Harry Caudill: Appalachian Environmentalist

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If you read your history, in fact, you'll find that there was a great lot of people in North Carolina who were not active in the Revolution. They weren't active on the frontier either. They waited behind the frontier and it was only after others had pushed beyond these mountains that they came in and settled. They didn't make their move until it was safe to do so. Boone was all the way out in Missouri-hundreds of miles west-when my ancestors came to east Kentucky.

So it was the Scotch-Irish and the Germans and the French who passed through here first. But they wouldn't stop. They didn't want anything to do with these mountains. That's not to say that no Scotch-Irish settled here at all, because some did, but they were never the dominant element. In the main, the Germans had staked their claim to the bluegrass in Kentucky's middle and tire 'Scotch-Irish had gone all tile way to Missouri by the time east Kentucky began to fill up.

Eastern Kentucky, which was claimed largely by our English forebears beginning in about 1792, was the last part of the state to be settled. The Scotch-Irish had already incorporated Lexington, a hundred miles to the west, 20 years before. Lexington had a university with a medical school and a law school and was a growing town with hundreds of slaves building fences and clearing land when people began to come here. So when we talk about all those brave, hardy pioneers who settled these mountains well, they weren't brave and hardy at all.

Now West Virginia was somewhat different. It did get a little more of that pioneer movement than eastern Kentucky got. And I think the Scotch-Irish had a more significant influence in West Virginia than they did here. That influence was still a minor one, though, compared to the English.

PLOWBOY: Why did the Scotch-Irish pass right through this part of the country?

CAUDILL: They were too strong, too dominant, and too compelling a people to settle down to the standards that people adjusted to in these mountains. The Scotch-Irish were an ambitious people. They wanted to go where the good land was. People who were ambitious didn't stop here when there was land in Illinois that you couldn't plow to the bottom of. And the Old South, too, was waiting to be settled.

The Scotch-Irish, then, took one look at this poor land they had no real idea back then of the tremendous wealth under the earth-and moved right on to better sections of the country. And wherever they went, they generally were successful. They have a tremendously strong gene pool, you see, and if you look at the great American fortunes you'll see that every one-with the exception of du Pont-belongs to a Scotch-Irish name. Ford, Mellon, Rockefeller. They're all Scotch-Irish.

PLOWBOY: And while they were moving on to greater things, our largely English ancestors were settling for second or third best here in the Appalachians.

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