140 THE CAROLINA MOUNTAINS 
reasons and at different times, drifted in from the 
eastern lowlands as well as down from the North. 
Most of the writers tell us rather loosely that the 
Southern mountains were originally peopled with 
refugees of one sort and another, among whom were 
criminals exported to the New World from England, 
which, they might as well add, was the case with the 
whole of the newly discovered continent, America 
being the open door of refuge for the world's op- 
pressed. Hither fled dissenters from all sorts of es- 
tablished form, from French Hugenots to convicts, 
a company of seekers who, for the most part, were 
to fulfill a high destiny in the making of a nation. 
The popular writers, in speaking of the origin of 
the "Mountain Whites," rather insist upon the 
criminals, perhaps because of their sensational 
value, but one can find no evidence that these male- 
factors, many of them "indentured servants" sent 
over for the use of the colonies, made a practice of 
coming to the mountains when their term of serv^i- 
tude expired. And knowing the manner in which 
many of these white slaves, wretched precursors of 
the black slaves, were procured, without any other 
fault of theirs than their helplessness, one need not 
tremble with fear at thought of them. 
The truth is, the same people who occupied Vir- 
ginia and the eastern part of the Carolinas peopled 
the western mountains, English predominating, and 
in course of time there drifted down from Mrginia 
large numbers of Scotch-Irish, who, after the events 
of 1730, fled in such numbers to the New World, and 
