ographical Journal_, of London, in
1901, gave us some examples:

"These Kentucky mountaineers are not only cut off from the outside
world, but they are separated from each other. Each is confined to
his own locality, and finds his little world within a radius of a
few miles from his cabin. There are many men in these mountains who
have never seen a town, or even the poor village that constitutes
their county-seat.... The women ... are almost as rooted as the
trees. We met one woman who, during the twelve years of her married
life, had lived only ten miles across the mountain from her own
home, but had never in this time been back home to visit her father
and mother. Another back in Perry county told me she had never been
farther from home than Hazard, the county-seat, which is only six
miles distant. Another had never been to the post-office, four
miles away; and another had never seen the ford of the Rockcastle
River, only two miles from her home, and marked, moreover, by the
country store of the district."

When I first went into the Smokies, I stopped one night in a single-room
log cabin, and soon had the good people absorbed in my tales of travel
beyond the seas. Finally the housewife said to me, with pathetic
resignation: "Bushnell's the furdest ever I've been." Bushnell, at that
time, was a hamlet of thirty people, only seven miles from where we sat.
When I lived alone on "the Little Fork of Sugar Fork of Hazel Creek,"
there were women in the neighborhood, young and old, who had never seen
a railroad, and men who had never boarded a train, although the Murphy
branch ran within sixteen miles of our post-office. The first time that
a party of these people went to the railroad, they were uneasy and
suspicious. Nearing the way-station, a girl in advance came upon the
first negro she ever saw in her life, and ran screaming back: "My
goddamighty, Mam, thar's the boogerman--I done seed him!"

But before discussing the mountain people and their problems, let us
take an imaginary balloon voyage over their vast domain. South of the
Potomac the Blue Ridge is a narrow rampart rising abruptly from the
east, one or two thousand feet above its base, and descending sharply to
the Shenandoah Valley on the west. Across the Valley begin the
Alleghanies. These mountains, from the Potomac through to the northern
Tennessee border, consist of a multitude of n