Night Comes To The Cumberlands Harry M Caudill by Harry M. Caudill 9781938471216, 1938471210 instant download after payment.

The late Harry M. Caudill saw the land and people of Appalachia with an
unflinching eye. His classic, Night Comes to the Cumberlands, follows
the long road traveled by the Southern mountaineer.
His biography
of the Cumberland Plateau begins in the violence of Indian wars and
ends in the economic despair of the 1950s and 1960s. 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 timber. Some of the people who settled this land in the
eighteenth century may have come from the slums of England, but they
became intrepid explorers like Simon Kenton and Jim Bridger. They lived
by scratch farming, hunting , and making moonshine whiskey. The Civil
War ravaged their land, leaving in its wake a legacy of hate which
erupted in the great Kentucky mountain feuds and continued in the
"Moonshine Wars" of the Prohibition era.
In the late nineteenth
century, the coal men came into the isolated valleys and easily
persuaded the mountaineers to sign away their mineral rights for
pitifully smalls sums. The countryside was then systematically plundered
in what constitutes one of the ugliest eras of exploitation in American
history.
At the time it was written, Night Comes to the Cumberlands
framed an urgent appeal to the American conscience. Today it details
Appalachia's difficult past, and, at the same time, presents an accurate
historical backdrop for a contemporary understanding of the Appalachian
region that Harry M. Caudill loved so dearly and served so well.