HEMP

The Anglo-Saxon farmers had scarce conquered foothold, stronghold,

freehold in the Western wilderness before they became sowers of

hemp--with remembrance of Virginia, with remembrance of dear ancestral

Britain. Away back in the days when they lived with wife, child, flock

in frontier wooden fortresses and hardly ventured forth for water,

salt, game, tillage--in the very summer of that wild daylight ride of

Tomlinson and Bell, by comparison with which, my children, the midnight

ride of Paul Revere, was as tame as the pitching of a rocking-horse in

a boy's nursery--on that history-making twelfth of August, of the year

1782, when these two backwoods riflemen, during that same Revolution

the Kentuckians then fighting a branch of that same British army,

rushed out of Bryan's Station for the rousing of the settlements and

the saving of the West--hemp was growing tall and thick near the walls

of the fort.

Hemp in Kentucky in 1782--early landmark in the history of the soil, of

the people. Cultivated first for the needs of cabin and clearing

solely; for twine and rope, towel and table, sheet and shirt. By and by

not for cabin and clearing only; not for tow-homespun, fur-clad

Kentucky alone. To the north had begun the building of ships, American

ships for American commerce, for American arms, for a nation which

Nature had herself created and had distinguished as a sea-faring race.

To the south had begun the raising of cotton. As the great period of

shipbuilding went on--greatest during the twenty years or more ending

in 1860; as the great period of cotton-raising and cotton-baling went

on--never so great before as that in that same year--the two parts of

the nation looked equally to the one border plateau lying between them,

to several counties of Kentucky, for most of the nation's hemp. It was

in those days of the North that the CONSTITUTION was rigged with

Russian hemp on one side, with American hemp on the other, for a

patriotic test of the superiority of home-grown, home-prepared fibre;

and thanks to the latter, before those days ended with the outbreak of

the Civil War, the country had become second to Great Britain alone in

her ocean craft, and but little behind that mistress of the seas. So

that in response to this double demand for hemp on the American ship

and hemp on the southern plantation, at the close of that period of

national history on land and sea, from those few counties of Kentucky,

in the year 1859, were taken well-nigh forty thousand tons of the

well-cleaned bast.

What history it wrought in those years, directly for the republic,

indirectly for the world! What ineffaceable marks it left on Kentucky

itself, land, land-owners! To make way for it, a forest the like of

which no human eye will ever see again was felled; and with the forest

went its pastures, its waters. The roads of Kentucky, those long

limestone turnpikes connecting the towns and villages with the

farms--they were early made necessary by the hauling of the hemp. For

the sake of it slaves were perpetually being trained, hired, bartered;

lands perpetually rented and sold; fortunes made or lost. The advancing

price of farms, the westward movement of poor families and consequent

dispersion of the Kentuckians over cheaper territory, whither they

carried the same passion for the cultivation of the same plant,--thus

making Missouri the second hemp-producing state in the Union,--the

regulation of the hours in the Kentucky cabin, in the house, at the

rope-walk, in the factory,--what phase of life went unaffected by the

pursuit and fascination of it. Thought, care, hope of the farmer

oftentimes throughout the entire year! Upon it depending, it may be,

the college of his son, the accomplishments of his daughter, the

luxuries of his wife, the house he would build, the stock he could own.

His own pleasures also: his deer hunting in the South, his fox hunting

at home, his fishing on the great lakes, his excursions on the old

floating palaces of the Mississippi down to New Orleans--all these

depending in large measure upon his hemp, that thickest gold-dust of

his golden acres.

With the Civil War began the long decline, lasting still. The record

stands that throughout the one hundred and twenty-five odd years

elapsing from the entrance of the Anglo-Saxon farmers into the

wilderness down to the present time, a few counties of Kentucky have

furnished army and navy, the entire country, with all but a small part

of the native hemp consumed. Little comparatively is cultivated in

Kentucky now. The traveller may still see it here and there, crowning

those ever-renewing, self-renewing inexhaustible fields. But the time

cannot be far distant when the industry there will have become extinct.

Its place in the nation's markets will be still further taken by

metals, by other fibres, by finer varieties of the same fibre, by the

same variety cultivated in soils less valuable. The history of it in

Kentucky will be ended, and, being ended, lost.

Some morning when the roar of March winds is no more heard in the

tossing woods, but along still brown boughs a faint, veil-like

greenness runs; when every spring, welling out of the soaked earth,

trickles through banks of sod unbarred by ice; before a bee is abroad

under the calling sky; before the red of apple-buds becomes a sign in

the low orchards, or the high song of the thrush is pouring forth far

away at wet pale-green sunsets, the sower, the earliest sower of the

hemp, goes forth into the fields.

