It was curious how
the cane which once had so thickly clothed this wide plateau fled before
the
farmer. You
did not have to plow it out of your meadow. It seemed to quit the
meadow of its own
accord. This
year it would be everywhere herabouts, tall and lusty, and next year it
would all be
gone save for a
few stunty clumps, growing steadily thinner and punier.
As the cane went away
a new kind of grass, spreading like a magic carpet, took its place on the
"barrons" and in
the made pastures. You had only to clear away the timber, grub up
the roots and
make sunny spaces
where before there had been deep shade, and here it came.
There was a tradition
about this grass. It was said that Finley, the Irishman whose eyes
were the
first white man's
eyes to look upon the great hunting-ground which the Cherokees called by
the
Alogonquin word
Kentucky, meaning the loved place, brought it with him.
Daniel Boone may have
been the Pathfinder, but John Finley, a lesser-known man, was the
Pathmaker, for
he showed Boone the way. But long before that, he, the adventurous
trader, went
with certain friendly
Shawnee braves to their favorite camping spot of Eskippakithika and there
set
him up a hut impounded
within a long stockade and spread his trade goods in his fortress.
As the story had it,
he had carried his wares wrapped against breakage in hay grown of a stock
brought by someone
from Great Britain, and he cast this hay upon the earth and it seeded itself
in
the sod and presently
grew with a luxuriance almost beyond imagining. So for a spell
the pioneers
of Boone's day
and Kenton"s, which was also the day of Isham Bird, dubbed it English grass
or
Lancaster grass,
after Lancaster in Pennsylvania, where Finley lived.
But presently, marking
how when the wind stirred the heavy seed-heads their yellow pods against
the deep lush color
of the stems cast a soft bluish overlay upon the whole rippling field,
they fell to
calling it blue-grass.
But when the breeze rumpled it, and except in the time of ripening, it
was
about the greenest
grass you ever saw. Cattle, feeding on it, throve most amazingly.
Now Shadwell Bird,
the Ex-kec-boater, saw in the advancing blue-grass not a promise, but a
threat to his most
beloved pursuits. So he took his gun and his chattels and his dumpy
copperish-colored
mate and he went where the rolling lands gave way to rock lands.
Anyone who is interested
in having the booklet "John Finley, Kentucky Explorer" can e-mail me.
I will be happy
to send it to you!!
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