[Illustration: OLD STONE HOMESTEAD.]
THE BLUE-GRASS
REGION OF KENTUCKY
AND OTHER KENTUCKY ARTICLES
BY JAMES LANE ALLEN. ILLUSTRATED
[Illustration: (Publisher's logo)]
NEW YORK
HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS
M DCCC XCII
Copyright, 1892, by HARPER & BROTHERS.
_All rights reserved._
PREFACE
The articles herein reprinted from HARPER'S and _The Century_ magazines
represent work done at intervals during the period that the author was
writing the tales already published under the title of _Flute and
Violin_.
It was his plan that with each descriptive article should go a short
story dealing with the same subject, and this plan was in part wrought
out. Thus, with the article entitled "Uncle Tom at Home" goes the tale
entitled "Two Gentlemen of Kentucky;" and with the article entitled "A
Home of the Silent Brotherhood" goes the tale entitled "The White Cowl."
In the same way, there were to be short stories severally dealing with
the other subjects embraced in this volume. But having in part wrought
out this plan, the author has let it rest--not finally, perhaps, but
because in the mean time he has found himself engaged with other themes.
[Illustration: JAMES LANE ALLEN
AUTHOR OF
"THE KENTUCKY CARDINAL,"
"THE CHOIR INVISIBLE,"
"THE REIGN OF LAW," ETC.
BOOK NEWS PORTRAIT N
VOL. 24. NO. 287, JULY.]
CONTENTS
PAGE
THE BLUE-GRASS REGION 1
UNCLE TOM AT HOME 45
COUNTY COURT DAY IN KENTUCKY 87
KENTUCKY FAIRS 127
A HOME OF THE SILENT BROTHERHOOD 169
HOMESTEADS OF THE BLUE-GRASS 199
THROUGH CUMBERLAND GAP ON HORSEBACK 229
MOUNTAIN PASSES OF THE CUMBERLAND 269
ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
Old Stone Homestead _Frontispiece_
Blue-grass 5
Sheep in Woodland Pasture 9
Negro Cabins 15
Cattle in a Blue-grass Pasture 21
Hemp Field 25
Tobacco Patch 29
Harrodsburg Pike 33
A Spring-house 41
The Mammy 59
The Cook 65
Chasing the Rabbit 77
The Preacher 81
Wet Goods for Sale--Bowling Green 91
Concluding a Bargain 93
Court-house Square, Lexington, Kentucky 97
The "Tickler" 101
The Quack-doctor 105
Auctioning a Jack 109
Lords of the Soil 113
Swapping Horses 117
Gentlemen of Leisure 121
Corn-husking 131
Militia Muster 135
Products of the Soil 139
Cattle at Lexington Fair 143
Harness Horses 147
The Modern Tourney 151
The Judge's Stand--The Finish 155
A Dinner-party 157
The Race-course--The Finish 159
Stallions 163
Mules 165
Office of the Father Prior 177
Within the Gates 181
A Fortnightly Shave 187
The Garden 197
Old Ferry at Point Burnside 233
"Damn me if them ain't the damnedest beans I ever seen!" 237
Moonrise on Cumberland Ridge 239
Cumberland Falls 243
Native Types 247
Interior of a Mountaineer's Home 251
Mountain Courtship 255
A Family Burying-ground 259
A Mountaineer Dame 261
Old Corn-mill at Pineville 265
Map Showing Mountain Passes of the Cumberland 277
Cumberland Gap 281
Ford on the Cumberland 297
Kentucky River from High Bridge 309
THE BLUE-GRASS REGION
I
One might well name it Saxon grass, so much is it at home in Saxon
England, so like the loveliest landscapes of green Saxon England has it
made other landscapes on which dwell a kindred race in America, and so
akin is it to the type of nature that is peculiarly Saxon: being a
hardy, kindly, beautiful, nourishing stock; loving rich lands and apt to
find out where they lie; uprooting inferior aborigines, but stoutly
defending its new domain against all invaders; paying taxes well, with
profits to boot; thriving best in temperate latitudes and checkered
sunshine; benevolent to flocks and herds; and allying itself closely to
the history of any people whose content lies in simple plenty and
habitual peace--the perfect squire-and-yeoman type of grasses.
In the earliest spring nothing is sooner afield to contest possession
of the land than the blue-grass. Its little green spear-points are the
first to pierce the soft rich earth, and array themselves in countless
companies over the rolling landscapes, while its roots reach out in
every direction for securer foothold. So early does this take place,
that a late hoar-frost will now and then mow all these bristling
spear-points down. Sometimes a slow-falling sleet will incase each
emerald blade in glittering silver; but the sun by-and-by melts the
silver, leaving the blade unhurt. Or a light snow-fall will cover tufts
of it over, making pavilions and colonnades with white roofs resting on
green pillars. The roofs vanish anon, and the columns go on silently
rising. But usually the final rigors of the season prove harmless to the
blue-grass. One sees it most beautiful in the spring, just before the
seed stalks have shot upward from the flowing tufts, and while the thin,
smooth, polished blades, having risen to their greatest height, are
beginning to bend, or break and fall over on themselves and their nether
fellows from sheer luxuriance. The least observant eye is now
constrained to note that blue-grass is the characteristic element of the
Kentucky turf--the first element of beauty in the Kentucky landscape.
