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Guide to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park

items 112 of 144 items
  • wcu_great_smoky_mtns-2800.jpg
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  • THE HIGHLANDERS I here are two main groups of mountain people: The valley-dwellers and those who live in the coves and on the sides of the mountains. The valley-dwellers, only nominally mountain people, are little if any different from the people of the lowlands. They dwell in towns and cities and have the conveniences of modern life. The real mountain people, belonging to the second group, have characteristics developed by a stern environment. It is to this group that the settlers of the Great Smokies belong. "The western Piedmont and the mountains," Horace Kephart, author of Our Southern Highlanders, said, "were settled neither by Cavaliers nor by poor whites, but by a radically distinct . . . people who are appropriately called the Roundheads of the South. . . . The first characteristic that these pioneers developed was an intense individualism. The strong and even violent independence that made them forsake till the comforts of civilization and prefer the wild freedom of the border was fanned at times into turbulence and riot; but it blazed forth at a happy time for this country when our liberties were imperilled." The people of the Great Smokies have maintained the great force of character and virility of the pioneers from whom they are descended. They belong to that homogeneous racial group that produced such men as Boone, Sevier, Clarke, Robertson, Admiral Farragut, Shelby, Houston. Andrew Jackson, Lincoln, Crockett, and Sergeant York. They are of English, Scotch-Irish, and German descent, their racial stock being purely nordic. It was men of this type who, feeling the call of the wilderness, gradually pushed westward the frontiers of civilization and carved out of territory once known only to the Indian and the buffalo tin imperial domain that has resulted in an extension of the American republic from the Atlantic ocean to the shores of the Pacific. 112
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Object’s are ‘parent’ level descriptions to ‘children’ items, (e.g. a book with pages).