CHAPTER 10.
THE BLUEGRASS
God's Country!
No humor in that phrase to the Bluegrass Kentuckian! There neverwas--there is none now. To him, the land seems in all the New World, tohave been the pet shrine of the Great Mother herself. She fashioned itwith loving hands. She shut it in with a mighty barrier of mightymountains to keep the mob out. She gave it the loving clasp of a mightyriver, and spread broad, level prairies beyond that the mob might glideby, or be tempted to the other side, where the earth was level andthere was no need to climb; that she might send priests from her shrineto reclaim Western wastes or let the weak or the unloving--if suchcould 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 andwild beasts. Just as she made Eden for Adam and Eve. The red men foughtfor the Paradise--fought till it was drenched with blood, but no tribe,without mortal challenge from another straightway, could ever call arood its own. Boone loved the land from the moment the eagle eye in hishead swept its shaking wilderness from a mountain-top, and every manwho followed him loved the land no less. And when the chosen came, theyfound the earth ready to receive them--lifted above the baneful breathof river-bottom and marshland, drained by rivers full of fish, filledwith woods full of game, and underlaid--all--with thick, blue,limestone strata that, like some divine agent working in the dark, keptcrumbling--ever crumbling--to enrich the soil and give bone-buildingvirtue to every drop of water and every blade of grass. For thosechosen people such, too, seemed her purpose--the Mother went to therace upon whom she had smiled a benediction for a thousand years--therace that obstacle but strengthens, that thrives best under an alieneffort to kill, that has ever conquered its conquerors, and that seemsbent on the task of carrying the best ideals any age has ever knownback to the Old World from which it sprang. The Great Mother knows!Knows that her children must suffer, if they stray too far from hergreat teeming breasts. And how she has followed close when this Saxonrace--her youngest born--seemed likely to stray too far--gathering itssons to her arms in virgin lands that they might suckle again and keepthe old blood fresh and strong. Who could know what danger threatenedit when she sent her blue-eyed men and women to people the wildernessof the New World? To climb the Alleghenies, spread through the wastesbeyond, and plant their kind across a continent from sea to sea. Whoknows what dangers threaten now, when, his task done, she seems to beopening the eastern gates of the earth with a gesture that seems tosay--"Enter, reclaim, and dwell therein!"
One little race of that race in the New World, and one only, has shekept flesh of her flesh, bone of her bone--to that race only did shegive 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 itto fight its own fight with savage nature, savage beast, and savageman. And thus she gave the little race strength of heart and body andbrain, and taught it to stand together as she taught each man of therace to stand alone, protect his women, mind his own business, andmeddle not at all; to think his own thoughts and die for them if needbe, though he divided his own house against itself; taught the man tocleave to one woman, with the penalty of death if he strayed elsewhere;to keep her--and even himself--in dark ignorance of the sins againstHerself for which she has slain other nations, and in that happyignorance keeps them to-day, even while she is slaying elsewhere still.
And Nature holds the Kentuckians close even to-day--suckling at herbreasts and living after her simple laws. What further use she may havefor them is hid by the darkness of to-morrow, but before the Great Warcame she could look upon her work and say with a smile that it wasgood. The land was a great series of wooded parks such as one mighthave found in Merry England, except that worm fence and stone wall tookthe place of hedge along the highways. It was a land of peace and of aplenty 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 wearand a roof to cover his head, whether it was his own roof or not. Ifslavery had to be--then the fetters were forged light and hung loosely.And, broadcast, through the people, was the upright sturdiness of theScotch-Irishman, without his narrowness and bigotry; the grace andchivalry of the Cavalier without his Quixotic sentiment and hisweakness; the jovial good-nature of the English squire and theleavening spirit of a simple yeomanry that bore itself with unconscioustenacity to traditions that seeped from the very earth. And the wingsof the eagle hovered over all.
For that land it was the flowering time of the age and the people; andthe bud that was about to open into the perfect flower had its livingsymbol in the little creature racing over the bluegrass fields on ablack pony, with a black velvet cap and a white nodding plume above hershaking curls, just as the little stranger who had floated down intothose Elysian fields--with better blood in his veins than he knew--wasa reincarnation perhaps of the spirit of the old race that had laindormant in the hills. The long way from log-cabin to Greek portico hadmarked the progress of the generations before her, and, on this sameway, the boy had set his sturdy feet.