Page:Life of Henry Clay (Schurz; v. 1).djvu/27

Rh being scalped. No part of the country has therefore more stories and traditions of perilous adventures, bloody fights, and hairbreadth escapes. For a generation or more the hunting-shirt, leggins, and moccasins of deerskin more or less gaudily ornamented, and the long rifle, powder-horn, and hunting-knife formed the regular “outfit” of a very large proportion of the male Kentuckians. We are told of some of the old pioneers who, many years after populous towns had grown up on the sites of the old stockades, still continued the habit of walking about in their hunter's garb, with rifle and powder-horn, although the deer had become scarce and the Indian had long ago disappeared from the neighborhood. They were loath to make up their minds to the fact that the old wild life was over. Thus the reminiscences and the characteristic spirit and habits left behind by that wild life were still fresh among the people of Kentucky at the period of which we speak. They were an uncommonly sturdy race of men, most of them fully as fond of hunting, and perhaps also of fighting, as of farming; brave and generous, rough and reckless, hospitable and much given to boisterous carousals, full of a fierce love of independence, and of a keen taste for the confused and turbulent contests of frontier politics. Slavery exercised its peculiar despotic influence there as elsewhere, although the number of slaves in Kentucky was comparatively small. But among freemen a strongly democratic spirit prevailed. There was as yet little