Warm they must be, soft and warm, those fields, its chosen birthplace.

Up-turned by the plough, crossed and recrossed by the harrow, clodless,

levelled, deep, fine, fertile--some extinct river-bottom, some valley

threaded by streams, some table-land of mild rays, moist airs, alluvial

or limestone soils--such is the favorite cradle of the hemp in Nature.

Back and forth with measured tread, with measured distance, broadcast

the sower sows, scattering with plenteous hand those small oval-shaped

fruits, gray-green, black-striped, heavily packed with living marrow.

Lightly covered over by drag or harrow, under the rolled earth now they

lie, those mighty, those inert seeds. Down into the darkness about them

the sun rays penetrate day by day, stroking them with the brushes of

light, prodding them with spears of flame. Drops of nightly dews, drops

from the coursing clouds, trickle down to them, moistening the dryness,

closing up the little hollows of the ground, drawing the particles of

maternal earth more closely. Suddenly--as an insect that has been

feigning death cautiously unrolls itself and starts into action--in

each seed the great miracle of life begins. Each awakens as from a

sleep, as from pretended death. It starts, it moves, it bursts its

ashen woody shell, it takes two opposite courses, the white,

fibril-tapered root hurrying away from the sun; the tiny stem, bearing

its lance-like leaves, ascending graceful, brave like a palm.

Some morning, not many days later, the farmer, walking out into his

barn lot and casting a look in the direction of his field, sees--or

does he not see?--the surface of it less dark. What is that uncertain

flush low on the ground, that irresistible rush of multitudinous green?

A fortnight, and the field is brown no longer. Overflowing it, burying

it out of sight, is the shallow tidal sea of the hemp, ever rippling.

Green are the woods now with their varied greenness. Green are the

pastures. Green here and there are the fields: with the bluish green of

young oats and wheat; with the gray green of young barley and rye: with

orderly dots of dull dark green in vast array--the hills of Indian

maize. But as the eye sweeps the whole landscape undulating far and

near, from the hues of tree, pasture, and corn of every kind, it turns

to the color of the hemp. With that in view, all other shades in nature

seem dead and count for nothing. Far reflected, conspicuous, brilliant,

strange; masses of living emerald, saturated with blazing sunlight.

Darker, always darker turns the hemp as it rushes upward: scarce darker

as to the stemless stalks which are hidden now; but darker in the tops.

Yet here two shades of greenness: the male plants paler, smaller,

maturing earlier, dying first; the females darker, taller, living

longer, more luxuriant of foliage and flowering heads.

A hundred days from the sowing, and those flowering heads have come

forth with their mass of leaves and bloom and earliest fruits, elastic,

swaying six, ten, twelve feet from the ground and ripe for cutting. A

hundred days reckoning from the last of March or the last of April, so

that it is July, it is August. And now, borne far through the steaming

air floats an odor, balsamic, startling: the odor of those plumes and

stalks and blossoms from which is exuding freely the narcotic resin of

the great nettle. The nostril expands quickly, the lungs swell out

deeply to draw it in: fragrance once known in childhood, ever in the

memory afterward and able to bring back to the wanderer homesick

thoughts of midsummer days in the shadowy, many-toned woods, over into

which is blown the smell of the hemp-fields.

Who apparently could number the acres of these in the days gone by? A

land of hemp, ready for the cutting! The oats heavy-headed, rustling,

have turned to gold and been stacked in the stubble or stored in the

lofts of white, bursting barns. The heavy-headed, rustling wheat has

turned to gold and been stacked in the stubble or sent through the

whirling thresher. The barley and the rye are garnered and gone, the

landscape has many bare and open spaces. But separating these

everywhere, rise the fields of Indian corn now in blade and tassel;

and--more valuable than all else that has been sown and harvested or

remains to be--everywhere the impenetrable thickets of the hemp.

Impenetrable! For close together stand the stalks, making common cause

for soil and light, each but one of many, the fibre being better when

so grown--as is also the fibre of men. Impenetrable and therefore

weedless; for no plant life can flourish there, nor animal nor bird.

