The Anglo-Saxons of the Kentucky Mouitains



did, with, "the men folks they mostly sets on a fence and chaw
tobacco and talk politics."
  The mountain woman, therefore, at twenty-five looks forty, and
at forty looks twenty years older than her husband. But none of
the race are stalwart and healthy. The lack of vigour in the men
is due chiefly to the inordinate use of moonshine whiskey, which
contains 20 per cent. more alcohol than the standard liquor. They
begin drinking as mere boys. We saw several youths of seventeen
intoxicated, and some women told us boys of fourteen or fifteen
drank. Men, women, and children looked underfed, ill nourished.
This is due in part to their scanty, unvaried diet, but more perhaps
to the vile cooking. The bread is either half-baked soda biscuits
eaten hot, or corn-pone with lumps of saleratus through it. The
meat is always swimming in grease, and the eggs are always fried.
The effect of this shows, in the adults, in their sallow complexions
and spare forms; in the children, in pimples, boils, and sores on their
hands and faces. This western side of the mountains, moreover,
has not an abundant water-supply, the horizontal strata of the rocks
reducing the number of springs. Hence all the mountain region of
Kentucky, West Virginia, and Tennessee shows a high percentage
of diarrhceal diseases, typhoid, and malarial fever.
  The home of the mountaineer is primitive in the extreme, a
survival of pioneer architecture, and the only type distinctly Ameri-
can. It is the blind or windowless one-room log cabin, with the
rough stone chimney on the outside. The logs are sometimes
squared with the hatchet, sometimes left in their original form with
the bark on; the interstices are chinked in with clay. The roofs
are covered with boards nearly an inch thick and 3 feet long, split
from the wood by a wedge, and laid on, one lapping over the other
like shingles. The chimneys, which are built on the outside of the
houses, and project a few feet above the roof, lend a picturesque
effect to the whole. They are made of native rock, roughly hewn
and cemented with clay.; but the very poorest cabins have the low
"stick chimney," made of laths daubed with clay. In the broader
valleys, where the conditions of life are somewhat better, the double
cabin prevails-two cabins side by side, with a roofed space be-
tween, which serves as a dining-room during the warmer months of
the year. Sometimes, though rarely, there is a porch in front,
covered by an extension of the sloping roof.  In some of the
marginal counties -of the mountain region and in the sawmill dis-
tricts, one sees a few two-story frame dwellings. These are deco-



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