Sherry Chandler

Houses

From Daniel Drake’s Pioneer Life in Kentucky 1785-1800 (Henry Schuman, Inc., 1948):

Now fancy to yourself a log cabin of the size and form of Dove’s dining room — one story high — without a window — with a door opening to the south — with a half finished wooden chimney — with a roof on one side only — without any upper or lower floor — and fancy, still further, a man and two women stepping from sleeper to sleeper (poles lad down to support the floor, when [my father] should have time to split the puncheons), with two children — a brother & sister — sitting on the ground between them, as joyous as you ever saw . . . and you will have the picture which constitutes my first memory. [ p. 15]

. . .

The first event I can remember I have described in my letter to Harriet Echo. It occurred in the autumn or beginning of the winter of 1788 when I had entered my 4^th year. For the next 6 years my father continued to reside at the same place, in the original log cabin, which in due course of time acquired a roof, a puncheon floor belown and a clap board floor above, a small square window without glass, and a chimney, carried up with cats & clay to the height of the ridge pole. These cats & clay were pieces of small poles, well imbeded in mortar. The rifle, indespensable both for hunting & defense, lay on two pegs driven into one of the logs. The axe and a scythe (no Jerseyman emigrated without that implement) were kep at night under the bed as weapons of defense, in case the Indians should make an attack. On the morning the first duty was to ascend the ladder which always stood, leaning behind the door, to the loft and look through the cracks for Indians lest they might have planted themselves near the door, to rush in when the strong crossbar should be removed, and the heavy latch raised from its resting place. But no attack was ever made on his or any other of the five cabins which composed the station.[p. 24]

From Annette Kolodny’s The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630 – 1860 (UNC Press, 1984):

As late as 1859, for example, the forty-eight-year-old Nicolas Stott Shaw accompanied her children on a week-long trek “through a dense and often trackless forest,” nervously making her way from the railroad station in Grand Rapids to a waiting cabin about ten miles from present-day Big Rapids, Michigan. Sustained by the belief “that we were going to a farm . . . [with] some resemblance at least to the prosperous farms we had seen in New England,” Nicolas was shocked to discover at the end of her journey only “the four walls and the roof of a good-sized log-house, standing in a small cleared strip of the wilderness, its doors and windows represented by square holes, its floor also a thing of the future, its whole effect achingly forlorn and desolate.” To be sure, Nicolas Shaw and her children succeeded in making a home of the cabin some “one hundred miles from a railroad, forty miles from the nearest post-office, and half a dozen miles from any neighbors save Indians, wolves, and wildcats.” But in the first shock of recognition “that this was really the place father had prepared for us,” she could only bury her face in her hands, and in that way she sat for hours without moving or speaking.” Indeed, as her daughter would insist many years later, Nicolas’s “face never lost the deep lines those first hours of her pioneer life had cut upon it.” [pp. 229-230]

A snowy woods in the 18th Century

In 1847-48, Daniel Drake, a prominent physician in the Ohio Valley, sat down to write a series of letters to his children about his life as an early settle in Kentucky. His parents came from New Jersey to Mays Lick, just a few miles down the road from where I now live, when he was three years old and he lived there until he left, at 15, to study medicine. The letters he wrote were subsequently published as Pioneer Life in Kentucky1785-1800. Drake was a charming writer, as many of these pioneers seem to be, if maybe just a little coy in apologizing to his children for rattling on about old times.

This morning I came across this passage, which seemed appropriately Currier and Ives for the Christmas season, and so I decided I’d share it here:

[In winter], my equipments were a substantial suite of butternut-linsey, a wool hat, a pair of mittens, and a pair of old stocking legs drawn down, like gaithers, over the tops of my shoes to keep out the snow which was quite as deep in those days as in later times and a great deal prettier. (Don’t smile, if you please, till you hear me out.) I do not mean that the separate flakes were more beautiful than at present; but that a snow in the woods in those days was far more picturesque than a snow in or around town as we see it now.

