The New South

e inexorable working of economic law. By far the greater part, however, were of the same stock as the restless pioneers who poured over the mountains to flood the Mississippi Valley. Students of the mountain people maintain that so small an accident as the breaking of a linchpin fixed one family forever in a mountain cove, while relatives went on to become the builders of new States in the interior. Cut off from the world in these mountains, there have been preserved to this day many of the idioms, folksongs, superstitions, manners, customs, and habits of mind of Stuart England, as they were brought over by the early colonists. The steep farms afforded a scanty living, and though the cattle found luscious pasturage during the summer, they were half starved during the winter. If by chance the mountaineers had a surplus of any product, there was no one to whom they might sell it. They lived almost without the convenience of coinage as a means of exchange. Naturally in such a society there was no place for slave