An Example of the Effect of Mountain Transportation.—Some . times the difficulty of transportation among the mountains leads to peculiar kinds of law-breaking. For instance, in Kentucky, Ten nessee, and other places in the southern Appalachian Mountains there used to be many "moonshiners" and there are still some who distill whisky illegally. They need ready money; the corn, which is their chief crop, cannot be taken to market down in the lowlands because there are no good roads. The price at which the corn would sell would not pay a quarter of the cost of transportation.
If the same corn is made into whisky the resulting product is only one-thirtieth as bulky as the corn. The cost of transportation is thus reduced so that the mountaineer can carry his product to the lowlands and sell it at a profit... This fact has caused the mountaineers to break the law for many generations. When the government col lected a tax on whisky the "moonshiners" felt that it was not right to take away their profit on the only product that they could take to the lowlands and sell for cash. When the sale of whisky was com pletely forbidden, the mountaineers felt that a still greater injustice was done them. Thus for many years they have broken the law because the mountains make transportation so difficult.
Difficulties of the Farmer in Rugged Regions : (1) Rapid Erosion.— The farmer in rugged regions is at a disadvantage because he lives in a region of erosion. Every rain carries away some of the soil, especially when the fields have been freshly plowed. In the Caro linas, Georgia, and other Southern States the Appalachian foothills have suffered almost irreparable harm in this way. Under the influ ence of unwise cultivation the soil of hundreds of farms has been gullied so that the fields are ruined. Where the slopes are fairly gentle this difficulty can be overcome by plowing so that all the furrows are horizontal and the rain water stands in them instead of running down them. This is called contour plowing because the furrows run horizontally like the contour lines on a map. The wash ing away of the soil by the rain and also by landslides and avalanches is doubly harmful for the material carried from the fields is often spread out on the valley floors and there for a time ruins other fields.
(2) Thin Rocky Soil.—Although more soil is actually formed in mountain regions than in plains, so much is carried away by erosion that the remaining soil is thin and rocky. Among the Himalayas, for example, the fields are so rocky that each year after they have been plowed, women go about picking up the stones and throwing them over their shoulders into baskets strapped to their backs. They have done this for centuries, yet the stones are still numerous, for new ones are plowed up or brought down by the streams.
(3) Lack of Level Spaces: Terraces.—Another great difficulty of the mountain farmer is the scarcity of level places for fields. He uses the valley bottoms, but they do not provide space enough. To get more land he must construct terraces on the hillside. In countries like China and Japan this has been done on an enormous scale. Whole mountain sides are often covered with terraces where walls 5 or 10 feet high have been built up in order to form terraces 20 or 30 feet wide. The labor of making such terraces and of keeping them in repair is so great that it helps to keep the mountain people poor.
Cattle Raising among the Mountains.—Since ordinary farming is so difficult, mountaineers try to make a living in other ways, for instance, by keeping cattle and sheep: These animals can easily graze on slopes too steep for cultivation. They can also be pastured on the rich grass which covers the valley floors and the mountain sides above the tree line. In California in June along the roads lead ing into the high Sierras, one must often pick his way through herds of hundreds of cows and calves or through flocks of stupid sheep that refuse to turn out for the passing automobile. The animals are being driven to the high mountains to graze during the summer.
In Switzerland the mountain meadows are called "Alps," and have given their name to the world's most famous mountains. Every sum mer when the snows disappear the people of the lower mountains move with their herds and flocks to chalets or huts among the flowery meadows near the snow-line. There they spend the summer caring for the cows and making butter and cheese. Such a life may be pleasant for a while, but it is lonely and unstimulating, so that the people who follow it are apt to be uneducated and backward.