The woods immediately beyond our fields were unmutilated and not thinned out as you see them at present. They were, in fact, as nature received them from the hand of her Creator. When a snow had fallen without wind, the upper surface of every bough bent gracefully under its weight, and contrasted beautifully with the dark and rugged bark beneath; — the half decayed logs had their deformities covered up; the ground was overspread with a covering as pure and white as the souls of Nelly or Anna or Mary or Etta (sweet darlings, how I want to kiss them!). The cane as high as my head and shoulders, with its long green leaves made the alto relievo of the snowy carpet: — the winter grapes hung in what seemed rich clusters, from the limbs of many trees, which were decorated with tufts of green mistletoe, embellished with berries as white as pearls; while the Celastrus Scandens [Climbing bittersweet), a climbing vine hung out from others, its bunches of orange red berries, and the Indian Arrow wood (Euonymus Carolinensis) [E. Americanus, L., Strawberry Bush] below, displayed its scarlet seeds suspended by threads of the same colour. [pp. 76-77]

The bracketed interpolations were made by the editor, one Emmet Field Horine, M.D., of the old edition I found, published by Henry Schuman of New York in 1948.

Wild bittersweet used to grow in the fencerows of the country lane I lived on, but I haven’t seen it for years now. Farmers tend to clear out their fencerows. What he means by winter grapes I do not know. Back home in Owen County, I used to make wild grape jelly but we didn’t call them winter grapes. Cane, a form of bamboo, disappeared from Kentucky nearly as quickly as the buffalo.

For instance in central Kentucky in 1790, one canebrake was reported to be ‘‘15 miles long and nearly half as wide.’’ Today it is estimated that less than 2% of original habitat remains.

Overgrazing and cultivation are the primary culprits of native Arundinaria’s habitat loss. Decades of fire suppression have also been harmful in two ways: the canopy grows too thick for understory plants like river cane, and when fires do occur, they tend to be catastrophic and leave too much sunlight for the cane to reestablish itself.

I’m not sure what he means by Indian Arrow Wood, which is identified in my Google search as the wahoo (Euonymus atropurpurea), which is not the same as the strawberry bush, and neither is what we have in our yard and call a burning bush (Euonymus alata). Mistletoe is still around in abundance.

Butternut, I think, was a brown dye made from the bark of the butternut tree.

A backwoods Christmas, 1796

Back in June, I shared with you some excerpts from the journal of Francis Baily who was Running Mad for Kentucky in the winter of 1796 when his party got caught in a great freezing of the Ohio River, followed by a thaw. The freezing was bad but the thaw produced huge ice floes that stove in the party’s Kentucky boat. They managed to offload most of their goods and haul them up the river bank, where they took shelter in an abandoned hut.

Here is Francis Baily’s diary entry for Christmas Day, 1796:

December 25th, Christmas Day-Two of our party being ill with the fatigues we had undergone on the 21st, the task of superintending the conveyance of our goods devolved upon me. We had been employed at it the whole of yesterday; and as soon as daylight approached this morning we began the same career again, nor did we cease this routine, except to take the scanty pittance we had saved from the wreck, till the setting sun and our own weary limbs told us it was time to close the scene once more. I could not think of the happy moments which were enjoyed in my own country on this auspicious day, and perhaps by those whose remembrance is the most dear to me, without contrasting them with my present situation. Here am I in the wilds of America, away from the society of men, amidst the haunts of wild beasts and savages, just escaped from the perils of a wreck, in want not only of the comforts, but of the necessaries of life, housed in a hovel that in my own country wou1d not be good enough for a pigstye, at a time too when my father. my mother, my brothers, my sisters, my friends and acquaintance, in fact, the whole nation, were feasting upon the best the country could afford. I could not but picture to myself the fireside of my own home, where I saw them all assembled round; a beam of happiness perhaps glistening in every face, save when after dinner I was remembered in their glasses; then, perhaps, a sigh broke out from some of them, and the conversation might turn upon “where I was,” and “what I was doing;” but this dying away, I should soon be forgotten again, and they would return to spend the day in mirth and happiness. Ah! little do they think of the hardships I have undergone, or of those which seem to continue to press us. Little do they think that, while they are partaking of all the bounties of nature, that I am suffering the contrary extreme through want; and would gladly partake of the refuse of their table, or thankfully receive what they would give a common beggar at the door. Methought, if I could but make my appearance in the midst of them at this time, that I should scarce be remembered by them, my long beard, my rough and tattered clothes, and all together would puzzle them at first to conceive what stranger was come amongst them; at least, I think they would begin to chide the servant for admitting so uncouth a visitor before they would recollect or discover who I was. [pp 202-203]