Scarce a beetle runs bewilderingly through those forbidding colossal

solitudes. The field-sparrow will flutter away from pollen-bearing to

pollen-receiving top, trying to beguile you from its nest hidden near

the edge. The crow and the blackbird will seem to love it, having a

keen eye for the cutworm, its only enemy. The quail does love it, not

for itself, but for its protection, leading her brood into its

labyrinths out of the dusty road when danger draws near. Best of all

winged creatures it is loved by the iris-eyed, burnish-breasted,

murmuring doves, already beginning to gather in the deadened tree-tops

with crops eager for the seed. Well remembered also by the long-flight

passenger pigeon, coming into the land for the mast. Best of all wild

things whose safety lies not in the wing but in the foot, it is loved

by the hare for its young, for refuge. Those lithe, velvety,

summer-thin bodies! Observe carefully the tops of the still hemp: are

they slightly shaken? Among the bases of those stalks a cotton-tail is

threading its way inward beyond reach of its pursuer. Are they shaken

violently, parted clean and wide to right and left? It is the path of

the dog following the hot scent--ever baffled.

A hundred days to lift out of those tiny seed these powerful stalks,

hollow, hairy, covered with their tough fibre,--that strength of cables

when the big ships are tugged at by the joined fury of wind and ocean.

And now some morning at the corner of the field stand the black men

with hooks and whetstones. The hook, a keen, straight blade, bent at

right angles to the handle two feet from the hand. Let these men be the

strongest; no weakling can handle the hemp from seed to seed again. A

heart, the doors and walls of which are in perfect order, through which

flows freely the full stream of a healthy man's red blood; lungs deep,

clear, easily filled, easily emptied; a body that can bend and twist

and be straightened again in ceaseless rhythmical movement; limbs

tireless; the very spirit of primeval man conquering primeval

nature--all these go into the cutting of the hemp. The leader strides

to the edge, and throwing forward his left arm, along which the muscles

play, he grasps as much as it will embrace, bends the stalks over, and

with his right hand draws the blade through them an inch or more from

the ground. When he has gathered his armful, he turns and flings it

down behind him, so that it lies spread out, covering when fallen the

same space it filled while standing. And so he crosses the broad acres,

and so each of the big black followers, stepping one by one to a place

behind him, until the long, wavering, whitish green swaths of the

prostrate hemp lie shimmering across the fields. Strongest now is the

smell of it, impregnating the clothing of the men, spreading far

throughout the air.

So it lies a week or more drying, dying, till the sap is out of the

stalks, till leaves and blossoms and earliest ripened or un-ripened

fruits wither and drop off, giving back to the soil the nourishment

they have drawn from it; the whole top being thus otherwise

wasted--that part of the hemp which every year the dreamy millions of

the Orient still consume in quantities beyond human computation, and

for the love of which the very history of this plant is lost in the

antiquity of India and Persia, its home--land of narcotics and desires

and dreams.

Then the rakers with enormous wooden rakes; they draw the stalks into

bundles, tying each with the hemp itself. Following the binders, move

the wagon-beds or slides, gathering the bundles and carrying them to

where, huge, flat, and round, the stacks begin to rise. At last these

are well built; the gates of the field are closed or the bars put up;

wagons and laborers are gone; the brown fields stand deserted.

One day something is gone from earth and sky: Autumn has come, season

of scales and balances, when the Earth, brought to judgment for its

fruits, says, "I have done what I could--now let me rest!"

Fall!--and everywhere the sights and sounds of falling. In the woods,

through the cool silvery air, the leaves, so indispensable once, so

useless now. Bright day after bright day, dripping night after dripping

night, the never-ending filtering or gusty fall of leaves. The fall of

walnuts, dropping from bare boughs with muffled boom into the deep

grass. The fall of the hickory-nut, rattling noisily down through the

scaly limbs and scattering its hulls among the stones of the brook

below.

The fall of buckeyes, rolling like balls of mahogany into the little

dust paths made by sheep in the hot months when they had sought those

roofs of leaves. The fall of acorns, leaping out of their matted, green

cups as they strike the rooty earth. The fall of red haw, persimmon,

and pawpaw, and the odorous wild plum in its valley thickets. The fall

of all seeds whatsoever of the forest, now made ripe in their high

places and sent back to the ground, there to be folded in against the

time when they shall arise again as the living generations; the homing,

downward flight of the seeds in the many-colored woods all over the

quiet land.

In the fields, too, the sights and sounds of falling, the fall of the

standing fatness. The silent fall of the tobacco, to be hung head

downward in fragrant sheds and barns. The felling whack of the

corn-knife and the rustling of the blades, as the workman gathers

within his arm the top-heavy stalks and presses them into the bulging

shock. The fall of pumpkins into the slow-drawn wagons, the shaded side

of them still white with the morning rime. In the orchards, the fall of

apples shaken thunderously down, and the piling of these in sprawling

heaps near the cider mills. In the vineyards the fall of sugaring

grapes into the baskets and the bearing of them to the winepress in the

cool sunshine, where there is the late droning of bees about the sweet

pomace.