Over the stretches of woodland pasture, over the meadows and the lawns,
by the edges of turnpike and lane, in the fence corners--wherever its
seed has been allowed to flourish--it spreads a verdure so soft in fold
and fine in texture, so entrancing by its freshness and fertility, that
it looks like a deep-lying, thick-matted emerald moss. One thinks of it,
not as some heavy, velvet-like carpet spread over the earth, but as some
light, seamless veil that has fallen delicately around it, and that
might be blown away by a passing breeze.
[Illustration: BLUE-GRASS.]
After this you will not see the blue-grass so beautiful. The seed ripens
in June. Already the slender seed stalks have sprung up above the
uniform green level, bearing on their summits the fuzzy, plumy, purplish
seed-vessels; and save the soft, feathery undulations of these as the
wind sweeps over them, the beauty of the blue-grass is gone. Moreover,
certain robust and persistent weeds and grasses have been growing
apace, roughening and diversifying the sward, so that the vista is less
charming. During July and August the blue-grass lies comparatively
inactive, resting from fructification, and missing, as well, frequent
showers to temper the sunshine. In seasons of severe drought it even
dies quite away, leaving the surface of the earth as bare and brown as a
winter landscape or arid plain. Where it has been closely grazed, one
may, in walking over it, stir such a dust as one would raise on a
highway; and the upturned, half-exposed rootlets seem entirely dead. But
the moderated heats and the gentle rains that usually come with the
passing of summer bring on a second vigorous growth, and in the course
of several weeks the landscape is covered with a verdure rivalling the
luxuriance of spring.
There is something incongruous in this marvellous autumnal
rejuvenescence of the blue-grass. All nature appears content and
resting. The grapes on the sunward slopes have received their final
coloring of purple and gold; the heavy mast is beginning to drop in the
forest, followed by the silent lapse of russet and crimson leaves; the
knee-deep aftermath has paled its green in the waiting autumn fields;
the plump children are stretching out their nut-stained hands towards
the first happy fire-glow on chill, dark evenings; and the cricket has
left the sere, dead garden for a winter home at the hearth. Then, lo!
as if by some freakish return of the spring to the edge of winter the
pastures are suddenly as fresh and green as those of May. The effect on
one who has the true landscape passion is transporting and bewildering.
Such contrasts of color it is given one to study nowhere but in
blue-grass lands. It is as if the seasons were met to do some great
piece of brocading. One sees a new meaning in Poe's melancholy
thought--the leaves of the many-colored grass.
All winter the blue-grass continues green--it is always _green_, of
course, never _blue_--and it even grows a little, except when the ground
is frozen. Thus, year after year, drawing needful nourishment from the
constantly disintegrating limestone below, flourishes here as nowhere
else in the world this wonderful grass.
Even while shivering in the bleak winds of March, the young lambs
frolicked away from the distent teats of the ewes, with growing relish
for its hardy succulence, and by-and-by they were taken into market the
sooner and the fatter for its developing qualities. During the long
summer, foaming pails of milk and bowls of golden butter have testified
to the Kentucky housewife with what delight the cows have ruminated on
the stores gathered each plentiful day. The Kentucky farmer knows that
the distant metropolitan beef-eater will in time have good reason to
thank it for yonder winding herd of sleek young steers that are softly
brushing their rounded sides with their long, white, silky tails, while
they plunge their puffing noses into its depths and tear away huge
mouthfuls of its inexhaustible richness. Thorough-bred sire and dam and
foal in paddocks or deeper pastures have drawn from it form and quality
and organization: hardness and solidity of bone, strength of tendon,
firmness and elasticity of muscle, power of nerve, and capacity of lung.
Even the Falstaff porkers, their eyes gleaming with gluttonous
enjoyment, have looked to it for the shaping of their posthumous hams
and the padding of their long backbones in depths of snowy lard. In
winter mules and sheep and horses paw away the snow to get at the green
shoots that lie covered over beneath the full, rank growth of autumn, or
they find it attractive provender in their ricks. For all that live upon
it, it is perennial and abundant, beautiful and beneficent--the first
great natural factor in the prosperity of the Kentucky people. What
wonder if the Kentuckian, like the Greek of old, should wish to have
even his paradise well set in grass; or that, with a knowing humor, he
should smile at David for saying, "He maketh his grass to grow upon the
mountains," inasmuch as the only grass worth speaking of grows on his
beloved plain!
[Illustration: SHEEP IN WOODLAND PASTURE.]
II
But if grass is the first element in the lovely Kentucky landscape, as
it must be in every other one, by no means should it be thought sole or
chief. In Dante, as Ruskin points out, whenever the country is to be
beautiful, we come into open air and open meadows. Homer places the
sirens in a meadow when they are to sing. Over the blue-grass,
therefore, one walks into the open air and open meadows of the
blue-grass land.
This has long had reputation for being one of the very beautiful spots
of the earth, and it is worth while to consider those elements of
natural scenery wherein the beauty consists.
