Appalachians

“ The middle section of the Appalachians, rather arbitrarily limited by the Hudson and the James rivers, may be described first because The Middle Appalachians. it contains the best representation of the three longitudinal belts of which the mountain system as a whole is composed. The mountain-making compression of the heavy series of Palaeozoic strata has here produced a marvellous series of rock folds with gently undulating axes, trending north-east and south-west through a belt 70 or 80 m. wide; no less wonderful is the form that has been produced by the processes of sculpture. ”

“ It is a noisy, busy place, with wide streets, swift electric cars, and blazing furnaces. To see it grow is like watching a new Pittsburg rise up in the heart of the South.
From the Berkshire country at the north to the southern end of the Appalachians, there are to-day thriving towns and fertile fields. No longer does the mountain wall cut off the products of the West from the markets of the East. Yet hardly a hundred years ago the eastern strip of country was practically shut off from the whole territory drained by the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. ”

“ Nowhere do they invade the region of perpetual snow, and glaciers are absent. These statements are true also for all of the mountains on the eastern side of the continent to the south of Hudson Strait.
The Appalachians abound in beautiful scenery, but, except about a few of the very highest domes and ridges, have 82 little of the stern ruggedness which is typical of truly great mountains. Their countless valleys are now mostly cleared of their primitive forests and under cultivation. To a large extent also even the steep hillsides are tilled. ”

“ The fact that several large rivers rising to the northwest of the northern Appalachians flow directly across or through the numerous ridges composing the system in deep, narrow valleys, and the similar behaviour of the streams rising on the eastern border of the southern Appalachians, but flowing westward, are among the most interesting features of the entire region. ”

“ Then the frosts and rains, and later the glaciers, attacked the granite, and carved it into the jagged forms of to-day. The glaciers moulded the gorges which the streams had cut. The glaciers have passed, but still the work goes on. Slowly the mountains rise, and slowly, but not so slowly, the frosts chisel and the rains carry away. If conditions remain as now, history will again repeat itself, and the gorgeous peaks of to-day will decline, a million years or more from now, into the low rounded summits of our eastern Appalachians, and later into the flat, soil-hidden granites of Canada. ”

“ The country in which we were, seemed made on purpose to lose one’s-self in. The road winds along at some distance from the river, frequently out of sight of it; the shore is uneven, covered with crags and hillocks; nothing like a landmark to be seen, or a mountain to guide one’s-self by, except occasionally, when one gets a peep at the Appalachians rising out of the blue distance. ”

“ The Appalachians are not high enough seriously to affect the climate or landscape of the region. Their flanks slope gradually down to the sea, furrowed by rivers which from the first gave character to the colonies.In New England, where there is an abundance of good harbors, the coast is narrow and the streams are short and rapid, with stretches of navigable water between the waterfalls which turn the wheels of industry for a busy, ingenious, and thrifty people. ”

“ The Appalachians extend from Canada into Georgia and Alabama, nearly parallel with the Atlantic, 20 to 100 miles inland, and known from north to south as the Height of Land in Maine, the White Mountains in New Hampshire, the Adirondacks and Catskills in New York, the Berkshires in Massachusetts and Connecticut, the Highlands in New Jersey and the Alleghanies in Pennsylvania and the south, where they have parallel ranges, as the Blue Ridge. ”

“ The Blue Ridge, along the eastern side, consists of layers of crystalline rocks, the oldest known in the Appalachians, that have suffered so great an amount of metamorphism as to render the determination of their exact age a matter of considerable difficulty. ”

“ Practically no part of this great range, which extends from near Albany to Alabama, is completely unfit for the uses of man, and it includes some of the most fertile valleys of America. The most important feature connected with this double mountain system of the Appalachians is the great area of table-lands which it upholds; these bordering uplands are found all around the mountain system. ”

“ The wall of the Appalachians narrowed the westward horizon of the early English colonies in America, guarded them against the excessive expansion which was undermining the French dominion in the interior of the continent, set a most wholesome limit to their aims, and thereby intensified their utilization of the narrow land between mountains and sea. ”

“ Between the ridges and in pockets or coves of the mountains are lands that are easily cultivated, and in many places the mountains, when cleared, are fertile to their summits. The scenic culmination of the Appalachians is Blowing Rock in North Carolina, 3,500 feet above the sea, where the rifleman without stirring from one spot may drop his bullets into the Catawba flowing into the Atlantic, the New, which is a head water of the Ohio, and the Watauga, a branch of the Tennessee. ”

“ Since mountains are inhospitable to every phase of the historical movement, they long remain regions of retardation. Hence to their bordering plains they sustain the relation of young undeveloped lands, so that life in their piedmont belts tends to show for a long time all the characteristics of a new colonial frontier. The rim of the Southern Appalachians abundantly illustrates this principle even to-day. ”

“ The Alps and their related mountains, and even the Himalayas, were not yet born, for they have on their high summits deep-sea beds of the Cretaceous and even of later date. In America, the Appalachians and the old Laurentian ranges remained above water; but the Rocky Mountains and the Andes were in great part submerged, and a great Cretaceous sea extended from the Appalachians westward to the Pacific, and southward to the Gulf of Mexico, opening probably to the North into the Arctic Ocean. ”

“ Of all the different expeditions into the region west of the Appalachians this was the most important. Following its doings, you shall see the long spur of the Anglo-Saxon civilization thrusting out and out into the West—to the Mississippi, the Missouri, the Rockies, the Pacific—and never setting backward foot.
The journey over the mountains was not rapid and not continuous, it being necessary for the party to hunt as well as to explore. The rifle, the ax, the horse, the boat, were their aids and agents, their argument and answer to the wilderness. Evolution had gone on. The American was born. ”