Miserable he may have been, but he still conjured up a scene worthy of Dickens.

The temperature here in Kentucky at the dawn of Christmas Day, 2009 is 51 °F with a southeast wind gusting to 22 mph. The forecast says the wind will turn southwesterly during the day and temperatures will fall into the high 30s. The Ohio River is long since dammed to within an inch of its life and while it may well be running high, it is highly unlikely to freeze.

Wherever you are and however you may or may not celebrate Christmas may you be sustainably well housed and well fed.

Peace and good will to all.

And just to give you something to look at, here is a photo TR took of the redbellied woodpecker at our feeder on the solstice.

The isolate, white male hunter

In The Land Before Her. Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-1860 (UNC Press, 1984), Annette Kolodny analyzes the mythology of Daniel Boone thus:

In the end, of course, the nation took to its heart the heroic mythology of the wilderness hunter . . . For, in fantasy as in life, if the wilderness was to be possessed by the cultivators, then it could be no place for the hunters; and if the hunters triumphed, then however appealing their gardens, the cultivators would have to be barred (or removed). And so, while historically the wilderness was given over, frontier by frontier, to the cultivators, in fantasy it forever remained the domain of the male hunter-adventurer (albeit stripped of his commercial and settlement associations). Daniel Boone emerged from his original incarnation as a brooding, meditative protector of settlements to become Boone the isolate, white male hunter, companion to the Indian. [p. 67]

It is just this mythological interface of forest and garden that Robert Morgan explores in his popular Boone. A Biography (Algonquin Books, 2009). Except that where Kolodny presents the forest as feminine and erotic to the men who made the myth, Morgan sees it as feminine and maternal: great mother wilderness opposed to father commerce. (I’ll grant some overlap here between the erotic and the maternal; the overarching point is the forest as feminine object of desire.)

Morgan’s book has been advertised as a portrait of the real Boone, but I found it more a portrait of Boone the larger-than-life hero. John Mack Faragher tries to sort fact from legend in his Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer, and Meredith Mason Brown, in Frontiersman: Daniel Boone and the Making of America, places Boone in the social history of his time. Both of these are books of standard biography, but I found Morgan’s book more a work of creative nonfiction or maybe even historical criticism. Morgan is willing to enter Boone’s mind, to tell you what the great man thought and felt. He concludes that the meeting between Boone and John James Audubon did take place, because it was right that the great woodsman and the great naturalist should have met. The fact of their physical presence in the same place at the same time is irrelevant.

Morgan really admires Boone; I would go so far as to say that he loves Boone and the lost forest of his myth. Identifying with Boone is not necessarily a bad thing. I find myself doing it. And Morgan is a poet, after all, an excellent poet, but probably more interested in the spirit than the fact of the matter, the truth of the heart. In a biography, what I perceived as the lack of objectivity made me uncomfortable. I can draw my own conclusions, build my own what-if castles.

The fact is, whatever else it may have been, Boone’s was always a commercial enterprise. Even the indigenous nations had turned commercial hunters by the time Boone enters the scene.

I argued with Morgan a lot, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I argue with a lot of books that I find valuable. I was uncomfortable enough with this book that I put it down for several weeks. I found him too willing to accept the positive and argue away the negative. Or maybe it was just my bitter feminist bent that doubted, maybe the truth of my heart is found in a different place.

