536 



WESTERN STATES. 



17. Character, Manners, 8fc. The character of the Western States is mixed, out tne 

 predominant traits are those of Virginia, and of New England. Kentucky was settled from 

 Virginia and North Carolina, while Ohio is a scion of New England. These two States have 

 in turn sent their population further west. But there is much sectional character, much of the 

 openness and boldness of the men and their descendants who contested every inch of territory 

 with savages, whose houses were garrisons, and who fought at the threshold for their hearths 

 and altars. The Kentucky character pervades, more or less, all the Western States, and it is 

 a creditable, though a peculiar mark. To estimate the sons, we must describe the fathers, and 

 many of the early settlers yet alive. The " Big Knives," as the first hunters were called by 

 the Indians, from their swords, had too little fear of danger to shrink from a forest so stained 

 with massacres, that it was called the " Dark a«d Bloody Ground." This was the appalling 

 name of Kentucky. Beautiful as it now is, it was more so in its uncultivated state, when the 

 " wilderness blossomed as the rose." It was a forest solitude, unrivalled on earth. It was 

 shaded with trees that had no parallel eastward of the mountains, and under them the tall grass 

 supplied food for innumerable herds of buffalo and deer. It was a grand natural park, where 

 nations came to take their game. Everything in this wonderful country was found to be on a 

 scale of magnificence. The trees were giants of the vegetable creation ; the caves extended 

 under navigable rivers, to the extent of eastern counties ; and bones of the mammoth lay 

 strewed around the springs, indicating a new and wonderful aspect of animal life. This lonely 

 paradise of woods, waters, and flowers, to which every animal that was in Eden seemed gath- 

 ered, was the hunting-ground, not the abode, of savages. 



The first explorers were lost in admiration, and their reports were received hke the accounts 

 of the New World, in Spain. Before this^ the country had not, indeed, been fully discovered. 

 The navigators had entered inlets and bays, and the settlers were on the line of coast. The 

 true discoverers, the bold Argonauts to these Hesperides, were Finley and Boone. These 

 were men of rude nurture but of high poetic feeling, yet cool, circumspect, and the bravest of 

 the brave. They were no misanthropes, though they had a passion for the solitude of the 

 forest. They "loved not man the less, but nature more." Their May of life was in the 

 waving woods, and danger was a cheap price for their favorite pursuit. 



These adventurers were more daring than Cortez or Pizarro, for they went singly to invade 

 nations. Harrod, one of the settlors, became so much attached to sylvan life, that, long after- 

 wards, when the country was studded with villages, and bending with harvests, when he had 

 wealth and honors, and a happy family around him, he used to stray away for weeks in the dis- 

 tant forest. A tree looked to him like a friend, and the forest seemed to be his home. He 

 died as he had lived ; from his last excursion he returned not, and the time and manner of his 

 death are alike mysterious. Had he thus disappeared in ancient Greece, we should have had 

 in Ovid the account of his metamorphosis or transformation to some noble tree. Boone, also, 

 died in his forest ; he retired before the wave of emigration, and required a wilderness to him- 

 self. He was dislodged like a hunted deer, from one covert to another. He died in old age, 

 far from men, and his body was found in the attitude of shooting ; he was sitting, resting his 

 rifle on a log, and bending his eye along the barrel. Boone was an extraordinary man. He 

 was a hunter fit to stand by Nimrod, " and give direction." He was a patriot, but in his con- 

 ception, the civil compact was an association of hunters, in which the authority belonged to the 

 most steady of heart, hand, and eye. Roads and canals, agriculture and manufactures, formed 

 no part of his Utopia ; and he was never so happy as when most distant from all trace of 

 them. But Kentucky, the child of his affections, became a changeling, and he left it for more 

 solitary regions. 



in the evening, Mrs. F. was safely delivered of a female 

 infant, and, notwithstanding all, did well. The babe, 

 from preceding circumstances, was feeble and sickly, and 

 1 saw could not survive. At midnight, we had raised a 

 blazing fire. The children came into the boat. Supper 

 was prepared, and we surely must have been ungrateful 

 not to have sung a hymn of deliverance. There can be 

 but one trial more for me, that can surpass the agony of 

 that day, and there can never be on this earth, a happier 

 period tli.in those midnight hours. The babe stayed with 

 us but a day and a half, and expired. The children, poor 

 tJijngs, laid it deeply to heart, and raised a loud lament. 

 We were, T havo remarked, fir away from all human 



aid and sympathy, and left alone with God. We deposited 

 the body of our lost babe, — laid in a small trunk for a 

 coffin, — in a grave amid the rushes, there to await the 

 resurrection of the dead. The prayer made on the occa- 

 sion by the father, with the children for concourse and 

 mourners, if not eloquent, was, to us, at least, deeply af- 

 fecting. The grave is on a high bank, opposite to the 

 second Chickasaw bluff, and I have since passed the rude 

 memorial which we raised on the spot ; and I passed it, 

 carrying to you my miserable and exhausted frame, with 

 little hope of renovation, and in the hourly expectation 

 of depositing my own bones on the banks of the Missis- 

 sippi." 



