyond; while the giant river offered itself as a huge trade artery to bring them close to all the outer world, if only they were allowed its free use.
In North Carolina, however, they lose their character as a single ridge and expand into the broad mass of the southern Appalachians. There Mount Mitchell dominates the eastern part of the American continent and is surrounded by over thirty other mountains rising to a height of at least six thousand feet.
She is the finest woman west of the Appalachians or east of them. I had matrimonial inclinings toward the paragon myself." "That I know," said the young man, with crabbed acrimony. "Yes, you know that. That is an additional reason, you think, for wishing to meet me in dudgeon.
Indeed, we might also say that our own desperadoes could take lessons from their ancestors of the past generation who lived in the forests of the Mississippi valley. Those were the days when the South was breaking over the Appalachians and exploring the middle and lower West.
Early the next morning, two bold Appalachians rose early and took a run up the mountain, getting back to breakfast and making the descent of nearly 1,200 feet in eighteen minutes! The climb was represented as more difficult than that of the day before.
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