One might say, first, that the landscape possesses what is so very rare
even in beautiful landscapes--the quality of gracefulness. Nowhere does
one encounter vertical lines or violent slopes; nor are there perfectly
level stretches like those that make the green fields monotonous in the
Dutch lowlands. The dark, finely sifted soil lies deep over the
limestone hills, filling out their chasms to evenness, and rounding
their jagged or precipitous edges, very much as a heavy snow at night
will leave the morning landscape with mitigated ruggedness and softer
curves. The long, slow action of water has further moulded everything
into symmetry, so that the low ancient hills descend to the valleys in
exquisite folds and uninterrupted slopes. The whole great plain
undulates away league after league towards the distant horizon in an
endless succession of gentle convex surfaces--like the easy swing of the
sea--presenting a panorama of subdued swells and retiring surges.
Everything in the blue-grass country is billowy and afloat. The spirit
of nature is intermediate between violent energy and complete repose;
and the effect of this mild activity is kept from monotony by the
accidental perspective of position, creating variety of details.
One traces this quality of gracefulness in the labyrinthine courses of
the restful streams, in the disposition of forest masses, in the free,
unstudied succession of meadow, field, and lawn. Surely it is just this
order of low hill scenery, just these buoyant undulations, that should
be covered with the blue-grass. Had Hawthorne ever looked on this
landscape when most beautiful, he could never have said of England that
"no other country will ever have this charm of lovely verdure."
Characteristically beautiful spots on the blue-grass landscape are the
woodland pastures. A Kentucky wheat field, a Kentucky meadow, a Kentucky
lawn, is but a field, a meadow, a lawn, found elsewhere; but a Kentucky
sylvan slope has a loveliness unique and local. Rightly do poets make
pre-eminently beautiful countries abound in trees. John Burroughs,
writing with enthusiasm of English woods, has said that "in midsummer
the hair of our trees seems to stand on end; the woods have a frightened
look, or as if they were just recovering from a debauch." This is not
true of the Kentucky woods, unless it be in some season of protracted
drought. The foliage of the Kentucky trees is not thin nor dishevelled,
the leaves crowd thick to the very ends of the boughs, and spread
themselves full to the sky, making, where they are close together,
under-spaces of green gloom scarcely shot through by sunbeams. Indeed,
one often finds here the perfection of tree forms. I mean that rare
development which brings the extremities of the boughs to the very limit
of the curve that nature intends the tree to define as the peculiar
shape of its species. Any but the most favorable conditions leave the
outline jagged, faulty, and untrue. Here and there over the blue-grass
landscape one's eye rests on a cone-shaped, or dome-shaped, or inverted
pear-shaped, or fan-shaped tree. Nor are fulness of leafage and
perfection of form alone to be noted; pendency of boughs is another
distinguishing feature. One who loves and closely studies trees will
note here the comparative absence of woody stiffness. It is expected
that the willow and the elm should droop their branches. Here the same
characteristic strikes you in the wild cherry, the maple, and the
sycamore--even in great walnuts and ashes and oaks; and I have
occasionally discovered exceeding grace of form in hackberries (which
usually look paralytic and as if waiting to hobble away on crutches), in
locusts, and in the harsh hickories--loved by Thoreau.
But to return to the woodland pastures. They are the last vestiges of
that unbroken primeval forest which, together with cane-brakes and
pea-vines, covered the face of the country when it was first beheld by
the pioneers. No blue-grass then. In these woods the timber has been
so cut out that the remaining trees often stand clearly revealed in
their entire form, their far-reaching boughs perhaps not even touching
those of their nearest neighbor, or interlacing them with ineffectual
fondness. There is something pathetic in the sight, and in the
thought of those innumerable stricken ones that in years agone were
dismembered for cord-wood and kitchen stoves and the vast fireplaces
of old-time negro cabins. In the well kept blue-grass pasture
undergrowth and weeds are annually cut down, so that the massive
trunks are revealed from a distance; the better because the branches
seldom are lower than from ten to twenty feet above the earth. Thus in
its daily course the sun strikes every point beneath the broad
branches, and nourishes the blue-grass up to the very roots. All
savagery, all wildness, is taken out of these pastures; they are full
of tenderness and repose--of the utmost delicacy and elegance. Over
the graceful earth spreads the flowing green grass, uniform and
universal. Above this stand the full, swelling trunks--warm browns and
pale grays--often lichen-flecked or moss-enamelled. Over these expand
the vast domes and canopies of leafage. And falling down upon these
comes the placid sunshine through a sky of cerulean blueness, and past
the snowy zones of gleaming cloud. The very individuality of the tree
comes out as it never can in denser places. Always the most truly
human object in still, voiceless nature, it here throws out its arms
to you with imploring tenderness, with what Wordsworth called "the
soft eye-music of slow-waving boughs." One cannot travel far in the
blue-grass country without coming upon one of these woodland strips.
[Illustration: NEGRO CABINS.]
