APPALACHIAN NATIONAL PARK 29 
mountaineer is seeing a new light. The appearance 
of gullies that ruin his land, the washing-away of his 
soil, the drowning of his valleys, the drying-upof his 
life-giving springs, these things he is beginning to 
notice with consternation and to ask the reason why, 
so that the race will soon have passed to which be- 
longs the man who recently declared that in his 
opinion the people would be better off if there was 
not a tree on the mountains. Of course what he saw 
in imagination was a land covered with grain-fields, 
but he is discovering that the destruction of the trees 
is not followed by fertile acres; in short, that his 
beloved mountains were not designed by nature for 
grain- fields. 
The inaccessibility of the Southern mountains long 
saved them, and now, thanks to the new impulse, 
the Southern Appalachians will escape, to an extent, 
at least, the most serious dangers of lumbering, 
though they can no longer escape the lumber- 
man, who is swinging his axe on the most "inaccess- 
ible" coves and peaks of the Great Smokies them- 
selves, "the largest lumber company in the world" 
having recently purchased an enormous tract of two 
hundred and fifty thousand acres of virgin forest in 
the North Carolina mountains, forests containing, 
besides spruce and hemlock, some of the finest hard- 
wood trees ever grown here, notable among which 
are tulip and cherry, the latter having long since 
been removed from the more accessible forests. But 
fortunately this lumber company, in its methods of 
handling the trees, belongs to the new era. Under 
