In the midst of such a material expansion one has learned to expect fine houses, but I was surprised to find three very good book-stores (as I remember, St. Louis has not one so good), and a very good start for a public library, consisting of about 16,000 well-arranged and classified books. Members pay $2 a year, and the library receives only about $2500 a year from the city. The citizens could make no better-paying investment than to raise this library to the first rank. There is also the beginning of an art school in some pretty rooms, furnished with casts and autotypes, where pupils practise drawing under direction of local artiste. There are two social clubs—the University, which occupies pleasant apartments, and the Kansas City Club, which has just erected a handsome club-house. In these respects, and in a hundred refinements of living, the town, which has so largely drawn its young, enterprising population from the extreme East, has little the appearance of a frontier place; it is the push, the public spirit, the mixture of fashion and slouching negligence in street attire, the mingling of Eastern smartness with border emancipation in manner, and the general restlessness of movement, that proclaim the newness. It seems to me that the incessant stir, and especially the clatter, whir, and rapidity of the cable ears, must have a decided effect on the nerves of the whole population. The appearance is certainly that of an entire population incessantly in motion.
I have spoken of the public spirit. Besides the Board of Trade there is a Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Bureau, which works vigorously to bring to the city and establish mercantile and manufacturing enterprises. The same spirit is shown in the public schools. The expenditures in 1887 were, for school purposes, $226,923; for interest on bonds, $18,408; for grounds and buildings, $110,087; in all, $355,418. The total of children of school age was, white, 31,667; colored, 4204. Of these in attendance at school were, white, 12,933; colored, 1975. There were 25 school-houses and 212 teachers. The schools which I saw—one large grammar-school, a colored school, and the High-school of over 600 pupils—were good all through, full of intelligent emulation, the teachers alert and well equipped, and the attention to literature, to the science of government, to what, in short, goes to make intelligent citizens, highly commendable. I find the annual reports, under Prof. J. M. Greenwood, most interesting reading. Topics are taken up and investigations made of great public interest. These topics relate to the even physical and mental development of the young in distinction from the effort merely to stuff them with information. There is a most intelligent attempt to remedy defective eyesight. Twenty per cent, of school children have some anomaly of refraction or accommodation which should be recognized and corrected early; girls have a larger per cent, of anomalies than boys. Irish, Swedish, and German children have the highest percentage of affections of the eyes; English, French, Scotch, and Americans the lowest. Scientific observations of the eyes are made in the Kansas City schools, with a view to remedy defects. Another curious topic is the investigation of the Contents of Children’s Minds—that is, what very small children know about common things. Prof. Stanley Hall published recently the result of examinations made of very little folks in Boston schools. Professor Greenwood made similar investigations among the lowest grade of pupils in the Kansas City schools, and a table of comparisons is printed. The per cent, of children ignorant of common things is astonishingly less in Kansas City schools than in the Boston; even the colored children of the Western city made a much better showing. Another subject of investigation is the alleged physical deterioration in this country. Examinations were made of hundreds of school children from the age of ten to fifteen, and comparisons taken with the tables in Mulhal’s “Dictionary of Statistics,” London, 1884. It turns out that the Kansas City children are taller, taking sex into account, than the average English child at the age of either ten or fifteen, weigh a fraction less at ten, but upwards of four pounds more at fifteen, while the average Belgian boy and girl compare favorably with American children two years younger. The tabulated statistics show two facts, that the average Kansas child stands fully as tall as the tallest, and that in weight he tips the beam against an older child on the other side of the Atlantic. With this showing, we trust that our American experiment will be permitted to go on.
In reaching the necessary limit of a paper too short for its subject, I can only express my admiration of the indomitable energy and spirit of that portion of the West which Kansas City represents, and congratulate it upon so many indications of attention to the higher civilization, without which its material prosperity will be wonderful but not attractive.
XV.—KENTUCKY.
All Kentucky, like Gaul, is divided into three parts. This division, which may not be sustained by the geologists or the geographers, perhaps not even by the ethnologists, is, in my mind, one of character: the east and south-east mountainous part, the central blue-grass region, and the great western portion, thrifty in both agriculture and manufactures. It is a great self-sustaining empire, lying midway in the Union, and between the North and the South (never having yet exactly made up its mind whether it is North or South), extending over more than seven degrees of longitude. Its greatest length east and west is 410 miles; its greatest breadth, 178 miles. Its area by latest surveys, and larger than formerly estimated, is 42,283 square miles. Within this area prodigal nature has brought together nearly everything that a highly civilized society needs: the most fertile soil, capable of producing almost every variety of product for food or for textile fabrics; mountains of coals and iron ores and limestone; streams and springs everywhere; almost all sorts of hard-wood timber in abundance. Nearly half the State is still virgin forest of the noblest trees, oaks, sugar-maple, ash, poplar, black-walnut, linn, elm, hickory, beech, chestnut, red cedar. The climate may honestly be called temperate: its inhabitants do not need to live in cellars in the summer, nor burn up their fences and furniture in the winter.
Kentucky is loved of its rivers. It can be seen by their excessively zigzag courses how reluctant they are to leave the State, and if they do leave it they are certain to return. The Kentucky and the Green wander about in the most uncertain way before they go to the Ohio, and the Licking and Big Sandy exhibit only a little less reluctance. The Cumberland, after a wide detour in Tennessee, returns; and Powell’s River, joining the Clinch and entering the Tennessee, finally persuades that river, after it has looked about the State of Tennessee and gladdened northern Alabama, to return to Kentucky.
Kentucky is an old State, with an old civilization. It was the pioneer in the great western movement of population after the Revolution. Although it was first explored in 1770, and the Boone trail through the wilderness of Cumberland Gap was not marked till 1775, a settlement had been made in Frankfort in 1774, and in 1790 the Territory had a population of 79,077. This was a marvellous growth, considering the isolation by hundreds of miles of wilderness from Eastern communities, and the savage opposition of the Indians, who selw fifteen hundred whilc settlers from 1783 to 1790. Kentucky was the home of no Indian tribe, but it was the favorite hunting and fighting ground of those north of the Ohio and south of the Cumberland, and they united to resent white interference. When the State came into the Union in 1792—the second admitted—it was the equal in population and agricultural wealth of some of the original States that had been settled a hundred and fifty years, and in 1800 could boast 220,750 inhabitants, and in 1810, 400,511.
At the time of the settlement, New York west of the Hudson, western Pennsylvania, and western Virginia were almost unoccupied except by hostile Indians; there was only chance and dangerous navigation down the Ohio from Pittsburg, and it was nearly eight hundred miles of a wilderness road, which was nothing but a bridle-path, from Philadelphia by way of the Cumberland Gap to central Kentucky. The majority of emigrants came this toilsome way, which was, after all, preferable to the river route, and all passengers and produce went that way eastward, for the steamboat bad not yet made the ascent of the Ohio feasible. In 1779 Virginia resolved to construct a wagon-road through the wilderness, but no road was made for many years afterwards, and indeed no vehicle of any sort passed over it till a road was built by action of the Kentucky Legislature in 1700. I hope it was better then than the portion of it I travelled from Pineville to the Gap in 1888.