Hi gang, I wanted to post this article reprint from the Asheville Citizen Times on Jan. 26,1969 by Lewis W. Green. I hope you will, as I, agree that this is a excellent article for those of us on the hunt for our elusive ancestors. I thought it was a perfect sentiment. THE GHOSTS OF A FIERCE AND DIFFICULT PEOPLE They came into this tortuous, tangled land of mountains-- not so much to begin a new life as to continue the old one without interference. A difficult people, neither kings nor presidents ruled them. to a hard land came a hardy race. These old mountains drew them and filled their peculiar need, because here the grim and gloomy weathers on the high tops brought response from the hidden and obscure climates of a highlander's fey soul. Fierce people-- their spirit was of eagles. Their code grew from the rattlesnake, an honorable creature whose warning is brief and whose answer is quick. They cleared their land and worked it and each generation inbred in the coves and on the ridges, grew more lost and ignorant of the world outside, and came to know nothing of that world as the decades flowed by-- but they never lost their mother-wit, nor courage, nor obstinacy, nor audacity, no, never their wild highland spirit. Nor ego nor individuality. Nights of the bitter wind, moaning at the eaves and shrieking past the chimney... hardy, tough, staring at nature and life with the eyes of realists. And they lived it out and then died-- rarely in peace and comfort but most often bitterly, in misery and at times bloodily. Those who first came here are lost in the fathoms of time now. Their blood courses through the generations and in other veins; but their thoughts and ways mingle and fade through strange new brains. Their language has undergone mutations, and though still distinctive, is losing, losing, losing..... Time, the slow abrasive pour of a liquid we do not see, even as it swirls its grains upon our days... wearing, grinding, washing, draining. We have lost them forever and traces are fading away. But here and there, now and then, we can pierce the veils, hear the tongues, see this people. We see them as though remote ghosts in the gloaming, coming and going and sowing their shy days there in private pasts and forgotton lives. Romanticism was in these practical people. Their poetry was brief and crude and the imagery of it reflected them. Shot Pouch Road. Wild Cat Cliff. Wolf Pen Mountain. Lick Stone Ridge. Hard Scrabble Road ? What mocking wit. Lick Skillet Road. The winters were long, the children many, the food was scarce. These broken voices of taciturn pioneer imagery-- Hanging Dog and Possum Trot, Rabbit Run and Standing Indian, Snow Bird and Shining Rock, Bee Tree and Cranberry, Spruce Pine and Old Fort, Mine Hole and Bald Mountain, Sandy Mush and Big Ivey, Peach Tree and Poverty Branch, Fires Creek and Pigeon River, Wagon Gap Road and Elk Mountain, Blowing Rock and Grandfather Mountain; Ox Creek and Bee Log and Hickory Nut Gap and Big Roan and Walnut Creek and Dark Ridge and Ninevah and Sulphur Springs. And what part of the land they did not stamp with their own poetry, they borrowed from the Indian: Watauga and Soco, Saunooke and Cataloochee and Junaluska and these names they laid down--Stecoah, Tuskaseigee, Oconaluftee, Nantahala, Osceola, Fontana, Qualla, Hiawassee. And why not borrow these liquid and musical words ? Together both races endured the life of the mountains. We hear them across the gulf, and we see them. Crumbled cabins, scattered foundations. Lonely chimneys, a snake in the stone, a toad on the hearth, headstones sinking away in the slow mire of the earth. Or this old house, built to withstand the winds of a thousand years..... And the house did not last for its thousand years but served four generations and the last ones did not care because the world had come into the coves to lead them out and they went somewhere else, and they noted curiously that time was not passing as slowly as it had in the time of the fathers, but had speeded up and was out of control. And so the later ones will not have what their fathers had, will not work their stingy land all day, will not sit tiredly of evenings and listen to the first owl begin hooting, or watch those infinitely slow currents of time and fate move toward old tired midnight; nor exult in the early moon through summer trees, nor drink pure spring water from all the quick streams, nor dance to fiddles skirling wildly of other highlands, nor hear the far deep bugling of hounds a'running, and the new ones are the losers because they have the blood and spirit, and they have the exultancy of the soul and do not know where to spend it. The first ones came here and are gone, and the world is richer for their coming and poorer for their going, and we did not know them. END OF ARTICLE OF LEWIS GREEN. Carolyn