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Updated: June 8, 2025
No one looking into his kindly gray eyes would suspect that they belonged to one who had seen as hard and dangerous service in the Revenue Department as any man then living. In an easy, unassuming way he told me many stories of his own adventures among moonshiners and counterfeiters in the old days when these southern Appalachians fairly swarmed with desperate characters.
An interesting crop in our neighborhood was ginseng, of which there were several patches in cultivation. This curious plant is native throughout the Appalachians, but has been exterminated in all but the wildest regions, on account of the high price that its dried root brings.
France now formally asserted her right to all countries drained by streams emptying into the St. Lawrence, the Great Lakes, and the Mississippi. This vast empire would have extended from the comb of the Rockies on the west discovered in 1743 by the brothers La Vérendrye to the crest of the Appalachians on the east, thus including the western part of New York and New England.
The anthracite and plumbago associated with hypogene rocks may have been coal; for not only is coal converted into anthracite in the vicinity of some trap dikes, but we have seen that a like change has taken place generally even far from the contact of igneous rocks, in the disturbed region of the Appalachians.
Spain was to resume possession of the Floridas, insuring thereby the coveted unbroken coast line on the Gulf. The vast area between the Mississippi and the Appalachians and south of the Ohio was to be an Indian territory, half under Spanish and half under American "protection."
Down this old winding trail into the greatest valley of all the world, and beyond that valley out into the Spanish country, moved steadily the adventurers whose fathers had but recently crossed the Appalachians. One of the strongest thrusts of the American civilization thus entered the cattle-range at its lower end, between the Rio Grande and the Red River.
Fifty-five miles north of Staunton an isolated chain of mountains known as the Massanutten range, which is high and abrupt, divides the valley for more than forty miles until at Strassburg it falls again suddenly to the plain. Like the Appalachians it breaks into two ridges Massanutten and Kells mountain."
The wars had to be paid for; a policy for governing the new territories had to be formulated; the Indian tribes beyond the Appalachians had to be pacified and protected; and Britain had to remain "at the ready" to defend her newly-won position of power. Neither France, nor Spain, was about to give in easily. The French, particularly, were awaiting the chance to challenge the British.
Before us rose visions of the airy forms of the Alps, the beautiful and majestic wall of the Pyranees, the dark, forbidding masses of the Eifel, and then the various ranges of the Appalachians. The answer was that all are beautiful, each possessing its own peculiar charm. All are ours to enjoy as long as we behold their outlines; yes, longer, for no one can erase them from our memory.
After the economy was flourishing, there would be a chance for finding the riches in the mountains to the west and the longed-for passage to the South Sea, so confidently believed to lie just beyond the Appalachians. All these enterprises presupposed the "winning of the Forest" between the York and the James, which Wyatt hoped to accomplish by means of his palisade scheme.
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