They lived almost without the convenience of coinage as a means of exchange.

Naturally in such a society there was no place for slaves, and to this day negroes are not welcome in many mountain counties.

But though these mountain people have missed contact with the outside world and have been deprived of the stimulus of new ideas, they seldom give evidence of anything that can fairly be classed as degeneracy.

Ignorance, illiteracy, and suspended or arrested development the traveler of today will find among them, and actions which will shock his present-day standards; but these same actions would hardly have shocked his own father's great-grandfather.

These isolated mountaineers have been aptly called "our contemporary ancestors." The same people, it is true, had poured out of their cabins to meet Ferguson at King's Mountain; they had followed Jackson to New Orleans and to Florida and they had felt the influence of the wave of nationalism which swept the country after the War of 1812.