alo and elk and beaver had been
driven out of Tennessee and Kentucky, and those rolling savannahs were
being fenced and tilled, that much attention was given to the mountains
proper. Then small companies of hunters and trappers from both east and
west began to move into the highlands and settle there.

These explorers, pushing outward from the cross-mountain trails in every
direction, found many interesting things that had been overlooked in the
scurry of migration westward. They discovered fair river valleys and
rich coves, adapted to tillage, which soon attracted settlers of a
better class; and so, gradually, the mountain solitudes began to echo
with the ring of axes and the lowing of herds. By 1830 about a million
permanent settlers occupied the southern Appalachians. Naturally, most
of them came from adjoining regions--from the foot of the Blue Ridge on
one side and from the foot of the Unakas or of the Cumberlands on the
other, and hence they were chiefly of the same frontier stock that we
have been describing. No colonies of farmers from a distance ever have
been imported into the mountains, down to our own day.

Deterioration of the mountain people began as soon as population began
to press upon the limits of subsistence. At first, naturally, the best
people among the mountaineers were attracted to the best lands. And
there to-day, in the generous river valleys, we find a class of
citizens superior to the average mountaineers that we have been
considering in this book. But the number and extent of such valleys was
narrowly limited. The United States topographers report that in
Appalachia, as a whole, the mountain slopes occupy 90 per cent. of the
total area, and that 85 per cent. of the land has a steeper slope than
one foot in five. So, as the years passed, a larger and larger
proportion of the highlanders was forced back along the creek branches
and up along the steep hillsides to "scrabble" for a living.

It will be asked, Why did not this overplus do as other crowded
Americans did: move west?

First, because they were so immured in the mountains, so utterly cut off
from communication with the outer world, that they did not know anything
about the opportunities offered new settlers in far-away lands. Moving
"west" to them would have meant merely going a few days' wagon-travel
down into the lowlands of Kentucky or Tennessee, which already were
thickly settled by a people of very different social class. Here