ntrast, south of the Potomac there are
forty-six peaks, and forty-one miles of dividing ridges, that rise above
6,000 feet, besides 288 mountains and some 300 miles of divide that
stand more than 5,000 feet above the sea. In North Carolina alone the
mountains cover 6,000 square miles, with an _average_ elevation of 2,700
feet, and with twenty-one peaks that overtop Mount Washington.

I repeated to myself: "Why, then, so little known?" The Alps and the
Rockies, the Pyrennees and the Harz are more familiar to the American
people, in print and picture, if not by actual visit, than are the
Black, the Balsam, and the Great Smoky Mountains. It is true that summer
tourists flock to Asheville and Toxaway, Linville and Highlands, passing
their time at modern hotels and motoring along a few macadamed roads,
but what do they see of the billowy wilderness that conceals most of the
native homes? Glimpses from afar. What do they learn of the real
mountaineer? Hearsay. For, mark you, nine-tenths of the Appalachian
population are a sequestered folk. The typical, the average mountain
man prefers his native hills and his primitive ancient ways.

We read more and talk more about the Filipinos, see more of the Chinese
and the Syrians, than of these three million next-door Americans who are
of colonial ancestry and mostly of British stock. New York, we say, is a
cosmopolitan city; more Irish than in Dublin, more Germans than in
Munich, more Italians than in Rome, more Jews than in nine Jerusalems;
but how many New Yorkers ever saw a Southern mountaineer? I am sure that
a party of hillsmen fresh from the back settlements of the Unakas, if
dropped on the streets of any large city in the Union, and left to their
own guidance, would stir up more comment (and probably more trouble)
than would a similar body of whites from any other quarter of the earth;
and yet this same odd people is more purely bred from old American stock
than any other element of our population that occupies, by itself, so
great a territory.

The mountaineers of the South are marked apart from all other folks by
dialect, by customs, by character, by self-conscious isolation. So true
is this that they call all outsiders "furriners." It matters not whether
your descent be from Puritan or Cavalier, whether you come from
Boston or Chicago, Savannah or New Orleans, in the mountains you are a
"furriner." A traveler, puzzled and scandalized at this, asked a native
of the Cumberla