Our Southern Highlanders

The author offers an observational portrait of life in the Southern Appalachian highlands, combining personal travel accounts, natural description, and social reportage. Chapters describe mountain geography and outdoor pursuits such as hunting, detail economic practices like barter and moonshining, and examine domestic routines, dialect, education, local law, and feuds. Vivid sketches of cabins, kin networks, and subsistence farming illuminate how landscape, poverty, and isolation shape behaviors and beliefs. Interspersed are anecdotes, practical campcraft, and reflections on change as timbering and outside influences encroach on traditional ways.