es and
nationalities, united only by the bond of a common interest, blended into
one people and became known to their lowland neighbors as _Gortze_, or
"mountaineers." From a mere assemblage of stragglers, fugitives and
vagabonds they developed in the course of four or five hundred years into
a brave, hardy, self-reliant people, and as early as the eighth century
they had established in the mountains of Daghestan a large number of
so-called _volnea obshesve_, or "free societies," governed by elective
franchise, without any distinction of birth or rank. After this time they
were never conquered. Both the Turks and the Persians at different periods
held the nominal sovereignty of the country, but, so far as the
mountaineers were concerned, it was only nominal. Army after army was sent
against them, only to return broken and defeated, until at last among the
Persians it passed into a proverb, "If the shah becomes too proud, let him
make war on the mountaineers of the Caucasus." In 1801 these hitherto
unconquered highlanders came into conflict with the resistless power of
Russia, and after a desperate struggle of fifty-eight years they were
finally subdued and the Caucasus became a Russian province.

At the present time the mountaineers as a class, from the Circassians of
the Black Sea coast to the Lesghians of the Caspian, may be roughly
described as a fierce, hardy, liberty-loving people, whose component
members have descended from ancestors of widely different origin, and are
separable into tribes or clans of very different outward appearance, but
nevertheless alike in all the characteristics which grow out of and depend
upon topographical environment. They number altogether about a million and
a half, and are settled in little isolated stone villages throughout the
whole extent of the range from the Black Sea to the Caspian at heights
varying from three to nine thousand feet. They maintain themselves chiefly
by pasturing sheep upon the mountains and cultivating a little wheat,
millet and Indian corn in the valleys; and before the Russian conquest
they were in the habit of eking out this scanty subsistence from time to
time by plundering raids into the rich neighboring lowlands of Kakhetia
and Georgia. In religion they are nearly all Mohammedans, the Arabs having
overrun the country and introduced the faith of Islam as early as the
eighth century. In the more remote and inaccessible parts of the Eastern
Caucasus there sti