But of all that the earth has yielded with or without the farmer's

help, of all that he can call his own within the limits of his land,

nothing pleases him better than those still, brown fields where the

shapely stacks stand amid the deadened trees. Two months have passed,

the workmen are at it again. The stacks are torn down, the bundles

scattered, the hemp spread out as once before. There to lie till it

shall be dew-retted or rotted; there to suffer freeze and thaw, chill

rains, locking frosts and loosening snows--all the action of the

elements--until the gums holding together the filaments of the fibre

rot out and dissolve, until the bast be separated from the woody

portion of the stalk, and the stalk itself be decayed and easily broken.

Some day you walk across the spread hemp, your foot goes through at

each step, you stoop and taking several stalks, snap them readily in

your fingers. The ends stick out clean apart; and lo! hanging between

them, there it is at last--a festoon of wet, coarse, dark gray riband,

wealth of the hemp, sail of the wild Scythian centuries before Horace

ever sang of him, sail of the Roman, dress of the Saxon and Celt, dress

of the Kentucky pioneer.

The rakers reappear at intervals of dry weather, and draw the hemp into

armfuls and set it up in shocks of convenient size, wide flared at the

bottom, well pressed in and bound at the top, so that the slanting

sides may catch the drying sun and the sturdy base resist the strong

winds. And now the fields are as the dark brown camps of armies--each

shock a soldier's tent. Yet not dark always; at times snow-covered; and

then the white tents gleam for miles in the winter sunshine--the

snow-white tents of the camping hemp.

Throughout the winter and on into early spring, as days may be warm or

the hemp dry, the breaking continues. At each nightfall, cleaned and

baled, it is hauled on wagon-beds or slides to the barns or the

hemphouses, where it is weighed for the work and wages of the day.

Last of all, the brakes having been taken from the field, some

night--dear sport for the lads!--takes place the burning of the

"hempherds," thus returning their elements to the soil. To kindle a

handful of tow and fling it as a firebrand into one of those masses of

tinder; to see the flames spread and the sparks rush like swarms of red

bees skyward through the smoke into the awful abysses of the night; to

run from gray heap to gray heap, igniting the long line of signal

fires, until the whole earth seems a conflagration and the heavens are

as rosy as at morn; to look far away and descry on the horizon an array

of answering lights; not in one direction only, but leagues away, to

see the fainter ever fainter glow of burning hempherds--this, too, is

one of the experiences, one of the memories.

And now along the turnpikes the great loaded creaking wagons pass

slowly to the towns, bearing the hemp to the factories, thence to be

scattered over land and sea. Some day, when the winds of March are

dying down, the sower enters the field and begins where he began twelve

months before.

A round year of the earth's changes enters into the creation of the

hemp. The planet has described its vast orbit ere it be grown and

finished. All seasons are its servitors; all contradictions and

extremes of nature meet in its making. The vernal patience of the

warming soil; the long, fierce arrows of the summer heat, the long,

silvery arrows of the summer rain; autumn's dead skies and sobbing

winds; winter's sternest, all-tightening frosts. Of none but strong

virtues is it the sum. Sickness or infirmity it knows not. It will have

a mother young and vigorous, or none; an old or weak or exhausted soil

cannot produce it. It will endure no roof of shade, basking only in the

eye of the fatherly sun, and demanding the whole sky for the walls of

its nursery.

Ah! type, too, of our life, which also is earth-sown, earth-rooted;

which must struggle upward, be cut down, rotted and broken, ere the

separation take place between our dross and our worth--poor perishable

shard and immortal fibre. Oh, the mystery, the mystery of that growth

from the casting of the soul as a seed into the dark earth, until the

time when, led through all natural changes and cleansed of weakness, it

is borne from the fields of its nativity for the long service.

I

The century just past had not begun the race of its many-footed years

when a neighborhood of Kentucky pioneers, settled throughout the green

valleys of the silvery Elkhorn, built a church in the wilderness, and

constituted themselves a worshipping association. For some time peace

of one sort prevailed among them, if no peace of any other sort was

procurable around. But by and by there arose sectarian quarrels with

other backwoods folk who also wished to worship God in Kentucky, and

hot personal disputes among the members--as is the eternal law. So that

the church grew as grow infusorians and certain worms,--by fissure, by

periodical splittings and breakings to pieces, each spontaneous

division becoming a new organism. The first church, however, for all

that it split off and cast off, seemed to lose nothing of its vitality

or fighting qualities spiritual and physical (the strenuous life in

those days!); and there came a time when it took offence at one

particular man in its membership on account of the liberality of his

religious opinions. This settler, an old Indian fighter whose vast

estate lay about halfway between the church and the nearest village,

had built himself a good brick house in the Virginian style; and it was

his pleasure and his custom to ask travelling preachers to rest under

his roof as they rode hither and thither throughout the

wilderness--Zion's weather-beaten, solitary scouts.

