Democratic Sentinel, Volume 8, Number 41, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 November 1884 — THE DEPOPULATED HIGHLANDS. [ARTICLE]

THE DEPOPULATED HIGHLANDS.

The Hornet of Famous Chieftains Deserted by Their Descendants. I There are few Highland glena that do not contain traces of the banished population. In Lochaber, along the shores of Loch Arkaig, the home of the Clan Cameron, the remains of what were once extensive townships may yet be seen. The celebrated Glencoe formerly teemed with a hardy population. Famous Glengarry is a sheepwalk, and the powerful Clan Macdonnell are now in Canada. Round Fort Augustus and far into the country of 'the Clan Fraser is naught but desolation. In hundreds of straths in Rossshire the wild heather has not even yet obliterated the green pastures and the cultivated fields that once belonged to the MacKenzies and Munroes, and from whence the different battalions of the gallant Ross-shire Buffs marched to conquer at Maida, at Seringapatam, at Assaye, and Argauin. So late as 1849, when the present Prime Minister had already obtained political eminence, Hugh Miller attempted, but fruitlessly, to draw the attention of the British public to the work of destruction that was going on. He eloquently proclaimed that “while the law is banishing its tens for terms of seven and fourteen years, the penalty of deep-dyed crimes, irresponsible and infatuated power is banishing its thousands for life for no crime whatever. ” A large number of the dispossessed tenantry were sent to America; the remainder settled on the seashore, where they were cramped into small holdings, and have since lived. The tourist steaming along the wild coast of the western Highlands and islands may see perched on every cliff, in the most exposed situations and subject to the fury of Atlantic gales, the wretched hamlets that now contain the remnants of the Highland clans. Probably he will wonder how a population can at all manage to exist under such conditions. But there they are, elbowed to the very verge of their country. For large tracts of that country the proprietors even now can show' no scrap of document, their claim to possession resting solely on the fact that it has never been contested. Created and looked upon, like the foxes, as mere vermin that interere with sport, discouraged and thwarted in every direction, these people, notwithstanding their poverty and the hardships of their lot, have maintained unimpaired the noblest attributes of their race. Crime of any kind is almost unknown among them. Their moral standard is the highest in Britain, contrasting in that respect most remarkably with their lowland neighbors; and not a few' of, the leading British statesmen, lawyers, divines, and soldiers of the past eighty years first saw the light in these crofters’ huts. Far behind the strip of inhabited littoral stretch the Blue Mountains, the snug and often fertile glens from whence the clans were banished, now turned into silent wildernesses, inhabited only by sheep and deer and an occasional shepherd or keeper. There are the vast tracts rented by the American, Mr. Winans, as a hunting ground, to be visited by that alien for two or three months, and abandoned to solitude for the reminder of the year, where not even a native of the soil may plant his foot. —Nineteenth Century.