THROUGH KENTUCKY.
I took the train from St. Louis, after receiving some road routes
kindly given by Mr. Harry L. Swartz, to Louisville, Ky. My recollection
of the Illinois dirt roads, after a lapse of five months, was too
vivid. The result of my encounter with one hundred and twenty-five
miles of clay ruts and lumps, had left too many scars behind, and
my indignation had not sufficiently subsided from the boiling point,
to make me care to wheel across that State a second time; so, after
making the acquaintance of a few wheelmen in Louisville, among them
Messrs. Thompson, Adams, Allison, and Huber, I started out over the
Shelbyville pike.
The pikes in Kentucky are macadamized, the rock used for that purpose
being hauled and dumped alongside the road where it is broken up
by negroes. It was no uncommon sight to see four or five "niggers,"
as they are always spoken of there, seated in rows by the roadside
in the scorching sun pounding these rocks into small pieces. From
twenty to twenty-five cents a perch is the price paid for this rock,
and five perch is a very good day's work. The riding, as a general
thing was very good, and there was plenty of coasting interspersed,
but the many loose stones in the road would not allow very lively work.
Although I did not go through the finest portion of the blue-grass
region, it was a very pretty country to ride over, plenty of trees,
cool-looking groves, and fine-looking farm-houses set back quite
a distance from the road on a knoll, a winding driveway leading to
them. Sometimes these farm-houses would have a cluster of tumble-down
shanties near them, a reminder of ante-bellum times. All the houses,
unless of the recent build, had the chimneys on the outside.
Besides enjoying the ride through this fertile, beautiful-looking
country, it was quite refreshing to be able to pass a group of
children, quite mature ones, sometimes, without being the object
of such facetious remarks as "Get up there, Levi," "Let her go,
Gallagher," and so on, words that are always on the tip of the
tongue of every white young American all through the West as well
as in the East. But no such remarks ever fell from the lips of the
colored children. They would open their eyes wide, and grin perhaps,
but not a word was said, unless, as it sometimes happened, it was
"Good mornin'," or "How de do." Much as I had to regret the ignorance
of the colored people--for they hardly ever gave a satisfactory answer
to an inquiry about roads and streets--still they never tried to say
something smart as I passed by, a compliment that cannot be paid to
the white people of Kentucky, or anywhere else.
The first night out I stopped at a farm-house with a widow and a lazy
son. The husband had been killed in the rebel army. The next morning
at the breakfast table the old lady asked me what kind of bread
I had to eat in California. I replied, "Very good, both home-made
and baker's." "Well," said she, "my daughter has been visiting in
California, and she says they make their bread there in this way:
The women take a mouthful of water and squirt it over the flour,
and then take another mouthful and do the same, and in this way mix
it up. I don't want to eat any of their bread." I explained how the
Chinese laundrymen sprinkle their clothes, and suggested that perhaps
there was some mistake, but it was no use trying to enlighten a mind
that probably, until the war, believed the Yankees had horns and tails.
The bicycle is not in favor in Kentucky. I was obliged to make more
dismounts on account of frightened horses than in any section of this
country through which I have passed. And not only do the horses and
their drivers dislike them, but the women express themselves very
forcibly about them. A saddle-horse, left unhitched in front of a
house, ran away down the road at my approach, but was easily caught. "I
don't wonder he was afraid of the thing. They had not ought to be
allowed in the road," said a female voice, with emphasis. The sound
came from the inside of the house somewhere, I did not look to see
where. Meeting a carriage, in which were two persons, I dismounted,
as the horse showed some signs of fright, but it was needless, and
as they drove leisurely by the man smiled and bowed to me. "Don't
bow to him. I would not be seen bow--", was what I heard issuing
in a piping voice from the inside of the dilapidated vehicle. She
evidently belonged to the aristocracy--to the same liberal class of
females that spat upon Union soldiers during the rebellion.
Toward night I came suddenly upon another saddle-horse around a bend
in the road. Saddle-horses are in such customary use, both by men and
boys, that it is no uncommon sight to see half a dozen such horses
hitched to trees near the school-houses, the scholars riding them
to and from school. This particular horse was hitched in front of a
saloon out in the country, and before I could stop he pulled back,
broke the bridle, and ran down the road. A man came reeling out of
the saloon into the road with a black rawhide whip in his hand, a
tall, large-framed man, with full, red cheeks, long face, moustache,
and goatee, a typical Kentuckian, drunk, too. "Now you jest take
that bridle, and ketch that horse, and bring him back here again,
or you'll get a pounden. I am a peaceable man, but I ain't afraid of
Christ, damnation, or high water. Now you do as I say," and he walked
deliberately back into the saloon, perhaps out of consideration for
my humiliated feelings, but probably to take another drink.