Of the artistic service rendered the landscape of this region by other
elements of scenery--atmosphere and cloud and sky--much might, but
little will, be said. The atmosphere is sometimes crystalline, sometimes
full of that intense repose of dazzling light which one, without ever
having seen them, knows to be on canvases of Turner. Then, again, it is
amber-hued, or tinged with soft blue, graduated to purple shadows on the
horizon. During the greater part of the year the cloud-sky is one of
strongly outlined forms; the great white cumuli drift over, with every
majesty of design and grace of grouping; but there come, in milder
seasons, many days when one may see three cloud belts in the heavens at
the same time, the lowest far, far away, and the highest brushing
softly, as it were, past the very dome of the inviolable blue. You turn
your eye downward to see the light wandering wistfully among the low
distant hills, and the sweet tremulous shadows crossing the meadows with
timid cadences. It _is_ a beautiful country; the Kentucky skies are not
the cold, hard, brilliant, hideous things that so many writers on nature
style American skies (usually meaning New England skies), as contrasted
with skies European. They are at times ineffably warm in tone and tender
in hue, giving aerial distances magical and fathomless above, and
throwing down upon the varied soft harmonious greens of the landscape
below, upon its rich browns and weathered grays and whole scheme of
terrene colors, a flood of radiance as bountiful and transfiguring as it
is chastened and benign.
But why make a description of the blue-grass region of Kentucky? What
one sees may be only what one feels--only intricate affinities between
nature and self that were developed long ago, and have become too deep
to be viewed as relations or illusions. What two human beings find the
same things in the face of a third, or in nature's? Descriptions of
scenery are notoriously disappointing to those whose taste in landscape
is different, or who have little or no sentiment for pure landscape
beauty. So one coming hither might be sorely disappointed. No
mountains; no strips of distant blue gleaming water nor lawny cascades;
no grandeur; no majesty; no wild picturesqueness. The chords of
landscape harmony are very simple; nothing but softness and amenity,
grace and repose, delicacy and elegance. One might fail at seasons to
find even these. This is a beautiful country, but not always; there come
days when the climate shows as ugly a temper as possible. Not a little
of the finest timber has been lost by storms. The sky is for days one
great blanket of grewsome gray. In winter you laugh with chattering
teeth at those who call this "the South," the thermometer perhaps
registering from twelve to fifteen degrees below zero. In summer the
name is but a half-truth. Only by visiting this region during some
lovely season, or by dwelling here from year to year, and seeing it in
all the humors of storm and sunshine, can one love it.
III
But the ideal landscape of daily life must not be merely beautiful: it
should be useful. With what may not the fertility of this region be
compared? With the valleys of the Schuylkill, the Shenandoah, and the
Genesee; with the richest lands of Lombardy and Belgium; with the most
fertile districts of England. The evidences of this fertility are
everywhere. Nature, even in those places where she has been forced for
nearly a hundred years to bear much at the hands of a not always
judicious agriculture, unceasingly struggles to cover herself with
bushes of all sorts and nameless annual weeds and grasses. Even the
blue-grass contends in vain for complete possession of its freehold. One
is forced to note, even though without sentiment, the rich pageant of
transitory wild bloom that _will_ force a passage for itself over the
landscape: firmaments of golden dandelions in the lawns; vast beds of
violets, gray and blue, in dim glades; patches of flaunting sunflowers
along the road-sides; purple thistles; and, of deeper purple still and
far denser growth, beautiful ironweed in the woods; with many clumps of
alder bloom, and fast-extending patches of perennial blackberry, and
groups of delicate May-apples, and whole fields of dog-fennel and
golden-rod. And why mention indomitable dock and gigantic poke, burrs
and plenteous nightshade, and mullein and plantain, with dusty
gray-green ragweed and thrifty fox-tail?--an innumerable company.
Maize, pumpkins, and beans grow together in a field--a triple crop.
Nature perfects them all, yet must do more. Scarce have the ploughs left
the furrows before there springs up a varied wild growth, and a fourth
crop, morning-glories, festoon the tall tassels of the Indian corn
ere the knife can be laid against the stalk. Harvest fields usually have
their stubble well hidden by a rich, deep aftermath. Garden patches, for
all that hoe and rake can do, commonly look at last like spots given
over to weeds and grasses. Sidewalks quickly lose their borders.
Pavements would soon disappear from sight; the winding of a distant
stream through the fields can be readily followed by the line of
vegetation that rushes there to fight for life, from the minutest
creeping vines to forest trees. Every neglected fence corner becomes an
area for a fresh colony. Leave one of these sweet, humanized woodland
pastures alone for a short period of years, it runs wild with a dense
young natural forest; vines shoot up to the tops of the tallest trees,
and then tumble over in green sprays on the heads of others.
[Illustration: CATTLE IN A BLUE-GRASS PASTURE.]
A kind, true, patient, self-helpful soil if ever there was one! Some of
these lands after being cultivated, not always scientifically, but
always without artificial fertilizers, for more than three-quarters of a
century, are now, if properly treated, equal in productiveness to the
best farming lands of England. The farmer from one of these old fields
will take two different crops in a season. He gets two cuttings of
clover from a meadow, and has rich grazing left. A few counties have at
a time produced three-fourths of the entire hemp product of the United
States. The State itself has at different times stood first in wheat
and hemp and Indian corn and wool and tobacco and flax, although half
its territory is covered with virgin forests. When lands under improper
treatment have become impoverished, their productiveness has been
restored, not by artificial fertilizers, but by simple rotation of
crops, with nature's help. The soil rests on decomposable limestone,
which annually gives up to it in solution all the essential mineral
plant food that judicious agriculture needs.
