“At the time it was first published in 1962, it framed such an urgent appeal to the American conscience that it actually prompted the creation of the Appalachian Regional Commission, an agency that has pumped millions of dollars into Appalachia. Caudill’s study begins in the violence of the Indian wars and ends in the economic despair of the 1950s and 1960s. Two hundred years ago, the Cumberland Plateau was a land of great promise. Its deep, twisting valleys contained rich bottomlands. The surrounding mountains were teeming with game and covered with valuable timber. The people who came into this land scratched out a living by farming, hunting, and making all the things they need-including whiskey. The quality of life in Appalachia declined during the Civil War and Appalachia remained “in a bad way” for the next century. By the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, Appalachia had become an island of poverty in a national sea of plenty and prosperity. Caudill’s book alerted the mainstream world to our problems and their causes. Since then the ARC has provided millions of dollars to strengthen the brick and mortar infrastructure of Appalachia and to help us recover from a century of economic problems that had greatly undermined our quality of life.”-Print ed.

2019 Reprint of 1963 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition software. The biography of the Cumberland Plateau in Appalachia begins in the violence of the Indian Wars and ends in the despair of the idle miners living off Welfare. Two hundred years ago the plateau was a land of promise. The deep, twisting valleys contained rich bottomlands; the mountainsides, teeming with game, produced mighty timer. The people who settled this land in the eighteenth century were the sweepings of the English slums--but they produced great explorers like Simon Kenton and Jim Bridger. They lived by scratch farming, hunting and moonshine whiskey. The Civil War ravaged the land, leaving in its wake a legacy of hate which erupted into the great Kentucky mountain feuds and continued in the "Moonshine Wars" of the Prohibition Era. When Caudill first wrote in 1962 the Cumberland Plateau was a wasteland of refuse-clogged streams, sterile hillsides, abandoned company towns and great piles of slag and rusting automobiles. The people were often illiterate, clannish and grim, but their fighting spirit was sapped and many, if not most, lived on welfare, which they regarded as their right. Schools were atrocious where they existed and the remaining coal was being ruthlessly gouged out by strip mining operations that, ironically, fed the gargantuan industrial complex of the TVA. The publication of this book was a clarion call to action to address the distress of this region and resulted in the creation of the Appalachian Regional Commission, an agency that has pumped millions of dollars into Appalachia.

Caudill explores the southern Appalachian Mountains area's history, from its first settlement to the Civil War, and from the rise of coal barons to the economic despair of the 1950s and 1960s.

This book of stories celebrates people who have a magnetism, a tenacity, a personal vision, an independence, and a self-sufficiency that elude most of us today.

Outspoken Appalachian writer Harry M. Caudill analyzes the exploitation and decline of the eastern Kentucky mountain lands, which have rendered "no people in the nation...more forlorn than the Appalachian highlanders in our time." Frontier attitudes, a strong attachment to the land, and isolation have produced in Appalachia a backwoods culture which made its people susceptible to an outside exploitation of their resources that has perpetrated on them a passive society largely dependant on relief. But the times, says Mr. Caudill, are changing. A growing world population and global industrialization have created a drastically altered situation in eastern Kentucky. The area's resources of energy are essential to the progress and well-being not only of the nation but also of the world; and the world is prepared to court the favor of the people who control these resources and is prepared to pay the price demanded by those owners. Mr. Caudill makes an eloquent plea for Kentuckians to reclaim the resources that lie in their mountains and to demand their fair share of the wealth generated by those resources. If they are willing to do this, the state and especially the people in eastern Kentucky can have a bright and prosperous future. But they can delay no longer. They must break the mold of passivity and take destiny into their own hands. An attorney in Whitesburg, Kentucky, Harry M. Caudill is the author of such well-known books as Night Comes to the Cumberlands, Dark Hills to Westward, and My Land is Dying. The Kentucky Bicentennial Bookshelf is a celebration of two centuries of the history and culture of the Commonwealth.

Reproduction of the original: The Children of the Night by Edwin Arlington Robinson