espie's Gap, over the pathway that
hung like a narrow ribbon about the breast of Roan Mountain, lifting its
crest in dignified isolation sixty-three hundred feet above the levels.
The "Unakas" was the name the Cherokees had given to those white men who
first invaded their hills; and the Unakas is the name that white men at
last gave to the mountain.

Great companies of men were to come over the mountain paths on their way
to the Mississippi country and beyond; and with them, as we know, were
to go many of these mountain men, to pass away with their customs in the
transformations that come with progress. But there were others who
clung to these hills. They were of several stocks--English, Scotch,
Highlanders, Ulstermen, who mingled by marriage and sometimes took their
mates from among the handsome maids of the Cherokees. They spread from
the Unakas of Tennessee into the Cumberland Mountains of Kentucky; and
they have remained to this day what they were then, a primitive folk
of strong and fiery men and brave women living as their forefathers of
Watauga and Holston lived. In the log cabins in those mountains today
are heard the same ballads, sung still to the dulcimer, that entertained
the earliest settlers. The women still turn the old-fashioned spinning
wheels. The code of the men is still the code learned perhaps from
the Gaels--the code of the oath and the feud and the open door to the
stranger. Or were these, the ethical tenets of almost all uncorrupted
primitive tribes, transmitted from the Indian strain and association?
Their young people marry at boy and girl ages, as the pioneers did, and
their wedding festivities are the same as those which made rejoicing at
the first marriage in Watauga. Their common speech today contains words
that have been obsolete in England for a hundred years.

Thrice have the mountain men come down again from their fastnesses to
war for America since the day of King's Mountain and thrice they
have acquitted themselves so that their deeds are noted in history. A
souvenir of their part in the War of 1812 at the Battle of the Thames
is kept in one of the favorite names for mountain girls--"Lake Erie." In
the Civil War many volunteers from the free, non-slaveholding mountain
regions of Kentucky and Tennessee joined the Union Army, and it is said
that they exceeded all others in stature and physical development. And
in our own day their sons again came down from the mountains to carry
the to