At length through Cumberland Gap following Boone's Wilderness Trail came
the ancestors of David Crockett, Samuel Houston, John C. Calhoun,
"Stonewall" Jackson, and Abraham Lincoln. The Boones and Lincolns had
been neighbors back in Pennsylvania in one of the most German
settlements. Yet both families themselves were English.

THE MOUNTAINEER

Difficulties of communication are enough to explain the isolation of
mountaineers. For long years, even until yesterday, the only roads were
the beds of tortuous and rockstrewn watercourses that were dry when you
started at sunup and were suddenly transformed by a downpour to swollen,
turbulent streams, perilous even to ford.

But for all that, in 1803 there were a million settlers in the southern
highlands. Hardships of life there might have shaken a man's faith but
not his love of the country. In Kentucky alone in 1834 there were 500
pensioners of the Revolution. And when the guns roared at the opening of
the Civil War, the southern highlanders sent 180,000 riflemen to the
Union Army.

An isolated people drops easily into illiteracy. Cut off as the mountain
men were from the outside world, they knew little of what was going on
beyond their mountain walls. Even if newspapers had found their way to
the mountaineer's cabin they would have been of little use to men who
could not read. On the other hand, had the mountain men known of the
great westward movement toward the plains few of them could have joined
the caravans. The mountaineer had no money because he had no way to
produce money. For that reason he could not even reach the nearest
lowlands. Even if he had moved down into the lowlands he could not hope
to own land but would only have fallen once more into the unbearable
state of his forbears in Ulster--that of tenant, or menial, with
proprietors and bosses to harass his life. This peril alone was enough,
aside from the lack of money, to make the highlander shrink from the
society of the lowlands. The few who straggled down were glad enough to
return to the cloister of the mountains. Besides the mountaineer didn't
like the climate or the water down there. The sparkling, cool mountain
brook, the constant breeze and bracing air were much more to his liking.
Indeed the climate has had its effect upon the mountaineer, not only
upon his physical being--he is tall and stalwart; few mountain men are
dwarfed--but the bracing air enables him to toil f