The Kentucky Trace: A Novel of the American Revolution

Introduction - Sandra L. Ballard

v introduction SANDRA L. BALLARD Originally released in  by Knopf, THE KENTUCKY TRACE is Harriette Simpson Arnow’s final novel published during her lifetime.1 It is the story of William David Leslie Collins, raised in a Virginia gentry family of loyal British subjects, but he is covertly involved as a rebel patriot in the American Revolutionary War. Having already written in her novels Hunter’s Horn and The Dollmaker about the experiences of Appalachian people who stayed home during World War II, Arnow once again describes American mountain people during wartime. Specific skirmishes and battles play a role in the action of the novel, but Arnow seems more intent on showing the American Revolution as an era that divided families and resulted in ragged lines of allegiance within communities. She chooses to show war less in terms of military maneuvers and more in terms of its effects on an individual and those around him. Instead of focusing on such famous pioneers as Daniel Boone, in The Kentucky Trace Arnow provocatively explores what happened to “ordinary” pioneers in the Cumberland region. Arnow was well prepared to write this novel: she had spent nearly twenty years researching the time and place that provide its setting. Her two vi nonfiction books on pioneer life in the Cumberland River Valley, Seedtime on the Cumberland (1960) and Flowering of the Cumberland (1963), feature details that provide impressive historical veracity regarding these characters and frontier life—from proper footwear and clothing to food, housing, travel routes, and the making of saltpeter for gunpowder. In this novel, the fabric of daily life is a tight weave, bloody and frayed in places, not ornate, but reliable and elegant in its authenticity. The Kentucky Trace offers readers not only the gritty close-up details of pioneer life, but also a trustworthy and eye-opening wide-angle view of the American Revolution, economics, class culture, environmentalism, gender roles, and identity politics. When we meet Leslie Collins in the opening scene of the novel, he is a prisoner on the verge of being lynched by a gang of outlaws. Some Overmountain Men, fresh from a patriot victory at Kings Mountain, intervene and he narrowly escapes.2 Collins doesn’t tell them he has scouted for patriot militia officer Francis Marion, the “Swamp Fox,” or that he fought in the Battle of Camden in South Carolina.3 But readers learn that his battlefield experience at Camden has had a deep, jarring effect on him: “The place was like something out of Revelation when it was over and he could take time for a look. Tarleton’s dragoons had mowed down the panicked rebels like wheat” (6). Leslie had shot one of Tarleton’s officers—and he had been shocked to recognize the Redcoat as his brother: “He reckoned he’d wonder forever if his bullet had caused his brother Percy to lose his arm, or made a wound that went into gangrene and killed him. He had expected Percy to take the King’s side, but not under a commander evil as Tarleton” (7). Cut off from the rest of his family, Leslie does not know the whereabouts of his other brother or his father, “a red-hot Loyalist” (7). Like many on the American frontier, Leslie is making his own way: “He was nobody’s son and nobody’s brother any more” (6). For most of the novel, his dilemmas primarily involve events on the Kentucky frontier, away from Revolutionary War battles, although he struggles with being alienated from his family and forging for himself an identity he can live with. On his own since the age of 17 and educated by a decade in the woods, 27-year-old Leslie is a land surveyor, not a soldier. “He had surveyed a big boundary of land in western Pennsylvania for a company that aimed to burn all that fine timber into charcoal to run the iron furnaces they were vii building. In these gone-wild-for-western-lands times nobody—royalist or Continental—cared which side a surveyor was on” (22). With this brief description, Arnow deftly provides a picture of politics and economics in colonial America, while at the same time giving information about her protagonist ’s occupation. She offers additional cultural perspective on being a land surveyor with Leslie’s observation that the “Indians had the right word for a sextant—land stealer” (139). Leslie feels...