The Quest for a Lost Race

by Thomas Edward Pickett

Potts.

Poyntz, or Ponz, a branch of Fitz-Poyntz, Ponz, tenant D. B. Nicholas Printz held land in Gloucestershire, temp. K. John. Under Poyntz, Lower says, Walter Julius Ponz, a tenant in chief at the time of the Norman survey, was son of Walter Ponz, a noble Norman. The surname Poyntz may be traced from Normandy through England and Virginia to Kentucky.

Many years before the establishment in Kentucky of a club or society with a roving commission for historic research, there dwelt in the northern highlands of the Bluegrass region a sagacious and successful cattle-breeder, who was a practical student of pedigrees and had put the knowledge thus acquired to a profitable use. All of his theories would not have been accepted by Weismann; nor, on the other hand, would all of Weismann's theories been accepted by him. The conclusions which lay nearest his special vocation had been carefully "applied" after his own fashion, and he was satisfied with the results. Francis Galton, himself, had no better grounds for belief in the laws of heredity.

He was a Kentuckian of the early type—not unlike the Kentuckians and Virginians that the English traveler, Mr. Pym Fordham, describes in a series of letters from the South and West. His mental gifts and pleasing manners, to say nothing of his commanding stature, not only made him conspicuous, but wherever he went assured him welcome and the right of way. There was a look of quiet resourcefulness in the man. His facial contour was striking. The features, seen in profile, were large, strong, and regular, and their impressiveness was notably enhanced by a broad, flowing beard with the same reddish tinge that brightened his locks of long brown hair. His eye was steady, soft, and penetrating—noting everything, overlooking nothing. His complexion was peculiar—not "ruddy" or glowing from daily exposure, at all seasons, in the open air, but of an almost bloodless hue; as colorless, at least, and as clear as if untouched by sun, or wind, or rain, in his active routine of life upon a Bluegrass ranch. It was the life of a man whose time was largely given to observation and thought; and as one might suppose, he had an ample field for the indulgence of his studious tastes. His special line of work was the propagation of "high-grade" cattle by crossing our native stock with fine imported strains.

In our pastoral mid-century days the casual traveler passing along a mountain road in the Red River region of Eastern Kentucky could not have failed to observe, in the great forests that cast their dense shadows as far as the headwaters of Buckhorn, large herds of native cattle that browsed and "drowsed" in the shade of those deep Druidic woods. If the traveler were a man of the English race, and as well informed and observant as a traveler should be, he would say at once, "These cattle are in no degree akin to the English blood-stock which I have seen in the Bluegrass lowlands of the State. They are wholly unlike; their 'lines' are wholly different,—size, shape, coloring, deer-like delicacy of structure and peculiar curve of horn; nothing in their construction is heavy or cumbrous except the deep, rich golden udders of the kine. They remind one of no familiar English stock. They are not Durhams nor Herefords, nor Devons. Are they not Alderneys?" At all events, this was the native stock from which our practical Bluegrass theorist obtained his "high-grade" cattle, by crossing it judiciously with fine imported strains from the Channel Isles. The results were all that could be desired. The half-grade cattle were scarcely distinguishable from the imported stock, and if the milk was not so "rich," the quantity was much larger. The same was true of the uncrossed mountain stock which was brought to Kentucky by the "comelings" of the Eighteenth Century, and was never a "degenerate" stock in any practical sense. The "deer-like" structure of the mountain cow came partly from environment and partly from race. It was one of the rough-hewn maxims of mountain husbandry—"The best milker is a cow with a little foot,"—a foot that can thread the brushiest "cove" or climb the airiest height to crop the nutrient herbage that makes the nutritious milk. The succulent "pea-vine" made the milk; the tissue-forming "mast" or acorn made the meat. The little-footed heifer had the freedom of the range; and, by some subtle morphologic law, the locomotive organ that was small, firm, and well-shaped seemed to imply or determine the full symmetric development of thorax and brain and an easy, unobstructed operation of the functions associated with both. The loyal mountaineer of the old stamp was chauvinistic to the core. Though fifty years have passed, he still grows eloquent when he recalls the "fighting bulls" and the flowing pails of his boyhood days. A handsome, vivacious Highlander of this class—a gentleman of marked Gallic aspect and scion of an early pioneer stock—recently boasted to the writer, and almost in the language of the Vergilian swain (bis venit ud mulctram), that old "White-face" came regularly to the pail twice a day—yielding six gallons in two milkings. These mountain kine were not large; but they were gentle, spirited, clean-limbed, fine-haired, and carried in their generous udders an abundance of wholesome milk. They bore indelible marks of race. Had they been larger, they might have remained to this day an untraveled stock. Their size favored easy transportation, and the canny emigrant made note of the fact. As a consequence of this demand from emigrants, no doubt, great numbers of cattle were shipped from the Channel Islands to England in the early decades of the Nineteenth Century—a circumstance which completely answers the assumption that our mountain cattle were derived originally from an English stock. For many years the name "Alderney" was applied without discrimination to all cattle imported from the Anglo-Norman islands of the English Channel—islands which England has held with an iron grip since the Conqueror brought them under English rule. The thrifty islanders—descendants of the old Norman stock and for years clinging tenaciously to the old Norman dialect—are now true Anglo-Normans, making daily proclamation of their loyalty to the English crown, and, until a very recent period, always in Anglo-Norman French.

Only this then remains to be said. A thoughtful Bluegrass cattle-breeder, bearing a distinctively Anglo-Norman name that had come down from Normandy—through England and Virginia to Kentucky[14]—and bearing in his own person characteristics and distinctive marks of his Anglo-Norman descent—utterly indifferent to "ethnological" theories and absolutely unconscious of his own descent from the Anglo-Norman race, is convinced—not by "herd-books" or historic pedigrees—but simply and solely by the evidence of his own eyes, that a certain native stock of cattle in the mountains of Kentucky were merely an earlier importation than his own from the Anglo-Norman islands of the English Channel. He had the courage to put his theory to the touch of practical experimentation, and the astonished "experts" at the great cattle-fairs of the country bore generous testimony to the quality of his work.

If such conclusions are fairly deducible from an imperfect or incomplete study of a race of CATTLE in the mountain region of Kentucky, why should a logical mind discredit like conclusions resting upon testimony that is singularly cumulative and convergent in regard to a contemporaneous race of MEN that is historically traceable from Normandy—through England and Virginia—to the same or a similar physical environment in that same State of Kentucky? Could there be a better example of cumulative verification?

Preston. General William Preston, "The Last of the Cavaliers."

Pyle.

Quantrell, or Quantrall.