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8. Remembering
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8. Remembering In mid- October 1824, a Choctaw delegation en route to Washington , D.C., stopped in Maysville to dine at Langhorne’s Inn. Among them was an eighty- year- old chief, Puckshunubbe, a veteran of the Indian resistance against Ameri can settlement between the 1760s and 1790s. As he leaned forward to look down the Ohio River, the old man stumbled and fell off a twenty- foot abutment. He died two days later. Residents of Maysville and other Ken tucki ans gathered by the hundreds to memorialize Puckshunubbe. The ceremony and funeral were, as a 1930s historian depicted, “military to the nth degree . . . [and] the largest concourse ever assembled in the little Kentucky town. Came from all parts of Kentucky those who had warred against him, to pay a just tribute to his great military powers.” Then, in an understandable moment of exasperation, the historian concluded, “Pioneers!” Nearly three decades of war against Indians in the late eighteenth century had ushered terror into the homes of Kentucke’s settlers, but here in the streets of Maysville were their children and grandchildren celebrating the enemy, praising his martial acumen, and interring him with full military honors in the town graveyard alongside men who had lost their lives trying to exterminate him and his people. How • Remembering • 255 they could so easily forgive and forget gave rise to the historian’s frustration. The following year, a more joyous festivity for the Marquis de Lafayette eclipsed the pomp of Puckshunubbe’s memorial. A large assembly crowded to watch the Revolutionary icon step ashore in Maysville and traverse a path of expensive Turkish carpets to a ceremonial feast hosted by the town’s most prominent merchant, John Armstrong. Afterward, Lafayette inspected the local militia before being escorted back to his steamboat. Ken tucki ans watched and waved from the wharf as the boat labored up the Ohio River. The Frenchman’s western tour through Maysville and other Kentucky towns inspired new fashion among the younger generation: “Evry thing was Lafayette,” murmured a laborer with little appreciation for refined dress; “All the new Fashions were Lafayette. It Ran to such Extrems that you Could not By a Hat nor anny thing out of A Store But it was Lafayette.” Curiosity may have drawn Ken tucki ans into the crowded little river town to reach out and touch Lafayette’s coat or Puckshu nubbe’s casket, but the eloquence of public speakers and the opportunities to reminisce contributed to a broader sense of his tori cal significance for their lives. Collective memory is constructed in moments like these, when populations pause to reflect on their shared past and its meaning for their individual and communal lives. Yet, collective memory also evolves with each successive generation. Children and grandchildren do not attach the same meaning and worth to symbolic representations as did those who witnessed actual events. For example, older Ken tucki ans viewed LafayetteasaRevolutionaryherowhohadhelpedtosecureAmeri can life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. A younger generation of Ken tucki ans,whileacknowledginghimasaparticipantinthebirthofan Ameri can nation, reinterpreted him as a symbol of refined European gentility, justifying their own rampant commercialism and rush to respectability in the process. Only Maysville’s wealthiest and most powerful citizens attended the banquet with Lafayette . The teleological meaning of the Kentucke frontiers and their revolutionary context had been appropriated by the middle class. Likewise, Puckshunubbe had been transformed from a warrior who terrorized western settlers into a symbol of the Van- [54.225.35.224] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 23:37 GMT) Kentucke’s Frontiers 256 • ishing Indian. In 1819, Henry Clay summed up the conventional wisdom: We are powerful and they are weak: . . . to use a figure drawn from their own sublime eloquence, the poor children of the forest have been driven by the great wave which has flowed from the Atlantic ocean to almost the base of the Rocky Mountains, and, overwhelming them in its terrible progress, has left no other remains of hundreds of tribes, now extinct, than those which indicate the remote existence of their former companion, the mammoth of the New World! Like the great mammoths of Big Bone Lick whose remains had once drawn Ameri can imaginations westward, native peoples faced extinction, if not physically at least culturally. As Thomas Jefferson asserted in 1824, “barbarism has . . . been receding before the steady step of amelioration; and will in time, I trust, disappear from the earth.” Few Ken tucki ans in the 1820s appreciated the irony in celebrating Indians...