Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/32

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THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

A "moonshine" still

to know. We did not, for example, find a person who had not heard of the explosion of the "Maine." There was a good deal of desultory interest in the possibilities of a war with Spain. But the whole question seemed remote, and was so thought of by the

people themselves. As one old man said: "I reckon we mountaineers wouldn't know much about a war if there was one."

The chief contact with the outside world is through the lumbermen who go down the river on their rafts as far as Frankfort, or even to the Ohio, or through the merchants who make periodical trips to the "settlements," as the towns and cities of the Bluegrass region are called. In one or two places we heard of sons who were in the army or navy, and of their letters which were handed around from house to house, or reported by friendly gossip. A few papers, chiefly agricul- tural journals and religious weeklies, are to be found in the more accessible cabins. But we spent the night with one family that had not seen a paper for months. They were ten miles from the nearest post-office.

The mountaineers in the county towns are fond of telling anecdotes to illustrate the ignorance of the bacl^woods-men. Many of these have been embodied in the stories of mountain life. The jests are passed about with great glee by the store- keepers and petty lawyers of the little towns. The tale that had greatest vogue at the time of our visit was of the mountaineer who complained that he could not sleep because of the electric light in his hotel room at Lexington. When he was asked why he didn't blow it out, he replied that he couldn't, "because they had the blamed thing in a bottle." Most of the stories have about them a suggestion of newspaper origin.