Although I was not mentioned in his "little list," from his other
remarks I judged he was not afraid of me either, and certainly a
Kentuckian who is not afraid of water is a brave man indeed. So
quickly mending the bridle with a string, I walked a rod or so,
put the bridle on the horse without the least trouble, hitched him,
and went on my way. Passing through Frankfort, I went to the north of
Lexington, which is situated in the heart of the blue-grass region,
and rode on to Georgetown. The term "blue grass" is derived, I was
told, from the fact that the grass in that section of the State has
a bluish color when it is in seed. The sun, during the middle of
the day, was so hot that occasionally I was inclined to lie down on
the grass under a shady tree. Once I was stretched out with my head
within a foot of a stone wall, and had dozed off almost to sleep,
when I suddenly smelt a snake. To one who has handled so many live
and dead ones, the scent of a snake is very familiar, and, as may be
supposed, I was not long in jumping to my feet. There was no snake in
sight, but sure enough out on the road was the track of a snake that
had recently crossed, and I felt certain it was not many inches from
my head when I awoke. Judging from the size of the track left by one
I saw crossing the road a little farther on, this one must have been
five or six feet long.
Reaching Cincinnati on the third day from Louisville, I had a few
moments' pleasant talk with Robert H. Kellogg, formerly of Manchester,
Conn., but now general agent of Cincinnati for the Connecticut Mutual
Life Insurance Company. "Seeing a Yankee from Connecticut will make
me feel good for a week," said he, as I left him.
When I went across Ohio in May, the consul at Cleveland in directing
me to Columbus sent me off into a section of the State where the
roads were miserable, and where I got stuck two days in the yellow
clay. Consequently I never felt like advising others to follow the
misdirections of that consul at Cleveland. But after traveling so many
miles since, and not being misled by any one to amount to anything,
it is curious, upon entering Ohio again, and applying to the consul for
the best roads to Chillicothe, that he, even with the help of the Ohio
State Road Book, should be unable to send me out of Cincinnati in the
right direction. The map that goes with the road book is a splendid
map. It gives every river, all the railroads, the outlines of every
town, the name of every county, city, and village--everything almost
but the roads. It is large in size, but it is remarkably small in road
information, and so of little use to a touring wheelman. At least the
consul and I studied it diligently for nearly half an hour, and then
he decided I must go out to Loveland, twenty or twenty-five miles,
and inquire, just as the consul at Cleveland sent me to Wellington,
and then told me to inquire, just as any three-year-old boy could
direct me.
So the next morning I started for Loveland, but I inquired before I got
there, and found I was going in the wrong direction, of course. Then I
rode across four or five miles of dirt roads, composed mostly of loose
rocks and dust, to another pike, a splendid one, but at Goshen found
I was still going in the wrong direction; so after six or eight more
miles of dirt roads, I found a pike that leads almost in a straight
line from Cincinnati to Chillicothe. The pikes radiate from the
city as do the spokes of a wheel from the hub, and consequently it
is important to start out on the right one, but it was two o'clock
in the afternoon before I found out which one that was. But it was a
good one, especially near Hillsboro, and the second night I was one
hundred and twenty miles from that useless road book and the friendly
but misleading consul.
Coming, with the help of steam-power for a short distance, to the
Ohio River again, opposite Parkersburg, West Virginia, I rode along up
toward Marietta. The roads were good, running close to the bank of the
river which was forty or fifty feet below, and, with fine farm-houses
along both banks, and trains of cars rushing up and down, the ride
was greatly enjoyed. I kept pace for miles with a stern-wheel steamer
going up the river. The water looked so inviting, I pushed the machine
down behind some bushes next the river, stripped, and took a good
bath. Then I hung the pocket-mirror against the root of a large stump,
left there by the big flood probably, took the shaving apparatus out
of the knapsack, and had a good shave. This recalled to my mind where
I performed the operation one morning in the Yellowstone. It was in a
pretty meadow between the Grand Cañon and Morris, and near a pebbly
brook. I had laid the machine up against a pine tree, under which I
was standing, and had just got my face well lathered when three stages
came down the road close by. Several ladies exclaimed simultaneously,
"O, see the bicycle!" but catching sight of me, with me chin elevated,
they murmured something more I could not hear, and went out of sight.
Leaving the machine outside in front of the post-office at Marietta
I found I must wait several hours for the next Eastern mail, and
so escaping the crowd that in so short a time had blocked the door
and filled the sidewalk, I pushed my way out, and rode a mile to the
"Mound Cemetery," as it is called, and I believe generally accepted to
be the resting place of a part of the nation, the Toltecs of Mexico,
who passed from the face of the earth before the Aztecs appeared,
who were in turn annihilated by the conquering Spaniards. I had
not time to pursue the study of ethnology, but climbed to the top
of the big mound, feeling secure there among those quiet folks from
the flood of questions that inevitably pour down upon me wherever I
stop. But no, a man who heard me inquire the way followed and climbed
up the forty-five stone steps only to bore me while I write these
words. He could not wait to give the others a chance, those who had
waited silently for a couple of thousand years. But the Toltecs have
more sense. As I pushed the machine up the steep side of the mound
they did not ask me "Why don't you get on and ride?" but I have met
hundreds of persons who would not derisively but soberly ask that
same question if they saw a wheelman pushing his machine up the side
of a house. And doubtless this man would have done the same when I
came if he had been where the Toltecs are. (I wish he was.) But he
is gone now, and I can almost hear the old Toltec beneath me give a
sigh of relief. It may be the wind, though, blowing through the big
oak trees that are growing up the sides of the mound.
Distance traveled with the wheel, 4,005 miles.