CHANGING CONDITIONS IN KENTUCKY 121
BuBsell Sage Foundation, have informed me that the great majority of these emigrants who go untrained into the economic struggle of the outside world fare poorly, I was strikingly reminded of this fact in a mountain pass by my guide, who said that one of his cousins has gone to Arkansas and has written for him to come also. My man in- formed me that he is "athinking about it in his mind." Sometimes he thinks he will go. " Does that land produce there ? " he queried again and again. " Would it feed a man ? What is the lay of the land ? How high are the mountains, and the color of the soil, is it red? Some tells me as how it is a clay soil. But clay soil won't produce well. Here- abouts hit won't produce much more'n grass." 1 couldn't make him realize that far away Arkansas is a large state with varied soils and topography, I felt hopelessly that when I spoke of the tracts of level t&nd in the country of promise, he thought of it in terms of the few acres of bottom land of his home hemmed in by mountains, for "isn't it true that that's what the world is, mountain and slope? Some tells me to go; some tells me not. I might go and find that the land wouldn't produce. I'm afraid that if I go, my kin '11 be het up about hit. Then if the soil won't produce, I'd have to come back, an' thera set agin me." Public health is not as good as might be expected at first thought. The situation has been summarized by Miss VerhoefE (in "The Ken- tucky Mountains") as follows:
Endurance and mnseular stren^ are conunon, but a strong constitution ie u««ptioaal. Bad honaing and sanitation, ill-cooked and insufficient food, ez- posnre to weather, and . . . poverty, have had their detrimental effects, nhich ba've been angmented by a dose intermarriage of families and by an inoidinately large use of liqnor.
��Pm. 12. Apples
VOL. 111. — 9.
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