146 THE CAROLINA MOUNTAINS 
self as good as his neighbors, Irrespective of who has 
the biggest cornfield; and so old-fashioned that he 
believes progress to be a menace against his personal 
freedom, a thing to be combated at every point. His 
long-continued, almost communal life in a free wil- 
derness, where every one had a right to do what he 
pleased, — hunting, fishing, pasturing, even cutting 
down trees wherever it happened to suit his conven- 
ience, — made for him the acceptance of other ideas 
of property rights peculiarly difficult. He gladly 
sold his land to the newcomer whose slaughter of the 
forests he understood, but if the purchaser, instead 
of destroying, tried to preserve the forest land, pro- 
hibiting burning-over, pasturing, and common use 
of the territory — then there was trouble. Also the 
inalienable right to hunt and fish when and where 
he pleased was a part of the faith of the mountaineer, 
whose long sojourn in the wilderness had ingrained 
in him primitive ideas which the gradual fiUing-up 
of the country did not change, although his methods 
were rapidly exterminating both fish and game 
animals. 
But while the new pioneer among the settled na- 
tives of the Southern mountains had his troubles, 
the native himself, although it may not have been 
apparent at first, was changing. He learns slowly, 
but an idea once established grows and flourishes with 
astonishing vigor. In course of time the advantages 
of modern methods, particularly in business, dawn 
upon him, when, sometimes to the discomfiture of 
his unconscious teachers, he takes a hand and proves 
