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[231]
THROUGH CUMBERLAND GAP ON HORSEBACK
I
Fresh fields lay before us that summer of 1885. We had left the rich, rolling plains of the Blue-grass Region in central Kentucky and set our faces towards the great Appalachian uplift on the south-eastern border of the State. There Cumberland Gap, that high-swung gate-way through the mountain, abides as a landmark of what Nature can do when she wishes to give an opportunity to the human race in its migrations and discoveries, without surrendering control of its liberty and its fate. It can never be too clearly understood by those who are wont to speak of "the Kentuckians" that this State has within its boundaries two entirely distinct elements of population—elements distinct in England before they came hither, distinct during more than a century of residence here, and distinct now in all that goes to constitute a separate community—occupations, manners and customs, dress, views of life, civilization. It is but a short distance from the blue-grass country to the eastern mountains; but in traversing it you detach yourself from all that you have ever experienced, and take up the history of English-speaking [232] men and women at the point it had reached a hundred or a hundred and fifty years ago.
Leaving Lexington, then, which is in the midst of the blue-grass plateau, we were come to Burnside, where begin the navigable waters of the Cumberland River, and the foot-hills of the Cumberland Mountains.
Burnside is not merely a station, but a mountain watering-place. The water is mostly in the bed of the river. We had come hither to get horses and saddle-bags, but to no purpose. The hotel was a sort of transition point between the civilization we had left and the primitive society we were to enter. On the veranda were some distinctly modern and conventional red chairs; but a green and yellow gourd-vine, carefully trained so as to shut out the landscape, was a genuine bit of local color. Under the fine beeches in the yard was swung a hammock, but it was made of boards braced between ropes, and was covered with a weather-stained piece of tarpaulin. There were electric bells in the house that did not electrify; and near the front entrance three barrels of Irish potatoes, with the tops off, spoke for themselves in the absence of the bill of fare. After supper, the cook, a tall, blue-eyed, white fellow, walked into my room without explanation, and carried away his guitar, showing that he had been wont to set his sighs to music in that quarter of the premises. The moon hung in that part of the heavens, [233] [234] [235] and no doubt ogled him into many a midnight frenzy. Sitting under a beech-tree in the morning, I had watched a child from some city, dressed in white and wearing a blue ribbon around her goldenish hair, amuse herself by rolling old barrels (potato barrels probably, and she may have had a motive) down the hill-side and seeing them dashed to pieces on the railway track below. By-and-by some of the staves of one fell in, the child tumbled in also, and they all rolled over together. Upon the whole, it was an odd overlapping of two worlds. When the railway was first opened through this region a young man established a fruit store at one of the stations, and as part of his stock laid in a bunch of bananas. One day a mountaineer entered. Arrangements generally struck him with surprise, but everything else was soon forgotten in an adhesive contemplation of that mighty aggregation of fruit. Finally he turned away with this comment: "Damn me if them ain't the damnedest beans I ever seen!"