Soil and air and climate--the entire aggregate of influences happily
co-operative--make the finest grazing. The Kentucky horse has carried
the reputation of the country into regions where even the people could
never have made it known. Your expert in the breeding of thoroughbreds
will tell you that the muscular fibre of the blue-grass animal is to
that of the Pennsylvania-bred horses as silk to cotton, and the texture
of his bone, compared with the latter's, as ivory beside pumice-stone.
If taken to the Eastern States, in twelve generations he is no longer
the same breed of horse. His blood fertilizes American stock the
continent over. Jersey cattle brought here increase in size. Sires come
to Kentucky to make themselves and their offspring famous.
The people themselves are a fecund race. Out of this State have gone
more to enrich the citizenship of the nation than all the other States
together have been able to send into it. So at least your loyal-hearted
Kentuckian looks at the rather delicate subject of inter-State
migration. By actual measurement the Kentucky volunteers during the
Civil War were found to surpass all others (except Tennesseeans) in
height and weight, whether coming from the United States or various
countries of Europe. But for the great-headed Scandinavians, they would
have been first, also, in circumference around the forehead and occiput.
Still, Kentucky has little or no literature.
[Illustration: HEMP FIELD.]
One element that should be conspicuous in fertile countries does not
strike the observer here--much beautiful water; no other State has a
frontage of navigable rivers equal to that of Kentucky. But there are
few limpid, lovely, smaller streams. Wonderful springs there are, and
vast stores of water in the cavernous earth below; but the landscape
lacks the charm of this element--clear, rushing, musical, abundant. The
watercourses, ever winding and graceful, are apt to be either swollen
and turbid or insignificant; of late years the beds seem less full
also--a change consequent, perhaps, upon the denudation of forest lands.
In a dry season the historic Elkhorn seems little more than a ganglion
of precarious pools.
IV
The best artists who have painted cultivated ground have always been
very careful to limit the area of the crops. Undoubtedly the
substitution of a more scientific agriculture for the loose and easy
ways of primitive husbandry has changed the key-note of rural existence
from a tender Virgilian sentiment to a coarser strain, and as life
becomes more unsophisticated it grows less picturesque. When the work of
the old-time reaper is done by a fat man with a flaming face, sitting on
a cast-iron machine, and smoking a cob pipe, the artist will leave the
fields. Figures have a terrible power to destroy sentiment in pure
landscape; so have houses. When one leaves nature, pure and simple, in
the blue-grass country, he must accordingly pick his way circumspectly
or go amiss in his search for the beautiful. If his taste lead him to
desire in landscapes the finest evidences of human labor, the high
artificial finish of a minutely careful civilization, he will here find
great disappointment. On the other hand, if he delight in those
exquisite rural spots of the Old World with picturesque bits of
homestead architecture and the perfection of horticultural and
unobtrusive botanical details, he will be no less aggrieved. What he
sees here is neither the most scientific farming, simply economic and
utilitarian--raw and rude--nor that cultivated desire for the elements
in nature to be so moulded by the hand of man that they will fuse
harmoniously and inextricably with his habitations and his work.
The whole face of the country is taken up by a succession of farms. Each
of these, except the very small ones, presents to the eye the variation
of meadow, field, and woodland pasture, together with the homestead and
the surrounding grounds of orchard, garden, and lawn. The entire
landscape is thus caught in a vast net-work of fences. The Kentuckian
retains his English ancestors' love of enclosures; but the uncertain
tenure of estates beyond a single generation does not encourage him to
make them the most durable. One does, indeed, notice here and there
throughout the country stone-walls of blue limestone, that give an
aspect of substantial repose and comfortable firmness to the scenery.
But the farmer dreads their costliness, even though his own hill-sides
furnish him an abundant quarry. He knows that unless the foundations
are laid like those of a house, the thawing earth will unsettle them,
that water, freezing as it trickles through the crevices, will force the
stones out of their places, and that breaches will be made in them by
boys on a hunt whenever and wherever it shall be necessary to get at a
lurking or sorely pressed hare. It is ludicrously true that the most
terrible destroyer of stone-walls in this country is the small boy
hunting a hare, with an appetite for game that knows no geological
impediment. Therefore one hears of fewer limestone fences of late years,
some being torn down and superseded by plank fences or post-and-rail
fences, or by the newer barbed-wire fence--an economic device that will
probably become as popular in regions where stone and timber were never
to be had as in others, like this, where timber has been ignorantly,
wantonly sacrificed. It is a pleasure to know that one of the most
expensive, and certainly the most hideous, fences ever in vogue here is
falling into disuse. I mean the worm-fence--called worm because it
wriggled over the landscape like a long brown caterpillar, the stakes
being the bristles along its back, and because it now and then ate up a
noble walnut-tree close by, or a kingly oak, or frightened, trembling
ash--a worm that decided the destiny of forests. A pleasure it is, too,
to come occasionally upon an Osage orange hedge-row, which is a green
eternal fence. But you will not find many of these. It is generally too
much to ask of an American, even though he be a Kentuckian, to wait for
a hedge to grow and make him a fence. When he takes a notion to have a
fence, he wants it put up before Saturday night.
