'Wild West' mentality lingers in modern populations of US mountain regions
The early settlers of North American were in some sense selected by personality. It must have taken a certain sort of risk-taking personality to give up everything and climb aboard a crowded rickety passenger ship for a month-long journey to a vast and mostly uninhabited land. The people who arrived in America and decided to take it one step further by moving away from the crowded cities of the east into the vast and dangerous interior of the continent must have been a special breed.<p>You can still see some of these early mountain towns today--some are practically unchanged from what they looked like 100 years ago.