Kentuckian

“ To the popular imagination the most familiar type of the early Kentuckian is that of the fighter, the hunter, the rude, heroic pioneer and his no less heroic wife: people who left all things behind them and set their faces westward, prepared to be new creatures if such they could become. But on the dim historic background are the stiff figures of another type, people who were equally bent on being old-fashioned creatures if such they could remain. ”

“ He extenuated my non-response to the pleasing remarks of the distinguished Kentuckian, on the ground of indisposition, and, after happy allusions to the patriotism of Rhode Island, Virginia, and Kentucky, in the darkest period of American history, he rivetted his piercing eyes on the magnificent array of female loveliness, and entranced the sweet angels with language as luxuriant as Antony’s to Cleopatra, in the high antiquity of Roman and Egyptian splendor. ”

“ The Kentuckian's pulsations seem to be regulated by a gigantic and equipoised animal impulse. There is very little sinking of the heart in gloomy anticipation, with him; he enjoys the present, uninterrupted by the past or future. After all, are not these hardy and free sons of the west the happiest of all created beings? They enjoy nearly every thing that we do, perhaps not exactly in the same degree, but certainly with as much of the heart, if not so much of the head ”

“ Such will be found to be the true character of the Americans when jostled awhile together, until their local angles are worn off; and such may be found and already pretty well formed, in the genuine Kentuckian, the first brave and daring pioneer of the great West; he is the true model of an American—the nucleus around which the character must form, and from which it is to emanate to the world. This is the man who first relinquished the foibles and fashions of Eastern life, trailing his rifle into the forest of the Mississippi, taking simple Nature for his guide. ”

“ When the Kentuckian describes a man as a “high-toned gentleman” he means exactly the same that a Bostonian means when, he says that a man is a “very good fellow,” only the men described have a different culture, a different personal flavor; and it is fortunate that the Kentuckian is not like the Bostonian, for each has a quality that makes intercourse with him pleasant. In the South many people think they have said a severe thing when they say that a person or manner is thoroughly Yankee ”

“ The Kentuckian, at least, has but little reason to criticise the stuff of which he is made, particularly since he stands easily first among the modern races of men. This is an estimate from an impartial source—a writer for the English press. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Uncle Clem, do you think that I'm stilted in my talk?"
"Why, not any more so than the average boy in this part of the country. You know the Kentuckian is taught to talk with a flourish; it is in keeping with the pretense of his surroundings; he must be gallant with woman and lordly with man. No, you are not particularly stilted, but there is one branch of information that you are stubbornly overlooking—the horse. You have studied the orator, but I want to tell you that the horse has done quite as much to make Kentucky known as the orator. ”

“ The two armies were a mass of struggling men, shooting, stabbing, striking. The battle had become a series of duels man to man. Tom, pistol in hand, rode at a big Kentuckian, but the gray-clad giant dodged the bullet, caught his own unloaded musket by the muzzle, and dealt the boy a blow with its butt that knocked him off his horse and left him senseless on the ground. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Your Kentuckian of the present day is a good illustration of the doctrine of transmitted instincts and peculiarities. His fathers were mighty hunters,—men who lived in the woods, and slept under the free, open heavens, with the stars to hold their candles; ”

“ As a rule the people love the country life less than of yore, since an altered social system has deprived it of much leisure, and has added hardships. The Kentuckian does not regard it as part of his mission in life to feed fodder to stock; and servants are hard to get, the colored ladies and gentlemen having developed a taste for urban society. ”

“ It was the first time also that she had ever encountered in a Kentuckian the type of student mind—that fitness and taste for scholarship which sometimes moves so unobtrusively and rises so high among that people, but is usually unobserved unless discovered pre-eminent and commanding far from the confines of the state. ”

“ I appeal to you as Kentuckians, as worthy sons of those who rescued the dark and bloody ground from savage barbarity, by the memories of the past of your history, and by the future of your fame, if you are but true to yourselves, to rise in the majesty of your strength and drive the insolent invaders of your soil from your midst. ”

“ I have fought many times with the Kentuckians, and they are brave men. Sometimes we have beaten them, and sometimes they have beaten us. They have great warriors, Clark, Boone, Kenton, Harrod and the tall youth who sits here, my captive. Let not the colonel of the King forget that with Clark at their head they crossed the Ohio, took [Pg 122] Vincennes and Kaskaskia and him who was then the commander of Detroit, Hamilton, now held prisoner in a far land beyond the mountains. ”

“ The Indians drew the pursuers into an unfavorable position on the 19th, when a severe battle ensued, in which the Kentuckians were beaten with the loss of seventy-six men; among whom were Colonels Todd and Trigg, Major Harland, and a son of Colonel Boon. The battle lasted only fifteen minutes. The retreat from the field was yet more disastrous than the battle itself. It was fought on the banks of the main fork of the Licking river, at the great bend, forty-three miles from Lexington. The Kentuckians were pursued across the river, some on horseback and others on foot. ”

“ And thus, with a head filled with cares of a fashion altogether new, the sturdy young Kentuckian moved homeward with a degree of abstraction in his countenance which was not among the smallest wonders of the day and place in the estimation of his friends and neighbors.
Meanwhile, the work of mischief was in full progress. Everybody knows the degree of familiarity which exists among all classes in a country-village, particularly when the parties are brought together under the social and stimulating influences of religion. ”

