Our Southern Highlanders: a narrative of adventure in the southern Appalachians and a study of the life among the mountaineers

Kephart, Horace

Nine years have passed since this book first came from the press. My log cabin on the Little Fork of Sugar Fork has fallen in ruin. The great forest wherein it nestled is falling, too, before the loggers' steel. A railroad has pierced the wilderness. A graded highway crosses the county. There are mill towns where newcomers dwell. An aeroplane has passed over the county seat. Mountain boys are listening, through instruments of their own construction, to concerts played a thousand miles away. We have had the war. We are having an attempt at prohibition. Even in farthest Appalachia people realize that the world has been upset, and that old ways, old notions, old convictions perhaps, must give place to new ones.And yet, if one strolling along our new Asheville-to-Atlanta highway should step aside at the first brook crossing, turn "up the branch," and follow the rough by-road that steeply ascends the glen, he would come presently to a log cabin where time still lingers a century belated. The old-fashioned hospitality would be offered him with right good will. And if he tarried (who would not?) he would observe something of the pioneer life this book describes. They die hard, those old ways, in the mountains. Some of them were good ways, too. They were picturesque, at least. I have tried to give a true picture of life among the southern mountaineers, as I have found it during eighteen years of intimate association with them. This book deals with the mass of the mountain people. It is not concerned with the relatively few townsmen, and prosperous valley farmers, who owe to outside influences all that distinguishes them from their back-country kinsmen. The real mountaineers are the multitude of little farmers living up the branches and on the steep hillsides, away from the main-traveled roads, who have been shaped by their own environment. They are the ones who interest the reading public; and this is as it should be; for they are original, they are "characters." No one book can give a complete survey of mountain life in all its aspects. Much must be left out. I have chosen to write about those features that seemed to me most picturesque. The narrative is to be taken literally. There is not a line of fiction or exaggeration in it. Our Southern Highlanders was first published in 1913. It has had several printings in the original form. In the present edition I have corrected errors of the press, and one or two of my own, but otherwise, no alteration has been made of the text. I have continued the story of moonshining to the present day, and have added three new chapters: The Snake-Stick Man, A Raid into the Sugarlands, and The Killing of Hoi Rose.