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Updated: May 8, 2025
We had with us a Harvard professor, a topographical surveyor, an amateur photographer, a Concord philosopher and the champion walker of the club. Apropos of some of the feats of the latter a story was told of the man who walked forty miles in two hours. This was putting the Appalachians entirely in the shade, and the story called forth incredulous remarks.
The plains of North America form the third of the four main physical divisions of the continent. For the most part they lie between the great western cordillera on one side and the Laurentian and Appalachian highlands on the other. Yet they lap around the southern end of the Appalachians and run far up the Atlantic coast to New York.
Between them lay a vast and beautiful region where no tribe dared dwell, but into which all ventured now and then for war and hunting. The southwestern Indians were called Appalachians by the olden writers, because this was the name then given to the southern Alleghanies.
Along the western Appalachians, from Virginia to Georgia, the mountain folds are broken by more than fifteen parallel thrust planes, running from northeast to southwest, along which the older strata have been pushed westward over the younger.
Gold was taken in large quantities from the Appalachians. There were about five thousand miles of railroad in the country as compared with the something more than one thousand miles which it had in 1833. The telegraph was following the railroads.
Minneapolis, Omaha, etc., would not pay 3 cents premium for the best eggs produced, but cities of the same size east of the Appalachians and especially in New England, will pay a good premium. The Far West or the mountain districts will pay up better than the Mississippi Valley.
It may interest the reader to know that a species of American dog existed in the Southern Appalachians down to a very recent time recent, at least, in a geological sense. The remains of one of these animals were found by the writer in a cave in East Tennessee, near Cumberland Gap. From the fragments of the skeleton, Mr. J. A. Allen has described the species.
Farther south both the crystalline band and the Alleghany plateau become more difficult to traverse, so that communication between the Atlantic coast and the Mississippi Valley is reduced to small proportions. Happy is New York in its situation where no one of the three bands of the Appalachians opposes any obstacle.
Tear away from his native rock your Switzer, your Tyrolean, your Basque, your Montenegrin, and all alike are stricken with homesickness beyond speech or cure. At the first chance they will return, and thenceforth will cling to their patrimonies, however poor these be. So, too, our man of the Appalachians. "I went down into the valley, wunst, and I declar I nigh sultered!
By 1830 about a million permanent settlers occupied the southern Appalachians. Naturally, most of them came from adjoining regions from the foot of the Blue Ridge on one side and from the foot of the Unakas or of the Cumberlands on the other, and hence they were chiefly of the same frontier stock that we have been describing.
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