[Illustration: TOBACCO PATCH.]
If the Kentuckian, like the Englishman, is fond of fencing himself off,
like the Frenchman, he loves long, straight roads. You will not find
elsewhere in America such highways as the Kentuckian has constructed
over his country--broad, smooth, level, white, glistening turnpikes of
macadamized limestone. It is a luxury to drive, and also an expense, as
one will discover before one has passed through many toll-gates. One
could travel more cheaply on the finest railway on the continent. What
Richard Grant White thought it worth while to record as a rare and
interesting sight--a man on an English highway breaking stones--is no
uncommon sight here. All limestone for these hundreds of miles of road,
having been quarried here, there, anywhere, and carted and strewn along
the road-side, is broken by a hammer in the hand. By the highway the
workman sits--usually an Irishman--pecking away at a long rugged pile as
though he were good to live for a thousand years. Somehow, in patience,
he always gets to the other end of his hard row.
One cannot sojourn long without coming to conceive an interest in this
limestone, and loving to meet its rich warm hues on the landscape. It
has made a deal of history: limestone blue-grass, limestone water,
limestone roads, limestone fences, limestone bridges and arches,
limestone engineering architecture, limestone water-mills, limestone
spring-houses and homesteads--limestone Kentuckians! Outside of
Scripture no people was ever so founded on a rock. It might be well to
note, likewise, that the soil of this region is what scientists call
sedentary--called so because it sits quietly on the rocks, not because
the people sit quietly on it.
Undoubtedly the most picturesque monuments in the blue-grass country are
old stone water-mills and old stone homesteads--landmarks each for
separate trains of ideas that run to poetry and to history. The latter,
built by pioneers or descendants of pioneers, nearly a hundred years
ago, stand gray with years, but good for nameless years to come; great
low chimneys, deep little windows, thick walls, mighty fireplaces;
situated usually with keen discretion on an elevation near a spring,
just as a Saxon forefather would have placed them centuries ago. Haply
one will see the water of this spring issuing still from a recess in a
hill-side, with an overhanging ledge of rock--the entrance to this
cavern being walled across and closed with a gate, thus making,
according to ancient fashion, a simple natural spring-house and dairy.
Something like a feeling of exasperation is apt to come over one in
turning to the typical modern houses. Nowhere, certainly, in rural
America, are there, within the same area, more substantial, comfortable
homesteads. They are nothing if not spacious and healthful, frame or
brick, two stories, shingle roofs. But they lack characteristic
physiognomy; they have no harmony with the landscape, nor with each
other, nor often with themselves. They are not beautiful when new, and
can never be beautiful when old; for the beauty of newness and the
beauty of oldness alike depend on beauty of form and color, which here
is lacking. One longs for the sight of a rural Gothic cottage, which
would harmonize so well with the order of the scenery, or for a light,
elegant villa that should overlook these light and elegant undulations
of a beautiful and varied landscape. It must be understood that there
are notable exceptions to these statements even in the outlying
districts of the blue-grass country, and that they do not apply to the
environs of the towns, nor to the towns themselves.
Nowhere does one see masses of merely beautiful things in the country.
The slumbering art of interior decoration is usually spent upon the
parlor. The grounds around the houses are not kept in the best order.
The typical rural Kentucky housewife does not seem to have any
compelling, controlling sense of the beautiful. She invariably concedes
something to beauty, but not enough. You will find a show of flowers at
the poorest houses, though but geranium slips in miscellaneous tins and
pottery. But you do not generally see around more prosperous homes any
such parterres or beds as there is money to spend on, and time to tend,
and grounds to justify.
[Illustration: HARRODSBURG PIKE.]
A like spirit is shown by the ordinary blue-grass farmer. His management
strikes you as not the pink of tidiness, not the model of systematic
thrift. Exceptions exist--many exceptions--but the rule holds good. One
cannot travel here in summer or autumn without observing that weeds
flourish where they harm and create ugliness; fences go unrepaired;
gates may be found swinging on one hinge. He misuses his long-cultivated
fields; he cuts down his scant, precious trees. His energy is not
tireless, his watchfulness not sleepless. Why should they be? Human life
here is not massed and swarming. The occupation of the soil is not close
and niggard. The landscape is not even compact, much less crowded. There
is room for more, plenty for more to eat. No man here, like the ancient
Roman prætor, ever decided how often one might, without trespass, gather
the acorns that fall from his neighbors' trees. No woman ever went
through a blue-grass harvest field gleaning. Ruth's vocation is unknown.
By nature the Kentuckian is no rigid economist. By birth, education,
tradition, and inherited tendencies he is not a country clout, but a
rural gentleman. His ideal of life is neither vast wealth nor personal
distinction, but solid comfort in material conditions, and the material
conditions are easy: fertility of soil, annual excess of production over
consumption, comparative thinness of population. So he does not brace
himself for the tense struggle of life as it goes on in centres of
fierce territorial shoulder-pushing. He can afford to indulge his
slackness of endeavor. He is neither an alert aggressive agriculturist,
nor a landscape gardener, nor a purveyor of commodities to the
green-grocer. If the world wants vegetables, let it raise them. He
declines to work himself to death for other people, though they pay him
for it. His wife is a lady, not a domestic laborer; and it is her
privilege, in household affairs, placidly to surround herself with an
abundance which the lifelong female economists of the North would regard
with conscientious indignation.
