Sherry Chandler

The dear hunt

Whoso List to Hunt

Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,
But as for me, alas, I may no more.
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,
I am of them that farthest cometh behind.
Yet may I, by no means, my wearied mind
Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore,
Fainting I follow. I leave off, therefore,
Since in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
As well as I, may spend his time in vain.
And graven with diamonds in letters plain
There is written, her fair neck round about,
“Noli me tangere, for Caesar’s I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.”

— Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder (1503-1542)

This is a translation of a Petrarchan sonnet that Wyatt co-opted to refer to Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. It shows up nearly every year in Poetry Daily’s Poet’s Pick mailings during April. It is a particularly attractive adaption of courtly love’s use of the hunt as a metaphor for courtship. According to Wikipedia,

by the High Middle Ages, the necessity of hunting was transformed into a stylized pastime of the aristocracy. More than a pastime, it was an important arena for social interaction, essential training for war, and a privilege and measurement of nobility.

Here, in Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer (Henry Holt, 1993), is John Mack Faragher on the tale of Daniel Boone’s fire hunt:

Frontier legend related a different tale of their meeting. On a summer’s eve, the deer congregated at the creeks to avoid the swarms of bothersome mosquitoes and feast on the tender water mosses, young Boone would oftentimes pursue the “fire hunt,” a companion holding a firebrand aloft while he stalked the creek, rifle at the ready. Starting from their feeding and gazing upon the approaching fire, the deer would stand frozen, seemingly hypnotized by the light, the reflected glow cast by their eyes a target for his rifle. On one such occasion, so the tale was told, Rebecca, whose task it was to herd her father’s cows, is out searching for strays when she is overtaken by sudden nightfall. Losing her way in the dark, she strikes a course for home by wading through the shallows of the creek. Suddenly ahead she sees the glow of an approaching torch and the reflection of a rifle barrel. At the same moment Boone levels his piece at the blaze of her eyes but, sensing that these shining orbs are unlike those of any deer he had seen, holds his fire for a crucial second, long enough for Rebecca to bound away in terror through the woods. Boone pursues and finds her trail leading leading to the Bryan homestead. There he meets the panting maiden. Thunderstruck at how near he had come to destroying this woman, whom he immediately knows will become the object of his love, he thereafter gives up firehunting. [pp.43-44]

In The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers 1630 – 1860 (Univ North Carolina Press, 1984), Annette Kolodny interprets this fire hunt folk tale thus:

If the fire-hunt legend calls to mind medieval allegories in which the hunting of the hart plays out a lover’s pursuit of his dear, it does so with a difference. In medieval allegories, the hunt begins with a wounding of the hart and terminates with its capture, the symbolic uniting of the lovers thus displacing the prior pursuit. In [Timothy] Flint’s Biographical Memoir of Daniel Boone [published 1828], however, the hunting never ceases. The imputed consummation that closes the story does not, in fact, bind Daniel to Rebecca’s side. For Boone’s “darling pursuit of hunting” is not metaphorical: it is his controlling “passion.” The “unexplored paradise of the hunter’s imagination” is the forest here, not the marriage bed. As a result, the Rebecca Bryan of the fire-hunt legend emerges not as a person beloved in her own right but, instead, as a human cipher who has managed, if only briefly, to take on the erotic appeal of the wilderness that defined her husband’s meaning. [p. 87]

But in How the West Was Lost. The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), Stephen Aron sees this hunting as a democratizing factor:

For English and Anglo-American gentlement charged with preserving peace and trade with Indians and establishing order over the backcountry, the meetings of hunters exposed the limits of their governance. . . . The problem, it seemed to many gentry authorities, was that backcountry settlers in general, and “hunters” in particular, too closely resembled the Indian peoples whose lands they invaded. According to well-heeled travelers, primitive ways prevailed along a wide arc from the interior of Pennsylvania to the uplands of South Carolina. They especially proliferated where hunting lured inhabitatnts from civilizing pursuits. In the Carolina uplands that were the southern flank of Greater Pennsylvania in the 1760s, the Anglican minister Charles Woodmason confronted a “people of abandon’d Morals and profligate Principles, the lowest Pack of Wretches my eyes ever saw.” Emissaries for church and king recoiled from the near-savage “white Indians” who peopled the backcountry. Residents of the upper Ohio Valley, reported Thomas Gage, the British military commander for North America in 1772, “differ[ed] little from Indians in their manner of life.” They dressed like Indians (or were “half-naked”), comported themselves like Indians, and indiscriminately consorted with one another like Indians. Backcountry settlers, agreed Sir William Johnson, supervisor of Britain’s relations with northern Indians, were “a lawless set of people as fond of independency as” Indians, “and more regardless of government, owing to ignorance, prejudice, democratical principles and their remote situation.”