“ There sat a man on heights no more to be scaled by him than heaven, and yet that puzzling smile for the blissful ignorance, in the young, of how gladly the old would give up their crowns in exchange for the swift young feet on the threshold—no wonder the boy could not understand. Through that gate dashed presently a pair of proud, high-headed black horses—"star-gazers," as the Kentuckians call them—with a rhythmic beat of high-lifted feet, and the boy's eyes narrowed as the carriage behind them swept by him, for in it were Colonel Pendleton and Gray, with eager face and flashing eyes. ”

“ A KENTUCKY INVENTOR
Though the stalwart pioneers, dressed in their primitive suits of deerskin or homespun, pushed farther and farther into Kentucky, stopping not for privation or peril, danger or disaster, climbing cliffs, fording streams, fighting savages, yet they were not all merely unlettered backwoodsmen hunters and fighters. Though the education of nearly all was more or less limited, a number of these early courageous Kentuckians have made unusual contributions to the useful sciences. ”

“ And thus it happened, that, while Roland deemed the antagonists were manoeuvring over the hill side, dragging themselves from bush to bush and rock to rock, to no profitable purpose, they were actually creeping nigher and nigher to each other every moment, the savages crawling onwards with the exultation of men who felt their superior strength, and the Kentuckians advancing with equal alacrity, as if ignorant of, or bravely indifferent to their inferiority. ”

“ Whether we write of the hardy pioneer facing danger and privation, of the volunteer soldier freely offering up his life on the altar of his country, of the great general leading his men to victory, of the mature-minded statesman helping to guide the ship of state, or of the brilliant orator swaying thousands by his eloquence, we find Kentuckians in every rôle. ”

“ The fact that the river commerce throve was partly the cause and partly the consequence of the general prosperity of Kentucky. The pioneer days, with their fierce and squalid struggle for bare life, were over. If men were willing to work, and escaped the Indians, they were sure to succeed in earning a comfortable livelihood in a country so rich. "The neighbors are doing well in every sense of the word," wrote one Kentuckian to another, "they get children and raise crops." [Footnote: Draper MSS., Jonathan Clark Papers. O'Fallen to Clark, Isles of Ohio, May 30, 1791.] ”

“ And yet we shall discover differences. These people—these groups of twos and threes and hundreds, lounging, sitting, squatting, taking every imaginable posture that can secure bodily comfort—are they in any vital sense new Kentuckians in the new South? If you care to understand whether this be true, and what it may mean if it is true, you shall not find a better occasion for doing so than a contemporary county court day.
AUCTIONING A JACK.
The Kentuckian nowadays does not come to county court to pick a quarrel or to settle one. ”

“ Hip hurrah for the happy land of freedom."
The loyal Kentuckians were in great glee and rejoiced over the victory. It was their battle against rebel invaders from Tennessee, Mississippi and Alabama, who were first met by their own troops of Wolford's First cavalry and the Fourth Kentucky infantry, whose blood was the first to be shed in defense of the Stars and Stripes; and their gratitude went out to their neighbors from Minnesota, Indiana and Ohio who came to their support and drove the invaders out of their state. ”

“ The late Professor Shaler is frequently quoted to the effect that ethnological research discloses the existence in Kentucky of the largest body of nearly pure English folk to be found on the face of the globe—that has been [Pg 26] separated for two hundred years from the parent English stock. But the facts do not warrant the assumption that the Kentuckian is of purely "Anglo-Saxon" derivation. In him, at least, the blood of the Norman is not wholly lost. He is, however, as Professor Shaler says, an "Elizabethan" Englishman. ”

“ Further we find the humorist bringing smiles to every face, the consecrated minister leading thousands to a new life, the inventor bringing comfort and ease, and the artist skillfully using his brush or chisel to imitate Nature. Indeed, the roll call of eminent Kentuckians will show that they have played such important parts in both military and civil affairs that one or more, and often many, Kentuckians have filled each of these posts with credit to themselves and glory to their state. ”

“ In the far North, as in the far South, men had but to drift with the tide. Among the Kentuckians, the forces that moulded her sons—Davis and Lincoln—were at war in the State, as they were at war in the nation. By ties of blood, sympathies, institutions, Kentucky was bound fast to the South. Yet, ten years before, Kentuckians had demanded the gradual emancipation of the slave. That far back, they had carved a pledge on a block of Kentucky marble, which should be placed in the Washington monument, that Kentucky would be the last to give up the Union. ”

“ Taking in hand the exact and vivid characterization of the old Norman by the contemporary chronicler, Malaterra, we ask ourselves, "Are the Kentuckians also marked by the characteristics here described?" Are they persuasive orators, able lawyers, brilliant fighters, ready and practical thinkers; astute and successful negotiators? Have they scholarly tastes? Social gifts and [Pg 134] accomplishments? A passion for travel, exploration, adventure, field sports, and fine horses? "I like him very much," said the English swell St. Aldegonde, speaking of Colonel Campian, the Southern colonel. ”