In truth, there is much evidence to show that this park-like country,
intersected by many beautiful railroads, turnpikes, and shaded
picturesque lanes, will become less and less an agricultural district,
more and more a region of unequalled pasturage, and hence more park-like
still. One great interest abides here, of course--the manufacture of
Bourbon whiskey. Another interest has only within the last few years
been developed--the cultivation of tobacco, for which it was formerly
thought that the blue-grass soils were not adapted. But as years go by,
the stock interests invite more capital, demand more attention, give
more pleasure--in a word, strike the full chord of modern interest by
furnishing an unparalleled means of speculative profit.
Forty years ago the most distinguished citizens of the State were
engaged in writing essays and prize papers on scientific agriculture. A
regular trotting track was not to be found in the whole country. Nothing
was thought of the breeding and training of horses with reference to
development of greater speed. Pacing horses were fashionable; and two
great rivals in this gait having been brought together for a trial of
speed, in lieu of a track, paced a mighty race over a river-bottom flat.
We have changed all that. The gentlemen no longer write their essays.
Beef won the spurs of knighthood. In Kentucky the horse has already been
styled the first citizen. The great agricultural fairs of the State have
modified their exhibits with reference to him alone, and fifteen or
twenty thousand people give afternoon after afternoon to the
contemplation of his beauty and his speed. His one rival is the
thoroughbred, who goes on running faster and faster. One of the brief
code of nine laws for the government of the young Kentucky commonwealth
that were passed in the first legislative assembly ever held west of
the Alleghanies dealt with the preservation of the breed of horses.
Nothing was said of education. The Kentuckian loves the memory of Thomas
Jefferson, not forgetting that he once ran racehorses. These great
interests, not overlooking the cattle interest, the manufacture of
whiskey, and the raising of tobacco, will no doubt constitute the future
determining factors in the history of this country. It should not be
forgotten, however, that the Northern and Eastern palate becomes kindly
disposed at the bare mention of the many thousands of turkeys that
annually fatten on these plains.
V
"In Kentucky," writes Professor Shaler, in his recent history, "we shall
find nearly pure English blood. It is, moreover, the largest body of
pure English folk that has, speaking generally, been separated from the
mother country for two hundred years." They, the blue-grass Kentuckians,
are the descendants of those hardy, high-spirited, picked Englishmen,
largely of the squire and yeoman class, whose absorbing passion was not
religious disputation, nor the intellectual purpose of founding a State,
but the ownership of land and the pursuits and pleasures of rural life,
close to the rich soil, and full of its strength and sunlight. They
have to this day, in a degree perhaps equalled by no others living, the
race qualities of their English ancestry and the tastes and habitudes of
their forefathers. If one knows the Saxon nature, and has been a close
student of Kentucky life and character, stripped bare of the accidental
circumstances of local environment, he may amuse himself with laying the
two side by side and comparing the points of essential likeness. It is a
question whether the Kentuckian is not more like his English ancestor
than his New England contemporary. This is an old country, as things go
in the West. The rock formation is very old; the soil is old; the race
qualities here are old. In the Sagas, in the Edda, a man must be
over-brave. "Let all who are not cowards follow me!" cried McGary,
putting an end to prudent counsel on the eve of the battle of the Blue
Licks. The Kentuckian winced under the implication then, and has done it
in a thousand instances since. Over-bravery! The idea runs through the
pages of Kentucky history, drawing them back into the centuries of his
race. It is this quality of temper and conception of manhood that has
operated to build up in the mind of the world the figure of the typical
Kentuckian. Hawthorne conversed with an old man in England who told him
that the Kentuckians flayed Tecumseh where he fell, and converted his
skin into razor-strops. Collins, the Kentucky Froissart, speaking of
Kentucky pioneers, relates of the father of one of them that he knocked
Washington down in a quarrel, and received an apology from the Father of
his Country on the following day. I have mentioned this typical Hotspur
figure because I knew it would come foremost into the mind of the reader
whenever one began to speak with candor of Kentucky life and character.
It was never a true type: satire bit always into burlesque along lines
of coarseness and exaggeration. Much less is it true now, except in so
far as it describes a kind of human being found the world over.
