Mother herself. She fashioned it
with loving hands. She shut it in with a mighty barrier of mighty
mountains to keep the mob out. She gave it the loving clasp of a mighty
river, and spread broad, level prairies beyond that the mob might glide
by, or be tempted to the other side, where the earth was level and
there was no need to climb; that she might send priests from her shrine
to reclaim Western wastes or let the weak or the unloving--if such
could be--have easy access to another land.

In the beginning, such was her clear purpose to the Kentuckian's eye,
she filled it with flowers and grass and trees, and fish and bird and
wild beasts. Just as she made Eden for Adam and Eve. The red men fought
for the Paradise--fought till it was drenched with blood, but no tribe,
without mortal challenge from another straightway, could ever call a
rood its own. Boone loved the land from the moment the eagle eye in his
head swept its shaking wilderness from a mountain-top, and every man
who followed him loved the land no less. And when the chosen came, they
found the earth ready to receive them--lifted above the baneful breath
of river-bottom and marshland, drained by rivers full of fish, filled
with woods full of game, and underlaid--all--with thick, blue,
limestone strata that, like some divine agent working in the dark, kept
crumbling--ever crumbling--to enrich the soil and give bone-building
virtue to every drop of water and every blade of grass. For those
chosen people such, too, seemed her purpose--the Mother went to the
race upon whom she had smiled a benediction for a thousand years--the
race that obstacle but strengthens, that thrives best under an alien
effort to kill, that has ever conquered its conquerors, and that seems
bent on the task of carrying the best ideals any age has ever known
back to the Old World from which it sprang. The Great Mother knows!
Knows that her children must suffer, if they stray too far from her
great teeming breasts. And how she has followed close when this Saxon
race--her youngest born--seemed likely to stray too far--gathering its
sons to her arms in virgin lands that they might suckle again and keep
the old blood fresh and strong. Who could know what danger threatened
it when she sent her blue-eyed men and women to people the wilderness
of the New World? To climb the Alleghenies, spread through the wastes
beyond, and plant their kind across a continent from sea to sea. Who
knows what dangers