184 THE ALPINE REGION. 



mountain cliffs indicate the occurrence here, in the remote past, of a great 

 fissure or crevasse in the earth's crust, a gigantic fault when tlie southern 

 slopes fell down hundreds of feet and exposed the precipitous rock w^alls 

 that now face the southeast. 



The boundary line of South Carolina reaches the most easterly chain 

 of the Appalachian mountains, known here as the Saluda mountains, 

 near the corner of Greenville and Spartanburg counties, and follows the 

 summits of the ridge for fifty miles (thirty miles in an air line) until it 

 intersects the old Cherokee Indian boundary line. From this point the 

 mountain chain, here called the Blue Ridge, curving lightly to the north, 

 passes out of the State, and the boundary line pursues a more southerly 

 and a straight course to where the east branch of the Chatuga river in- 

 tersects the thirty-fifth degree of north latitude. The Chatuga, flowing 

 westward to its junction with the Tugaloo river, which in turn becomes 

 the Savannah river, flowing to the southeast, are the northwestern and 

 western boundaries of the State. The mountain chain divides the w^aters 

 of the State flowing to the Atlantic Ocean from those flowing northward, 

 which eventually find issuance to the southwest through the Tennessee 

 and Mississippi rivers into the Gulf of Mexico. Considering the water-shed 

 of South Carolina alone, the culminating point wdience the rivers of this 

 section flow, is to be found in the horse-shoe curve of the mountain chain 

 north of the straight boundary line referred to as uniting the Chatuga 

 and the Blue Ridge. Hence the numerous sources of the Keowee river, 

 White Water, Toxaway, Jocassee and other creeks take their rise and flow 

 nearly due south. The main stream of the Saluda sw^eeps away to the 

 east, and the Chatuga hurries westward. 



It was from a noted summit" of this range (Whiteside) that Mr. James 

 E. Calhoun observed, as early as 1825, that the character of the mountains 

 change from an unbroken chain to isolated masses towards the south. 

 Such isolated masses form a striking feature of the mountains of South 

 Carolina, and they make their appearance over a wide area of the State, 

 extending w^est and east from Stump House mountain, near Walhalla, in 

 Oconee county, past Paris mountain, in Greenville, Gilke's mountain, in 

 Union, to King's mountain and Henry's Knob, in York. Southward 

 they reach to Bird's mountain, in Laurens, Parson's mountain in Abbe- 

 ville, and Ruft's mountain on the Newberry and Lexington line. The 

 narrow^ mountain ridge that divides the river system of the Mississippi 

 from that of the Atlantic slope, and the interdigitation, as it were, of the 

 sources of the Hiwassee and Tennessee with those of the Savannah, have 

 long suggested to engineers the possibility of establishing an interflow , 

 between these w^aters. A canal, Mr. Calhoun says, across Rabun Gap 

 would pour thirty-five miles of smooth water from the Little Tennessee 