More disturbing, backcountry people, like adjacent Indian villagers, displayed little respect for their “betters” and no enthusiasm for the schemes of improvers and uplifters.

. . . According to the theory of human developmental history that reigned in the Age of Enlightenment, when backcountry whites hunted, they reverted to the lowest mode of subsistence. True, gentlemen on both sides of the Atlantic hunted too. But they went after game for sport, not subsistence, and thus escaped being stigmatized as white Indians. [pp. 13-14]

And so we are back to the Medieval hunt, the one that is for gentlemen only and led the Kings to make “poaching” a death-penalty crime.

Faragher interprets the tale a little differently:

Variants of this folktale circulated widely in the backcountry settlements of frontier America. The story of the hunter who falls in love with his prey is, in fact, common in the folklore of many hunting peoples; the sexual union of hunter and deer-woman was a recurrent motif in the oral culture of American Indians. Its appropriation in the Boone firehunt tale is another example of frontier borrowing and suggests some closer affinities between American and Indian cultures. It also hints at important tensions between frontier men and women. Rebecca is placed in deadly peril by Boone’s pursuit of his occupation. She is saved by the restraint of his passion, and his transformation from hunter to husband is achieved through the renunciation of an aspect of his livelihood. Thus the tale addresses in metaphor certain discontinuities of gender and suggests that men must forsake certain freedoms to achieve union with women. However, while the tale may contain an important cultural truth, Boone descendants protested its biographical inaccuracy. [p. 44]

And so the fire hunt never happened. But frontier Americans needed it to have happened. Who knows why?

What’s in a name?

After a discussion of the origins of the name Kentucky, familiar ground for most of us natives, Robert Morgan has this to say in Boone: A Biography (Algonquin, 2007)

Some words have a resonance, a color, and are memorable even before we know what they mean. We love to say them just to feel them in the air and on our tongue. Some words have a peculiar rightness and catch on like a bit of poetry. Kanta-ke is such a term, and people have never tired of saying it since it was first heard by whites in the middle of the eighteenth century. There is a symmetry to the word, to the balance of vowels and consonants, beginning with the k sound and ending with the k sound. And of course the name was thought to have an etymological and semantic rightness too. Whatever they called it, those who sought Kentucky already saw it as a mythic, Edenic place. Whatever the entymology of the word, Kentucky certainly seemed like the land of the future to Boone and Findley, and many other explorers of the time. [pp. 90-91]

Puts me in mind of what Moses Austin had to say about those poverty-stricken settlers running mad for Kentucky. Sometimes our mythology is destructive.

Contrasts

Here is a copy of a rather famous portrait by David Wright, called “Gateway to the West.” It was commissioned by the Cumberland Gap Historical National Park, where it appears as a 14-foot mural. It purportedly shows Colonel Daniel Boone leading settlers through Cumberland Gap.

Here is a copy of a painting from Elizabeth Ellet’s paper “Slavery on the Kentucky Frontier.” It is from the private collection of William Loren Katz and purports to show a slave coffle moving toward the newly settled areas of the Wes.

Compare and contrast.

Slaves on the frontier

Ellen Eslinger begins her article “The Shape of Slavery on the Kentucky Frontier, 1775-1800″ (The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 1994, volume 92, pages 1-23) like this:

In 1778, the Virginia General Assembly received a petition from Kentuckian Nathaniel Henderson requesting recompense for one of his bondsmen. This slave, whose name was London, had been killed when a British-led force of more than four hundred Indians besieged Boonesborough for nine days earlier that year. With fewer than forty men in the fort, the commanding officer of the militia had ordered Henderson’s slave to a sentry post in a log building used as a kitchen, near an embankment where the enemy was trying to tunnel under the fort s timber walls. In the nighttime stillness the inhabitants of Boonesborough could hear the digging beneath them. London took several shots at the enemy, until the bright flash from his gun betrayed his location to sharpshooters. He was one of two American casualties.

