the Appalachian people remain
in public estimation to-day, as Poe judged them, an uncouth and fierce
race of men, inhabiting a wild mountain region little known.

The Southern highlands themselves are a mysterious realm. When I
prepared, eight years ago, for my first sojourn in the Great Smoky
Mountains, which form the master chain of the Appalachian system, I
could find in no library a guide to that region. The most diligent
research failed to discover so much as a magazine article, written
within this generation, that described the land and its people. Nay,
there was not even a novel or a story that showed intimate local
knowledge. Had I been going to Teneriffe or Timbuctu, the libraries
would have furnished information a-plenty; but about this housetop of
eastern America they were strangely silent; it was _terra incognita_.

On the map I could see that the Southern Appalachians cover an area much
larger than New England, and that they are nearer the center of our
population than any other mountains that deserve the name. Why, then, so
little known? Quaintly there came to mind those lines familiar to my
boyhood: "Get you up this way southward, and go up into the mountain;
and see the land, what it is; and the people that dwelleth therein,
whether they be strong or weak, few or many; and what the land is that
they dwell in, whether it be good or bad; and what cities they be that
they dwell in, whether in tents, or in strongholds; and what the land
is, whether it be fat or lean, whether there be wood therein or not."

In that dustiest room of a great library where "pub. docs." are stored,
I unearthed a government report on forestry that gave, at last, a clear
idea of the lay of the land. And here was news. We are wont to think of
the South as a low country with sultry climate; yet its mountain chains
stretch uninterruptedly southwestward from Virginia to Alabama, 650
miles in an air line. They spread over parts of eight contiguous States,
and cover an area somewhat larger than England and Scotland, or about
the same as that of the Alps. In short, the greatest mountain system of
eastern America is massed in our Southland. In its upper zone one sleeps
under blankets the year round.

In all the region north of Virginia and east of the Black Hills of
Dakota there is but one summit (Mount Washington, in New Hampshire) that
reaches 6,000 feet above sea level, and there are only a dozen others
that exceed 5,000 feet. By co