THE BLUEGRASS
God's Country!
No humor in that phrase to the Bluegrass Kentuckian! There never
was--there is none now. To him, the land seems in all the New World, to
have been the pet shrine of the Great Mother herself. She fashioned it
with loving hands. She shut it in with a mighty barrier of mighty
mountains to keep the mob out. She gave it the loving clasp of a mighty
river, and spread broad, level prairies beyond that the mob might glide
by, or be tempted to the other side, where the earth was level and
there was no need to climb; that she might send priests from her shrine
to reclaim Western wastes or let the weak or the unloving--if such
could be--have easy access to another land.
In the beginning, such was her clear purpose to the Kentuckian's eye,
she filled it with flowers and grass and trees, and fish and bird and
wild beasts. Just as she made Eden for Adam and Eve. The red men fought
for the Paradise--fought till it was drenched with blood, but no tribe,
without mortal challenge from another straightway, could ever call a
rood its own. Boone loved the land from the moment the eagle eye in his
head swept its shaking wilderness from a mountain-top, and every man
who followed him loved the land no less. And when the chosen came, they
found the earth ready to receive them--lifted above the baneful breath
of river-bottom and marshland, drained by rivers full of fish, filled
with woods full of game, and underlaid--all--with thick, blue,
limestone strata that, like some divine agent working in the dark, kept
crumbling--ever crumbling--to enrich the soil and give bone-building
virtue to every drop of water and every blade of grass. For those
chosen people such, too, seemed her purpose--the Mother went to the
race upon whom she had smiled a benediction for a thousand years--the
race that obstacle but strengthens, that thrives best under an alien
effort to kill, that has ever conquered its conquerors, and that seems
bent on the task of carrying the best ideals any age has ever known
back to the Old World from which it sprang. The Great Mother knows!
Knows that her children must suffer, if they stray too far from her
great teeming breasts. And how she has followed close when this Saxon
race--her youngest born--seemed likely to stray too far--gathering its
sons to her arms in virgin lands that they might suckle again and keep
the old blood fresh and strong. Who could know what danger threatened
it when she sent her blue-eyed men and women to people the wilderness
of the New World? To climb the Alleghenies, spread through the wastes
beyond, and plant their kind across a continent from sea to sea. Who
knows what dangers threaten now, when, his task done, she seems to be
opening the eastern gates of the earth with a gesture that seems to
say--"Enter, reclaim, and dwell therein!"
One little race of that race in the New World, and one only, has she
kept flesh of her flesh, bone of her bone--to that race only did she
give no outside aid. She shut it in with gray hill and shining river.
She shut it off from the mother state and the mother nation and left it
to fight its own fight with savage nature, savage beast, and savage
man. And thus she gave the little race strength of heart and body and
brain, and taught it to stand together as she taught each man of the
race to stand alone, protect his women, mind his own business, and
meddle not at all; to think his own thoughts and die for them if need
be, though he divided his own house against itself; taught the man to
cleave to one woman, with the penalty of death if he strayed elsewhere;
to keep her--and even himself--in dark ignorance of the sins against
Herself for which she has slain other nations, and in that happy
ignorance keeps them to-day, even while she is slaying elsewhere still.
And Nature holds the Kentuckians close even to-day--suckling at her
breasts and living after her simple laws. What further use she may have
for them is hid by the darkness of to-morrow, but before the Great War
came she could look upon her work and say with a smile that it was
good. The land was a great series of wooded parks such as one might
have found in Merry England, except that worm fence and stone wall took
the place of hedge along the highways. It was a land of peace and of a
plenty that was close to easy luxury--for all. Poor whites were few,
the beggar was unknown, and throughout the region there was no man,
woman, or child, perhaps, who did not have enough to eat and to wear
and a roof to cover his head, whether it was his own roof or not. If
slavery had to be--then the fetters were forged light and hung loosely.
And, broadcast, through the people, was the upright sturdiness of the
Scotch-Irishman, without his narrowness and bigotry; the grace and
chivalry of the Cavalier without his Quixotic sentiment and his
weakness; the jovial good-nature of the English squire and the
leavening spirit of a simple yeomanry that bore itself with unconscious
tenacity to traditions that seeped from the very earth. And the wings
of the eagle hovered over all.
For that land it was the flowering time of the age and the people; and
the bud that was about to open into the perfect flower had its living
symbol in the little creature racing over the bluegrass fields on a
black pony, with a black velvet cap and a white nodding plume above her
shaking curls, just as the little stranger who had floated down into
those Elysian fields--with better blood in his veins than he knew--was
a reincarnation perhaps of the spirit of the old race that had lain
dormant in the hills. The long way from log-cabin to Greek portico had
marked the progress of the generations before her, and, on this same
way, the boy had set his sturdy feet.