In the American Grain (Second Edition) (New Directions Paperbook) by William Carlos Williams

Author:William Carlos Williams [Williams, William Carlos]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2009-10-01T04:00:00+00:00

The Discovery of Kentucky

THERE WAS, thank God, a great voluptuary born to the American settlements against the niggardliness of the damming puritanical tradition; one who by the single logic of his passion, which he rested on the savage life about him, destroyed at its spring that spiritually withering plague. For this he has remained since buried in a miscolored legend and left for rotten. Far from dead, however, but full of a rich regenerative violence he remains, when his history will be carefully reported, for us who have come after to call upon him.

Kentucky, the great wilderness beyond the western edge of the world, “the dark and bloody ground” of coming years, seemed to the colonists along the eastern North-American seaboard as far away, nearly, and as difficult of approach as had the problematical world itself beyond the western ocean to the times prior to Columbus. “A country there was, of this none could doubt who thought at all; but whether land or water, mountain or plain, fertility or barrenness, preponderated; whether it was inhabited by men or beasts, or both or neither, they knew not.” But if inhabited by men then it was the savage with whom the settlers had had long since experience sufficient to make them loth to pry further, for the moment, beyond the securing mountain barrier.

Clinging narrowly to their new foothold, dependent still on sailing vessels for a contact none too swift or certain with “home,” the colonists looked with fear to the west. They worked hard and for the most part throve, suffering the material lacks of their exposed condition with intention. But they suffered also privations not even to be estimated, cramping and demeaning for a people used to a world less primitively rigorous. A spirit of insecurity calling upon thrift and self-denial remained their basic mood. Opposed to this lay the forbidden wealth of the Unknown.

Into such an atmosphere, more or less varied, more or less changed for better or worse in minds of different understanding, was born Daniel Boone, the foremost pioneer and frontiersman of his day. A man like none other about him Boone had for the life of his fellow settlers, high or low, no sympathy whatever. Was it his ancestry, full of a rural quietness from placid Dorset or the sober Quaker training of his early associations that bred the instinct in him, made him ready to take desperate chances with his mind for pleasure? Certainly he was not, as commonly believed, of that riff-raff of hunters and Indian killers among which destiny had thrown him—the man of border foray—a link between the savage and the settler.

His character was not this. Mild and simple hearted, steady, not impulsive in courage—bold and determined, but always rather inclined to defend than attack—he stood immensely above that wretched class of men who are so often the preliminaries of civilization. Boone deliberately chose the peace of solitude, rather than to mingle in the wild wranglings and disputings of the society around him—from

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