Those who dwell there are the direct descendants of pioneers. Here they
had lived for generations unmolested by the rush and hurry for homes to
the more fertile West. Often in those days a mountain neighbor was forty
miles away, and they were long rugged miles. To-day a traveler distant
on the mountainside can be recognized by the mountaineers while the
man's features are still untraceable, by the droop of a hat or a
peculiar walk, or amble of the mule he rides. In the case of any
traveler along those remote roads the odds are long that the man, his
father, his grandfather--as far back as anyone can remember--all were
born and raised in the neighborhood, and the neighborhood is the valleys
and the cleared spaces on the sides of all the mountains near around.
So the mountaineer of to-day is the transplanted colonist of the
eighteenth century; he is the backwoodsman of the days of Andrew
Jackson; his life has the hospitality, the genuineness and simplicity of
the pioneer. It has been said of the residents of the Cumberland
Mountains that they are the purest Anglo-Saxons to be found to-day and
not even England can produce so clear a strain.
The mountain families have intermarried and because of the
inaccessibility of their homes have remained marooned in their mountain
fastnesses. They are Anglo-Saxon in their blood and their customs.
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