But I was saying that old race qualities are apparent here, because this
is a people of English blood with hereditary agricultural tastes, and
because it has remained to this day largely uncommingled with foreign
strains. Here, for instance, is the old race conservatism that expends
itself reverentially on established ways and familiar customs. The
building of the first great turnpike in this country was opposed on the
ground that it would shut up way-side taverns, throw wagons and teams
out of employment, and destroy the market for chickens and oats. Prior
to that, immigration was discouraged because it would make the already
high prices of necessary articles so exorbitant that the permanent
prosperity of the State would receive a fatal check. True, however, this
opposition was not without a certain philosophy; for in those days
people went to some distant lick for their salt, bought it warm from
the kettle at seven or eight cents a pound, and packed it home on
horseback, so that a fourth dropped away in bitter water. Coming back to
the present, the huge yellowish-red stage-coach rolls to-day over the
marbled roads of the blue-grass country. Families may be found living
exactly where their pioneer ancestors effected a heroic settlement--a
landed aristocracy, if there be such in America. Family names come down
from generation to generation, just as a glance at the British peerage
will show that they were long ago being transmitted in kindred families
over the sea. One great honored name will do nearly as much in Kentucky
as in England to keep a family in peculiar respect, after the reason for
it has ceased. Here is that old invincible race ideal of personal
liberty, and that old, unreckoning, truculent, animal rage at whatever
infringes on it. The Kentuckians were among the very earliest to grant
manhood suffrage. Nowhere in this country are the rights of property
more inviolable, the violations of these more surely punished: neither
counsel nor judge nor any power whatsoever can acquit a man who has
taken fourpence of his neighbor's goods. Here is the old land-loving,
land-holding, home-staying, home-defending disposition. This is not the
lunching, tourist race that, to Mr. Ruskin's horror, leaves its crumbs
and chicken-bones on the glaciers. The simple rural key-note of life is
still the sweetest. Now, after the lapse of more than a century, the
most populous town contains less than twenty thousand white souls. Along
with the love of land has gone comparative content with the annual
increase of flock and field. No man among them has ever got immense
wealth. Here is the old sense of personal privacy and reserve which has
for centuries intrenched the Englishman in the heart of his estate, and
forced him to regard with inexpugnable discomfort his neighbor's
boundaries. This would have been a densely peopled region, the farms
would have been minutely subdivided, had sons asked and received
permission to settle on parts of the ancestral estate. This filling in
and too close personal contact would have satisfied neither father nor
child, so that the one has generally kept his acres intact, and the
other, impelled by the same land-hunger that brought his pioneer
forefather hither, has gone hence into the younger West, where lie
broader tracts and vaster spaces. Here is the old idea, somewhat current
still in England, that the highest mark of the gentleman is not
cultivation of the mind, not intellect, not knowledge, but elegant
living. Here is the old hereditary devotion to the idea of the State.
Write the biographies of the Kentuckians who have been engaged in
national or in local politics, and you have largely the history of the
State of Kentucky. Write the lives of all its scientists, artists,
musicians, actors, poets, novelists, and you find many weary
mile-stones between the chapters.
[Illustration: A SPRING-HOUSE.]
Enter the blue-grass region from what point you choose--and you may do
this, so well traversed is it by railways--and you become sensitive to
its influence. If you come from the North or the East, you say: "This is
not modern America. Here is something local and unique. For one thing,
nothing goes fast here." By-and-by you see a blue-grass race-horse, and
note an exception. But you do not also except the rider or the driver.
The speed is not his. He is a mere bunch of mistletoe to the horse.
Detach him, and he is not worth timing. Human speed for the most part
lies fallow. Every man starts for the goal of life at his own natural
gait, and if he sees that it is too far off for him to reach it in a
lifetime, he does not run the faster, but has the goal moved nearer him.
The Kentuckians are not provincial. As Thoreau said, no people can long
remain provincial who have a propensity for politics, whittling, and
rapid travelling. They are not inaccessible to modern ideas, but the
shock of modern ideas has not electrified them. They have walled
themselves around with old race instincts and habitudes, and when the
stream of tendency rushes against this wall, it recoils upon itself
instead of sweeping away the barrier.
The typical Kentuckian regards himself an American of the Americans, and
thinks as little of being like the English as he would of imitating the
Jutes. In nothing is he more like his transatlantic ancestry than in
strong self-content. He sits on his farm as though it were the pole of
the heavens--a manly man with a heart in him. Usually of the blond type,
robust, well formed, with clear, fair complexion, that grows ruddier
with age and stomachic development, full neck, and an open, kind,
untroubled countenance. He is frank, but not familiar; talkative, but
not garrulous; full of the genial humor of local hits and allusions, but
without a subtle nimbleness of wit; indulgent towards purely masculine
vices, but intolerant of petty crimes; no reader of books nor master in
religious debate, faith coming to him as naturally as his appetite, and
growing with what it feeds upon; loving roast pig, but not caring
particularly for Lamb's eulogy; loving his grass like a Greek, not
because it is beautiful, but because it is fresh and green; a peaceful
man with strong passions, and so to be heartily loved and respected or
heartily hated and respected, but never despised or trifled with. An
occasional barbecue in the woods, where the saddles of South Down mutton
are roasted on spits over the coals of the mighty trench, and the
steaming kettles of burgoo lend their savor to the nose of the hungry
political orator, so that he becomes all the more impetuous in his
invectives; the great agricultural fairs; the race-courses; the monthly
county court day, when he meets his neighbors on the public square of
the nearest town; the quiet Sunday mornings, when he meets them again
for rather more clandestine talks at the front door of the neighborhood
church--these and his own fireside are his characteristic and ample
pleasures. You will never be under his roof without being touched by the
mellowest of all the virtues of his race--simple, unsparing human
kindness and hospitality.