When I came back to it recently I was more receptive. Possibly I was in a different emotional and intellectual place — I’ve found that I have to be “ready” to read some books — or perhaps it was because I’d reached the point in Boone’s life where settlement catches up with him and his footprint is a little more life sized.

Which is to say, exactly that point of his original incarnation as a brooding, meditative protector of settlements as opposed to Boone the isolate, white male hunter, the point where he talks to Filson, keeps a tavern, commands a militia.

Toward the end of the biography, when Boone is in Missouri acting as a sort of don on his Spanish land grant, continuing to find ways to explore and hunt, my skepticism returned. This is where arthritic aging Boone makes it all the way out to the Rockies, where he meets Audubon, where legend once again overlaps fact like the shingled land claims in Kentucky, and where Morgan believes and I doubt.

All that said, Boone is a beautifully written book, well researched, and with a comprehensive bibliography and set of notes. Morgan is excellent writing about the Shawnee, portraying them as neither savage nor noble. His picture of Boone’s life as a captive and Blackfish’s adoptive son is wonderful in giving us the texture of that life, i’s attraction for a man of Daniel Boone’s predelictions. Morgan is also very good in his portrait of Rebecca Boone. I give him high marks for that.

And I see in my sidebar that I have pulled a quote from William Stafford:

Poverty plus confidence equals
pioneers. We never doubted.

Camp Nelson

One of the horrors I discovered in Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin 2007) was that the African-American soldiers fighting in the Union Army could be as badly treated by Northern forces as by Southern.

Here, from Helen Deiss Irvin, is a harrowing incident from Kentucky’s Civil War:

In the devastating war it took to free the slaves, many black men were impressed into or enlisted in the Union army, and black women were bystanders who often suffered. . . . black women journeyed in droves to Camp Nelson, where their husbands or sons were trianing as Union soldiers. The Union commander, Speed S. Fry, called this situation the “Nigger Woman Question.” He expelled the women and had those who returned whipped. But the strength of family ties led more black woman and children to Camp Nelson, where they settled in samll huts they themselves put up near the camp. Living conditions were miserable, and most were penniless. One old woman with several sons in the Union army washed and sewed to pay her way.

Without giving these people time to collect their meager belongings, the Union commander evicted 400 of them in late November, 1864. Gutman tells that they were “dumped” from wagons on roadsides “in extreme cold weather.” They suffered intensely. Having no other place to turn, about 250 made their way back to the camp. Of these, 102 died.

Still they came, often turned out by their former owners when slave husbands joined the Union army. By January, 1865, Camp Nelson was the residence of 3,060 slaves, mostly women and children. [pp. 60-61]

From the Camp Nelson website, there is a kinder side to this incident, which states that 10,000 African-Americans enrolled in the Union army there:

The families of the African-American Soldiers attracted the attention of the American Missionary Association, an abolitionist society founded prior to the Civil War. Reverend John Fee, the founder of Berea College, came to Camp Nelson in 1864 to teach and minister to the refugees at Camp Nelson. His efforts eventually led to the founding of Ariel College and church and finally the settlement of Hall. Fee believed passionately in the equality of the races and he sought to educate the freedmen to become independent, self-reliant members of an integrated American society The refugee camp for the families of the African-American soldiers was located near the present day community of Hall west of US 27. This was also the site of Ariel College.

And here:

Fry was severely criticized by the northern press, the U.S. Sanitary Commission and by the missionary to the refugees, Rev. John G. Fee. Fry’s actions also enraged the African-American recruits and undermined the recruitment of African-Americans in Kentucky. Because of the complaints and reactions, Washington directed Fry to establish a camp for the refugees within Camp Nelson

A direct result of Fry’s actions at Camp Nelson and the uproar which followed was the passage into law, in February 1865, of the act which freed the wives and the children of the ex-slave enlistees. This act resulted in an increase in the enlistment of enslaved African-Americans in Kentucky and other border states.

