Page:The National geographic magazine, volume 1.djvu/362

 trading was active. Whiskey was on trial at other bars than that of the court, and the long rifle, powder-horn and pouch had not been left in the mountains. To a "tenderfoot" (who had the day before been mistaken for a rabbit or a revenue officer!) the attentions of the crowd were not reassuring.

The general opinion was, I felt, akin to that long afterward expressed by Groundhog Cayce: "It air an awful thing ter kill a man by accident;" and I staid but a very short time in Asheville.

Riding away toward the sunset, I traversed the old plain without seeing that it had had a continuous surface. I noted the many gullies, and I lost in the multitude of details the wide level from which they were carved. That the broader fact should be obscured by the many lesser ones is no rare experience, and perhaps there is no class of observations of which this has been more generally true than of those involved in landscape study. But when once the Asheville plain has been recognized, it can never again be ignored. It enters into every view, both as an element of beauty and as evidence of change in the conditions which determine topographic forms. Seldom in the mountains can one get that distance of wooded level, rarely is the foreground so like a gem proportioned to its setting; all about Asheville one meets with glimpses of river and valley, sunken in reach beyond reach of woodland which stretch away to the blue mountains. The even ridges form natural roadsites, and in driving one comes ever and anon upon a fresh view down upon the stream far across the plain and up to the heights. And to the student of Appalachian history, the dissected plain is a significant contradiction of the time honored phrase, "the everlasting hills." That plain was a fact, the result of definite conditions of erosion; it exists no more in consequence of changes. What were the original conditions? In what manner have they changed? Let us take account of certain other facts before suggesting an answer. Of the mountains which wall the Asheville amphitheatre, the Blue Ridge on the east and the Unaka chain on the west are the two important ranges. The Blue Ridge forms the divide between the tributaries of the Atlantic and those of the Gulf of Mexico, and the streams which flow westward from it all pass through the Unaka chain. It would be reasonable to suppose that the rivers rose in the higher and flowed through the lower of the two ranges, but they do not. The Blue Ridge is an irregular, inconspicuous elevation but little