Blue-grass and Rhododendron: Out-doors in Old Kentucky

Foreword by Wade Hall

Foreword By 1901, when John Fox, Jr., collected the twelve sketches and essays that make up Blue-grass and Rhododendron , he was already the acclaimed author of three novels and some two dozen stories and short pieces of nonfiction that had been appearing for almost a decade in a number of national magazines. Nine of these selections had been published in Scribner's Magazine , Harper's Weekly, Outing, and Century. Such true-life adventures with their presentation of fact by means of fictional techniques had proved popular with a largely male readership. Even female readers were attracted by these local-color sketches of life in one of America's least known "odd corners." Serving as tour guide, Fox invites his audience to go with him log rafting down the Kentucky River, bass fishing in the Cumberland Mountains, rabbit hunting in the Bluegrass, and chasing outlaws in the border country of Kentucky and Virginia. Along the route we meet Old South colonels and their ladies, lawless moonshiners and their shy daughters, bloodthirsty preachers, and educated young gentleman visitors who IX Foreword explore the southern mountains for fun and profit. These sketches offer a delightful blend of macho adventure and sage observation by an erudite young writer who had lived in the two worlds that provide his subject matter-the elegant society of the Bluegrass aristocracy and the hardscrabble feuding clans of mountaineers. Of these contrasting and sometimes antagonistic cultures, Fox made a literary turf, particularly in his later bestselling novels, The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come (1903) and The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1908). This was literary property that Fox was uniquely qualified to exploit. Born in 1862 at Stony Point in Bourbon County, Kentucky, he attended his father's private boarding school, later studying at Transylvania University in Lexington and graduating in 1883 from Harvard. After a short period as a law student and journalist in New York, he returned to Kentucky in 1885 because of poor health. He became interested in the mountain people and their culture when his family began to develop mining and real estate interests in the Cumberland Gap region of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia. By 1890 Fox was living in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, an ideal vantage point for his business and literary development. His family's business ventures sputtered in the financial panic of 1893, but Fox's x Foreword literary investments prospered. From then on, he dedicated his time and talents to mining the rich resources of his native Bluegrass and his adopted mountains . Subtitled "Out-doors in Old Kentucky," these sketches are aptly named despite the fact that several of them are actually set over the border in Virginia. The collection is introduced by "The Southern Mountaineer," an essay about the common characteristics of the some three million highland people then living in the eight southern states from Virginia to Alabama. These were a people of predominantly Scotch-Irish origin who had been caught in a geographical backwater and had become "a distinct remnant of Colonial times." Moreover, Fox declares that "whatever traits the pioneer brought over the sea, the Southern mountaineer has to-day." In folkways, religion, and language these highlanders were living in a cultural pocket of arrested time. In "The Kentucky Mountaineer" Fox asserts the kinship of Kentuckians with other southern mountain people, stressing, however, their "general superiority " because of their indulgence in good and bad extremes. In Fox's words: "The Kentucky mountaineer may be the best of all-he can be likewise the worst of all." In these two essays Fox provides documentary details of mountain life that read like stereoXl Foreword types only because they are now so familiar. His sometimes sweeping generalizations are convincingly buttressed with colorful anecdotes from his own experience . Indeed, some of Fox's incisive observations may be as valid today as they were almost a century ago. Of the proud, independent mountaineer, he writes: "Carelessly applied charity weakens his pride, makes him dependent." The three Bluegrass sketches about hunting rabbits, foxes, and raccoons pull back a musty curtain to reveal an idealized landscape of romance and gaiety, the rough spots covered with the soothing balm of language. Gentlemen hunt not for food and not even for the fun of killing their quarry, Fox maintains, but mainly for "the fun of the chase." A rabbit hunt may conjure up visions of medieval knights accompanied by their fair ladies and...