Here is a photo that I stole from the site of the refugee camp. I highly recommend that you go spend some time at the Camp Nelson webpage.

Thou bright spot on earth

Mary Austin Holley didn’t want to come to Kentucky in 1818 and she wasn’t overjoyed to stay in Kentucky. In fact, on one occasion, when she went back to Boston for a visit without her husband, she tried to leverage him back by somehow “missing” her accommodations home. Yet when the Holleys left Lexington in 1827, she was sorry to leave. Leaving behind her only daughter and her new-born grandson might have had some influence.

Another reason may have been that the Holleys were pretty much forced out of Transylvania. The religious conservatives who had always found Holley’s administration way too liberal had won the statehouse in the person of Joseph Desha. Had Holley stayed, Transylvania may have rivaled Harvard and Yale.

At any rate, Mary Holley wrote the following poem on the occasion of her leaving. It was widely reprinted and was distributed as a broadsheet, her best-known work. Text is from Rebecca Smith Lee’s Mary Austin Holley: A Biography (Univ Texas Press, 1962)

On Leaving Kentucky

Farewell to the land at whose call I deserted
A dearly loved home and the place of my birth!
In sorrow I met thee, with eyes half averted;
In sorrow I quit thee, thou bright spot on earth!

With the wide world to rove in as in life’s early day,
But with spirits less buoyant as chastened by time,
Reflecting in sadness I tread the lone way,
As homeless I leave thee, thou beautiful clime.

Shrubes and trees, which I’ve planted and nurtured with care,
Geraniums, roses, and myrtles, adieu!
Who your first fruits and flowers hereafter will share,
and who will e’er show such devotion to you?

To the church too farewell, where with weekly devotion
My heart and my voice in full unison were
With the organ’s deep tones as with lively emotion
I joined in the concert of praise and of prayer.

But how to the friends who have cherished me ever
Shall I utter the word, or but think we must part!
Let Destiny rule as she chooses, O never
Shall their sacred remembrance be torn from my heart!

May they too forget not they once loved the stranger,
Whatever her mood was, grave, gay, or serene;
Though a pilgrim henceforth, in far countries a ranger,
She will still love to dwell on the days that have been.

— Mary Austin Holley

Slave state

Some snippets from Helen Deiss Irvin on slavery:

In the Kentucky social hierarchy, most powerless were black women. Subject to all of the abuses of slavery, they were vulnerable to additional ones as women. It was widely known, for example, that the slave trader Lewis Robards of Lexington sold black women into prostitution—a practice in which no one intervened—and other traders operated breeding farms for southern markets. Moreover, the exploitation of black women by their owners was not unusual, as evidenced by numbers of nearly white slave children.

Nice word: exploitation. But to continue:

. . . The sales in Lexington of Eliza, only one sixty-fourth black, and of two sisters who were graduates of Oberlin College—all three the daughters of their white masters—were causes célèbres, as J. Winston Coleman, Jr., relates in Slavery Times in Kentucky. But black women, children, and men were sold every court-day, and no one turned a head. It was whiteness, the obvious kinship with the white ruling class, that distressed onlookers. [pp. 48-49]

Coincidentally, NPR recently ran a story about a study showing that people who approve of Barack Obama perceive his skin tone to be lighter than it is while those who disapprove see it as darker. Obviously we have not got beyond this prejudice for the white.

