ered by high
mountains, 3,000 to 6,700 feet above sea-level.]

OUR SOUTHERN HIGHLANDERS

OUR SOUTHERN HIGHLANDERS

CHAPTER I

"SOMETHING HIDDEN; GO AND FIND IT"

In one of Poe's minor tales, written in 1845, there is a vague allusion
to wild mountains in western Virginia "tenanted by fierce and uncouth
races of men." This, so far as I know, was the first reference in
literature to our Southern mountaineers, and it stood as their only
characterization until Miss Murfree ("Charles Egbert Craddock") began
her stories of the Cumberland hills.

Time and retouching have done little to soften our Highlander's
portrait. Among reading people generally, South as well as North, to
name him is to conjure up a tall, slouching figure in homespun, who
carries a rifle as habitually as he does his hat, and who may tilt its
muzzle toward a stranger before addressing him, the form of salutation
being:

"Stop thar! Whut's you-unses name? Whar's you-uns a-goin' ter?"

Let us admit that there is just enough truth in this caricature to give
it a point that will stick. Our typical mountaineer is lank, he is
always unkempt, he is fond of toting a gun on his shoulder, and his
curiosity about a stranger's name and business is promptly, though
politely, outspoken. For the rest, he is a man of mystery. The great
world outside his mountains knows almost as little about him as he does
of it; and that is little indeed. News in order to reach him must be of
such widespread interest as fairly to fall from heaven; correspondingly,
scarce any incidents of mountain life will leak out unless they be of
sensational nature, such as the shooting of a revenue officer in
Carolina, the massacre of a Virginia court, or the outbreak of another
feud in "bloody Breathitt." And so, from the grim sameness of such
reports, the world infers that battle, murder, and sudden death are
commonplaces in Appalachia.

To be sure, in Miss Murfree's novels, as in those of John Fox, Jr., and
of Alice MacGowan, we do meet characters more genial than feudists and
illicit distillers; none the less, when we have closed the book, who is
it that stands out clearest as type and pattern of the mountaineer? Is
it not he of the long rifle and peremptory challenge? And whether this
be because he gets most of the limelight, or because we have a furtive
liking for that sort of thing (on paper), or whether the armed outlaw be
indeed a genuine protagonist--in any case,