“ No European chain of mountains affords so remarkable an illustration of the persistency of such flexures for a great distance as the Appalachians before alluded to, and none has been studied and described by many good observers with more accuracy. ”

“ The narrow and parallel zones of the Appalachians here mentioned, consist of strata, folded into a succession of convex and concave flexures, subsequently laid open by denudation. The component rocks are of great thickness, all referable to the Silurian, Devonian, and Carboniferous formations. There is no principal or central axis, as in the Pyrenees and many other chains—no nucleus to which all the minor ridges conform ”

“ In a given family, the individuals present great differences of expression with age, as between the vigorous relief of the young Himalaya and the subdued forms of the old Appalachians; or with elevation over base level, as between the gentle plain of the low Atlantic coast and the precocious high plateaus of the Colorado river region ”

“ Mountain ranges are made of belts of enormously and exceptionally thick sediments. The strata of the Appalachians are thirty thousand feet thick, while the same formations thin out to five thousand feet in the Mississippi valley. ”

“ The northern forms of coniferous trees also occur in the highest portion of the Appalachians as far south as North Carolina, and are found along the most elevated ridges of the Rocky Mountain range, from the extreme north through to Arizona and New Mexico, and along the culminating portion of the Sierra Nevada nearly to the southern border of California. ”

“ Old, worn-down mountains, like the Appalachians and the Ural, broad as they are, have been less effective obstacles than the towering crests of the Alps and Caucasus. The form of the elevation also counts. Easy slopes and flat or rounded summits make readier transit regions than high, thin ridges with escarpment-like flanks. Mountains of plateau form, though reaching a great altitude, may be relatively hospitable to the historical movement and even have a regular nomadic population in summer. ”

“ Even the latest and most authoritative treatise on physical geography has premised the same derivation of physiognomy for the glacial Alps and the arid-high plateaux of western America, for the forest-clad Appalachians and the barren South African veldt, for the jungle-matted eastern Andes and the desert Australian interior. Ordinary stream-corrasion is made to account for all. ”

“ Appalachians; a nation of Indians who formerly inhabited the extreme southern portion of the United States, and have left their name in the leading range of the Appalachian mountains. In 1539 De Soto found them in Florida, a term at that era comprehending also the entire area of the present states of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and other portions of the southern territory. They were numerous, fierce, and valorous. They were clothed in the skins of wild beasts. They used bows and arrows, clubs and spears. They did not, as many nations of barbarians do, poison their darts. ”

“ Here first in the whole length of the Allegheny section of the Appalachians we find an exceptional condition of stream life, and here also we come into a region lately glaciated, where heaps of drift have thrown the streams out of their old tracks. ”

“ Beyond the Appalachians the middle interior contains a very large proportion of habitable land. It was long ago recognized as a land of great promise, and it is to-day a land of great performance, covered with a network of railways, yielding an enormous product of grain, and developing industries of all kinds. ”

“ The rugged region embracing the Adirondacks, together with the more elevated portions of New England and of the adjacent provinces of Canada, has many geographical features that are similar to those of the southern Appalachians, but at the same time this, the central portion, differs in a marked way from the southern extension of the Atlantic mountains. The higher mountains in each of these picturesque regions are at least in a general way to be considered as the unconsumed remnants of ancient uplands, the greater part of which have been eroded away. ”

“ Then the Appalachians were formed, lifting their heads much higher than at present, after which they were cut down almost to sea level, and then once more upraised. The Coast Range Mountains of our Pacific Coast have come into existence since the middle of the present (Cenozoic) geologic era. Every mountain, like every organism, has a life history, in some cases simple, and other cases complex. All pass through stages of birth, youth, maturity, old age, and death. ”

“ Something of the nature of the gorgeous fields of bloom about the great peaks of the Pacific mountains is suggested on the treeless summits of the White Mountains, but although classed by botanists among alpine floras, the plants growing there fail to give a true idea of the display characteristic of the mountains which make a nearer approach to the lower limit of perennial snow. In the southern Appalachians the absence of a luxuriant alpine flora is perhaps more than counterbalanced by the profusion of rhododendrons, azaleas, and laurels. ”

“ Southwestward the valley grows narrower, and the ridges which break its surface become straighter. Everywhere they are flat-topped, steep-sided, and narrow, while between them lie parts of the main valley floor, flat and fertile. Here in the south, even more clearly than in the north, the valley is bordered on the east by the sharply upstanding range of the crystalline Appalachians, while on the west with equal regularity it comes to an end in an escarpment which rises to the Alleghany plateau. ”

“ Farther south both the crystalline band and the Alleghany plateau become more difficult to traverse, so that communication between the Atlantic coast and the Mississippi Valley is reduced to small proportions. Happy is New York in its situation where no one of the three bands of the Appalachians opposes any obstacle. The plains of North America form the third of the four main physical divisions of the continent. For the most part they lie between the great western cordillera on one side and the Laurentian and Appalachian highlands on the other. ”

“ The rocks composing the greater portion of the Appalachians are stratified marine sediment such as sandstone, shale, limestone, etc., which were laid down one on another until a great depth was attained, corresponding, as we may fancy, to a pile of rugs, the original thickness in Pennsylvania being about 40,000 feet. ”

“ These medicinal waters, together with the purity and energizing character of the air, has long given the mountains, especially in North Carolina and Virginia, a high repute as a health resort.
Vegetation and Fauna. The Appalachian region is covered with a dense forest growth where it has not been removed by man, forest trees covering the mountain slopes practically to their summits, except where the barren rocks furnish no soil. ”