The Taney County republican. (Forsyth, Mo.) 1895-1992, 1909-04-29

| 1,OUO OF luSn, all LOlQ, anu InSy ar
genuinely sons and daughters of th'
American Revolution, being lineal de
scendants of the soldiers who at York
town settled once for all the independ
ence of the American colonies.
These people are primarily English
their remote ancestors having beer
among the earliest of the English colo
lists in Virginia, and they have through
successive generations travelled from
Virginia to North Carolina, from North
Carolina to Tennessee, from Tennee-
ssee to Kentucky and Missouri, finally
settling in the neighborhood of Forsyth
in fancy county. From the very be-
ginning they have kept their blood
pure from alien admixture They have
always married among themselves, and
it has been asserted that there is not a
trace of any blood in their veins other
than that which flowed through the
veins of their ancestors of the Seven
teenth Century.
Without the least effort these people,
ignorant mountaineers though they are,
can prove their eligibility to any of the
patriotic societies of America. Their
wives and daughters are Colonial Danes
in the truest sense. Their sons are
Sons of the American Revolution. Any
one of the women of the community
might now be in Washington helping
to decide the momentous question be-
fore the national congress of the Daugh-
tiers of the American Revolution.
But with it all they present aremark-
able, and, in a way, a pathetic con-
tradiction. OF the purest blood in
America they are yet without cult
vation. Identified throug their ances-
tors with the making Of this nation they
have no part and no interest in the life
of the nation of to-day, and know little
of what it has become in the eyes OF
the world. Descendants of the gentry
of the Old World, cavaliers and court
iers, they are common mountaineers
with none Of the luxuries, and few OF
necessities of life, dependent for their
daily bread upon the labor of their
hands, and with so little education that
even the teachers among them could
not enter any Missouri High School.
SPEAKS SHAKESPERIAN ENGLISH.
They speak English of the time OF
Shakespeare and discuss the homeiest
subject in language that suggests the
Mosques of the Elizabethan era, yet
few of them can read and almost none
of the older ones can write even their
own names. Their manners are de-
hghtfully quaint with just touch OF
the old chivalry of their ancestors. but
their lives are of the humblest and their
surroundings are sordid in the extreme.
They are adjectiy poor, but intensely
proud, and very resentful of any as
sistance that savors of patronizing, and
will accept nothing in charity and no
gift that does not come in the form OF
a courtesy.
They are hospitable to strangers and
polite to any whom they meet in the
neighborhood of their homes, but they
will brook no interference with then
affairs and no encroachments upon
their rights. In this they are like al
mountaineers the world over, courteous
if approached as friend, but fierce il
treated as an enemy.
They are people of past genera
ton to whom the ways of the world oi
to-day are as utterly unknown as if there
was no world outside their own little
mountain domain. They see people
who visit their country and they lister
with the most intense interest to the
stories these outsiders tell of the cite:
from which they come, but they make
no effort to learn more for themselve:
about the outer world. They know
they are Americans and glory in tina
knowledge, and they take great pride
in the fact that their blood is absolutel,
upmixed with what they consider foreign
faint, but they do not take citizen
part in the nation they helped to es
tablish. They rarely vote, even for
President. Political candidates of thei
district find no sympathy from them
They have no ambition to be il
things" and no desire to enlarge thei
circle of friends beyond their own i'm
mediate community.
They have one ambition, however
an absorbing ambition that is as grea
in the Oldest among them as in tn
youngest. That is to acquire an edu
cation. With the refinement which
their heritage from the gentle folk VIII
, were their forbears they feel the lac
/ of the cultivation which education give:
and they eagerly grasp every means