CHAPTER 10. 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.