While the Shawnee did, indeed, try to tunnel into Boonesborough, John Mack Faragher tells the story of London a little bit differently in his biography Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer (Macmillan, 1993). Tunnels don’t get much attention in our tales of Indian warfare, but fire does. In Faragher’s version of London’s death, on the night after they began to tunnel, the Shawnee were also trying that old favorite of Western movies. They had been throwing flaming torches into the fort. The tactic didn’t have much success, thanks in part to a squirt gun Squire Boone invented on the spot using old rifle barrels. But, says Faragher:

The Shawnee tactics this night did succeed, however, in claiming the first American fatality of the seige. A small fence that adjoined the back wall of one of the cabins was set afire, and, fearing that it would burn through, several men dug through the cabin floor and London, a slave whose master was away from the settlement, squeezed out and succeeded in pushing the blazing timbers away with a forked stick. As he lay in the dark outside the fort, London saw a Shawnee warrior hidden nearby behind a tree stump. He whispered to the men behind him to pass up a loaded gun, took aim, pulled the trigger; the lock snapped failing to ignite the powder, and the warrior jerked toward the well-known sound, peering into the darkness, without making out the shooter. London cocked and pulled again, and this time the powder in the pan flashed, but the gun failed to fire. Now the Indian saw his attacker clearly, illuminated by the burst of powder, and shot him dead. Such failings of weapons were among the common dangers of battle, when haste prevented the necessary precautions in loading and cleaning. [pp. 194-195]

According to Faragher, Nathaniel Henderson’s petition to the Virginia General Assembly was “scornfully” rejected.

But Eslinger isn’t so much interested in the details of battle as in the fact that the role of slaves in settling Kentucky is generally glossed over. It might be safe to generalize that African-American slaves did more of the work than did white settlers and faced as much, if not more, of the danger. Eslinger continues:

What was London doing at Boonesborough? Was his death mourned by a wife and children? Does his participation in the community’s defense indicate that slaves on the frontier held a closer status with whites�a greater equality wrought by conditions of extreme danger? Did the ability to use a gun and proximity to expanses of wilderness facilitate making a bid for freedom? Did the frontier create special conditions for slaves, and, if so, how were these conditions regarded by the slaves themselves?

Most studies of slavery in Kentucky address the antebellum years, merely noting the arrival of blacks during the settlement period. Given the much greater abundance of source material for the nineteenth century, this emphasis is understandable. But it encourages a tendency to project antebellum patterns of slavery back to an earlier period. In some settings the distinction between frontier and later periods might not be too problematic, but the Anglo-American frontier in Kentucky involved extraordinary isolation and danger. Historians have shown how these conditions affected every aspect of daily life for white settlers. It seems reasonable to consider, then, how the experience of London and his fellow slaves on the trans-Appalachian frontier might have differed from slavery as it existed elsewhere in the late eighteenth century and from slavery as it later existed in nineteenth-century Kentucky.

Faragher tells of slaves belonging to Richard Callaway and others who helped to clear the Wilderness Road and at least one slave was killed doing that work. He also gives African American slaves credit for doing much of the practical work of feeding the white settlers while they were out grabbing land claims. A slave named Shadrach was with the first unsuccessful expedition that Boone led into Kentucky in 1773. It was he who led Boone to the body of his tortured son.

According to Eslinger, a tally of the inhabitants of Harrodsburg in 1777 counted 85 white men, 26 white women, 12 slaves over the age of ten, and seven African-American children. By 1790, there were 12,000 slaves in Kentucky, and 40,000 by the end of the 18th century. In that same time, Thomas D. Clark says the total population of Kentucky rose from 0 to 220,000, making slaves 18% of the population. (Kentucky’s current African-American population is 7.5% of our total population of 4,206,074. [Link to PDF])

I have visited Eslinger’s excellent article before on these pages. Fascinating stuff, and eye-opening.

If, as Eric Holder opines, we are a nation in need of taking a more honest look at our relationship to race, we might start by admitting that, while the American Adam may have been white, he had some brown brothers.

Byron on Boone

George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824) on Daniel Boone (1734-1820). This passage is from Canto VIII (of 16) of “Don Juan,” which was published in 1823.

