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!”