THE EARLY SETTLERS 143 
mountain "ranges" for practically eight months of 
the year. The reason for their remaining after the 
easy conditions of pioneer life had passed are, first, 
because those who remained were not those who 
came, but their descendants, born and raised in the 
wilderness, inured to its life of want and of freedom, 
and with no knowledge of any different life. And 
then, they were imprisoned in their mountain fast- 
nesses because of lack of means of communication, 
in part the result of obstacles presented by the slave 
states that surrounded them like an unnavigable 
sea; by lack of communication and by the condi- 
tions of life in the lowlands where the black man was 
king as well as slave. As time went on, they were 
forgotten by the rest of the world, which they in 
turn forgot. 
Excepting in a few places where people came a 
little while each summer for pleasure, and where the 
traffic of the mountains passed out, the mountaineer 
had no contact with the outside world. Even the 
coming of the summer visitors, who, in the early 
days, brought their own servants in the form of 
slaves, did not to any extent influence the lives of 
the natives. To get a living from the poor soil re- 
quired all their energies, the mild climate indispos- 
ing them to exertion beyond that needed to supply 
the merest necessaries of life. And so it happened 
that for a hundred years or more most of them were 
completely lost to the world. 
Bad blood there was among them as well as good, 
and brave men as well as weak ones. The brave as 