Of all men, saving Sylla the man-slayer,
       Who passes for in life and death most lucky,
     Of the great names which in our faces stare,
       The General Boon, back-woodsman of Kentucky,
     Was happiest amongst mortals anywhere;
       For killing nothing but a bear or buck, he
     Enjoy'd the lonely, vigorous, harmless days
     Of his old age in wilds of deepest maze.

     Crime came not near him--she is not the child
       Of solitude; Health shrank not from him--for
     Her home is in the rarely trodden wild,
       Where if men seek her not, and death be more
     Their choice than life, forgive them, as beguiled
       By habit to what their own hearts abhor--
     In cities caged. The present case in point I
     Cite is, that Boon lived hunting up to ninety;

     And what 's still stranger, left behind a name
       For which men vainly decimate the throng,
     Not only famous, but of that good fame,
       Without which glory 's but a tavern song--
     Simple, serene, the antipodes of shame,
       Which hate nor envy e'er could tinge with wrong;
     An active hermit, even in age the child
     Of Nature, or the man of Ross run wild.

     'T is true he shrank from men even of his nation,
       When they built up unto his darling trees,--
     He moved some hundred miles off, for a station
       Where there were fewer houses and more ease;
     The inconvenience of civilisation
       Is, that you neither can be pleased nor please;
     But where he met the individual man,
     He show'd himself as kind as mortal can.

     He was not all alone: around him grew
       A sylvan tribe of children of the chase,
     Whose young, unwaken'd world was ever new,
       Nor sword nor sorrow yet had left a trace
     On her unwrinkled brow, nor could you view
       A frown on Nature's or on human face;
     The free-born forest found and kept them free,
     And fresh as is a torrent or a tree.

     And tall, and strong, and swift of foot were they,
       Beyond the dwarfing city's pale abortions,
     Because their thoughts had never been the prey
       Of care or gain: the green woods were their portions;
     No sinking spirits told them they grew grey,
       No fashion made them apes of her distortions;
     Simple they were, not savage; and their rifles,
     Though very true, were not yet used for trifles.

     Motion was in their days, rest in their slumbers,
       And cheerfulness the handmaid of their toil;
     Nor yet too many nor too few their numbers;
       Corruption could not make their hearts her soil;
     The lust which stings, the splendour which encumbers,
       With the free foresters divide no spoil;
     Serene, not sullen, were the solitudes
     Of this unsighing people of the woods.

     So much for Nature:--by way of variety,
       Now back to thy great joys, Civilisation!

— George Gordon, Lord Byron, from Don Juan

Cat with backwoodsman

In February of 1778, Daniel Boone and a company of salt makers were captured by the Shawnee at the Upper Blue Licks, just a few miles from where I live. Boone was taken to Chillicothe and adopted by the chief Blackfish under the name Sheltowee or Big Turtle. To all appearances he was content among his adopted family and he appeared to agree to help the British take Boonesborough.

Uncertain of Daniel’s fate, tired of a frontier which had already cost her one son and very nearly a daughter (the kidnapping and rescue of Jemima Boone being one of the more famous episodes in Kentucky history), and possibly feeling a certain hostility because she came from a Loyalist family, Rebecca Bryan Boone decided to leave Boonesborough and return to the Bryan enclave in the Yadkin Valley of North Carolina.

On June 16, having learned that the British and the Shawnee are planning a siege of Boonesborough, Daniel made a daring escape carrying nothing more than a purloined rifle barrel and some jerky. He evaded the Shawnee and made the 160-mile journey to Boonesborough in 4 days.

It was not until late the next day, June 20, that he crossed the Kentucky at the ford above Boonesborough and hailed settlers from several hundred feet away. He had to be cautious, for with his head plucked he could not be distinguished easily from an Indian. “Bless your soul,” pronounced one of the men as Boone came up and others stood in stunned silence. The Boonesborough settlers gathered at the gate but offered no uproarious greeting. Quite the contrary, Boone found them sullen and suspicious; Andy Johnson’s report of treachery had spread from Harrodsburg and infected Boonesborough. Looking for a friendly face, Boone inquired after Rebecca and the family. “She put into the settlements long ago,” someone answered, “packed up and was off to the old man’s in Carolina.” Boone went to the family cabin, which stood empty and hollow, to nurse his bitter disappointment. As he sat, the family cat, left behind when Rebecca moved back to North Carolina, suddenly reappeared and settled itself in his lap. —John Mack Faragher, Daniel Boone, The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer (Henry Holt and Company, 1992), p.p. 174-175

A Companion for Owls

The folks at GoodReads sent me a message. It said, and I paraphrase, “it’s been 180 days since you added A Companion for Owls to your “currently reading” list. Would you like to update your list?”