With African-American slaves as with Native Americans, there was a great fear of miscegenation that did not apply to white men. Here is a key paragraph from Catherine Clinton’s Mrs. Lincoln: A Life (HarperCollins, 2009):

From the earliest years of settlement, the rising birthrate of mixed-race children induced authorities to attempt to resolve “miscegenations” with a stroke of the pen: In 1662, the Virginia assemply passed legislation declaring that slave offspring inherited the status of the mother (partus sequitur ventrem) This law provided white males with an incentive to prefer slave women as illicit sexual partners—as they could not be charged with bastardy. [p. 23]

Clinton tells the story of Richard M. Johnson, a friend of Mary Lincoln’s father, John Robert Todd, and an exception to the rule of “exploitation,” the one that said these sexual liaisons would be politely ignored. Johnson would serve as vice president under Martin Van Buren but before achieving that high estate, he created a scandal in Lexington not only by acknowledging his two mixed-race daughters, offspring of his long liaison with his “housekeeper,” but also by trying to arrange advantageous marriages for them with white men. He accomplished this in part by settling lands and money on them, thereby adding fuel to the fire (see “bribed” below).

Like the sisters sold at auction, Johnson’s daughters were well educated. When Lafayette stayed with Jonson on his visit to Lexington in 1825, Clinton quotes a neighbor as reporting the event thus:

Evry thing that was necsary for the occasion was prepared in fine order. Johnson’s Two Daughters they Played on the piano fine. They Ware Dressed as fine as money Could Dress them & to one that Did not no they ware as white as anny of the Laydes thare & thare ware a good many. [p. 24]

I daresay the daughters, Imogene and Adaline, could probably spell better than the reporter, too.

Lexington Society might have tolerate such socializing from a wealthy powerful war hero, but with their marriages, Johnson had gone too far. George D. Prentice, editor of the Louisville Journal, explained the situation thus in 1835:

The author of the Declaration of Independence had his faults, but he was at least careful never to insult the feelings of the community with an ostentatious exhibition of them. He never lived in open intercourse with an “odoriferous wench”; He never bribed “his white fellow citizens” to “make such beasts of themselves” before the open eyes of the world as to stand up in the church, grasp the sable paws of negresses and pronounce the sacred vows of wedlock. [p. 25]

Prentice was a Unionist, an ardent Henry Clay supporter, and a member of the Know-Nothing Party but his writing style was broadly satiric and the liberal peppering of quotation marks in this passage leads me to wonder just where his barbs were falling.

Clinton reports that Adaline died of a “broken heart” in February 1836 because of all her father suffered on his daughters’ account [p. 25].

Horace and Mary Austin Holley were instrumental in bringing Lafayette to Lexington, by the way. Mary Holley would, no doubt, have been one of those white women present at Johnson’s plantation, Blue Springs in 1825. In 1818, when Mary Holley first came to Lexington with her husband, who was to be president of Transylvania University, she was uneasy about having slaves as servants. She soon adjusted, however, and when the Holleys were preparing to leave Kentucky in 1827, Rebecca Smith Lee records that:

[Horace Holley] reckoned up his own financial condition carefully . . . and wrote to Orville that he was leaving Kentucky worth at least six thousand dollars, counting his books, furniture, land, and two slaves. [Mary Austin Holley: A Biography (Univ Texas Press, 1962), p. 172]

Unfortunately, when the Holleys left Lexington, they fell on hard times. They went to Louisiana where events did not work out the way Horace Holley thought they would. Ill and humiliated, he decided he had to flee the cursed south:

“One breath of air,” he cried out as Mary begged him to lie back on the couch by the window and let her fan his brow, “one breath of air from the Northern shore of freedom, though borne upon the eastern gale, were worth all the boasted luxuries of the ever-smiling scented South, alluring but to destroy!” [Mary Austin Holley: A Biography, pp. 181-182]

But in order to book their passage, the Holleys had to have money:

He hastened to book passage for himself and wife and son on the Louisiana two weeks hence, and spent his scanty strength making preparations to leave. Most of his ready cash had gone toward equipment for the house and school, and a few days before sailing he was compelled to sell their excellent colored woman named Susanna for the sum of four hundred and fifty dollars, with Mr. Martin Duralde as witness to the transaction. [Mary Austin Holley: A Biography, p. 182]

Horace Holley never made it to the Northern shore of freedom. He died of yellow fever on the voyage. After his death, Mary Austin Holley returned to Louisiana to serve as governess on the LaBranche plantation.