I
What is a Kentucky book, is the one great question this work has
elicited. Surely a Kentucky book is one written by a Kentuckian about
Kentucky or Kentuckians and printed in Kentucky; surely it is a book
written by a Kentuckian upon any subject under the sun, and published
in any clime; surely it is one written in Kentucky by a citizen of any
other state or country, regardless of the subject or place of
publication, for, "in general, I have regarded the birthplace of a
piece of literature more important than that of the author." But is a
book, though treating of Kentucky or Kentuckians, regardless of its
place of publication, whose author was not born in, nor for any
appreciable period resided in, this state, entitled to be properly
classified as a Kentucky work? The writer has responded in the
negative to this question in the present work.
There have been several noted American authors who have written volumes
about Kentucky or Kentuckians, and they themselves were not natives of
this state, nor resided within its confines. Those early Western
travelers rarely omitted Kentucky from their journeys. The first of
them, F. A. Michaux, published his famous _Travels to the West of the
Alleghany Mountains, in the States of Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee_, at
London, in 1805; two years later F. Cuming's _Tour to the Western
Country, through Ohio and Kentucky_, was printed at Pittsburg; and in
1817 John Bradbury got out the first edition of his now noted _Travels
in the Interior of America_, at London. Bradbury died in 1823 and
to-day lies buried in the cemetery at Middletown, Kentucky, near
Louisville. George W. Ogden's _Letters from the West_ (New Bedford,
1823); W. Bullock's _Sketch of a Journey through the Western States_
(London, 1827); and Tilly Buttrick's _Voyages, Travels, and Discoveries_
(Boston, 1831), round out fairly well that group of Scotchmen,
Englishmen, New Englanders, and what not, who found many interesting
things in Kentucky a hundred years and more ago. Ogden spent two summers
in Kentucky; Bullock owned a river-side tract near Ludlow, Kentucky, and
old Bradbury sleeps in a quiet Kentucky hamlet, but neither of them may
be properly classified as a real Kentuckian.
The Beauchamp-Sharp tragedy of 1825 was the one Kentucky event that
kindled the imaginations of more alien writers than any other happening
in our history. Edgar Allan Poe, William Gilmore Simms, Charles Fenno
Hoffman, G. P. R. James, James Hall, and several others, wrote plays,
novels, and poems based upon this tragedy. In 1832 James Kirke Paulding,
the friend of Washington Irving, published one of the earliest Kentucky
romances, entitled _Westward Ho!_ which name he got from the old
Elizabethan drama of John Webster and Thomas Dekker. Two years after the
appearance of Paulding's tale, William A. Caruthers, the Virginia
novelist, printed _The Kentuckian in New York_; and in the same year
Thomas Chandler Haliburton ("Sam Slick"), put forth one of his earliest
works, _Kentucky, a Tale_ (London, 1834). In 1845 Charles Winterfield's
_My First Days With the Rangers_, appeared, to be followed the next year
by William T. Porter's _A Quarter Race in Kentucky_.
These writers hardly did more than point the way to Kentucky for Mrs.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose world-famous novel, _Uncle Tom's Cabin_
(Boston, 1852), was set against a background of slave-holding
Kentucky. This is the most famous example our literature affords of a
writer of another state or country coming to Kentucky for the
materials out of which to build a book.
In 1860 David Ross Locke, the Ohio journalist and satirist, discovered
the _Rev. Petroleum V. Nasby_, postmaster at "Confedrit X Roads,
Kentucky," and his political satires on Kentucky, the _Nasby Letters_,
tickled the readers of his paper, _The Toledo Blade_, through many
years. These alleged communications from poor Petroleum may be read
to-day in Locke's _Swingin' Round the Cirkel_, and _Ekkoes from
Kentucky_. J. G. Marshall's _The Outlaw Brothers_ (New York, 1864); Miss
Martha Remick's _Millicent Halford: a Tale of the Dark Days of Kentucky
in the year 1861_ (Boston, 1865); two novels by Edward Willett, entitled
_Kentucky Border Foes_, and _Old Honesty: a Tale of the Early Days of
Kentucky_, both of which were issued in the late sixties; Constance F.
Woolson's _Two Women_ (New York, 1877), and Mrs. Anna Bowman Dodd's
story, _Glorinda_ (Boston, 1888), concludes the group of writers of the
comparatively modern school who did not linger long in the "meadowland,"
but who found it good literary soil, and helped themselves accordingly.
In recent years Mr. Winston Churchill's _The Crossing_, Dr. James Ball
Naylor's _The Kentuckian_, Mr. Augustus Thomas's _The Witching Hour_,
and the Kentucky lyrics of Mrs. Alice Williams Brotherton, the Ohio
poet, have drawn fresh attention to Kentucky as a background for
literary productions, although they are written by those who cannot
qualify as Kentuckians. But to claim any of these writers for the
Commonwealth, would be to make one's self absurd. Dr. Naylor's lines
upon this point are _apropos_:
I must admit--although it hurts!--
That I was born unlucky;
I've never, literally, had
A home in Old Kentucky.
And yet I feel should wayward Chance
Direct my steps to roam there,
I'd meet you all and greet you all--
And find myself _at home_ there!
As has already been indicated, the good physician-poet is not by any
manner of means the only alien bard who has remembered Kentucky in his
work. No less a poet than the great Sir Walter Scott celebrated
Kentucky in _Marmion_--the State's first appearance in English poetry.
The passage may be found near the close of the ninth stanza in the
third canto. Lord Marmion and his followers have ridden "the livelong
day," and are now quartered at a well-known Scottish hostelry. They
have all eaten and drunk until they are on the borderland of dreams
when their leader, seeing their condition,
... called upon a squire:--
"Fitz-Eustace, know'st thou not some lay,
To speed the lingering night away?
We slumber by the fire."--