Page:The Scientific Monthly vol. 3.djvu/113

 CIIAyGIXG CONDITIONS IN KENTUCKY 107

Irish, Pennsylvania Dutch, and others, formed the van of the 300,000 frontiersmen who passed through Cumberland Gap, 1775-1800, to settle in Kentucky.

Some of these found a home in the plateau region, which offered clear springs, magnificent forests, abundant game, and good valley land sufficient for that first generation of hunter-farmers. No one could have foretold then the coming of canal and railroad.

The first permanent settlements in the Kentucky mountains were made in the decades 1780 to 1800. Filson's map of Kentucky (1784) shows " settlements " on Eockcastle River, the Upper Louisa Fork, and a fork of Red River. By 1800 the population was 7,964, which was about four per cent, of the population of the state; it is now about 600,000, which is about twenty-five per cent, of Kentucky. Genea- logical records of this people are utterly lacking. Their names and sur- vivals in customs and language point to English and Scotch-Irish an- cestry in general, although a few^ German and Huguenot names are found.

Between 1800 and 1840 the mountain region was an integral part of the state for various reasons. Four interstate, transmontane routes traversed the plateau in leading from the Ohio and the Blue Grass settlements on the west to the Big Sandy and Kanawha region on the east, and thus on to the tide-water communities. The plainsmen bought lean cattle in the Blue Grass and sent them in droves of from 200 to 300 through the mountains to the Potomac, where they were fattened and sold in Baltimore and Philadelphia. Large droves of hogs followed the same routes. Furthermore, the hog and cattle drivers bought com at the homes of the mountain people and brought news from the outside world, thus binding the Kentucky people somewhat closely together. Also, because the Kentucky interstate commerce passed through the mountains, the slender state appropriations for roads were impartial, the mountain counties being favored equally with the lowland.

But between 1830 and 1850 the four interstate roads declined gradu- allv to a wretched condition and state of non-use ; for the Blue Grass and Ohio regions were finding other routes to market, by use of steamboats, etc. Therefore the mountain counties lost their market and received little outside help for roads. As a result, these peoples, who have never been able to travel freely among themselves within their mountains, have since about 1845 suffered the further handicap of being cut off from the outside world, and have lived in surprisingly complete isolation. Presently the civilization of the rest of the Americans changed, and they became ^' foreigners ^^ to the mountain folk. Thus the mountaineers have lived isolated by topography and social antipathy.

During the civil war thousands of the mountaineers, whose ancestors, had fought in the revolution and the war of 1812, joined the Union army and received a practical education. Some received similar train-

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