While giving entertainment to man and beast, if a Sunday came round, he

would further invite his guest, no matter what kind of faith the vessel

held, if it only held any faith, to ride with him through the woods and

preach to his brethren. This was the front of his offending. For since

he seemed brother to men of every creed, they charged that he was no

longer of THEIR faith (the only true one). They considered his case,

and notified him that it was their duty under God to expel him.

After the sermon one Sunday morning of summer the scene took place.

They had asked what he had to say, and silence had followed. Not far

from the church doors the bright Elkhorn (now nearly dry) swept past in

its stately shimmering flood. The rush of the water over the stopped

mill-wheel, that earliest woodland music of civilization, sounded loud

amid the suspense and the stillness.

He rose slowly from his seat on the bench in front of the pulpit--for

he was a deacon--and turned squarely at them; speechless just then, for

he was choking with rage.

"My brethren," he said at length slowly, for he would not speak until

he had himself under control, "I think we all remember what it is to be

persecuted for religion's sake. Long before we came together in

Spottsylvania County, Virginia, and organized ourselves into a church

and travelled as a church over the mountains into this wilderness,

worshipping by the way, we knew what it was to be persecuted. Some of

us were sent to jail for preaching the Gospel and kept there; we

preached to the people through the bars of our dungeons. Mobs were

collected outside to drown our voices; we preached the louder and some

jeered, but some felt sorry and began to serve God. They burned matches

and pods of red pepper to choke us; they hired strolls to beat drums

that we might not be heard for the din. Some of us knew what it was to

have live snakes thrown into our assemblages while at worship; or nests

of live hornets. Or to have a crowd rush into the church with farming

tools and whips and clubs. Or to see a gun levelled at one of us in the

pulpit, and to be dispersed with firearms. Harder than any of these

things to stand, we have known what it is to be slandered. But no

single man of us, thank God, ever stopped for these things or for

anything. Thirty years and more this lasted, until we and all such as

we found a friend in Patrick Henry. Now, we hear that by statute all

religious believers in Virginia have been made equal as respects the

rights and favors of the law.

"But you know it was partly to escape intolerable tyranny that we left

our mother country and travelled a path paved with suffering and lined

with death into this wilderness. For in this virgin land we thought we

should be free to worship God according to our consciences."

"Since we arrived you know what our life has been,--how we have fought

and toiled and suffered all things together. You recall how lately it

was that when we met in the woods for worship,--having no church and no

seats,--we men listened and sang and prayed with our rifles on our

shoulders."

He paused, for the memories hurt him cruelly.

"And now you notify me that you intend to expel me from this church as

a man no longer fit to worship my Maker in your company. Do you bring

any charge against my life, my conduct? None. Nothing but that, as a

believer in the living God--whom honestly I try to serve according to

my erring light--I can no longer have a seat among you--not believing

as you believe. But this is the same tyranny that you found unendurable

in Spottsylvania. You have begun it in Kentucky. You have been at it

already how long? Well, my brethren, I'll soon end your tyranny over

me. You need not TURN me out. And I need not change my religious

opinions. I will GO out. But--"

He wheeled round to the rough pulpit on which lay the copy of the Bible

that they had brought with them from Virginia, their Ark of the

Covenant on the way, seized it, and faced them again. He strode toward

the congregation as far as the benches would allow--not seeing clearly,

for he was sightless with his tears.

"But," he roared, and as he spoke he struck the Bible repeatedly with

his clenched fist, "by the Almighty, I will build a church of my own to

Him! To Him! do you hear? not to your opinions of Him nor mine nor any

man's! I will cut off a parcel of my farm and make a perpetual deed of

it in the courts, to be held in trust forever. And while the earth

stands, it shall stand, free to all Christian believers. I will build a

school-house and a meeting-house, where any child may be free to learn

and any man or woman free to worship."

He put the Bible back with shaking arms and turned on them again.

"As for you, my brethren," he said, his face purple and distorted with

passion, "you may be saved in your crooked, narrow way, if the mercy of

God is able to do it. But you are close to the jaws of Hell this day!"

He went over into a corner for his hat, took his wife by the hand and

held it tightly, gathered the flock of his children before him, and

drove them out of the church. He mounted his horse, lifted his wife to

her seat behind him, saw his children loaded on two other horses, and,

leading the way across the creek, disappeared in the wilderness.