nds what he would call a "Dutchman or a Dago." The fellow
studied a bit and then replied: "Them's the outlandish."

[Illustration: A Family of Pioneers in the Twentieth Century]

Foreigner, outlander, it is all one; we are "different," we are "quar,"
to the mountaineer. He knows he is an American; but his conception of
the metes and bounds of America is vague to the vanishing point. As for
countries over-sea--well, when a celebrated Nebraskan returned from his
trip around the globe, one of my backwoods neighbors proudly informed
me: "I see they give Bryan a lot of receptions when he kem back from the
other world."

No one can understand the attitude of our highlanders toward the rest of
the earth until he realizes their amazing isolation from all that lies
beyond the blue, hazy skyline of their mountains. Conceive a shipload of
emigrants cast away on some unknown island, far from the regular track
of vessels, and left there for five or six generations, unaided and
untroubled by the growth of civilization. Among the descendants of such
a company we would expect to find customs and ideas unaltered from the
time of their forefathers. And that is just what we do find to-day among
our castaways in the sea of mountains. Time has lingered in Appalachia.
The mountain folk still live in the eighteenth century. The progress of
mankind from that age to this is no heritage of theirs.

Our backwoodsmen of the Blue Ridge and the Unakas, of their connecting
chains, and of the outlying Cumberlands, are still thinking essentially
the same thoughts, still living in much the same fashion, as did their
ancestors in the days of Daniel Boone. Nor is this their fault. They are
a people of keen intelligence and strong initiative when they can see
anything to win. But, as President Frost says, they have been
"beleaguered by nature." They are belated--ghettoed in the midst of a
civilization that is as aloof from them as if it existed only on another
planet. And so, in order to be fair and just with these, our backward
kinsmen, we must, for the time, decivilize ourselves to the extent of
_going back_ and getting an eighteenth century point of view.

But, first, how comes it that the mountain folk have been so long
detached from the life and movement of their times? Why are they so
foreign to present-day Americanism that they innocently call all the
rest of us foreigners?

The answer lies on the map. They are creatures of environment, enm