A gentle reminder that I was not holding up my end, not being a good GoodReads citizen. No literate human being, it implied, could spend six months reading a single book, especially not a slender volume of poetry.

But GoodReads is wrong.

They don’t know how I read poetry books.

Very slowly.

Say, one poem a day. Or two. And I read them over several times. And then I sit and look out the window at the middle distance and absorb.

In the case of Maurice Manning’s A Companion for Owls, Being a Commonplace Book of D. Boone, Long Hunter, Back Woodsman, etc. (Harcourt, 2004), the reading time was especially long. There are several reasons for my lingering. One is that this volume of poetry is not particularly slender, coming in as it does at 128 pages. I’ve read shorter novels. Then there’s the fact that the collection deals with a period of Kentucky history in which I have a great interest. Mostly though, I was slow because I read it once through just to read the poems (of which there are about 90 pages) and then I read it through again to read the poems in conjunction with the endnotes (of which there are about 30 pages, including a 17-page divagation on the theme that it was Kentucky made English Romanticism possible).

Manning is a sometimes antic poet. Anyone who has read his Yale-Younger-Poet prize-winning Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions knows that he loves lists, shape poems, and a sort of schematic vizpo.

Take, for example, the poem below:

for which the end-note reads:

On April 24, 1777, Boone was shot in the ankle during an Indian siege at Boonesborough. The injury plagued him later in his life. That the state of Kentucky is shaped like a human foot is certainly a plausible comparison, though it is not one Boone explicitly made. He did however have intimate knowledge of sadness and would most likely have acknowledged that sadness often encircles joy.

On might infer that Boone left a large footprint indeed in Kentucky.

As with many contemporary poetry collections dealing with historical personalities, some of the poems in A Companion for Owls benefit from an explanatory endnote. Some, however, stand perfectly well alone. It seems typical of Manning, however, to decide that an end-note for one poem implies an end-note for all, whether needed or not. Some are very tongue-in-cheek. The note to “Advice to Rovers” reads:

It is not known if anyone ever came to Boone and asked how to be a Noble Savage.

Manning is also a metaphysical poet and the subject of his Boone poems is the relationship of man to God and nature. We are not dealing with Boone the hero here but with Boone the contemplative. He is also the Natural Man, if not the Noble Savage, a man with stated contempt for Jefferson and his expansionism. Boone as the American Adam is one of the few white men who actually experienced this new Eden. The irony, of course, is that he also partook of its exploration and its destruction.

The tone is set by the opening poem, “On God:”

Is there a god of the gulf between a man
and a horse? …

It is also set by poems like “Without a Vision,” which deals with the death of Boone’s son at the Battle of Blue Licks, the last battle in the Revolutionary War. In this rather intellectual book, it is the poem that touched me most:

Don’t ever name a son Israel;
and don’t ever follow a man hot
for blood into battle, because
he will bring blood upon you:
that is the one wage of vengeance.

I profited from my second reading of the book because the voice of the Boone poems doesn’t indulge in quite the same pyrotechnics found in Lawrence Booth or the speaker in Manning’s third collection Bucolics (Harcourt, 2007). Not that it’s quiet, exactly. But it is as Bobbie Ann Mason said in the Oxford American:

Maurice Manning is a wry skeptic with a streak of romanticism. In his work, each iota and instant matters.

You have to pay attention.

It took a while for me to understand this voice. Once I did, I came to like it a lot, not for what it says about Boone necessarily but for what it says about Manning. As Mason has said, his heart is in Kentucky and it shows in these poems, which might be seen as both celebration and elegy for the wilderness that was and the man who is most identified with it. Perhaps best stated in “Notes on ‘The Natural Man’”

                                                            …Filson said
this country could someday be a polis, a princely
city-state, he called it. …You want
the truth? I was rather friendly with the Indians!
It was the pro-polisites who decided we should kill
the Indians in order to civilize them. I came here
a man of relative peace and all of a sudden it’s wide
streets, evangelists, and courthouse squares…
I’ve got three dead Indians on my soul: What kind
of civilization is that?